Chapter Seventeen #2
She nodded, as though noting a fact for future reference. He could almost see her arranging it in her mind.
The realisation, when it crossed her face, was not dramatic. A slight brightness about the eyes. Her chin lifted.
“I shall want to know what to pack,” she said. “And whether a lady’s maid is generally provided, or whether I ought to bring Polly, and how long the crossing might be at this time of…”
“Lydia.”
He said it gently enough, but she stopped at once. Looked at him, closely. He shook his head, unable to find words for what must be said that would not sound cruel. She said it instead.
“You’re not taking me with you.”
It was not a question. He had not expected it to be.
“No,” he said. “I am not.”
He kept his voice level and steady and watched her absorb it. The hands in her lap tightened briefly, then relaxed. She looked down at them, then back at him, and he was struck, not for the first time, by how much older than sixteen she looked when she was not trying to charm anyone.
“Why?” she said, very quietly.
He gave her the excuses, the words he had spent much of a wakeful night thinking up. Trying to be gentle in the cruelty he must inflict on her, for her own safety and well-being.
“It is unsafe. The war is unpredictable. The conditions are rough, and there is no society, no comfort, nothing that could be called civilised living anywhere near where I will be. Nothing that a lady should have to endure, ever.” He paused.
“And you are sixteen years old. You should not be encamped on the Canadian frontier. It is not where you ought to be.”
She absorbed this without comment. He watched her considering whether to argue, and watched her conclude that she had no arguments which would actually hold.
“How long?” she asked finally, looking down at her hands again.
“I cannot say with any certainty.” He said this, knowing it to be true and also knowing it to be insufficient.
“My parents will be glad to have you at Matlock, and Darcy at Pemberley, with Georgiana and her companion and…” he stalled out, almost having revealed what was not yet a certainty.
“You will not want for company, or for…”
“Will you write to me?”
She had not looked up. The question was quiet and controlled, and he understood it immediately for what it was; not the request it seemed, but the one she was not making, which was whether she would matter to him at all while he was on the other side of the ocean.
“Of course I will write,” he said. “Though I must warn you that the post between Canada and England is infrequent at the best of times. My letters may reach you weeks or months late. And it is possible that yours to me may not arrive at all.”
She nodded again. Her face was quite composed.
“I need to know you are safe,” he said. It came out more simply than he had intended.
“As long as I know you are safe and well, I can bear the separation with something approaching fortitude. It is a great deal easier to do one’s duty when one is not worried for those at home.
” He looked at her steadily. “I am asking you to be well and safe and to not give me cause to worry. I know that is not a small thing to ask.”
Lydia was quiet for a moment. Something moved across her face that he could not read; it was there and gone before he had named it.
“I will be perfectly well,” she said. “You are not to worry about me for a single moment.”
She said it with such deliberateness that he understood it to be a gift; the gift of someone removing themselves from your list of concerns because you have enough of those already. He received it as it was meant, giving her the gift of his trust in her word in return.
“Thank you,” he said.
She looked out of the window. The silence between them was not comfortable, but it was honest, which was perhaps better.
“Will you come back?” she asked, and then seemed to regret asking it, looking quickly back at her hands.
“I intend to.” He said it without hesitation, because it was true. “I have every intention of it.”
She nodded, apparently finding this satisfactory, or at least as satisfactory as anything was going to be this morning.
He reached across and placed his hand over hers, where they lay folded in her lap.
She did not draw away. She looked down at his hand for a moment, and then she looked up at him, quite steadily, and he thought she was going to say something more, but she did not.
He held her hands until they heard footsteps in the hall, and then he released them and stood.
He told her she had done him great honour, which was the truest thing he could offer, and she held her composure through it with a grace that he suspected had cost her everything she had. He bowed to her, correctly, and went out.
She found Kitty in the bedroom they had shared since childhood, and sat down on the edge of the bed without a word. Kitty took one look at her and shut the door.
“He’s going away,” Lydia said. “America. Canada, specifically. He’s leaving on the twenty-third.” She heard how flat it sounded and could not amend it. “He is not taking me with him. I am to go to Matlock, or to Pemberley. He says it is not safe.”
“It’s not safe,“ Kitty said immediately, fiercely. “He’s right about that, at least. I’ve heard Canada is a dreadful wilderness, no place for…”
“I know he is right,” Lydia said. “I know it. That is what makes it so perfectly dreadful.”
Kitty sat down beside her without another word and took her hand, very firmly.
Lydia did not cry. She had used up all her tears weeks ago, she thought, in the Forsters’ house in Brighton, and what was left was only this: the cold clear knowledge that she was sixteen and about to be married and then immediately left behind, and that she had promised not to make it harder for him by minding.
“It isn’t fair,” Kitty said, with wholehearted conviction.
“No,” Lydia agreed. “It isn’t.”
They sat together for a while, exactly as they had done a hundred times before when the world was difficult, and Lydia found that it helped, not because Kitty could fix any of it, but because she was here and she was angry on Lydia’s behalf and she did not try to make it better.
She just held her hand and let her mind the things she had said she would not mind, and that was, in the circumstances, rather a lot.
After a while, Lydia sat up straighter, and smoothed her skirt, and said, “Do you know, I think I should like some tea.”
“I’ll ring for it,” said Kitty, and she did, and they had their tea, and talked of other things, and when Lydia went to bed that night she lay awake for a long time thinking of Canada, and the twenty-third, and the way Fitzwilliam had said as long as I know you are safe, and the question she had asked that she wished she had not, except that she was glad she had, because he had not hesitated.
I intend to.
She turned her face into the pillow, and did her best to be satisfied with her lot. And if a few tears leaked from beneath her eyelids and soaked into the pillow, well, Kitty would certainly never reproach her for them.