Nana looked at Caroline Bingley with an expression of such incandescent fury that the candles on the nearest candelabra guttered and went out, all six of them at once, and a footman nearly dropped his tray.
The footman did not drop his tray. But the tray tilted, just slightly, just enough, and a large glass of red wine slid from its surface and poured, in a single spectacular cascade, down the front of Caroline Bingley’s cream silk dress.
Caroline screamed.
It was a magnificent scream, high and piercing. It cut through the music, the conversation, the oppressive cold, drew every eye in the ballroom. Louisa Hurst leapt to her feet. A nearby matron produced a handkerchief. Two footmen converged. Caroline stood in Pemberley’s ballroom with claret running down her bodice and staining the chalk pattern beneath her feet, and for one glorious, terrible moment, every person in the room was looking at Caroline Bingley and not at the guttering candles or the unnatural cold or the man who had murdered the last master of Pemberley.
Nana, beside Elizabeth, folded her arms.
“She deserved that,” Nana said.
Elizabeth could not disagree. It had been a reprieve, a momentary respite of the tension, though it was already fading. Louisa was bundling Caroline toward the door, the footmen were mopping the floor, the guests were turning back to the dancing. But the cold was still there, George Darcy was still following Wickham, the candles still guttering. Elizabeth knew it was only a matter of time.
Elizabeth looked at Darcy. Darcy looked at her. They both knew, though Darcy could not feel what she was feeling, he knew he was not the most furious person in this room at Wickham’s presence. Whatever was building in this house, Caroline’s scream had bought them minutes, not a solution.
The musicians played on. The guests danced. Pemberley blazed with fury as much as candlelight.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
JaneandLadyMatlockhad handled the seating crisis between them by the time the supper room opened. Elizabeth saw the discreet consultation, the swift creation of two new place cards, the rearrangement of existing ones. The result: Wickham and Lydia were seated at the far end of the table, well away from family, bracketed by a local squire’s wife on one side and a cheerful, slightly deaf colonel on the other. It was expertly done. Nobody who did not know would have guessed that the places had been created from nothing.
Wickham followed the crowd to supper from the card room, and the candles were finally burning steadily for the first time in an hour. George Darcy followed him, but at a greater distance now. Nana had been at him, Elizabeth suspected. She had seen Nana speaking urgently to George just before supper, and whatever she had said appeared to have had some effect, because George was no longer immediately behind Wickham’s shoulder. He stood at the far end of the supper room instead, watching, his face rigid, his hands clenched at his sides. He had tried to harm Wickham, to throttle him or stop his heart from the inside. He had failed; ghosts could not touch the living. The failure had left him more furious than ever.
Elizabeth sat beside Darcy and ate nothing and smiled at everyone who spoke to her.
Lydia chattered happily to the squire’s wife, who was too polite to excuse herself. She ate enormously and drank three glasses of wine. She complimented the food, the music, the house, the chalk pattern on the ballroom floor. At one point, between the fish and the meat, she leaned across the table toward Kitty and said, in the carrying voice that was so much like their mother’s, “Kitty! Is it not the most wonderful ball? You must come and sit with me after supper, I have so much to tell you about Newcastle, you would not believe the officers...”
Kitty looked at Lydia. Her expression was neutral, polite as she said, “I cannot, Lydia. I am engaged to dance the next set.”
“Oh, but after that! We have hardly spoken, Kitty, and I have missed you dreadfully, and there is so much...”
“I have promised all of my sets this evening, I am afraid. I shall have little time to sit and gossip.” Kitty’s voice was pleasant, firm. She turned back to her conversation with the gentleman beside her. Lydia’s face fell for just a moment before the bubble closed over her again; she turned back to the squire’s wife with renewed enthusiasm.
Elizabeth watched it happen. Kitty, who had spent her whole childhood in Lydia’s orbit, who had been Lydia’s shadow and Lydia’s echo, had removed herself with quiet, deliberate finality. It was not cruelty. Kitty would not be cruel to Lydia. But she would not be pulled back in, either, and Lydia, for one brief instant, looked forlorn before she remembered that she was Mrs Wickham at a ball and there was no reason in the world to be forlorn.
Elizabeth looked at her youngest sister and thought: She is only sixteen. She is married to a murderer, and she does not know. Whatever happens tonight, I must get her out of this house before she learns it in the worst possible way.
“Jane,” Elizabeth said, leaning toward her sister. “After supper, could I ask you to please take Lydia somewhere quiet? Keep her with you.”
Jane did not ask why. She nodded.
After supper, the dancing resumed. The musicians struck up a country dance. Guests returned to the ballroom in high spirits, the claret and the conversation having done their work. Elizabeth stood with Darcy at the edge of the floor and watched the sets form, and for a few minutes the ball looked like what it was supposed to be: a celebration, a triumph, three hundred people enjoying the hospitality of Pemberley’s new mistress.
Then Wickham came back.
He had been drinking steadily since his arrival, and the claret had done what it does to men who believe themselves charming: it had made him more so, in his own estimation, and less so in everyone else’s. He walked through the ballroom loose-limbed, arrogant, as though Pemberley were his own. He stopped to admire the portraits. He paused at the refreshment table to take another glass.
Elizabeth followed him. She did not decide to follow him; her feet moved of their own accord, drawn by a dread she could not name, a certainty that wherever Wickham went in this house tonight, she needed to be near.
Darcy was beside her. He had not left her side since Wickham and Lydia walked through the terrace doors. He could not feel what she felt, could not see what she saw, but he could read her face, and her face was telling him that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong.
George Darcy was three steps behind Wickham. He had not left Wickham’s side either. The cold moved with them, a pocket of chill air that trailed Wickham through the warm room. Guests stepped aside without knowing why, drawing their shawlstighter, blaming the draughts. The candles bent and guttered as George passed.
Wickham reached the staircase to the musicians’ gallery. It was a narrow wooden stair, steep, curving upward to the balcony where the orchestra played. He stopped at the foot of it and looked up, and Elizabeth saw him smile, the easy, proprietary smile of a man remembering a happy childhood. He had played on these stairs as a boy, she realised. He had run up and down them when George Darcy was alive, the ballroom open, Wickham the favoured godson with the run of the house.
He put his foot on the first step.
“Wickham,” Elizabeth said. “Please do not go up there.”
