Not the settled kind, like Longbourn’s or Netherfield’s. Coaching inns attracted a different sort altogether: transient spirits, confused and disoriented, people who had died far from home and had no anchor to hold them. They drifted through the corridors, clustered in the taproom, sat in corners looking lost. The sheer density of them hit Elizabeth like a wall of cold water the moment she stepped through the door.
She froze. It was an old reflex, as automatic as breathing; when the dead pressed in, she held herself quiet and let the wave of awareness wash over her before she decided how to respond. There was a woman in Tudor dress standing by the desk, looking anxiously at the door, waiting for someone who would never walk through it. A man in a soldier’s coat who kept walking from one end of the corridor to the other as though searching for something. A serving girl no older than sixteen, her face streaked with tears. Dozens of others, fading in and out of Elizabeth’s awareness like clouds passing across the sun.
Most of them were harmless. Confused travellers, people who had been caught in the current of a place where hundreds had come and gone for centuries. They did not need her help. They were simply there, and they would go on being there long after she left.
But they could see her. Some of them were already turning toward her, sensing the thing that made her different, the quality she had never been able to name that drew the dead to her like moths to candlelight. The Tudor woman was watching her from the end of the corridor. A child, no more than eight, tugged at her skirt as she passed and said, “Can you see me? Can you really see me?”
Elizabeth’s step faltered. Darcy, beside her, glanced down immediately.
“Are you well? You look pale.”
“Merely tired from the journey,” she said, and smiled, and hated herself for it.
Kitty appeared at her elbow. She slipped her arm through Elizabeth’s, an easy, sisterly gesture, and said brightly, “Come, let us find our rooms; I want to show Georgiana the embroidery pattern Mama gave me before we left. Mr Darcy, would you be so kind as to have our trunks sent up? My travelling case in particular; I shall want to freshen up before supper.”
It was beautifully done. In the space of a few sentences, Kitty had given Darcy a task that would occupy him for several minutes, and created a reason for Elizabeth to leave the crowded corridor full of spectral strangers. All without a flicker of anything butcheerful, slightly scatterbrained enthusiasm. Upstairs, she was equally deft, urging Georgiana and Mrs Annesley to take a few moments and use the wash-water first; she would just help Elizabeth with her outer clothing.
The moment they were alone, the door closed behind them, Kitty’s expression changed.
“How bad?” she asked quietly.
“Dozens,” Elizabeth said, sinking onto the bed. “Everywhere. Most of them are just passing through, I think, but there are a few who are stuck, and they can see me, and that child...” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “There is a little girl, Kitty. She cannot be more than eight. She is alone and she is frightened and she does not understand why nobody will speak to her.”
Kitty sat beside her and took her hand, the same way Jane would have done. Kitty could not see the dead. She never had. But she had spent a lifetime learning the signs: the sudden stillness, the eyes tracking something invisible, the way Elizabeth’s breathing changed when the spectral world pressed too close, and she was here, now, taking the role Jane normally would. Elizabeth was unutterably grateful not to be alone in this moment.
“Can you help her?” Kitty asked.
“I do not know. I can try. But it will take time, and Darcy will notice if I disappear.”
“Leave Darcy to me,” Kitty said firmly. “I can ask him any number of questions about Pemberley. Tell me when you need to slip away, and I will manage it.”
Elizabeth looked at her younger sister, this girl who had spent years being dismissed as silly, as Lydia’s shadow, as the Bennet nobody noticed, and saw instead the person she was becoming away from Lydia’s influence: steady, sharp, fiercely loyal.
“Thank you,” Elizabeth said.
Kitty squeezed her hand. “Go and wash your face. You look as though you have seen a ghost.” She paused. “Which I suppose you have. Several dozen of them.”
Supper was a lively affair, Kitty orchestrating the conversation with a deftness that would have impressed a seasoned hostess. She asked Georgiana about the lake at Pemberley, whether one could row on it, whether there were fish, what the grounds looked like in autumn. Georgiana, delighted to have someone so interested, talked more freely than Elizabeth had ever heard her, describing the walks, the woods, the kitchen garden, and the succession houses where the gardeners grew pineapples, actual pineapples, which made Kitty gasp so theatrically that even Darcy laughed.
“You must teach Lizzy all about it,” Kitty said, beaming at Georgiana. “She will want to understand every inch of the place, and you know it better than anyone.”
“I should like that very much,” Georgiana said softly, and there was a wistfulness in her voice that Elizabeth recognised. Georgiana had spent too much of her life in drawing rooms with chaperones. Kindly though Mrs Annesley was, the prospect of having a sister near her own age, of having company that was not supervision, was plainly something she had been longing for.
Elizabeth excused herself shortly after the meal, claiming a headache from the journey. Darcy looked concerned but did not press; Kitty immediately began asking him about the estate’s tenant farms, and by the time Elizabeth slipped out of the private dining room, Darcy was deep in an explanation of crop rotation and Kitty was nodding along as though fascinated.
The corridor was quieter now, most of the living guests having retired or settled in the taproom. The spectral ones remained. Elizabeth moved through them carefully, murmuring greetings to those who seemed aware of her, offering small kindnesses where she could.
Near the kitchen stairs, a stout woman in a travelling pelisse was berating the wall with considerable force. “The chicken,” she announced to no one in particular, “was not cooked through. I said so at the time. I said, ‘Mr Featherstone, that chicken is pink,’ and he said, ‘Nonsense, my dear, it is merely moist,’ and I said, ‘There is a meaningful distinction between moist and raw, Mr Featherstone,’ and was I listened to? I was not. And now look.” She gestured at herself with magnificent indignation. Elizabeth pressed her lips together, murmured her condolences, and moved on.
The soldier on the stairs turned out to be a deserter from the war who had died of fever on his way home. He was young,not much older than Kitty. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his head hanging. He did not want help. He wanted someone to know his name. She asked for it, and he told her: William Carver, of Sunderland. She repeated it back to him, and watched something in his face ease. He did not speak again, but he lifted his head, and his eyes followed her as she passed, and she thought perhaps that was enough.
The Tudor woman was searching for her son. Elizabeth sat with her for a time, listening, but the woman’s son had been dead for three hundred years, and there was nothing Elizabeth could do to ease that particular ache except to say she was sorry, and she said it, and meant it.
But it was the little girl who pulled at her most urgently.
She was sitting in the corner of the servants’ passage, her arms wrapped around her knees, her chin resting on them. Her dress was from perhaps fifty years ago, practical wool, worn at the cuffs. She had red-gold hair and, when she looked up at Elizabeth, eyes the colour of April skies.
“I can see you,” Elizabeth said gently, kneeling beside her. The floorboards were cold even through her skirts. “I can hear you. Can you tell me your name?”
