Her composure held, but she went very still.
He told her about the orders. He kept it plain and factual, as he did with all difficult intelligence, and he watched her face as he spoke. She listened without interrupting, which was itself remarkable. Her hands were folded in her lap. He could see, from the slight whitening of her knuckles, what the stillness was costing.
“When do you leave?” she said, when he had finished.
“The twenty-third, two days after the wedding. I must be in Plymouth by the end of the month.”
She nodded, as though noting a fact for future reference. He could almost see her arranging it in her mind.
The realisation, when it crossed her face, was not dramatic. A slight brightness about the eyes. Her chin lifted.
“I shall want to know what to pack,” she said. “And whether a lady’s maid is generally provided, or whether I ought to bring Polly, and how long the crossing might be at this time of…”
“Lydia.”
He said it gently enough, but she stopped at once. Looked at him, closely. He shook his head, unable to find words for what must be said that would not sound cruel. She said it instead.
“You’re not taking me with you.”
It was not a question. He had not expected it to be.
“No,” he said. “I am not.”
He kept his voice level and steady and watched her absorb it. The hands in her lap tightened briefly, then relaxed. She looked down at them, then back at him, and he was struck, not for the first time, by how much older than sixteen she looked when she was not trying to charm anyone.
“Why?” she said, very quietly.
He gave her the excuses, the words he had spent much of a wakeful night thinking up. Trying to be gentle in the cruelty he must inflict on her, for her own safety and well-being.
“It is unsafe. The war is unpredictable. The conditions are rough, and there is no society, no comfort, nothing that could be called civilised living anywhere near where I will be. Nothing that a lady should have to endure, ever.” He paused. “And you are sixteen years old. You should not be encamped on the Canadian frontier. It is not where you ought to be.”
She absorbed this without comment. He watched her considering whether to argue, and watched her conclude that she had no arguments which would actually hold.
“How long?” she asked finally, looking down at her hands again.
“I cannot say with any certainty.” He said this, knowing it to be true and also knowing it to be insufficient. “My parents will be glad to have you at Matlock, and Darcy at Pemberley, with Georgiana and her companion and…” he stalled out, almost having revealed what was not yet a certainty. “You will not want for company, or for…”
“Will you write to me?”
She had not looked up. The question was quiet and controlled, and he understood it immediately for what it was; not the request it seemed, but the one she was not making, which was whether she would matter to him at all while he was on the other side of the ocean.
“Of course I will write,” he said. “Though I must warn you that the post between Canada and England is infrequent at the best of times. My letters may reach you weeks or months late. And it is possible that yours to me may not arrive at all.”
She nodded again. Her face was quite composed.
“I need to know you are safe,” he said. It came out more simply than he had intended. “As long as I know you are safe and well, I can bear the separation with something approaching fortitude. It is a great deal easier to do one’s duty when one is not worried for those at home.” He looked at her steadily. “I am asking you to be well and safe and to not give me cause to worry. I know that is not a small thing to ask.”
Lydia was quiet for a moment. Something moved across her face that he could not read; it was there and gone before he had named it.
“I will be perfectly well,” she said. “You are not to worry about me for a single moment.”
She said it with such deliberateness that he understood it to be a gift; the gift of someone removing themselves from your list of concerns because you have enough of those already. He received it as it was meant, giving her the gift of his trust in her word in return.
“Thank you,” he said.
She looked out of the window. The silence between them was not comfortable, but it was honest, which was perhaps better.
“Will you come back?” she asked, and then seemed to regret asking it, looking quickly back at her hands.
