Chapter Twenty-One
The seam would hold.
This was the tailor’s assurance as Fitzwilliam shrugged back into his jacket in the cramped back room off St James’s Street, and he had no reason to doubt the man; the repair was neat enough that he could not find it by feel, which was the relevant test. He had one formal jacket.
He had not thought about this before tonight.
Three years of campaign dress had apparently done something to his sense of what civilian life required of a man.
He had arrived in London shortly after eight o’clock that morning, gone to Horse Guards to deposit his meagre belongings, and then reported to the War Office, being under orders to report as soon as possible.
It was, apparently, not convenient for the War Office to make it possible for him to actually follow those orders.
He sat in three different anterooms, spoke with two functionaries, and was then directed to a third who turned out not to be the relevant person after all.
The relevant person had been at lunch. He waited.
He found the torn seam while waiting, which was at least an occupation.
He eventually spoke to the correct functionary, delivered the reports he had been charged with delivering, and was then sent on to another office to wait.
Finally, what he already knew had been officially confirmed.
He would not be reassigned, his formal discharge would be ready within the fortnight, and he had been formally thanked for his service.
It was strongly intimated that a knighthood might be forthcoming in due time. He cared not in the slightest.
Before going to the War Office he had sent a man round to Darcy House to enquire whether the family was in town, with a note to be delivered if they were: a brief line to say he had arrived in London and would call as soon as he was at liberty.
He had thought of sending a second note, specifically to his wife, and had not done so, and was not certain why.
When he returned to his room at Horse Guards in the early evening, irritated beyond measure that what should have been a simple matter had taken up the entire day, there was a reply waiting.
Come at once, Elizabeth had written, in a brisk decisive hand.
Lydia is with us and will be so glad to know you are home.
A line below, with the air of someone adding necessary information under slight protest: I am afraid we are to host a ball this evening which cannot now be cancelled.
We shall quite understand if you are not yet ready to face such an environment, or if the War Office does not release you tonight.
He read the note twice, standing in his room, before he realised it was already too late to go at once in any meaningful sense; it was past six, the receiving line would begin at eight, and arriving at the start of the ball would cause precisely the kind of fuss Elizabeth was hinting he should avoid.
He could not descend on them now, in the middle of the preparations, and he ought not to arrive early enough to be announced with the guests.
The shock to Lydia if he suddenly appeared before her in the receiving line might be too much.
He had time, in other words, to get his jacket repaired.
He had read the note twice more in the tailor’s back room while he waited for the man to repair his jacket.
He kept returning to the same sentence. Lydia is with us and will be so glad to know you are home.
Elizabeth had written it deliberately; she did nothing without intention, and she had an understanding of her sister he did not have, might never have.
The letters had come through when they came through, which was to say infrequently and in clumps, and he had not always been in a position to write back promptly, and the letters he did send would likely have arrived months after the events they described.
He was aware of this. He was not sure he had reckoned with it properly, nor with what will be so glad was telling him about what the alternative might have looked like.
Will be so glad. He turned it over in his mind, wondering if it was the truth. Then he put the note away and paid the tailor and went to Darcy House.
He arrived forty minutes after the receiving line ended.
The footman at the door was a long-time family retainer who recognised him and admitted him without ceremony, for which he was grateful.
He had been announced at enough military dinners to know that late arrivals with announced names tended to draw the assembled company’s attention in a way he was not yet ready to be examined.
He gave his hat and gloves to a second footman and stood in the entrance hall for a moment, listening to the music floating down from above.
He went up.
A decade of military service had taught him to scan every room he entered before he did anything else.
He was aware of this habit; he had been told, by two separate officers he respected, that he would lose it in time.
He was not sure he wanted to. In a drawing room it was merely useful.
He made a comprehensive sweep of the ballroom with his eyes before he moved from the doorway.
Darcy first, on the floor, which he noted with something close to surprise.
Darcy danced only out of duty in Fitzwilliam’s experience, but there he was with Elizabeth beside him, brilliant in deep green, very much in her element, and Darcy was smiling.
Fitzwilliam had been afraid, in the distant way he trained himself not to think about things that were too far away to be useful, that Elizabeth might have become stiff and formal with the consequence of Pemberley behind her.
She had not. She looked, if anything, more herself than before.
He was glad of it, and doubly glad for the obvious joy on Darcy’s face as he danced with his wife.
There was Georgiana, further down the line of dancers.
Grown up considerably; she had been a girl when he left and she was not a girl now.
Dancing with a young man who was looking at her with an expression so transparent that Fitzwilliam could read it from thirty feet away.
He would want to know more about that young man. He filed the thought.
He moved on.
A face he knew near the far wall. Caroline Bingley had not changed; she had decided some years ago exactly what she was going to look like and had been executing the decision with great precision ever since.
She was watching someone on the near side of the room with an expression he recognised as malevolent jealousy, which was not in itself remarkable; the interesting thing was that she was not watching Elizabeth, which was where her malevolent jealousy usually resided. She was watching someone else.
He followed her eyeline.
There was a woman standing near the windows.
Blue silk, a bright blue that caught the candlelight, with pearls at her throat and in her dark hair.
She was the centre of a loose group of young men, none of them quite close enough to constitute crowding, which suggested she had managed the distances herself without appearing to do so.
She was saying something; the man nearest her laughed.
Her attention moved around the group with effortless ease; she appeared the kind of woman who never had to work at saying or doing the right thing.
He could not place her, but something about her stayed his attention. She was familiar, and yet not.
He was watching her, nagging at his memory to recall why he knew her, when the young man at the edge of her circle, not quite worked up to entering it, consoling himself on the periphery, turned to the man beside him and said something.
Too far to hear clearly. But Fitzwilliam had spent years reading lips in noisy environments, across parade grounds, over cannon fire.
The dashing Mrs Fitzwilliam.
He became very still.
He looked at her again. Properly, this time.
Brown curls. The shape of her face, which was both the same and not as he remembered.
The puppy fat that had still rounded her cheeks three years ago had vanished, leaving elegant cheekbones which enhanced the flash of her eyes as she made another witty remark, this one making the entire circle around her laugh.
But everything else was wrong, which was to say everything else was new, which was to say he had married a girl and there was a woman standing by those windows who had his name and he had not the first idea when or how this had happened.
She held herself differently. She had always been a girl who took up space in a room, who made her presence known without making much apparent effort; this woman occupied precisely the space she chose to occupy and no more, and held it with the quiet assurance of someone who had never in her life needed to make a noise about it.
She knew exactly where everyone in the room was.
He could see it in the slight tilt of her attention, the unhurried way her focus moved.
He recognised the habit because it was one of his own.
He needed a drink.
He was still watching her when it happened.
It was a general survey of the room, the unconscious circuit of someone who had been doing it for years; he recognised that too. Her gaze drifted across him and stopped. For one moment, before she knew she was doing it, her face was completely open.
Pure, uncomplicated delight. Something younger than her face. Something real.
Then it closed. He watched it close, smooth and deliberate as a hand closing over a coin. She said something to the man nearest her, a small gesture of excuse, and crossed the room towards him unhurried, making it look as though she had been intending to cross the room all along.
She stopped at a polite distance and curtsied, correctly.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam.” Her voice was warm, composed, perfectly calibrated. “Welcome home.”
Not Richard.