Chapter Thirty-Five #2
“There is something,” he said, “that I have to tell you. I should have told you weeks ago and I did not, and I want to tell you now.” he was not meeting her eyes now, looking carefully at the path in front of them.
“Caroline Bingley said something to me. At the beginning of November, before the assembly.”
When he told her, Lydia’s face went through several things in rapid succession, which Fitzwilliam catalogued with the attention he had been paying to her face for three months, now operating without his direction.
First: recognition. She had known something had been said; she had read it in him across the room at the assembly and had understood its source without knowing its content, because she had been watching Caroline Bingley operate in drawing rooms for three years and knew the level of damage Caroline could leave behind her.
Then fury. Not yet directed; he could see her assembling it, the specific, precise fury of a woman who knows exactly what she is dealing with and has the vocabulary for it.
“What,” she said, with a control that was itself a form of fury, “did she say.”
He told her. All of it, plainly. Chatterton.
The implication. The history Caroline had constructed and offered in the warm, concerned manner of a woman who had only the family’s interests at heart.
He told her without excuse and without softening, because there was no version of honesty that left any of it out.
The fury arrived. First at Caroline, which was like watching a very precise instrument brought to bear on a target it had been designed for.
What she thought of a woman who spread poison out of wounded pride, using a girl who had never been the actual target; she said it with an exactness and an edge that the old Lydia would have had and the new Lydia had refined.
Not a word of it he disagreed with. He did not attempt to moderate any of it.
“It has never been about me,” she said, and her voice had shifted from precise fury to something rawer underneath.
“Not once, not for a single moment. I am merely what is available. The nearest instrument for something that was always about Elizabeth and Darcy and what she wanted and did not get.” At the stone path she looked.
“She will keep doing it. As long as I am the easiest target.”
“She will not,” he said. “I intend to make certain of it.”
“You believed her,” she said.
There it was.
“Yes,” he said. “Not entirely, and not for long, but in the moment, when she said it in that particular way…” He stopped. “Yes.”
The fury shifted. He watched it shift with the steady attention of a man who has decided he is not going to manage this or redirect it or make it smaller. He is going to sit with it and let it be what it is.
“Three years,” she said. “I have spent three years ensuring that not one person in London or Derbyshire or anywhere else has had cause to doubt my conduct. Every drawing room, every morning call, every evening party where I was the colonel’s wife who was very nearly ruined at sixteen and could not afford a single wrong step.
” Her voice was not raised; it was very quiet, which was worse.
“You were not there for any of it. You did not see any of it. And when a woman who has hated every Bennet since she met us told you a story designed precisely to use what you already half-believed about me…” A stop.
Tears on her face, she did not appear to have noticed.
“You believed her. Not fully. But enough; enough to make you doubt.”
“Yes,” he said again. There was nothing else to say.
He reached for her hand.
She pulled it away. Not cruelly; instinctively, the way one pulls away from a thing one doesn’t yet trust. He withdrew. He did not try again. He stayed where he was, on the cold bench, beside her, not attempting to fix or manage or resolve. Not going anywhere.
She noticed. He saw her notice: a slight shift in her attention, a fraction of the fury redirected into something that was registering him, what he was doing and what he was not doing.
They sat in silence for a while. The garden was still. Above them the pale sky had not changed.
“The letters,” she said, finally, allowing herself to move on to another thing she had been wanting to talk to him about, “used to arrive all at once. Four or five together, months out of order. I would read them and try to reassemble the sequence and I could never quite make them feel current. They always felt like stories.” A pause.
“I wrote back to each one. I don’t know if the replies arrived in any useful order. ”
“They didn’t,” he said. “Mostly in clusters, in the spring, when the ice broke. I used to read them in the order of the dates and try to imagine the winter they described.” A pause. “I kept them. Every one.”
“I kept yours too,” she said.
A silence fell between them. Not uncomfortable; just… waiting. Lydia did not know what to say, so she waited.
“I want to tell you what it was actually like,” he said.
