Page 14 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)

METHODIST WORKHOUSE, HORSHAM

L ydia was still partly a child, and she was, as a result of not having fully hardened into adulthood, more resilient than she knew. She had begun to fit in without really thinking about it.

Several advantages began to show themselves to her as she adjusted to her new life. First, she had been taught to sew and had worked much more complicated, fiddly things than half shilling gloves worn by shop girls and governesses.

The work was not challenging. Sitting still, however, and bending over in poor light for the whole of a day was a trial.

More than once did Lydia think of jumping up from her bench and running out the door.

Only the remembrance of the terrors of the road, the weather, and unrelenting hunger kept her pinned to her place.

The aching in her back and boredom in her mind could only be countered by thinking, and for once in her life, Lydia began to think deeply.

She did not think about home in these silent hours lest she weep and stain the linen over which she huddled.

Instead, she contemplated her advantages.

Besides being able to sew, she had a second advantage she could clearly discern: that of being something like Carver’s personal token, and Carver was one of the half a dozen prevailing females in the place.

Sure, everyone teased Lydia and called her a countess because they thought she had been someone’s mistress.

And certainly, she was ridiculed for being used to much better than she was getting and for being naively stupid about poverty.

But no one ever dared mistreat her because Carver was squat, solid, and patently vicious when pushed.

Thankfully, Lydia found Carver rather more likeable than not.

She was blunt and honest, and she had a strict, understandable moral code that derived from having whored for money when she was young and deciding she would rather starve to death.

Carver’s backbone seemed unbreakable, and Lydia unconsciously emulated her mentor by trying to be a bit more stoic than she was brought up to be.

When she was not contemplating her luck in having snagged Carver as her particular sponsor, Lydia reflected that her upbringing as a gentleman’s daughter, while vastly impractical most times in a workhouse, also graced her with multiple advantages.

For one thing, she was educated—not extremely well but sufficient to be a veritable sage in comparison with her ward companions.

Her wisdom showed itself accidentally at first. Dora Jameson had been bemoaning her husband’s death in the war. “Stabbed, he was, by a Spaniard, so’s I’m told.”

“But we’s fightin’ the French,” Margaret Ferguson said with a snort of derision. “He weren’t in no Spain.”

“Napoleon invaded Spain and made it part of the French empire,” Lydia remarked offhand. “Portugal too. Half the army is in the Peninsula—that is Spain and Portugal.”

“Oh? And you would know, would ya?”

“Well, I did not really want to hear about it at all, if I am honest. But Papa would read to us from his newspaper at the breakfast table for ten whole minutes. He said he would be able to hold up his head in the neighbourhood if we were only half stupid.”

The members of the second wardroom fell silent and looked over at Lydia, who was trying to pare her toenails with the one pair of sewing scissors allotted to the house for grooming. Carver spoke first. “So’s the war’s more than agin the French?”

“Oh, the French are the enemy, of course. But they took Switzerland, trounced the Russians and the Austrians, and captured Portugal and Spain, and if we are not careful, Napoleon will have us too.”

“Lordy!” cried Dora. “I ’spose Bill died of a purpose!”

“He most certainly did, Dora,” Lydia said as she put on her newly constructed linen socks. “I suppose he killed a dozen Frenchmen and Spaniards before he was taken down. Sir William says one of our boys is worth twenty of theirs.”

Shortly after this, she was approached regularly by those who were not embarrassed to appear ignorant. Even Carver had asked her a question yesterday morning over porridge. “What’s the ’change, Bennie?” Lydia was ‘Bennie’ when Carver was feeling affectionate.

“Oh, do you mean the Exchange?”

“What I said, ain’t it?”

“Well, I do not really know very much about it except that is where a gentleman puts his money. Like a pool. Suppose we all put our week’s wages together in a box. Like that.”

“Why’d we do that?” Carver scoffed.

“I think it has to do with what the town men do with it. They grow the money and send the gentlemen the extra.”

“Huh?”

“Suppose we put our week’s wages in a box. And then we went out and bought eggs and butter and flour and made cakes with it. And suppose our cakes were really good and that the mayor’s wife had to have them, then we could charge a pretty penny for them. We would get back our wages and then some.”

