Chapter Seven
ELIZABETH COULD NOT believe that Caroline had gone to Mr. Darcy, but then she should have expected it, truly.
Of course, this would be what Caroline would have wanted from the beginning.
This was perfect for her, every night at Pemberley, sharing the dining room table with Mr. Darcy. It was everything she had ever wanted.
“He does not know you are here at all,” said Caroline to her.
And of course he did not know, because Caroline would not wish any hint of her former rival in the man’s vision, even if there was no way that Mr. Darcy might ever want Elizabeth now, and even if Caroline did not even know how close Elizabeth had come to being Mr. Darcy’s wife.
Caroline continued, “I did not wish to give him any hint that might tarnish your reputation or to damage the future of my little niece or nephew you are growing.” She smiled. “So, you will have to stay out of sight.”
They had to repack their trunks.
Caroline and Louisa had maids who helped them, but Elizabeth was obliged to do it on her own, for—though Mrs. Birch had obliged her in the first place—Mrs. Birch was busy with other duties to get them all free of the house. Elizabeth dared to say that Mrs. Birch would be pleased to bid them adieu.
Elizabeth then had to carry her own trunk, for the maids weren’t inclined to help her, and Caroline and Louisa weren’t either.
Perhaps carry was the wrong word. Drag was what she did.
Stooped over, hunched, her back screaming at her, until there were twinges in her stomach that alarmed her, and she stopped, the trunk halfway down the stairs.
She leaned into it, heaving out noisy breaths, holding it on the steps, and she simply stayed there, until the twinges eased.
She waited.
Mr. Birch must come along, she thought, or someone else must come along, see her, and insist to go after Mr. Birch.
But time passed, and no one came by at all.
A yell from out of the house carried in, Caroline’s voice. “Oh, Eliza, where are you?”
Elizabeth gathered her voice. “I am having trouble with my trunk.” There. They would be ashamed of themselves, leaving a woman who was carrying a babe all alone to bring her trunk down the stairs. They would send someone to help.
“Well, if you could make haste?” called Caroline. “We are eager to be on our way.”
Elizabeth had a choice now, she knew. She could ask for help. She could admit that she could not do this on her own. She could lower herself and make herself vulnerable in front of Caroline.
Or she could drag the trunk herself.
She chose the latter.
Luckily, the twinges did not return, and then she wondered if she would actually like to lose the babe, if that wouldn’t actually be the best thing that could have possibly ever happened to her at this juncture, in fact.
She scolded herself for thinking such a thing, but… well… she could not deny that if it happened, she would be both sad at the loss of the child, who she had already grown attached to, and also very, very relieved.
When she got to the carriage, everyone was on board. She dragged her trunk over, and the maids were sitting on the back. She could not lift the thing onto the rack beneath the carriage. She looked up at the driver, who took pity on her, hopping down to take it from her and put it on the carriage.
Then, Elizabeth climbed into the carriage with Caroline and Louisa.
“Finally,” said Caroline.
“Whatever kept you?” said Louisa.
Elizabeth balled her hands up into fists. She wanted to explode, but she kept it in. She realized, however, that she would not be able to keep it in forever. Eventually, this explosion would happen, and it would likely be at a point when she least wished it to happen.
THE DOWER HOUSE was vast compared to the cottage they had come from, but Elizabeth’s presence must be kept entirely secret from everyone, even the servants who would be serving them here.
They had been spared a cook and a maid of all work, both of whom were on loan from Pemberley, and who would, Caroline said, gossip if they found out about Elizabeth.
Therefore, Elizabeth would be required to do quite a bit for herself. She would have to empty her own chamberpots and fill her own wash basins, to change her own bedsheets, and to stay entirely out of sight, at all times the servants were about.
Caroline said that the maids would help her, but Elizabeth well knew that neither Bessie nor Jennifer would be inclined.
It was not until the next morning that Elizabeth realized that there had been no provisions made for her to eat.
She was meant to stay in her room at all times when the servants were in the house. They came over to sweep, see to the fires, make food, and things of that nature, and then they left in the mid-morning. Elizabeth came down, famished, and there was nothing.
