Chapter Eleven A Practical Guide to Staking One’s Neighbours
Chapter Eleven: A Practical Guide to Staking One’s Neighbours
THE NETHERFIELD CARRIAGE had disappeared beyond the turn in the drive before Mr Collins returned to the drawing room.
Elizabeth had watched his conference through the window, observing the four gentlemen gathered under the yews while Mr Darcy conversed with her cousin and Mr Hurst guarded the path to the carriage.
Mr Collins entered, his self-importance struggling to re-establish itself after a severe fright.
Mrs Bennet demanded an account of Lady Catherine’s business.
He assured her that his patroness was in excellent health, refused to describe the conversation, and glanced at Elizabeth’s right hand before withdrawing to his chamber.
The omission was more informative than anything he might have revealed.
Mr Darcy and Mr Hurst had detected a significance in her hand before Mr Collins approached them.
Mr Collins had witnessed Mr Wickham touch that same hand.
Mrs Hurst’s fingers had felt cold enough to drive him away, Mr Wickham’s eyes had turned black, and Mr Darcy had referred to an old grievance after staring at Elizabeth as though he had found the gentleman’s signature on her skin.
Taken separately, each incident invited a rational explanation.
Collected together, they had conspired against reason.
Mr Bennet entered the hall carrying his hat and walking stick. “Sir William has requested my opinion on a matter concerning the parish road, and I have been unable to invent a convincing illness.”
Elizabeth followed him before he could escape. “May I use your study while you are gone, Papa?”
He paused with one glove half drawn over his fingers. “You may use every book in it, provided that you do not improve their arrangement. I know where everything is because nothing has moved since your birth.”
“I am seeking a rational explanation for something that bothers me.”
“Then you have chosen the wrong room. Most of my books are in French, and the English ones contradict one another.” He pulled the glove into place and studied her face more closely. “Is this explanation likely to damage the furniture?”
“I hope not.”
“Your mother would prefer certainty. She forgives intellectual confusion more readily than scratches.”
Hill opened the door for him, and Mr Bennet stepped out into the cold morning. Elizabeth waited until his horse had been brought around, then entered the study and closed the door.
The familiar room had never appeared secretive before.
It contained Mr Bennet’s desk, two leather chairs, and shelves burdened by years of purchases made without any obligation to improve their owner.
Books on history and philosophy occupied the easiest reach, while theology, antiquarian studies, and agricultural promises had migrated near the ceiling.
The highest shelves carried a layer of dust thick enough to preserve evidence against anyone who disturbed them.
Elizabeth began with the reference works.
She searched through apparitions, spectres, revenants, and walking corpses before finding vampyre, an entry so brief and dismissive that official English knowledge appeared to regard the subject as an embarrassing Continental habit.
The belief belonged chiefly to Hungary, Moravia, and neighbouring lands, where the dead were accused of leaving their graves and consuming the vitality of the living.
This was inconvenient. Mr Darcy belonged to Derbyshire and had not, so far as Elizabeth knew, left any grave at all.
The reference directed her to several names, and Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary proved the easiest to find.
His discussion was more entertaining than useful.
The genuine blood-suckers of London and Paris were financiers, brokers, and men of business.
“These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces.”
Elizabeth lowered the book.
Netherfield was certainly agreeable, and Pemberley might qualify as a palace to anyone not born in one.
Mr Bingley, however, had neither the concentration nor the malice required to impoverish a nation through finance.
He would forgive a debtor before the man had finished apologising and probably lend him the sum again to relieve the embarrassment.
She returned Voltaire to the desk and inspected the upper shelves.
Calmet’s formidable Dissertations on apparitions and the vampires of Eastern Europe stood between a collection of sermons and a treatise promising improvements in the cultivation of turnips.
Elizabeth dragged the steps, climbed until her head nearly touched the ceiling and drew out the volume.
Dust descended over her sleeves, the sermons, and several generations of neglected agriculture.
