Chapter 6
Both Bennet and his second daughter were beside themselves with worry. It had been confirmed from Jamaica that the cousins, Jane and Tommy, had boarded
The West Indies Trader, and she had sailed as scheduled. Two days after their departure, a massive storm, one called a hurricane, had descended on the area without warning.
No wreckage had been found, meaning there could be no official determination, and the Earl, Countess, and their family could not be declared dead for seven years.
Bennet took Elizabeth with him to visit the last remaining family member they were aware of, Lady Marie Fitzwilliam, at Hilldale House in London.
She had married Andrew Fitzwilliam, Viscount Hilldale, a year previously.
“Uncle Thomas,” Marie’s cheeks were stained with tears. She saw Elizabeth and enfolded her younger cousin in her arms. “Lizzy, I am so very sorry, Jane and Tommy, all of my family!” Lady Marie descended into a fresh round of tears, and her husband extracted her and took her into his arms tenderly.
“It is my choice to hope, Marie!” Elizabeth stated, her back stiff as a board. “Until the wreckage is found, and we are told all hope is lost, I choose to believe all of our family are alive and waiting to be rescued! My hope always rises when things look bleakest.”
“I will pray you are right, Lizzy,” Marie said with a tremulous voice.
“Are you managing my cousin’s assets?” Bennet asked the Viscount.
“I am, Bennet,” the Viscount replied. The two had met soon after Marie accepted the Fitzwilliam heir’s offer of marriage.
“Everything will be held in trust until, as we hope and pray, they are found and returned to us hale and healthy, or seven years pass. Marie and I leave for Holder Heights in a few days, and we intend to remain there and manage the Holder holdings as best we can.”
“If you want to communicate with us, please send any letters to the care of my solicitor, Mr. Jacob Philips of Meryton. I am sure you know the reason,” Bennet stated dryly.
Two days later, the same day the Viscount and Viscountess departed London for Staffordshire, Bennet and Elizabeth returned to Longbourn.
~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~
Shortly after their arrival, they were accosted by Martha Bennet. “Did you learn any news about your precious Jane?” Martha asked spitefully.
“Madam!” Bennet growled a warning and turned on his heel.
The slamming of the study door reverberated throughout the house.
The truth was Thomas Bennet was wracked with guilt.
If he had kept Jane and Tommy at home, they would have been with him now and not, as he suspected, at the bottom of the sea somewhere.
The only glimmer of joy in his life was his Lizzy, who spent many hours talking and reading to him in his study. As he withdrew into himself more and more, he began to spend almost all his waking hours in the study with a book and his port.
When Elizabeth wanted to have a meal in the company of her father, or spend time with him, she would go into his study.
He was always pleased to see her, but she did not miss the looks mingled with anguish and guilt on her father’s face, and he would not talk about the subject with her, so he continued to stew in his misery.
It was during this time Elizabeth slowly, but surely, took over the running of the estate.
A month after his new habit of closeting himself in his study, Elizabeth invited Mr. Philips to Longbourn and cared not if her father wanted to be left to his own devices.
At her request, she had Philips set up a trust he would administer and to which she had access.
Before her father had begun to sink into the doldrums of despair, he had taken an active role in running the estate—now all he cared for was his port and books.
Bennet knew Lizzy needed him, but he could not motivate himself to do any more.
Feelings of guilt paralysed him, and he was doing as much as he was capable of.
Without Bennet being as present as he was before, Martha and her nasty daughter started to take advantage of the situation after having seen no change in his behaviour in the following months. Louisa tried to blunt their verbal attacks through diversion, but they simply ignored her.
Not long after her sixteenth birthday on the fifth day of March 1806, the loneliest one Elizabeth ever celebrated, Caroline Bingley slapped Elizabeth when she refused to give her a bracelet her father had aside for her birthday before the tragedy.
It was gold with some delicate scroll work, and had diamonds spaced four to five inches apart.
In her younger days, Elizabeth had been taught to punch by her male Bennet cousins.
She drew her hand back and allowed her fist to fly.
