Chapter Fifteen
With three weeks to go until the wedding and a great deal of preparations to conduct, Mr Bennet packed up his family and prepared to return to Longbourn.
He conceded a stay of two days at Mr Gardiner’s house in London, for his wife and daughters to visit the fabric warehouses, but firmly vetoed using London modistes to have Lydia’s wedding clothes made.
Whatever could be made by her sisters and the seamstresses in Meryton would have to do.
Lydia accepted these edicts with good grace, far better than her mother, who wailed and carried on until Lydia herself tapped her on the arm and said firmly;
“Now Mama, I am the one getting married and I do not mind in the least; why should you?”
Startled, Mrs Bennet ceased her tears and peered at her youngest daughter.
“You truly do not mind, Lyddie?”
“I do not,” Lydia said stoutly.
“I am proud of you,” Elizabeth whispered in Lydia’s ear, nudging her elbow.
A little startled, Lydia looked at her sister. She had been feeling just the smallest bit wistful; had Elizabeth noticed that? She really could be alarmingly perceptive at times. Shyly, Lydia gave Elizabeth a small smile.
“I’m quite proud of me too,” Lydia whispered back, and was rewarded further when Elizabeth snorted with laughter and put her arm around Lydia’s shoulders. It was a nice feeling, to have this closeness with Elizabeth, Lydia thought.
General Lewes came to bid farewell to Lydia, even asking a few private moments to converse with her.
The rest of the Bennet family watched in amazement as Lydia threw her arms about the old general and kissed his cheek with great warmth, even promising to write to him and tell him all about the wedding.
“You do that, my girl, and do not forget that you always have a friend in me,” were his parting words, along with a pat on her head and his hand to help her up into the carriage.
“Who on earth was that, Lyddie?” Elizabeth asked as the carriage door closed and the horses began to move, the old officer cheerfully waving to them and Lydia waving back with a wide smile.
“Oh, my other suitor,” Lydia said, quite seriously. “I should certainly have married him if the colonel had not proposed.”
They all stared at her agape, probably waiting for her to burst into giggles and cry “What a fine joke!” but she remained serious.
General Lewes was one of the kindest, noblest men she had ever been honoured to meet, and faced with the choice of a marriage of convenience to him or utter disgrace, well, that was no choice at all.
Mrs Bennet was the first to break the silence. Obviously unable or unwilling to address that topic, she changed it entirely and began to chatter about wedding clothes, until her husband cried out begging her to stop, he could take no more talk of ribbons and lace!
Two days in London passed in a whirlwind of shopping and then they were on the road again back to Longbourn, conveyed in the greatest of comfort in Mr Darcy’s carriage, which he had once again set at their disposal.
Kitty and Mary came running out to greet them with cries of joy, followed quickly by Mrs Gardiner and the children, who flung themselves at their father enthusiastically.
Kitty seized Lydia’s hands the moment she stepped down from the carriage, her eyes enormous and her words tumbling over each other in her haste to get them all out at once.
“Lyddie, you must tell me everything. Jane wrote but she did not say nearly enough and Mama’s letter was all about the wedding clothes and I could not make out what had actually happened.
Lydia, is it truly true? You are engaged to Colonel Fitzwilliam?
Colonel Fitzwilliam? And he is Mr Darcy’s cousin? ”
“I am.” Lydia squeezed her sister’s hands and let herself be pulled into the warmth of the house. “Though it is rather a long story.”
“I want to hear all of it.” Kitty drew her close and lowered her voice. “Every single word. Tonight, in my room, after Mama has gone to sleep.”
“After Mama has gone to sleep, then,” Lydia agreed, and felt something loosen a little in her chest at the familiar conspiratorial pleasure of it.
Mary had greeted each of her family with a solemn handshake, even Lydia, and was now eyeing the luggage being unloaded from the second carriage with an expression of mild disapproval at its quantity.
