Chapter Twenty-One #2
He bowed over her hand. He was, he realised, at a disadvantage he had not anticipated and could not immediately account for.
“Mrs Fitzwilliam.” He straightened. “I apologise for the lateness of my arrival.”
“Not at all,” she said pleasantly. “There was a great deal of military business, I imagine, on your return.”
“The War Office,” he said. “And a tailor.”
Something moved in her eyes, very briefly. Not amusement. Something more considering. “Well,” she said, “you are here now.”
“I am,” he agreed.
There was a moment in which neither of them had anything to say, which was not something he had experienced often and had not expected to experience with her specifically. The girl in Brighton had never for a single moment lacked something to say.
Then Elizabeth appeared at his elbow.
“Richard.” Warm, proprietary, welcoming. She took his arm and kissed his cheek in the manner of a woman who had been Mrs Darcy long enough to feel perfectly confident in London society. “I am very glad you are here at last. You look very well; doesn’t he, Lydia?”
“Extremely,” Lydia said, with the same pleasant composure.
Elizabeth’s eyes moved between them with the alertness of a woman taking a measurement. Whatever she concluded, she kept it to herself. “Come and see Darcy,” she said, steering him gently. “He has been on edge since your note arrived this morning.”
He went. He glanced back once. Lydia had already returned to her corner of the room, to the group that had paused and now resumed, and she did not look as though she had looked back.
Darcy shook his hand with quiet warmth and said only “welcome home,” which was the right thing.
Georgiana embraced him with genuine feeling and then gave him a look, very brief and very direct, that told him she had noticed something and was filing it away.
He would not have said he was particularly readable this evening but evidently his cousin disagreed.
“Lord Anstruther,” Elizabeth said, drawing forward the young man who had been hovering at Georgiana’s elbow. “He and Georgiana have become great friends.”
The young man was perhaps twenty-four; he had the look of someone who read a great deal and didn’t mind if you knew it, which Fitzwilliam found he approved of more than he expected to. His regard for Georgiana was utterly transparent, though he was doing his best to be decorous about it.
“Colonel,” Anstruther said, with a slight bow. “Your reputation precedes you.”
“I hope not unfavourably,” Fitzwilliam said.
“Entirely the reverse. Miss Darcy speaks of you with great affection.”
Georgiana looked serene. Darcy looked, very briefly, as though he was doing some sort of internal calculation that he would share with no one.
Fitzwilliam’s attention drifted across the room. He could not prevent it.
Lydia was dancing now. Her partner was a fair-haired young man who was plainly delighted with himself for having secured her hand and slightly lost for what to do with the good fortune.
She was talking, he noticed; not performing the dance in silence but talking with the easy grace of someone who could do several things simultaneously without apparent effort.
Her partner laughed at something she said.
Her attention was fully on her partner, without the slightest indication that intimated she knew she was being observed.
He watched her for the rest of the evening.
She never once looked as though she was being watched.
Lydia had built an idea of what this reunion would be, in the past three years of waiting.
Not a fantasy; she was not sixteen anymore and had long since lost the habit of building fantasies.
But a hope, reasonable and moderate, something she had allowed herself because it seemed harmless: that when he came home there would be some moment of recognition.
Not dramatic. Just real. Some acknowledgement that they were not truly strangers, that the years of letters and the understanding they had reached before he sailed counted for something.
She had imagined a moment of quietness, just the two of them, having a chance to speak alone.
To get to know each other again, or anew.
But he had not come in the afternoon, when it would only have been family and Elizabeth would have made absolutely sure Lydia and her husband had a chance to speak privately.
Instead, he had appeared in the doorway of the ballroom, and she had seen him before she was ready, and she had schooled her face and crossed the room and curtsied, and she had said Colonel Fitzwilliam and he had said Mrs Fitzwilliam and they were strangers. Complete and courteous strangers.
There had been one moment, a fraction of a second when he appeared in the doorway, when something unguarded moved through her.
Quick and bright and wholly inconvenient.
She had closed it down before it could amount to anything, because in the middle of a crowded ballroom was definitely not the place or time for such feelings, especially when she herself did not know quite what they meant yet.
She rather hoped he had not seen any of it in her expression.
Things one did not yet understand were better kept close until one did.
A young man was bowing before her. She accepted his hand and allowed herself to be led into the set, and they danced, and she smiled at him at the appropriate moments, and whatever his name was she could not have said.
Patient, thorough, making no effort at discretion; that was how he had been watching her all evening.
She had seen him assess a room like that in Brighton, cataloguing everything without appearing to, and she had thought then that it was a military habit, the sort of attention one learned when survival might depend on it.
She had spent three years learning her own version of it, and she knew precisely what it looked like and what it meant.
He had come home to take the measure of her.
This was not a criticism; it was the reasonable action of a man who had arranged a situation, left it in other people’s hands, and returned to discover whether the arrangement had succeeded.
She executed a turn, came back to her partner’s hand, smiled.
The Matlocks had formed her. The Darcys had welcomed her, and given her greater access to Society, which had tested her.
He would want to know the result, and she had spent the evening giving him a clear answer.
Nothing wanting. Everything correct. Mrs Fitzwilliam, equal to every room she was placed in.
The music resolved. The young man bowed, pleased with himself. She curtsied and thanked him warmly and did not watch him go.
Richard was still watching her, though he was ostensibly conversing with Darcy and two other gentlemen. She could almost feel his eyes on her like a weight she did not know how to carry. She turned, and accepted the next glass of champagne that came her way, and went to find Georgiana.
Tomorrow she would see him again, and she would be gracious and impenetrable, and she would do it for as long as was necessary, and eventually she would have enough evidence to know what, if anything, she was permitted to want. She was very good at waiting. Three years had taught her well.