Chapter Twenty
Thecarriagewaswaiting,and the family had gone inside.
This had been managed, Lydia suspected, by Elizabeth, who had a talent for arranging people into the right positions without appearing to do anything at all. Her mother had required some steering; she had shown every sign of wishing to remain on the front step indefinitely, pressing Fitzwilliam to take care of himself, to send word very often, to come home as soon as he could arrange it; but the door was closed now and the drive was quiet, and there was only the carriage with its waiting horses,and Fitzwilliam standing before her with his hat under his arm and the sun touching golden lights in his hair.
“Well,” he said.
“Well,” she agreed.
He had, she knew, already seen to everything that could be seen to. There was an allowance settled on her, generous enough that she had blushed when her Uncle Phillips read it out; she would want for nothing. He had arranged matters with a thoroughness she was coming to understand was how he did things. Whatever else he was, he was not a man who left loose ends.
“You are happy to stay here until after…” he paused. “Until the weddings are done? It makes no sense for anyone to travel north only to come back again, and your sisters will be glad to have you with them a little longer, I think.”
“I know.” She did know; it had been his idea and she had been grateful for it, though she had not said so. While it might have made sense for her to reside at Netherfield with the Matlocks while they awaited Darcy’s wedding to Elizabeth, it would have felt exceptionally strange, with her family so close. “I shall be perfectly comfortable here. And then Matlock.”
“And then Matlock,” he agreed. A pause. “My mother will be good to you. She is, she takes some knowing, but she is good.”
“The countess has been very kind to me already.”
“Yes.” He looked at her with the directness he reserved for things he meant precisely. “She told me she thought I had made rather a better choice than I knew. She was right.”
Lydia looked at the gravel of the drive. Then she made herself look up, because she had decided, somewhere in the last few weeks, that she was going to stop looking at the floor when things were difficult.
“Will you, is there anything you need from me?” she asked. “Any specific thing I ought to do, or not do, while you are away. That would…” she searched for the word, “that would make things easier for you.”
He looked at her steadily for a moment. “Be well,” he said. “Be safe. That is all I need from you.”
She nodded. Her throat was doing something she was choosing to ignore.
“I need to know,” he said, more quietly, “that you are all right, and that you are not, that you are not merely enduring things. I would like you to be as happy as circumstances permit.” He paused. “Write to me, even if the letters cannot get through. Write them anyway. I should like to think of you writing them.”
“I will,” she said. “I will write very long letters and tell you everything, even if they never arrive.”
“Good.” He put his hand out, and she gave him hers, and he held it for a moment, his thumb moving once across her knuckles. “You have done everything I could have asked of you,” he said. “More. I want you to know that.”
She could not speak, quite, so she nodded again.
He bent and kissed her hand, and then he released it and stepped back, and that was all there was; that was all there could be, on a front step with the coachman sitting up on the box and Plymouth at the end of the road and Canada beyond that across an entire ocean.
“Take care of yourself, Lydia.”
“And you,” she said.
He went to the carriage. The door closed. The horses started forward.
She stood on the front step of Longbourn and watched it go down the drive and through the gate and along the lane until the trees took it, and then there was nothing to see but the empty lane and the late summer morning spread out across the fields, very still, very green, going on in all directions without particular regard for anything that had just happened.
She stood there for a little while after that, until the door opened behind her and Jane’s arm came quietly around her shoulders, and she allowed herself to be drawn inside.
She was still at Longbourn when the first letter came, two weeks later; a single page, creased from the journey, written in a handshe did not recognise as his until she remembered that she had never seen his handwriting before.
Plymouth, 4 September
Our departure is delayed by weather, which is irritating but not, the captain assures me, unusual at this time of year. The ship is tolerably comfortable and the officers good company. I have been reading, there is little else to do, and find I had forgotten how pleasant it is. I hope all at Longbourn are well and that your sisters’ happiness does not become oppressive.
R.F.
She read it four times and wrote back immediately, eight pages, and was not at all certain he would ever receive them. Likely the ship had sailed days ago now and the letter must await another ship to make the Atlantic crossing.
