Page 4 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl (Pride and Prejudice Variations #5)

LONGBOURN

“ M r Bennet! Mr Bennet! Are we to be burned in our beds?” shrieked Mrs Bennet when the pounding on the door woke her suddenly in the night.

Mr Bennet put on his dressing gown, grabbed a candle, and went below to see who would be demanding entrance at this time of night.

His light shone on Mr Hill who was peering out at an express rider.

Above Mr Bennet, lining the staircase, were his daughters Jane, Mary, and Kitty.

His wife stood on the landing, gripping her nightgown to her chest. “Oh, Mr Bennet! Do not toy with me! I shall die of the suspense! What is it? What catastrophe is upon us?” she cried.

Mr Bennet scanned the letter he had been handed while he absently reached for a coin in his pocket. Not finding any, he said abstractedly, “Jane?”

His eldest daughter slipped down the stairs and into his study, returning with his purse. Mr Bennet folded the note, paid the express rider, and as Mr Hill locked the door once again, looked up at his family.

“Papa,” Jane gasped, seeing the bewildered look on her father’s face, “what is it?”

And thus, the day broke on the Bennets of Longbourn at one o’clock in the morning. Lydia had eloped with Lieutenant Wickham the night before last.

The scene could hardly be described even by those present.

There were cries and gasps, and everyone spoke at once.

Mrs Bennet could not be made to understand what had happened to her favourite.

She had to be told over and over, and when at last some glimmer of understanding began to show itself in the density of her anxious mind, her wails were added to the general family din.

Needless to say, no one slept again that night.

Jane, seeking to return to her natural state of complacency, went to the kitchen and helped Mrs Hill make tea.

Mary searched through her books for some kind of homily she could read to her family, some manner of explanation for Lydia’s fall into sin, and a means whereby the sisters remaining could cling to Christian respectability.

Kitty hung her head and fiddled with the sash on her robe, and she looked nervously about her until finally her father took note and demanded to be told what she knew of it.

Lydia, it seemed, had something like this in her mind when she went away to Brighton. “She was set on bringing home a husband,” Kitty whimpered as if she were accused of a crime. “She was determined to please Mama!” she ended defiantly .

“And you never once thought,” asked her father grimly, his voice rising with each word, “that perhaps Lydia’s plan was not a good one?

That perhaps you might all, by association, be ruined as she has now ruined herself?

That your youngest sister, were you not to alert me of her impending ruination, would be lost to decency and may never return home to see you again? ” Mr Bennet roared.

Kitty escaped to the corner, ill-used and weeping out her heart. Mrs Bennet had to be helped by both Mary and Jane to her bed. She needed laudanum, her vinaigrette, and a cold cloth with lavender water.

Even with these, it was many hours before her moans and lamentations ceased.

Mr Bennet closed himself in his study and snapped at Jane through the door when she tried to speak to him.

Eventually, as dawn broke, Jane thought perhaps she should decide something at least, and so she sent Kitty and Mary up to their rooms before she went to the escritoire in the parlour and wrote out a letter to the next eldest sister, Elizabeth, who was on holiday in Derbyshire with their aunt and uncle Gardiner.

Ten o’clock found the house of Longbourn as still as a tomb. No one came down to breakfast, and no one asked for a tray. Mr and Mrs Hill sat huddled in the kitchen with the upstairs maid and the backhouse boy. Jane dozed fitfully in the chair by the cold hearth.

At last, Mr Bennet came out of his library.

He went upstairs for three quarters of an hour, came back down dressed, and said, “I expect Colonel Forster any time from this afternoon to the end of the week, Jane. He has, of course, gone after them. I suppose the delay of a day in notifying me was justified, for he must have thought he could find them quickly and spare himself the mortification of telling me he did not keep my daughter out of harm’s way. ”

He paused and looked over his spectacles at the tray in the hallway.

“I see you have put a letter to Lizzy and my brother Gardiner in the hall for the post. I wish you would wait and see whether we have any further news. Perhaps the colonel has, even now, recovered her.” He then locked himself once again in his study.

Jane eyed her letter. She longed for her sister Elizabeth’s support as she sat alone in the parlour.

Lizzy would know what to do—how to proceed.

Lizzy would not have let everyone sink into such forlorn, pitiful despair.

But Jane Bennet was not a young lady who could ignore her father’s direction, and she reasoned that it would be a shame to cut up Lizzy’s happiness with news of an elopement about which she could do nothing.

It would be selfish to recall the travellers so they, too, could sit in the parlour and fret, and so she retrieved her letter from the tray.

When Colonel Forster recovered Lydia, she would send the joyful news by express and spare Lizzy any distress at all.