“Yes,” Fitzwilliam said. “I imagine it is.”
There was something in the way he said it: not managed, not considered. She looked at him sideways.
“You don’t have to do that,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything,” she denied, too quickly.
“You are,” he said. “You’ve been doing it since I sat down. Calibrating. Managing the distance.” A steady look. “You don’t have to.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and it came out before she could weigh it, “how not to. With you especially. I’ve been doing it since October. Since the ballroom, in fact, since you appeared in the doorway and I…” Another stop.
“And you what?” he said.
She had a choice, in this moment. Redirect it; she had redirected it a hundred times, and she could do it again, and he wouldaccept the redirect because he had learned that pushing did not work, and the distance would remain, and she would go inside and file it and go on being Mrs Fitzwilliam in perpetuity. Or she could… not.
“And I was glad,” she said, through a throat that had gone quite tight. “Genuinely glad, for about one second, before I remembered that gladness was not a safe position and closed it down.” She looked at her hands. “I have thought about that second rather often.”
The garden was very quiet.
“I thought of you,” he said, “considerably more than was strategically sensible, for three years in Canada. Whether you were well. Whether you were happy. Whether the letters were arriving in the right order or coming in clumps three months late. Whether you were finding Matlock bearable.” A pause. “Whether you had found anyone to talk to.”
“I had Georgiana, and Elizabeth,” she said. “And General Lewes.”
“I know,” he said. “I know that now.” A pause with something complicated in it. “I was jealous of Lewes. I want you to know that I am aware of how that reflects on me.”
“Jealous of a man of seventy,” she said, carefully.
“Jealous,” he said, “of a man who was permitted to know you. Who had the version of you that you gave to nobody else. Who offered to marry you, lest you forget, but encouraged you to choose me instead for your own sake. I understood, watchingyou with him, what I had not been given. And I made it about him, which was easier than making it about what I had failed to be.”
She was quiet for a moment. “He knew you were jealous,” she said, with a faintly reminiscent little smile. The first smile she had managed when thinking of her friend, since his passing. “He thought it was promising.”
Something moved in his expression. “He would,” he said, with a warmth that was also grief, and she felt it because she was feeling the same thing.
They sat with it for a moment, the shared loss, which was not the same loss but was a loss nonetheless.
“There is something,” he said, “that I have to tell you. I should have told you weeks ago and I did not, and I want to tell you now.” he was not meeting her eyes now, looking carefully at the path in front of them. “Caroline Bingley said something to me. At the beginning of November, before the assembly.”
When he told her, Lydia’s face went through several things in rapid succession, which Fitzwilliam catalogued with the attention he had been paying to her face for three months, now operating without his direction.
First: recognition. She had known something had been said; she had read it in him across the room at the assembly and had understood its source without knowing its content, because she had been watching Caroline Bingley operate in drawing rooms for three years and knew the level of damage Caroline could leave behind her.
Then fury. Not yet directed; he could see her assembling it, the specific, precise fury of a woman who knows exactly what she is dealing with and has the vocabulary for it.
“What,” she said, with a control that was itself a form of fury, “did she say.”
He told her. All of it, plainly. Chatterton. The implication. The history Caroline had constructed and offered in the warm, concerned manner of a woman who had only the family’s interests at heart. He told her without excuse and without softening, because there was no version of honesty that left any of it out.
The fury arrived. First at Caroline, which was like watching a very precise instrument brought to bear on a target it had been designed for. What she thought of a woman who spread poison out of wounded pride, using a girl who had never been the actual target; she said it with an exactness and an edge that the old Lydia would have had and the new Lydia had refined. Not a word of it he disagreed with. He did not attempt to moderate any of it.
“It has never been about me,” she said, and her voice had shifted from precise fury to something rawer underneath. “Not once, not for a single moment. I am merely what is available. The nearest instrument for something that was always aboutElizabeth and Darcy and what she wanted and did not get.” At the stone path she looked. “She will keep doing it. As long as I am the easiest target.”
“She will not,” he said. “I intend to make certain of it.”
“You believed her,” she said.
There it was.
“Yes,” he said. “Not entirely, and not for long, but in the moment, when she said it in that particular way…” He stopped. “Yes.”