Lydia considered telling her that she had not packed most of it herself, and decided it would not be worth the lecture on the sin of vanity.
The house seemed to close around them all like a pair of comfortable arms as the family pushed inside, talking and exclaiming over each other, and Lydia found herself pausing just inside the door for a moment.
She had been away perhaps three weeks in total, but Longbourn felt different; or perhaps she was different, which came to the same thing.
I am engaged, she thought, quite experimentally. I am going to be married.
Neither fact had quite resolved itself into anything real, though she had thought of little else for days now.
She was still working out what to make of it all when Kitty caught her arm again and dragged her firmly towards the stairs, and she let herself be dragged, and the strange vertiginous feeling faded back into the comfortable noise of home.
It was Jane who noticed the calling-card on the hall table, for Mrs Bennet was still directing the disposal of the luggage and Mr Bennet had retreated with the air of a man who intended to reach the sanctuary of his library before anyone could prevent him, and the younger girls were all still talking at once in the parlour.
Elizabeth noticed Jane noticing it. She watched her sister pick it up, turn it over, see the hand upon it, and go very still in a way that was quite unlike her usual composure; more as though composure had been superseded by something larger.
“Good news?” Elizabeth asked.
Jane looked up. Her face, which had been carefully controlled for most of the journey, was completely open, and Elizabeth was struck by the realisation that she had not seen it like that in rather a long time.
“Mr Bingley is returned to Netherfield,” Jane said. “He came this morning, and left his card. He has written a note on the back that he will call again tomorrow.”
Elizabeth crossed the hall and took her sister’s hand, and said nothing at all, because nothing needed saying. Jane’s fingers tightened on hers.
“It may mean nothing,” Jane said, which was so transparently untrue that Elizabeth almost laughed.
“Of course,” she said instead, very gravely. “Nothing whatsoever.”
Jane was trying very hard not to smile. Elizabeth gave up the effort and smiled for both of them.
The Matlock letter arrived the following morning, just as the family was finishing breakfast.
It was addressed, correctly, to Mr Bennet, who opened it, read it, and passed it across the table to his wife without comment.
Mrs Bennet read the first two lines and screamed.
“An earl!“ she cried, grasping at her husband’s sleeve.
“Mr Bennet, an earl! And a countess! They are coming here, they are coming to Longbourn, they are… Mr Bennet, the guest rooms! The guest rooms are not at all fit to receive an earl, the curtains in the blue room have been wanting new lining since Easter, and Cook cannot possibly be expected to produce a suitable dinner at such short notice, and my nerves, my nerves, I cannot be expected to…”
“They write that they will happily stay at Netherfield, my dear,” Mr Bennet observed.
“Netherfield! With Caroline Bingley?” Mrs Bennet transferred her attention to this new catastrophe without pausing for breath. “Of all the... no, no, we must insist they stay here, it is only right and proper, Mr Bennet, you must write to them at once and insist…”
“I suspect the Earl of Matlock is not a man accustomed to being insisted at,” Mr Bennet said, to the table in general.
“We could have the curtains re-lined in a fortnight,” Mary offered thoughtfully.
Nobody paid her any attention.
Lydia had taken the letter from where her mother had dropped it and was reading it through with care.
The hand was a fine one, the address elegantly brief, the tone warm and gracious.
The countess wrote that they were greatly pleased by the news of their son’s engagement and looked forward to welcoming Miss Lydia Bennet into the family.
The earl added two sentences at the foot of the page in a different hand, endorsing all his wife had said and expressing his personal satisfaction in his son’s choice.
She read it twice. She set it down.
The Earl and Countess of Matlock, she thought. His parents. Who will be my parents now, in a manner of speaking.
The thought ought perhaps to have been daunting.
Instead she found it settling somewhere warmly in her chest, alongside the memory of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s quiet confidence and General Lewes’s steady kindness.
She had not thought, until Brighton, that the world contained very many people she could trust. She was revising that opinion by degrees.
