He turned. The charming smile was still in place, but his eyes were flat, the way Lydia had described them in her letter. Dead eyes in a handsome face. “Mrs Darcy. Merely admiring the view. One can see the whole ballroom from the gallery. I used to sit up there as a boy and watch the guests below.”
Behind Wickham, George Darcy’s face was white with fury.
“The gallery is for the musicians,” Elizabeth said. “It is not open to guests.”
“Surely an exception can be made for an old friend of the family.” He turned back to the stairs, climbed, glass in hand. Elizabeth could not stop him without making a scene; she could not make a scene with three hundred people watching, wondering why the mistress of Pemberley was chasing George Wickham up a staircase.
Graves was at the foot of the stairs. He had been there all evening, rigid, fists clenched. As Wickham climbed past him, Graves looked at Elizabeth, and his face held a question she did not know how to answer.
Wickham reached the top. He stood at the railing of the musicians’ gallery, looking out over the ballroom, his glass raised, his red coat bright against the dark wood. The musicians had paused between sets. The gallery was empty except for Wickham and the music stands and the guttering candles in their sconces. He looked down at the crowd below and spread his arms, as though embracing the room, as though Pemberley itself had been waiting for him to return.
“Magnificent,” he said, to nobody. To everybody. “Truly magnificent. Old Mr Darcy would have loved this.”
Elizabeth gripped Darcy’s arm. George was at the foot of the stairs, looking up at Wickham. Nana was beside Elizabeth. Every ghost in the ballroom had gone still. Sarah Dunn, Miss Pardoe, Graves, Mrs Alcott, the wispy shades in the gallery above. All of them watching Wickham lean against the railing of the musicians’ gallery with his glass of claret and his charming smile.
Then Sir Roderick came through the wall.
He cameroaring. There was no other word for it. Only one living soul in that room could hear it, but Elizabeth heard it in her bones, in her teeth, in the soles of her feet, and she flinched so hard that Darcy turned to her in alarm.
“Elizabeth? What is it?”
She could not answer. She was staring at the south wall of the ballroom, where Sir Roderick Darcy was emerging. He was enormous. Not tall, not physically large, but enormous in the way that George was solid and Nana was vivid: a presence that filled the space it occupied and pushed everything else aside. His face was a mask of absolute, ungovernable rage, his mouth wide open and the roar that emerged from it was so loud Elizabeth could hear nothing else. He had been asleep for as long as any ghost at Pemberley could remember. He was awake now.
He crossed the ballroom floor in strides that covered impossible distances. The candles did not gutter this time. They went out. Every candle on the south end of the ballroom, twenty or thirty of them, extinguished at once. Guests gasped. Someone dropped a glass. The musicians’ gallery candles blew out too, plunging the upper level into shadow. Living guests stumbled aside without knowing why, clutching at their partners, their drinks, their composure. The cold hit like a wall. Elizabeth’s teeth chattered. Darcy gripped her hand.
Sir Roderick did not look at Elizabeth. He did not look at Darcy. He did not look at Nana or George or Graves or any of the ghosts who pressed themselves against the walls as he passed. He looked only upward, at the musicians’ gallery, at the man who stood at the railing in his red coat with his glass of claret and his dead eyes and his charming smile.
He went up the stairs. The wooden steps creaked under a weight that should not have been there. A living guest standing near the staircase looked down at the steps, frowning; the wood was groaning, yet nobody was on them.
Wickham was still at the railing. He had observed the extinguished candles, the rush of cold air, and his smile had faltered. Not because he could see Sir Roderick, but because the ballroom had gone suddenly cold, dark, and very wrong; even George Wickham, who had no gift, no sensitivity, no conscience, could feel it.
Sir Roderick reached the top of the stairs.
He crossed the gallery in two strides. He stood directly behind Wickham, and Wickham did not see him, but Wickham shivered, and his hand tightened on his glass.
“No,” Elizabeth said. She said it aloud. She did not care who heard. “No, stop, please...”
Darcy looked at her. “Elizabeth?”
Sir Roderick put out his hands andpushed.
It should not have been possible. Ghosts could not touch the living. The rules were clear, had always been clear, and Elizabeth had understood them since childhood. But Sir Roderick Darcy had been sleeping for longer than anyone could remember. He had been reportedly been an exceptionally disagreeable man in life. He had woken to find his descendant’s murderer standing in his ballroom drinking claret, and the rules, apparently, did not apply to him.
Wickham stumbled forward, his foot slipping on the top step which a ghostly maid had spent the whole day diligently polishing, and went over the railing.
He did not fall far. The musicians’ gallery was one storey above the ballroom floor, perhaps twelve feet, but the staircase below was narrow and steep, all dark wood and sharp edges. Wickham hit the banister, twisted, fell the rest of the way. His glass shattered. The sound it made was slight, compared to the sound his body made when it hit the ballroom floor, head-first.
Someone screamed. Then someone else. Then the whole room was noise: shouting, chairs scraping, the crowd surging toward and away from the crumpled figure at the foot of the musicians’ gallery staircase.
Graves drifted aside, his face blank. He had waited at the foot of those stairs all evening. Nana pressed her hands over her mouth; whether in horror or satisfaction, Elizabeth could not tell. George Darcy stood at the foot of the stairs, looking down at the body of the man who had murdered him. His expression was the same blank mask Darcy wore at Hunsford: processing something shocking, something he did not know how to answer.
Darcy was already moving. He pushed through the crowd, knelt beside Wickham’s body. Elizabeth saw him press his fingers to Wickham’s neck. She saw his face when he looked up. She knew before he spoke.
“Send for the physician,” Darcy said. His voice carried across the silent ballroom. “And clear the room, please. My sincerest apologies, but the ball is over.”
The guests left. They left in a confusion of carriages, cloaks, hushed voices: three hundred people who had come to dance, to eat, to judge the new Mrs Darcy, now going home with a different story entirely. A man had fallen from the musicians’gallery.He had been drinking. The stairs were so steep. A terrible accident. What a dreadful end to such a lovely evening.
Elizabeth stood in the entrance hall and watched them go. She stood with her face composed, thanking each guest as they left, because she was the mistress of Pemberley; this was her duty. If her voice was steady, her eyes dry, it was because she had no tears left after the afternoon, no composure left to lose.
