Page 11 of Old Boots (Pride and Prejudice Variations #3)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I saw nothing at all amiss with Miss Bennet. In fact, I admired her and held her in the highest esteem. When her sister mournfully referred to the changes wrought on her by their situation, I did not understand.

“What has it done to her?” I asked.

Miss Elizabeth glanced appraisingly at me, but I sensed she had come to the end of her confession.

“I suppose you know more than I what the assumption of responsibility at too young an age does to a person. Besides, I have said too much already. To be overly confiding is cloying to one’s listener. No, no. Do not disagree with me, Mr Darcy.”

I smiled at her and gave her the privacy she demanded. We had come to a high spot and looked dispassionately at the scenery below. Our conversation had been too fraught to allow us to become poetic about the landscape.

Bandit sank down in a patch of grass and panted loudly while Miss Elizabeth walked a short distance away from me. At last she returned and offered me the ghost of a smile.

“Perhaps you would relieve my embarrassment if you now became overly confiding with regard to your sister.”

My turn had come to hedge. I rubbed my neck in discomfort and took a few paces towards the cairn which marked the hill’s zenith.

“Pardon me, I should not have asked that of you,” Miss Elizabeth said quietly, speaking to my back.

I turned and faced her. “The subject is painful, and I am habitually closed-lipped about it, but I trust your confidence as you have trusted mine. The case with Georgiana, you see, is exactly that of your own sister’s.”

“What? How can that be?”

“I do not exaggerate. She nearly eloped with a fortune hunter, only he would have married her, and in doing so, he would have plagued me and tortured her for the rest of our lives.”

“There seems little difference in our circumstance to be sure. We would both have been made utterly miserable and gossiped about in perpetuity. But how did your sister meet such a man? My mother was never vigilant, but surely Miss Darcy had better supervision?”

“The lady I hired as her companion was known to the villain. Mr Wickham conspired with her, undoubtedly for profitable gain, and when my sister went on holiday, he followed her and was given free access to her by the woman I hired to keep her safe.” I absently snapped a dead twig off a scrubby dogwood and tossed it down the hill.

"You are likely wondering what my sister was thinking to allow herself to be courted without my knowledge, but you see, the man was the son of my father’s steward and had known Georgiana all her life. ”

“What a vile trick! I suppose you killed him for it.”

“I certainly wished to, but my sister’s reputation was my first concern. I could not risk having it bandied about that I duelled with her seducer.”

“I suppose not. But how did the plan not succeed? It sounds as though it was a very close-run thing.”

“It was as close in my situation as your having the headache in your sister’s case.

I had a cancellation in my plans and some intuition drove me, I suppose.

Do not laugh—I cannot account for it otherwise.

On a whim, I went to Ramsgate to surprise Georgiana and to take her out to the shops or wherever she wished to go. ”

“Did you find this man in her parlour?”

“She confessed to me her plan to elope with him. He had been my childhood companion, and my sister did not know I knew him for a degenerate as he grew up. She expected me to be delighted and to convince him of my sufficient approval to allow for a respectable wedding.”

“Your poor sister,” she said. “You must have been incandescent with rage.”

I could not help turning back to look at her and was on the verge of saying I had behaved with great control. But in truth, I suppose I had turned purple with fury.

“I am sure I was. Georgiana nearly fainted when she discovered that her supposed friend was a rake and a scoundrel.”

“At least she was remorseful. Lydia became recalcitrant and would not admit her mistake. The more we tried to make her see the degree of her folly, the more stubbornly she clung to her feelings of injustice. She positively raged at my father for interrupting her happiness.”

Bandit rescued us then from our mutually awful recollections. He stood, shook himself, and tentatively wagged his tail.

“I see you are ready for more exercise, sir,” I said, and thinking to relieve Miss Elizabeth of some of the oppression of memories her disclosures had likely stirred, I spoke with specious condescension. “Take my arm. There are some loose stones just there.”

She huffed playfully and said, “Perhaps you should take my arm, Mr Darcy. I have walked this path in all weather and even well after dusk. Besides, should you stub your toe for lack of familiarity with this path, you will further scuff your boots.”

“What a shrew you are to bring up that painful subject,” I said, but I claimed her arm with the confidence of a gentleman, and she relented sufficiently to turn Bandit’s lead over to me.

