Chapter 21
Elizabeth
Elizabeth handed a hairpin to the colonel, who knelt in order to try to tickle the lock’s tumblers into the unlock position.
“You are very courageous, climbing out of your window like that, Miss Elizabeth,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said.
She laughed and said, “Or, perhaps, very stupid.”
“Oh, I will not honour that supposition with a response!” he said.
“Except I believe that is what you just did.”
They both chuckled.
“Almost had it!” the colonel said with a frustrated huff. “I guess I should concentrate more,” he muttered.
The silent interval seemed to Elizabeth to be anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes—but of course it felt more like a few decades—but then there was the faint sound of broken glass and a woman’s inarticulate, fearful cry.
Richard jumped to his feet, looking down the corridor, which looked entirely peaceful, but from which some thuds and scrapes could be heard.
“That’s Jane’s scream!” Elizabeth exclaimed.
She said, “I hope you can smash down the door—I will go outside and see if I can see anyone going in or coming out!”
She sprinted down the stairs, and she was surprised to hear the colonel’s voice echoing in the halls, an accompaniment to the thumping sounds that probably were the result of him trying to break down the door. “Darcy!” Thump. “Bingley!” Thump. “Hurst!” Thump. “Ryles!”
From outside, she could see that Jane’s window was indeed broken, and a rope dangled from it.
She pulled at the rope, but it seemed firmly attached at the top.
She took hold of the end of the rope and then backed away from the tree.
She hurled it up, and she was satisfied that it caught in between a branch and its offshoot.
Would that slow down someone intending to climb down? Likely not, but.…
Her brain was leaping about from one assumption to another, and none of them made any sense.
If Caroline locked them all in, then who was breaking windows and using ropes to climb up or down or both?
If Mr. Darcy or Mr. Bingley wanted to break in through the window rather than the door, which seemed unlikely, would not one of them let the colonel and her know beforehand?
Did someone intend to climb down a rope one-handed, with the other hand, presumably, holding an unwilling captive?
(Elizabeth gulped as she considered Jane being grabbed and wrestled down a rope with some horrible man who would surely be unable to get down safely only using one arm and hand!)
Just in case some horrible man did make an appearance, Elizabeth considered the dozen or so sticks on the ground, wondering if one of them could be used as a weapon.
One stick was actually a small branch, about the dimension of her wrist in diameter and about four feet long.
The branch tapered dramatically the last quarter or so of its length, and she was able to use her knee to snap off the thinner end.
She supposed her improvised weapon would be the best she could do, and she hurried to hide herself…again, just in case.
The thudding sounds coming from Jane’s room ceased with a terrible crashing sound, and Elizabeth hoped that meant that the colonel had been able to breach the door.
She could barely see the window through the leaves of the bushes she crouched amongst, but she was able to see the movement of a figure appearing at the window and jerking the rope.
A man’s voice uttered multiple curses as the rope refused to budge from the spot where it had caught in the joint between two branches.
The man gripped the rope and swung out of the window, using the rope to successfully climb into the tree’s branches and then downward at a speed that spoke of desperation.
When the man was almost to the ground, he dropped heavily, and, as he awkwardly stood, Elizabeth emerged from her hiding place and thwacked him in the back of one knee.
He gave a tremendous yell, but, as he crumpled to the ground, he managed to turn his torso towards her and, reaching out one hand, pulled at her skirt, causing her to fall as well.
Elizabeth still had the stick, and she brought it down on the man’s hand and managed to pull away from him. There was a distinct ripping sound, and she held her skirt with one hand in case the rip would chance to display her petticoat or chemise.
The man on the ground looked to be in his late twenties and was exceedingly handsome, or would have been if his face was not twisted into such a caricature of pain and anger.
His age and looks made her wonder if he was the infamous Mr. Wickham, although Mr. Darcy and his cousin had seemed positive that he was not involved in Miss Bingley’s blackmail scheme.
And why would that wicked and mercenary man want to break into Jane’s chambers…?
Elizabeth shuddered as she contemplated if she should attempt to further incapacitate the man. But the colonel’s voice booming out from the window above and the sounds of someone hastening towards them made her turn her attention outward. In relief, she realised that Mr. Darcy had arrived.
She felt much safer, but she shifted her eyes back to the man on the ground, and she saw that he was taking a pistol out of his pocket.
“Pistol!” she cried.
Mr. Darcy plucked the stick from her hand and swung it hard against the man’s hand—and the weapon—
The noise of the pistol’s discharge was extremely sharp, extremely loud. Elizabeth keened, certain that Mr. Darcy had been shot.
