“Mr Bingley is returned to Netherfield,” Jane said. “He came this morning, and left his card. He has written a note on the back that he will call again tomorrow.”
Elizabeth crossed the hall and took her sister’s hand, and said nothing at all, because nothing needed saying. Jane’s fingers tightened on hers.
“It may mean nothing,” Jane said, which was so transparently untrue that Elizabeth almost laughed.
“Of course,” she said instead, very gravely. “Nothing whatsoever.”
Jane was trying very hard not to smile. Elizabeth gave up the effort and smiled for both of them.
The Matlock letter arrived the following morning, just as the family was finishing breakfast.
It was addressed, correctly, to Mr Bennet, who opened it, read it, and passed it across the table to his wife without comment.
Mrs Bennet read the first two lines and screamed.
“Anearl!“ she cried, grasping at her husband’s sleeve. “Mr Bennet, anearl! And acountess! They are coming here, they are coming toLongbourn, they are… Mr Bennet, the guest rooms!The guest rooms are not at all fit to receive an earl, the curtains in the blue room have been wanting new lining since Easter, and Cook cannot possibly be expected to produce a suitable dinner at such short notice, and my nerves, my nerves, I cannot be expected to…”
“They write that they will happily stay at Netherfield, my dear,” Mr Bennet observed.
“Netherfield! With Caroline Bingley?” Mrs Bennet transferred her attention to this new catastrophe without pausing for breath. “Of all the... no, no, we must insist they stay here, it is only right and proper, Mr Bennet, you must write to them at once and insist…”
“I suspect the Earl of Matlock is not a man accustomed to being insisted at,” Mr Bennet said, to the table in general.
“We could have the curtains re-lined in a fortnight,” Mary offered thoughtfully.
Nobody paid her any attention.
Lydia had taken the letter from where her mother had dropped it and was reading it through with care. The hand was a fine one, the address elegantly brief, the tone warm and gracious. The countess wrote that they were greatly pleased by the news of their son’s engagement and looked forward to welcoming Miss Lydia Bennet into the family. The earl added two sentences at the foot of the page in a different hand, endorsing all his wife had said and expressing his personal satisfaction in his son’s choice.
She read it twice. She set it down.
The Earl and Countess of Matlock, she thought.His parents. Who will be my parents now, in a manner of speaking.
The thought ought perhaps to have been daunting. Instead she found it settling somewhere warmly in her chest, alongside the memory of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s quiet confidence and General Lewes’s steady kindness. She had not thought, until Brighton, that the world contained very many people she could trust. She was revising that opinion by degrees.
“I quite like the curtains in the blue room,” she remarked.
“Lydia!” her mother exclaimed. “How can you sit there so calmly when we are to receive anearland acountess?”
“Perhaps because Lydia is the one marrying into the family,” Elizabeth said, with a sidelong smile at Lydia, “and is therefore rather more at ease with the connection.”
Lydia raised her eyebrows serenely. Mrs Bennet, distracted from her nerves for a moment, peered at her youngest daughter as though trying to determine whether she had been replaced when her back was turned.
“Human beings, every one of them,” Mary observed. “Whatever their rank.”
“Thank you, Mary,” said Mr Bennet, rising from the table. “Now, if no one has any immediate crises requiring my attention…”
“The guest rooms, Mr Bennet…”
“… I shall be in my library,” he continued, without breaking stride.
Lydia watched him go with a private amusement she had not previously known she shared with him, and went back to re-reading the countess’s letter.
The house was quiet by half past ten, her mother exhausted by the effort of her anxieties, her sisters all abed. Lydia had sat with Kitty for an hour and told her as much as she could, watching Kitty’s face cycle through astonishment and indignation and fierce protectiveness on her behalf, and felt better for it in a way she had not expected. There was no wisdom in Kitty, no measured perspective, and she did not try to improve the occasion. She simply sat beside Lydia and was furious with Wickham specifically and the world at large for putting her sister in such a position, and it was, Lydia found, exactly what she needed.
She could not sleep, however. She lay awake for some time, looking at the ceiling, and eventually gave up, put on her wrapper and went down to the kitchen for some warm milk, in the way she had done since she was small.
A light was still burning in the library.
