Chapter Twenty
The carriage was waiting, and the family had gone inside.
This had been managed, Lydia suspected, by Elizabeth, who had a talent for arranging people into the right positions without appearing to do anything at all.
Her mother had required some steering; she had shown every sign of wishing to remain on the front step indefinitely, pressing Fitzwilliam to take care of himself, to send word very often, to come home as soon as he could arrange it; but the door was closed now and the drive was quiet, and there was only the carriage with its waiting horses, and Fitzwilliam standing before her with his hat under his arm and the sun touching golden lights in his hair.
“Well,” he said.
“Well,” she agreed.
He had, she knew, already seen to everything that could be seen to.
There was an allowance settled on her, generous enough that she had blushed when her Uncle Phillips read it out; she would want for nothing.
He had arranged matters with a thoroughness she was coming to understand was how he did things.
Whatever else he was, he was not a man who left loose ends.
“You are happy to stay here until after…” he paused. “Until the weddings are done? It makes no sense for anyone to travel north only to come back again, and your sisters will be glad to have you with them a little longer, I think.”
“I know.” She did know; it had been his idea and she had been grateful for it, though she had not said so.
While it might have made sense for her to reside at Netherfield with the Matlocks while they awaited Darcy’s wedding to Elizabeth, it would have felt exceptionally strange, with her family so close.
“I shall be perfectly comfortable here. And then Matlock.”
“And then Matlock,” he agreed. A pause. “My mother will be good to you. She is, she takes some knowing, but she is good.”
“The countess has been very kind to me already.”
“Yes.” He looked at her with the directness he reserved for things he meant precisely. “She told me she thought I had made rather a better choice than I knew. She was right.”
Lydia looked at the gravel of the drive. Then she made herself look up, because she had decided, somewhere in the last few weeks, that she was going to stop looking at the floor when things were difficult.
“Will you, is there anything you need from me?” she asked. “Any specific thing I ought to do, or not do, while you are away. That would…” she searched for the word, “that would make things easier for you.”
He looked at her steadily for a moment. “Be well,” he said. “Be safe. That is all I need from you.”
She nodded. Her throat was doing something she was choosing to ignore.
“I need to know,” he said, more quietly, “that you are all right, and that you are not, that you are not merely enduring things. I would like you to be as happy as circumstances permit.” He paused.
“Write to me, even if the letters cannot get through. Write them anyway. I should like to think of you writing them.”
“I will,” she said. “I will write very long letters and tell you everything, even if they never arrive.”
“Good.” He put his hand out, and she gave him hers, and he held it for a moment, his thumb moving once across her knuckles. “You have done everything I could have asked of you,” he said. “More. I want you to know that.”
She could not speak, quite, so she nodded again.
He bent and kissed her hand, and then he released it and stepped back, and that was all there was; that was all there could be, on a front step with the coachman sitting up on the box and Plymouth at the end of the road and Canada beyond that across an entire ocean.
“Take care of yourself, Lydia.”
“And you,” she said.
He went to the carriage. The door closed. The horses started forward.
She stood on the front step of Longbourn and watched it go down the drive and through the gate and along the lane until the trees took it, and then there was nothing to see but the empty lane and the late summer morning spread out across the fields, very still, very green, going on in all directions without particular regard for anything that had just happened.
She stood there for a little while after that, until the door opened behind her and Jane’s arm came quietly around her shoulders, and she allowed herself to be drawn inside.
She was still at Longbourn when the first letter came, two weeks later; a single page, creased from the journey, written in a hand she did not recognise as his until she remembered that she had never seen his handwriting before.
Plymouth, 4 September
Our departure is delayed by weather, which is irritating but not, the captain assures me, unusual at this time of year.
The ship is tolerably comfortable and the officers good company.
I have been reading, there is little else to do, and find I had forgotten how pleasant it is.
I hope all at Longbourn are well and that your sisters’ happiness does not become oppressive.
R.F.
She read it four times and wrote back immediately, eight pages, and was not at all certain he would ever receive them. Likely the ship had sailed days ago now and the letter must await another ship to make the Atlantic crossing.
The double wedding was quiet, as such things go; Jane and Elizabeth married from Longbourn on a clear September morning, and Lydia stood in the church and was genuinely, uncomplicated happy for them, which was something she had not really trusted herself to manage beforehand.
She had been afraid she might mind too much, in the wrong way.
She did not. She was glad, and said so, and meant it, and when Elizabeth embraced her before stepping into Darcy’s carriage, Lydia held on for a moment longer than was strictly necessary and then let her go.
She went north with the Matlocks three days later.