She said to Caroline, her voice low and even, “I cannot very well grow this child if you starve me.”
Caroline realized that she had miscalculated. “Oh, dear.”
Louisa rolled her eyes. “You didn’t think about feeding her? That is exactly like you. All you care about is having your dinners with Mr. Darcy, and here we all are, in service to your scheme, Caroline.”
“I shall say that we need extra for Louisa, that is all,” said Caroline. “I shall send Bessie over for something now.”
Bessie returned, just a little while later, with only some bread and butter.
Elizabeth was very hungry. “This is not enough.”
“Did you not explain that Mrs. Hurst was quite hungry?” said Caroline to Bessie.
“I thought,” said Bessie, “that a bit of starving might do her good, to teach her the wages of her sins.”
Caroline pressed her lips together. “Well, in the future, Bessie, I should like you to remember that what you should do is less thinking and more obeying. But there is nothing for it now.” She turned to Elizabeth. “You will have to make do with that for today.”
That was Elizabeth’s breakfast and luncheon, and she felt dizzy when she climbed the stairs to her hidden room later, as the rest of the company were dressing for dinner.
In her hidden room, the fire had gone out. She was obliged to sit up and get it going again. Her stomach was growling. They must bring her something back from the dinner, she thought, something substantial.
But they did not.
She roused herself and came down to meet them, and she asked immediately about food.
“Oh, dash everything,” said Caroline.
Louisa cringed. “We were distracted by the promise of Miss Darcy’s playing, I think. I did think of it, Elizabeth, I promise that I did. I shall send Jennifer over this time.”
Elizabeth could not help it. She was very tired and very hungry, and had been recently uprooted twice—once to the cottage and secondly to this dower house. The cottage had been a better situation for her than this, which was proving utterly dreadful. She began to cry.
“Excuse yourself,” said Caroline in a severe voice. “It will not do to fall apart in public.”
She was right, of course. Elizabeth nodded. Tearily, she said, “Pray, excuse me,” and she left and went upstairs to her room.
There, she lay in the darkness, the fire of the fireplace waning yet again, for what seemed a very long time.
Finally, there was a knock at the door. It was Louisa. She had brought a plate of food, everything from dinner—meat and potatoes and yams and dinner rolls, all of it.
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth.
“Yes, I had to go myself,” said Louisa. “I went to the kitchen and said I was with child and quite hungry and they gave me whatever I asked. Jennifer was worthless. What have you done to turn both of our maids against you?”
“Nothing,” said Elizabeth. “Well, just gotten myself with child, I suppose. They think I am sinful.”
Louisa sighed. “I see.” A pause. “I shall not be able to do this every night. And neither Caroline nor I can come up with a plausible reason to have an entire dinner delivered here every night.”
“Well, we are here because of me,” said Elizabeth. “Because of this babe. I must be fed.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Louisa.
But Elizabeth wondered if Louisa cared overmuch about the babe. Maybe if Elizabeth lost it, she would be happy enough with the situation. And Elizabeth had wanted to lose it as well, but not this way, not this slow and awful way. She must eat.
CAROLINE’S SOLUTION WAS to make sure there was extra food for breakfast and luncheon and to say that Elizabeth must make three meals out of it, which Elizabeth did, as best as she could.
The days settled in a routine. She would wake, and the servants would be in the house, and she would not be able to draw attention to herself. She would have to wait to build up the fire in her room until they were far enough away that they would not notice.
Then, shivering, she would get up and work on that.
She kept a bit of food in her room from the night before to eat just as she woke up, or she would be famished.
She would alternate between eating and working on the fire.
When she had a nice blaze going, she would pull a chair up, wrap herself in a blanket, and read the morning away.
She had a good supply of books here, that was the only good thing about the dower house. It had a small library which was well stocked, crowded with book shelves, each filled with a number of books.
She reread all sorts of classics, poems and plays from ancient Rome and Greece.
And she read Evelina. She read Pamela. She read The Scottish Chiefs and The Lady of the Lake.
