Chapter 10 #2
“I will be well.” He stopped on the front steps and said, “I wished to tell you, as I informed your father, that I would like to formally call on you, court you with the goal of, hopefully, marriage. However, I feel that I must focus on Wickham first. He has been a thorn in my side for years, but I do not wish him to be a thorn in every Bennet’s side as well.
I have consulted with your father, and I have learnt what steps your father has taken to alert the good folk in and around Meryton.
But it will take some thought to plan the next steps, and it may take time to accomplish those steps.
In the meantime, if you need to reach me for any reason, your father has agreed to send messages to me at Netherfield, or to my valet, Wilkins, who will best know how to get word to me. I will be merely three miles away.”
Elizabeth could not convince her body to respond correctly.
She trembled and grinned rather than curtseying and murmuring warm words of understanding and acceptance.
She opened her mouth in an attempt to say something—she rather hoped to say something appropriate, and if not that, perhaps something witty.
But instead she just gave a little gasp while her warming cheeks must have been blushing quite vividly.
Watching her with one of his most inscrutable smiles, Mr Darcy said, “I believe I have robbed you of the ability to speak!” He reached out and took her hand, giving it a little squeeze.
Somehow that gesture reactivated her brain, and Elizabeth arched one eyebrow. “I imagine, sir, that you enjoyed that prospect, but I assure you that I generally do not remain silent for long.”
“I would not have it any other way,” he murmured, and he brought her hand up to his lips for a kiss. “Goodbye for now, Elizabeth.”
“Goodbye, Mr Darcy.”
“Might you call me Fitzwilliam?” he asked. “At least when we are alone?”
“Good night, Fitzwilliam. And thank you for rescuing me from Mr Wickham. Again.”
That night, Elizabeth went to bed quite early, curling up with her father’s copy of Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.
She felt quite different about bedtime of late because she still shared a room and bed with Jane—but now that she was seeing Jane with a different perspective—in part, through Darcy’s perspective—she no longer felt comfortable telling her sister her every thought and dream.
Before reading the poetry, Elizabeth contemplated the fact that she had apparently misunderstood Jane’s motivations and, indeed, her character…
her entire life. After giving it some thought, she realised that when she was very, very young, just toddling around in a gown and leading strings, Jane was already wearing miniature dresses, behaving beautifully, and being incessantly praised by both parents for her pretty speeches and perfect manners.
In contrast to Jane, young Elizabeth had been louder, bolder, and far more active.
Those characteristics seemed designed to earn parental scolding, not praise.
She was too young to interest her father with her wit, certainly way too young at that point to indulge her father in all his favourite activities—literary analysis, debate, chess—and her mother seemed to be continually vexed with her.
So she had needed her older sister’s affection.
She had viewed Jane as practically perfect because she used her admiration for her sister in exchange for Jane’s attention. She had believed Jane to be steady and kind because she had needed her to be so.
That night, as Jane climbed into bed, her face was lit in a smile that seemed as gentle and loving as ever.
“Good night, Lizzy. I hope you have the sweetest of dreams!” she said, her voice sounding affectionate.
Jane pinched out her own candle and turned with her back towards Elizabeth, apparently assuming that she would stay up to read as usual.
“Good night, Jane. I hope that for you, as well,” Elizabeth whispered, and, lying on her side so that her book lay in the circle of light from her own candle, she began to read:
The rose is fairest when 't is budding new,
And hope is brightest when it dawns from fears;
The rose is sweetest washed with morning dew
And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.
That night Elizabeth did not have the sweetest of dreams. Instead, she had another disturbing dream about Mr Wickham.
This time she was not trying to protect her sisters from him, but Mr Darcy.
Somehow, Mr Wickham had locked both of Mr Darcy’s wrists behind his back using metal rings, and had bound his ankles tightly together using rope.
Mr Darcy was saying her name, quite calmly, “Elizabeth. I need your help, please, Elizabeth.”
But Elizabeth was a victim of the strange physics only found in dreams. She could hear Mr Darcy, and unfortunately she could hear Mr Wickham, as well, who was taunting him by calling him “Fitz” in the most juvenile manner.
She tried to move towards Darcy, tried to speak to him, but her legs were slowed down as if she was moving through jelly, and her voice was distorted and made so quiet she was certain that the men could not hear her.
She watched in horror as Mr Wickham approached his prisoner with a large knife—and as she made one more valiant effort to aid Darcy, she woke up.
