Chapter Nineteen
The dress was white muslin with a sash of pale gold and small seed pearls at the neckline, and it was the most beautiful thing Lydia had ever owned.
She stood before the glass in her old bedroom while Polly put the last pins in her hair, and tried to recognise herself.
The girl looking back at her had the same brown eyes and the same curls, but something about the set of her face was different, had been different since Brighton, and Lydia had not yet decided whether she liked it.
It looked like someone who knew things. She was not sure she wanted to know them.
Around her, Longbourn was in its full wedding morning chaos.
She could hear her mother in the next room delivering instructions at a volume and frequency that suggested she believed nobody would act on them unless told at least four times each, the sound of Kitty’s voice protesting something, Mary’s lower and more resigned underneath it.
Downstairs someone was laughing; Jane, she thought; Jane had a certain laugh on happy mornings that Lydia had known all her life.
Carriage wheels rattled on the drive, and within a few minutes the house was quieter. Her sisters were going in the carriage first, and it would then return for Lydia and her parents. She breathed slowly, knowing time was growing short.
“There, miss,” Polly said, stepping back. “You look lovely.”
Lydia looked at herself a moment longer. Then she picked up the small posy of white roses the countess had sent over from Netherfield’s hothouses that morning, and she went downstairs.
Her father was in the hall.
He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at nothing in particular, with the expression of a man deep in thought he would not readily share. He looked up when she appeared on the stair.
There was a silence, which was not uncomfortable. Her father had always communicated a good deal in his silences, when you knew how to listen.
“You look very well, Lyddie,” he said at last.
It was not much, as speeches went. She knew him well enough by now to understand it was all she would get, and perhaps all she needed.
“Thank you, Papa.” She came down the last two steps. He offered his arm, which surprised her; it was a formal gesture, not entirely characteristic. She took it.
“Are you,” he began, and then stopped, as though he had asked the question but was not sure he wanted the answer.
He tried again. “I hope this… that is to say… I want…” He stopped again.
Drew himself up. “I want you to know that I am aware I have not always given you the attention you deserved, Lydia. You were always…” a pause, “you were always very much your mother’s child, and I own that I did not look closely enough.
” His jaw worked briefly. “I am looking now.”
Lydia looked at the floor, and then made herself look up at him instead. “I know, Papa.”
“Good.” He patted her hand once, on his arm.
“Good. Then I shall just say that whatever foolish assumptions anyone may have made about what you are made of, those of us who have been paying attention this summer know rather better.” He looked at her steadily.
“Fitzwilliam is getting a good deal more than he may yet realise.”
It was, without question, the longest speech of direct personal feeling her father had ever made to her. Lydia felt her throat tighten and made a firm private decision not to cry before she had even left the house.
“He had better realise it,” she said, which made her father’s mouth curve, and the moment resolved itself back into something manageable.
From above them, Mrs Bennet’s voice descended the stairs at full sail. “Mr Bennet! Lydia! We shall be late!”
Meryton church was fuller than Lydia had expected.
She had known there would be townspeople; Fitzwilliam had been a visible and popular presence in the neighbourhood these past weeks since the banns had begun to be called, and Meryton had opinions about everything and everyone.
Fitzwilliam was waiting at the altar.
His eyes fixed on her as she came down the aisle on her father’s arm, and she watched him look at her, properly look, the way he occasionally did when he thought she was not watching, and something in his face settled.
She took her place beside him. He was very close. She could feel the warmth of him.
“All right?” he said quietly, just for her.
“Yes,” she said. And she was.
The rector began.
Lydia paid attention to the words, which she had not really expected to do.
She had assumed she would be too frightened, or too occupied with not crying, or too aware of the hundred pairs of eyes on her back.
But the words were very old and very serious and they meant something, standing there beside him, and she listened to all of them.
To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part.
She said them clearly enough to be heard, which she had also not been certain she could manage.
When he put the ring on her finger she looked at it rather than at him, which was cowardice of a small kind, but she needed a moment. The ring was gold, plain and warm, and it sat on her hand with a solidity that surprised her. She had known it was coming and was still surprised by it.
With this ring I thee wed.
She looked up then, and found him already looking at her.
They came out of the church into the late summer brightness, and Lydia was still blinking at the light when she heard her name, her old name, the one she had always answered to but was not hers any more.
“Miss Lydia!”
She turned, and her face broke into a smile she had not had to manufacture in weeks.
General Lewes was coming up the church path in full dress uniform, medals catching the sun, moving with the unhurried authority of a man who has arrived precisely when he intended to. Beside him, Fitzwilliam went still in the way that meant he was suppressing a strong reaction of some kind.
“General!” She went to him without the slightest ceremony, both his gnarled hands taken in hers. “I did not know you were coming!”
“Would hardly miss it, would I?” He looked her over with the same warmth she remembered. “You look magnificent, my girl. Fitzwilliam’s a lucky man.” He looked past her at Fitzwilliam, who had arrived at her shoulder. “Well done. I knew you’d make the right choice.”
“General Lewes.” There was a note in Fitzwilliam’s voice he reserved for men he respected. “I was not aware you were in Hertfordshire.”
“I cannot stay long, I’m afraid; I’ll take a glass at the breakfast and then I must be off again.
” He patted Lydia’s hands before releasing them.
“I came to see you married properly,” he said to her, with a directness she had always found bracing and kind in equal measure.
“I wanted to know for myself that you were all right.”
“I am all right,” she said, and meant it the same way she had meant it in the church. “I am very glad you came.”