“Not the anecdotes. The parts I didn’t write.
” Out at the garden. “Canada is very cold in a way that is different from English cold; it is the kind of cold that makes England feel like a fiction you invented. The isolation of it. The way I trained myself not to think about home because home was too far away to be useful.” A pause. “I was not always successful.”
“What did you think about?” she said.
“You,” he said. “Whether you were well. Whether you were finding anything to like about Matlock.” He turned the bare twig he had picked up from the path in his hands.
“I thought about you at Brighton – the girl I came to know before I ever had any inkling that Wickham even knew your name. How much I’d liked that girl, sharp witted and clear eyed and honest almost to a fault. ”
She looked at him.
“I always carried your last letter,” he said. “Inside my coat, in the pocket next to my heart. Whichever one you’d most recently sent, so it was the last thing I had your hands had touched. I don’t know if that is something you want to know. I think you should know it.”
Lydia was looking at him with the expression he didn’t know how to name.
The face she wore when nothing was required.
He had seen it in a window’s reflection in a room she thought she was alone in, and he was seeing it now in a cold garden in January with full knowledge that she knew he was watching.
“I don’t know,” she said, “what to do with you.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know what to do with you either. I have been getting it wrong since October.”
“Since before that,” she said, but there was something in it that was not quite an accusation. Something that acknowledged both of them in the getting-wrong.
“Yes,” he said. “Since before that.”
The garden held them, cold and still, and neither of them moved, and the distance between them on the bench was not the managed distance of two people staying within each other’s range.
It was only the distance that remained, which was not the same thing at all, and which was closable, he thought, if they were both willing, and if not today then soon.
“I am not going to tell you,” she said, after a while, “that it is all right. Because it isn’t, quite, yet.”
“I know,” he said.
“But I think,” she said carefully, as though testing the weight of each word before placing it, “that it might be. Eventually.” A pause. “If you continue not going anywhere.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I have sold my commission. There is nowhere to go, that I would go without you.”
“Good,” she said, with the sharpness and the warmth together, entirely Lydia, and he was glad of it in a way he would not have known how to be glad of it three months ago.
They sat a little longer in the cold garden, in the silence that was no longer managed, and neither of them was in any hurry.
Then he said, carefully: “May I kiss you?”
She looked at him. Then she said: “Yes.” And then, to his utter delight, she showed him that she was still very much that Brighton girl somewhere underneath Mrs Fitzwilliam by adding: “I have been waiting approximately three years for you to ask, and I must say you might perhaps have considered doing so before sailing to Canada.”
He laughed before he kissed her. The laugh came first, genuine and unguarded, and then the kiss, which was brief and real, and neither of them was performing anything at all.
That night, Fitzwilliam stood at the door between their rooms and looked at it.
He had his hand on the handle. He had been standing there for some minutes, which was far longer than was dignified, but dignity had not served him especially well in recent months and he was not inclined to weight it heavily.
The question before him was whether this was rushing.
Whether, having arrived at the beginning of something this afternoon, he was now proposing to skip several steps.
Whether the door was even unlocked.
He had not tried it. He was thinking about trying it.
He was also thinking about the three years on the other side of various doors and oceans, and the kiss they had shared earlier, and the way Lydia had looked up at him afterwards and smiled as she had once smiled at him three years ago on the promenade at Brighton.
His hand was on the handle, and then the handle turned under his fingers, from the other side, and the door opened, and Lydia looked up at him, wide-eyed, with a lamp in her hand and her hair down and an expression that was startled and then, immediately, something else.
She laughed.
Not the composed drawing room laugh, not the careful managed version; the real one, unguarded and bright, the one he had missed ever since Brighton and had been trying to produce for three months.
The laugh he had given up trying to produce and had apparently produced anyway by standing on the wrong side of a door long enough for her to open it.
She stepped forward, into his arms, the lamp set aside somewhere. “Richard,” she said, and he kissed her, and there were no more oceans or doors or anything else at all left in between them.