Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
He talked to three people he had not seen since before Canada and remembered nothing of what was said.
He accepted a glass of wine and did not drink it.
He stood at the edge of the room and watched his wife move through it with the facility of long practice and felt the specific frustration of a man who knows he is being unreasonable and cannot stop.
Darcy appeared beside him during the third set, which was not a coincidence; Darcy did not coincide.
“Bingley’s sister called this morning,” Fitzwilliam said, keeping his voice level.
“I know,” Darcy said. “The butler informed me.”
“She is concerned for Lydia’s reputation.”
“I imagine she is,” Darcy said, in the tone that contained a complete opinion without wasting more words on it.
Fitzwilliam said nothing. He watched Lydia complete a figure with a young man who was plainly delighted to have secured her for the set and slightly uncertain what to do with the good fortune.
“She is not deceiving you,” Darcy said, quietly, and moved away.
Fitzwilliam stood where he was and thought about this.
He knew she was not deceiving him. He knew it from Darcy’s account of three years, and Lewes’s account of three years, and his own recent weeks of observation, and from every specific thing he had seen in her that was genuine rather than performed. He knew it completely.
He was still watching Chatterton.
He went home that night unable to account for himself, which was a condition he had very rarely been in and did not find improved by reflection.
He stood in his room for some time looking at nothing.
He could hear, from the other side of the door, the small sounds of Lydia preparing for bed: her maid’s footsteps, the soft closing of a wardrobe, then quiet.
He stood and listened to the quiet and thought about what kind of man lets a woman like Caroline Bingley into his head and then cannot get her out again, and did not find a satisfactory answer.
Elizabeth had been informed of the morning’s visit the moment she returned from her calls.
Wilson, her maid, had it from the footman who had admitted Miss Bingley, and because the household was aware, in the way that households always were, that Miss Bingley spending a half-hour talking to Mr Fitzwilliam was a thing worth noting.
She had carried this information to the assembly that evening and had watched the assembly with it in mind, and by the end of the third set she had a reasonably complete picture of what was happening.
She found Darcy in her sitting room when she came upstairs. He was reading, which meant he had been waiting, because Darcy did not read in other people’s sitting rooms without a reason.
“You spoke to him,” she said, setting down her things.
“Briefly.”
“And?”
“He knows that Lydia is not doing whatever Caroline made her out to be doing.” Darcy set the book down. “He does not know what he is going to do about his marriage, which is the difficulty.”
Elizabeth sat down. She thought about Fitzwilliam’s face across the assembly room, which she had been watching at intervals all evening.
She thought about Lydia, who had also been watching him, when she thought no one was attending to her, with an expression Elizabeth recognised: the careful assessment of someone taking a reading and not liking the result.
“She will have seen it,” Elizabeth said. “Whatever Caroline has managed to do. Lydia will have seen it in him tonight.”
“Yes.”
“Then whatever ground he had made up this past fortnight…” She stopped.
“Yes,” Darcy said.
They sat with this for a moment.
“I should speak to him,” Elizabeth said.
“He knows what Caroline is,” Darcy said.
“I should speak to Lydia, then.”
“And tell her what? That her husband is struggling with a jealousy he knows to be irrational but cannot yet master? She will have concluded something of the kind herself. What she does with the conclusion is her own affair.”
Elizabeth looked at him. There were moments when she found his restraint very difficult to live alongside, and this was one of them. “We are watching two people make each other miserable.”
“We are watching two people work through something that is theirs to work through,” Darcy said, not unkindly.
“I have said what I had to say to him. Lewes said what he had to say. Georgiana, I think, has also said something, in her own way. If none of that has been sufficient, it will not be made sufficient by another person telling him the same thing.”
“And if he does something irretrievable before he works through it?”
Darcy was quiet for a moment. “Then we deal with that. But I don’t think he will.”
“You have more confidence in him than he currently deserves.”
“Perhaps.” He picked up his book again, and then set it down. “Lydia is also working through something. She has had three years of practice at asking for nothing. She will not ask for help with this. Offering it uninvited will not assist her; it will only give her more to manage.”
Elizabeth sat for a while longer. She thought about Lydia at sixteen, raw and trying very hard not to show it, in a situation that should not have existed and which she had nonetheless handled with a tenacity that Elizabeth had quietly admired even then.
She thought about Lydia now, everything that tenacity had built and everything it had cost. She thought about what it would take for Lydia to stop managing, and whether Fitzwilliam currently looked like a man worth the risk.
She thought he did not. Not tonight.
“I hate this,” she said.
“I know,” Darcy said.
“I am going to say nothing.”
“I know.”
“It is the correct decision and I hate it.”
“Yes,” Darcy said, and had the good sense to leave it there.