Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE

REFLECTIONS AT THE MILL POND

N ot until Tuesday of the following week did I have the opportunity to tool my little Zephyr about the neighbourhood. On account of a letter from Jane, Saturday morning had slipped away, and the afternoon was taken up with entertaining our aunt and uncle Philips. I did not go out on Sunday, which was proper, and on Monday, the day dawned too wet to be promising.

Tuesday morning, however, was warm though cloudy, and despite the muddy roads, I was anxious to be away. The Lindbury Wood, which was always a favourite route of mine, was out of the question, since the shade under the archway of trees made for great stretches of impassable mud pits. The lane up to Oakham Mount was similarly plagued, so I settled for the drier roads that sat high above the ditches and hedgerows encasing the fields around Meryton.

Eventually, I found myself pulling up to the old mill pond. This was a location I usually avoided, and I do not know why I happened there. Howsoever it came to be, my ponies nickered their approval and upon coming to a stop on a high spot overlooking the disused mill house with its slime-covered reservoir, they began to nibble at patches of grass growing between the ruts in the long disused lane.

It struck me, as I stared deeply into the brackish water below me, how life ticks forward with the predictability of a clock, until one day, it does not. Fate, when she moved, could be both swift and shocking.

The day that had changed everything for me, indeed for my family, had been a chilly one in late winter. The Netherfield party had gone after Mr Bingley’s ball. Jane, downcast and heartsick, had also left for London, and we were, in consequence, terribly dull.

Who would have guessed this pond on that cold day many months past would figure so prominently in the trajectory of our family, for my youngest sister, Lydia, had come to mischief at this abandoned mill.

Unfortunately, the pond had not been iced over, and she had been dunked completely into its murky depths. Meanwhile, we—her family—knew nothing of the danger into which she had put herself, for she had told us she was walking out to visit Maria Lucas. She had even convinced Kitty not to come along, we later learnt, through the promise of a frill of lace.

In any event, my youngest sister, drenched, blue, and shivering uncontrollably, was returned to us slumped over and tied with a rope to the back of a mule. The drover, who was herding a dozen oxen south from Milton Keynes to Watford, knew nothing about how she came to be wet, stating only that he had seen her stumbling down the middle of the road, and being a good Christian, he had stopped, shaken from her the word ‘Longbourn’ and an accompanying vaguely pointed finger, and he then felt himself duty-bound to return her home.

Lydia’s delivery to us had been a strangely subdued affair. The afternoon had been quiet, and the servants were below preparing for dinner service. My mother was dozing in her room, and my sisters and I were scattered throughout the house. Only my father had, by mere chance, been at hand to step outside to see who had come up the drive, and seeing him do so as I rounded the corner of the landing on my way down the stairs, I followed him out the door.

I reached the scene in time to see my father hand the drover a few coins. Mid-step over the threshold, my mouth hung open, I stood stock-still while my poor brain tried to understand what my eyes were showing me.

“Bear a hand!” my father called out irritably, waking me from my dream. Then, by the force of instinct, I ran to Lydia, who was being untied from the mule and deposited into my father’s arms.

Thankfully, by the time the screeches began, the drover was already well down the drive in pursuit of his animals that had meandered unattended past our estate while he was on his errand of mercy.

For once I was in sympathy with my mother’s cries of disaster. Lydia was in a bad way. Mary and I worked feverishly to strip her of her stinking, wet, half-frozen clothes. We stuck our heads out of the room to call the maid, then upon her arrival at the door, sent her for warming pans to put between the sheets. We chafed my sister’s arms and legs, glancing at one another anxiously as we did so, for her limbs were as cold and lifeless as those of a corpse.

“Thank goodness she had enough strength to point the way before she collapsed,” I murmured to Mary. “She must have been at her last gasp if she was still standing.”

My mother and Kitty, meanwhile, were rendered powerless from their shock and terror to see her so moribund. They stood on the periphery of the room, clinging to one another while crying out to Lydia to tell them what happened, to explain how came she to be soaked in the dead of winter!

