Chapter Twenty-Two
Fitzwilliam had left the ball at one o’clock, which was earlier than was polite but which he could not help.
He was exhausted, he told himself; three years of campaign and a transatlantic crossing and three days on the road from Plymouth followed by a frustrating day of War Office anterooms had left their mark, and there was no shame in a man wanting his bed.
He did not examine the other reason, which was that he had found, as the evening wore on, that watching his wife be the undisputed centre of every room she moved through was something he could only sustain for so long before he began feeling something other than pride.
At noon the following day he presented himself at Darcy House, which was the earliest hour he thought reasonable given that the ball had probably not concluded until four o’clock, or later.
The morning had passed in a state of vague purposelessness that was new to him; he was accustomed to having somewhere to be.
The butler showed him to a morning-room, and within a few minutes the household began to assemble, in the slightly rumpled, good-humoured way of people who had not found their beds until very late and were being sensible about it.
Maids began bringing in tea and breakfast-dishes, and everyone sat down to revive themselves.
A maid was just pouring coffee for him when the door opened to admit a small person of determined aspect, escorted at a cautious distance by a nursemaid who had clearly learned not to attempt control and had settled instead for attendance.
James Darcy, at eighteen months, was a compact and serious individual with his father’s colouring and, apparently, his mother’s fearlessness.
He surveyed the room with the purposeful expression of someone conducting an inspection, found the table, found the people at the table, and then found Fitzwilliam, who was a new feature of the landscape and therefore required examination.
Fitzwilliam had no experience of children this age. He was not sure what the correct response was. He settled on sitting very still and allowing the inspection to proceed.
James approached, studied him at close range for a considerable interval, and then held out a piece of toast, already squashed beyond recovery.
It appeared to be an offering.
Fitzwilliam took it with appropriate gravity and said “Thank-you.”
James, satisfied, turned his attention to Darcy, who scooped him up and deposited him on his knee, where James sat with perfect contentment and began demolishing another piece of toast.
Fitzwilliam became aware that he was being watched.
Lydia’s face, for a moment, was unguarded: something warm and unperformed, a real smile, the kind that reached the eyes and made her look younger.
She was watching James, or watching Fitzwilliam holding the squashed toast, or watching the two things together, and she had forgotten for that interval to be Mrs Fitzwilliam.
Then she became aware of him noticing and composed herself, very smoothly, and reached for the teapot.
“It is a great honour to be handed one of James’ treasures,” she said pleasantly. “He gave Mr Darcy a dead beetle last week.”
“I was very moved,” Darcy said, without looking up from his son.
Fitzwilliam eyed James and discreetly placed the squashed toast on the edge of his plate, wiping his hand on his napkin. Fortunately, James did not seem to notice this unfortunate rejection of his gift.
The household was, Fitzwilliam observed over the next half-hour, thoroughly settled into itself.
Elizabeth poured her own coffee without waiting for a servant.
Georgiana passed the toast-rack to Darcy and moved the butter within reach of Lydia without being asked.
Lydia was warm and gracious and charming, the perfect guest who also, quite evidently, knew the exact location of everything in this room and had known it for some time.
Three years absent from his own life, and everyone in this room had continued without him, which was correct and right and in the ordinary way of things and nonetheless gave him an odd, displaced feeling he had no real understanding of what to do with.
The practical approach suggested itself.
“I have been thinking,” he said, at a pause in the conversation, “about where it would suit best for us to establish ourselves, now that I am home. Matlock would be an obvious choice, of course, with my parents there, and the country would be pleasant. Or, if you would prefer London, a house of our own in town is quite possible.” He felt he was being admirably clear and considerate. “What do you think?”
Lydia set her cup down. Her expression was calm and pleasant. “I am quite in your hands,” she said. “Whatever you think best.”
Georgiana, who had been buttering a piece of toast throughout this exchange, continued to butter it. She said nothing. She did not look up. But something in the set of her attention, the quality of her silence, suggested that she had just confirmed something she had already suspected.
Not sure what. And not sure what to do next; how was he to make decisions about their future without any understanding of Lydia’s preferences?
Still turning it over, he heard Elizabeth say, with great cheerfulness, that she had several calls to make and perhaps Lydia would accompany her, and Lydia agreed as though she was quite accustomed to doing so, and the visit drew towards its natural end.
Fitzwilliam accompanied them. There was no real reason not to, and Elizabeth seemed to expect it.
Over the following days, he found himself joining the household’s social circuit in the same unplanned way, by a series of small assumptions rather than any deliberate invitation: morning calls, an afternoon at the picture gallery, two evening parties, a concert at Lady Astley’s.
During the voyage home, he had thought about how this would go.
He had imagined it, in the careful way one imagines things one cannot afford to think about too directly: a gradual re-acquaintance, easy conversation, the natural resumption of something interrupted.
He had known Lydia in Brighton. She had been uncomplicated to know.
She had said whatever was in her head and expected him to keep up with it, which he had generally been able to do.
The woman now presenting herself as Mrs Fitzwilliam at morning calls and evening parties was not uncomplicated to know.
She was perfectly pleasant. She was thoroughly gracious.
She engaged with everything he said so completely and so warmly and without the slightest detectable resistance that he could not find a single handhold.
