Chapter 8 #2
He reached the door. Wrenched it open. Pushed through into the small reception room.
Empty.
No attendant. No Mrs. Morgan. The door to the hall beyond stood slightly ajar.
“Is anyone here?” His voice echoed strangely in the empty space.
No response.
The boy was at his elbow, tugging his sleeve with desperate urgency. “Please, sir—you must hurry. Third door on the left. She is in trouble, sir! There is no time!”
Darcy hesitated.
He knew what he was about to do. He knew the risk. This was a ladies’ establishment, a place where women came to bathe in privacy and seclusion. There would be women in states of undress behind those doors. If anyone witnessed him entering . . .
But Georgiana was in that room. With Wickham. And there was no one else to help her. The attendant had vanished. Mrs. Morgan was nowhere to be seen. He was the only one who could stop this.
He pushed through the door and into the hall beyond. The passage was narrow and dim, lit by small windows set high in the walls. Doors lined both sides numbered with small brass plates. The sound of water splashing came from somewhere further down, and a woman’s voice humming tunelessly.
It was no more than a few feet into the back passage, and Darcy made his decision.
He did not knock. If Wickham was within, he needed the advantage of surprise, needed to burst in before the blackguard could use Georgiana as a shield or make his escape. Every second of warning was a second Wickham could use against him.
He turned the handle. The door opened smoothly, silently. He slipped inside and closed it behind him, shooting the bolt across to secure it. Now Wickham could not escape. Now he would face the consequences of what he had done.
He turned and opened his mouth to speak, but his eyes lit upon a shapely leg in a stocking.
A woman standing beside a copper tub, half-dressed, frozen in the act of pulling her stocking up.
Dark hair tumbled loose around her shoulders, still damp from the bath.
Eyes wide with shock—not blue, but amber and gold, catching the light from the small window high on the wall.
Miss Bennet.
She stared at him. He stared at her.
The moment stretched between them, terrible and endless. The thin fabric of her chemise clung to skin still wet from the bath. She was beautiful and horrified and utterly, impossibly wrong.
Miss Bennet secured her stocking and stood, allowing her chemise to drop down her form, but the light in the room from the little window lit her from the back and highlighted her figure. She soon had her dress on, better covering her, and it was that movement which broke him out of his shock.
“Mr. Darcy,” Miss Bennet said in a strangled hiss. “Get out.”
Yes. Oh, God. Where was Georgiana? Had the boy had the room wrong? Had he misunderstood? Was Wickham even now forcing her to leave with him?
His fingers fumbled as he slid the lock back and turned the knob. Tried to push the door open. It would not move. He shook it.
No. “It is blocked.”
Miss Bennet pushed past him to try it for herself. “What are you doing here?” she whispered as she pushed at the door. She huffed when it would not budge.
She smelled of salt water and some faint hint of jasmine. “Miss Bennet,” he said quietly, “I beg your pardon. A boy came to the bookshop and said Georgiana was in danger. He said Wickham was here and pointed me to this room. Do you know which room is hers?”
She brushed him again as she walked back to her clothing and picked up two hairpins. His eyes followed her, but his panic did not ebb.
“She is just across the hall. Turn around.”
He turned so fast he caught his elbow on a shelf. A cake of soap skidded, and a bottle tumbled down after it, struck the tiles, and shattered.
He froze as the room filled with fragrant lavender.
Behind him, he heard the rapid rustling of fabric. The wet slap of her hair being twisted up. A muttered word he was certain no gentleman’s daughter was supposed to know.
“Your sister is not here,” she whispered. “This is my room, Mr. Darcy. My bathing room. And you locked yourself inside it.”
“I can see that.”
“Can you? Because you were looking at the ceiling a moment ago, which suggests your observational powers are not presently at their sharpest.”
“Miss Bennet, I assure you, Georgiana is in danger.”
“She is not in danger. She is dressing, I am sure, as I was doing, with Mrs. Morgan sitting in the hall.”
“Mrs. Morgan is not there. No one is there.”
She pursed her lips at that. “I can only presume Georgiana would have called out if there was a problem.”
Yes, he supposed that was true. Unless she had been prevented. But no, she had quite a loud scream when she wished.
“There has been no sound?”
“Only of water being poured into tubs and someone humming.” She made a sound he interpreted as frustration. “You may turn around.”
He turned. Her spencer was in place, and her hair was twisted into something that could charitably be called a knot. She was flushed and furious and dripping onto the floor.
“We must get you out of here,” she whispered.
“The door is blocked,” he said. Did she not understand?
She turned to look at him with an expression that could have curdled cream. “Yes, Mr. Darcy, I am aware there is a door. I have been using it for weeks without incident.”
