Page 2 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)

S hock, having taken hold, suspended even the silliest thoughts that were prone to arise in the mind of Miss Lydia Bennet of Longbourn, Hertfordshire.

She was acutely aware of the rumble of the wheels of the retreating coach, the low chuckle of the outrider, the subsequent chirping of crickets in the ditch, a few stars shining through the humid haze, and the throbbing in her rear from being thrown onto the hardened clay of the ruts in the road.

How long she sat slumped and uncomprehending in this state she could not guess, but eventually, outrage replaced shock, and she staggered upright and screamed at the top of her lungs.

After venting the worst of her rage in roars and unholy howls of indignation, she devolved into sobs, hiccups, and moans.

Lydia stood—alone—upon the London Road in the dark.

Surely, Wickham would come back for her, she began to reason, although reasoning was not her strong suit.

He could not be so lost to honour and duty that he would abandon a gentleman’s daughter in the wilds of West Sussex in the middle of the night.

Roughly two hours later, Lydia began to think that perhaps Mr Wickham was not a gentleman after all.

When he finally returned for her, she would tell him off at the top of her lungs!

This seemed a paltry punishment for what he had done to her, and yet, as she would be dependent upon him to restore her to Colonel Forster’s home, she could hardly tear out his liver with her bare hands.

The image of doing so, however, was quite sustaining.

Consequently, Lydia—thinking darkly of throwing George Wickham’s beloved Hessians into the fire, cutting his pomaded curls off his head as he lay in a drunken stupor, seeing him bound, pale and weeping, in a tumbrel headed for the guillotine, or paying a thoroughly disreputable sea captain to press him into the lower decks of a second-rate ship headed for Java—finally looked around her.

She could hardly remain standing in the road.

If the night mail were to pass, she would be ploughed down by a team of six at the gallop.

Perhaps the night mail would pass, she thought.

She would flag it down, and the passengers and coachman would all gather around her, and after hearing what had been done to her, they would support her as she limped aboard, make room for her to lie down on the forward-facing seat, ply her with biscuits and tisanes and the like, and drive her straight to the magistrate’s house in Brighton. Yes. This became her fixed plan .

And indeed, the night mail coach did come.

But it roared past her in a flash. She yelled and waved her handkerchief for nothing.

She may as well have been a cricket in the ditch!

She coughed for a quarter hour on the dust left behind and began to limp down the road.

By the time she reached the cross post marking the intersection of the London Road with the track to Cowfold, she had walked more than two miles.

She arrived at the marker—which she could only dimly make out on account of the gibbous moon making its way across the sky—with two blisters, a stone bruise, and the sole come halfway off her right slipper.

Sinking gratefully to the ground with the cross post supporting her back, Lydia felt around in her valise for an extra pair of shoes.

She knew she had not packed any, thinking her favourite and prettiest slippers were all she would need to be married in, but she looked anyway.

The night was mild, and she did not carry a shawl, but she had suffered a shock and naturally began shivering the moment she stopped walking.

There was nothing for it, she thought, but to put her second dress over the one she wore and to throw her nightgown around her shoulders for warmth; thus, dressed like the rag seller at the Hertford fair, she fell into a state between sleep and a swoon.

The sound of wheels and horse hooves on the road startled Lydia awake.

She saw by the lightening of the gloom that dawn was near breaking, and she stood up, anxious to hail the means of her rescue.

Oh, how her papa and her uncles would make Wickham pay for his infamy, she reflected with grim satisfaction.

Indeed, the morning had broken upon Lydia Bennet in an unprecedented state of flinty-eyed determination.

But these self-same eyes began to make out an approaching dray.

The driver and a man who sat next to him also began to perceive her, and something in the way they both came to attention alerted some instinct of self-preservation in Lydia.

She was already standing, but now she reached down for her nearly empty bag and bolted away into the adjoining field of half-grown barley.

Hampered by her nightgown flapping behind, she threw it off.

“Oy!” cried the carter. “Come back ’ere, partridge!” She heard both men calling after her with some appalling descriptions of what they would like to do when they caught her, and she stumbled pell-mell away until she was certain they no longer followed.

