The Zephyr

Chapter 22

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A PIG IN THE GARDEN

I may have drifted off for as much as half an hour with my head thrown back against June’s stall, entertaining a series of half-waking, half-sleeping, and entirely delirious dreams. Mary King rode away from Longbourn in a golden carriage, and I, dressed in a costume reminiscent of a medieval noviciate, danced every set at a masked ball with a mysterious man known only as the ‘Derbyshire Swift’.

“May I tell you of the roses in my mother’s garden?” he murmured in my ear, filling the air with the scent of roses with his breath.

To this intoxicating invitation, I had sweetly replied, “No, there is a chicken bone stuck in my ear.”

Hunger woke me, or perhaps it was an impatient whinny to be let into the paddock. In any case, I blinked back into the rational world, stepped out into the yard, and was making for the service door when a horseman appeared over the nearest rise. He came to the back of the house through the kitchen garden .

All my senses awoke, and I turned to face Mr Wickham.

“Miss Elizabeth Bennet,” he drawled with great irony, doffing his hat from high on his saddle.

“You are not welcome here,” I said, ruing the inescapable necessity of looking up at the man.

“Ah. Am I not? But how sad I am to hear you say so. Perhaps I should make amends and pay a call on your dear mother?”

“She would not receive you.”

“And Mr Bennet? Might he entertain a visit?”

“How dare you!” I spat out.

“Upon my word,” he said philosophically, “I did not expect country people such as yourselves to have such long memories. I only meant it as a joke, you know.”

“A joke that you left her for dead?” I cried.

“Miss Elizabeth?” Mrs Hill called anxiously from the kitchen door. “Should I fetch the mister?”

I did not turn away from Mr Wickham as I called over my shoulder, “Do not trouble him, Hill. There is only a pig in the garden, and this man is here to take it away.”

Mr Wickham turned his cob around with a look of hardened insolence on his face, but then the clothes hung on the line behind the house caught his eye, and by the shift of his posture and the sly glance he threw at me before he sauntered away, his departure left me a quaking wreck.

The day thereafter stretched out interminably, and I endured it in a painful state of suspended dread. I was wildly tempted to run upstairs, to pull my sisters into a corner for a conference of terrified whispers, to warn Mary not to even glance out the tiny dormer window, to put Mr and Mrs Hill on notice, and even to warn my father!

But some instinct, some deeply practical sense, silenced me, for what good would come of it? Why should anyone else suffer the foreboding that made both a lump and a pit in my belly. No one, least of all Mary King, would be served by my failure to contain my panic, and more to the point, Mr Wickham had gone away. For now. I would wait to see Mr Darcy, and if worse came to worst and I felt anyone needed to know of Mr Wickham’s arrival in Meryton, I would share what I knew.

Just before it was time to dress for dinner, Mrs Hill came to my room with Mary King’s dress and underthings, her freshly scrubbed boots, and a warning.

“Hill says as how he has seen a man lurking in the hedge at the end of the drive.”

“On horse?”

“No. Not like the one who came to the house earlier. A low sort, the likes of which you rarely see here, miss.”

“A man for hire?”

“Something like. What should he do, then?”

“Mr Hill you mean? If he clears him off, the man will only come back and find a better hiding place from which to watch our comings and goings. I say we are better off knowing where he is and allowing him to believe we do not know he is there.”

She stood before me in wordless, anxious disapproval.

I, too, wished for this ordeal to have ended days ago, and this new development caused a fresh burst of fear to gallop around in my chest. That said, I somehow managed to clear my throat to lessen the tremor in my voice and to speak with extreme frankness.

“Surely, you must have a notion that some mischief came to pass this winter with regard to my youngest sister. But for the grace of God, she would be in a much worse case than the pitiful figure hiding in the attic. We must, for the sake of what is right, stay the course.”

She glared down her nose at me. “And what course might that be, miss?”

“Two—maybe three more days and I shall have secured safe passage away from Longbourn for her and a way in which she can remain out of that horrible man’s reach.”

“So long? As it is, I can barely sleep.”

“Do you suppose any of us can? Please, Hill, I beg of you, be patient and hopeful. For my sake?”

Her shoulders sank back down, and she took a fortifying breath. “Very well, miss. As you say, we can stay the course for a day or two more.”

The housekeeper had left my room with far less anxiety than I, sitting stunned on the edge of my bed, now sustained. Mr Wickham was here, he knew Mary was at Longbourn. He saw her dress hanging on the line! In consequence, he had a man on watch, so when she left us, he would know and easily follow her.

How quickly he had discovered her! I marvelled at his feral instincts and his blind luck. Of all the days to have his wife’s dress hung outside! He had probably only meant to speak to the servants, to solicit gossip of any sightings of his wife. ‘The silly thing,’ he would have said fondly, ‘left home in a miff over a shawl I would not buy for her’ or some such thing, and he may, for all I knew, have visited the back of half a dozen houses already.

Absently, I felt the material of the offending garment beneath my hand as I contemplated his disgusting charm, and by some reflex of distraction, I then began to run my fingers over its textured surface.

Soon, I was also examining the dress with my eyes. It had once been an elegant brown velvet carriage dress, but the pile was worn bare in broad patches, and the hem was worn to threads where it touched the ground. Hill had resorted to having the thing washed, and though it should have been brushed clean and cared for in the proper way, it looked as though it had been laundered many times. Besides, it had been hopelessly muddied when I found her, and there was nothing for it but to wash it with soap and water and to hang it out to dry. I then fell to wondering whether Mary had run away from home in this same garment. Had that scoundrel never bought her anything more than a mob cap and a piece of fustian with which to sew herself a frock suitable for servitude? He may well have deprived her thus, particularly when she did not make him instantly rich.

Then, as my mind was far, far off, picturing the mean lodging in which this poor woman’s torment had taken place, an idea dropped noiselessly into my head.