Jane would have known how to soothe them. Indeed, her presence would have been a godsend to me, but alas, she was none the wiser and likely sitting with our aunt Gardiner in the comfortable parlour in town! Out of necessity, I then took charge.

“Lie down next to her, Kitty,” I said with a deliberate serenity that belied my own shock. “You also, Mama. Warm her as much as you can, and for heaven’s sake, do not ask her anything. She cannot speak at all and must save all her strength so she can recover.”

After a quarter of an hour, I went downstairs to speak to my father.

“Should we send for Mr Jones?” I asked, wiping my hands upon my apron to keep from wringing them. “My lord, what could have happened to her? There are no streams or creeks between here and Lucas Lodge. How long was she walking in such a state?”

My father, who was pacing in the hall, did not reply.

“Papa?” I asked insistently.

He came to a halt, grunted, and said, “I had best speak to my daughter before we call for anyone.”

I then went down to the kitchen to discover what was taking so long with the warming pans and to fetch a pot of tea. But perhaps something of my father’s preoccupation— his agitated manner—struck me, for I was suddenly moved to caution in my explanations to the servants.

Lydia had got herself wet through and through, I had explained with glib unconcern as if speaking of a silly child, and she was in need of a cup of hot tea with heaps of cream and sugar. My mother was with her, and I would ring the bell when we were ready for more hot water and such. Dinner would be best served on trays, I said with a quick, reassuring smile, for none of us had time to change, and I did not want the food to get cold.

Glancing at my father, who had ceased his pacing but was now staring out the parlour window, I tried to dissuade myself from indulging a sense of doom, and I returned upstairs with the tray in a deeply sober state. The warming pans arrived directly and were slipped between the sheets with some care not to burn Lydia’s feet. After the application of this welcome heat, Lydia began to moan a little and to make fretful little movements. Mary and I then propped her up with a mound of pillows, and we were spooning tea into her mouth when my father came into the room with a small bottle of brandy. He poured a dram of liquor into Lydia’s teacup and watched us for a few moments as we urged her to swallow this medicine. She coughed a little and seemed more rousable in consequence. He then sent us all away save for Mama.

Our parents spent another quarter of an hour sequestered with Lydia, after which my mother remained at her bedside, and Papa came down. He went directly to his book-room, shrugging off all our anxious questions as he went, and shutting the door in our faces.

We then knew with awful certainty that something dreadful had befallen my sister, for he did not call for Mr Jones to see her, and perhaps more saliently, a heavy silence fell over the house.

What I ultimately learnt from this episode was that ruination is not an all-or-nothing proposition.

Through hints and insinuations, and through the patching together of things we were and were not told, we learnt my sister had not gone to Lucas Lodge but to the old mill. She had done so on a dare by none other than my favourite, Mr George Wickham.

And though his intent must certainly have been to debauch her, either for the fun of it or perhaps as a test of his ability to lure a young lady into danger, Lydia was still too much the child for his plan.

She had managed to get a ride on a farm cart heading in the direction of the old mill, no doubt glorying in her cleverness all the way there. However much she was wrong to ever meet Mr Wickham, she had done so out of complete ignorance—innocence, as it were—for she had not been prepared to do more than flirt with him.

In effect, my youngest sister had arrived at a tryst without any understanding of her part to play in it.

Rather than surrendering herself to his powers of seduction, she had flinched away from his advances and cried out in consternation—in angry confusion as to why he was touching her in a way she did not like. From what we could gather, Mr Wickham had quickly lost interest or patience or both. But when he made to leave, Lydia had run after him out of her profound bewilderment and fear of being abandoned quite a long way from home. I suspect she had grabbed onto his coat sleeve or otherwise thrown herself upon his retreating back.

