The fury shifted. He watched it shift with the steady attention of a man who has decided he is not going to manage this or redirect it or make it smaller. He is going to sit with it and let it be what it is.
“Three years,” she said. “I have spent three years ensuring that not one person in London or Derbyshire or anywhere else has had cause to doubt my conduct. Every drawing room, every morning call, every evening party where I was the colonel’s wife who was very nearly ruined at sixteen and could not afford a single wrong step.” Her voice was not raised; it was very quiet, which was worse. “You were not there for any of it. You did not see any of it. And when a woman who has hated every Bennet since she met us told you a story designed precisely to use what you already half-believed about me…” A stop. Tears on her face, she did not appear to have noticed. “You believed her. Not fully. But enough; enough to make you doubt.”
“Yes,” he said again. There was nothing else to say.
He reached for her hand.
She pulled it away. Not cruelly; instinctively, the way one pulls away from a thing one doesn’t yet trust. He withdrew. He did not try again. He stayed where he was, on the cold bench, beside her, not attempting to fix or manage or resolve. Not going anywhere.
She noticed. He saw her notice: a slight shift in her attention, a fraction of the fury redirected into something that was registering him, what he was doing and what he was not doing.
They sat in silence for a while. The garden was still. Above them the pale sky had not changed.
“The letters,” she said, finally, allowing herself to move on to another thing she had been wanting to talk to him about, “used to arrive all at once. Four or five together, months out of order. I would read them and try to reassemble the sequence and I could never quite make them feel current. They always felt like stories.” A pause. “I wrote back to each one. I don’t know if the replies arrived in any useful order.”
“They didn’t,” he said. “Mostly in clusters, in the spring, when the ice broke. I used to read them in the order of the dates and try to imagine the winter they described.” A pause. “I kept them. Every one.”
“I kept yours too,” she said.
A silence fell between them. Not uncomfortable; just… waiting. Lydia did not know what to say, so she waited.
“I want to tell you what it was actually like,” he said. “Not the anecdotes. The parts I didn’t write.” Out at the garden. “Canada is very cold in a way that is different from English cold; it is the kind of cold that makes England feel like a fiction you invented. The isolation of it. The way I trained myself not to think about home because home was too far away to be useful.” A pause. “I was not always successful.”
“What did you think about?” she said.
“You,” he said. “Whether you were well. Whether you were finding anything to like about Matlock.” He turned the bare twig he had picked up from the path in his hands. “I thought about you at Brighton – the girl I came to know before I ever had any inkling that Wickham even knew your name. How much I’d liked that girl, sharp witted and clear eyed and honest almost to a fault.”
She looked at him.
“I always carried your last letter,” he said. “Inside my coat, in the pocket next to my heart. Whichever one you’d most recently sent, so it was the last thing I had your hands had touched. I don’t know if that is something you want to know. I think you should know it.”
Lydia was looking at him with the expression he didn’t know how to name. The face she wore when nothing was required. He had seen it in a window’s reflection in a room she thought she was alone in, and he was seeing it now in a cold garden in January with full knowledge that she knew he was watching.
“I don’t know,” she said, “what to do with you.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know what to do with you either. I have been getting it wrong since October.”
“Since before that,” she said, but there was something in it that was not quite an accusation. Something that acknowledged both of them in the getting-wrong.
“Yes,” he said. “Since before that.”
The garden held them, cold and still, and neither of them moved, and the distance between them on the bench was not the managed distance of two people staying within each other’s range. It was only the distance that remained, which was not the same thing at all, and which was closable, he thought, if they were both willing, and if not today then soon.
“I am not going to tell you,” she said, after a while, “that it is all right. Because it isn’t, quite, yet.”
“I know,” he said.
“But I think,” she said carefully, as though testing the weight of each word before placing it, “that it might be. Eventually.” A pause. “If you continue not going anywhere.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I have sold my commission. There is nowhere to go, that I would go without you.”
“Good,” she said, with the sharpness and the warmth together, entirely Lydia, and he was glad of it in a way he would not have known how to be glad of it three months ago.
They sat a little longer in the cold garden, in the silence that was no longer managed, and neither of them was in any hurry.
Then he said, carefully: “May I kiss you?”
She looked at him. Then she said: “Yes.” And then, to his utter delight, she showed him that she was still very much that Brighton girl somewhere underneath Mrs Fitzwilliam by adding: “I have been waiting approximately three years for you to ask, and I must say you might perhaps have considered doing so before sailing to Canada.”
