Chapter Twenty-Six
Lydia saw her husband coming up the drive from the window of her sitting room, which was at the front of the house and caught the afternoon light well.
He was on horseback, and had been gone since the early morning without leaving word of his destination.
He rode with the ease of a man who has spent years in the saddle under conditions considerably less pleasant than a London autumn, and there was something in the set of his shoulders that she had learned, over the past weeks, to read.
He had been thinking, on the way home. Thinking hard, about something that mattered.
She had seen this specific expression twice before, she thought: once at the concert, when he had been watching Chatterton from across the room with his face very still and his glass untouched; and once after she had beaten him at an argument about Georgiana and Anstruther, a fact he had absorbed with the specific quality of attention of a man who had just been shown something he would need to reconsider.
She was getting better at reading him. She was not sure what to do with this information.
She watched him until he disappeared round toward the mews, and then turned back to her writing desk.
The letter to Kitty was three pages long and had been, so far, a great deal more honest than was probably wise.
She had told Kitty that London was exactly as she had left it, which was simultaneously true and not true at all.
She had told her that Georgiana was very well and very happy and being very patient, which was all true.
She had told her that Richard was home, which Kitty already knew, and that he was well, which she believed to be accurate, and that they were settling in.
She had not told Kitty what settling in consisted of, which was: watching each other from a polite distance and pretending not to.
The street outside offered nothing interesting when she put the letter aside and looked up at it.
She was not, she had concluded, indifferent to his efforts at courtship.
This was the difficulty. If she were indifferent it would be considerably simpler; she could receive the flowers and the carefully selected books and the drives in the park with genuine rather than performed composure, and there would be nothing to protect.
But she was not indifferent, which meant every morning she came downstairs not knowing whether there would be something, and every morning there was something, and she put it away carefully in a place she was not going to examine until she had more evidence than she currently possessed.
The evidence she currently possessed was: three years of absence, one morning at breakfast where she had been asked what she wanted and been handed a list of his preferences, and a fortnight of slightly awkward courtship which was, she recognised, genuine and which she also recognised could stop.
Men had purposes. He had come home with a purpose, which was to establish himself in civilian life and repair what had been, by any honest accounting, a marriage conducted almost entirely on paper.
The courtship was part of that purpose. She was not yet sure that she was more than part of that purpose, and until she was sure, she would not give him anything he could put down and walk away from.
She was aware this was not fair. She was aware also that she had spent three years being scrupulously fair, to everyone, at considerable cost to herself, and that she was perhaps owed a small measure of unfairness.
Georgiana knew all of this, or most of it.
They had not discussed it directly; they did not need to.
Georgiana had the quality, rare in anyone of any age and remarkable in a girl of nineteen, of listening in a way that communicated understanding without requiring the thing understood to be said aloud.
Lydia did not tell Georgiana what she thought or felt about Richard’s courtship.
Georgiana watched her with the eyes of someone who knew anyway, and Lydia was periodically grateful that Georgiana was not a different sort of person, the sort who would want to discuss it.
She was not going to discuss it. She was going to wait, and watch, and be as certain as she could be before she did anything that could not be undone.
The night after he had told her about Lake Ontario and Captain Aldridge and the bear, she had lain awake for some time listening to the silence on the other side of the adjoining door.
It was the sort of thing she could not have done before Brighton.
Before Brighton, she had not known that there was a species of silence that was inhabited rather than empty; she had barely known that silences had different qualities at all.
Since Brighton she had become very good at reading the rooms she was in, and she had learned to read silences the way she read rooms, by attention rather than assumption.
The silence on the other side of the door was inhabited. She was almost certain of it.
She had been almost certain, also, that if she lay still long enough and the silence continued long enough, she would hear the handle turn.
She had been almost certain of this in the way one is almost certain of something one wants very much and has no guarantee of.
She was nineteen years old and had been married for three years and she was spending every night in this house listening to the silence on the other side of a closed door.
At two in the morning she had got up, put on her wrapper, crossed the room, and did something she had not planned to do and was not certain she would do again: she turned the small key in the lock, and went back to bed.
It was still unlocked.
