Chapter Thirty-Two
An Invitation to Dine
Elizabeth was wandering in the gardens when her father returned home from London.
It was nearly a fortnight since the elopement, and he had been gone for over a week.
The snows had melted in an early thaw, which rendered the roads clear for travel but which had turned the fields into mud and had transformed the crisp white landscape into a skeletal field of naked trees against a brown and grey land and sky.
Her father, when he descended from the carriage, mirrored the bleak landscape. He looked defeated, dejected, a man shrunken in upon himself. There was no sign of the sardonic glint so often found in his eye, no trace of his accustomed lackadaisical mirth. He had gone into battle and had lost.
“It’s no use, Lizzy,” he had sighed. “I looked in all the places I know, in several I did not know, and in others still I wish never to know again.” He shook his head, the motion so slow and wearied that Lizzy, for a moment, was afraid for his health.
He dragged at his small bag as if it weighed a hundred pounds and called to one of the grooms to arrange for his one trunk to be returned to the house.
“Let me take that, Papa,” Elizabeth gestured to the satchel that likely held his personal grooming items and a single change of clothing.
“No, no, my girl. I am not so defeated that I cannot manage as little as this.” His shoulders slouched.
“But I had to give up. I was doing no good in London, and the man Colonel Hastings arranged as our liaison as much as told me I was wasting my time. Wickham is a deserter, and with the army after him, with their superior resources, there was little I could do. He bade me return home, and what could I do but obey?”
In truth, this accorded with the two letters he had sent from London, letters so full of nothing that anybody might have written them. And yet, Elizabeth wondered if she would give up on the search for her own child so quickly.
Nevertheless, it was with great relief that she and her family welcomed their father back home.
He entered the house to choruses of “Papa, you’re home!
” and “Mr. Bennet, I did not think you would ever return to us!” Mama spent the following two days alternately congratulating him on not being killed and berating him for having failed to find their wayward daughter, and he accepted both with sheepish acknowledgement.
“If I had found the cur, I might have challenged him,” he admitted to Lizzy one evening as they attempted a game of chess in his study.
“And if I had done so, he would most surely have taken victory, since it is an age since I have shot at anything other than birds, and longer still since I held a sword. Your mother’s fears were not entirely irrational. ”
With her father’s return came murmurings in the village about Lydia’s true fate.
Why had Mr. Bennet rushed off to London?
If Lydia were there, why had he returned without her?
And what of that scoundrel Wickham? As suspicious looks grew into mutterings, which grew into thinly veiled accusations, it became rather widely known that Wickham had left behind him not only his fellow soldiers and his position in the militia, but had also left a pile of debts both to his comrades and to several of the local merchants.
Suddenly Lydia’s disappearance took on a far more sinister aspect in the public imagination, and the Bennets’ standing within the village began to suffer.
The sisters were permitted entry into the shops, but either a hawk-eyed proprietor would watch their every move, or there would be nobody available to offer them assistance.
Demands were sent for the full payment of their accounts, and the shopkeepers now required full payment in coin for every item purchased.
The butcher suddenly did not have the best cuts of beef available, and the miller had just run out of fine white flour as their man on the wagon drove up to collect his order.
Before many days had passed, Mrs. Hill was obliged to send her staff to Oakham or even as far as Hatfield to purchase the basic supplies for the house.
Of Lydia herself there was no word, neither from her nor from any of the others supposedly searching for her.
Colonel Hastings had written once stating that he would write only when he had something to communicate, and Colonel Forster’s occasional visits also imparted precious little information.
As for Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr. Darcy, it was as if they had never been at all.
The only beneficial result of the entire affair was that the Benoit cousins had been, if not welcomed, then accepted into Meryton’s poor society.
Colonel Forster had let slip to his wife some supposedly secret knowledge that they had come to escape the Tyrant in their home country, which information was all about the village by dinnertime, and the three men were widely, if tacitly, looked upon as heroes.
Foreigners, to be sure, and therefore not entirely to be trusted, but heroes nonetheless.
They were permitted to let a small cottage on the outskirts of the village and were not shunned, despite their association with the disgraced Bennets.
They were even cautiously approached by those who deemed their French adequate to a simple conversation.
Then, three weeks to the day after the elopement, an article in The Times caught Elizabeth’s eye.
Traitors in the First Circles ran the headline.
The article itself said very little other than suggesting that highly placed persons in the government had some evidence that an unnamed member of the peerage had been taken into custody on suspicion of working for the French.
Such stories were not uncommon, albeit less frequent now than five or six years before, but the particular timing of this incident was of note.
There was nothing to suggest the peer was or was not Lord Stanton, but Elizabeth felt certain that one thread from the knot of activities over the past months had been tidied away.
A letter addressed to her father, which arrived two days later, confirmed her suspicions.
“Colonel Hastings has invited me to join him in his offices to discuss some recent events,” Papa related as he read through the missive.
“Furthermore, considering your considerable contribution to the positive outcome, he would like to include you in the invitation. Can you handle being subjected to such unladylike conversation in a room full of men of various military ranks? I shall, of course, be there.”
Lizzy cocked her head and stared at him.
“Well yes,” her Papa replied. “I rather imagined that would be your reply. I shall accept for both of us at once. The colonel suggests we join him and his senior officers for dinner tomorrow. I shall inform your mother that we both shall be dining out.”
Lizzy blew a wisp of hair off her face. “She will complain about my lack of respectability in dining with the officers and will wax on about how this will stain my reputation forever. Perhaps we ought not to tell her where we are going.”
But Papa shook his grey head. “We have had enough of secrets here, my girl. I shall tell her the truth, and I shall brook no refusal. As for your reputation, if being in the company of your own father is not sufficient chaperonage, I would caution her to think of her youngest child. After the damage Lydia has done to all of you girls, there is little more harm a respectable dinner in the company of respectable men can do. Are you pleased, or would you prefer I go alone and report the information to you upon my return?” His quizzical expression told her exactly what he imagined her response would be.
For the first time in days, she laughed. “I would not refuse even if my reputation were to be in tatters, for I am longing to hear what happened! I would not give that up for the world.”
And the same, she realised as she lay in bed that night, could be said for this whole affair.
No matter the vexation she had felt towards Mr. Darcy upon first meeting him, no matter how he had subsequently grown on her and become dear to her, and then had broken her heart, no matter the confusion about her father’s loyalties and the terror she had felt upon learning of Stanton’s ultimate betrayal of her friend, she realised that she would not give up a single moment of this affair for any reward.
She had come to know a wonderful man, even if he could not be for her; she had made a friend of his cousin, she had been respected and admired for her knowledge and abilities.
She had met heretofore unknown cousins, and had, in her own right, helped in Britain’s fight against the Monster and his quest for dominion over all of Europe.
She might never be written into the history books for her small efforts, but she had made her contribution and she knew it.
This was worth the heartbreak. She might never again know a man like Mr. Darcy; she might never forget how he made her feel, how he looked at her when she broke the code or when she glanced at him through lowered lids; she might never marry, for who could compare in her estimation with this wonderful and enigmatic man?
But for a while, she had been admired and maybe even loved, and she had felt important and valuable.
And that was a gift she would cherish forever.