Page 1 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)
THE LONDON ROAD NORTH OF brIGHTON
T he coach had just passed the track that led to the hamlet of Hickstead when the trouble began.
Lydia Bennet had been chirping like an ecstatic bird, having run away from Brighton with George Wickham, lately of the ---militia.
He had some business in town, he said, and teased that he would be lonely.
They were at an assembly when he told her he must go, having just come out of the card room.
And Lydia, neither shy nor prone to think deeply, had giggled and flashed her eyes at him. “But why should you be lonely, Wicky?”
On a lark, she had packed her bag made of Turkish carpet and slipped out of Colonel Forster’s house just past dusk when the servants were all busy with lighting the lamps and her friend Mrs Forster was dressing for an evening out with her husband’s stodgy old friends.
Lydia had never been so happy in her life.
To elope! With Wickham! And what would her dear mama say when she heard that her youngest—the favourite of all her five girls—had married first?
“Can we not go any faster, Wicky?”
“It is dark, my dear.”
“And where shall we stop for the night? Oh, how much fun it will be to hear you tell the innkeeper that I am Mrs George Wickham!”
“I doubt I shall say so.”
“Not say so? But why will you not? I may as well be Mrs Wickham, you know. Mrs Wickham! How well that sounds! And how jealous my sisters will be. Lizzy will turn green, fly up to her room, lie down and weep, and demand a cold cloth for her head. But what will I wear? Mama always says the wedding clothes are the most important thing. Wicky, I must have wedding clothes.”
He took a swig from his flask and lit a cheroot.
“And where should we marry? I suppose we shall have to go to Gretna Green. I doubt the blacksmith will have seen a prettier girl than me this whole year. La! Is there anything more romantic? Scotland must be very cold even in summer. Oh dear. I wish I had brought my pelisse. But you can buy me one in London, can you not? Will it take very long, do you think? I mean, I have never heard how long it takes to elope…”
Lydia Bennet was a voluble girl and she unleashed her bouncing high spirits in a torrent of words.
George Wickham, who had taken her on a whim, began to wonder what the devil he had been thinking.
He had lost heavily at cards—so heavily in fact that he was compelled to ditch his lieutenancy in the militia in haste.
He had been plagued by Lydia Bennet since he first made her acquaintance in Hertfordshire.
She had followed him to Brighton and flirted with him outrageously, and he doubted he could shake her off if he tried.
He knew—because he had asked her—she had nearly five pounds to spend on holiday; so here he was, trapped in a coach with her for that paltry sum alone.
But the noise! Thinking only to silence her, he crushed his cheroot under his boot on the floor of the coach and reached for her.
Lydia Bennet was a girl with fixed ideas about what marriage, elopement, and such things were like.
She would be kissed, complimented, cosseted, and spoiled with presents.
Naturally, she would go out dancing as often as possible and decide on what was for dinner.
She would boss the servants, tease her husband’s friends, and generally do whatever she wanted to do.
So, when Wickham reached for her and began to kiss her, she was only slightly annoyed to have been interrupted in her conversation.
“You are very impatient,” she said, averting her face to catch her breath. “My goodness, but you are positively carried away! You should sit over there until I am called Mrs Wickham.”
Little could she know that this was just the irritant required to make Mr Wickham decide to be rid of her shortly after he ruined her.
He drank the last of the brandy from his flask, untied his cravat, threw it aside, and set upon her in earnest, determined to shut her up for once and punish her for thinking he would ever give his name to a penniless, jabbering nitwit with a large bosom.
When Wickham’s lovemaking became more assertive, Lydia began to protest. She did not prefer to be handled this way.
He answered her with a roughness she had never experienced in her life, much less expected of her dear Wickham.
Her temper flared even as he wrestled with the bodice on her dress, and she slapped him resoundingly on the cheek.
George Wickham had a temper of his own, and he slapped her resoundingly in return and, grabbing handfuls of her skirt, began to show her who was to be her master.
Lydia was not as terrified as she should have been.
She hardly understood what he meant to do to her, only perhaps vaguely realising that he meant no good by ripping her shift, and she was livid at this unexpectedly horrible treatment.
With her hands being uselessly pinned behind her back by his left arm, she fought the only way she knew how: she bit Wickham savagely on his exposed neck.
He roared in pain, grasped his bleeding neck with one hand, and flung her viciously away from him with the other.
Her back slammed against the forward wall with a thud, and the coachman, hearing the ruckus, pulled to a stop.
Before she knew what was up or down—for she was well and truly stunned—Lydia Bennet found herself on her bottom in the road .
“You…you!” she stammered, struggling unsuccessfully to stand.
She could see Wickham in the faint lamplight.
Still clutching his neck with one hand, he ripped open her reticule, crumpled her money into his pocket, turned her purse upside down to shower coins on the floor, tossed it and the valise out the door, and was gone.