Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
You know also, I think, what I am going to say next.
He cannot cross the distance alone. It is too wide, and too much of it is your own construction, which is understandable and has served you well and is no longer serving you at all.
He is your husband, Lydia. Not Matlock, not Society’s good opinion.
Him. And he is, I think, worth the risk, if you can bring yourself to take it.
I say this as someone who has your interest at heart above all other considerations. I say it also as someone who has watched you manage every room you enter for three years, and who finds, upon reflection, that he would like very much to see you stop.
Do write when you can. I am very dull company for myself.
Your affectionate friend, H. Lewes, Gen. (ret’d)
She folded the letter and set it on the desk.
Then she sat for a moment looking at it with an anger that had nowhere clean to go, which was the worst kind. It was a kind letter. It was a letter written with three years of genuine affection behind it and her interests as the whole of its concern, and she was furious at every word of it.
He cannot cross the distance alone.
She knew he was right. She had known it, in some form, for weeks; she was not in the habit of lying to herself, and she had too clear an eye for the arithmetic of the situation to have missed it.
She had known it and filed it away under not yet, because not yet was still a position, still a choice she was making with her eyes open, still hers.
What she had not expected was for Lewes to take it from her.
He had always been on her side. That was what he was, what he had been from the first: the one person who asked nothing of her except that she be herself, who had known the Brighton girl and watched what she became and found both versions sufficient.
He had never once suggested she should be different.
He had never once implied that the walls she had built were anything other than rational in the circumstances she had faced.
And now he was telling her to find the door in it, and he was right, and she could not forgive him for it at the moment, even though she would, and even though she knew he had written it at some cost to himself, and even though the part about his chest, tucked in at the beginning so she would not worry about it, was the first thing she would think about when she woke in the night.
She put the letter in her writing case.
Her aunt’s letter was still four lines. It was going to stay that way.
She got up, and went to find Georgiana.
Georgiana was in the music room before luncheon, which was where she was usually to be found at that hour. She looked up with the attention of someone who had already heard or intuited something, because Georgiana generally did.
“I have a headache,” Lydia said.
Georgiana said she was sorry to hear it, and asked if she needed anything.
“Company without conversation,” Lydia said, and attempted a smile. Her mask never seemed to fit very well around Georgiana; she had the disconcerting sensation the other girl could see right through it anyway.
“A little light music?” Georgiana suggested gently.
“That would be very pleasant,” Lydia said, threw herself in an ungainly pile of skirts on the settee, and shut her eyes.
But today, even Georgiana’s beautiful music was of no use. Lydia was angry, and had no outlet for it.
Luncheon was attended. The afternoon was a morning call already accepted and kept, with excellent company provided throughout, and home by five, head still bad, upstairs early, and she did not see Fitzwilliam come in from wherever he had been all afternoon and she did not ask.
Fitzwilliam left Darcy House at half past two and walked.
No particular destination; that was the point.
Two hours through a foggy November London that was mostly indifferent to him, which was what he wanted.
Lydia’s words kept returning as he walked, not the sharp ones, which he had deserved, but the flat accurate ones: three years, every drawing room, without reproach, without a single word from him. Not a syllable to dispute.
The evidence had all been assembled, the conclusion correctly drawn, and then he had walked into that morning room and done precisely what Caroline had intended him to do, because the one thing he could not assemble evidence against was his own jealousy, which had been present since the concert, possibly longer, and which he had been refusing to name for exactly that long.
He was jealous of Chatterton. Jealous of Lewes, who was seventy years old and for three years had given Lydia freely what Fitzwilliam had been unavailable to give; genuine affection and care.
He was jealous of every room she walked into and owned without visible effort, of the attention she distributed to everyone around her while giving him the careful measured fraction she thought he had earned.
Jealous of the life she had built without him and how well it fitted her and the fact that it appeared, from the outside, not to require him in the slightest.
This was not a flattering account of himself.
In a coffee house on Piccadilly, as the light failed, he sat with it and found it accurate, and found that accurate unflattering accounts were more useful than comfortable ones, and that arriving at the correct analysis several hours after doing the damage was an exceedingly poor form of competence.
The right tool for the morning would have been the truth told directly: that he was frightened, that he had been frightened since the night of the ball when he walked into a ballroom and found a woman where he had left a girl, that everything he was doing was an attempt to cross a distance he had himself constructed, and that he did not know how.
That truth had not been available to him this morning.
That was the whole problem, stated plainly, and no amount of walking through London was going to resolve it tonight.
By the time he turned back toward Darcy House the streets were lit and the November cold had become serious.
Upstairs, on the other side of the door, all was quiet.
She had not gone out tonight; he had asked the butler, who gave him a knowing look before remarking that Mrs Fitzwilliam had retired early.
Standing there, listening, he thought about the handle and did not move toward it.
Not certain of his reception, he told himself.
Not going through that door until he was certain, because going through it badly would be worse than not going at all.
The reasoning was correct. Also true was that he had been telling himself some version of it for weeks, and that a man could wait for certainty his whole life and never find it, and that the door was ten feet away, and that he was standing here doing nothing.
He went to bed. The ceiling offered nothing useful. Eventually, after a considerable time, he slept.
Lydia lay at the edge of the bed in the dark, angrier than she had been in a very long time.
Ten feet away, across a door she had unlocked with her own hand weeks ago, thinking she knew what she was doing. She had heard him come up the stairs and heard his door and heard the silence that followed, the same inhabited silence she had been reading since he moved into this house.
She looked at the door.
If he opened it right now she would tell him exactly what she thought of a man who had given even one ounce of credence to Caroline Bingley’s word. Not drawing room language, none of it, and she would not regret a syllable. Open it, she thought. Open it and let me stop carrying this alone.
The door did not open.
Of course it did not open. She knew perfectly well it would not, because he was going to sleep peacefully on the other side of it and be correct and courteous, as he always was, and she was going to be angry in the dark with nowhere to put it. Even her anger was hers alone. Even that.
The door stayed unlocked. At this hour the key was on the other side of the room and she was not going to get up again, she told herself. In the dark she thought about all of the things she did not want to think about, and was extremely incompetent at not thinking about them.
She did not, for a long time, go to sleep.