Defeated, she fell into the barley, thinking—like a girl of fifteen who had never had the slightest challenge in all her life—that she would be found dead in this pitiful field in a couple of hours.

The valise had been a casualty of her flight, as had her nightgown.

And so, after catching her breath, she arranged her dresses just so and tried to tuck up her hair in her poke bonnet.

Unfortunately, the wretched hat would not cooperate and, indeed, it was most uncomfortable for a lie down.

And so, she placed it on her chest, crossed her arms, and hoped her face was pretty in spite of all she had suffered, so that when she was found dead, someone would remark on her looks at least.

“Cor! ’Tis a twirl, John.”

Lydia awoke to see two men silhouetted against the morning light as they leant over and examined her.

“How’d she git in yer barley then?”

They seemed to puzzle over this and then jumped back as Lydia struggled to her feet and braced herself, fists forward, for a struggle. “I will scream,” she said through clenched teeth.

The older of the two shook his head bemusedly. “Daft is she, John?”

The younger man propped himself on his hoe and looked at her as if considering this question.

“I am Lydia Bennet,” she huffed. “A man I took to be a gentleman tried to—he pushed me out onto the road! And I wish to see the magistrate!” Lydia’s voice was defiant, but the shaking of her knees betrayed her.

“Daft,” the younger man concluded. “What do we do with ’er, Scoot?”

“Clear off!” commanded the elder man to Lydia. “Shoo!”

The two farmers, deaf to her screeches of protest, alternated between making herding noises and chasing her with their hoes until Lydia was routed back towards the menace of the crossroads.

She scuttled along in the ditch, wary of carts and drays, and hoped for a respectable looking coach to hail.

Ahead of her, she saw a scraggly hedge and thought to shelter in it while she waited for deliverance.

The day turned warm. Her second dress, now as filthy as her primary garment, had been pulled off and rolled into a ball.

Lydia regretted her valise, of course, and her bonnet.

Both possessions, along with her nightgown, were somewhere deep in that horrid Scoot’s barley field.

She was also, she noticed, as she felt around her head, missing some pins.

They must have come loose as she ran. She did what she could, which was not much, to straighten her hair and appear respectable for the respectable coach or curricle that would soon come down the road.

How grateful she would be to drink a pitcher of lemonade!

She was parched, she realised. Dying of thirst in the dirt, in fact, on the side of the London Road north of Brighton.

The mail passed, as did the Brighton stage, followed by the coach-for-hire posting down from London with private passengers.

After the first encounter, Lydia suffered no urges to hail them.

She had learnt that coaches with teams of four passed at speed and would as soon run over her as stop.

A single rider also flew past, an express most likely, but to him she would have been a blur.

Eventually, she saw on the horizon a promising vehicle, a perch phaeton driven by a smartly dressed man with a stable boy standing behind. She jumped to her feet from the shade of the hedge and ran to the middle of the road where she flailed her arms.

But, the man in the phaeton snapped his whip and neatly drove right round her where she stood in the road, while the hideous child on the back thumbed his nose and stuck out his tongue.

“Well!” she cried out at the retreating man.

Lydia, enamoured of soldiers, was often enough in their company that she could search around in her head for an epithet befitting the callous wretch who was now out of earshot.

“You hog-grubber!” she roared, cursing aloud for the first time in her young life.

Swearing at the top of her lungs offered no relief, however, and only made her throat drier than it had been.

And when her eyes swept downwards over her filthy dress and broken shoe, she realised that her hair was bedraggled, she had no bonnet, and she had slept in the dirt.

She wondered whether, perhaps, she had better not curse lest she convince passers-by that she was not really a gentleman’s daughter.

Considerably cowed by repeated signs of the heartlessness of mankind, Lydia retreated to her shelter in the straggly hedge and searched the sky for a cloud that would drop a little rain and quench her thirst. But the day was fair and dry.

She wondered, in a fatalistic and impartial way, whether she would be found shrivelled up—a bag of bones in a crisp casing of skin—all possibility of remarks on the prettiness of her face, gone.