“She would not have,” Lydia said. “But I was. I knew nothing, and she taught me everything.” A pause. The edge of something: a remark that was more honest than she had intended to make, sitting just behind her teeth. She let it out. “I cried every night for the first month, and I made very sure nobody knew about it, and I think she knew anyway and allowed me the fiction that I was managing. That was perhaps the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
That had not been planned. The reason for it she could not account for, except that neither of them were managing the conversation and the sunshine was warm on her face and it was apparently the kind of day on which things emerged that she had not planned on saying.
Fitzwilliam was very still. “I did not know that,” he said.
“I know you didn’t,” she said. Not unkindly, but accurately. His mother would never have written it in her letters, not wishing to burden him, and Lydia herself would rather have been torn apart by wild horses than admit it. Except admit it she had, to his face, somehow.
A silence. “I have been thinking about something Darcy said to me, after the funeral,” he said, looking at his cup. “About walls, and who built them, and who was being waited for to dismantle them.” A pause. “I have not been able to think about much else, actually.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“I believe I have been doing it again,” he said. “Waiting. Calling it something other than waiting and hoping you wouldn’t notice.” He looked up. “I think you noticed.”
“I notice most things,” she said, carefully.
“Yes,” he said. “I know.” There was that expression she had seen on the floor of her sitting room, the one she could not name and still could not quite: he was wearing it now. “I am attempting to stop. I am aware that attempting is not the same as succeeding and that I don’t have a very strong record on the subject. But I wanted you to know that I am trying something different from what I have been trying.”
What to say to this she did not know. She looked out at the garden instead: the frost and the unexpected sunshine. His presence across the room, not waiting, not managing, just there.
She was about to say something. Not certain what; something real, something that was going to come from the file of things she had been not yet examining, and she was on the edge of it when Georgiana’s carriage came back up the street, earlier than expected, and the moment closed with the gentle, absolute finality of a book being shut.
They attended a small party at the Astleys’ ten days after the funeral. It was the first evening engagement Lydia had felt able to manage, and she had said so to Elizabeth, who had nodded with the particular quality of attention that meant she had heard considerably more than what was said.
In the carriage on the way, Fitzwilliam watched her, which he had given up pretending not to do. The full composure was back: all appointments correct, everything in order. The first time in several days he had seen her in complete Mrs Fitzwilliam. The morning room version had been different; the one that had sat in the winter sunshine and said she had cried for a month. She had clearly not planned on saying it. He was still carrying that, another guilt to add to the several others he held. He suspected he would be for some time.
The Astley party was moderate in size, well-chosen, the kind of gathering that felt effortless because its hostess had spent considerable effort on it. Fitzwilliam went through the ordinary business of arrival, greeted his hosts, spoke to several people he knew. Lydia remained at the edges of his attention, which was where she had been since October, and he found, without surprise, that Chatterton had approached her. What was surprising was how close Chatterton was standing.
Too close. Not unsuitably so, not in a way that anyone watching casually would mark as wrong, but Fitzwilliam had spent two months learning to read the distances Lydia maintainedaround herself, and Chatterton was inside them, deliberately. Fitzwilliam thought that Chatterton was a man who has found that grief softens defences, and had learned to make use of it.
And across the room, he caught sight of Caroline Bingley. Watching, with the expression of a woman who had placed a bet and was waiting to collect, and the patience in her face was the patience of someone who had been operating this way for a very long time and had rarely been disappointed.
Fitzwilliam crossed the room.
Not quickly. Not with any register that would draw attention to the crossing. Through the party with the easy unhurried confidence of a man going somewhere he had always been going, and arrived at Lydia’s side.
“Mrs Fitzwilliam,” he said, and it was not the formal address it had been in October; it was something else now, something that had weight behind it. His hand at the small of her back, barely a touch, just enough to move her very slightly towards him and away from Chatterton. “I have just seen arriving someone I should very much like to introduce you to, if you would oblige me.”
That she registered it he could feel. Not visibly; she was too accomplished for visible. She turned her head to look at him, and she said “But of course, Fitzwilliam. I am always delighted to meet your friends.”
Chatterton stood for a moment on the outside of this, reading the geometry of it with the speed and accuracy of someone who had been reading rooms longer than most. Then, smoothly, hesmiled at them both, said something pleasant to Lydia about hoping she was well, and turned to speak to someone on his other side with the elegant unhurriedness of a man who has made a decision and sees no reason to make anything of it.
He did not come back.
Fitzwilliam led Lydia away, and found someone he knew to introduce her to, who of course she turned out to be already acquainted with. He remained by her side, and the evening passed, and somewhere at the edge of the room Caroline was no longer watching them, and he did not look at her.
The carriage home was quiet. They had managed quiet carriages before, both of them, in the way of people who have learned to exist in each other’s company without requiring anything of it. This quiet was not the same.
Out of the window Lydia watched the city going past, the lit windows and the dark streets, and was aware of him across from her in a way she had been aware of him all evening. Since the moment he appeared at her side, in fact, edging out Chatterton with admirable speed and efficiency. What he had done she had felt as clearly as she had felt anything in months; the deliberateness of it, the level of attention, the hand at her back that was barely there and simultaneously the only thing she was truly aware of.
Filed. All of it, filed, in the way she had been filing things for weeks, and the file was now full to the point where she was going to have to open it whether she intended to or not.
Chatterton she understood. From their first meeting she had understood him, and his presence at the party tonight had not surprised her and his absence from her orbit for the rest of the evening had surprised her only in the manner of its accomplishing. That had not been her doing. Plainly and publicly, in front of anyone who cared to notice, that had been Fitzwilliam’s.
What to make of it, she did not know yet.
The carriage moved through the dark London streets and she looked at the lit windows going past and thought: soon. She would have to look at all of it soon.
Across from her, Fitzwilliam was looking at her. Without turning her head she knew this, in the way she knew most things about where he was and what he was doing, which was a habit she had developed without intending to and had not yet decided what to do about.
She did not redirect it. Let him look, which was its own kind of answer, even if she was not yet ready to look back.
The carriage turned into the street, and the lights of Darcy House came up ahead, and she gathered herself, and the evening ended, and she went upstairs with the file still full and the question still unanswered and the sense, for the first time in three years, that she was going to have to answer it soon, and that she might, possibly, not be sorry when she did.
