Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The door opened, and Mr. Darcy stepped out first. Of course he did.
He put himself between her and the passage as though his broad shoulders alone could shield her from what waited on the other side, as though the simple fact of his body in the doorway might draw every eye to him and away from the woman behind him.
Instinctive. Gallant. And utterly, heartbreakingly useless, because Mrs. Younge had screamed Elizabeth’s name loud enough to rattle the windows, and every woman who took the waters regularly at Mrs. Lilly’s knew who she was.
“I must ask you all to return to your rooms,” he said, in a voice of immovable authority that probably worked perfectly on stewards and tenants and men who owed him money. “There is nothing here that requires your attention.”
Elizabeth peeked out through the gap between the hinges and the half-opened door.
A woman in curling papers smiled faintly from the doorway on the other side of the passage. “We are in our rooms, sir. Or very near them. You are the one who ought not to be here.”
Mr. Darcy did not hesitate. “Do not be alarmed. There is no impropriety—”
Elizabeth closed her eyes. Oh, well done.
“Sir,” someone said, with the feigned patience one might use on a child insisting he had not eaten the Christmas pudding though he was wearing it on his face, “people generally only deny impropriety when it has in fact occurred.”
Not true. But it might as well have been, for all the good the distinction would do her.
“I am not denying—” Mr. Darcy caught himself. “I am simply stating—”
“And if you are protecting someone,” another woman interrupted, far too brightly, “you are doing it in an extremely obvious manner.”
Elizabeth watched Mr. Darcy from behind the half-opened door.
He was trying, she would give him that. It had obviously not occurred to him that a hallway full of women in dressing gowns with the possibility of excellent gossip laid before them might not instantly obey his orders.
He had probably never failed to command a room in his life, and he had no idea what to do.
It was like watching a man attempt to argue with the tide.
Elizabeth knew more than Mr. Darcy about this, at least. There was nothing he could say to a gaggle of gossips that would not make everything worse.
Every denial would be a confirmation, every explanation a confession.
The only reasonable move was the one he seemed constitutionally incapable of making, which was to stop talking entirely.
He did not stop talking.
“If you would simply allow me to explain—”
“Oh, do,” said curling papers, settling against her doorframe awaiting the entertainment.
This was ridiculous. Elizabeth paused, relishing the final seconds of her life as she had known it, and then stepped out into the wreckage.
The little hall was full of women, some in dressing gowns, hair wrapped in towels, others clutching shawls, expressions caught between alarm and something far less charitable.
Mrs. Caldwell, who had shared a perfectly pleasant conversation with Elizabeth about summers at the seaside only last week, would not meet her eyes.
The older woman in silk nearest the staircase, Lady .
. . Something, swept her gaze from Elizabeth to Mr. Darcy and back again in a single, devastating arc, and Elizabeth could almost hear the scratch of the quill that would write the letter she was silently composing.
A stout woman in a dressing gown that had seen better days stood near Mrs. Caldwell, her mouth pursed in naked disapproval.
Elizabeth was fully dressed. Her gown was buttoned up. Her hair was pinned. The woman currently sitting in judgement of her virtue was wearing a thin cotton wrapper and one slipper.
Georgiana peeked out of her room across the hall. Elizabeth shook her head slightly and the girl retreated back inside.
She took in every averted gaze, every fascinated stare, every tightened mouth. There was no way to stop the scandal. But she could face it unashamed.
The proprietress Mrs. Lilly pushed through the crowd, arms spread wide. “Out! All of you, out! This is a respectable place of business, not a theatre!”
The ladies retreated, but not before they looked, and whispered, and looked again.
Then Mrs. Morgan was there. Jaw set, fury in her eyes. Mrs. Morgan had been drawn away somehow, Elizabeth had no doubt of that, for her companion would never have abandoned her otherwise. Now the formidable woman was realising that she had been tricked into leaving Elizabeth unprotected.
Mrs. Morgan did not look at Mr. Darcy. She stepped past him, took Elizabeth by the arm, and said in a low, firm voice, “Come with me, my dear. Now. Do not look at anyone. Do not speak to anyone. We are leaving.”
Elizabeth looked down. There was a scuff mark on the floorboards beneath her bathing room door.
It was fresh, pale against the darker grain.
The kind of mark a wedge might leave if kicked hard into place and then removed.