Mr Wickham had then pushed her away from him, most likely a gesture of his disgust at her tearful pleading, and in so doing, he had sent her reeling backwards into the pond. That in itself was horrible, but even worse, he had not stayed to assure himself she was not drowned.

Thus, our Lydia was ruined .

But barring the fait accompli, which was a physical violation resulting in total and inarguable disgrace, the degree to which her reputation was damaged ultimately depended on our ability to mitigate the gossip. If no one ever knew what she had done, she was barely tarnished at all. If, however, everyone was aware of the failed seduction, she would have been shamed for life.

Never mind that Lydia had nearly frozen to death—the world would not think all that poorly of Mr Wickham. Society did not love a rake, but there were inherent allowances made, since men were known to act out their fundamentally lustful nature. He would be condemned but easily forgotten, particularly when everyone became preoccupied with the girl who had allowed him the liberty to behave so badly. It was of no consequence that she did not know what he had in mind! Women were—and always had been since the Garden of Eden—tasked with responsibility for both sides of this vile coin and pitied as the victims of sin while at the same time condemned for having invited it.

Fortunately for us, Lydia was young and strong, and though the pond had long been stagnant and disgusting, she had suffered no real consequences other than a slight cold. We had been enormously lucky as well that the man who discovered her was only passing through the village and not a resident and that the servants at Longbourn, who had known Lydia from birth to be a hoyden of the highest order, did not find too much out of the ordinary in the incident. Even my mother’s undisguised distress was not so remarkable to the maids, for when had we enjoyed a week in which she had not taken to her bed in nervous prostration? Never!

To the best of our ability, my sisters and I strove to uphold the appearance of unconcern. We pretended that Lydia, in the aftermath of a silly scrape, was a nuisance, and though our parents were oddly sombre, we made light of the episode for the sake of the servants. It was unconscionable of me, but I did make one or two remarks to Kitty within hearing of the upstairs maid, Martha, that I would be glad when Mama and Papa had recovered from their tiff over money to replace Lydia’s ruined dress.

Within the span of five days, Lydia was sent to London, where she would stay for at least six months or maybe longer. Against my mother’s objections, my father had made these arrangements with Uncle Gardiner, and he had personally taken her to town, ill or not.

But in the interim, Papa had not been idle. He had gone out every day in search of Mr Wickham. Not only had the man attempted to ruin my sister, he could have killed her. And to add insult to injury, he happened to be a young and charming officer who might stoop to crowing in the barracks and taverns of Meryton of his exploits at the old mill with Lydia Bennet.

“Tell me you do not intend to fight him,” I had pleaded earnestly, clutching at my father’s sleeve as he swung into the saddle the first time he went out in search of the man. “Mama is in such a state, thinking you might be killed, and indeed, I do not blame her!”

“Do you think I have such poor aim, child?” he had asked with the ghost of a smile. Then patting my hand, he said, “Do not remonstrate with me. I am not a fighting man. ”

“What will you do when you find him?”

“What I must,” he said, all traces of even the faintest smile wiped from his face.

What my father must do, I assumed, was to threaten prosecution in hopes the man would leave the county—which would not work. Mr Wickham would not be concerned in the least, for such a threat must be idle. What father would lay information with the constable that would compromise his daughter’s good name? Papa would then be forced to offer money in exchange for Mr Wickham’s silence, and that is a strategy that works but rarely. I fretted unrelentingly for three days, striving to put a brave face on what would certainly end in a tragic, expensive scandal.

But again, we were lucky.

The day after the incident at the abandoned mill, Mr Wickham—perhaps realising how complicated his life could become after injuring and nearly drowning a gentleman’s daughter—had somehow convinced Miss Mary King to elope with him. Perhaps he feared he had actually killed Lydia or that she had died as the heroine of a gothic novel, whispering the name of her murderer with her last breath. Perhaps Mr Wickham did not spare a second thought for what he had done. We would never know. Howsoever it came to be, he and Miss King were gone three full days before their disappearances were even linked by the general public, and it was understood by one and all what had happened.

