“Tell him,” George said. His voice was rough. “Tell him I am here. I can see him. I...” He stopped. Started again. “Tell him I am proud of him. Tell him I have watched him carry this family for six years. He has done it better than I ever did. I am sorry. For Wickham. For not listening. For every time I chose that boy over my own son. I was wrong, and I knew it before I died, and I have not been able to say it until now.”
Elizabeth repeated his words, exactly, changing nothing. She had learned from Nana that precision mattered: a ghost’s words were their own, and she was the conduit, not the editor. She spoke George’s sentences in George’s cadence. Darcy stood and listened, his jaw clenching tighter with every phrase, his eyes growing brighter. He did not look away from the spot where his father stood.
When Elizabeth finished, the room was quiet.
“He knew,” Darcy said, at last. “Before he died. He knew about Wickham.”
“As Mr Wilson told us, he came to your father and told him what Wickham had done to Sally. Your father believed it at once, without question. He said the scales fell from his eyes. He saw what you had been trying to tell him for years, and he summoned Wickham home and confronted him.”
“And Wickham killed him for it.”
“Yes. Foxglove. Your father did not know it was coming. They dined together, talked afterwards in the library. Wickham brought him brandy to drink. George thought the matter was resolved. Then he went to bed and he did not wake.”
Darcy pressed his hand over his eyes. He stood like that for a long moment, his hand covering his face, his shoulders rigid. Elizabeth sat and watched him, did not touch him, because she could see that he needed a moment where nobody could see his expression. She gave it to him.
George watched his son. His face was stripped of everything Elizabeth was accustomed to seeing there: the anger, the restlessness, the driving need for justice. What was left was simpler and more painful. A father looking at his son, knowing he had failed him, unable to do the one thing a father wants to do: reach out, put his hand on his child’s shoulder, sayyou did well. I am sorry. You did well.
Darcy lowered his hand. His eyes were red, but he was composed.
“Ask him,” Darcy said. “Ask him if he can hear me, when I speak.”
“He can hear you. He has always been able to hear you. He simply cannot answer. That has been the worst of it for him, I think.”
Darcy turned to the empty space where his father stood and said, “I forgive you, Father. For Wickham. For all of it. You were deceived, and you paid for it with your life, and I do not blame you. I have not blamed you for a long time.”
George Darcy made a sound Elizabeth had never heard from him. It was not a word. It was not a cry. It was the sound of six years of grief breaking loose.
“He heard you,” Elizabeth said. “He is...” She did not know how to describe what was on George’s face, so she did not try. “He heard you, Darcy.”
Georgiana came when Elizabeth sent for her.
She came quickly, because the note Elizabeth sent with a maid had said onlyCome to my parlour at once, alone, and Georgiana was not a girl who needed to be told twice. She knocked. Elizabeth opened the door. Georgiana came in, saw Darcystanding by the fire with his red-rimmed eyes and his ruined waistcoat, and stopped.
“What has happened?” she said. “Is it Lady Catherine? Anne told me what she...”
“Sit down, Georgiana,” Darcy said.
She sat. She looked between them, her brother and his wife, and Elizabeth could see her reading the room: Darcy’s face, Elizabeth’s swollen eyes, the charged quiet of the parlour. Georgiana was good at reading rooms. She had been doing it since Ramsgate, watching for danger in the faces of the people around her.
“Elizabeth has told me,” Darcy said. “About the ghosts.”
Georgiana’s eyes went wide. She looked at Elizabeth.
“I told him everything,” Elizabeth said. “The gift. Nana. The household.”
“You told him.” Georgiana’s voice was barely audible. “He knows?”
“He knows. He believes me.”
Georgiana looked at her brother. Darcy met her eyes, and whatever she saw in his face made her exhale, a long, shaking breath. She had kept Elizabeth’s secret for weeks, carrying it alongside her own fear of what would happen when her brother found out. Now it was out. He was not angry. The relief in her face was as naked as Elizabeth’s had been.
“There is more,” Elizabeth said. “Georgiana, I need to tell you something I have been keeping from you. I kept it from you because I was trying to protect you, but I cannot any longer.”
Georgiana’s hands tightened in her lap, and she looked nervous again.
“Your father is here,” Elizabeth said. “His ghost. He has been at Pemberley since his death. He is in this room, right now, standing beside Darcy.”
Georgiana did not cry. She went white, so white that Elizabeth reached for her hand, afraid she might faint, but Georgiana gripped Elizabeth’s fingers hard and held on and did not faint. She stared at the spot beside Darcy where Elizabeth had indicated, and her eyes moved as though searching for something she desperately wanted to see and could not.
