Elizabeth set down her notes and went to find Nana.
Nana was in the portrait gallery, standing before the painting of Lady Anne. Her arms were folded, her chin raised, and she was not looking at the painting. She was looking through it, past it, at something Elizabeth could not see.
“Nana. George says the house is unsettled.”
“It is.”
“He says the ghosts are restless. The footman is marching, Miss Pardoe will not leave the library, Graves has abandoned his ball preparations and is standing guard at the front door.”
“Yes. Sarah Dunn is polishing the stairs to the musicians’ gallery over and over again, starting at the top and working down to the bottom, and she will not stop.”
“What is happening?”
Nana was quiet for a long moment. The gallery was dim around them, the portraits watching from their frames. The air felt thick. Not cold, not warm. Dense. Like the hours before a thunderstorm when the pressure drops and the birds fall silent.
“Be ready,” Nana said.
“Ready for what?”
Nana turned to her. She was afraid. Elizabeth had not seen Nana afraid before, not once, not of Lady Catherine or of the murder investigation or of anything else. Nana did not do fear. She did authority, disapproval, caustic wit, on rare occasions tenderness. Not fear. Seeing it on her face now was worse than anything Catherine had done.
“I do not know,” Nana said. “But something is coming. Whatever it is, it is coming, and I think the ball will bring it.”
“That is not helpful, Nana.”
“I am not trying to be helpful. I am trying to warn you. There is a difference, and you would do well to attend to it.” She looked back at the portrait. “This house has stood for more than four hundred years. It has weathered grief, scandal, death, wars. It does not unsettle without reason, but even I cannot tell you what is coming.”
Elizabeth hesitated, and then she reached out and placed her hand on the wall, wondering if she would feel anything other than wallpaper over plaster over cold stone.
She almost snatched her hand away, because the wall was vibrating. Faint, and she suspected no other living resident of the house would sense what she was feeling, but it felt almost like a heartbeat. Pemberley itself, the great house that had stood through four centuries of grief, scandal, death, wars, as Nana had said, was restless indeed. It was impossible to ascribe any human emotion to the feeling, but if Elizabeth had been pressed to name one, she would have said it was angry. It reminded her, unsettlingly, of the way George Darcy looked when he spoke of Wickham.
Elizabeth went to bed that night and lay beside Darcy, who was already sleeping, and stared at the canopy above them.
Tomorrow, three hundred guests would come to Pemberley to be entertained. There would be candlelight, music, the whole county watching the new Mrs Darcy, judging whether she was worthy of the name.
Beneath it all, the house was angry. The dead were restless. Nana was afraid.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, and did not sleep for a long time despite her exhaustion.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Elizabethwokeonthemorning of the ball feeling as though she had not slept at all.
She had, a little; Darcy was already up and gone when she opened her eyes, which meant she had slept through his rising. But her body felt heavy and wrong, as though something was sitting on her chest. She pressed her hand flat against her breastbone and breathed, and the pressure did not ease.
The house felt it too. She could tell the moment she put her feet on the cold floor and stood. The vibration from last night was still there, that faint hum in the stone and the wood, and it was stronger now. Her skin prickled as she crossed the room to ring for her maid. She told herself it was the ball. Three hundred guests, the first entertainment she had hosted as Mrs Darcy, the county watching and judging. Of course she was nervous. Of course her stomach was turning over. That was all it was.
She did not believe herself for a moment.
She was in the ballroom with Mrs Reynolds, reviewing the chalk pattern that had been painstakingly laid down in the design Nana had spent three days perfecting, when Jane appeared in the doorway.
“Lizzy. You need to come to the study.”
“What has happened?”
“Lady Catherine has just gone in there with Darcy. Lord Matlock is there too. Georgiana heard raised voices and came to find me.”
Elizabeth set down her list. Her hands were unsteady, which she told herself was the ball, and which she knew was not. She had been fighting nausea since breakfast and had eaten almost nothing, and the wrongness in the house was pressing on her like a headache.
