Chapter Thirty
Mrs Bennet’s voice preceded her into Darcy House by approximately fifteen seconds.
Fitzwilliam, who had been in the entrance hall when the carriage was announced and had not found a reason to leave it, used the time to position himself near the stairs, where he could observe without constituting an obstacle.
He had not met Mrs Bennet since the wedding; she had written to him twice during his time in Canada, letters of such comprehensive enthusiasm that he had struggled to compose adequate replies and had eventually concluded that adequacy was not what was wanted, and had simply written back with warmth and brevity and hoped for the best.
The door opened. Mrs Bennet swept in on a tide of trailing frills and enthusiastic utterances, embraced Elizabeth with vigour, patted Darcy’s arm in a manner that suggested she had revised her early opinion of him entirely, and then stopped in her tracks when she saw Fitzwilliam standing by the stairs.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam!” The exclamation was so loud that it startled even the Darcy butler, who had positioned himself with considerable experience of Bennet arrivals.
“Oh, how wonderful! How very wonderful, you are home at last! We have been so worried, all of us, your poor wife most of all, though she has borne it admirably, everyone says so. And you look so well! Does he not look well, Mr Bennet? A little thin perhaps, but soldiering will do that to a man.”
Fitzwilliam bowed, and said he was very glad to see her, and meant it more than he expected to. Mrs Bennet seized his hand and pressed it with artless, genuine warmth, beamed at him as though his safe return were a personal gift to herself, and then turned, still beaming, to find Lydia.
Lydia was standing at the drawing room doorway. Fitzwilliam had not seen her come out.
Mrs Bennet crossed the entrance hall and took her youngest daughter’s hands and looked at her, and for perhaps ten seconds said nothing at all. In Fitzwilliam’s admittedly limited experience, ten seconds of silence from Mrs Bennet constituted a significant event.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, in a very different register from the one she had arrived in.
“You look so well. So elegant. The Countess has done wonders, I always said she would.” Then, recovering herself somewhat: “The pearls! Are those new? Mr Bennet, come and look at Lydia’s pearls.
You look very well, my dear, quite the finest thing in London I should not wonder, and those pearls; are they the Colonel’s gift or his mother’s?
Either way they are exactly right. I said to your father on the road, I said, I am sure Lydia will be quite transformed, and so you are, though you were always a pretty girl, always, whatever anyone might say. ”
Through all of this Lydia stood and received it, warmly and without visible effort, interjecting at the precise moments that kept the flow of her mother’s feeling moving without compounding it. The management was so smooth as to be almost invisible. Almost.
“Mr Bennet, the pearls,” Mrs Bennet insisted.
Mr Bennet had come in behind his wife without ceremony.
He was a smaller man than Fitzwilliam remembered, neatly made, with the particular stillness of someone who has been married to a great deal of noise for a very long time and has not allowed it to affect him.
He kissed Lydia’s cheek, said she was looking very well, and looked at the pearls with the seriousness the occasion seemed to require.
“Very fine,” he said, which appeared to satisfy Mrs Bennet.
His gaze crossed Fitzwilliam’s briefly, assessed him with a directness that did not trouble to conceal itself, and moved on.
Mary came in last, behind her father, with the quietness that had always characterised her.
It had a different quality now: the quietness of someone who had found their life and settled into it, rather than of someone still looking.
She greeted Elizabeth and Darcy with warm composure, and then found Lydia, and the greeting between them was brief and real and considerably warmer, Fitzwilliam thought, than sisters who had not been close might manage.
James was in the drawing room with his nursemaid, occupied with a set of wooden blocks.
He looked up when the party entered, subjected the newcomers to the same thorough assessment he had previously applied to Fitzwilliam and the squashed toast, and fixed his attention on Mrs Bennet.
Mrs Bennet descended upon him with exclamations; James held his ground, examined her face at close range, identified her cap ribbon as an object of interest, and took hold of it with decisive authority.
“Oh, the little angel,” Mrs Bennet breathed. “Look at him, Mr Bennet. Is he not just like his father?”
