This was the thing she could not say to anyone, because there was no one to say it to. Not Georgiana, who would be kind and want to do something about it. Not Elizabeth, who would be furious on her behalf and do something about it, and the something would involve Fitzwilliam knowing she had needed Elizabeth’s fury on her behalf, which she was not willing for him to know. Absolutely not her mother, who would catastrophise. Not Kitty, who would not understand, or Jane, who would want to find the best in everyone, or her father, who had made his assessment of her eight years ago and she did not think it had changed.
Nobody.
Three years of managing alone, and perfectly well, and that would continue, and she was going to finish this letter to her aunt and go to luncheon and be Mrs Fitzwilliam, because that was what she did.
The letter to her aunt was four lines and going no further.
A tap at the door brought a maid, with the post. Lydia knuckled away a tear that was definitely not trying to leak from her eye and thanked the maid, hoping the letter she was handed wouldnot place her further in arrears with her aunt. Her brows rose slightly on General Lewes’ hand on the packet, and a half-smile touched her lips despite her grim mood. She sat back down and opened it.
My dear Mrs Fitzwilliam,
Forgive an old man for writing when he promised a call; my chest has decided to remind me this week that I am seventy, and I find myself confined to the house for a few days. Nothing of consequence. I am merely tedious company and the physician has said so in terms that would not flatter him in a drawing room.
I write, in fact, because I have been thinking about you since our last meeting, and I find I cannot be entirely comfortable keeping my thoughts to myself, which you have always known to be one of my worst habits.
You are exhausted, my dear. You have been exhausted for a long time, I believe, though you are far too accomplished to let it show. I do not think I have told you often enough how remarkable what you have built is, and I tell you now: it is remarkable. But I wonder whether you have built it so thoroughly that you can no longer see the door in the wall.
Your husband came to visit me, and I spoke plainly to him, and I hope he listened to what I had to say. What I did not say to him I will say to you, as I think you are more in need of hearing it: he is trying. He is doing it badly, because he does not know how, and because he is a man who has spent fifteen years managing situations rather than entering them, and those are not the same thing. You know this, because you are moreobservant than almost anyone I have met and you have been watching him carefully since he came home.
You know also, I think, what I am going to say next. He cannot cross the distance alone. It is too wide, and too much of it is your own construction, which is understandable and has served you well and is no longer serving you at all. He is your husband, Lydia. Not Matlock, not Society’s good opinion. Him. And he is, I think, worth the risk, if you can bring yourself to take it.
I say this as someone who has your interest at heart above all other considerations. I say it also as someone who has watched you manage every room you enter for three years, and who finds, upon reflection, that he would like very much to see you stop.
Do write when you can. I am very dull company for myself.
Your affectionate friend,H. Lewes, Gen. (ret’d)
She folded the letter and set it on the desk.
Then she sat for a moment looking at it with an anger that had nowhere clean to go, which was the worst kind. It was a kind letter. It was a letter written with three years of genuine affection behind it and her interests as the whole of its concern, and she was furious at every word of it.
He cannot cross the distance alone.
She knew he was right. She had known it, in some form, for weeks; she was not in the habit of lying to herself, and she hadtoo clear an eye for the arithmetic of the situation to have missed it. She had known it and filed it away undernot yet, because not yet was still a position, still a choice she was making with her eyes open, still hers.
What she had not expected was for Lewes to take it from her.
He had always been on her side. That was what he was, what he had been from the first: the one person who asked nothing of her except that she be herself, who had known the Brighton girl and watched what she became and found both versions sufficient. He had never once suggested she should be different. He had never once implied that the walls she had built were anything other than rational in the circumstances she had faced.
And now he was telling her to find the door in it, and he was right, and she could not forgive him for it at the moment, even though she would, and even though she knew he had written it at some cost to himself, and even though the part about his chest, tucked in at the beginning so she would not worry about it, was the first thing she would think about when she woke in the night.
She put the letter in her writing case.
Her aunt’s letter was still four lines. It was going to stay that way.
She got up, and went to find Georgiana.
Georgiana was in the music room before luncheon, which was where she was usually to be found at that hour. She looked up with the attention of someone who had already heard or intuited something, because Georgiana generally did.
“I have a headache,” Lydia said.
Georgiana said she was sorry to hear it, and asked if she needed anything.
“Company without conversation,” Lydia said, and attempted a smile. Her mask never seemed to fit very well around Georgiana; she had the disconcerting sensation the other girl could see right through it anyway.
“A little light music?” Georgiana suggested gently.
“That would be very pleasant,” Lydia said, threw herself in an ungainly pile of skirts on the settee, and shut her eyes.
