Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
MATCHSTICKS AND GLUE
S o much had happened last winter. Not all of it had been terrible, however. It had been at Christmas when I learnt I had won the lottery for the Zephyr.
Pure mischief had led me to submit my name, for John Lucas had come panting into the parlour at Longbourn waving the notice he had clipped out of The Sporting Gentleman ’ s Quarterly. He was certain he would win, and feeling generous, he unbent enough to say, “And if you would leash your tongue behind your teeth for once, Lizzy, I might even take you out for a drive.”
“Would you?” I cried in mimicry of childish joy.
He then made the fatal error of waving the notice in front of my nose. “Do not get your hopes too high, my girl. I have never known you to pass by an opportunity to tease me.”
In a flash I had the piece of paper he had been brandishing in my own hand, and I began to read it aloud in a tremulous contralto to, well, to tease him.
“A marvel of the newest modes of construction…made to tr ansport on a flat cart to be put together with a few common tools…making the joy of a sporting curricle available even to those young gentlemen living in the country who would not…” I then fell silent as I read the rules and exclaimed in my ordinary voice, “But it says here anyone can enter! My word, I might assume even I could enter if I…” My words dwindled off into nothing as I reread the rules.
“What?” cried John. “But why should you? No, you must have mistaken—” he spluttered, snatching away the notice. “It cannot say anyone can enter. Of course you cannot submit your name. You are a female! What would you do with the thing anyway? Your father keeps only plough haulers and the one cob, and she is a sway-backed bone bag.”
“Do not disparage our Nellie!” I cried, much amused by his reaction to my empty threat.
“I know you mean to nettle me,” he went on, attempting to reassure himself. “I know you would not enter because you do not even like horses.”
“I like horses well enough, thank you. I simply do not understand them, nor do I know how to ride or drive. Surely, a person could learn, could she not?”
“Learn! At your age?” he scoffed.
This had been a step too far for me, and I snatched back the notice, went to the escritoire in the corner of the room, and jotted down the address where entries were to be sent.
“Sir!” John cried, appealing to my father to put a stop to my mad plan. “Surely, you would not let her enter the drawing for a curricle!”
“My father,” I said, playfully pulling Papa’s earlobe as I returned to my seat, “would not prevent me from engaging in any folly, for he dearly loves to ridicule me for silliness. ”
My father obliged me by chuckling before I turned my attention back to our guest.
“You do not honestly believe you have a chance to win a curricle for which thousands of people plan to compete, do you, John? That is what I would call silly,” I said reasonably.
“Then do not enter!”
“Alas, I must, for you so unhandsomely reminded me I am getting closer to extinction every day. Perhaps it would be best if I had something to do with myself next year when I am so very old.”
And so it happened on a blustery day last winter, that in the midst of a great commotion in which everyone in my family expressed their opinion at once, I stood mute, staring at the letter announcing EM Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire was the winner of a smart new Zephyr. The entire thing was so ludicrous—so laughable—as to be nearly incomprehensible.
John Lucas had been right. I was the last person in the neighbourhood who would consider an association with horses, and furthermore, I had never entertained the slightest aspiration to hold the reins.
However, once again the impulse to be contrary arose. I suppose it grated upon my nature to be assumed to fit so neatly into a mould, as a person who behaves in such a particular way as to be easily anticipated, confined by a sense of staid predictability perhaps, or simply stifled by the presumptions made of my character. In short, I felt so confined in my life, I had developed a great affinity for anything that was unexpected.
Thus, after a moment of stunned silence, I proclaimed to my family—and later the neighbourhood—that I had every intention of keeping my prize and learning to manage a horse.
My father, knowing me well, had not believed for a moment that I meant it. Indeed, even I had no faith in my intention of doing so. Over my mother’s shrieks of dismay that I would kill myself and must be forbidden to accept the thing, he had spoken.
“If Lizzy can put this storied contraption together,” he had announced with a gleam of mischief in his eyes, “she may certainly keep it. Moreover, my dear, I shall make her a loan against her portion of your dowry for the purchase of a pony.”
So loud were my mother’s objections to his challenge, my father was forced to pat her arm and say, “Never fear, Mrs Bennet. She will never be able to assemble such a pile of lumber, which I am certain it will turn out to be when it arrives. And if it eases your mind, I will forbid Mr Hill from helping her.”
My father knew me well indeed, but perhaps he had forgotten that it is never advisable to slap a glove on my face. Challenged with a project deemed far outside my capabilities, I had begun to peruse the instructions sent with my prize, and after an hour thus spent, I walked to Meryton and bought the hide glue, varnish, and set pins required.
Just as my father had predicted, the Zephyr was nothing but a pile of lumber tied neatly on a cart. The instructions were laboriously hand-written and sadly indecipherable to me, but I could hardly admit to the world I was too stupid to understand them. Thus, I tinkered away as they say in a shroud of secrecy in a disused shed behind the stables. My father, perhaps suffering a twinge of guilt, offered me a token of his support by asking Mr Hill to put up a tarp over the open end of the shelter and forbidding any young busybodies from checking on my progress.
Thankfully, he was too indolent himself to be curious. To my knowledge, he did not look over my work in secret. He may have thought perhaps to spare my pride, or more likely, he simply did not want to hear one more word about the Zephyr. And who could blame him? It was so much the talk of the neighbourhood, even I was nearly sick of it. Nevertheless, I was grateful for the privacy to make mistakes and right them without the commentary of the host of naysayers who wished only to laugh at me.
John Lucas’s insulting pronouncement that the Zephyr was made of matchsticks and glue was closer to the mark than not. The vehicle, designed to be sent by cart to provincial buyers buried deep in the country yet wishing to own a curricle they could claim had ‘come from London’, was, as John had said, hung suspiciously like a gig. She was also made of more alder than oak and quite petite compared to Mr Darcy’s substantively masculine sporting curricle.
