12. In which Mrs. Fitzwilliam's political career is...(2)

“Oh! Well. Mary is not known for being a pattern card of good behavior. Sometimes I think she speaks specifically to outrage propriety. As long as you are not censuring me , you may glower all you like.”

Darcy smiled a little; Elizabeth tried to return it but was still unsettled. When everyone had retired for the evening she took her candle not back to her room, but to the portrait gallery. The portraits of the most recent additions to the family were closest to the entrance; Elizabeth paused first before the Maria Cosway portrait of Lady Honoria and Miss Duncan, looking as if they had just been surprised on one of their usual walks through the Scottish heather. It had been the concerted effort of months to have Miss Duncan included in the portrait, and Elizabeth and Marjorie had to threaten to sit out of their own portraits to finally achieve their object.

Her candle flame highlighted little details from the portraits of her other sisters-in-law: the folds of Arabella’s red velvet skirt, her daughter’s coral silk sash, the white tops of Arabella’s husband’s boots; the flower Lady Sybil was examining, and the lush vegetation at the feet of Mr. Omai. Elizabeth passed them by, still feeling bitter at the stilted letters she had received from Arabella and Sybil. It had not been their faults that they had not known what to say to her, nor that that had been unable to visit, but Elizabeth still could not forgive them for their absences.

She came at last to the portrait of herself and Colonel Fitzwilliam. Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun had painted it only last year, shortly after Napoleon’s first abdication. Elizabeth looked at first at Colonel Fitzwilliam, seated and in full dress uniform, smirking a little, and then moved her candle to take a better look at herself. Here was the Mrs. Fitzwilliam she had known, the one she had been comfortable being: in white muslin and Grecian curls, half-laughing and leaning an arm against the back of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s chair, as if she had just interrupted him from writing dispatches, in order to tease him. This, she thought, was still the true portrait of her: lively and playful, delighting in the ridiculous, quick in wit and emotion, devoted to the few whom she really loved. Not the stoic widow and politician, or the delicate, elegant creature that ought to be swooning at home, or the merry widow ready to form a liaison.  

It seemed to her fitting that only another Elisabeth could pin her down as she saw herself. Elizabeth could not be the creature men wished her to be. But, she thought, eyes flicking to her husband’s painted gray gaze, she had lost her greatest ally. She had lost the man who had seen her for who she was, and insisted on it when other men would have tried to confine her. And she had seen him for all he was, when everyone else insisted upon a blind eye. Perhaps, she thought, feeling both melancholy and happy at the reflection, that was what a soulmate really was, and why it was so rare— someone who took the time and effort to look clear-sightedly at another person, and to accept them all the same.

Elizabeth rubbed the pad of her left thumb against the bottom of her wedding ring. “Well, Richard, my dear,” she told the painting, “at least, we knew each other.”