She held herself differently. She had always been a girl who took up space in a room, who made her presence known without making much apparent effort; this woman occupied preciselythe space she chose to occupy and no more, and held it with the quiet assurance of someone who had never in her life needed to make a noise about it. She knew exactly where everyone in the room was. He could see it in the slight tilt of her attention, the unhurried way her focus moved. He recognised the habit because it was one of his own.
He needed a drink.
He was still watching her when it happened.
It was a general survey of the room, the unconscious circuit of someone who had been doing it for years; he recognised that too. Her gaze drifted across him and stopped. For one moment, before she knew she was doing it, her face was completely open.
Pure, uncomplicated delight. Something younger than her face. Something real.
Then it closed. He watched it close, smooth and deliberate as a hand closing over a coin. She said something to the man nearest her, a small gesture of excuse, and crossed the room towards him unhurried, making it look as though she had been intending to cross the room all along.
She stopped at a polite distance and curtsied, correctly.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam.” Her voice was warm, composed, perfectly calibrated. “Welcome home.”
NotRichard.
He bowed over her hand. He was, he realised, at a disadvantage he had not anticipated and could not immediately account for.
“Mrs Fitzwilliam.” He straightened. “I apologise for the lateness of my arrival.”
“Not at all,” she said pleasantly. “There was a great deal of military business, I imagine, on your return.”
“The War Office,” he said. “And a tailor.”
Something moved in her eyes, very briefly. Not amusement. Something more considering. “Well,” she said, “you are here now.”
“I am,” he agreed.
There was a moment in which neither of them had anything to say, which was not something he had experienced often and had not expected to experience with her specifically. The girl in Brighton had never for a single moment lacked something to say.
Then Elizabeth appeared at his elbow.
“Richard.” Warm, proprietary, welcoming. She took his arm and kissed his cheek in the manner of a woman who had been Mrs Darcy long enough to feel perfectly confident in London society. “I am very glad you are here at last. You look very well; doesn’t he, Lydia?”
“Extremely,” Lydia said, with the same pleasant composure.
Elizabeth’s eyes moved between them with the alertness of a woman taking a measurement. Whatever she concluded, she kept it to herself. “Come and see Darcy,” she said, steering him gently. “He has been on edge since your note arrived this morning.”
He went. He glanced back once. Lydia had already returned to her corner of the room, to the group that had paused and now resumed, and she did not look as though she had looked back.
Darcy shook his hand with quiet warmth and said only “welcome home,” which was the right thing. Georgiana embraced him with genuine feeling and then gave him a look, very brief and very direct, that told him she had noticed something and was filing it away. He would not have said he was particularly readable this evening but evidently his cousin disagreed.
“Lord Anstruther,” Elizabeth said, drawing forward the young man who had been hovering at Georgiana’s elbow. “He and Georgiana have become great friends.”
The young man was perhaps twenty-four; he had the look of someone who read a great deal and didn’t mind if you knew it, which Fitzwilliam found he approved of more than he expected to. His regard for Georgiana was utterly transparent, though he was doing his best to be decorous about it.
“Colonel,” Anstruther said, with a slight bow. “Your reputation precedes you.”
“I hope not unfavourably,” Fitzwilliam said.
“Entirely the reverse. Miss Darcy speaks of you with great affection.”
Georgiana looked serene. Darcy looked, very briefly, as though he was doing some sort of internal calculation that he would share with no one.
Fitzwilliam’s attention drifted across the room. He could not prevent it.
Lydia was dancing now. Her partner was a fair-haired young man who was plainly delighted with himself for having secured her hand and slightly lost for what to do with the good fortune. She was talking, he noticed; not performing the dance in silence but talking with the easy grace of someone who could do several things simultaneously without apparent effort. Her partner laughed at something she said. Her attention was fully on her partner, without the slightest indication that intimated she knew she was being observed.