“Someone has secured it from—”
“The window.” Miss Bennet crossed to the far wall and rose on her toes to peer through the small window set high above the tub. Her shoulders sagged. “You would not fit. Perhaps you could lift me up and I could try.”
Darcy rolled his eyes. “A cat would not fit so small an opening.”
She was not listening. She had already hitched up her skirts, stepped onto the small wooden stool beside the tub, and from there onto the higher rim of the copper tub itself. It groaned beneath her weight and shifted on the floorboards with a sound that made them both freeze.
“Miss Bennet,” he said, exasperated.
“If you are about to tell me this is unbecoming, Mr. Darcy,” she whispered harshly, “I would remind you that you are standing uninvited in my bathing room.”
She steadied herself with one hand against the wall and reached for the window ledge with the other.
Her fingers found the latch. She pushed.
The window swung open perhaps eight inches before catching on a rusted hinge, and through the gap came the sound of gulls and the distant sea and the brilliant blue sky.
She put her head through. Then she stopped.
“It is . . . rather narrow,” she admitted, her voice slightly muffled.
“Yes.” Darcy said dryly.
“If I turned sideways—”
“You will not fit.”
“You do not know that.”
This was true. What he could see was Miss Bennet balanced on the rim of a copper bathing tub, one shoulder wedged in a window barely wider than a bandbox, her hair coming loose again and her feet braced against the copper with a determination that bordered, oddly, on the heroic, without a single moment wasted on panic or self-pity.
She turned sideways, and for one suspended moment Darcy believed, with both admiration and alarm, that she was going to prove him wrong. Then she stopped, pulled back, angled her shoulder another way, and pushed hard forward again.
“You are correct,” she said, still facing the outside world. “I do not fit.”
She withdrew from the window with as much grace as the operation permitted. She stepped down from the tub, pushed her hair from her face, lifted her arms to fix her coiffure, and met his eyes with a look of such composure that he almost believed she had not just been partway through a window.
He thought she was the most extraordinary woman he had ever met. He also thought the timing of this realisation was catastrophically poor.
One of her buttons was in the wrong hole. “I told you it was too small,” he said, and nodded at the misaligned button. She simply looked at him until he pointed at it and she looked over her shoulder.
Her face flamed red. Resigned, she turned her back to him. His fingers grazed the skin at the nape of her neck as he fixed it. Something electric travelled up his spine. He attempted to tell himself it was the same as correcting a button on Georgiana’s gown when she was small.
It was not the same.
“There,” he said, and stepped back. Two steps, which was one more than the room comfortably permitted, and his shoulder met the wall.
She crossed her arms over her chest and pointed with one elbow at the copper tub. “I would offer you a seat, but as you can see, there is only . . .”
Despite the situation, Darcy almost smiled.
It was an entirely inappropriate response, but what else could he do in the face of this absurdity?
He forced himself back to seriousness. He had walked into this trap like a man following a map someone else had drawn, and had then, as his own contribution to the scheme, locked the door.
“The boy lied,” he said, feeling quite stupid. “It was not a mistake. Someone wanted me to enter this room, not Georgiana’s.”
Miss Bennet went still. Her eyes, which had been blazing with fury, sharpened into something colder. “Someone?” she repeated.
A woman screamed, startling them both.
The scream had not come from inside the room. It came from outside, in the passage. But Darcy’s heart slowed when he realised it did not belong to Georgiana. His relief was brief.
“A man! There is a man in that room! I saw him go in!”
He closed his eyes. He had been caught in this room and now the trap was being sprung. When he opened his eyes a moment later, Miss Bennet was staring at him. Then she lifted her chin as the colour drained from her face. Her voice, however, was perfectly steady. “I know that voice.”
More screaming came, closer and louder. “Help! Someone help! There is a man in the ladies’ bathing rooms!”
Footsteps. Doors banging open. Voices rising in alarm and excitement and something that sounded horribly, unmistakably like delight.
“It is Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy!” A woman’s voice, shrill and carrying. “I saw his face when he entered Miss Bennet’s room! Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, in Miss Bennet’s bathing chamber!”
Miss Bennet’s countenance darkened, and she clenched her jaw. “That,” she whispered, “is Mrs. Younge.”
Darcy saw the moment understanding became devastation, could see it move across her countenance like a shadow. But then she straightened her spine, lifted her chin, and composed her features into something that might, to a casual observer, have passed for calm.
Her entire future had just collapsed around her, and she had decided to meet it standing.
“Miss Bennet,” he whispered. “I am very sorry. I will make this right. I swear to you . . .”
“Do not make promises you cannot keep.” She met his eyes, and for one moment the wit and the fury fell away and something raw and hollow appeared.
Someone was rattling the door. He had already unlocked it, so this was clearly for show.
“The door, Mr. Darcy,” she said. “It seems we have no choice but to open it.”