Chapter Twenty-Nine
The music room was empty when Fitzwilliam passed it the following morning, which was unusual; Georgiana was generally at the pianoforte at this hour.
Then, going past a second time, he found her there after all, sitting at the instrument but not playing.
Her hands were in her lap. She was looking at the middle distance with the expression of someone who has been thinking about something for long enough that she has stopped seeing the room.
“Are you all right?” he asked from the doorway.
She looked up. “Yes,” she said. “Come and sit.”
The ease between them had always been real, uncomplicated in the way that few relationships in either of their lives were uncomplicated.
She was nineteen and he was thirty-four and they had known each other since she was a small girl with a fondness for his horse and a habit of following him about on his visits to Pemberley, asking questions he had generally been able to answer.
When the Ramsgate business happened, it was to Fitzwilliam she had talked to while Darcy was handling Wickham, because Darcy would be devastated by the truth and she knew Fitzwilliam would not be shattered, only very quietly furious, and she had needed someone she could tell it to without the added burden of managing their reaction.
He had sat with her for three hours. He did not remember now what he had said. Apparently it had been the right thing.
He sat beside her on the bench. The lid of the pianoforte was open. Outside, the November day was dull and grey.
A silence. Not uncomfortable; they had always been capable of silence together. Georgiana was looking at the keys without seeing them. He waited.
“You are the most capable man I know,” she said, after a while.
Not a preamble he had expected; he had assumed this conversation was to be about Anstruther, but apparently it was not. He said nothing.
“When Wickham came to Ramsgate, you managed what happened better than anyone could have. My brother was beside himself, genuinely I think close to something he could not have come back from without you there. You kept him from doing something that would have destroyed his own life as well as mine, and you did it calmly, and without anyone else ever knowing what had nearly happened.” A pause.
“And then Brighton, the following summer, when everything had already gone so terribly wrong, and you managed Lydia’s situation when no one else knew what to do.
You saw clearly when no one else was seeing clearly.
You found the course of action that protected her as much as it could be protected, and you did it quickly, and correctly. ”
Outside, a carriage went past. The fire shifted.
“All this, while surviving a decade of war.” The faintest dryness in her tone.
“The Peninsula, and then Canada at the end of it, and you came back from all of it intact, which is not nothing.” She paused again.
“And you came home and within a fortnight you were managing here as well. My situation, and what my brother should think of Anstruther. Lydia’s position in society.
The question of where you and she would live.
You do it so well,” she said. “You have never once, in my experience, been wrong in your judgement of what the situation requires.”
Fitzwilliam was very still.
“I wonder,” Georgiana said, with the care of someone delivering the thing they have been working toward all along, “whether you have ever considered that Lydia is not a situation.”
Without heat. Without accusation. She had thought carefully about how to say it, and this was the most precise version, and she left it at that. Then she rose, quietly, and left the room.
The fire was the only sound for some time.
Fitzwilliam sat on the piano bench and looked at the keys and did not see them. Long enough for the fire to need attention, which he gave it without thinking, and then returned to the bench.
Brighton. He thought about Brighton first, because Brighton was where it had started, or where his management of it had started, which was not the same thing.
He had been thirty-one, and she had been sixteen, and he had managed the situation.
That was the accurate account. He had intercepted Lydia and Wickham by the merest chance, Lydia frightened and shocked once she realised the truth of the pit she was in.
And, despite General Lews making his kindly offer, he had seen at once what needed to be done: the marriage, the placement at Matlock where his mother could begin the work of making her into something she had not been before.
Time for Lydia to grow up, because she was sixteen and he was thirty-one and he had not seen a clear way to making a happy marriage from those bad beginnings without giving her that time.
He had been clear-eyed about it. He had not been unkind.
He had believed, at the time, that these things amounted to the same thing as being good to her, and he had not questioned this.
The wedding night at Netherfield. He had thought about that less, over the years, than he had thought about almost anything else connected to Brighton, and he thought about it now with the specific discomfort of examining something one has been careful to leave alone.
Managed correctly, he had believed at the time: propriety, decorum, a consideration for her youth and the circumstances of their hasty marriage.
And then the carriage in the morning, driving away, and the expression on her face as he left; standing alone in Longbourn’s drive with her family watching from the windows.
He had filed that face away at the time as one of the unavoidable costs of a necessary course of action.
He had not taken it out again in three years.
Not until now, in the empty music room, with Georgiana’s sentence still in the air.
What had he expected to find when he came home?
He had not, he realised, asked himself this.
He had been so occupied with the actuality of her, with the woman in the ballroom and the puzzle of her impermeability, that he had not stopped to examine what he had originally intended.
Sitting with the question now, in the quiet room, he found it did not reflect well on him.
Someone settled, he thought. Someone who had become what the situation required and had found a way to be satisfied with it.
Accomplished, composed, her history sufficiently managed, his name sufficiently protected.
Someone glad to see him, not ecstatically, not in a way that made demands, but glad in the moderate, gracious way that suited their positions and his convenience.
He had imagined coming home to something tidy.
Someone he had made and who knew it and was grateful.
What he had come home to was a woman so thoroughly accomplished, so perfectly impenetrable, that he could not find a seam in her anywhere.
Someone who had been looking at him since the night of the ball with eyes that saw him very clearly and gave him nothing.
And he had spent weeks treating this as a puzzle to be solved, sending flowers and books and proposing drives in the park, still managing, and calling it courtship.
Georgiana was nineteen years old. She had been out in society for less than two years. She had looked at his marriage and understood it with a clarity that had apparently not been available to him in three years of mistaking management for care.
The evidence of those three years was sitting in his travelling-chest upstairs.
His letters to Lydia, as well as her to him; he had kept copies, as he kept copies of everything that might need to be referred to later.
He thought about them now. His early ones had been formal, brief, directed as much at the situation as at her.
Later he had made the effort toward warmth: observations about Canada, some of the stories.
The letters had got longer as he found his footing.
Hers had got shorter. He had noticed, and thought she was maturing, learning to be less effusive, becoming the kind of woman who expressed herself with economy and precision.
It had not occurred to him, until now, that her letters had not been growing more precise. They had been growing more careful.
What he had not done, in three years of letters, was ask once what she wanted.
Not what she preferred between the households he had made available to her.
Not what she hoped for. What she actually wanted: from the marriage, from the life he had arranged for her without consultation, from him.
The question had not occurred to him. He had assumed the question answered, because she wanted what any woman in her position would want, which was security, and position, and the obliteration of the Brighton scandal, and he had provided all of these things efficiently and at some personal cost, and it had seemed sufficient.
It had never occurred to him that sufficiency was not the point.
The ballroom. That single unguarded flash across the room when she first saw him, and how she had closed it.
He had watched her do it. Had seen the precise moment she became aware of him seeing it, watched her compose herself as smoothly as a curtain being drawn, and had thought: not the right moment.
The right moment would come later. When the courtship had established something between them, when the distance had been sufficiently narrowed by correct behaviour on his part, then she would stop performing, and the original Lydia would be there, waiting for him to find her.
When had he ever let her moment be the right one?