Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE BEST-LAID PLANS
E arly on the fateful morning when I heard Martha in the hall carrying away the chamber pots outside our doors, I asked her to come to my room just as soon as she could reasonably do so.
When she arrived with a pitcher of hot water and the look of a hound on the hunt upon her face, I bade her to once again go on pretence to the cottages and to make her way to the Fettermans’ with a specific bit of news for Mr Wickham.
“But I cannot get away till noon, miss,” she said earnestly.
“I will intervene with Mrs Hill to give you leave to go. Ask her to step into my room as soon as she has seen to my mother, if you will.” As an afterthought, I also said, “And make yourself truly believable with Mr Wickham, Martha. That man can easily smell a lie, for he is himself a liar and a villain besides.”
As I waited for the housekeeper to come to my room, I pondered that Mary King’s fate was now in the hands of one sly, mercenary maid. If there was anything in my life made of matchsticks and glue, it was my plan to remove the ghost from our attic and to give her a chance to rejoin the land of the living, to make a future for herself.
After I had spoken to Mrs Hill and dressed for the day, I quietly took the staircase up to the attic to say farewell to Mary.
There she sat, also already dressed, looking up at me from the one chair in the room, her eyes lit with a nearly ethereal glow, so filled to overflowing was she with gratitude. I had come to think of her as our ghost very often since she had come to Longbourn, for she had been so deprived of light, air, warmth, company, and even the relief of freely moving about that she had begun to look even more hollow-eyed than she had that day on the road.
But that morning I found her newly revived as she urgently whispered whilst grasping my hand, “I am in your debt and to such a degree, Elizabeth. I only wish I could thank you enough. May God bless you for what you have done for me.”
“And may God bless you, for you have a way to go before you may yet find your peace. But when you do and if you feel safe in doing so, you must write to us to let us know you are well. Meanwhile, we shall pray for you.”
Lest she cry, for she was as moved by the depth of her gratitude as I was, I then spoke with great practicality. “Now, do you know what to expect? Mr and Mrs Hill will help you, so you should not be afraid.”
She nodded. “I am not afraid for myself, but I fear for you and your sister. ”
“You need not be anxious for us. The thing is as simple as can be. Farewell, then,” I said, and she stood and embraced me before I went downstairs to breakfast.
Once seated with my family, I discovered that my luck, which had up to this point been capricious, turned ever so slightly my way, for my mother had in her hand a letter from Jane.
“Mr Bingley has returned to town!” she crowed. “And…” she read silently for half a minute, “Oh! He is to take her out for a drive in the park!” She squeezed Kitty’s arm, since she was closest for such a happy mangling.
“Mr Bennet,” she then declared with resolution, “I need the carriage. I must spend the morning calling upon all my friends.”
“You should have Lizzy ferry you where you wish to go, my dear.”
“It is still too muddy this morning for an open carriage, Papa,” I replied with a shrug, “otherwise I should be happy to do so.”
He relented but not without that sharp glance of inquisition I had been subjected to every morning since Mary King’s arrival. At last I could endure his scrutiny with complacence and even offered him something of a nod and a hopeful smile.
Upon seeing this, he pulled out his pocket watch. “Very well, but it is coming upon eleven o’clock. You had better go now, Mrs Bennet, for it is likely to rain again this afternoon. Come to think of it, I shall go with you and pay my annual visit to the neighbours. It is not seemly that they must always come to me.”
“Do you come too, Kitty? Mary? I do not ask you, Lizzy, for I know you will only hide in the stall with your ponies rather than do your duty.”
“I would like to go, Mama,” Kitty said brightly, “but Mary must be excused because she is working on Aunt Philips’s box, and if the paint dries too much before she puts in the final details, it could be ruined.”
I had planned to simply steal away without my mother’s blessing if I had to, but for once I did not have to add to my anxieties. Feeling as though we had successfully jumped the first fence in a furious fox hunt, my sister and I waved away our family and then retreated upstairs, coming down half an hour later to find the Zephyr poised for action. June and July were straining against the yoke and executing their endearing little frets and fidgets, signalling they were primed for a run.
“Are you ready, Mary?” I asked bracingly.
“I am,” she said, adjusting Mary King’s bonnet and smoothing down the worn velvet of her travelling dress.
“Ha!” I cried as I flicked the ribbons, and we went at a crisp canter down the drive. Seeing no one coming from either way, I steered my horses onto the road without more than slowing down, snapped the whip in the air, and in a few strides, we were trotting swiftly down the lane.
It was still muddy, but we had had no rain in the night, and the puddles were receding a little. I took the correct line through the worst of them with the ready assurance of having driven through them in worse conditions only two days before.