“How did your sisters come to be sent to school?” I asked, after a suitable interlude in which we walked briskly downhill.

“Jane made the decision. She was, up to the time of my mother’s death, the gentlest, least polemic girl ever born.

Nothing undid her faster than conflict. But she found herself thrust into the role of matriarch.

My father had descended into a nearly irretrievable melancholy, and Jane was left to manage Lydia, who stormed and threw tantrums at any form of restriction applied to her.

Kitty, torn to pieces between Jane and Lydia, began to pretend to be ill just as our mother had done, and Mary fell ill in earnest. I suppose I was of some help to Jane, but in truth, I was so angry at how broken my family had become, I had to be tiptoed around lest I erupt.

“With the greatest reluctance to burden him with our troubles, Jane wrote to my uncle, Mr Gardiner, in London. He was my mother’s brother, and he is, if I may say so, a reliable, respectable man. We put Lydia at Mrs Trencher’s in Bath.”

“Did you?”

“I assume you have heard of it.”

“I have.”

Mrs Trencher had made a reputation for herself as a lady who found husbands for the girls enrolled in her school, whether they were ill-favoured, dull-witted, or stained in their reputations.

Her bridegrooms were usually widowers in need of mothers for their children, or men who were equally ill-favoured, dull-witted, or also stained in their reputations.

I had heard the only qualification Mrs Trencher required of her students was a guaranteed dowry of three thousand pounds.

“If you are wondering how we provided for my sister’s dowry, my mother’s legacy provided each of her daughters one thousand pounds.

Jane and I gave up our portions because Lydia must marry, or she will surely ruin us.

And until she is settled, she must be looked after by someone who shares her ambitions for a match. ”

“And your other sister?”

“She is also in Bath, but at Mrs Spencer’s Academy. Our hope was that in separating them, Kitty might find her way. ”

“Has she?”

“It is still too soon to tell. Jane would never say so, but she believes she failed us by being unequal to the job of repairing my sisters’ characters.

She grieves over it, and is, as you see, as humbled by her guilt as my father is by his remorse.

The end result for Jane is that she has given herself over entirely to the task of caring for my father almost as a penance. She has even resigned never to marry.”

For some reason, Miss Elizabeth looked at me carefully as she told me this, and so I replied with reasonable assurance, “The right man might change her mind. Besides,” I continued somewhat philosophically, “some semblance of her former self may rise up over time. I can attest to this phenomenon. We are given perhaps more than we can manage, and we stagger under the load, but sooner rather than later, we take it on and are made stronger for it. We begin to find a way forward as ourselves—as who we were born to be—rather than who we are expected to be.”

Was this, in fact, what was happening to me? Was this newfound self, this devil in me that tormented Miss Bingley and befriended persons that were considered below me by my friends and relations, the resurgence of the carefree, ungovernable young gentleman I used to be?

“Huh!” I blurted out.

“Pardon me? ”

“Oh, I only had to clear my throat.”

“I have forced you to talk more than you usually do.”

“You have forced me to do more than that, miss.”

The lady was, by degrees, regaining her sense of humour. “I?” she scoffed. “How have I forced you to anything? Just what do you accuse me of, sir?”

“You have forced me to pay attention to a dog that should have been left in the river.”

“Had you truly meant that, I would have to cut the acquaintance.”

“You know I do not. But he is certainly a dog I would never deign to notice. How did he come to impose himself on your sister?”

“He arrived on our doorstep as a half-starved handful of fur on the day of my mother’s funeral.”

“Dear me. I suppose Miss Bennet had been so consumed with her duties after your mother’s death that she did not know what to do with herself. Did this mongrel become the new object of her concern?”

“I failed to mention it was sleeting that day.”

“He made himself irresistible by being pitiful.”

“If I knew Bandit to be intelligent, I would accuse him of that. But I believe it was a simple case of fate. Besides, Jane believed he would grow into a lap dog.”

“Did she not make note of the size of his paws?”

“She was too busy cooing into his little puppy face, sir. The thing is done. He is ours now, and believes himself to be the best thing that ever happened to our family.”

Rather than begin to wonder whether he was the best thing that ever happened to me, I changed the subject, and we spoke of a wide range of topics that were neither painful nor revealing until we reached Longbourn.