Chapter Twenty-Eight
Fitzwilliamcamedownstairsthemorning after the assembly with the intention of finding Lydia before the day dispersed them both into their separate routines. Most of the night had gone on working through his reasoning, which remained, in the cold light of a November morning, as follows: he did not believe Caroline Bingley. She had no interest in Lydia’s wellbeing, or his, or anyone’s except her own. What she had said, she had said because Lydia was the available target and he was the available instrument and Caroline Bingley had been trying, in one form or another, to damage the family she had decided had wronged her from the moment Darcy laid eyes on Elizabeth and fell head over heels.
All of this he believed clearly, and alongside it he knew that Chatterton’s reputation was real and that Chatterton had been positioning himself relative to Lydia in a way that suggested very long practice, and that Lydia’s composed warmth in response looked, from the outside, exactly as Caroline had described it. The outside view was wrong. Composed warmth was just the surface Lydia presented to everyone and everything, and Chatterton, for all his reputation, was not within the same order of danger as Wickham, who had actually threatened her and whom she had survived.
He had known this at two in the morning, known it at three, knew it now as he descended the stairs in the watery November light and turned toward the morning room, where she sat at the escritoire by the window, writing letters, as she generally was at this hour.
She looked up when he came in. Her expression was pleasant and inquiring, the expression she brought to most things, and he had a clear and sudden understanding that what he was about to do was wrong and that he could not identify a better version of it.
He did it anyway.
The approach was careful, which was the wrong register entirely. He said he had been thinking about Chatterton. That he would prefer, if she had no objection, that she limit the time she spent in his company going forward. Not suggesting anything improper had occurred; it was merely that Chatterton’s reputation was such that her own might suffer from the association. He said this without accusation, in what he recognised, after he had finished speaking, was the register he had until very recently used for operational briefings.
She was still for a moment.
“I see,” she said. Her voice was level. “May I ask what has given you cause to doubt my management of the situation?”
“Nothing has,” he said. “I am not questioning your conduct. I am concerned about appearances.”
“Appearances,” she said.
“Chatterton’s reputation is well-established. People will draw conclusions regardless of the truth of the matter.”
The pen went down. She looked at him with a direct stare, though her expression remained calm. “I have been managing appearances,” she said, still in that level tone, “in every drawing room from Matlock to Mayfair, for three years. Without reproach, from even the higest sticklers. Without a single word from you on the subject of my conduct or the company I kept.” The pause that followed was precisely calibrated. “I find I am curious what has changed.”
He said that the situation was different now that he was home.
“Is it,” she said. Not a question.
“I simply feel that, now that I am here, it would be appropriate…”
“I was not aware,” she said, and her voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than if it had gone cold, “that my conduct required closer supervision now that you have returned.” A steady look. “I had thought I had demonstrated, over some yearsand to the satisfaction of Society as a whole andyour motherin particular, that I was capable of managing it without assistance. I apologise if I was mistaken in that impression.”
“You were not mistaken,” he said. “That is not what I am…”
“I am grateful for your concern,” she said, and the courtesy of it was absolute and closed every door available to him simultaneously. “I will of course take your wishes into account.”
The pen was picked up. Her eyes went down to her letter.
The dismissal was so complete that he felt it like something physical. For a moment he stood, unable to think of anything to say that might improve on the situation and aware that remaining made it worse, and then he left, pulling the door closed behind him.
He stood in the hallway for several long moments, trying to understand just how that conversation had gone so utterly, disastrously wrong.
There were no answers in the polished floor tiles at his feet, or in the vase of fresh flowers on the sideboard. Fitzwilliam suspected that there were no answers to be found anywhere, because he didn’t even comprehend the questions.
Lydia heard him in the hallway.
The letter was not getting written. Her hand was not steady enough and her eyes were not doing what she told them. She looked at the words on the page until his footsteps moved away toward the stairs, and then put the pen down again.
She had read it in his face across the room the previous evening, the quality of his stillness when Chatterton was in his eyeline, and had understood what it meant and where it had come from with the speed and clarity of someone who had been watching Caroline Bingley operate in drawing rooms for three years. She had not named it, even inside her own head, because naming it would have required acknowledging that it had worked on him, and she had not been ready to acknowledge that yet.
Now she was.
At the escritoire, looking out at the November street, she allowed herself for the first time in three years to be angry without managing the anger.
The architecture of not-needing, built so carefully over three Matlock winters and Pemberley summers and London seasons conducted with an absolute determination to never, ever put a foot wrong again, had been correct. She had thought, in the past few weeks, that perhaps she had been overcautious. That the careful management of her own hopes had been unnecessary and could be relaxed. That the bear story and the laugh and the courtship, however awkward, meant something she could allow herself to take seriously, even if he had not yet opened the door she had unlocked.
She had not been wrong to build it. She had been utterly correct; but even though she had done every single thing right for threeyears, it didn’t matter. This was always how it was going to be: he was always going to be more susceptible to the account someone else gave of her than to the evidence of his own observation, because he had come to know her when she was a silly girl making a catastrophic mistake and people like Caroline Bingley would always be there to remind him of it, and she was always, always going to have to prove herself against accusations. Even when they were never about her at all.
