Page 12 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)

METHODIST HOUSE, HORSHAM

T he girl in the cracked mirror of the dingy closet referred to as the women’s bathing room was a stranger to Lydia Bennet.

Her eyes, once dancing with mischief, were red-rimmed, sunken, and glittering.

Streaks of dirt and patches of grime disfigured her once pretty, heart-shaped face, and her hair hung in tangled hanks.

“What has happened to me?” she whispered.

“You have gone with the devil, Bennet,” Mrs Hart replied matter-of-factly. “Here.”

She handed Lydia a strange, close-toothed comb. Lydia turned it over and over in her hand and puzzled over it until the matron threw up her hands and said, “For the nits, girl.”

“Nits?”

“Crawlers. Surely you itch.”

Now that she mentioned it, Lydia did itch.

She had itched for days but she had also ached, shivered, and suffered severe pangs of hunger.

The worst of her miseries had simply prevailed over small inconveniences such as cracked lips and an itching head.

“Oh my lord!” she cried, clawing at her scalp as if a spider crawled in her hair. “Get them off, Mrs Hart! Get them off!”

“What nonsense is this? Be quiet, you dratted girl. There is a basin of water and a lump of soap. Wash yourself, and then I shall get someone to come and help with your hair washing.”

Lydia could hardly move. She felt as if legions of bugs marched across her skull, down her back, under her arms, and between her toes.

In desperation, she took a linen towel and wound it around her head to keep any creatures from migrating elsewhere, and then she took the rough cloth and the hard soap and scrubbed herself raw.

Mrs Hart returned with a bundle and a woman of indeterminate age, neither young nor old.

“This is Carver, Bennet. She will help with your hair and settle you in your ward. Carver, here are the scissors if it comes to that.” With that ominous statement, the matron left the room.

Lydia stared at the woman who looked back at her indifferently. “Right,” she shrugged, “I ain’t got all night. If we don’t cut it off, we will miss our supper.”

“Cut it off,” Lydia said with a whimper. “There are things in it!”

“You ain’t lying. Bend over the dry bucket then.”

The procedure was hasty and rough, but Lydia could hardly argue with the result.

Her head was relieved of its heavy burden of infested tangles and she felt clean—truly scrubbed—deliciously, stingingly clean.

The clothes she was given were also clean, and though her shift was made of fustian and coarse to the touch, she was glad of it.

After tying a grey linen scarf into a kind of pauper’s turban around Lydia’s shorn head, Carver helped her pull on a simple grey dress and handed her a white apron.

“Good luck keeping it white,” she grumbled. “Least ways, you ain’t got to wear the yellow here.”

“I look well in yellow,” Lydia said wistfully. “What is all this talk of a yellow dress?”

“In the parish ’ouse, whores wear the yellow. Heaps the shame on ’em, it does.”

“But I am not a—I am not that!” Really! All this talk of her being fallen, consorting with the devil, and lucky not to be put in yellow was more than Lydia could stand.

“No, countess. Ain’t none of us ever been whores,” snorted Carver. “Matron said to try these ’ere shoes.”

“Are there any socks?”

“Those as has socks ’ere make their own.”

“Oh,” Lydia said, eyeing the leather shoes that could be worn by any farm boy.

Well, she sighed, bending down to tie them, they were a sight better than ruined slippers, and they were only slightly overlarge.

Lydia’s accommodations were appalling, but she refrained from open complaint.

She had spent the night under Parch’s potato wagon in the mud, after all, and a straw pallet on the floor with a wool blanket and a roof overhead represented a step up.

It was, however, daunting to be stared at by half a dozen women as she came in the room.

They were all in various stages of undress, washing their faces and hands with water from a single bucket.

In the corner was another bucket, which Lydia eyed with suspicion.

The smell of the place was none too pleasant either, but her straw bed began to call to her, and she sank onto it in a heap of debilitated fatigue.

“N’other duchess, looks like,” said one of the women with a sneer.

“A countess to be sure,” replied Carver. “Not in the trade for long, I’d wager.”

“Long enough to get herself throwed in the trash heap.”

“So much for airs and graces. Thought she’d die of the louse, she did,” Carver snickered.

“I may yet die of the louse,” murmured Lydia in the hollow voice of those resigned to the hangman.