The feeling of her heart hammering almost distracted her from an odd sound—odd, at least, in the dead of night. Elizabeth breathed shallowly but carefully, willing her body to calm, and she listened carefully for sounds not made by her own laboured breathing.
There was a sharp whisper. It must be Lydia and Kitty, Elizabeth was sure. That was not terribly strange, even so late, but the answering whisper sounded desperate. “Please, Lyddie. Please!”
She grabbed her wrapper and tied it around herself as she opened the door, peering in the direction of the voices.
The shock of seeing Lydia fully dressed, even in a pelisse and bonnet, in the middle of the night meant that she had to speak up, waken everyone, alert her parents, certainly, to whatever was going on here.
She said, “Lydia Bennet, where do you think you are going?”
Lydia gave a cry of disappointment, but she lifted her chin and said, “I am in love with Mr Wickham, and I am determined to marry him!”
“And yet he has no desire to marry you,” Elizabeth said flatly.
Lydia, of course, was already opening her mouth—no doubt to claim that he had proposed—so Elizabeth continued before her sister could protest, saying, “As you know, from what Papa has said about Mr Wickham, he promises marriage and proposes to young ladies, and then he ruins them and leaves them. He is not in the least honourable.”
Mr Bennet, his eyes looking unfocused without his spectacles, shambled out of his bed chamber to frown at his daughters.
Mary came out from her room and stared a stern judgement at her youngest sister, and Mrs Bennet, the last on the scene, looked to be so shocked, she neither spoke nor fluttered her handkerchief.
Speaking more harshly than Elizabeth had ever heard him, Mr Bennet said, “None of my daughters are going to marry Mr Wickham, and I declare that none of you shall even speak to him, if I can help it. Now, Lydia, have you been communicating with this reprobate? Notes passed secretly, something of that sort?”
Lydia looked as if she would not answer, but then she glanced around the little circle of her disapproving family, and she blushed in apparent shame.
But, Lydia being Lydia, she still managed to lift her chin defiantly and insisted, “Yes, because that mean old Mr Darcy has made it impossible for poor Mr Wickham to call and court as a man should, so my dear Wicky has had to slip me some notes to express his enduring love for me.”
Their father simply stuck out his hand, clearly demanding the most recent note, or perhaps every secret note that Mr Wickham had penned.
Apparently, his lack of words made the quiet insistence more compelling, and Lydia just stared at that hand and finally took a folded paper out of her reticule and placed it in Mr Bennet’s hand.
He looked at it only briefly and then crumpled the note into a ball. “And how did these notes come to you, and how did you respond to them?”
“Abby, the vicar’s daughter, would come and knock at the kitchen door, and ask for me.
I—I told Hill that we were working together for the parish poor.
Abby would hand me a bundle of fabric, with a note inside, and I would read it, write an answer, and then fold that answer into a garment I had finished.
The little clothes I sewed really did go to children in need, Papa. ”
Elizabeth watched her father’s surprise that fourteen-year-old Abigail Raymondson would be roped into a note-exchanging scheme with a rake.
She reminded herself, Wickham likes ‘em young, and she shook her own head in despair over the possibility that Mr Wickham was toying with Abby’s happiness and reputation… hopefully not her ruination!
“Well, young lady, you have proved yourself too young to be out,” Mr Bennet said, “and you shall not even walk into Meryton nor attend calls with your mother for a month complete; of course functions such as assemblies are wholly out of the question for the foreseeable future. I want you to know that there will be a maid in your bedroom every night and a footman under your window; I will take from your future dowry the extra expense of having to employ servants to guard you. There is no possibility that you will sneak away, even if I have to install metal bars in your window and keep you in your room under lock and key.”
Elizabeth finally noticed that the only family member not attending to the little drama in the hallway was Jane.
Intensely interested in her elder sister’s response to this further revelation of the depravity of Mr Wickham, she turned back to their shared room and cast her dark-acclimated eyes to their shared bed.
Her first thought was that Jane had not stirred from her sleep. But then she realised that the Jane-shaped lump in their bed was made up of—pillows!
She popped back into the hall, where her father was grasping Lydia’s elbow and walking her towards Lydia and Kitty’s room. Mary had disappeared, and Mrs Bennet was clutching her lace-edged handkerchief and mumbling fretfully.
“Jane is missing!” Elizabeth announced to her family.