Lydia and Kitty had done the same to Mary once, when she would not play so that they could dance.
Mrs. Morgan began to walk, and Elizabeth allowed herself to be pulled along. Not because she was helpless, but because Mrs. Morgan was right. Every glance she returned, every flicker of emotion that crossed her face would become part of the story. Silence was the only armour that remained.
“Your sister is just across the hall,” she said to Mr. Darcy as she passed him. She did not look at him. She wanted to, but she did not.
Mrs. Morgan steered her through the reception area and out into the street.
The morning sun hit Elizabeth’s face like an insult, cheerful and golden and utterly indifferent to the disaster that had just occurred.
Mrs. Morgan set a pace that was brisk but not panicked.
Quick enough to outrun gossip, slow enough to avoid creating more.
Elizabeth was surprised to find that she was shaking.
She could not stop her hands from trembling, no matter how tightly she clenched her fists.
“I was called outside,” Mrs. Morgan said, her voice clipped. “A woman who had fainted. But there was no woman, and by the time I returned, Mrs. Younge was screaming.” She shook her head.
“It will reach Hertfordshire,” Elizabeth said quietly.
To her credit, Mrs. Morgan did not pretend otherwise. “It may.”
Elizabeth thought of Jane, who was so good, so wholly undeserving of the consequences a scandal would bring.
Jane, whose prospects were modest enough without her sister’s name becoming a byword for impropriety.
And Mary. And Kitty. And Lydia, who was scarcely more than fifteen but would feel its consequences all the same.
She had worked herself nearly to death to see them all through their illnesses. And now the lives she had saved would be destroyed anyway.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together and kept walking.
When they reached their lodgings, Mrs. Morgan poured tea and said, “Tell me exactly what he saw.”
“He saw me in my shift. Briefly.”
“And how long were you alone with him?”
“Perhaps five minutes. He attempted to leave straight away, but the door had been blocked from outside. He turned his back while I put myself to rights. I even tried the window.” A strange, bitter almost-laugh escaped her.
“I climbed onto the bathing tub and attempted to fit myself through an opening the width of a prayer book. So there is that.”
Mrs. Morgan studied her. “You are not crying.”
What she was feeling was beyond tears. “No. I am considering what Mamma will say.” Elizabeth drew a breath.
“She will be torn between horror at the scandal and rapture that the man in question is wealthy. The war between those impulses may grant me several hours of peace until she understands that such a man will never propose to me.”
“Even now you jest.”
She attempted to respond as she knew Jane would do, with grace.
But she could not. Her anger was building into a white-hot, trembling rage at Mrs. Younge, at Mr. Wickham who must also be involved, at the boy who had lied, at the rusted hinge that would not let the window open wider.
And even at Mr. Darcy, who had been so intent on playing his sister’s hero that he had not paused to note how peculiar it was that there was no attendant to stop him from entering or that Mrs. Morgan was not sitting in the hall between their rooms.
Elizabeth closed her eyes. “Humour is all I have left. The alternative is to weep.”
She had simply gone to soak in warm seawater, to share the morning with a friend, and then return to her lodgings feeling refreshed. And now she was ruined because Mrs. Younge and Mr. Wickham had conspired to manipulate Mr. Darcy’s love of and need to protect his sister.
Mrs. Younge had named her deliberately. Not merely a man in a lady’s bathing rooms, a cry which Mr. Darcy’s authority and wealth might conceivably have contained.
No, she had made certain to announce Miss Bennet’s room, spoken at carrying volume, twice.
Mr. Darcy had dismissed the woman without a reference.
She had nothing left to protect and had made certain Elizabeth had nothing left either.
She recalled balancing on the rim of that copper tub in a desperate attempt to fit herself through the tiny window, and the ridiculousness of the image was acute.
Then Mrs. Morgan spoke again, and her voice was different. Smaller. Stripped of its usual tartness. “I should not have left you.” She stopped. “If you are harmed by this, Elizabeth, it will be because you were under my protection and I allowed it to happen. I could not bear that.”
Elizabeth reached across and took Mrs. Morgan’s hand. “I see I must give you a similar speech to the one I delivered to Georgiana. You were deceived, just as Mr. Darcy was. Mrs. Younge fooled Mr. Darcy, fooled all those women, and she fooled you. That is Mrs. Younge’s responsibility, not yours.”