Chapter Twenty-Three
The study was the room in Darcy House that most resembled its equivalent at Pemberley: books on three walls, a desk that was used rather than merely occupied, a fire that was kept properly rather than decoratively.
Fitzwilliam had spent a good deal of time in studies like this one over the years and found them, as a category, the most honest rooms in any house.
Darcy poured brandy for them both and settled into the chair opposite. They sat for a while in the comfortable silence that was one of the pleasures of long acquaintance. The house had quieted around them; it was late, the household gone up.
Then Darcy said, without preface: “I want to tell you what the last three years looked like from this side.”
Fitzwilliam said nothing. He waited.
It was not an accusation. He understood this from the beginning and held onto it through what followed, because what followed was not easy to sit with.
Darcy spoke with the quiet precision he brought to everything that mattered to him: a set of facts, delivered without editorial comment, in chronological order.
Lydia at Matlock in that first autumn. Darcy had visited, to check on her, and he had corresponded with Lord and Lady Matlock who had shared their impressions with him.
How Lydia had doner her best but clearly struggled to fit into a household of a very different social stratum than she was accustomed to, where everyone was kind but nothing was familiar and she was very young and very much on her own.
Her first Christmas at Pemberley, which she had managed admirably, which had cost something that was visible to those watching closely.
The letters from Canada, which had arrived when they arrived: some promptly, some in clusters three or four months after the events they described, one dated nine months before it was placed in her hand.
The way she had read each letter, sitting in whatever room she happened to be in, and then put it down and said nothing and, at Pemberley, gone for a very long walk in the grounds regardless of the weather, returning an hour later acting as though nothing had happened, but declining to discuss the contents of the letters.
“She did everything that was asked of her,” Darcy said. “Everything. Without complaint. I think you should know what that cost.”
Fitzwilliam turned his glass in his hands. “I knew it would be hard,” he said. “I did not send her into it without knowing that, but taking her with me was… not an option.”
“Yes,” Darcy said. “You knew it abstractly.” A pause, not unkind.
“You know it differently now. Canada was hard too; I do not say otherwise, and I do not diminish what you have been doing. But you chose it. You chose to go. Lydia has had very little choice in anything that has happened to her since Wickham decided she would be a useful tool to wield against me.”
Fitzwilliam did not answer, because there was no answer that served any purpose.
Darcy was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “General Lewes has been very attentive.”
Fitzwilliam looked up.
“He called whenever she was in London. Corresponded between visits. She is very fond of him.” Darcy said it without inflection, reporting facts. “He has been, I think, a considerable comfort to her.” He looked at his cousin steadily. He did not elaborate. He did not need to.
Fitzwilliam looked back at the fire. He was aware that his face had done something, and that Darcy had seen it, and that Darcy had intended to see it.
Elizabeth brought James in to say goodnight while they were still sitting with their brandy.
He was in his nightgown and slightly damp from his bath, and he crossed the room directly to Fitzwilliam, which seemed to surprise Elizabeth and did not appear to surprise Darcy at all.
He deposited something in Fitzwilliam’s lap: a cloth rabbit of advanced age, one ear significantly longer than the other, faintly damp.
Fitzwilliam picked it up with the careful uncertainty of a man who had handled ordnance but had no experience of the things a small child considers precious. He was not sure whether to hold it or return it or simply acknowledge it.
James watched him with serious attention, apparently satisfied with his response, then turned and held his arms up to Darcy, who took him without looking up from his glass.
It was the first time in the conversation that Darcy smiled.
General Lewes called at Darcy House the following morning.
He was seventy now, retired at last with Napoleon’s defeat, but with the upright bearing of a man who had spent fifty years in uniform and saw no reason to abandon the habit.
He had sent a note the previous day, he said, in response to Mrs Fitzwilliam’s letter; he was delighted she was back in London and hoped the family would forgive him for descending on them at what might be an inconvenient moment.
Lydia crossed the drawing room to meet him with a directness that Fitzwilliam had not seen from her before.
Not the measured, gracious approach she brought to every other room she entered, calibrated and correct.
She just went to him, and the welcome she gave him was warm and unperformed and without self-consciousness, the greeting of someone who had no need to consider how she appeared.
She was, for those few moments, just Lydia.
Fitzwilliam stood and watched this and understood, with a clarity that arrived unpleasantly, that it was the first time he had seen her entirely herself since that first instant in the ballroom when she recognised him, that single unguarded instant before the mask came down.
With everyone else, including him, there was always a layer between Lydia and the room.
With Lewes there was nothing of the sort.
Lewes greeted him with measured warmth, shook his hand, said he was very glad that Fitzwilliam was safely home and that he hoped Canada had not been too unkind. The courtesy was impeccable. The assessment underneath it was equally evident to anyone who might be observing.
Georgiana joined them shortly afterward, and the four of them went out.
They walked in the park, Georgiana drifting naturally a little ahead with the tact of someone who understood when her presence was useful and when it was not.
Lewes walked beside Lydia with the ease of long habit, and Fitzwilliam fell in on his other side.
Lewes talked about the Canadian campaign with the authority of a man who had spent his career understanding military operations from the inside.
He asked intelligent questions and listened to the answers with genuine attention, and Fitzwilliam found himself more comfortable in the conversation than he had any real wish to be, given the specific quality of discomfort he was also managing.
There was no fault to be found with General Lewes. This was its own kind of difficulty.
He watched them together, Lewes and Lydia.
The shorthand of people who had been in each other’s company often enough to have developed a private vocabulary: a specific look that meant something he couldn’t read, a reference to some shared occasion that made her smile in the way she did not smile in drawing rooms. He said something about a horse.
She laughed, a real laugh, the kind he had heard perhaps twice since his return: unguarded, brief, genuine.
Fitzwilliam had not made her laugh like that. He had only made her smile, the carefully polite smile she distributed evenly and without apparent effort. He had not, in two weeks of trying, produced the laugh.
He kept his face neutral and said something sensible about the campaign, and Lewes responded with the equanimity of a man who noticed considerably more than he mentioned.
At one point Lydia and Georgiana stopped at a flower seller’s cart near the park gate, their heads bent over a tray of late-season blooms. Fitzwilliam and Lewes walked a few paces ahead and then slowed, as if by mutual agreement, to a halt.
Lewes looked out at the park for a moment. Then he said, pleasantly, not looking at Fitzwilliam: “I hope you are proud of your wife, sir.”
Fitzwilliam said that he was.
“Good,” Lewes said. He paused. “I hope you will ensure she knows it.”
He said nothing further. He did not look at Fitzwilliam to see how the remark had landed. He clasped his hands behind his back and waited with perfect tranquillity for the ladies to finish their deliberations, as though he had said nothing more consequential than a remark about the weather.
Fitzwilliam stood beside him and thought about several things, and said none of them.