The Zephyr

Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

JUNE AND JULY

M r Darcy had been shocked. Not only had my driving startled him, but he expressed a noticeable degree of amazement that I associated myself with horses in any way.

When he had been in Hertfordshire last year, I had a reputation as a strong walker—a predilection attributed to the fact I did not ride. We had Nellie, and Jane rode her occasionally—most notably in the rain to pay a call on Miss Bingley. Thus, the universal assumption in the neighbourhood, which likely seeped into Mr Darcy’s impression of me by means of simple observation, was that since I had the means to learn to ride but did not, I must be afraid of horses. And this was true.

When I was a little girl, I had been walking with Mama in Meryton when a horse bolted and threw its rider. The screams, the flailing of those powerful legs and flashing, iron-shod hooves stomping upon the inert figure on the ground had made a distinctly terrifying imprint on my mind. My mother, severely shaken, had clutched at us before pressing our faces into her skirts to spare us from seeing more than we had—the scene was indeed that dreadful—and it only added to my impression of danger.

But seeing the Zephyr in her pose of readiness to show me the world had enticed me to reconsider. Civilisation was powered by horses, was it not? And my father had said we would find a pony, which to me, sounded like a smaller, more domesticated creature than the Duke of Wellington’s famous war horse.

Thus, reassured and expressing my readiness to learn to drive, my father indulged me by going out to find a horse for my curricle.

But when he returned with not one horse, but two, I stood in the yard astonished, even dismayed. “Papa!” I cried. “Two horses? This is too much!”

He ignored me, dismounted Nellie, and handed the reins to a youngster who had ridden without a saddle atop one of the horses.

“Mr Hill,” he said, as our man came out of the kitchen, “might you settle these ponies? They are half-starved as you can see. And see to this boy as well. He does not speak, and best we can tell, his name is James.”

James also looked half-starved, and when my father finally finished speaking to Mr Hill, he led me inside the house. At the hall table, he took off his hat, coat, and gloves, and handed them to Martha before he turned to me. “Well, Lizzy? We have been lucky today.”

“Have we? They will require so much! Have you not objected to adding to the stables on the account of the expense? ”

“Oh well,” he said, walking down the hall to his book-room, “they need only hay and oats, you know.”

“Wagon loads of each! But where did you get them? And why did you buy two?” I asked as I trailed after him.

Only when he had re-entered his sanctuary, put up his feet on a leather stool, and lit his pipe did he explain. The ostler at the posting house had told him that Mr King might have a horse to sell, and so my father had ridden to the house where Mary King had lived until she ran away with Mr Wickham.

There he met Mr King, her uncle. The man, Papa said, was clearly harassed and impatient of negotiations. However, a tea tray had come up from the kitchen and the two gentlemen, being of similar age and background, began to speak more congenially.

Mr King had thawed and with little preamble, he said, “There is no point in dancing around the thing, Bennet. My niece is disgraced and her name blackened in this neighbourhood. My business is elsewhere in any case, which is why I was not here, and I am only here now to close the house and to sell what I do not wish to cart away.”

My father, though he is often wry, must have spoken in a tone of commiseration. After all, his youngest daughter had narrowly escaped worse than Miss King’s fate. Not a man to divulge endless details of a conversation, however, I was given only to understand that Miss King’s carriage horses were eventually discussed, looked over, and acquired for a song.

“Until Mr King returned, the house was for all practical purposes abandoned. Only the cook stayed, for she had nowhere to go. The housekeeper and ladies’ maid had both gone. The man of all work and the groom had also decamped, for when Mr King arrived and discovered that his niece, who had inherited a goodly sum of money from her grandfather, had been seduced away by a rake, they would all have also been held to account.”

“She left her horses behind?”

“I suppose Wickham hired a carriage and took her away surreptitiously at night. She left everything.”

“Save for her inheritance,” I said glumly.

“Yes. Though Mr King is determined to make it hard for Wickham to collect. He has so far refused to answer the man’s letters, has moved the lady’s account to a bank in Shropshire, and has hired a brace of solicitors to manufacture what delays they can.”

“That poor girl.”

My father puffed his pipe in grim reflection but did not answer. After a moment he refocused his vision from his inward thoughts and looked at me appraisingly. “At any rate, you now have two ponies, Lizzy. They are matched for stride and trained to the harness. I understand they are also saddle-trained but were rarely ridden. They have been neglected for a few weeks, but we shall take them out when we have fed them properly.”

Now that the challenge was directly in front of me, my impulse was to hedge, to confess my trepidation, and ask to be excused from learning to whip. However, I instinctively knew that there were times when false confidence was still confidence and that to pretend bravery can sometimes lend a lady a dram of courage.

