Chapter Twenty-Four
The discharge papers arrived on a Tuesday, which was also the day he moved into Darcy House.
The timing was coincidental. He had already arranged, at Darcy’s quiet suggestion, to take up residence there rather than continue at Horse Guards; it made more sense, Darcy had said, with the straightforward tact he brought to delicate matters, now that his commission was sold.
He had a room on the second floor, well-appointed, comfortable, adjacent to a suite of rooms that were evidently Lydia’s.
There was an adjoining door between them.
He did not try the handle. He did not permit himself to think about whether it was locked.
He was, he told himself, tired from the move.
The civilian wardrobe was a more pressing problem.
He had one presentable coat and a collection of things that had been perfectly adequate in Halifax and were not, on reflection, adequate in London.
He spent three days acquiring what was necessary, which involved significantly more time spent in tailors’ back rooms than the uniform incident the evening of his arrival in London, and a degree of decision-making about cut and cloth and colour that he found considerably more taxing than operational planning.
A uniform told you what you were. A gentleman’s wardrobe apparently required you to decide.
Living at Darcy House, he expected to see rather more of his wife than when he was merely a welcome visitor, but it was apparently not to be the case.
Lydia’s social calendar proved to be a thing of considerable density.
She was out more often than she was in: morning calls, afternoon engagements, evening parties and balls almost every evening, all of which from which she returned at midnight or later looking as unruffled and unremarkable as if she had spent the evening reading.
They ate dinner together twice, at large tables with other people, and had a brief exchange in the hallway on Thursday morning that could not, by any generous measure, be called a conversation.
He was beginning to suspect that this was not accidental.
The first quiet evening came at the end of his second week in the house.
It was a small dinner, only the household. Darcy and Elizabeth, Georgiana, Lydia, and himself. He wore the dark blue coat that the tailor had delivered that afternoon, which fit well and still required him to think about where to put his hands. In uniform, this had never been a question.
Elizabeth noticed the coat immediately and said it suited him very well. Darcy gave him the brief, direct look of a man who understood what it meant to put a uniform away, and chose not to make a speech about it. Georgiana squeezed his arm when he greeted her.
Lydia said “how very smart,” pleasantly, and he found he still could not tell whether she noticed anything beyond the coat itself.
The dinner was easy in the way of a household comfortably settled into its own habits.
The conversation moved without effort. Fitzwilliam found himself talking more than he usually did, which he attributed to the civilian coat requiring him to prove he was still himself without the uniform’s assistance.
As the meal drew to a close, a sound began from somewhere upstairs: the persistent unhappy complaint of a child in discomfort.
Elizabeth’s attention shifted almost imperceptibly.
Darcy said, quietly, that Mrs Henderson had mentioned James had been unsettled since the afternoon.
After the covers were removed Elizabeth excused herself with a look of maternal concern, and Darcy followed shortly afterward with the air of a man who was technically retiring to his study but would in practice be found somewhere near the nursery.
It would hardly be the act of a gentleman to sit alone and drink port while the ladies removed to the drawing room, so Fitzwilliam accompanied them there.
Georgiana promptly said she thought she might play for a while if no one objected, and went to the pianoforte at the far end of the drawing room without waiting for an answer.
This was, Fitzwilliam suspected, deliberate.
Georgiana’s tact had always been of the active variety.
Which left him and Lydia on the sofa nearest the fire, with no social architecture to arrange themselves around.
They sat for a little while in silence. The fire was well-built, the room pleasantly warm. Georgiana had chosen something slow and undemanding. Through the ceiling, faintly, James’s complaint continued and then faded.
Lydia said, as Georgiana began a second piece: “Was it very cold? In Canada.”
Not the campaign. Not anything he would have expected. There was something younger in the question than her usual register, a genuine curiosity that had not been filtered through Mrs Fitzwilliam first.
“Extraordinarily,” he said. “I had been told, of course. I don’t think it is possible to actually convey it to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The cold there is a different order of thing from anything one encounters in England.”
“How so?”
He thought about it. He was not, ordinarily, a man who talked much about himself; the army bred a certain economy with personal disclosure. But the question was genuine and the room was quiet and he found he had something to say.
“In England,” he said, “the cold is something you feel at the surface. You go inside and it stops. In Canada it is structural. It gets into the buildings. You can feel it through three layers of wool. At forty below, the air itself seems to resist you; there is a silence that comes with extreme cold, because everything that would otherwise be moving is stopped. If you open your mouth, the water inside it freezes; a most peculiar sensation.”
She was listening properly, he noticed. Not the polished attentiveness she deployed at morning calls but something more direct, her eyes on him, genuinely there.
“Lake Ontario in January,” he said, finding the image, “freezes completely. At dawn, when the light is first coming up, it is pure white and absolutely flat, and the sky turns a colour I cannot accurately describe because I have no reference for it in England. One of my junior officers, a young man from Surrey who had never been north of Birmingham, stood and stared at it for ten minutes one morning. He was late to the briefing. I did not reprimand him.”
“What an incredible thing,” she said softly, something like wonder in her face.
He told her about the deep, endless forests: the way sound was absorbed rather than carried, the sense of being in a space genuinely indifferent to human presence, the sheer scale of things.
He told her about Captain Aldridge and the bear, which was not strictly a dignified story and involved Aldridge losing his hat, two buttons from his coat, and a significant portion of his dignity before the animal decided he was not interesting and departed.
She laughed before he reached the end of it, which meant he had to pause, and laughed again at the conclusion: a real laugh, unguarded and brief, the same thing he had heard in the park with Lewes.
He stopped talking.
He had not intended to stop. He had simply become aware of it, the quality of the sound, the way it changed her face, and the words had gone somewhere.
She became aware of him noticing, in the half-second after, and the smile remained but something shifted beneath it: a slight change in her stillness, as though she too had heard something unexpected.
They were two people sitting by a fire, with Georgiana playing very quietly in the background, and the moment was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable but something else, open in a way that neither of them had planned for.
Then Georgiana’s piece reached its end. The silence that followed had a different quality, and they both reached for the ordinary at the same moment: Lydia remarking that the music had been very pretty, Fitzwilliam agreeing, Georgiana turning on the bench to say she thought she might be tired and suggest tea.
Tea arrived. Darcy and Elizabeth came back downstairs, James reported settled at last. The evening concluded pleasantly.
He went upstairs and thought about colours on Lake Ontario at dawn, and the laugh, and did not try the handle of the adjoining door.
He brought her flowers the following morning.
It was not, he told himself, an elaborate gesture; it was the sort of thing one did for one’s wife.
She received them graciously and thanked him warmly and he could no more read what she thought of them than he could have read the sky.
He tried a book, a few days later, which he thought might interest her; she thanked him for that too, warmly, correctly, and he watched her carry it upstairs with the same expression she brought to everything and learned nothing at all from it.
He proposed a drive in the park. She accepted with the composure she brought to everything. The drive was pleasant. She was perfectly good company. She was utterly opaque.
He thought of Brighton, which he recognised as the wrong comparison and couldn’t help making anyway.
The girl in Brighton had told him, within the first week of their acquaintance, that she found most military men insufferably pompous, that she intended to dance every time there was an opportunity for dancing and could he confirm whether he counted among the insufferably pompous or not.
He had said he rather hoped not. She had said she would form her own view and report back.
She had reported back, with her opinions very clearly stated, at some length, a few days later.
He was starting to miss the girl who had made the insufferably pompous remark.
The evening party at Lady Hargrove’s was the occasion at which he first understood the difficulty he was in.