Chapter One #2
Truly, there had been a number of reasons why she had denied Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal, but she had come to regret the fact that she had done so.
Mr. Darcy, upon reflection, had begun to seem to her not so very bad at all, and perhaps even rather good, and perhaps even a man she might have been able to fall in love with.
She had refused him, and she had not been kind about it, and she often turned the matter over and over in her mind and wished she could have known then what she knew now and made some other choice.
Perhaps not to accept him outright, perhaps not that, for there were other objections to the man.
For one thing, he had declared that she was “not handsome enough to tempt him” to dance, which settled rather strangely against his declaration when he proposed to her, that he ardently loved and admired her.
For another, he had separated her dear sister Jane from a man she truly had fallen for, Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Darcy had bragged about it, calling it a triumph.
Of course, he claimed that was only because he thought that Jane did not have any true feelings for Mr. Bingley, and Elizabeth supposed she might be inclined to believe his motives were good ones.
So, perhaps she could have said she needed time to think about it, instead of outright telling him that she would not marry him if he was the last man in England or something of that nature. She did not remember her exact phrase, but she knew it was dreadful.
At any rate, Mr. Wickham had fueled her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and now she knew that Mr. Wickham was a snake of a man, and she told Lydia this when Lydia teased her about Mr. Wickham.
For Lydia thought that Elizabeth still had feelings for Mr. Wickham, and since he was not engaged to be married to anybody, that Elizabeth would wish to continue to flirt with the man, and Lydia was not at all shy about saying this, both in private and in public, in front of positively anyone at all.
Elizabeth took her sister aside and said she had learned things about Mr. Wickham that meant he was not a man to be trusted. She did not give Lydia specifics, for she knew better than to think her sister could keep such information quiet.
And, indeed, Lydia could not keep it quiet.
Lydia went directly to Mr. Wickham and wanted to know what absolutely terrible things he had done, and Mr. Wickham was all innocence, but Elizabeth saw his expression when he looked at her, saw that he was not at all pleased that she would be spreading anything negative about him.
And soon after that, one evening, she had very little to drink and she nodded off anyway.
Elizabeth thought that Mr. Wickham put laudanum in her drink on purpose, as a sort of revenge for whatever it was she had said, but she had no proof.
She remembered that night, that she had fallen asleep in a chair in the sitting room while the men were playing loo, and she remembered Lydia laughing over her that she’d drunk too much.
She remembered Lydia and Mrs. Forster saying they would help her to bed.
She remembered fighting them off and limping off to her bedchamber, falling down on top of the covers, still dressed, and then…
The next thing she knew, she was waking and there was a body settled heavily against her own.
She was sluggish as she tried to struggle.
A thick male hand went over her mouth, whiskered lips against her jaw, liquor-laced breath blowing over her face. “It’s all right, Lizzy, it’s all right. Almost there,” said a deep voice. “See? It’s nice, hmm? You don’t mind a bit. I think you like that, do you not?”
Which was when she realized her skirts had been lifted, that her legs were bare, and that the man on her was having his way with her like that.
“You do like it,” he told her. “I’m going to take my hand away, and you’re not going to make a bit of noise. Nod if you understand.”
She had not nodded. She had gazed up into the eyes of Mr. Wickham as he huffed and wheezed over her, and she had been horrified.
But when he stopped, he did take his hand away, and she was too shocked to cry out.
He stumbled off of her, and she lay there, watching him leave, hearing the door shut, and she tried to tell herself that it hadn’t happened at all, that it had been a dream.
She tried to convince herself of this in the morning, when there was tenderness between her thighs and his awful leavings leaking out of her. She washed it all away, thinking to herself it was only a dream, that it must be a dream.
And then, weeks later, when her bleeding didn’t come, she tried to tell herself that wasn’t to do with that.
Sometimes her bleeding was late. Sometimes she skipped months.
She wasn’t entirely certain how it was that babes were gotten upon women, but she knew it had to do with the parts of their bodies that had been engaged with each other in the awful dream—the not-dream, if she was honest with herself—but even so, it had been such a long time ago, and she had convinced herself not to think of it.
She could have said something, she supposed.
But what?
She did not know how to speak of it. She could not confide in Lydia of all people, and she was not close to Mrs. Forster, and it went without saying that she could not explain it to a man, like Colonel Forster.
Besides, Elizabeth had an idea of what would happen if she did tell someone.
They would make Mr. Wickham marry her.
But she could not bear the idea of marrying a man who was so vindictive as to trick her, to drug her, to take her will away, to use her, and all to punish her because she had tried to protect her sister from him.
Her sister who was rather close in age to Mr. Darcy’s sister, the very young girl Mr. Wickham had debauched.
She would not be married to a man like that.
What Mr. Wickham had done to her already was very bad, but it was at least over now, and she was not going to subject herself to a lifetime of the man.
Of course, it also really wasn’t over.
She was with child.
After another month went by and she did not bleed and she began to feel ill in the morning, she knew it was true.
But she didn’t know what to do. She thought it was rather ironic that she had been concerned about Lydia ruining the family’s reputation, when here she was, with child, with no husband, and when that was discovered, it would be she who destroyed the Bennet family.
Truly ironic, yes.
And to think, if she had never said a thing to her father about this, she could have been on holiday with her aunt and uncle, even then.
Instead, the hot sun rose over the sea in Brighton, and Elizabeth was nothing but despair.