Chapter Fifteen
The letter from Longbourn arrived in late August, and Elizabeth read it twice at the breakfast table before passing it, wordless, to her husband.
My dear Lizzy, Jane had written, I do not know how to tell you this except plainly.
Lydia has written to say that Captain Denny, having apparently learned nothing at all from the Brighton business, has resurfaced in Newcastle where the regiment now sits, and has been paying her attentions again under an assumed name, believing enough time had passed that no one would connect him with the scandal.
Lydia, foolish as ever, seems half persuaded to renew the acquaintance regardless.
Papa has written to Colonel Forster directly, but I confess I am frightened, Lizzy.
She has learned nothing from the first fright, and I do not know that a second will teach her any better.
Darcy read it through twice, his expression darkening with each line, and set it down with a stillness that Elizabeth had learned, this past summer, to recognize as barely contained anger.
"He is a persistent fool," he said. "I had thought the first lesson sufficiently sharp."
"Apparently not sharp enough." Elizabeth pressed her fingers to her temple, feeling the old familiar dread of Lydia's carelessness settle back into her chest, though tempered now, she noted with some surprise, by a certainty she had not possessed the previous winter. "What will you do?"
"I will go to Newcastle."
"We will go to Newcastle." She met his eyes, steady. "I have spent a great deal of this past year learning what happens when things are managed quietly, without my knowledge, however well intentioned. I do not intend to learn that lesson twice."
Something in his face softened, and he reached across the table, took her hand.
"No. I do not suppose you do." A pause, weighing something.
"I confess I find I do not mind the company this time.
Last winter I thought I was protecting you by acting alone.
I begin to think I was only protecting my own fear of asking for help. "
"An excellent lesson, husband."
"I have an excellent teacher," he said again, and this time there was nothing but warmth in it.
They travelled north within the week, faster than was strictly comfortable, and arrived in Newcastle to find Lydia not yet ruined but dangerously close, Denny having wormed his way back into the family's confidence under a name that fooled Colonel Forster's household staff but did not, Elizabeth was relieved to find, fool Lydia's own husband, whose watchfulness since the Brighton incident had sharpened into something genuinely protective.
"I have had my eye on him," Wickham said, when Darcy found him, with a bluntness that suggested the old rivalry between the two men had, at least on this single point, found common ground. "I do not trust him, and I told Lydia as much before you arrived. She did not much thank me for it."
"No," Darcy said, "I do not suppose she did."
It was, in the end, a simpler resolution than the previous winter's near-catastrophe.
Denny, confronted this time by both Darcy and a husband who had every reason of his own to want the man gone, left Newcastle within two days, and Lydia, chastened rather more thoroughly this time by the sheer number of relations who had traveled north to catch her at it, promised, with somewhat more conviction than her previous promises, to conduct herself better.
"I do wish everyone would stop treating me as though I have no sense at all," she said, sullen, on the last evening before Darcy and Elizabeth's departure.
"Then stop giving everyone cause to believe it," Elizabeth said, not unkindly, and Lydia, for once, had nothing sharp to say in return.
They rode back toward Pemberley in easy silence, the countryside golden with early autumn, and Elizabeth found her mind drifting back over the whole shape of the year, from a cold terrace in October to this, husband and wife riding home together with no secrets left between them worth the name.
"You did well, this time," she said, watching him.
"We did well." He glanced at her, something soft in his expression. "I have learned, this past year, that love kept silent does not protect the people it is meant to shelter. It only leaves them guessing, and guessing, I have found, is a poor substitute for being trusted with the truth."
"A hard-won lesson."
"The best ones generally are." He reached for her hand across the carriage seat, and held it the whole of the way home, and Elizabeth thought, watching Pemberley's chimneys rise into view against the golden evening sky, that whatever silences had once stood between them, none remained now, and none, she suspected, ever would again.