Lydia was another matter. It was she who looked well into her forties, not Jane. What age was she? Thirty-five or-six. Caroline could well imagine the shifts her family must have resorted to in order to stop Mrs. Wickham drowning herself in a bottle. Had they not endured the same with Mr. Hurst? Who had succumbed to an apoplexy eight years ago, enabling Caroline to quit Charles’s houses in favour of the Hurst residence in Brook Street, there to dwell with Louisa and Posy, and indulge more freely in her favourite pastime-pulling Elizabeth Darcy and her son to pieces.

She swallowed the lump in her throat as Fitz and Charles emerged from the church, their mother-in-law’s small coffin balanced on their shoulders, with the diminutive Mr. Collins and Henry Lucas on its back end; it gave the polished rosewood box an interesting but not precarious tilt. Oh, Fitz, Fitz! Why did you fall in love with her, marry her? I would have given you real sons, not a sole specimen as ludicrous as Charlie. A devotй of Socratic love, everyone is convinced of it. Why? Because the breathtaking degree of his beauty makes him look the sort, and I spread the calumny as a truth my intimacy with that family makes eminently believable. To brand the son with an affliction so far from his father’s heart is a way of punishing Fitz for not marrying me. You would think Fitz would see through the ploy, always starting, as it does, with something I have said. But no. Fitz believes me, not Charlie.

Her long nose twitched, for it had picked up nuances of trouble on this unwelcome trip to bury the empty-headed old besom. All had not been well in the Darcy mйnage for a while, but the mood was increasing-markedly so. Fitz’s air of aloof hauteur had grown back; during the early years of his marriage it had all but disappeared, though some instinct told her he was not the blissful man he had been at the altar. Hopeful, perhaps. Still aspiring to conquer-what? Caroline Bingley did not know, beyond her conviction that Fitz’s passion for Elizabeth had not resulted in true happiness.