He patted her cheek once, as though he had said what he came to say and was satisfied, and then Fitzwilliam was drawing her away gently to receive the rest of the well-wishers, and she went, looking back once to see the old general shaking hands with her father with the ease of men who have nothing to prove to each other.
The wedding breakfast was everything her mother had wanted it to be, which was to say it was very loud and very full and the table was magnificent.
Lydia sat at the top of it beside Fitzwilliam and ate rather less than she had expected to, and observed everything.
The earl and the countess, warm and easy; Lady Catherine holding court at the far end, occasionally looking down the table with an expression that was not quite approval but was on nodding terms with it.
Darcy beside Elizabeth, who was managing both her own happiness and her mother’s simultaneous social triumph with characteristic calm.
Bingley beside Jane. Kitty flushed with the importance of the day.
Mary, unexpectedly, talking at some length with the countess’s companion, a quiet woman with a kind face who appeared to find Mary genuinely interesting, which was the best thing Lydia had seen all morning.
General Lewes sat with her father and Lord Matlock, and the three of them were absorbed in a conversation that showed no signs of stopping, which seemed to please them all.
She fixed each thing in her mind, the way she had been doing since Brighton; carefully, deliberately, as though she were putting things away to keep. She did not know exactly when she had started doing this, only that she had, and that it helped.
She was aware, at a certain point, that Fitzwilliam had turned slightly towards her.
“You are very quiet,” he said.
“I am taking note of things,” she said, which was the truth and did not require any further explanation, and he looked at her for a moment and then nodded, as though it made sense to him, and did not press her. She was grateful for that.
Across the table, General Lewes caught her eye and raised his glass a fraction. She raised hers in return, very slightly, and he smiled at her.
One more thing to put away and keep.
He was gone by mid-afternoon, as he had said, his carriage departing the front of Longbourn while the party was still at the table. Lydia watched it go from the window. She heard footsteps behind her and glanced back to find Elizabeth.
“You are fond of him,” Elizabeth said.
“Very.” Lydia turned back to the window. “He was kind to me when there was no reason to be.” She considered. “Most kindness has a reason. His did not. I think he is the best friend I have ever had.”
Elizabeth was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I think that may be the best definition of friendship I have ever heard.”
Lydia looked at her, a little startled. Elizabeth was perfectly serious.
“You have grown,” Elizabeth said simply. “I hope you know that.”
Lydia looked back at the window, where the road was empty now, and the afternoon sun lay warm and long across the Hertfordshire fields. She did not know what to say, so she said nothing, and Elizabeth stood beside her quietly, and that was all right too.
Bingley had offered Netherfield for the wedding night, and Fitzwilliam had accepted.
Lydia had been uncertain at first, but one thought of spending that night at Longbourn and she had agreed immediately.
Now that she was here, however, everything felt strange.
Unreal. She sat at the dressing table in a guest room in an unfamiliar house, while a maid whose name she didn’t know unplaited her hair, and looked at herself in the glass.
Mrs Fitzwilliam. The name she would have for the rest of her life, whether he came back from Canada or whether he did not, and she would not think about that last part, she was not going to think about that.
The maid curtsied and went. The house was very quiet. It was late, nearing midnight.
She sat for a while longer, listening to the quiet.
And then, from somewhere below, the library she thought, or the billiard room perhaps, she heard voices.
Low, unhurried. She could not make out the words; they were too far away and too quiet for that.
But she could hear the rhythm of it; one voice, then the other, then the first again. Comfortable. Unhurried.
She listened to it for a while, and it was, in some way she could not have explained, exactly the right sound for this house on this night. Then she took herself to bed, and lay in the dark with her hands folded on the counterpane, looking at the ceiling, and tried to think of nothing.
After a while she turned her left hand so she could feel the plain gold ring against her fingers.
She did not sleep for a long time, but she was not unhappy. She was just awake in the dark, in the way of someone who has arrived at the end of a very long day and is now looking quietly at the beginning of everything that comes after.
Darcy had found the decanter of brandy without assistance, which was one of the advantages of having spent quite some time at Netherfield. Bingley had tactfully left them alone, and everyone else had long since retired.
He poured for both of them without asking. Fitzwilliam accepted his glass, turned it in his hands, did not drink immediately.
“She will be all right,” Darcy said.
It was not a question, but Fitzwilliam answered it anyway. “I know.”
A silence. The fire had burned down to embers and neither of them moved to build it up.
“She was glad to see the old general,” Darcy said.
“General Lewes.” The corner of Fitzwilliam’s mouth moved. “A truly good man. He would have stepped up for her, if I had not.”
“The choice you made was the right one,” Darcy said simply.
Fitzwilliam looked back at the fire. He drank. “She is going to be quite remarkable,” he said, in the tone of a man arriving at a conclusion that surprises him slightly. “Given time.”
“Yes,” Darcy said. “She is.”
Another silence, the kind that comes after the important thing has been said.
“Three days,” Fitzwilliam said eventually.
“Three days,” Darcy agreed.
Fitzwilliam turned his glass in his hands again. “Look after her for me.” It was not a request, exactly, nor an order. Something in between. Something he didn’t really have to say, and he knew it, but he said it anyway.
“I will.” Darcy looked at him steadily. “Come home, Richard.”
Fitzwilliam met his eyes. He set down his glass.
“I intend to,” he said, which was the same thing he had said to Lydia, and he meant it now precisely as he had meant it then.
He couldn’t make promises. They were a luxury no soldier could afford.
He could only express his intentions, perhaps speak the future into being what he hoped for if he desired it enough.
He hoped so, anyway.
They sat together a little longer, until the fire was quite out, and then they went to bed.