Matlock was large and cold and very beautiful, and the countess sat with her on her second evening there, by the fire in a small sitting room off the main drawing room, and said, “You are doing very well, you know. Better than most would.”
Lydia thought about it. “I am doing the only thing there is to do,” she said.
The countess looked at her with something that was almost amusement. “Yes,” she said. “That is generally what doing well consists of. It’s harder than most people realise.”
At Pemberley, the last of October came in cold and bright.
Elizabeth had, in the month since her marriage, been making her acquaintance with the house room by room, in the methodical way she had of approaching things she wished to understand properly.
She had found the conservatory, which was warm even on cold mornings and smelled of damp earth and green things.
She had found the small library off the master’s study, which was different from the great library and considerably more comfortable for reading in.
She had found that Mrs Reynolds would, if asked the right questions, tell stories about Darcy’s childhood that were a source of both illumination and quiet delight.
She had found that Georgiana, without the pressure of additional company, was even more sweet and funny than Elizabeth had realised.
Georgiana’s company was no small consolation for the separation from her sisters.
She had found, too, that Darcy, her husband, which was still occasionally a surprising thing to think, was easier to know at home than anywhere else.
Something in him settled at Pemberley. He walked the grounds in the morning without a hat and knew every tenant’s name and had opinions about crop rotation that he delivered with a solemnity she found endearing, and when he laughed, which he did rather more than people who had only met him in drawing rooms could ever imagine, it was a very good laugh.
She was, she thought, on a late October morning with the fire lit and the park turning gold outside the windows, genuinely happy. The thought arrived with some surprise, and then settled, and stayed.
The letter from Matlock was in the morning’s post, presented by Mrs Reynolds on a silver salver in a charming little sitting-room that had once been Darcy’s mother’s domain, adjacent to the music-room where Georgiana spent hours practising, filling their air with the most beautiful music imaginable.
It was a very pleasant place to spend her mornings.
She recognised Lydia’s hand on the direction at once, and carried it to her chair by the fire before opening it.
Matlock, 23rd October
Dear Lizzy,
I write from the countess’s very elegant sitting room, which has the finest view I have ever seen and is also absolutely freezing, as nobody appears to have explained to any of the fireplaces in this house that it is now October and we are in Derbyshire.
The countess says I may complain as much as I like as long as I wear my warmest shawl while doing it, which I consider a most reasonable arrangement.
Matlock is very grand and rather magnificent and I am working hard at not being intimidated by it, with mixed success.
Fitzwilliam’s brother and his wife are down from Scotland for the winter; Lord Heatheridge is kind but very serious; his wife Sophia is the same, and their two daughters are good girls, though they have clearly been brought up to think that enthusiasm is slightly vulgar.
I am doing my best not to disabuse them of this notion too forcefully.
The countess has been reading to me. She chooses novels, which I did not expect, and has opinions about them that I would not have expected of someone of her rank. I think I like her very much.
I have heard no more from Richard since that note from Plymouth, which is only to be expected I suppose considering the time it takes for ships to cross the Atlantic.
Lord Matlock explained to me that they will cease crossing at all soon until the spring, so I must wait patiently until then, I suppose.
I have written and sent several letters which will probably eventually arrive all in a great clump and be far more than he will have patience to read, which I consider only fair.
I think of him most in the evenings. I did not expect that; I expected the mornings to be hardest. But it is the evenings, when the house grows quiet, and I do not know what he is doing or whether he is well.
I hope Pemberley is everything you wished for, and that Mr Darcy is not being in the least haughty. Write when you can. I find your letters a great comfort.
Your affectionate sister, Lydia Fitzwilliam
P.S. I have also now been introduced to Lord Matlock’s horse, a very superior animal called Caesar who I am not permitted to ride on account of being too small and also a lady, which seems an insufficient reason to me. I intend to raise the matter again in the spring.
Elizabeth sat for a long time after she had finished reading, the letter in her lap, the fire warm at her feet, the October day bright and cold outside the window.
She thought of Lydia in the countess’s elegant, draughty sitting room; Lydia writing in the evenings, putting her heart on the pages.
Lydia raising the matter of Caesar again in spring with the serene confidence of someone who has decided to be all right and is, mostly, succeeding.
She thought of a girl at an assembly just one year ago, all flying ribbons and noise, who had looked at nothing carefully and thought little at all.
She folded the letter and held it, and felt something in her chest that was not quite pride and not quite sorrow and was entirely, she thought, love; the kind that arrives when someone you did not expect to astonish you does.
Then she opened her writing desk and wrote back at once, a long letter, the kind that assumed a real reader at the other end; and when she wrote I am glad you are finding Matlock to your liking, Lydia, and I am glad you are you, she meant every word of it.