“I quite like the curtains in the blue room,” she remarked.
“Lydia!” her mother exclaimed. “How can you sit there so calmly when we are to receive an earl and a countess?”
“Perhaps because Lydia is the one marrying into the family,” Elizabeth said, with a sidelong smile at Lydia, “and is therefore rather more at ease with the connection.”
Lydia raised her eyebrows serenely. Mrs Bennet, distracted from her nerves for a moment, peered at her youngest daughter as though trying to determine whether she had been replaced when her back was turned.
“Human beings, every one of them,” Mary observed. “Whatever their rank.”
“Thank you, Mary,” said Mr Bennet, rising from the table. “Now, if no one has any immediate crises requiring my attention…”
“The guest rooms, Mr Bennet…”
“… I shall be in my library,” he continued, without breaking stride.
Lydia watched him go with a private amusement she had not previously known she shared with him, and went back to re-reading the countess’s letter.
The house was quiet by half past ten, her mother exhausted by the effort of her anxieties, her sisters all abed.
Lydia had sat with Kitty for an hour and told her as much as she could, watching Kitty’s face cycle through astonishment and indignation and fierce protectiveness on her behalf, and felt better for it in a way she had not expected.
There was no wisdom in Kitty, no measured perspective, and she did not try to improve the occasion.
She simply sat beside Lydia and was furious with Wickham specifically and the world at large for putting her sister in such a position, and it was, Lydia found, exactly what she needed.
She could not sleep, however. She lay awake for some time, looking at the ceiling, and eventually gave up, put on her wrapper and went down to the kitchen for some warm milk, in the way she had done since she was small.
A light was still burning in the library.
She hesitated in the hall for a moment, which was absurd, for it was her father’s library and she was hardly going to require an invitation, and then pushed open the door.
Mr Bennet looked up from his book. He did not appear surprised to see her, merely shifted his spectacles up his nose and gestured vaguely at the other chair.
“I was going to the kitchen,” Lydia said.
“I expect it will still be there in a few minutes,” said her father.
She went in and sat down.
It was quiet in the library, the only sound the fire settling.
Lydia was not certain when she had last been in this room alone with her father.
Possibly she never had, or if she had it had been years ago, and she did not think he had ever looked at her quite the way he was looking at her now, as though unsure what he was seeing, and unsure whether to say so.
“I saw you reading the Matlocks’ letter,” he said at last. “What did you think of it?”
“I thought the countess writes very well,” Lydia said. “And the earl’s endorsement was brief, but it seemed genuine.”
“Brief and genuine,” Mr Bennet repeated. “Yes, I thought the same.” He turned a page, though she suspected he had not read the previous one. “Fitzwilliam strikes me as his father’s son in that regard.”
Lydia looked at the fire. “Yes,” she said. “I think so too.”
Another silence, longer this time. Mr Bennet closed his book over his thumb.
“I did not listen to Elizabeth,” he said, which was so oblique a beginning that it took Lydia a moment to understand that it was as close to an apology as he was capable of.
“About Brighton. She told me she was concerned, and I...” He paused.
“Well. We are here and Brighton is there, and it has all come out rather differently than it might have done.”
“Rather differently,” Lydia agreed.
“I think he is a good man,” her father said. “Fitzwilliam. I think he will take care of you, and that you may trust him.”
It was more direct than she had expected from him, and she found it required a moment to absorb. “Yes,” she said, when she had done so. “I think so too.”
Mr Bennet looked at her for another moment, with the air of a man who wished he were better at this sort of conversation and was doing his best regardless. Then he opened his book again.
“The kitchen,” he reminded her.
“Yes.” Lydia rose, then paused at the door. “Goodnight, Papa.”
“Goodnight, Lyddie,” her father said, not looking up, and the use of the childhood name was so unexpected that she carried it all the way to the kitchen and up to bed with her, turning it over in the dark like something small and unexpectedly valuable.