She escaped into worlds where things worked out, where there was sense made of suffering, where the guilty were punished, where the righteous were rewarded.
And then, when she must come back to reality, she had to fetch her own water—discreetly, so what she tended to do was to take a bit of water from all the other water basins—and then dump her own chamberpot out a window where no one would notice it.
Finally, the servants would be gone, and she could go to the kitchen and put together her own meals for the day.
Much of it was cold meats and bread, some cheese, and a few fruits.
It was enough to keep her alive, to give her sustenance, and to keep the babe in her growing, but she could not think it was the best way for her to be eating while increasing.
However, she must do as she must, so she did not complain.
In the afternoons, she was allowed to be in the sitting room with the Bingley sisters, but she was often just as happy to go back to her room and read, and they were just as happy to pretend she did not exist.
Once, in the afternoon, she slipped outside when they were not looking.
She did not go towards the main house of Pemberley, though she had seen it when they had come to the dower house, seen the stately enormity of it through a window and thought that she could have been mistress of this, and that if she had, she should never have been in Brighton with Lydia, and she should never have been taken advantage of by Mr. Wickham and none of this would have happened.
She wished for a bit of fresh air. She always had liked her walks, and she went into the wooded area nearby, walking along a path, and she tried to clear her head, to remind herself this would not last.
This was miserable. She was little better than a servant, truly, for she must see to herself entirely.
Her hair was a rat’s nest. There was a tangle in the back that she could not get to, no matter what she did, and she needed someone else to get it out for her, but she had no one to see to her, so she kept braiding it in such a way that no one would see the tangle, and then doing her best to work at it, intermittently, while she was reading.
She liked to tell herself that it was getting smaller, but the truth was that it worsened every night when she slept on it, and that all she was doing was getting it back to the same size each day.
She was not really getting enough to eat, but she was surviving, she reminded herself.
And it would have been miserable in any case.
True, if she could have been here with her aunt, it might have been more bearable, but it was never going to have been good to be carrying an illegitimate child in hiding.
She tried to look forward to the future promised her by Louisa.
Well, not promised, actually. The possible future that might be yanked away from her at any time.
However, it would be good if she could stay with the babe, in an out-of-the-way country house somewhere, have all the moments with her child that a mother might have, seeing her first steps, hearing her first words, playing dolls with her, watching her run in the summer sun, all of that.
Of course, it might not be much better than this, in some ways. She would practically be a servant. She would not be able to tell her child that she was her mother.
It went through her, then, the way it sometimes did, the force of all of this.
How her entire life had been destroyed in one moment, and that Mr. Wickham had no care over it.
He had done it for pleasure or for vengeance, but how could this be worth it, what he’d done to her, how could she have ever hurt him so badly to have taken her entire life?
She had to pause and hold onto a tree for a moment.
But then it was simply too much. She could not handle thinking like that. So, she distracted herself, but not with something pleasant. She distracted herself with a half-formed set of questions she had not really allowed herself to think through, for she knew she would draw horrifying conclusions.
Elizabeth was not being attended by anyone at all. No midwife was coming to see how she was doing or how the baby was progressing. Caroline could have asked for one for her sister, but she had not.
And Caroline had not remembered to feed Elizabeth.
So, it stood to reason that Caroline had not even thought about what would happen when it was time for the babe to come, when Elizabeth would go into her labors. Elizabeth rather expected she might be doing this all on her own.
She could say something now, she supposed, and she should, but she was loath to do so. For some reason, she did not want to beg any more assistance of those women, especially when it was clear they did not wish to assist her. She was an annoyance to them both.
That was when Elizabeth looked up and saw him, Mr. Darcy, on the path ahead.
He was walking towards her, but his head was down.
She thought of calling out to him, telling him that Caroline Bingley was keeping her hidden away in the dower house where she was going to birth Mr. Wickham’s child.
No, God in heaven, she never wanted Mr. Darcy to know that.
Instead, she darted away, quickly, out of sight.
Mr. Darcy looked up at the movement, brow furrowed, searching the area with his eyes, but seeing nothing, he shook himself and continued to walk.