Chapter Thirty-Three
The church at Richmond was small and very full, which surprised Fitzwilliam, though it probably shouldn’t have.
He had not thought about how many people Lewes would have accumulated in fifty years of living and soldiering and being, by all accounts, precisely the sort of man who gathered people without appearing to try.
Officers he recognised, some very senior.
Neighbours. A small cluster of women who had clearly known him socially, for decades by the look of them, who wept with the unself-conscious grief of people who have lost something irreplaceable and know it.
The household staff, in a row at the back.
A stolid-looking man in civilian clothes who turned out, when Darcy made a quiet enquiry, to be Lewes’ grandson-in-law.
Fitzwilliam stood through the service with his hands clasped behind his back and his face correct, which was the only thing he knew how to do, and thought about a man he had respected but understood, he suspected, considerably less than he ought.
There had been a moment in the park, the walk in October, when Lewes had clasped his hands behind his back and waited for the ladies to finish at the flower seller’s cart, and made his one remark about pride and ensuring she knew it, and then said nothing further.
The serenity of it. The complete absence of any need to see how the remark had landed, because he knew it had, and that was sufficient.
Fitzwilliam had spent the walk back to the carriage trying not to look as though something had just been said to him, and had not, he suspected, entirely succeeded.
He had been jealous of this man. Standing in the church while the rector read, he turned over that fact and found it precisely as unflattering as it had always been and no less true.
He had been jealous of a man of seventy who had spent three years giving Lydia freely and without agenda the specific thing Fitzwilliam had been too absent and too managing to give her himself.
The jealousy had made him susceptible to Caroline Bingley’s poison, had sat underneath every week of courtship like something he was pretending wasn’t there.
He had never named it at the time. He was naming it now, in a church at Richmond, with nowhere to put it and no possibility of managing it away.
He thought about her, at home. She had said very little since the note arrived; she had said almost nothing to him specifically, though she had been, from the following morning, completely composed.
He had watched her reassemble herself with the speed and thoroughness of someone who has had a great deal of practice, and had stood in various doorways being useless, and had asked twice whether she needed anything and been told, warmly, that she was quite all right.
She was not all right. He knew this and could do nothing with the knowledge.
They were invited back to Lewes’s house afterwards for refreshments, and here Fitzwilliam had a chance to speak to the stolid-looking grandson-in-law, who said little apart from remarking that his wife was of course very distressed to lose her grandfather.
He seemed to have little else to say, so Fitzwilliam left him to other condolences and circulated the room, finding far more interesting company in several senior officers he knew, who introduced him to others, some of whom had known Lewes for decades.
Fitzwilliam received their condolences on Lydia’s behalf, correctly and with the warmth he could manage, and several of them said she must come and visit, they should all have been better about keeping in touch, General Lewes had spoken of her so often and with such affection.
One elderly woman, the wife of another retired general, pressed his hand and said: “Your wife was very dear to him. He was very proud of what she had made of herself. He said so often. We shall all miss him dreadfully, but I think she will miss him as much as any of us.” She meant it kindly. He received it as it was meant.
He looked about the room and thought: she cannot be here.
She is at home, alone or with Georgiana, because this is not a place she should be.
Lydia in this room, even wearing her guise of Mrs Fitzwilliam, would have been as rare and exotic as a single red rose in a field of daisies.
He wished, though, that she could be. That she could have heard what the elderly lady had just said.
The inadequacy of it settled somewhere in his chest and stayed there.
The carriage back to London was cold, the windows frosted at the edges, the winter countryside giving way to the outskirts of the city in the thin afternoon light.
Darcy sat opposite him. They had been silent since leaving the house in Richmond, the silence of men who have been in the same difficult place together and are not yet ready to discuss it.
Fitzwilliam had never found it difficult to be in silence with Darcy, who was happier in silence than almost anyone else he knew, and yet today there was an uncomfortable charge to it.
An understanding that there were things that needed to be said; or perhaps it was just Fitzwilliam’s guilt making him imagine things.
“He knew,” Fitzwilliam said, after a while. “About the marriage. What it was and what it wasn’t. He saw it more clearly than I did, I think, from the moment I came home.”
“Yes,” Darcy said. “That sounds like him.”
Fitzwilliam turned his hat in his hands. “I was jealous of him.” He said it to the window. “I want you to know that I am aware of how that reflects on me.”
Darcy was quiet for a moment. Outside, the city was assembling itself around them, the streets thickening, the light already failing in the late January afternoon. “He knew that too,” he said.
“I imagine he did.” A pause. “It wasn’t about him. I knew that, even at the time, and it made no difference at all.” He looked at his hat. “What was he to her, exactly? In those three years. I have accounts of it, from you, from my mother, but accounts are not the same thing.”
