Page 15 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)

Lydia was not a careful person. Her history proved her to be heedless at the very least. But some instinct of intuition told her that, while she could tell true stories all day long, she really should not disclose anyone’s real name.

Bad enough they all knew who she was, Lydia did not feel she had the right to tell anyone her oldest sister was Jane Bennet or that Charlotte Lucas had married Mr Collins.

Her friends and loved ones did not deserve to be dragged into the workhouse alongside her.

With this in mind, she began her first story, deciding that George Wickham would be ‘John Wickstead’ and that Longbourn was to be ‘Longbridge’, Jane would be ‘Julie’, Lizzy would be ‘Ellen’, and so on.

Other names would be adjusted as she went along.

Her imagination, after all, was not an insufficient instrument, nor was she ever at a loss for words.

The description of evil Mr Wickstead pushing her bum-first from the coach and stealing her fortune of five whole pounds proved to be absolutely riveting.

For the first time since her travails began, Lydia felt that every single word she uttered was wholly believed.

When they blew out the candle, she felt her head and thought she must look much better, and she felt a surprising burst of warmth—of security.

Her ward mates believed her! She was surrounded by seven people who deplored what Wickham had done and did not scorn her openly for being ruined .

The following morning during the washing up and dressing ritual in the grey light of morning, Carver said to Lydia, “Did ye really not know, Bennie, what that man ’ad in his mind?”

Lydia shook her head. “He tried something rough with my skirts I did not like. I have no idea why.”

“Relations he were after.”

“What are ‘relations’?” Lydia asked. The occupants of the room howled for some time, but that evening, they collectively explained in gross, embellished detail, everything she could possibly wish to know about relations, and a great deal she would rather not have known.

“Do you mean kissing is like the aperitif?” she asked in horror.

“The wat?”

“Like the soup course, before the fish comes out?”

This was not language much understood, and Carver impatiently said, “’Tis the door, countess. If you let a man have a kiss, may’s well ’ave open’t the door.” She looked suggestively towards Lydia’s upper thighs. “To yer skirts.”

“Good lord. No wonder there is so much talk of kissing being sinful, and why Li—Ellen and Julie scolded me so.”

“Bit him for it, didn’t you,” Dora said with dark amusement.

“I did that,” Lydia chuckled. “I drew blood like a vampire.”

“A wat? ”

Lydia was grateful to turn the conversation away from lurid descriptions of coupling, and she spent the evening regaling her friends with a bone-chilling story her father had read from a book of German lore.

Scaring the livers out of her audience rendered Lydia a great favourite, but she became a high celebrity at the Methodist Workhouse when she began to tell stories that included descriptions of the meals served in the various estates and genteel houses.

Lydia recounted Sir William ‘Jones’ worn-out stories of going to Saint James’s Palace, and her audience became giddy as she described what he had likely been served. “Oh, I am sure there was a heavenly syllabub,” she said, “and maybe a floating island or a blancmange of fresh raspberries.”

Everyone begged to know: How did such a syllabub taste, and what was a floating island and ‘that blayman’?

Ne’er heard of it. Lydia took pleasure in describing her mother’s fit of nerves at the Sunday table when Charles ‘Bunting’ had up and left ‘Norrington’, leaving poor Julie to be laughed at for disappointed hopes.

This was a strangely benign memory, happy even.

Such a trifling it all seemed compared to what could really happen to a person.

Dora’s husband had been killed, and she had been tossed out of her lodgings without even her shoes.

Gentle Sally had been beaten nearly to death by a man for her meagre purse, and Maggie had a four-year-old boy in the children’s ward that she could not see more than ten minutes a day.

Carver had been used pretty unsparingly for a few years in a room above a tavern on the edge of Horsham, and Meg’s whole family died of cholera in the year six.

She looked around her at faces that had become a bit dear to her, and thinking to please them, she said, “If I recall, we had a goose that day. Mrs ‘Hillbury’ could roast a bird to make your mouth water for days. And as it turned on the spit, the goose fat dripped into the pan with the potatoes and made them turn golden. Being winter, there was no salad of course, but we had pickled peas with French sauce, and of course, a soup of creamed parsnips—the little ones, not the old ones thick as your arm.” Anyway, in the end, with her mama “waving her handkerchief and moaning about being forced into the hedgerows by the entail, we had an apple compote.”