Page 89 of Lydia and the Colonel

“Now,” Lord Matlock said, with the air of a man who considers foundations established and is ready to proceed to the next matter, “to the matter of an heir…”

“Henry,” Lady Matlock said, without looking away from Lydia.

“I merely ask…”

“Father, no,” Fitzwilliam said.

Lord Matlock looked around the room for support and found none forthcoming. He looked at Lydia last, in the manner of a man placing his final appeal with the person most likely to take his part.

Lydia laughed. The real laugh, unguarded and bright in the afternoon room. “My lord,” she said, “you are perhaps a littleprevious. But I do promise, when we have news to share, you will be the first to know.”

The warmth of it settled in the room. Lord Matlock subsided with the satisfaction of a man who has been told what he wanted to know. Lady Matlock’s mouth curved slightly. Georgiana caught Lydia’s eye with a sparkling glance, which was as close as Georgiana came to irreverence.

Later, while Georgiana played and the room arranged itself around the music, Lydia stood near the window, watching carriages roll along the street outside, and let herself be quiet for a moment.

She had often watched carriages passing windows and felt this: the loneliness of a woman impeccably welcome everywhere and belonging nowhere. She had been welcome at Longbourn and had somehow never felt like she truly belonged there; it had not been her home in any sense that mattered, only the place she had lived before her life began. Matlock had taken her in and made her capable, and she had loved it, but it had not been hers in the way a home is, not yet. Pemberley welcomed her with open arms but Pemberley was Darcy and Elizabeth’s, always. London she could move through like water, and London did not notice her absence and did not keep anything for her.

She had a name and a ring and she had built herself into someone worth the having of both, and she had done it alone,for three years, in a series of rooms that were not hers and a life that was and was not hers simultaneously. She still did not have a house to call hers, not yet, though Darcy’s man of business was looking. But for the first time in her life, Lydia did not look at the passing carriages and think about home being elsewhere, because home was here. In this room. In the man who had stepped up for her in Brighton and left her to grow up, and come back and turned out to be exactly what she had not known she was looking for.

The music was something slow and quiet. Outside, the March light was thinning toward evening, the street below beginning its later business. Elizabeth rang the bell for tea, saying something laughingly to Darcy about perhaps James would give him a jam moustache, if there were scones. Darcy looked dignified and Lady Matlock let out a ladylike giggle.

Across the room, Fitzwilliam was talking with his father, and he glanced up even as she looked at him and found her immediately, the way he had begun to do, as though he always knew where she was, and wanted to.

She smiled at him.

His face brightened in return: simply, without management. He moved his hand, a small gesture, but the meaning was clear;Come. Join us.

Lydia walked across the room without hesitation and slipped her hand into her husband’s arm. Lord Matlock at once included her in the conversation, asking her opinion on a play that had recently opened; she answered freely, not taking the time to manage her words, her emotions, because she did not have to.

She didn’t have to perform any of it any more. She was Mrs Fitzwilliam and she was Lydia and she was the girl from Brighton who had been given very little choice and had made something out of all of it anyway. She had built herself, room by room, year by year, into someone she could recognise; and she had, against considerable odds, found her way to a marriage she had not been promised and could not have imagined, and was choosing to walk into it with her eyes open. That seemed, on reflection, rather enough.

And by his side, she was home, in any room they found themselves in together.

At last.