Thankfully, the use of glue was but cautionary, for as I persisted in trying to understand the instructions, I came to the understanding that the construction of the Zephyr was such that it was held principally together with the use of cotter pins and doweling, pounded home and swelling in the crosspiece so that its supports expanded in the joint and made the connexion secure.
It was ingenious, really, and as my understanding grew of how things were made, I also grew a healthy appreciation for modern methods of joinery.
That said, understanding how something is made and actually making it are two different beasts. My father had not been wrong to reassure my mother that my ambition to drive would not be realised, for the exceedingly unladylike task of putting together a curricle was well beyond my ability. Two weeks on, I had managed only a few minor assemblies, and the most I could claim to have accomplished was to have attached the back rest and railing to the seat. Facing the astounding prospect of attaching the wheels to the axle and the front piece to the frame, not to mention raising the seat platform and securing it atop the whole, I came to the humbling end of my tenure in construction.
And then the episode of the Zephyr was rudely interrupted by Lydia’s visit to the mill pond, and in an instant, my aspiration to amaze the neighbourhood by learning to drive expired.
By the time my father returned from leaving Lydia in London, I had nearly forgotten my prize. I dressed with terrific modesty as though to protect my skin from any eyes and sat for hours in dazed confusion, reliving how careless I had been in engaging in a friendship with Mr Wickham. Retrospectively, everything about him was vile, from the purring sound of his voice to the evil slant of his coy glances. Mary’s attitude of propriety, shaped as it was by gloomy old men from the last century, had grated on all of us, but now I was forced to own that there were indeed reasons to be modest, careful, and even suspicious.
For me, the greatest of those reasons had been the crushing realisation that just because I had a feeling that someone was good or bad did not make them so. I felt a kind of childish rug had been pulled out from underneath me, yet I had not developed any compensatory structures upon which I could now stand. In what impression could I place my trust? How much assurance in my own judgment could I claim ?
After a few days of this melancholy absorption, my father called for me.
“Sir?” I said mournfully at his door.
His manner was fairly brisk and impatient. “Sit down. You had better tell me what has you so morose, Lizzy. I have come home to find you wrapped up to your chin, an unrecognisable version of yourself.”
“I-I have been chastened,” I protested, irritated that something so obvious had to be explained.
“For what? For being fooled by Mr Wickham’s charm? My word, child! Who in this neighbourhood did not fall victim to his winsome smile? No one. Yet, I do not see anyone else comporting as if they are a Methodist maiden preparing to set sail for Plymouth Rock.”
This served as a sufficient goad to cause my eyes, which had been firmly settled on the floorboards below my feet, to fly upward. But before I could answer in my own defence, he spoke with finality.
“I will have no more of your sulks. You had better come about or else all of Meryton may begin to wonder what has occurred here. What of your curricle?”
“My curricle! Surely, you do not now wish me to own it! I should appear so fast as to make me a mark for?—”
“For rakes and scoundrels? You had best go to your room and think, Lizzy, for I had always thought you brighter than the average girl.”
I stared at him. “To think, sir? I have done nothing but think!”
“You have had your eyes opened,” he said, suddenly much gentler in his tone. “As have we all. Do you really suppose you could not now smell a creature like Mr Wickham from across the room? ”
“I honestly do not know,” I said sadly. “I am afraid I cannot trust my own judgment.”
“I assure you your judgment is better now than it was last month. I say go about the life you want to make for yourself within the limitations God gave you. You should learn to drive, child, and laugh at your naysayers as much as you like. Besides, you are duty-bound to act as you always have. You must now deflect attention from the fact that Lydia is gone. If you continue to clasp your prayer book and stare weepily out the window, Lady Lucas may begin to think your sister has been banished for the requisite year.”
I stared at him. Good God! He was right. At least once in every season, we heard whispers about some girl or other leaving her home upon some made-up excuse. For a year.
“Let us give them something else to talk about,” he said in response to my wide-eyed silence.
“You mean my curricle,” I mumbled in a state of grave doubt.
“I do. This is not a suggestion,” he said. “You must do this because I tell you to.”
I grasped onto my only excuse not to obey him. “Yes, Papa, only I have come to a stand. As you predicted, there is a great deal I am incapable of doing, and the Zephyr remains in pieces.”
He stood up. “Come along, then.”
And that is how, with the help of Mr Hill and the farmer’s oldest boy, after one week of great industry in the shed behind the stables, the Zephyr was finally rolled out to bask in the light of a weak winter sun so the last coat of linseed oil on the spokes of its wheels could dry.
Wishing to escape my father’s rousing admonitions to come about and lacking anything else to do with myself, I had been present as the men had rigged a pulley to hold up the frame. Mr Hill even indulged me as I tapped in the cotter pins that kept the wheel attached to the—I shall not use the word flimsy—axle. After gracing me with a fatherly look, he then hammered the pins in farther with a series of mighty blows, and once the wheels were on the ground, he stood back to admire his work.
“That is a fine little buggy for a lady,” he said.
I could not but agree. She sat gracefully upon delicately spoked wheels, with an elegant slant of repose as if poised for a swift promenade around Regent’s Park or, at the very least, a christening with champagne.
Suddenly, I had a great urge to partake of her allure , to board this winged creature, and fly on a river of wind. I found myself quite ready to forsake my anxieties about Lydia, to abandon my misgivings with regard to rakes and ruination, and to think of something other than gossip and the cruel tricks of fate. Life, I had discovered in those fragile few weeks, was bitterly short.
It was best to laugh while one still could.