Chapter Twenty-Five
Fitzwilliamtoldhimselfitwas a courtesy call.
It was, after all, the sort of thing one did. Lewes had been a family connection of a loose kind since Brighton, had known Lydia through three years of London seasons while Fitzwilliam was abroad, had been, as Darcy had said without inflection, as though reporting a weather observation, a considerable comfort to her. It was natural to pay a proper call. It was the sort of thing a gentleman did.
He was not, he told himself, going because Lewes had saidI hope you will ensure she knows itand then clasped his hands behindhis back and looked at the park with the serenity of a man who had delivered his message and had no further business with the response. He was not going because Lewes had known Lydia in the years he had not, and because the question of what she had been like in those years, what she had actually been like rather than the colourless account she gave of herself and the careful accounts his mother and Darcy gave, was one he did not know how to ask of anyone else.
He rode out on a Thursday morning, the week after Lady Hargrove’s party. Lewes’ house was out in Richmond, genteel if not large, a handsome Georgian cottage that was rather less fashionable than it had presumably once been and comfortable with that fact. The interior, when the butler showed him in, confirmed it: a house that had been arranged for living in rather than for being seen, full of the accretion of a long career. Maps on the walls, in careful frames. Books in genuine disorder. The furniture was good quality and thoroughly used, and the fire in the morning room was the fire of an old man who felt the cold and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Lewes rose when he entered and shook his hand with the warmth he had shown in the park, minus the measuring quality, or perhaps with it set at a lower register. “Mr Fitzwilliam,” he said. “I am very glad you came. Sit down.”
Fitzwilliam sat. A maid brought coffee without being asked. The morning room looked out onto a small garden, bare now, the plane tree at its centre stripped to grey branches by the October wind.
They talked about the army first, which was natural ground. The peace had changed things considerably; the regiments werebeing reduced, officers put on half-pay, careers that had been built over twenty years in the field finding themselves suddenly without purchase. Lewes had views on this that were careful and specific, the views of a man who had spent fifty years watching institutions and understood both their resilience and their capacity for error. Fitzwilliam had views of his own. The conversation had the comfortable friction of two people who were largely in agreement and alert to the places where they were not.
Canada came next. Lewes asked about the campaign with the authority he had shown in the park, not the social curiosity of a drawing room but genuine professional interest: the logistics of supplying a force in that climate, the difficulties of the terrain, how the peace had finally been managed at the local level once the treaty was signed in Ghent. Fitzwilliam found himself talking at more length than he had with anyone outside the War Office. Lewes listened, interjected, drew him further, and by the end of it Fitzwilliam understood that he had been, without quite noticing, comprehensively assessed.
There was a pause in the conversation. Outside, a cart passed on the road. The fire settled.
Lewes refilled both their cups without asking.
“I should like,” he said, settling back in his chair with the air of a man about to say something he had considered carefully, “to speak plainly with you, if you will permit it.”
Fitzwilliam said he would permit it.
“I have known your wife for three years,” Lewes said. “I knew her first in the days immediately after that blackguard Wickham attempted to take advantage of her in Brighton, when she was very young and in a situation that would have broken a good many people considerably older than she was. She was not broken. She was, I thought, remarkable. I have continued to think so.” He looked at Fitzwilliam steadily. “I say this not as a preamble to a complaint. I say it so that you understand that what I tell you next comes from three years of observation, and is intended in your interest and hers.”
Fitzwilliam waited.
“She has spent three years,” Lewes said, “learning not to ask for anything.”
A pause. Fitzwilliam said nothing.
“Not because she is by nature self-effacing; she is not. You knew her in Brighton, and I think you will agree she was not a girl who had difficulty making her wishes known.” A brief, dry warmth in his expression. “But she was placed, very young, in a position where asking seemed neither safe nor appropriate. She was a guest in houses that were very kind to her and not her own. She had no money of her own, no real standing of her own, and a husband who was, for reasons that were perfectly sound and certainly not malicious, seven thousand miles away.” He said this without emphasis, as a statement of geography. “In those circumstances, what you learn is to manage. You learn to want only what you are likely to be given. You learn that your preferences are a commodity to be spent carefully, if at all.”
Fitzwilliam turned his cup in his hands.
“She is a very intelligent young woman, and she has become extremely good at this,” Lewes said. “She is now, in company, as accomplished a young woman as I have seen in thirty years of London seasons. She manages every room she enters. She gives nothing away.” He paused. “This is, you understand, entirely her own achievement. She built it from nothing, in three years, while she was also grieving the loss of the life she had always known, however imperfect that previous life may have been.” Another pause. “I find it extraordinary. I believe she finds it exhausting.”
“She does not appear to,” Fitzwilliam said.
“No,” Lewes agreed. “She does not appear to. That is precisely my point.” He looked at his cup for a moment. “She has learned, Fitzwilliam, very thoroughly, not to need you. The decisions that created the circumstances were understandable, and I do not sit in judgement of them. But the consequence is what it is. She has learned to be self-sufficient in your absence, and self-sufficiency of that kind does not dissolve merely because the cause of it is removed.” He looked up. “She will not undo it herself. She does not yet know she is allowed to.”
The fire settled again. Outside, two women passed on the pavement, talking; their voices came through the glass briefly and were gone.
“What would you have me do,” Fitzwilliam said, “that I am not already doing.”
It was not really a question. Lewes received it as one anyway.
“I would have you be patient,” he said. “I would have you understand that what she shows you is a performance in thetechnical sense, not a deception; she is not deceiving you about who she is, she is protecting herself in the only way she has learned how, and the two things are not the same.” He set his cup down. “I would have you remember that she was sixteen years old in Brighton, and that she has had very little choice in anything that has happened to her since. And I would have you ask yourself whether you have made it sufficiently clear to her that you are worth the risk of being herself with.”
Fitzwilliam sat with this for a moment.
“No,” he said, eventually. “I don’t think I have.”
Lewes nodded, once, as though this was the answer he had expected and it satisfied him to hear it said aloud. He reached for the coffee pot. “More coffee?”
Fitzwilliam said that he would, thank you.