Soon enough we went out for our first ride. I had once or twice been the passenger in a curricle, but the sensation of sitting atop what was my own vehicle was distinctly heady. My father held the reins as we rolled gently around the estate, across farm roads, and beyond to the surrounding fallow fields.

“They are a comely pair,” he remarked. “Very polite horses and much attached to one another.”

This struck me, for I had never thought of horses in possession of any human qualities. “Are they indeed?”

“See for yourself,” he said, directing my attention to their canter. In truth, there was a certain ease between them that even I, who knew nothing about horses, could detect.

“Will you name them?”

“Name them? I had not thought?—”

“We must have something to call them.”

“Well, they are a matched pair,” I mused. “And you say they have fair manners, and that makes me think of fair weather.” I looked again at the two of them as they pranced along in front of us, seemingly quite sunny in their expressions. “I shall name the smaller one June and the larger one July.”

“Those are suitably silly names,” my father declared amicably. “Here,” he said as we headed down the drive towards the house. “Sit close to me and take the reins.”

Thus, I had learnt to drive. Slowly at first, but then steadily I increased my understanding of the tension exchanged through the strap of leather between myself and my ponies. This was a conversation, I realised, and if I knew how to do anything, it was talk. The subtlest tug could adjust the cadence, a slight draw to one side or the other would offer a gentle suggestion that we carefully circumvent a deep rut in the road, and a strong pull would bring us to a smart stop. As I became more confident with the reins, I also learnt how to throw my weight from one side to the other as a ballast while rounding corners, how to urge the team with a forwards shift, and restrain them just a touch with a rearwards lean. We were acting in concert, I concluded, and my ponies seemed pleased to attend to my commands.

Predictably, my father tired of this game. He was not an energetic man, and perpetually driving past a mundane landscape he had seen all his life bored him. As he became increasingly unwilling to be coaxed out, I used Mr Hill—who I quickly learnt was not terribly handy at driving. He was also a man of twelve or perhaps thirteen stone, and not only did he strain the horses with his weight, his bulk on one side of the curricle upset their balance and robbed the exercise of all pleasure. Besides that, the poor man had work to do and could not always be at my beck and call.

By March, I began driving out with only the boy. James was perhaps ten, though he was quite small, and we soon discovered that he was not so much mute as he was deaf. He managed to understand what little he did by carefully watching my lips, or more often, by simply responding as he always had. Someone, at some point in his unfortunate life, had trained him to his job. If I came to a stop, he jumped down and held the pair’s bridles. When we returned to the stables, he stowed the Zephyr, unharnessed and watered the horses, rubbed them down with straw, fed them oats and hay, and shovelled manure over to the steaming heap on the far edge of the kitchen garden.

His plight was much like that of so many others. Unfortunate children, almost all of them orphans and those hampered by the seemingly insurmountable obstacles wrought by poverty or injury, were everywhere. But for the most part in our sheltered corner of Hertfordshire, these sad cases were massed in my mind into a great unknown, and I rarely thought of them unless I thought of the warrens of London.

But my daily interactions with a boy who did not have a single advantage often led me to reflect on my own gifts. On my excursions through the countryside, I entertained a feeling of overwhelming gratitude for my freedom alone. I could hardly reconcile the unbelievable benefice of having all my faculties, let alone my status as a gentlewoman, the embrace of a family, the bounty of food on the table, the shelter of a manor house, the warmth of a bed, and the mere cleanliness in which I lived—much less the pleasure of driving! While I might have spent those months bemoaning the horrible injury done to our family by Mr Wickham, instead, James had given me a lesson in gratitude, and I felt much indebted to him for this gift.

By April, I was quite attached to ‘the boy’ as he was generally called, and perhaps sensing my benevolence, he seemed inclined to return the attachment.

“Sir,” I said one fine spring morning when I had come in refreshed and windblown from a spanking run to the river.

“Hmm…” My father replied, much distracted by his perusal of his journal.

“Promise me we will keep James.”

“What?”

“I do not want him turned off or abandoned. This must be his home. You must somehow make this clear to Mr Collins.”

“Oh? How do you propose I force the issue from my grave?” he replied with a lifted brow.

“At least write a letter of intent and place it with your legal papers.”

“Anything else, Lizzy? Should I fund him a pension? ”

His irony annoyed me, and we spoke a mite testily for another two minutes until I had a half-hearted commitment he would do as I asked. Unsatisfied that he would remember, I then wrote to my friend Charlotte Collins.

