Page 3 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)

L ydia had been jolted, thrown, frightened, and tested by the elements, and by late afternoon she was once again in a half swooning sleep.

A donkey braying directly in front of her roused her with a heart-pounding start, and only after blinking hard to clear her vision, did she become aware of a cart passing by her hedge.

The driver was bent, solitary, and smallish.

If he were to try something with her skirts, she thought she could knock him to the ground, and so she staggered out to the road just in time for him to see her from the corner of his eye.

“Whoa, hey,” he said to his beast. When the slowly moving cart came to a stop, both man and donkey swivelled their heads and blinked at her with slightly rheumy eyes.

“Pray, stop,” she squawked. “Might you have some water or anything to drink? I need you to take me up in your cart.”

The man shrugged his rounded shoulders and pointed his long crop at the back of his cart. “They’s a pump at the Red Lion,” he growled.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr?—?

“Parch.”

Lydia scrambled into the cart, loaded with sacks of what might be potatoes. Did he say Perch or Parch? She could not tell. She would call him Parch because she was so thirsty. “Thank you Mr Parch,” she said.

He ignored her and drove on.

“I am a gentleman’s daughter,” she croaked from the cart.

“I was—a man I took to be a gentleman—” Pointless!

Parch was not listening, and her tongue was too thick and sticky to use properly.

She adjusted herself upon the multiple lumps beneath her, pulled her knees up to her chest, and put her face down to shade it from the late afternoon sun.

Eventually, Parch’s donkey pulled them to a stop. “Where are we?” she asked faintly.

“Cowfold. Red Lion.” He pointed his whip, and Lydia looked around at the yard. A few boys bustled about with random shouts. Barrels, horses, and the splash of buckets in the trough meant civilisation to Lydia. I am saved , she thought.

“Thank you,” she said, scrambling from the cart.

She gathered her dignity, straightened her dress, and limped around to the front door.

Unfortunately, her plan—of presenting herself to the notice of the innkeeper, asking for pen and paper and for a note to be sent, requiring a room, a bath, and a meal to be arranged on the expectation of her uncle’s arrival from London to pay for, in effect, her rescue and restoration to genteel comforts—was thwarted by a stout man at the door.

He spun her around before she said a word and pointed towards the kitchen, and then he sent her that way with a tap to the head and a half-hearted shove.

Lydia was sorely tempted to shriek and fly at this horrid person with her fingernails unsheathed.

However, she was terribly thirsty, and she had grown a little fearful of rough men.

Thus, she stumbled towards the back door to which she had been so rudely directed.

A child was plying the pump, and when he had filled his bucket, Lydia cautiously approached and asked whether she might have a drink.

He pumped the handle twice, and she drank from the cup of her hands.

When he teetered away with his bucket, she pumped for herself until her thirst was relieved.

She then washed her heated, dirty face, dried her hands on her skirt, and then went resolutely to the door of the Red Lion’s kitchen.

Lydia was met by a short, solid woman with iron grey hair who looked her up and down and said, “Well?”

The smells nearly overset poor Lydia. Her stomach clenched and rumbled, and her mouth watered even as she spoke. “I have fallen on very hard circumstances, Mrs?—”

“Cook.”

“Mrs Cook, I am a gentleman’s daughter?— ”

Mrs Cook, or whatever her name might have been, snorted and said, “Not hiring scullery.” She abruptly turned towards an enormous pot to poke at something inside it with a large wooden spoon.

“I am not looking for employment, Mrs Cook,” Lydia said, now on her dignity. “I only ask whether I might beg a piece of paper and ink and for a note to be sent.”

“Don’t cater to beggars. Now git.” The woman looked up from her pot and examined Lydia head to toe once again. Not appearing to like what she saw, she flapped her apron and bellowed, “Tom! Put down that bucket and fetch Ned.”

The suspicion that ‘Ned’ was the same man who had so recently shoved her caused Lydia to retreat swiftly back to the yard. The only security to be had was Parch’s potato cart, and there she went, scrambling up and crouching with the potatoes in a protective curl.

When Parch returned to the cart, he hoisted out a second bag of potatoes, scowled at his parasitic passenger, shrugged, and then ambled across to the kitchen.

At the door, he engaged in a transaction with the stonyhearted Cook.

She took his potatoes, handed him a few coins from her apron, and disappeared back into the kitchen.

Parch leant against the wall and waited until the boy, Tom, appeared from within and handed him a small parcel wrapped in a scrap of brown paper.

Lydia sat up and stared as Parch wandered over to a bench near his resting donkey, opened his parcel, and began to eat what appeared to be an end of bread with cheese and cold meat. She scrambled down and hungrily approached the bench. “I have not eaten since yesterday,” she said pre-emptively.

“Nor I,” he said thickly as he chewed.

“But I am very hungry,” she whined.

Parch shrugged. This seemed to be his universal response to everything, but to this gesture he added a terse observation.

“Who ain’t?” he said, before turning back to his meal.

Lydia watched in agonised fascination as he neatly disposed of first the meat, then the cheese, and finally the bread.

When he got to the last bite, he begrudgingly threw the crust at Lydia and stood up.

This mouthful was insufficient to fill Lydia with everlasting gratitude, but she managed to refrain from complaint lest she alienate the one person in the whole world with whom she could ally herself.

“Goin’ fer ale,” he said. “Keep yer eye on Bill.”

“The donkey? What am I to do with your donkey?”

“Don’t let ’em tease ’im.” He gestured at the stable boys, and with that, he went into the inn, presumably to the taproom, leaving poor Lydia to guard Bill.

She took up her post on the bench and armed herself with half a dozen pieces of broken cobble because she was in the mood to hurl missiles if only someone would give her a ready excuse.

As dusk fell, however, Lydia began to search around her for some place of shelter, and she was on the verge of abandoning Bill to huddle under the bench up against the trough when Parch returned.

He ignored her, went to his little donkey, patted the animal’s neck, stepped into the stable, and brought back a handful of hay.

Parch was thoughtfully doling out the hay for his beast, and hoping the man was in a benign mood, Lydia decided to impose herself and seek his protection.

“Parch,” she asked, “where do you sleep?”

“The cart.”

“You sleep in the cart? Surely not.”

“Deliverin’ I do.”

Lydia puzzled out that Parch’s cart still carried a dozen sacks of potatoes, and perhaps he was making deliveries to preordained customers.

He would sleep with his goods for economy and to protect what he owned.

This scenario—that there were people in the world who did not sleep in a bed under a roof at night—struck her momentarily dumb.

But she recovered herself and said in her most wheedling tone, “I have nowhere to go. Might I, too, sleep in your cart?”

She could barely make him out in the fading light, but she thought he shrugged.

Emboldened by her exhaustion, she wandered over to the cart, climbed wearily on board and curled into a ball.

And so it passed that Lydia Bennet, lately of Longbourn in Hertfordshire, spent the second night of her perilous adventure in a potato cart.