“Nell,” the girl whispered. “I’m Nell Whitmore. I was waiting for my da. He went out and he never came back.”
Elizabeth settled down beside her, there in the cold corner of a servants’ passage in a coaching inn on the Great North Road. “Tell me about your father,” she said.
Nell’s story came in fragments, pieced together from a child’s understanding of events and a ghost’s confused sense of time. Her father was a drover, had been a drover, had brought cattle south along the Great North Road. She had travelled with him sometimes, when her mother was ill. They had stopped at the Red Hart on this particular day, and her father had said he would go and put their horse to the cart. He had left Nell with her travelling cloak and her doll and told her to mind the innkeeper’s wife.
“She was kind,” Nell said. “She gave me bread and milk. But then she forgot about me. There was so much happening. People shouting. I went to the stable to find Da.”
“What happened then?” Elizabeth asked, though she had begun to suspect.
“There was a cart. I did not see it. I was looking for Da. And then...” Nell’s voice faded. “I was lying on the ground and the lady was crying, and Da came running, and he picked me up, and he said, ‘Nell, Nell, wake up, stay with me,’ but I could not. And then everything was strange and confused and I was all alone.”
Elizabeth wanted to hold Nell, but that was beyond her gift. She could only sit and listen.
“I thought he would come back,” Nell whispered. “He said he would come back. He said he would never leave me alone. But then so many people came, and they moved the carts, and the horses were gone, and I did not know where I was anymore. People came and went, and I saw them but they could not see me, and I have been waiting, and waiting, and he never came back.”
“Oh, Nell,” Elizabeth said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You can see me,” Nell said, and there was wonder in her voice now, and something like hope. “You are real. You are alive and you can see me.”
“I can see you,” Elizabeth confirmed. “And I hear you. And you are not alone.”
They sat like that for a long time. Nell talked, and Elizabeth listened, and she did something she rarely did: she made a promise. She would remember Nell Whitmore’s name. She would know that Nell had been loved, and wanted, and that she had mattered. It was a small thing, perhaps not even real comfort in any sense that endured. But Nell looked up at her with something like peace in her expression, and she said, quietly, “Thank you.”
By the time Elizabeth climbed the stairs, her head truly was aching and her legs were heavy and she wanted nothing more than to fall into bed and sleep for days. But she had just clambered into bed and laid her head on the cool pillow when Darcy came in, trying to be quiet until he saw her eyes were open. The worry on his face was almost worse than the ghosts as he sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at her.
“Your headache,” he said. “Is it very bad?”
“It is better now,” she lied, and reached for him. She moved carefully, deliberately, settling herself into his arms as though she were a much more fragile thing than she actually was. He enclosed her without complaint, his lips pressing against herhair. He smelled of leather and candle wax and the particular scent that was simply Darcy.
“Three more days,” he murmured. “And then you will be home.”
Home. Pemberley. A house that had stood for centuries, that had seen births, deaths, wars, and plagues, that had been home to generation upon generation of the family she had married into. She had glimpsed only two ghosts on her previous brief visits, but she had not been looking. She had been careful not to look.
She would not have that luxury now.
Elizabeth closed her eyes, pressed her face against his shoulder, and said nothing. She tried not to think about what waited at the end of the road.
Chapter Four
Elizabethrecognisedthefeelingbefore she recognised the road.
It had been the same on her previous visit, that summer afternoon with the Gardiners when she had come to Pemberley as a tourist and tried not to think too hard about the man who owned it until he appeared before her, much to her consternation. The house had pressed against her awareness then, a low, insistent hum at the edges of her gift, denser than anything she had felt before. She had attributed it at the time tothe age of the place, to the sheer weight of centuries soaked into its stones.
Now, as the carriages turned onto the approach road and the parkland opened up around them, she felt it again. The same hum, the same pressure. Only this time there would be no leaving.
“We are close,” Darcy said, and there was something in his voice she had come to recognise: pride, tempered by anxiety. She had heard it the day he asked if he could introduce Georgiana to her, and not understood it then. Despite her anxiety, she smiled to hear it now.
“I can tell,” Elizabeth said in answer to his remark, and meant it in a way he could not possibly understand.
The parkland was rolling and vast, the oaks beginning to turn bronze. Deer grazed in clusters on the slopes, lifting their heads as the carriages passed, and in the second carriage Kitty leaned out of the window and said, “Oh!” in a voice that managed to be both awed and slightly terrified.
Then the trees thinned, and there it was.
Elizabeth had seen Pemberley before. She had stood on this very approach and felt the first stirring of something she had not yet been ready to name, a sense that this place and the man who owned it were altogether more than she had allowed herself to imagine. But that had been a different Elizabeth, a visitor passing through, free to admire and move on. The woman in the carriage now was mistress of the vast estate before her, and the weight of that, layered over the pressure of the house’s presence,settled over her like a coat, a heavy one that was too warm for the weather, slightly suffocating.
“Well?” Darcy said.
“It is,” Elizabeth replied, choosing her words carefully, “exactly as beautiful as I remembered. And considerably more terrifying.”