Calmet proved exhaustive. He presented magistrates, soldiers, surgeons, villagers, corpses, graves, and blood, then arranged their testimony so carefully that the absurd began to acquire official seals.
His vampires were men who had been dead for months or years and yet “come again, walk about, infest villages, torment men and cattle, suck the blood of their relations.”
Elizabeth read the passage twice.
Mr Wickham had certainly walked about Meryton and might yet infest it, although the officers and young ladies appeared willing to assist him.
His interest in her hand had been unmistakable, but he had not attempted to suck the blood from any of her relations.
Mr Collins had accompanied them throughout the visit and was, by every visible measure, unsucked.
Further accounts described corpses exhumed after several weeks and found undecayed, flexible, and full of fresh blood.
Some had a ruddy complexion, while others had grown new hair and nails.
Mr Darcy was pale, rigid in manner, and scrupulously groomed.
Mr Bingley had a fresh complexion, but it seemed uncharitable to attribute amiability to recent burial.
The recommended remedies were more decisive than the evidence.
Suspected vampires were dug from their graves, pierced through the body, decapitated, and burned.
Several allegedly groaned when the stake entered them, which witnesses accepted as proof that the procedure had been necessary rather than evidence that it had been extremely painful.
Elizabeth rested her elbows on the desk and pressed both hands to her forehead.
A wooden stake offered the advantage of certainty only after making error impossible to correct.
If she drove one through Mr Darcy and discovered that he was an ordinary gentleman with peculiar habits, an apology would not restore the acquaintance.
Calmet refused to settle the question. He weighed fraud, fever, premature burial, panic, and physical corruption against official testimony, then left his reader to determine how many magistrates were required to make a corpse credible.
Elizabeth closed the volume with greater force than respect for scholarship demanded.
Tournefort’s Voyage into the Levant occupied another upper shelf.
His account of a supposed Vroucolacas on Mykonos began more promisingly because the author treated the islanders’ terror with scepticism.
A murdered peasant was believed to have returned after burial, entering houses, overturning furniture, extinguishing lamps, and assaulting the inhabitants.
The locals exhumed him, employed a butcher to remove his heart, and created such confusion that the smell of corruption, and burning incense persuaded many witnesses that smoke rose directly from the corpse.
Tournefort’s conclusion restored Elizabeth’s spirits. He and his companions “believed it to be very thoroughly dead.”
At last, an author capable of recognising death when it lay open before him.
Unfortunately, the dead man continued to be blamed for damaged roofs, broken doors, emptied vessels, and nocturnal attacks.
The heart was burned without improving his conduct, and the town descended into such terror that families abandoned their homes.
Tournefort considered the panic a disorder of the imagination.
Elizabeth agreed with him, but agreement provided no explanation for Mr Wickham’s black eyes or Mrs Hurst’s hand.
Mykonos had contained a decomposing corpse and a frightened population.
Hertfordshire contained several cold people and Mr Collins, which was not the same arrangement.
She discovered Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer on a lower shelf, less dusty than Calmet and considerably more dramatic.
The dead Oneiza appeared with “livid cheeks, and lips of blue,” while a brightness more terrible than death occupied her eyes.
The resemblance to Mr Wickham was not exact, yet Elizabeth felt the cold trace of his mouth against her hand as she read.
The remedy in Southey was immediate:
Thro’ the vampire corpse
He thrust his lance.
The creature fell, howled, and released the demon inhabiting it. Oneiza’s true spirit then appeared, beautiful, innocent, and inconveniently separate from the body which had just been pierced.
Elizabeth closed the poem. Southey had at least committed himself to an answer, although his solution required a lance, a demon, and the ability to distinguish a beloved woman from the malignant creature wearing her corpse. None was readily available at Longbourn.
By the middle of the afternoon, Mr Bennet’s desk had disappeared under books.
Dust streaked Elizabeth’s sleeves and one side of her face, while the study steps were stranded before the upper shelves.
She had acquired vampyre, oupire, Vroucolacas, and several methods of mutilating the dead, but no explanation which survived comparison with Netherfield.