Chapter Thirty-Five
The garden was cold and dry, the last of the frost still on the shadowed edges of the paths, the pale winter sky offering light without warmth.
Lydia came out without much intention; she had been sitting at the writing desk not writing anything for twenty minutes and the walls of the room had begun to feel like a reproach, and the garden had seemed, suddenly, preferable to being reproached by walls.
The length of the path she walked, and back, and then sat down on the wooden bench under the bare plane tree and looked at the house and let herself open the file in her head.
Chatterton first, because it was both the easiest and the most recent matter.
That particular problem was no longer a problem, and she could examine its resolution with the detachment she brought to closed matters: he had been a mild nuisance, clever and practised and not dangerous enough to require any deflective action on her part.
She had managed his attentions without difficulty.
No regrets on that score, and no real feelings about his disappearance from her orbit, which had been accomplished with the smoothness of a man accepting a verdict he respected even if he didn’t prefer it.
What she had feelings about was the way Fitzwilliam had accomplished it.
Fitzwilliam had crossed the room with the unhurried confidence of a man going somewhere he had always been going, and had arrived at her side, placing his hand at her back and his attention on her, and she had felt it more acutely she had felt anything in months.
The geometry of the group had shifted without a word being said about it.
And she had not minded. That was the strangest thing: she had not minded.
Underneath the composure she was wearing and the public situation she was managing, instead she had felt something that was not unlike warmth.
The question she had not asked herself was whether that warmth was gratitude, because he had, after all, removed a mild irritant efficiently and without fuss, or something else. Something that had to do not with what he had done but with why he had done it.
Jealousy, she thought, and sat with the word for a moment.
Because that was what it had been. Too clear-eyed about these things to dress it up as something more flattering, she knew it plainly: he had been watching Chatterton with the specific kind of stillness she recognised from the concert in October, and from Lady Hargrove’s party.
Whether it had been in his mind to be jealous of Chatterton before Caroline put it there, she could not know, but last night she was quite certain he had crossed the room not because he had assessed the situation and determined that intervention was strategically appropriate, but because he was jealous and he had acted on it.
And this was a thing she ought not to find warming.
The damage jealousy could do, she knew. From Caroline, whose jealousy had been a weapon used without scruple. From Wickham, whose jealousy of men wealthier than himself had been the engine of almost every bad decision he had ever made. She knew what it looked like when it turned destructive.
And yet. Fitzwilliam’s jealousy of Chatterton had not turned destructive. He had come across a room and been present in a way he had not been present before, and she had not minded.
And the file in her head was open now and she was going to look at all of it honestly or not at all.
Lewes, then.
Harder, this. She had not looked at this one directly, because looking at it directly meant looking at both the loss and what she understood about Fitzwilliam’s reaction to it now that she had not understood before.
In a general way she had known that Fitzwilliam was jealous of Lewes.
She had observed it without naming it, had filed it under: irrational, unworthy.
Faintly absurd, if she was honest. A man of seventy.
The most uncomplicated friendship she had.
Except that she had not been uncomplicated about it, had she?
With Lewes she had been able to be herself: the Brighton girl and the woman she had become, both at once, without effort.
No performance. No management. With Lewes she had been the thing she could not be in any drawing room in London, the thing she could not be with her own husband, the thing that existed underneath everything she had built and that she had not known, until she looked at it plainly, how much she had needed to be.
Fitzwilliam had seen that. He had stood in the park and watched her be herself with an old man and understood, with the clarity of someone who had been trying very hard to truly see her for weeks, exactly what he was looking at and exactly what it meant about everything he had not been given.
His jealousy of Lewes had not been about Lewes at all.
It had been about her. About wanting to be the person she was unguarded with.
Lydia sat for a long moment, staring at the cold garden with this realisation burning a strange heat in her stomach.
Lewes had known. He had seen both of them clearly, in the way he saw most things, and he had done what he had always done: opened a door and waited to see who walked through it.
He had spoken to Fitzwilliam in the park.
He had written to her with his worst habit on full display.
He had said things she had been furious at and had known were right and had not yet forgiven him for, and she was not going to be able to be furious at him anymore, and she was going to have to forgive him instead, and she found that the two things were not as different as she would have expected.
The cloak arrived around her shoulders without warning, and she jumped, startled.
Behind her, Fitzwilliam said nothing, only settled the cloak and stepped back, and she turned and found him standing a pace away looking at her with the expression that had no name.
“Your coat looked inadequate,” he said.
“It is somewhat inadequate,” she agreed.
His own coat was on, but he had come out without hat or gloves, which meant he had come out quickly, on impulse, without the considered approach.
“Sit with me a moment,” she said, which surprised them both slightly.
He sat beside her on the wooden bench, and they looked at the garden, and the silence was the occupied kind.
“I don’t know,” she said, after a while, “how much longer I can do it.”
“Do what?” he asked.
“Perform,” she said. “All of it. Every room, every conversation, every morning coming downstairs and being Mrs Fitzwilliam at every moment of the day.” She was still looking at the bare plane tree, and the backs of her eyes were beginning to feel hot.
“I don’t know how not to, anymore. That’s the difficulty.
I built it so thoroughly that I’m not sure where it ends and I begin. Lewes said…” She stopped.
“What did he say?”
“He said he would very much like to see me stop.” A pause. “I was furious at him for it. He was right, and I was furious anyway.” A shorter pause. “I am still somewhat furious, which is inconvenient given the circumstances.”
“Yes,” Fitzwilliam said. “I imagine it is.”
There was something in the way he said it: not managed, not considered. She looked at him sideways.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything,” she denied, too quickly.
“You are,” he said. “You’ve been doing it since I sat down. Calibrating. Managing the distance.” A steady look. “You don’t have to.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and it came out before she could weigh it, “how not to. With you especially. I’ve been doing it since October. Since the ballroom, in fact, since you appeared in the doorway and I…” Another stop.
“And you what?” he said.
She had a choice, in this moment. Redirect it; she had redirected it a hundred times, and she could do it again, and he would accept the redirect because he had learned that pushing did not work, and the distance would remain, and she would go inside and file it and go on being Mrs Fitzwilliam in perpetuity. Or she could… not.
“And I was glad,” she said, through a throat that had gone quite tight. “Genuinely glad, for about one second, before I remembered that gladness was not a safe position and closed it down.” She looked at her hands. “I have thought about that second rather often.”
The garden was very quiet.
“I thought of you,” he said, “considerably more than was strategically sensible, for three years in Canada. Whether you were well. Whether you were happy. Whether the letters were arriving in the right order or coming in clumps three months late. Whether you were finding Matlock bearable.” A pause.
“Whether you had found anyone to talk to.”
“I had Georgiana, and Elizabeth,” she said. “And General Lewes.”
“I know,” he said. “I know that now.” A pause with something complicated in it. “I was jealous of Lewes. I want you to know that I am aware of how that reflects on me.”
“Jealous of a man of seventy,” she said, carefully.
“Jealous,” he said, “of a man who was permitted to know you. Who had the version of you that you gave to nobody else. Who offered to marry you, lest you forget, but encouraged you to choose me instead for your own sake. I understood, watching you with him, what I had not been given. And I made it about him, which was easier than making it about what I had failed to be.”
She was quiet for a moment. “He knew you were jealous,” she said, with a faintly reminiscent little smile. The first smile she had managed when thinking of her friend, since his passing. “He thought it was promising.”
Something moved in his expression. “He would,” he said, with a warmth that was also grief, and she felt it because she was feeling the same thing.
They sat with it for a moment, the shared loss, which was not the same loss but was a loss nonetheless.