Chapter 38
Redbourn Heath, the following morning
Elizabeth woke to the loss of one pain and the discovery of another.
For several seconds she did not know where she lay.
The ceiling above her was low and discoloured, crossed by one dark beam from which old cobwebs hung in grey threads.
The air smelt of limewash, straw, damp wood, and the faint sourness of the pail in the corner.
Then memory returned entire: the lane, Mr Wickham’s smile, the hand upon her jaw, the sack, the cart, Mr Kerr’s voice at her ear.
She closed her eyes.
No.
The word did not alter the room. It only steadied her enough to open them again.
Her hands remained bound before her, not so close as to numb the fingers, but close enough to make every motion clumsy.
Her ankles had been untied, and no cord held her to the wall.
She could stand, cross the room, and reach the door; she could not use either hand properly, nor move without the constant scrape of hemp against skin.
That, she observed, meant they preferred her inconvenienced to maimed.
It was a narrow distinction.
She sat up slowly. Her head ached where the sack had pressed her hairpins against her scalp.
She reached up. Her pins were gone. So were the combs.
Part of her hair had loosened in the night and lay against her neck; the rest clung in a spoiled twist that pulled whenever she moved.
Someone had searched her while she slept.
The shuttered casement stood too high for her to reach without dragging the pallet beneath it, and the pallet was too low to promise much advantage.
The door had been made of old planks, thick and badly planed, with a narrow hatch cut into the upper part.
The hatch was shut. A line of light showed where it did not quite meet the frame.
Elizabeth tested the knot at her wrists with her teeth and gained only a taste of hemp and dust. She stood very still until the first wave of despair had passed.
A foolish heroine in one of Lydia’s admired horrid novels would have sunk upon the pallet and expired becomingly. Elizabeth had never seen the advantage of expiring where there was bread within reach.
She crossed to the pail and attended to necessity with as much dignity as a locked room permitted.
When it was done, she washed her fingers from the basin, though the water had already taken the taste of the room.
She drank next—three careful swallows. She waited to see whether her stomach would revolt.
It did not.
She took two more.
The bread lay hard upon the stool. Yesterday she had despised it. This morning she broke it, found it coarse and stale, and ate every crumb she could manage. Strength, she told herself, had never yet been improved by disgust.
When she had finished, she sat upon the pallet and listened.
At first there was little to hear. A bird scratched at the thatch. Somewhere outside, a horse stamped and blew through its nose. The cottage creaked once as the day warmed its old timbers. Then came a man’s step across the yard: light, irregular, familiar enough to make her hands close in her lap.
Mr Wickham.
Another step followed, heavier and slower. Mr Kerr.
Elizabeth slipped from the pallet and moved as near the door as her bound hands and care allowed. The lower plank was warped; between it and the sill ran a narrow darkness where sound entered better than light. She lowered herself to the straw, turned her cheek from the dust, and listened.
“You must not smile when you leave it for him,” Kerr said.
Wickham laughed softly. “My dear fellow, I have been smiling upon ruin since I was fifteen. It has served me admirably.”
“Not to-day.”
A pause followed. Leather creaked. Paper rustled.
“You have made it very solemn,” Wickham said. “Had I known you possessed so clerical a hand, I should have put you to copying billets-doux long ago.”
“Read it again.”
“I have read it twice.”
“Then read it a third time.”
The paper sounded once more. Wickham’s voice altered, took on an affected gravity, and carried just clearly enough through the door.
“Mr Thomas Bennet is required to place ten thousand pounds in Bank of England notes, wrapped in oilcloth, beneath the third milestone upon the St Albans road by twelve o’clock three nights hence.
He will come alone. He will speak to no magistrate, officer, neighbour, servant, or relation.
If any alarm is raised, or any man follows the bearer, his daughter’s safety is forfeit. Lord Julian is not forgotten.”
Elizabeth’s breath stopped.
Ten thousand pounds.
The sum stood before her not as money, but as impossibility. Longbourn’s books, her father’s careful columns, rents, economies, repairs deferred, timber counted, fields calculated to the acre: all rose in her mind and broke against that figure.
Then the name came after it, quieter and no less strange. Lord Julian. She knew no Lord Julian. She had never heard her father speak the name. Yet Mr Kerr had set it at the end of the demand as if those two words alone would open some locked chamber in her father’s memory.
