Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
NEWS FROM brIGHTON
W ith a sober determination to stem the flow of speculation, I did not drive for several days lest I encounter Mr Darcy. Thankfully, I was able to sink back into anonymity, since the neighbourhood was consumed with news from London. Cholera had spread farther into the city and had, in one reported instance, even decimated the ranks of Lord and Lady Martindale’s servants. The disease had not yet become catastrophic, but the reports were increasingly dire.
The week also brought news from Aunt Gardiner in the form of a hasty letter announcing their plans to avoid all risk by leaving Brighton, where an increasing number of people from London had fled. They planned to spend a few weeks at Longbourn.
Jane and Lydia would come home.
I was both elated and anxious, for this was a fraught reunion. On behalf of my eldest sister, I harboured a tender concern. Mr Bingley was still in the neighbourhood. Would her old wound tear open upon seeing him? As for Lydia, I entertained worries of a different kind. She was, by all accounts, altered to such a degree as must spark comment.
With this lingering sense of unease, I sought out my mother in the privacy of her room one morning several days after hearing this news. She sat at her dressing table examining her chin in the mirror and I sat on the bed behind her.
“Oh, good,” she said. “You are here, Lizzy. Is my chin heavier than it used to be?”
“Is it weighing you down?” I asked.
A habitual reaction of affront flashed across her features, but she caught herself and looked at my reflection with narrowed eyes. “You too will one day sit in front of a mirror and mourn,” she said with a sniff.
“You have nothing to wish for, Mama. You are as lovely as you have ever been. I swear it. But come, leave your poor chin alone for now. I wish to talk of Lydia.”
She turned and said, “Oh, I am dying to see her! I have missed her so.”
“And she is greatly altered according to Jane. We must decide what is to be done about her.”
“Done about her?”
“Consider, Mama. The facts are that she left suddenly for a period of months, and she is certain to return here quite cast down. Who would not mark a change so great in a person who made a reputation of wildness for herself? The matrons will all conclude?—”
“I have already thought of this. I shall make it known she has been ill.”
“And how common an excuse is that when a girl is banished for some months and returns home woebegone and in despair—in other words, looking for all the world as though she has given birth and been forced to relinquish an illegitimate child to an orphanage!”
“Shh!” she hissed fiercely at me before glancing fretfully at the door. Upon seeing it was closed and we were in fact speaking in private, she clasped her forehead and spat out, “But what is to be said? What can be done? I doubt an express would meet my brother on the road in time for him to change his plans.”
“Nor should he change them. I would rather they be safe in Hertfordshire.” I pondered the puzzle and came to no clever solution. “All I know is that it would be folly to claim Lydia has been ill. We would be better off pretending she is as she has always been, and upon being forced to account for the change, we must hint that perhaps what our neighbours recall of her character was little more than the silliness of a childhood she has since outgrown.”
“Yes, yes. That is a good idea. And-and Mrs Gardiner has been busy polishing her?—”
“And modesty is all the rage in London. That must be our constant refrain, Mama.”