He tried easy conversation. She met it easily.
He tried a direct question about her time in Derbyshire.
She answered it directly and pleasantly and told him nothing.
He tried, at one of the evening parties, a remark that was only barely appropriate, angling for some reaction other than gracious composure.
She received it graciously, with a smile that may or may not have acknowledged what he was doing, and moved on.
The girl in Brighton would have had an opinion within four minutes.
She would have had three opinions, stated simultaneously, at considerable volume.
He had spent three years reading her letters, which had become more guarded as time passed but had still contained, here and there, traces of the original Lydia: observations she could not quite prevent herself from making, a sharpness of phrase that suggested she had thought something she was not certain she ought to say.
Those traces had grown fewer, he now realised, as the letters had grown shorter.
He was beginning to miss the outrageous things. And he was quickly recognising that he did not know this woman at all. He wondered if anyone did.
The concert at Lady Astley’s was a private affair, perhaps forty guests in a long drawing room arranged around a small dais.
Georgiana played in the second half, two pieces that reduced the room to reverent silence.
When he looked at Anstruther during the second piece, the young man was watching Georgiana with an expression that had given up entirely on objectivity.
Whatever Darcy’s reservations, Fitzwilliam could not see the grounds for them; Anstruther at twenty-four was already a man one would trust, which was a quality rarer and more useful than any number of more obvious virtues.
He said as much, briefly, when they spoke at the interval.
Anstruther received the comment with a slight, considered smile and said that he was grateful for the Colonel’s good opinion and hoped he might come to deserve it.
Fitzwilliam came away thinking Darcy was being overcautious, and that Anstruther’s patient acceptance of that caution was itself the clearest possible evidence that Darcy was wrong.
It was in the first half of the concert that he noticed Lord Chatterton.
Thirty, perhaps, with the arrogant ease of a man who had always found the world willing to arrange itself around his convenience.
Handsome in a way that had most of the young ladies in the room casting sidelong glances in his direction, very well-dressed without being foppish, and his manner of paying attention had a quality that Fitzwilliam, who had learned to read men under pressure, recognised as calculated.
It was the attention of someone who had decided you were worth his time and intended you to know it.
Lydia, apparently, was worth his time.
She was seated in the row in front of Fitzwilliam, and Chatterton occupied a chair beside her with the air of a man who had arranged this and saw no reason to conceal it.
He spoke to her in the pauses between pieces with the low-voiced intimacy of a man conducting a private conversation in public.
She received each remark with polite warmth.
She did not encourage him. She did not, quite, discourage him either, and he was the sort of man who would take anything less than a direct setdown as an invitation to continue.
Something shifted in Fitzwilliam’s chest. He tried not to examine it too closely.
After the concert, on the steps of Lady Astley’s house, he found himself alongside Lydia for a moment while their carriage was brought round. “Chatterton,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. “Do you know him well?”
“We have met several times,” she said. “He is always very pleasant.”
“He has a certain reputation,” Fitzwilliam said, and then could not think how to continue without sounding either like a fool or a husband who had been absent three years and had therefore no standing to say anything at all, which was precisely what he was.
“Most people do,” Lydia said, pleasantly, and the carriage arrived.
The ride in Hyde Park was his idea. He proposed it at breakfast two mornings after the concert; she accepted without visible emotion, as she seemed to accept everything, and they went out together at ten o’clock with a groom following at a decorous distance.
She rode well, which he had not known and could not have guessed.
Not merely adequately well: she rode with the confidence of someone who had been properly taught and had then spent time consolidating what she had learned.
He said so, genuinely, because it was true, trying to keep the surprise out of his tone because she might be offended at his surprise.
“Your mother was very patient with me,” she said. “I had some bad habits when I arrived and she did not pretend otherwise. It took most of the first winter.”
He had not known this either. He had known, in an abstract sense, that she had been at Matlock; he had received letters from his mother saying she was well and coming along admirably, which he now recognised as a polite formula rather than a literal account of the situation.
He had not pictured his mother in a riding ring in the first winter, correcting bad habits with the patient precision she brought to every undertaking.
“She enjoys teaching,” he said. “She always did.”
“She does,” Lydia agreed. “And she has very decided opinions about which things are worth doing correctly.”
There was something in the way she said it, not quite warmth and not quite humour, that made him think there was more to say on the subject. He waited. The horses moved at an easy walk, the park quiet at this hour, the morning light bright through the plane trees.
She said: “Matlock is very beautiful in February, when the snow is on the upper grounds. I did not expect that.”
“I have always thought so,” he said. “I used to go up early to look at it when I was there as a child.”
“So does your father,” she said. “Before anyone else is up. I saw him once from my window and thought he was a gardener.”
Still smiling at this when the party appeared: four riders coming round the curve of the path, all of them apparently known to Lydia, and she lifted her hand in greeting and they drew alongside, and the conversation changed its nature.
She became Mrs Fitzwilliam again: warm, gracious, making introductions with perfect ease.
Watching her do it, he understood, with more clarity than he had managed at any point in the preceding week, that this was not the performance that replaced something.
It was the surface she had learned to sustain indefinitely, with no visible seam.
A pattern. He was not yet sure what to do about it.