Naturally, Meryton thereafter became a beehive of gossip in which Longbourn and its occupants did not figure in the least. Our maids, who may or may not have entertained suspicions regarding Lydia, were gleefully entertained by this development, for Miss King’s servants were said to have all run away as a result. Perhaps just as helpful had been Lydia’s removal from home, for there were no additional clues, no strange looks between our parents, no overheard conversations, and no clues as to our distress to keep her in the forefront of their minds.

And that is how my sister had been ruined, but only just, and how the passage of time would so neatly bury the incident. In under a year, even the intensity of our anxieties would fade—indeed, the very worst of our fears had already faded, for now, in the warmth of summer some months later, we were more hopeful that Lydia’s secret might never come to light.

Our narrow escape notwithstanding, we were all significantly changed by the incident.

My sisters and I were suddenly all too aware of the fragility of our reputations. Mary confessed to me her determination never to marry anyone, for look how horrible men could be! Kitty began to behave much more like a girl than a woman, perhaps longing for those days in the nursery when the wider world of troubles did not intrude on her mind at all. Even her fascination with table painting struck me as diversionary. She was not quite so silly that she believed such an accomplishment would result in a higher quality or more timely marriage proposal. This newfound purpose did, however, shield her from any outward pressure to make herself more marriageable, for she was certainly trying to claim mastery over a ladylike accomplishment. Moreover, it kept her safely flanked by Mary and Maria Lucas at all times when she was away from the house.

More notable were the changes wrought upon our parents. Among many other alterations in her speech and manner, my mother ceased to thrust us at officers without regard for their characters. Some degree of silliness had been knocked out of her, it seemed, for she talked only of Jane marrying suitably as was proper. Even then, the subject came up half as often as it had in the depth of her fever for a wedding. Just as surprising, perhaps because he could no longer ignore the risk of failing to do so, my father took a mite more interest in his daughters.

Jane, too, even though she was in London and distanced in reality, was also affected but not as much as I would have expected. My father, upon delivering Lydia to the care and supervision of Aunt Gardiner, had asked Jane to remain in London with our sister for the duration of her visit . Rather than missing Longbourn, my eldest sister had begun to take to city life and filled her letters home with news of new friends, concerts, exhibitions, our little cousins, and pleasant evenings spent with the Gardiner family.

Naturally and most notably, Lydia had been altered beyond recognition. Having been so nearly faced with her end, she had seen beyond the veil of her life. There was a great deal more to living than the scramble to fulfil her grossly materialistic desires, more to be grateful for than a new bonnet, and much more to consider before rushing headlong into anything. She was still young and uninformed, but now she knew herself to be vulnerable to these faults in her comprehension. Any small thought that flitted through her brain was no longer taken for God’s whole truth. Her confidence had been broken. She no longer considered herself to be an authority on any and all subjects, nor did she disdain as uninteresting subjects about which she knew nothing. Her personal taste and opinions no longer superseded those of all others, and she wrote home about her first visit to London with an almost childlike sense of having discovered more grandeur and variety in the world than she had imagined.

I found these letters more surprising also because they contained no references to beaux, her style of dress, or her dance partners. I had begun to think of my youngest sister as a hardened, self-interested girl who had cut herself free of any obligation to attend to her character, and besides that, I had but rarely heard her speak of anything else. Understandably perhaps, we had also learnt from Jane that she now seemed to consider the world to be unpredictable and even a potentially dangerous place, rendering her more inclined to retreat than to meet it head on any time soon.

As I stared out at the old mill and its pond, I considered this reformation. Indeed, I contemplated the mystery that is transformation in a human being, for such an occurrence as a true change of heart seemed rare to me—the stuff of novels. Yet, there we were, all of us involved, remade!

And then the wind also changed, rendering the smell too rank for me to linger thinking of Lydia. As I turned my dainty Zephyr homeward, I shook my head to clear it from the repeating refrain: he nearly killed her!

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