Chapter Thirty-Two
Shehadnotmoved.
Fitzwilliam had not moved either, for perhaps five seconds, which was four seconds longer than was useful. The note was in her hands. The street was empty. Her face was doing something he had no context for, because in two months of watching her he had never seen her face do anything without her permission, and whatever was happening now had nothing to do with permission.
He put his hand under her elbow. “Come inside,” he said.
She did not respond. He was not certain she had heard him.
“Lydia.” The voice that came out was not the voice he had been using for the past two months of careful courtship and considered approaches. It was the voice he used when something needed to happen and sentiment was not going to accomplish it. “Come inside. Now.”
She came. She moved with the automatic compliance of someone operating below the level of choice, her feet finding the steps without apparent instruction, and he kept his hand under her elbow and got her through the door and into the entrance hall and that was, he told himself, the right thing. She was inside. She was not standing in the cold on the front step looking at a letter she had already read twice. He took the letter out of her hand and read it, then read it again himself because he did not quite believe it the first time. Despite the amount of death he had witnessed in far too many years of war, this one felt different. Was different.
Georgiana was on the stairs.
She came down two steps and stopped, looking at Lydia’s face, and the question she had been about to ask did not make it out of her mouth.
“General Lewes,” Fitzwilliam said, and it was probably his own shock that made the words come out so bluntly. “In the night. His heart.”
Georgiana looked at him.
It lasted perhaps two seconds. It was not a long look. It was, nonetheless, thoroughly comprehensive, and he felt the full weight of it land before she moved past him to Lydia, taking her hands, saying nothing at all. Lydia looked at her with an expression that was neither composed nor uncomposed; simply blank in the way of someone who has not yet arrived at reality. Georgiana kept hold of her hands.
“Will you tell my brother?” Georgiana said, without looking at Fitzwilliam. Her voice was very even.
“Yes,” he said.
Georgiana began moving Lydia gently toward the stairs. Lydia went with her, one step, two, and then she looked back.
It was not a performed look. It was not managed or calibrated; it was just her face, turned back, for a fraction of a second. Looking for something. Looking, he realised, for him, but he had already half-turned away by the time he registered it, and when he turned back, she had looked away.
He stood for a moment irresolute, watching the two young women ascend the stairs, Lydia moving as though her legs were unimaginably heavy. And then he braced his shoulders and turned away to follow his orders, going to find Darcy.
He found them both in the morning room, Elizabeth reading and Darcy at the desk attending to some correspondence. They looked up when he came in, and he told them plainly, because there was no version of it that was not plain.
Elizabeth set her book down.
She sat for a moment without speaking. There was something in her face that he had not expected to see; genuine grief, not managed or considered. “He was a very good man,” she said. “A very great friend to this family.” She looked at her hands. “And to Lydia.” A pause. “She will be devastated.”
“Yes,” Darcy said quietly. He had risen from the desk. His hand rested briefly on Elizabeth’s shoulder; she reached up and covered it with her own without looking up. “He has been a considerable presence in her life. In all our lives, but in hers especially.” He looked at Fitzwilliam. “She will need time.”
“I know,” Fitzwilliam said. He was aware, saying it, that he did not know in any sense that was going to be useful to anyone.
Elizabeth looked up at him with the directness she never quite set aside for anyone. “Georgiana is with her?”
“Yes.”
Something in her expression, very briefly. Then she said: “Good,” and rose to leave, and there was a quality to the word that he chose not to examine too closely.
Darcy said that he would write to Lewes’ household and to those who should be informed. He said it with the quiet competence of a man who knows how to discharge a difficult obligation, perhaps has even anticipated the necessity, and does not make a performance of it. Fitzwilliam said that he would assist in whatever way was useful. They settled the practical matters between them; who was to be written to, what was to be arranged, what the correct form of acknowledgement was from the family. It took half an hour. It was necessary, and it wassomething to do, and Fitzwilliam did it with the thoroughness he brought to everything and was aware, throughout, of Lydia upstairs.
He sent a note to Lewes’ household expressing condolences. He wrote to two military acquaintances who had known the General well. He asked the housekeeper to have a tray sent up, something light. He was told, with tactful brevity, that Mrs Fitzwilliam was not taking anything at present, but that he was very good to think of it.
He went to the library. He sat there for a while. The fire needed attention and he gave it. The evening gathered outside the window and the house was quiet around him.
He had been in enough places where grief was present to know how it felt in a house. He had thought himself accustomed to it. What he had not been accustomed to was the specific and unmanageable sensation of grief in a room he was not in, attended to by someone who was not him, when it should be his place to attend to it.
He thought about the note in her hands. The thing that had happened to her face and the five seconds he had stood there before the commanding officer took over and got her inside. He thought about her looking back on the stairs, the fraction of a second before he turned away.
