They talked for another quarter hour about nothing of consequence: a mutual acquaintance’s retirement to the country, the state of the roads, whether the autumn had been unusually wet or merely normally wet. Lewes saw him to the door himself, shook his hand again, said he hoped they would meet again soon.
Fitzwilliam rode back into London, lost in thought. October had made the trees bright and brief overhead, the light comingthrough in fragments. His hands lay loose on the reins. The horse took the road home without much guidance from him.
She does not yet know she is allowed to.
He thought about Brighton again. He thought about a girl of sixteen, clever and badly supervised and lit from within with an energy she had no idea what to do with, in a situation that very rapidly became far worse than she had understood it could. He had managed that situation, and managed it well, and he had been right to. He did not doubt that.
Hehad managed it. He had gone on managing. He had managed the question of where she would live and how she would be received and who would form her, had arranged all of it with care and good faith, and then had gone to Canada and continued, at long range, to manage. He had written to his mother and to Darcy. He had written to Lydia. He had read her letters when they arrived.
He thought about those letters. The early ones, which had been more herself: observations she could not prevent herself from making, a sharpness of phrase, the voice of someone who had not yet decided what she was allowed to say. And then, as the years went on, the voice narrowing. Becoming more correct. Shorter. More careful.
He had noticed this. He had thought, when he noticed it, that she was growing up, learning to conduct herself properly. He had been glad of it, thinking that her life would be easier, more comfortable, if she learned to constrain herself to fit within what Society would expect of Mrs Fitzwilliam.
He thought about what Lewes had said and felt something move in his chest that was not comfortable and was not, he suspected, going to become comfortable for some time.
He had made it happen. Not through any malice or negligence, but through a sequence of decisions that were each individually reasonable and had together produced something he had not intended. She had learned to want only what she was likely to be given, and what she was likely to be given, for three years, had been very little from him specifically. So she had learned not to want anything from him at all. And now she stood in rooms and managed everything and gave nothing away and was perfect and impenetrable and utterly, completely beyond his reach, and this was, in a real and specific sense, his doing.
He let the horse move into a trot.
There was one thing Lewes had said that he turned over separately from the rest, holding it at a slight distance, examining it carefully.
Ask yourself whether you have made it sufficiently clear to her that you are worth the risk of being herself with.
He was not certain he had an answer to that yet. He thought about the evening in the drawing room, the bear story, the laugh, the moment afterward. He had not done anything with it. He had gone upstairs and thought about the lake and not tried the handle of the door.
He could not, he thought, keep waiting for her to cross the distance. The distance was his own construction. And he had a great deal of work to do.
