It was in the first half of the concert that he noticed Lord Chatterton.
Thirty, perhaps, with the arrogant ease of a man who had always found the world willing to arrange itself around his convenience. Handsome in a way that had most of the young ladies in the room casting sidelong glances in his direction, very well-dressed without being foppish, and his manner of paying attention had a quality that Fitzwilliam, who had learned to read men under pressure, recognised as calculated. It was the attention of someone who had decided you were worth his time and intended you to know it.
Lydia, apparently, was worth his time.
She was seated in the row in front of Fitzwilliam, and Chatterton occupied a chair beside her with the air of a man who had arranged this and saw no reason to conceal it. He spoke to her in the pauses between pieces with the low-voiced intimacy of a man conducting a private conversation in public. She received each remark with polite warmth. She did not encourage him. She did not, quite, discourage him either, and he was the sort of man who would take anything less than a direct setdown as an invitation to continue.
Something shifted in Fitzwilliam’s chest. He tried not to examine it too closely.
After the concert, on the steps of Lady Astley’s house, he found himself alongside Lydia for a moment while their carriage was brought round. “Chatterton,” he said, keeping his voice neutral. “Do you know him well?”
“We have met several times,” she said. “He is always very pleasant.”
“He has a certain reputation,” Fitzwilliam said, and then could not think how to continue without sounding either like a fool or a husband who had been absent three years and had therefore no standing to say anything at all, which was precisely what he was.
“Most people do,” Lydia said, pleasantly, and the carriage arrived.
The ride in Hyde Park was his idea. He proposed it at breakfast two mornings after the concert; she accepted without visible emotion, as she seemed to accept everything, and they went out together at ten o’clock with a groom following at a decorous distance.
She rode well, which he had not known and could not have guessed. Not merely adequately well: she rode with the confidence of someone who had been properly taught and had then spent time consolidating what she had learned. He said so, genuinely, because it was true, trying to keep the surprise out of his tone because she might be offended at his surprise.
“Your mother was very patient with me,” she said. “I had some bad habits when I arrived and she did not pretend otherwise. It took most of the first winter.”
He had not known this either. He had known, in an abstract sense, that she had been at Matlock; he had received letters from his mother saying she was well and coming along admirably, which he now recognised as a polite formula rather than a literal account of the situation. He had not pictured his mother in a riding ring in the first winter, correcting bad habits with the patient precision she brought to every undertaking.
“She enjoys teaching,” he said. “She always did.”
“She does,” Lydia agreed. “And she has very decided opinions about which things are worth doing correctly.”
There was something in the way she said it, not quite warmth and not quite humour, that made him think there was more to say on the subject. He waited. The horses moved at an easy walk, the park quiet at this hour, the morning light bright through the plane trees.
She said: “Matlock is very beautiful in February, when the snow is on the upper grounds. I did not expect that.”
“I have always thought so,” he said. “I used to go up early to look at it when I was there as a child.”
“So does your father,” she said. “Before anyone else is up. I saw him once from my window and thought he was a gardener.”
Still smiling at this when the party appeared: four riders coming round the curve of the path, all of them apparently known to Lydia, and she lifted her hand in greeting and they drew alongside, and the conversation changed its nature. She became Mrs Fitzwilliam again: warm, gracious, making introductions with perfect ease. Watching her do it, he understood, with more clarity than he had managed at any point in the preceding week, that this was not the performance that replaced something. It was the surface she had learned to sustain indefinitely, with no visible seam.
A pattern. He was not yet sure what to do about it.
