“I see dead people,” she said.
The words came out flat, graceless, nothing like the careful speech she had rehearsed a hundred times. She had planned to lead with Longbourn, with Great-Aunt Irene, with the history of it, the gift perhaps passed down from her Gardiner grandfather who had been far more successful in business than he had any right to be. She had planned to be measured and clear and to present it in a way that made sense. Instead she said it baldly, bluntly, like a confession, because that was what it was.
“I see ghosts. I’ve seen them my whole life. Since I was a child. My family know, but we have kept it secret because the alternative is...” She gestured vaguely at the door, beyond which Lady Catherine had just tried to have her locked away, and could not finish the sentence.
Darcy did not say anything. He did not move. He just watched her, expressionless, just as he once had at Hunsford when she rejected him with a cruelty he had never deserved.
“There are ghosts everywhere, Darcy. Longbourn’s are my family; my Great-Aunt Irene taught me how to manage my gift, how to live with it, how to keep it hidden. When I came to Pemberley, I walked through the front door and I saw them. Everywhere. The house is full of them. Servants, family, four hundred years of the dead, still here.”
She was speaking too fast, the words coming out in the wrong order, but she could not slow down because if she slowed down she would stop, and if she stopped she would never start again.
“One of them, one of the strongest, is Nana. Her real name is Dorothea Darcy. She was your great-great-grandmother, who came here as a very young bride, had a son. Her husband died when she was only twenty and Pemberley became her charge, the Darcy family her responsibility, her legacy. She runs this house. She has run it for a hundred and thirty years. She decided I was acceptable, barely, mainly because I could carry out her orders I think. She’s been teaching me Pemberley ever since. The passage behind the bookcase. The rose garden. She is the reason I know things I should not know.”
She stopped. Drew breath. Made herself look at him and meet his eyes.
“And your father,” she said. “Your father is here too.”
For the first time, Darcy’s expression changed, his jaw tightening. His eyes went bright. He gripped the arm of his chair hard enough that his knuckles whitened.
“My father.” He did not sound incredulous. He sounded shocked, as though he believed her, and the belief had hit him like a fist.
“George Darcy. He died in this house and he has never left it. He is angry and grieving and desperate for justice, because he was murdered, Darcy. Wickham poisoned him. Foxglove in his evening brandy, the night they dined together, the night Mrs Reynolds said they seemed so amiable. Your father confronted Wickham about Sally Wilson, and Wickham killed him for it, and your father has been trapped in this house for six years, watching you, unable to tell you any of it.”
She was crying. She did not know when she had started. The tears ran down her face and she did not wipe them away because her hands were gripping the arms of the chair as though she might fall out of it.
“Kitty has been helping me investigate because Kitty knows what I can do, so she covers for me. Georgiana knows about my gift because she was in the gallery when I was speaking to the ghost children who play there. She saw me talking to what she thought was empty air. I had to tell her. She’s kept the secret. I know you will be hurt that she knew before you did, and I’m sorry for that, I’m so sorry, but I’ve been afraid, Darcy. I’ve been afraid my whole life. Because the world doesn’t believe in ghosts, and a woman who sees things that are not there is a madwoman, and your aunt has just proved exactly how real that danger is.”
She stopped. There was nothing left. She had given him everything: the gift, the ghosts, the murder, Kitty, Georgiana, the fear. The compact she had kept since childhood, broken open in a quiet parlour just hours before a ball, with her face wet and her hands shaking and the house pressing down on them both.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. From below came the distant sounds of the household preparing for the evening, making ready for three hundred guests who would arrive in a few hours to dance and eat and judge whether the new Mrs Darcy was worthy of the name, while the new Mrs Darcy sat in her parlour with tears on her face, waiting to find out whether her husband thought she was mad.
Darcy looked at her. His face was closed again, unreadable.
He did not speak.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Darcywassilent,lookingat her, for what felt like forever.
Elizabeth sat in her chair and let him look. She had no more words. She had spent them all, every one, and what was left was just her: red-eyed, shaking, her hands gripping the chair arms, her face wet. From below, the faint sounds of the household preparing for the ball continued, indifferent to the fact that the world had just changed.
“You see ghosts,” Darcy said at last. His voice was very level.
“Yes.”
“You have seen them your whole life.”
“Yes.”
“My father is in this house.”
“Yes.”
He stood up. He crossed the room, not to the door, but to the window. He stood there with his back to her, looking out at the November grey. Elizabeth watched his shoulders, tried to read what was happening from the set of them. She could not. She gripped the chair arms harder. Her nails dug into the upholstery.
“Aunt Catherine’s observations,” Darcy said, still facing the window. “The conversations with empty rooms. The gallery at midnight. Stepping around something in the ballroom that she could not see.”
“Sarah Dunn,” Elizabeth said. “A former housemaid. She was scrubbing the floor. She has been dead for years, but she still does her job because she was a fiercely conscientious maid, and it was the maids’ job to scrub the ballroom floor. I stepped around her because I have always thought it rude to walk through ghosts, and I did not think about how it would look to anyone watching.”
