“I intend to.” He said it without hesitation, because it was true. “I have every intention of it.”
She nodded, apparently finding this satisfactory, or at least as satisfactory as anything was going to be this morning. He reached across and placed his hand over hers, where they lay folded in her lap. She did not draw away. She looked down at his hand for a moment, and then she looked up at him, quite steadily, and he thought she was going to say something more, but she did not.
He held her hands until they heard footsteps in the hall, and then he released them and stood.
He told her she had done him great honour, which was the truest thing he could offer, and she held her composure through it with a grace that he suspected had cost her everything she had. He bowed to her, correctly, and went out.
She found Kitty in the bedroom they had shared since childhood, and sat down on the edge of the bed without a word. Kitty took one look at her and shut the door.
“He’s going away,” Lydia said. “America. Canada, specifically. He’s leaving on the twenty-third.” She heard how flat it sounded and could not amend it. “He is not taking me with him. I am to go to Matlock, or to Pemberley. He says it is not safe.”
“It’snotsafe,“ Kitty said immediately, fiercely. “He’s right about that, at least. I’ve heard Canada is a dreadful wilderness, no place for…”
“I know he is right,” Lydia said. “I know it. That is what makes it so perfectly dreadful.”
Kitty sat down beside her without another word and took her hand, very firmly. Lydia did not cry. She had used up all her tears weeks ago, she thought, in the Forsters’ house in Brighton, and what was left was only this: the cold clear knowledge that she was sixteen and about to be married and then immediately left behind, and that she had promised not to make it harder for him by minding.
“It isn’t fair,” Kitty said, with wholehearted conviction.
“No,” Lydia agreed. “It isn’t.”
They sat together for a while, exactly as they had done a hundred times before when the world was difficult, and Lydia found that it helped, not because Kitty could fix any of it, but because she was here and she was angry on Lydia’s behalf and she did not try to make it better. She just held her hand and let her mindthe things she had said she would not mind, and that was, in the circumstances, rather a lot.
After a while, Lydia sat up straighter, and smoothed her skirt, and said, “Do you know, I think I should like some tea.”
“I’ll ring for it,” said Kitty, and she did, and they had their tea, and talked of other things, and when Lydia went to bed that night she lay awake for a long time thinking of Canada, and the twenty-third, and the way Fitzwilliam had saidas long as I know you are safe, and the question she had asked that she wished she had not, except that she was glad she had, because he had not hesitated.
I intend to.
She turned her face into the pillow, and did her best to be satisfied with her lot. And if a few tears leaked from beneath her eyelids and soaked into the pillow, well, Kitty would certainly never reproach her for them.