Very soon we heard a horse at a gallop behind us, and though I anticipated this, even wished for it, my heart leapt up into my throat. Mary and I glanced at one another, wide-eyed with mutual trepidation, and I turned back to the road and applied myself in earnest to a race. I was determined to do my very best, yet with the caveat of Scottish poet Robert Burns’s wisdom in the back of my mind: ‘the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley’.
But no matter what Mr Burns believed about schemes going awry, my fragile, ill-laid plan appeared to be working and alarmingly well at that.
It was fortunate that Mr Wickham was operating on his last gasp, for his wife had said he had lost all but the last dregs of what remained in Mrs Younge’s tin hidden in the kitchen. That meant he had a middling horse, and if it had been housed in the sheds behind the cottages and given whatever it could forage to eat with a stolen handful of oats now and then, he would not soon overtake us.
Still, Mr Wickham whipped the poor beast unrelentingly, and though my ponies were galloping at a thundering run now, I could hear his cries and oaths behind me.
Any decent horse with only one rider, a deep chest, and proper care, had the manoeuvrability and speed to overtake a Zephyr with two passengers pulled by carriage ponies, but Mr Wickham then met the false flat that led up to the Lea bridge, and he lost any advantage he had worked so hard to gain.
Mary and I sailed over this obstacle and dashed down the lane beside the dairy, and whilst our pursuer’s winded hack flagged behind, we came to a stop behind a massive mound of manure that shielded us from view of the road.
The starlings rose up in a fright and though I fretted they would betray our hiding spot, instead we heard Mr Wickham’s curses as he flew past under the harassment of a cloud of offended birds.
When my horses had caught their breath, I picked up the reins and calmly drove us past a startled milkmaid. We turned back down the lane and proceeded after Mr Wickham into Meryton proper at the dawdling pace of a country drive.
Once we were in the village, I pulled alongside Mrs Philips’s house, waved at her from the window, and she obliged me by raising the sash and exclaiming, “Lizzy Bennet! You are mud head to toe!”
“I know, Aunt. Forgive me, we will not come in and ruin your rugs. I only wished to say good day to you. Mary,” I said, gesturing at my equally filthy sister, “is in need of more gold paint for your box, ma’am.”
My mother then joined her sister at the window, and she too began to remonstrate with me for ruining my clothes so handily. But upon seeing a rider approaching from the other direction, my senses again lit up. Mr Wickham must have ridden through the village and doubled back to hunt for us, so I pleaded for mercy from her reasonable scolding, claiming my horses would soon caper if I kept them standing.
We plodded away from Mrs Philips’s house, and I heard, rather than saw, my aunt close her window against the chill. I could only hope my mother did not see who then approached us.
He slowed and assumed a look of great irony as he passed his eyes up and down over Mary in an intentionally unnerving leer. I could only imagine what my sister must have felt, since my skin crawled simply to witness such a look.
“Ladies,” he drawled, tipping his hat. “I was unaware what a whip you have become, Miss Elizabeth,” he added with a hint of danger in his voice.
“I have no idea what you mean. Excuse me, for I have no intention of speaking to you any more than I have,” I said coldly .
He continued, addressing my sister as though I had not spoken. “I have seen that dress somewhere before. It is remarkably like my wife’s.”
“Is it? I can hardly wonder at it,” I replied, “for she lived in Meryton, and who does not have one just like it? Mr Harrison received an enormous bolt of brown velvet by mistake two or three years ago.” I spoke dismissively, and with a firm snap of the reins, we left him staring at our backs.
“I am shaking, Lizzy,” Mary finally said, glancing off and on behind her.
“You! My knees are knocking as loudly as my heart!” We then burst into slightly hysterical giggles that were not reflective in any way of amusement, since we were, like our animal cousins, only shaking off our fright.
When we came back into the yard at home, Mr and Mrs Hill flew out of the kitchen with Martha on the run behind them, and we were shuffled quickly into the kitchen while Charlie led away the horses.
“Did he follow you?” the maid asked with a heaving chest.
“You did well, Martha. And our guest?”
“Wheeled out in the barrow, miss, through the farm and to the other side of the hay wain by the back lane, just as you planned,” Mr Hill said. “And there, as you said it would be, a coach was waiting to take her up.”
“Oh thank God,” I breathed, fighting back a sob. The strength seemed to suddenly drain out of my bones, and I said, “Might I trouble you for hot water and a tray, ma’am? Mary and I should rest a little until Mama comes home.”
“Your ticking has come just now,” she said kindly. “May as well be comfortable in your proper room, miss. ”
I sank into the fresh bedding after a thorough wash, a change into a comfortable dress of homely cotton, a cup of tea, and a generous helping of last night’s pudding.
And after a few tears of overwhelming relief rolled down my cheeks, I dozed in a state of heavenly rest.