Thank you, my dear Charlotte, for inviting me to visit Hunsford Parsonage for Easter. Sadly, Jane and Lydia are still in London, and I do not feel free to go to you just yet while Mama has need of me to fill Jane’s shoes. If you still wish for me to come later in the year, I would dearly love to visit. Meanwhile, have you heard I have been learning to drive? I am certain your brother has reported my scandalous doings, but I confess I quite love the liberty.

This was a convenient opening into the subject of the boy in the stables, and as delicately as I knew how, I asked for her influence of compassion in his favour when she assumed the role of mistress of Longbourn.

All of my concern for the boy proved to be for naught, however. One day he simply vanished.

We soon learnt, through the prodigious flow of gossip from the posting house next to the inn, that Miss King’s groom had returned to Meryton and retrieved the child, who was related to him in some way. He had only gone to find work, and having since also secured a place for the boy, he had taken him away. Mr Hill had even related that the child was happy to leave.

“There, you see, Lizzy?” my father said with a wink. “Your compassion was poured out uselessly.”

“If you are suggesting that my supply of tender feelings is finite, or worse, that I replace my heart with a stone, you are wasting your breath, Papa. Might I find a cottager’s boy to help Mr Hill with the team? Meanwhile, the girls are so well-behaved, they stand still for me when I step off.”

“As you say, child,” he said. “And if March and April do startle, let go of the reins and let them run. They should stop eventually.”

“She will break her neck, Mr Bennet,” my mother remarked, having listened to this conversation over a simple Wednesday night dinner of roast chicken.

“I promise I will not, Mama. Would you like me to take you for an airing tomorrow? Why wait for Sunday to show off your new parasol? Bring it along, and I will parade you up and down in front of the shops.”

This was just the sort of attention my mother could not resist. She had married ‘up’, as they say, and was perpetually on the hunt for opportunities to secure her position in the loftiest stratum of Meryton society.

So, after a spate of drizzling rain, the sun had broken through the clouds, and I took her out in the Zephyr, draped in her lightest lace shawl with her pink parasol twirling above her poke bonnet.

Naturally, we rolled past Lucas Lodge. I had hoped to aggravate John Lucas with that chafing sensation of envy, and I suspected my mother hoped much the same with regard to her principal rival, Lady Lucas. Alas, we passed by unnoticed. However, we were able to wave at Mrs Goulding who was coming out of the church. We nodded at all our acquaintance and even a few strangers and ended with the Zephyr pulled to stand outside Mrs Philips’ street-facing window.

My mother had news of Jane, whose marital prospects in Brighton were such a constant source of interest she could invent a suitor out of the merest mention of a respectable Mr So-and-So whom they met at church. Rich men like Mr Bingley, and soldiers such as Mr Wickham, had been written off her list of eligibles for Jane, and although she had become generally more sensible about our prospects, old habits die slowly, particularly when she was with a match-making accomplice as longstanding as her own sister.

Thus, while I patiently held my horses in restraint, Mama and Aunt Philips spoke at the open window for five minutes, and naturally, since they were thus engaged, my attention wandered up the street to behold—Mr Darcy!

He sat astride a tall, grey hunter and approached from the north end of the village. Once he had closed the distance, he pulled to a halt and tipped his hat. My relations, slightly annoyed to have their gossips thus interrupted, addressed him perfunctorily, and to my slight embarrassment, they then continued their private murmuring.

“Good day, sir,” I said sunnily to compensate for their rude dismissal, all whilst applying a slight pressure to the reins to assure my girls behaved themselves next to his strange horse.

“I see you have found an hour between downpours,” he said after acknowledging my greeting. “Will you be racing Mrs Bennet up Oakham Mount?”

“Yes,” I replied with a fair amount of sauciness. “Yes, indeed! She particularly enjoys the precipitous drop down the other side of that hill, and I assure you, Mr Darcy, I have only just the once tossed her off when I hit a rut at too much speed.”

“Hmm. I suppose you are making a joke, but something tells me you have experience of the other side of that hill.”

“It is possible I have, sir,” I replied with a toss of my head .

“And have you also hit a rut at speed?” he asked drily.

I flashed him a breezy smile. “Who has not had that pleasure?”

“I believe I was ten when I was last thrown up in the air by a bump.”

I laughed. “Then I am much to be envied, for I nearly lost my seat only last Tuesday.”

My reply was perhaps too flippant, for the gentleman’s patience seemed to suddenly wear thin. “I urge you to take care,” he said with an unreadable look upon his face. He then tipped his hat once again before turning his horse away.

“And I urge you to take half the stuffing out of your shirt,” I whispered under my breath, before turning to watch him leave. Unfortunately, he chose the same moment to turn back to look my way, and our gazes collided most awkwardly. Being a lady first and a hoyden second, I withdrew my attention—too quickly perhaps—and turned my back on Mr Darcy.