Page 61 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"There was nothing in the urn either," Gill said. He bowed, and went in to her father with his satchel.

Lydia had folded the linens wrong again.

She knew they were wrong because Hill had refolded them behind her, quietly. Everyone did everything quietly around Lydia now. Why did nobody ever warn you about this part? You could survive the worst thing that had ever happened to you. You could come home and be forgiven. You could still fold linens so badly that a housekeeper with forty years of Christian patience undid them behind you.

She folded them anyway. Every week. Badly. Because the folding was hers, and there was not very much that was.

That, and Miss Darcy's letters. There had been three now, in a neat round hand. They were about music and the weather at Pemberley and nothing at all. Why had Miss Darcy begun to write? She never said, and Lydia never asked. She kept them tied up with plain string. She was done with ribbon.

She was sitting on the bed when Kitty came up. They had shared it since Kitty was six and Lydia was five, both of them afraid of the cupboard. Kitty came in glowing from the cold with ivy bits in her hair.

Lydia knew in one look, the way she knew everything about Kitty, faster than thinking. "The captain came," Lydia said.

"He brought papers for Papa."

"He brought papers for Papa?" Lydia repeated, in a voice of vast worldly experience, and watched her sister go pink from collar to hairline. "Kitty Bennet! You are blushing. You like him!"

"I am not! I do not. He came about the court-martial, and we spoke a moment in the lane, that is all, and⁠—"

"You are the worst liar in this family, and this family contains Mary, who cannot even lie about liking the yellow shawl." Lydia pulled her knees up under her skirts. The old machinery was turning, and it felt good. It felt like being herself, the teasing, the nudging. In a minute she would say something about officers. Kitty would shriek and throw the pincushion. It would be last year again, and none of it would ever have happened.

The good ones don't need chasing, she almost said. Now, what you must do is contrive to be walking by the camp on washing-day⁠—

She stopped herself.

It took all her strength to stop. She felt the old advice arrive in her mouth, the whole silly confident catechism of it. It was everything she knew about officers and how to catch them. All of it had been learned from nowhere, tested on nothing, and paid for since with everything. Lydia shut her teeth on it and let it die.

Kitty was watching her. Kitty had seen the stop.

"He draws," Lydia said instead, slowly, choosing each new word with care. "That is what you told me. He draws, and he gave you the horse picture, and he answers your questions as though you were somebody sensible." She picked at the coverlet. "And he is kind? Truly? Not shop-window kind. Kind when it costs something?"

"Truly," Kitty said.

"And he did not run. When he learned about..." Lydia's mouth did the thing it did around the name, the small flinch she could not train out of it, so she went around, the way she always went around now. "About me."

Kitty was quiet for a moment. When she answered, her chin was up, and her voice had the new steadiness in it, the steadiness Lydia had watched arrive in her sister all autumn. "He said your choices were not my concern. But that was before I told him they were."

Lydia looked at her.

"I told him you were my concern all my life," Kitty said. "That we shared a room and a wardrobe and everything we ever had, and that anyone who wanted my good opinion would need to understand that my sister was hurt by a wicked man, and was mending, and was not to be spoken of as anything but mending. And he listened, all the way to the end, the way he listens. And then he said, 'That is how it should be, Miss Catherine.'" Kitty's color came up again, but she didn't look away. "So he did not run. He stood."

Outside the window the last light was going off the frost. Somewhere below, Mary was at the pianoforte, playing something slow and correct. Mama's voice ran under the floorboards, planning the ball. It was the sound of every winter evening of Lydia's whole silly life. It was so exactly the sound of home that her eyes went hot.

Had anyone ever fought for her good name before? Not like that. Not sideways, in a lane, quietly, to a man worth impressing, when she wasn't even there to see it. People had lied for her, which was different. The lie protected the family. What Kitty had done protected her, Lydia, the true her, the mending her, and had asked nothing back. "Do not let him go, Kitty," Lydia said. Her voice came out rough. "The good ones. You have to hold on to the good ones." She looked down at her hands, at the coverlet, at the room. It used to be full of ribbons, regimentals, and giggling until Papa banged the ceiling with his stick. Then she said the truest thing she had ever said in it. "I would not know. But you are cleverer than me."

"Lyddie."

"I am not being tragic. Do not look at me as if I am being tragic, I am being accurate, it is a new habit and Lizzy says it will improve my character." But her chin was unsteady. Kitty crossed the room and sat down on the bed. She took Lydia's hand, and Lydia held on. Hard.

They sat like that while the room went blue with dusk. Two girls on the bed they had whispered across for a dozen years. All the old whispering had been about officers, lace, and who had looked at whom at the assembly. Every word of it had been happy, and none of it had been true.

This was.

"He is rather handsome," Kitty offered at last, in a small voice, trying out being teased again to see if it could still be borne.

Lydia laughed. It caught her by surprise, the laugh, coming up whole through everything, and she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "He is very handsome, and he sits a horse beautifully, and if you do not contrive to show him the garden by Lady Day I shall despair of you entirely!" It was the old teasing, but slower now, with the cruelty gone out of it. "There. That is the last advice I shall ever give about an officer. I am retired. Lizzy says I may be anything I like now, and I am considering being a person of mystery."

"You could not be a mystery for a fortnight. You tell everyone everything."