Wickham continued, lighter now. “There. Horrid, plain, and quite persuasive. Though I still maintain that a little mention of beauty imperilled would improve the effect.”
“You will deliver the words written.”
“And if Mr Bennet refuses?”
“He will not.”
“You have a higher opinion of paternal affection than most fathers deserve.”
“He will not refuse.”
The certainty in Kerr’s voice disturbed her more than Wickham’s levity.
Wickham made a sound of amusement. “You want him bent.”
“I want him to remember.”
Elizabeth heard a sharp movement, then a small thud, as if a hand had struck wood very near the door. She drew back.
Kerr’s voice came lower. “Your money depends upon obedience.”
“My money depends upon success. Do not mistake me. I shall carry your demand to Longbourn, and Mr Thomas Bennet shall have a wretched morning.”
A horse shifted outside; metal rang lightly against a buckle.
“You will ride by the lower road,” Kerr said. “You will put the letter into his hand and be gone before the house is properly stirring.”
“The house has stirred, I dare say.”
“As it should.”
“And Miss Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth’s name in his mouth made the small room contract around her.
“She remains here.”
“In your custody.”
“Yes.”
“A dangerous trust.”
“To whom?”
Wickham laughed again, but uneasily. “To us all, perhaps. She has eyes enough for two judges and a tongue sharpened by affection.”
“Her tongue is of no consequence behind a barred door.”
Another pause. Elizabeth could picture Wickham adjusting his glove, restoring the negligent grace that had once seemed charming because she had not looked beneath it.
“Take care, Kerr,” he said. “She is her father’s daughter.”
“Is she?”
The reply held no humour, and Wickham did not laugh.
“I shall be back before night,” he said. “If fortune smiles, with Bennet already half dead of terror.”
“Fortune has smiled upon you too often. Do not depend upon her.”
“My dear Kerr, I depend upon other men’s vices. They prove far steadier.”
Boots crossed the yard. The horse gave a short snort; leather pulled; the saddle creaked under his weight. Elizabeth stayed still, every sense drawn to the sounds beyond the door. Wickham spoke once more, farther away.
“Do not let her charm you into mercy.”
“Go.”
The horse moved off at a walk, then quicker over hard ground, then quicker still until the sound thinned beneath trees and vanished.
Elizabeth remained on the floor. Her cheek had gone cold where it touched the plank. Ten thousand pounds. Her father alone. No magistrate, no servant, no neighbour. A name she knew not—Lord Julian.
She sat back slowly and pressed her bound hands together until the cord bit. Her father would think of her.
That was the worst of it.
A shadow crossed the line beneath the door.
Elizabeth rose at once and moved back towards the pallet, but the cord scraped against the boards. The sound, small as it was, filled the room.
The bar lifted. The door opened.
Kerr stood on the threshold with a knife in one hand.
Elizabeth looked from the blade to his face. “If you mean to frighten me, sir, you have chosen an unnecessary instrument.”
“Your wrists,” he said.
She did not move.
“I do not intend to cut you.”
“How reassuringly narrow your intentions are.”
His expression did not alter. “Hold your wrists out.”
Elizabeth held out her hands. He crossed the room and set the knife beneath the cord. The blade touched her skin, cold enough to make her fingers tighten. One turn, and the hemp gave.
She drew her hands back slowly. Red marks circled both wrists.
“The door remains barred,” he said.
“I had not mistaken this for liberty.”
His gaze moved once over her face, then to the empty stool and the pail.
“You will have water again before noon.”
“How generous.” Elizabeth looked towards the pail. “And that?”
A muscle moved once in his jaw.
“Set it by the door.”
She did not move. “I am newly restored to the dignity of hands, sir. I would prefer not to carry it while you stand there observing.”
For a moment she thought he would refuse. Then he stepped back into the yard and pulled the door nearly closed.
Elizabeth took the pail by its handle, set it just inside the threshold, and returned to the pallet.
Kerr opened the door only far enough to take it.
“Water before noon,” he said.
The door closed. The bar dropped into place.
Elizabeth waited until his steps retreated. Then she rubbed life back into her fingers and began again with the room.