Chapter Sixteen #2
The dining room at Netherfield was significantly larger than Longbourn’s, and considerably more elegant, which did nothing to soothe Mrs Bennet’s nerves as they arrived, and quite a good deal for Lydia’s.
Large and elegant rooms, she had discovered, required a certain kind of composure which she seemed to produce naturally, once her initial apprehension was past. It was cosier rooms that caught her out sometimes, rooms which invited intimacy she did not know how to perform without drawing too much attention on her inadequacies.
The earl was a tall man, silver-haired, with his son’s frank blue eyes and his son’s ability to look at a room and take its measure without appearing to.
He greeted the Bennets with a warmth that managed to be both elegant and genuine; Mr Bennet, who was rarely caught off-guard in social situations, looked faintly surprised by it.
The countess was small and dark and said very little, but her eyes missed nothing. She took Lydia’s hands as they were introduced and looked at her steadily for a moment with the expression of someone setting aside any account they have been given in order to form their own judgment.
“My dear,” she said, and smiled, and the smile was so much like Richard’s that Lydia had to work to keep her own composure.
“My lady,” Lydia said, in the most respectful tone she could muster up.
“So pretty.” Lady Matlock startled her by letting go of her hands, and reaching up to pat Lydia’s cheek. Her eyes were misty, making Lydia feel better about the dampness about her own. “Richard, you have chosen so well!”
Colonel Fitzwilliam approached, his expression warm as he took Lydia’s hand and kissed it, then placed his arm about his mother’s shoulders in a surprisingly affectionate gesture for such a public setting.
“She is much more than just a pretty face, Mama. You’ll see.”
Caroline Bingley had arranged herself at the far end of the room with the elegance of a woman who had spent considerable effort making it appear effortless.
She was dressed beautifully, as always, and the slight tightness at the corners of her mouth was visible only to anyone who was specifically looking for it.
Elizabeth was specifically looking for it.
She caught Lydia’s eye across the room, and Lydia, who had also noticed, pressed her lips together in a very small, very private smile. Elizabeth answered it with the merest lift of her brows.
The earl, it turned out, had a quality Elizabeth had not anticipated; he was funny.
Not in the obvious way, not the genial hearty humour of a man who enjoys the sound of his own laughter, but in a quiet, dry manner which reminded her rather forcefully of Mr Bennet, and she caught her father noticing it too, with a surprised appreciation.
Before the first course had been removed, the two men had discovered a shared passion for Roman history and were deep in argument about Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaigns, which was probably not what Mrs Bennet had imagined when she pictured dining with an earl.
Lydia sat beside the countess, who had engineered this arrangement with a skill that owed nothing to accident.
Elizabeth watched them from across the table with a divided attention; Caroline Bingley, on her left, was maintaining a flawless performance of gracious social ease which must have been costing her a great deal, and Lydia and the countess were talking quietly in a way that seemed, after the first ten careful minutes, to have relaxed somewhat.
“You seem very pleased,” Jane observed softly, beside Elizabeth.
“I am watching several things at once,” Elizabeth murmured, “and all of them are very interesting.”
Jane followed her gaze from Caroline to Lydia to the two fathers at the end of the table and said, with great charity, “How lovely that Papa and the earl are getting on so well.”
“Perfectly lovely,” Elizabeth agreed.
“And it is very pleasant to see Lydia so at ease with the countess.”
“Very pleasant indeed.”
Jane hesitated. “And Miss Bingley looks well this evening.”
Elizabeth smiled. “You are a much better person than I am,” she said, which made Jane look alarmed, which made Elizabeth smile wider.
Mr Darcy was watching her down the table, Elizabeth saw.
He was sitting on the other side of the countess, listening to her conversation with Lydia, but his eyes rarely left Elizabeth.
She smiled at him warmly, and the light which came to his normally serious face made her feel quite disconcerted.
She almost knocked over her wine glass and had to look away to focus.
She would not shame Lydia with poor manners at this most crucial meeting with her future parents-in-law!
They found one another in the corridor after dinner, when the gentlemen were still with their port and Mrs Bennet was holding court for the countess on the subject of wedding preparations, and Lydia caught Elizabeth’s arm.
“Did you see Miss Bingley’s face,” Lydia said, in a low voice, “when Lord Matlock told his story about the hunting party and mentioned how often Richard will be at Heatheridge once he has sold out?”
“The future seat of a future earl and countess,” Elizabeth murmured. “Yes, I saw.”
“She has been so agreeable all evening,” Lydia said, with a precision in her tone that Jane would absolutely have called unkind. “It must be exhausting.”
“I think she is finding it so.” Elizabeth looked back towards the drawing room. “But I am also a great deal more interested in what Lady Matlock said to you over the soup. You looked…” she considered, “as though you had not expected whatever it was.”
Lydia was quiet for a moment. “She told me,” she said, “that Richard had spoken of me in his letters. Not – not of the situation.” She seemed to be choosing her words with care.
“Of me. What I had said. What I had noticed.
“ She paused again. “I had not known he had written home about me in those terms.”
Elizabeth looked at her youngest sister, who was composing her expression with some effort and mostly succeeding. “I see,” she said.
“It was only a small thing,” Lydia said, a little too firmly. “I do not make too much of it.”
“No,” Elizabeth said. “Of course not.”
They stood together quietly for a moment in the corridor.
“The white was the right choice,” Lydia said at last, straightening. “Do you not think?”
“Absolutely the right choice,” Elizabeth agreed, and offered her arm, and they went back into the drawing room together.
The countess found Lydia in a brief moment of solitude near the end of the evening, when the company had rearranged itself and somehow contrived to leave her standing alone near the fireplace.
She came to stand beside her, unhurried, her dark eyes taking in the room with a quiet attention that Lydia recognised.
She notices things, Lydia thought. Just as Richard does.
“I am very glad we have had this opportunity to become acquainted before the wedding,” the countess said. “I confess I was rather more anxious about this evening than I care to admit.”
Lydia turned to look at her in genuine surprise. “You were anxious?”
“Oh, I had painted all sorts of pictures in my mind,” the countess said serenely, with a little smile of amusement that acknowledged she understood Lydia’s astonishment.
“Richard’s letters were very informative, but letters are not people, after all.
” She paused. “I am happy to report that you are considerably more yourself than any picture I had painted.”
Lydia was still working out whether that was a compliment when the countess took her hand and held it, briefly, in both of hers.
“I hope you will look on Matlock as your home while Richard is away,” she said. “We will take good care of you, my dear. And I think you will take better care of yourself than you perhaps know.”
She moved away before Lydia could answer, which was perhaps as well, as Lydia was not entirely certain she could have found the right words.
She stood by the fire for a moment longer, feeling the warmth at her back, and thought of Richard’s letters going north to Matlock, carrying not just news of a situation managed, but something more than that. A good opinion of her that she had not realised he possessed.
Across the room, her father caught her eye and gave her a small, dry nod of acknowledgement, exactly as he had in the library, and Lydia felt it settle alongside the other things she had been collecting: General Lewes’s hand on her arm in the summer, the countess’s brief warm clasp just now, Lyddie in the dark.
The knowledge that Richard had written to his parents in such terms that they were disposed to think well of her despite the situation, her youth, her lack of connections or dowry.
She was, she thought, rather richer than she had known.