This observation struck everyone in the room as hilarious. They cackled and roared with laughter.

“Come along, countess,” Carver said with a chuckle. “You’ll want yer supper now.”

Lydia was so dazed that the hush that fell over the room where she was taken for supper—and the evaluating stares as she followed her ward mates to the queue—did not cow her.

Her awareness seemed to be hovering above the scene.

Some girl quite incidental to Lydia was being instructed on the manner in which she was to hold her bowl and spoon.

This girl was sat down with broth and a piece of rubbery cheese.

A hot, weak tea, with milk and a luxurious spoonful of sugar stirred into it, was put before her, and Lydia abstractedly drank down this nectar while someone read something from the Bible about Esau being horrid to his brother Jacob.

How she got to her bed that night she did not know.

She woke once in the night with a start, but she throbbed with fatigue, and after recollecting where she was and that she was not in immediate danger on the London Road, she fell back into unconscious sleep.

The following days were hazy parades through a simple routine.

She numbly went for a breakfast of porridge, was sat down at a long table to make gloves, and after a wearing six hours, sat down to a dinner of cabbage with bits of bacon and oat bread.

The women took turns relieving themselves in the communal bucket and then Lydia, being the newest inmate, was handed the bucket and shown the pit behind the house.

“Do we take turns?” she asked in bewilderment.

Carver, who had taken possession of Lydia as if she were a novelty, guffawed. “If you like, Bennie,” she said. “Beings as yer new, it’s yer turn.”

“I am to empty the bucket until someone new comes to the ward?” Lydia cried. “How often do you get a new person?”

Carver shrugged. “Sooner or later. What’s the fuss? A little slop bucket never kilt nobody. What did you think happened at yer palace of gold when the chamberpot was full? Some poor soul had to haul it away. ”

“But—”

“Hush. Matron don’t take kind to whiners. You could have your penny took fer it.”

After the ordeal of the muck pit, Carver led her back to the workroom where they made gloves for another four hours.

The women were ‘at liberty’ until supper, which was the unvarying broth and cheese, and then they were sent to bed.

If by ten o’clock a pin dropping could not be heard in the hall, the wards were collectively docked, and similarly, failure to send two bodies down to the pump for wash water at six in the morning was costly.

Never in Lydia Bennet’s whole life had she cared a fig for rules.

But the Methodist Workhouse rules were such that infractions cost the residents their wages, and Lydia began to pay close attention.

One penny was held back for minor violations, such as complaining, swearing within hearing of the matron, and jostling in the supper line.

Both pennies were held back for indecency, stealing food from another person’s plate, and for shoving fights.

Worse behaviour was rewarded with a push out the door.

And while the routine was simple, the rules were complicated, arbitrary, and numerous.

A woman could be docked for sewing mistakes, some comment that was misconstrued, a sour look, or forgetting to duck into a curtsey upon encountering the matron or master.

Speaking to any of the male lodgers housed in the opposite wing of the building was strictly forbidden, as was missing Sunday’s sermon and stepping out of the building without permission.

Anything constituting a variation in humble obedience could be deemed wrong.

Even petting a crying child in the hall, Lydia soon found out, was a costly error.

“Bennet, what are you doing?” Matron asked. She was a stiff-backed woman of fifty with a plain face and lips that never curled into a smile.

“This little monkey is very sad,” Lydia replied. She was in the corridor at the end of the work day, crouched down near a little boy of about three years old and playfully tapped his nose.

“And he is not yours to attend to. He should be in his ward where his minder can see to him.”

“But the poor little boy?—”

“You have just relinquished a penny, Bennet. You have stepped out of your place. Return to your ward.”

“A penny! But I was only comforting a child! I was being a good Christian, was I not? How is kindness a punishable offence here?” she demanded.

“Two pennies, then. You should soon learn not to argue with me.”

Lydia stood with her fists clenched and was strongly inclined to go into a rant, as she used to do when anyone at Longbourn crossed her.

But Mrs Hart’s steely stare seemed to wish Lydia would give them half a reason to evict her, and by the thinnest thread of self-control, she forced her eyes to the floor and curtseyed before fleeing to her ward.

Her letter home would have to wait another week.