Caroline Bingley landed flat on her back after Elizabeth delivered her blow to the shrew’s upper left shoulder, a little above where a breast would have been had Miss Caroline developed any of note.
Mrs. Bingley had been proud of her daughter when she slapped a high and mighty Bennet girl but was incensed when the chit retaliated. “How dare you?” Martha Bennet screeched as she stalked toward Elizabeth with her arm cocked, ready to put the chit in her place.
“I would think twice about striking me if I were you Mrs. Bennet!” Elizabeth hissed.
Martha Bennet stopped her advance, not nearly as confident as she had been before.
“I know all about my father’s rules for you.
While I may not be willing to disturb him, I am quite capable of communicating with Mr. Philips and,” Elizabeth indicated the servants, including the Hills watching, “they would take pleasure in restraining you, should I ask it!”
“You hit my dear daughter,” Martha tried to bluster.
“After she slapped me, as I would not give her something that belongs to me!” Elizabeth retorted.
By now Caroline was sitting up and wailing. “Punish her, mother!” she whined.
Elizabeth looked at her stepmother in a challenging way. The woman had a modicum of good sense, so, after helping her shaking daughter to stand, she withdrew to her chambers, taking her caterwauling daughter with her.
No matter how Elizabeth tried, she found nothing that would alleviate her father’s dark moods.
She knew that many nights he now fell asleep on his sofa in his cups.
He was unshaven and unkempt many days and was losing weight as he hardly ate solid foods.
As the summer of 1806 wore on, Elizabeth had no idea how to coax her father out of his study and to entice him to start living once again.
~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~
What nobody in England knew was that the hurricane which had caught the ship unawares in August of 1805 had killed most of the officers and crew who had been above decks as they battled to sail the ship during the raging storm.
The ship, mostly intact, had been blown onto and over a reef that almost entirely surrounded a small, uninhabited island that was part of the chain of islands comprising the Bahamas.
There were a few hundred known islands in the chain, and hundreds more unknown.
James, Amelia, Jamey, Cassandra, and Phillip Bennet, along with their cousins Jane and Tommy Bennet, were among the handful of survivors who walked away, uninjured for the most part, from the wreck that finally broke apart and sank in the lagoon between the reef and island.
It seemed only those few who were below decks had survived.
Once the section of the ship they had been in came to rest in the lagoon, the Earl led his family out of the hulk.
His family and three crew members were able to reach the beach in the dark of the night, made even blacker by the still raging storm.
The survivors huddled under trees they found within a few hundred yards of beach.
At some point a few hours later, there was an eerie calm followed once more by the intense fury of the storm.
The Bennets and the remaining crew rode the storm out until it finally abated as the dawn broke.
Once the clouds cleared and light was able to reach them, they all walked out from under the trees onto the beach.
The West Indies Trader had been turned into matchwood!
There were timber and trunks floating in the lagoon.
They could not find a single longboat which had survived the ordeal.
The Earl took charge and organised the survivors into groups of two or three to explore and return to the beach in a few hours. Luckily for them, the storm had provided a bounty of downed fruits as well as some birds and some small animals which had not survived the storm.
Jane, Cassie and Tommy walked up a hill a mile from the beach.
The summit was flat and gave them a vantage point from which to see that the island, although not huge, was not tiny either.
As they walked around the summit to see all sides of the island, they saw there was a stream that ran into a natural pool to their west. That was when they learned they would have plenty of fresh water.
The reef seemed to circle the island except to the south, close to where they had come ashore, where there was a gap of mayhap a hundred yards where the angry sea had free access to the lagoon.
On their return to the beach, it was determined they would have more than enough food and water for a lengthy stay, but they had no knowledge of whether or not the island was on any of the shipping routes. They did not know when or if they would ever see another ship sail close to them.
Their first task was to collect as much useable material as they could, including timber, canvas from the sails, and trunks.
As the three surviving crew members were all seamen, they naturally deferred to the Earl, and he to them for their areas of expertise.
One had been the cook/surgeon, the second a carpenter, and the third a seaman who used to help set the sails.