The following morning she had checked, and the morning after that, and no move had been made to re-lock it.
This was either bravery or foolishness, and she was not yet certain which.
In the three weeks since, she had heard nothing from the other side of the door to indicate that he had tried it.
He had either tried it and found it open and not come through, which was one kind of information; or he had not tried it at all, which was another kind; and she was not sure which she preferred.
She was quite thoroughly in difficulties: that was her conclusion. Not a new condition, but the texture of it was different from anything she had experienced before.
Lord Chatterton called on a Thursday afternoon, which was not unexpected; he had been calling, or contriving to be wherever she was calling, with a regularity that had moved some weeks ago from mildly flattering to merely predictable.
He was received in the drawing room, as everyone was received, and offered tea, and sat with an elegant air that suggested he considered his presence in any room a gift to that room.
She liked him well enough as an object of study.
He was genuinely clever, which most of them were not, and his conversation had an edge to it that she had not found elsewhere in London this season.
She did not trust him in the slightest, which he knew, and which she suspected was part of the attraction for him; a woman who could not be seduced was considerably more interesting than a woman who could, and Chatterton was the sort of man who sought interest above all other qualities.
Knowing exactly what he was came from having known men like him since she was sixteen, which was one of the few practical advantages of having had the sort of sixteen that she’d had.
Wickham had been more charming and more dangerous.
Chatterton was merely dangerous, and a woman who had survived Wickham could manage Chatterton with both hands behind her back.
She poured tea and asked about his sister, who had recently married, and was perfectly warm and completely impenetrable, and he sat across from her with the expression of a man who was enjoying a game he had not yet won and was not yet certain he would.
He left, eventually, with the grace of someone who knew when to retreat without conceding the field, and she stood at the window and watched him go down the front steps and thought: you are a great deal of trouble to a great many people, Lord Chatterton, and not one of them is going to be me.
Miss Bingley appeared at two separate engagements in the week after Lady Hargrove’s party, and both times Lydia felt the specific attention of a woman positioning herself.
Caroline Bingley had always been one of the people from whom concealment had been most necessary.
Caroline was dangerous to her in the way of someone who had spent her whole life in drawing rooms and had a very clear idea of what she wanted and had watched everyone she considered inferior to herself obtain it instead.
She did not like Lydia. She never had. Lydia was well aware that Caroline’s animosity was not in the least personal; Caroline did not like any of the Bennets, had never forgiven Elizabeth for being the woman Darcy chose, and had transferred the animosity to Lydia by extension and by opportunity.
Lydia was, of all the Bennet sisters, the easiest to wound; she had the worst history and the most fragile position, even if Caroline did not know the whole of it, and wounds that could not be inflicted on Elizabeth could occasionally be inflicted on her instead.
Lydia watched Caroline talking to Richard at Lady Hargrove’s while trying very hard to pretend she was not watching them at all.
She did not know what was being said. She had a strong suspicion it involved Chatterton, because Chatterton was the available instrument, and she was not going to give either of them the satisfaction of appearing to notice.
She was, she thought, very tired. Not of Richard, specifically, but of the requirement to be impenetrable to everyone around her at all times, including the people who were supposed to be on her side.
She was tired of it in the way that she had occasionally been tired at Matlock, in the first year, when she had not yet understood that the performance was not temporary.
She had been very young then. She had thought it would become easier when he came home.
Richard’s profile across the room told her nothing about what Caroline was saying to him, and at this distance it never would, so she turned back to her own conversation and was perfectly charming and was very tired.
That evening she sat at her writing table for an hour without writing anything and then went to bed, where she lay for some time looking at the ceiling.
The house was quiet. Through the adjoining door, after a while, she heard him come upstairs: his footsteps, the sound of his door, the small sounds of a man preparing to sleep. Silence.
The bear story. The moment after the laugh. The silence on the other side of this door every night since he moved into Darcy House, and the cold of the handle at two in the morning, and the fact that she had neither re-locked it, nor had the courage to open the door herself.
She thought about being very tired, and about how much longer she could go on being tired, and what the alternative might cost.
She could find no answer yet. She turned over and went to sleep.