Chapter Twenty-Seven
Caroline Bingley had been positioning herself since that first ball.
Fitzwilliam had noticed it without particularly attending to it: the warm solicitude whenever they were in the same room, the careful questions about how he was finding London again, the way her attention sharpened whenever Lydia was also present.
He had filed it as one aspect of Caroline’s general management of a situation that had not resolved itself to her satisfaction, and had not thought much further about it.
She was Bingley’s sister, a permanent feature of the social landscape, and he had enough to occupy him without cataloguing her manoeuvres.
She called on a Wednesday morning, which was not in itself unusual; she called at Darcy House with a regularity that Elizabeth received with the resigned good humour of a woman who had long since accepted that some inconveniences were permanent.
What was unusual, though it only occurred to him afterwards, was the fact that she had apparently ascertained in advance that Elizabeth would be out, having gone to Bond Street with Georgiana and Lydia on a shopping expedition.
Darcy was also out on some errand, leaving Fitzwilliam as the only member of the family ‘at home’ to receive callers.
He was in the small library when the butler brought him the card.
He had no real objection to Caroline Bingley as a category of person; he had known her since before Darcy’s marriage and found her, then and now, completely comprehensible.
She was clever, she was skilled, and she was engaged in the permanent management of a situation that had not resolved itself as she had intended, which gave her a great deal of energy and nowhere useful to direct it.
He had always found it simplest to be pleasant and unreadable in her company.
He went down, thinking it incumbent on himself to be hospitable, in the absence of his cousins, and assuming the visit would be perfunctory once Caroline realised the ladies were not at home.
She was in the drawing room, dressed with the careful exactness of someone who had thought about this visit beforehand. She greeted him with the warmth she would have given a brother, if she had thought better of Bingley.
“Mr Fitzwilliam,” she said, which was correct now that his commission was sold and slightly pointed in a way he chose not to acknowledge. “I am so glad to find you in. I had rather hoped to speak with you privately, if you can spare a moment.”
A little surprised, he said he could spare a moment. He sat. She sat. Tea had already been brought, because the Darcy House staff operated with an efficiency that anticipated most situations.
She opened with Canada, and his return, and how very glad everyone was to have him safely home.
She asked about his plans, now that he had sold his commission; she imagined it must be a considerable adjustment, the transition from military life.
She spoke of the season, and mutual acquaintances, and the concerts she had attended, with the fluency of someone who had been conducting this variety of conversation for years and required no effort to sustain it.
She turned to Lord Anstruther, toward whom she had evidently decided to be warmly approving, which told him something about the current state of Darcy’s opinion of the match and how widely it had been inferred.
She was reading the room, as she always did, and she was doing it well, as she always did. He drank his tea and waited.
The turn came approximately eight minutes in, which was rather faster than he had expected.
“I hope you will forgive me,” she said, setting down her cup.
“I have been uncertain for some weeks whether to say anything at all. It is not my place, and I would not for the world cause distress. But I find I cannot in good conscience remain silent when it concerns someone for whom I have such very sincere regard.”
He said nothing. He kept his expression neutral and attentive. He had learned a long time ago that silence was the correct response to this type of preamble, because filling it generally served the speaker rather than himself.
“Lord Chatterton,” she said, with a delicacy that made the name itself sound like a confidence shared between intimates.
“I have observed, as I think many people have, that he has paid your wife a great deal of attention this season.” She paused, and her pause was precisely weighted.
“I want to say first, please believe me, that I have no doubt whatsoever of Mrs Fitzwilliam’s conduct.
None whatsoever. She is everything that is correct and proper, and I admire her very much.
” Another pause, slightly longer. “It is Lord Chatterton’s conduct that concerns me.
He is a man who does not, as a general rule, waste his time on women who do not reward his attention.
” She looked at him steadily, with the expression of a woman delivering intelligence she wished she did not have.
“Women who are seen to receive his company at length are sometimes thought, by people less well-acquainted with the situation than I am, to have given some encouragement. I know this is unjust. But I should be devastated if idle talk were to attach itself to Mrs Fitzwilliam’s name through no fault of her own.
Your name, Richard,“ she added, with the emphasis of someone who has saved the most effective instrument for last. “Your family’s name.”
She stopped there and let it sit.
Fitzwilliam looked at her for a moment without speaking.
He thought about what he knew of Caroline Bingley, which was considerable, and what he knew of Lydia, which was less than it should have been, though he hoped it was increasing daily.
He thought about Lydia’s expression at the concert when she received Chatterton’s low-voiced conversation in the pauses between pieces: polite warmth, giving nothing away, conceding nothing.
He thought about Lydia in Hyde Park on an October morning, the way she had looked on horseback, telling him his father got up before dawn to look at the snow and was once mistaken for a gardener.
He thought about what Lewes had said in Richmond, and what Darcy had said in his study in September, and what Georgiana had said without saying anything.
He thought about the laugh and the look on her face as she carried a muddy James Darcy in from the garden under her arm.
He did not believe Caroline Bingley.
He said, pleasantly, that he was grateful for her concern, and that he would give the matter his consideration.
She received this with appropriate warmth, and they talked for another quarter hour about nothing of consequence, and she left with the satisfied manner of someone who has accomplished what she came to do and knows it.
He sat for some time in the empty drawing room after she had gone.
He did not believe her. He believed clearly and without reservation, with the same conviction he brought to any assessment he had thought through carefully, that Caroline Bingley had an interest in this, and her interest was nothing to do with Lydia and everything to do with the accumulated weight of three Bennet sisters she had watched marry men she did not want them to marry.
She had chosen Lydia because Lydia was the available point of entry.
Jane was too close to home, Caroline still dependent on her brother’s goodwill.
Elizabeth was Mrs Darcy; established, confident, with her husband’s complete backing and trust; far too dangerous a target.
But Lydia? Lydia was the one with the history, the one whose position was still, despite everything, the most fragile.
He knew this. He understood it completely.
He also knew that Chatterton’s reputation was real.
He had known it since first seeing the man approach Lydia, had seen it confirmed at the concert, had watched Chatterton position himself at Lady Hargrove’s with the practiced ease of a man for whom this was routine.
He had felt something shift in his chest when Lydia laughed at whatever Chatterton had said to her, something he had not examined because examining it would have required naming it, and he had not been prepared to name it.
He did not believe Caroline. He could not un-hear her. He sat with both of these facts and found them very poor company.
The assembly that evening was at Almack’s. He arrived with Darcy and Elizabeth and Lydia, and had established, within five minutes and without appearing to look, that Chatterton was present.
He had not intended to watch them. He watched them.
She was doing nothing wrong. He could see this plainly, even through what Caroline had installed in his thinking that morning, which was apparently not susceptible to the understanding that he did not believe it.
Lydia received Chatterton’s conversation with the same polite attention she gave everyone.
She was neither seeking him out nor avoiding him.
She danced twice with other partners, talked easily with a group of women he recognised as her particular set, and was, as she always was, self-possessed and entirely unreadable.
This was the difficulty. He could not read her.
He had been trying for weeks and she had given him almost nothing: one evening by a fire, a laugh he had not known what to do with, a fortnight of courtship received with the same equanimity she brought to the weather.
He had come back from Richmond three days ago with Lewes’s words reorganising something at the back of his mind, with the beginning of an understanding of what he had done and what might be required to undo it.
The understanding felt considerably less solid now.
It had looked clear from the saddle on the road home, and it was not clear here.