Darcy looked out of the window for a long moment.
“He was the one person,” he said, “with whom she did not have to play a part. No history to manage. No position to protect. No performance required.” A pause.
“She was able to be truly herself with him, from very early on. I don’t think she knew how rare that was. I’m not sure she knows even now.”
The carriage moved through a narrow street, the buildings close on either side.
“I saw it,” Fitzwilliam said. “In the park, in October. I watched her be Lydia with him, not Mrs Fitzwilliam, and I understood precisely what I was looking at and precisely what it said about everything I had not been given.” He was quiet for a moment. “I made it about him. It was easier.”
“Yes,” Darcy said.
“She will miss him very much.”
“She will,” Darcy said. “He was the first person, I think, who saw her clearly and found what he saw sufficient. Not promising, not improvable. Sufficient.” He paused. “You might bear that in mind.”
He said nothing further. He did not need to.
They rode the rest of the way in silence, the city closing around them, the light gone entirely by the time Darcy House came into view.
The house was quiet when they returned. Elizabeth appeared in the hallway with the look of a woman who has been managing something in their absence and has done it well and does not intend to say so.
She kissed Darcy’s cheek, took his coat, asked briefly about the service.
He told her. Her face showed what it had when she first heard the news: grief, without any of her usual brightness around it.
“How was the house?” Darcy asked, obliquely.
“Georgiana has been with her most of the day,” Elizabeth said.
“She is calm, and quiet. She has been that way since this morning.” She paused.
“She asked me whether the lilac had come in yet at Pemberley. In January. I told her not until May and she said of course, she had known that, she simply could not think what else to talk about.” She looked at Fitzwilliam for a moment.
“She is not all right. But she is very good at appearing so.”
Fitzwilliam went upstairs.
The door to Lydia’s sitting room was ajar. He could see, through the gap, that she was at her writing desk, not writing. The lamp was lit. She was looking at the window, which gave back nothing at this hour but her own reflection and the room behind her, and she did not know he was there.
He stood in the corridor for a moment. He thought about knocking. He thought about Darcy in the carriage, and the wall, and the distance, and the three years of management with different names.
Then he looked at her face in the window’s reflection.
She was not composed. Not for these few seconds, alone in the room, when there was no one to see her.
The face in the glass was the face she wore when nothing was required of her.
He had seen it for the first time on the step, when the note arrived, and he was looking at it now in a reflection, and it was older and quieter than he had expected, and he felt something in him make a decision that had been a long time arriving.
He raised his hand and knocked.
She turned. The mask came back with the turning, automatic and complete, and she looked at him with the pleasant enquiring expression she brought to everything and he looked at it and thought: no. Not tonight.
“May I come in?” he said.
She said that of course he might. She gestured to the chair opposite. She said she was glad he was back, that she hoped the service had been a fitting tribute. Her voice was warm and even.
He came in. He did not sit in the chair opposite.
He crossed the room and sat down on the floor beside her writing desk, his back against the wall, his legs extended, in a posture that was unsuited to a drawing room and unsuited to a colonel, even a retired one, and he did not care about either of these things. He looked up at her.
She looked down at him and the mask flickered. Something younger appeared beneath it, startled and uncertain. She did not know what to do with this.
“He was a very good man,” Fitzwilliam said.
“I liked him very much, which I am not sure I ever adequately told him, though I do believe he knew how much I respected him. I should have told him the whole of it.” He looked at his hands.
“I met a woman this afternoon, at the house, after the cemetery. Mrs Caldecott, I believe, wife of General Caldecott. She said he spoke of you often. That he was very proud of what you had made of yourself.”
Lydia’s face was very still, but it was not unreadable. Her composure had cracked when he sat down on the floor, and her mask had not fitted quite back into place. He could see the grief in her eyes.
“I thought,” Fitzwilliam said, “that you should know that. That he talked of you often, and fondly, to those who knew him well. That it was said, even though you could not be there to hear it.”
The room was very quiet. The lamp threw a small, warm circle of light. Outside, January pressed against the window.
“Thank you,” she said. Her voice was uneven. “That is.” She stopped. “Thank you.”
He did not move from the floor. He had decided, in the corridor, that he was not going to manage this.
He was going to sit here, on the floor of her sitting room, for as long as was needed, and he was not going to be useful or capable or correct, because none of those things had been worth a great deal to either of them so far.
She looked at him for a long moment: her husband, on the floor of her sitting room, with no apparent intention of moving. Her face did not change, but neither did the mask slip back over it. She sat there and looked at him, and let him see that she was feeling something.
She did not say anything further. Neither did he. But she did not ask him to leave, and he did not leave, and the lamp burned steadily between them, and outside the city went about its business in the dark.