“I don’t think so. Nana has managed this house for a hundred and thirty years without Sir Roderick’s involvement, and I intend to do the same. He sleeps. We let him sleep. And we hope nothing ever wakes him again.”
Georgiana was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Darcy told me that Wickham and Lydia had been staying on the estate since the day before the ball, with a friend of Wickham’s who has one of the cottages near the north wood.”
“That is why the house was unsettled,” Elizabeth said. She had worked it out herself, lying in the dark waiting for Darcy, putting the pieces together. The vibration in the stone that had started two days ago. The ghosts growing agitated. Graves abandoning his ball preparations to stand guard at the front door. Nana’s fear. The nausea Elizabeth had fought all day. Pemberley hadknown. The estate was more than the house. Wickham had been on Pemberley land, sleeping in a Pemberley cottage, and the house had felt the presence of the man who murdered its former master like a poison in the soil. The ghosts had not known what they were feeling. They had only known that their home was wrong.
“Pemberley knew before any of us did,” Elizabeth said. “The house, the estate, felt him.”
Georgiana took this in and considered it. She was Darcy’s sister. She processed things the way Darcy did: carefully, thoroughly, turning them over before she committed to a response.
“Is my father at peace now?” she asked. “Now that Wickham is dead?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t seen him this morning. But I will find him, Georgiana. And I will tell you.”
Elizabeth found George in the long gallery, alone; Edmund and Charlotte tended to make themselves scarce when he was there, and today was no exception.
George was not pacing. He was standing at the window where Darcy had stood the evening before the ball, looking out at the south lawn and the lake beyond, and when Elizabeth came in he did not turn. She walked the length of the gallery and stood beside him, and for a while neither of them spoke.
“It is done,” George said. His voice was quiet. Not the restless, driving voice she had come to know. Empty, almost.
“It is done,” Elizabeth agreed.
“I have wanted to kill him for six years, and when I saw him walk into my house in that red coat, I wanted it so badly I could taste it. But I could not. I did not kill him.”
“I know. I saw you. You were beside me the whole time.”
“Sir Roderick.” George shook his head, slowly. “I did not know he could do that. None of us knew. He has been asleep since he became a ghost, so far as any of us knows. Nana spoke of him sometimes, always with a note of caution. She said he had a reputation for being disagreeable. She did not say he was capable of...”
“Nana did not know either.”
George was quiet again. The grey November light fell through the window and through his spectral form, casting no shadow.
“Elizabeth,” he said. “I think I am ready.”
She had been expecting it. She could feel it in the quality of his presence: a lightness, a thinning, as though the solidity that had kept him tethered to the house was dissolving. The rage that had held him here for six years was spent. The justice he had demanded had been delivered, not by the law, not by his son, but by his ancestor, rising up to punish the man who had poisoned his descendant. It was not the justice George had imagined, she was sure. But it was enough.
“Not yet,” Elizabeth said. “Please. Let me bring Darcy. Let me bring Georgiana. You can’t go without saying goodbye.”
George looked at her. His face was gentle in a way she had not seen before.
“Hurry,” he said. “I do not think I have long.”
Elizabeth ran. She ran through the gallery, down the corridor, found Darcy in the study. “Your father. Now. The gallery. He’s going.” Darcy stood up from his desk without a word and followed her. She sent a maid for Georgiana with a message that said onlyGallery, now, please hurry, and by the time they reached the long gallery George was still there, still at the window, but fainter.
“He’s here,” Elizabeth said. “By the window. He is... he is fading, Darcy. He does not have much time.”
Darcy turned to the window. Georgiana arrived, breathless. Elizabeth took her hand, positioned her beside her brother. The three of them stood before the window where George Darcy had spent so many hours watching the grounds he could not leave.
“Tell them,” George said. His voice was fading too. “Tell Fitzwilliam that I am more proud of him than I ever managed to say in life. Tell him he was right about Wickham, and I was wrong, and the greatest regret of my death is that I did not listen to my own son when he tried to tell me the truth. Tell him that the way he has cared for this family, for Georgiana, for Pemberley, has been everything I could have hoped for and more than I deserved.”
Elizabeth spoke his words. Darcy listened, his jaw tight, his eyes bright, and he did not look away from the place where his father stood.
“Tell Georgiana,” George said, and his voice cracked, “that she has her mother’s courage, her beauty, her heart. That I have watched her grow into a woman Annie would have been proudof, and I am sorry, I am so sorry, that I was not there to see it in life.”
Elizabeth repeated this too. Georgiana’s face was wet, but she was smiling through it, a fierce, broken smile that was more Darcy than Darcy.
“And tell them both,” George said, “that their mother is waiting for me. I can feel her. She has been waiting for six years, and I have kept her waiting long enough.”
Elizabeth’s voice broke on the last sentence. She got the words out, just. Darcy reached for Georgiana’s hand. Georgiana gripped it. They stood together, brother and sister, facing the window where their father was fading into the November light.
