She nodded and picked up her fork and did not taste what she ate.
He tried, after that, to shift the evening onto safer ground. He asked about the book she had been reading. He had seen it on the nursery table that morning, he said, and had recognised the binding.The Italian, Mrs Radcliffe. Was she enjoying it?
“I am, sir.” She managed three words and could not find a fourth. The mysteries of Schedoni and his crimes againstinnocent women felt, at this moment, rather too close to the bone.
“It is a fine edition. My mother purchased it the year it was published. She was fond of Mrs Radcliffe.” He paused for a second. “You are welcome to keep it as long as you wish.”
“Thank you, Mr Darcy.”
The meal continued. He offered observations about Radcliffe’s use of landscape, about the fashion for Gothic novels, about whether terror and horror were distinct emotions or merely different costumes for the same fear. He was trying. She could see the effort in it, the careful construction of normality, and she was grateful for it even as her mind circled and circled and would not land.
What do you know? What could you possibly know that I do not?
She excused herself, climbed the stairs to her room, and perched on the bed. She pressed her palms to her knees, and the question sat in her chest like a stone. The night stretched ahead of her, and sleep was not coming.
She lay in the dark with her hands folded on her chest and her eyes open. Her mind was turning the same question over and over until the edges of it were smooth and she was no closer to an answer than she had been at dinner.
What information could Mr Darcy possess about Lydia’s situation that would offer closure? Closure implied an ending, a door that could be shut, and Lydia’s door had been open for seven years with a draught blowing through it that chilled the entire family. Wickham had taken her, used her, discarded her, and vanished. There had been no reckoning,no consequence, no word. No one challenged him to a duel. He was never punished. He had simply ceased to exist in their lives, leaving only the wreckage behind.
She turned onto her side, pressing her face into the pillow, and tried to think of nothing. Naturally, her mind went instead to Somers Town, to Lydia.
She had arrived at the house at her usual hour. Kitty had greeted her at the door, Jane was helping her mother with the mending, and Mary was at the table with a stack of borrowed books and an expression that discouraged interruption. Elizabeth had kissed her mother, embraced Jane, and gone upstairs.
Lydia’s door was closed. Elizabeth knocked but no answer came. She knocked again, then opened it.
The room was dim. The curtains were half-drawn, as they always were now. Lydia no longer bothered to open them fully and nobody pressed her. She was sitting in the chair by the window, her back to the door, her hands in her lap. She did not turn.
“Lydia. Good morning, dearest.”
She did not reply, did not move, did not acknowledge her sister. Elizabeth stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She crossed to the bed and sat on the edge of it, facing her sister’s profile.
“I brought you something. I found a novel I thought you might enjoy. You should take it before Kitty commandeers it for herself.”
She held the book out but Lydia did not reach for it. She did not appear to have heard. Her eyes were fixed onthe window, on the patch of grey sky visible between the curtains, and whatever she was seeing, it was not the sky.
“Lydia.”
Elizabeth waited in the quiet. She could hear the sounds of the house below—Kitty’s footsteps, the clink of a cup, her mother’s voice giving some instruction. Normal sounds. In this room there was only stillness and the faint rasp of Lydia’s breathing, shallow and slow.
“Dearest, I am here. Will you not speak to me?”
She spoke gently and clearly, directly at her. Lydia did not respond, did not blink, did not turn her head. She did not give the smallest indication that she was aware another person had entered the room and was speaking her name.
One minute passed. Then two. Then five.
Elizabeth’s chest tightened. This was not Lydia being quiet, being subdued or tired or melancholy. This was Lydia absent. She was sitting in the chair and she was somewhere else entirely, locked behind a door that Elizabeth could not see and did not know how to open.
She rose from the bed. She crossed the room and knelt before the chair and took Lydia’s shoulders in both hands and shook her, firmly, not roughly but with enough force to make her head snap forward.
Lydia blinked, her eyes focusing. She stared at Elizabeth as though she had materialised from the air.
“Lizzy.” Her voice was thin, far away, as if returning from a great distance. “When did you arrive?”
“Five minutes ago, dearest. I have been speaking to you. Are you well?”
“Have you?” Lydia frowned. She glanced at the window, then back at Elizabeth, and the confusion on her face was genuine. She had not heard. She had not been pretending. She had simply not been there.
“I am tired, Lizzy. That is all.”