The Zephyr

Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

AN IMPERFECT PLAN

T hat night, with our hearts pounding, Mary, Kitty, and I crept out of our rooms in our stockinged feet, pushed open the door to the stair I had left unlatched, and in the light of a single candle, we floated ghostlike up to the little room in the attic where Mary King sat huddled on her mattress on the floor.

We sat close so that we could be heard as we spoke nearly in whispers.

“I have a plan, Mary,” I said, looking at Miss King. These pointed looks at one or the other was how we began to know to which Mary we spoke. Our situation was sufficiently extreme that we dispensed with all formality and spoke in frank and familiar terms.

“Yes?” she asked hopefully. I handed her the two shawls and stained coverlet I had brought up to add to the meagre blankets we had confiscated from Lydia’s room earlier in the day. My sisters leant in to hear my brilliant idea.

“We will get you to your uncle’s house, where you may apply to him in person for his help. He may deny you easily by letter or any equally indirect means, but to look into your eyes as he turns you away would require him to be heartless.”

“Which, after what I have done, he may be,” she said mournfully.

“But we must try, must we not? If he refuses to take you in, perhaps he would at least release what remains of your inheritance—the money he withheld from Mr Wickham. Forgive me for asking so brutish a question, but how much has he withheld?”

“A sum of just under three thousand pounds in the form of property,” she confessed.

“Your husband spent so much already?” I gasped aloud.

“He sank two thousand pounds into a speculation that did not thrive, then seeking to recover his losses, he took another two thousand to the gaming tables. At first, he was successful, but then his fortunes turned, and he began to try to revive his luck but ended with notes of hand that were paid by his creditor.”

Was he stupid? I thought to myself in the pause that followed. Even I knew that the gaming halls of London were full of sharps who would allow a careless man to win just often enough to hook him into a spiral of monumental losses. I cleared my throat to return to the subject at hand.

“That should be sufficient for you to seek a new identity as a widow and to fend for yourself.” If only I had so much to my name, I would have considered myself fortunate indeed, but my own penury was nothing to her peril, so I shook off all such comparisons.

“If you cannot appeal to his heart, then perhaps you might apply to his thirst for revenge. If your uncle believes Wickham desperately wants you returned to London, perhaps he can be recruited to thwart him?”

She sighed. “I am certain to be a stuttering fool. I always am when standing in front of him.”

“Not this time. Your life depends upon your eloquence—your remorse, your believability!”

A silence fell over us as we absorbed this fact, then my sister Mary, who was ever practical, asked, “How might we get her to Mr King? Where does he live?”

“He is no longer in Liverpool,” Mary replied in the bleakest of tones, “and he left no information as to where he now lives, so my husband could not force him to release the deeds to my grandfather’s properties.”

I knew some of this already, but my sisters did not, and while they puzzled silently over the greater implications of what she said, I also considered the grim fact that perhaps I had not understood the situation deeply enough. My notion of Miss King’s rescue depended entirely on finding her uncle.

“Yet, you planned to go to Liverpool in hopes of discovering him, did you not?” I asked hopefully.

“I had only thought to visit the house where he used to live in case someone might help me.” She then looked at us forlornly and added, “It was not a hopeful plan, I know, but it was the only plan I had left to me.”

“What can we do?” Kitty asked in an appropriately anxious whisper.

“I have—well,” I paused. “The truth is, I have written to Mr Darcy.”

A small scream ripped through the upper recesses of the house though Kitty clapped her hand over Mary King’s mouth almost instantly .

“Mr Darcy!” hissed my sister Mary in disbelief. “You wrote to Mr Darcy?”

Given her liberty to talk again, Mary King spoke in a gasp of despair. “Surely, he will give me up!”

“Hush,” I said, and, having heard the same sound from below us, we became still as hunted mice.

“Hill!”

My mother’s muffled cry sent me flying as silently down the stairs as I could. I slipped out of the door at the end of the hall and ran barefoot to her room.

“What is it, Mama?” I asked with my chest heaving.

“I heard a noise, and Mr Bennet will only tease me and call to me from his room that it must be a ghost in the rafters! Oh, I-I am so fluttery, Lizzy.”

I sat on the edge of her bed, grasped the closest vial I could feel in the dark, opened it and said upon its faint aroma, “Here is your lavender water, Mama. Would you like me to light the candle?” I did so before she replied, and I continued to speak reasonably. “I heard a sound earlier too, and I crept upstairs to see?—”

“Lizzy!”

“Well, there was nothing amiss. There was a screech owl by the shed earlier this evening, though I also wonder if Mary and I moving that old table from the stillroom up to the attic has caused the floorboards to complain of the change. This is quite an old house.”

The suggestion grabbed hold of her, and when Mrs Hill finally arrived with a cup of warm milk and a warming pan, I slipped out of the room, and after looking guiltily behind me, flew back up the stairs.