“Exactly like his father,” Mr Bennet said, in a tone suggesting this was a more complex observation than it appeared.
Darcy, from a safe distance, looked extremely composed.
Fitzwilliam watched Lydia laugh at something her mother said: a real laugh, unguarded, the kind she generally kept for people she was not managing.
She was not managing her mother. She was warm and present and occasionally redirected the conversation with a deftness Mrs Bennet almost certainly did not notice, but there was no surface to it.
No distance. She was just there, in the middle of her family, in a way she was not anywhere else he had seen her.
Tea was brought, and the drawing room arranged itself into the cheerful disorder of a household receiving family rather than guests.
Mrs Bennet occupied the sofa with James on her knee, continued to provide her opinions on everything that had occurred since she had last been in London, and was, Fitzwilliam thought, genuinely happy.
Not performing happiness: happy. There was a directness to it, however overwhelming the expression, that he found he could not dislike.
He found himself beside Darcy at the window, both of them slightly outside the main action.
“She has mellowed,” Fitzwilliam said quietly.
“Four daughters well-married,” Darcy said, with the air of a man who has made his peace with a situation and even, occasionally, found it amusing.
“Three grandchildren this far. Jane close by at Netherfield; Pemberley to visit. She has everything she ever wanted. It has, I find, a moderating effect.” A pause. “Mostly.”
Across the room, Mrs Bennet was telling Lydia something about Mary’s Mr Pearce, who was, she explained at some length, a very good young man, very steady, very well thought of in the parish, not exciting precisely, but then one did not want exciting in a clergyman, one wanted reliable, and reliable he certainly was.
Lydia listened, and asked questions that extended the subject further, and did not once glance across the room at her husband.
Mary, beside her sister on the small settee, caught Fitzwilliam’s eye for a moment with a look of such clear and undeceived intelligence that he felt briefly as though he had been read rather more thoroughly than he had intended.
Christmas Day came in cold and bright, a hard frost on the streets that kept the household cheerfully indoors.
Elizabeth had arranged dinner for four o’clock, with a table considerably more elaborate than even Darcy House normally produced.
James was permitted to the table for the first course, a concession to chaos that Darcy ostensibly disapproved of and, Elizabeth knew, was highly unlikely ever to veto no matter the magnitude of disaster which might occur.
Watching the three dearest males in her life – her husband and father, on either side of her son – Elizabeth thought: this is what she had wanted. Not any specific version of it she could have described, before it happened, but this exactly.
Mr Bennet was a different man at a table where someone wanted him present.
She had observed it before and she observed it again: his animation when his intelligence was met and used rather than merely suffered.
He talked to Darcy about the estate, the two of them having arrived over the past years at a mutual respect that was real if never precisely warm.
He talked to Fitzwilliam about the campaign with genuine interest, the questions well-aimed.
He talked to Georgiana about the pianoforte with the appreciation of someone who had spent thirty years wishing someone in his own household would play it properly.
And he watched.
Lydia was the daughter her father watched most. Elizabeth had always known this, had suspected since childhood that beneath the careless treatment there was a more complicated feeling: the specific discomfort of a man who recognises himself in disturbing ways in the child he has managed least well.
He watched Lydia now with the focused attention he gave to books he found unexpectedly interesting.
Not certain yet what he was reading. Not looking away.
Fitzwilliam watched Lydia too, from a different angle and with a different expression.
He was becoming, Elizabeth thought, considerably less easy to read than he had been at the beginning of the season, which she took as a promising sign.
What remained unclear was whether the shift had come quickly enough, or gone far enough.
Across the table, Lydia was talking to her mother about Mary’s trousseau.
She was warm and present and occasionally very funny; Mrs Bennet was flushed with happiness beside her.
On Lydia’s other side, Fitzwilliam was talking to Mr Bennet about Derbyshire.
Perfectly pleasant. Perfectly civil. The distance between them was not large enough to be noticed by anyone who was not looking for it.
Mary caught Elizabeth’s eye across the table.