But time seemed to slow down as Elizabeth saw that Mr. Darcy was now blocking her view of the man with his body, possibly in an attempt to protect her from any bullets flying about.
A thousandth of a second later, she noticed that the only part of the man-who-might-be-Mr.-Wickham that was still visible to her was one of the man’s legs. It jerked and then went still.
A split second later, she realised that Mr. Darcy did not drop to the ground in agony, nor did he surge back against her with the impact of a bullet. She supposed—she hoped—that he had not been shot, after all.
And a fraction of a second after that, she found herself in Mr. Darcy’s arms. “Are you well? Are you injured?” he asked several times before she could get any words out of her mouth.
“I am well,” she assured him. “And you?”
He clutched her even more closely to his chest, and she heard his heart’s frenetic pace. He breathed in audibly and then said softly, “I am better now.”
Mr. Darcy straightened up and stepped back from the embrace. She looked towards the man, but Mr. Darcy was still shielding her view. She asked, “Is that Mr. Wickham?”
“It was Mr. Wickham,” he responded.
They heard Jane calling to them from the window, and Elizabeth stepped where she could see her sister. “We are not injured; we are well!” she called.
“Thank God for that,” came the colonel’s deeper voice. He was hurrying around the tree and came to a stop, apparently astonished at the identity of the housebreaker, or the result of the gunfire, or both.
“Wickham???”
“Colonel Fitzwilliam, are my sister and Georgiana still locked in their rooms?” Elizabeth asked. “Georgie must be sick with worry.”
He responded, “A maid was just running up the stairs with a ring full of keys as I was running down. They should be free by now.”
Elizabeth got confirmation of that statement just a moment later, when Georgiana ran around the corner and flung herself at her brother.
Mr. Darcy likely wished to shield her from seeing Wickham’s body even more than he wished to protect Elizabeth from the sight; at any rate, he scooped up Georgiana and said, “Miss Elizabeth, please come inside with us.” He strode out of the shrubbery, past the tree.
Turning her eyes to Mr. Wickham, Elizabeth saw enough blood to convince her to immediately look away and follow the Darcys into the house. Of course, she then raced up to be with Jane.
Her sister certainly could not stay in a room with a broken door and window, and Elizabeth was happy to see that Mrs. Nicholls was already dealing with this need to change rooms. She assured Elizabeth that the room on the far side of her own was now being aired and made ready for Jane.
“Shall I send a footman to help with the move?” the housekeeper asked Jane.
“No, I thank you, but I am well enough to walk a short distance, and I have very few possessions here. Molly, my sister, and I will easily be able to pack up and carry the little bit I have.”
“Can you stay with Miss Elizabeth in her room until we have swept up any shards of glass?”
Jane promptly agreed, and the sisters went to Elizabeth’s room; Molly stayed back to help sweep and clean.
Jane whispered, “You must tell me everything, Lizzy! What has been happening today?”
Elizabeth wished she could tell her everything, but she did not know enough.
However, she did tell Jane that she assumed that Miss Bingley had locked them in—Georgiana as well as the two of them—but that apparently Mr. Wickham had armed himself, broken and then climbed up to the window of Jane’s room, and then, after descending the rope again, accidentally shot himself.
“He is dead,” Elizabeth told her sister.
Jane looked more horrified than relieved that the man who had broken into her bedroom was incapable of harming anyone ever again. Elizabeth said to her, “I cannot imagine why he broke into your room. What did he say?”
“When he first climbed into the window, the man—Mr. Wickham—said, ‘You are not Georgie!’ And then the colonel started shouting and trying to break down the door, and Mr. Wickham looked out of the broken window, and then he checked the other window…I am not sure all what he was doing, but he was saying a lot of ugly words, and it looked as if he was trying to pull at something.”
“If he was upset that you are not Georgie, it seems as if he climbed up to the wrong window,” Elizabeth said.
She knew the history of Mr. Wickham and Georgiana Darcy, but Jane did not, and so she immediately distracted her sister, asking another question: “So I am hoping that he did not touch you or take anything?”
“No, not at all.”
Elizabeth said, “I must go see Georgiana and Mr. Darcy, and I must find out what happened with Miss Bingley.”
“And also, could you please find out if Mr. Bingley is well?”
“Certainly, dear,” Elizabeth kissed Jane’s cheek, but a part of her wanted to counsel her sister to disengage her feelings from Mr. Bingley, remembering her feeling that he was not worthy, after all.
However, since he had been very assertive and fair-minded the night before, Elizabeth supposed that she could wait one more day in hopes that he would further redeem himself. She abandoned her sister to Molly’s care as she sought answers from Mr. Darcy.