“I ’spose…”

“And then we put back our week’s wages into the box and keep the extra to spend on ourselves. We then take what is in the box and go out the next week and make our cakes. The money in the box is our Exchange.”

“Well, I’ll be. T’would ne’er work though. We ain’t got no oven, nor do we know the mayor’s wife.”

“No, that was only an example. Suppose our Exchange was used to buy a bit of linen, and we made gloves in our spare time and sold them on the side.”

Carver shrugged. “With wat light girl? Spend all our pennies on tallow.”

“Yes, but the town men are very smart, and they think up schemes that do work.”

“Like wat?”

“I have no idea, Carver. Something to do with ships, I think, and the East India Company.”

Lydia sat thinking over her unlikely reputation as an expert as she hemmed the last seam on the first glove of the afternoon.

She wished she had paid much more attention to—well, to everything.

She wished she had read more books like Lizzy and flirted less.

Men, who had once been as irresistible as spun sugar comfits, were classed with the lice that always threatened to invade Lydia’s scalp again.

But, if she were not careful, her murderous thoughts of George Wickham would cause her to stab her finger.

Consequently, she thought of her other advantages, a curiously satisfying way to survive the tedium of her work.

In regards to her person, Lydia knew that her gentle upbringing gave her a much different idea of general hygiene than everyone else around her.

By comparison, she was fastidious, and she took her grooming seriously.

At Longbourn, she had been casual about these things.

She was pretty and she knew it, and what could rub the bloom off the rose anyway?

Having seen herself looking like a mole just dug out of the dirt, Lydia knew now that her genteel looks were easily lost and akin to currency, and if she did not want to end up a workhouse lodger for the rest of her life, she had better preserve what she had.

Lydia Bennet, of all the people in the world to work a flat iron, learnt to press her dress and her apron, and she did so with determined precision.

If she must wear a pauper’s dress, she would look well in it.

She went meekly to Mrs Hart and begged for scraps of linen for socks, and these she made carefully so the seams would not cut into her feet and make corns.

She combed for nits twice a day, fought with determination for first use of the water, and washed vigorously.

She had a sliver of wood from underneath the work table that she used every day without fail to scrape her teeth, and she was the only person in her ward to use the foul-tasting tooth powder provided by the house.

With the remaining linen scraps, Lydia fashioned her own gloves, which she used to empty the foul bucket.

She was careful to tuck up her dress and to wash the soles of her boots in the gravel by the pump after she had been out to the offal dump.

She rinsed the bucket until it no longer reeked, and after seeing wild mint growing at the edge of the muck pond, she brought sprigs of it back to the ward and crushed it into a small pouch made from floor sweepings and wore it around her neck.

Soon enough she had set a fashion. Everyone wore scrap gloves and carried mint sachets around their necks.

When Lydia once took a tiny bit of butter from her allotment at dinner and rubbed it on her hands before bed, everyone else took to applying this homely emollient to relieve their chapped skin.

Swiftly, Lydia began to think beyond these beauty rituals and to consider the state of her hair.

Had Carver sheared her with a dull sabre she could not have done a worse job.

Lydia’s hair was anywhere from half an inch to a spike of three inches long, all helter-skelter, and she began to look around her for a solution to this travesty of style.

Sally Watkins, a quiet lady of thirty or so, had decent-looking hair, and Lydia found herself increasingly jealous.

One day, after the first ward had passed on the communal scissors to the second ward, Lydia asked Sally whether she would give her head a little trim.

“Wat’ll you give ’er for it, countess? She ain’t yer slave,” challenged Carver, miffed that her handiwork was deemed insufficient.

“I shall tell her a story,” Lydia said unthinkingly.

Everyone in the room came to attention. A story seemed just the thing.

The day had been dreary, the light in the workroom dismal, the dinner mostly turnips and a meagre quantity of pickled pork, and no one’s spirits were high.

And so, as Sally Watkins carefully coiffed Lydia’s poor head, she told them how she had come to the Methodist Workhouse in Horsham.