Page 22 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

U pon leaving Lambton, hopefully for the last time in a good long while, I was far less relieved than agitated.

I have many faults, but since a wont of understanding was not one of them, I could not escape the fact that Elizabeth Bennet was not only indifferent towards me, she was quite averse to the acquaintance.

I directed my coach to the squire’s house, Hinwick Manor.

The Manor, as it was called locally, was a building of some history.

It had probably been there as long as the village church and had been added to and repaired to such an extent that it was now an imposing, ungainly sprawl.

If Pemberley was the seat of elegance in the district, then Hinwick was the seat of provincial power.

Sir Hugh Pembridge was not a nominal knight in the style of Sir William Lucas.

The suits of familial armour lining the great, flagged hall at Hinwick Manor, and those standing guard on either side of a hearth the size of Mrs Jennings’s entire kitchen, stood in mute testimony to his ancestral lineage.

The house had been built on ground they had contested, probably with the same axes, shields, and longbows that hung on the walls.

Sir Hugh, a barrel-chested, silver-haired brute of a man with a loud voice and wide stance, admirably represented his ancestors and was perfectly suited to such a place.

This was a man for the hunt, the race, the mill, and the horse fair, and though I met with him often on many matters, it was his lady I had come to speak to on this particular day.

“What is to do, Darcy?” was her bluff greeting. Lady Pembridge was not one for preamble, and so I explained my errand succinctly.

“She is an acquaintance, you say?”

“I met her in Hertfordshire when visiting a friend’s estate.”

“And her father also owns an estate there?”

“As I said, not a rich one.”

“Are you certain she is not chasing after your fortune, Darcy?”

“Positive, ma’am.”

“Very well. I will recognise her.”

“I would be grateful if you did.”

“I am sure you would. You cannot yourself be constantly visiting to assure she is comfortable without raising expectations.”

“Certainly without bringing unwanted attention to myself and Miss Bennet.”

To this reply, Lady Pembridge only nodded, but by the slight raising of her right brow and scant smile, I felt the recipient of a look that suggested she thought she knew more about my intentions than I.

Little did she suspect that my strong inclination was to altogether rid myself of intentions in that direction.

Having discharged my duty, I expected to be left in peace.

However, rather than forget all about Miss Bennet, which was my sincere wish, our last conversation played again and again in my head.

I ascertained that her aunt and uncle, likely the same relations who lived in Cheapside in London, were unaware of Mrs Jennings’s condition, and Miss Bennet was obstinately resolved to keep them ignorant at least until the lady’s companion and housekeeper returned.

She would then return to London, explain the case to her uncle, and he would decide what was to be done.

I did not agree with this strategy, but I understood it.

Other revelations were harder to comprehend.

She had the capacity to speak quickly, packing her every utterance with bits of truth, farce, nuance, irony, and amusement.

I could not easily pick apart the wheat from the chaff, per se, but I was able to infer she had refused an offer from Mr Collins and was in disgrace with her mother in consequence.

That Miss Bennet had escaped such a ludicrous match was unremarkable, but the idea of her marrying someone forced me to pause and to wrestle with the fact that that someone would not be me.

With the determination of a Roman philosopher, I shook off these plaguing, oppressive thoughts and applied myself to my own business—the business I had born to do.

Almost every winter in memory brought a fair amount of trouble to the area.

Our diminishing mineral resources and the resultant loss of prosperity meant men could no longer work, and families were left in deeper poverty.

Charity from the local estates could not do for people what a thriving industry could, and I met with Squire Pembridge twice to discuss the ramifications of yet another mine closure.

We came up short as to what to do, which frustrated me sufficiently to allow me a bit of distraction from what I had come to classify as my personal troubles.

Industry seemed to be the way of the future, and though our estates thrived and we supported many people in the time- honoured way of agriculture, we could not snap our fingers and conjure a steel works, nor were we close enough to the harbours to delve into the milling of cotton or the deportation of made goods.

We had gritstone, shale, and limestone, yet the mining of these paltry riches was hardly lucrative when considering the remoteness of our location from the industries that relied on them.

Transportation of heavy stone was the principal impediment to wealth, and na?ve investors from Derby and elsewhere who began their operations with high hopes, often ended them by means of simple abandonment, as had recently been the case.

All I was left with as remedy was what I owned, which was arable land, and sufficiently discouraged by any grander schemes, I applied myself to opening our poorer fields to productive uses by experimenting with tough grasses which might sustain geese and goats.

To put it bluntly, estate ownership is not a glamorous business, and as I engaged in various conferences with my steward, canvassed poor plots as yet unclaimed by tenants, and consulted heavy tomes on the minutiae of grass, I chuckled inwardly to consider the dismay this reality would cause Miss Caroline Bingley, who thought of Pemberley as a mere palace of luxury.

Regrettably, this led me to loop around to what I did not want to dwell on.

What had Miss Bennet said? She was not the least bit fragile and could suffer the indignity of a little work.

She was not one of the ‘temptingly handsome’ ladies of my acquaintance.

Clearly, she had heard what I had intended to be a private assessment of her at the Meryton Assembly and meant to wound me with that jab, and in truth, I did feel the stab of shame as a result.

Time in February marches slowly. The estate continued prosperous even in winter, producing cheese, hams, eggs, and butter, which we carted weekly as far away as Derby, where fresh goods commanded better prices.

My steward also found a family of cottagers willing to tend goats on my rockier fields in exchange for a place to live and half their production.

I settled in for the long wait for spring, when I could travel, and by default, distance myself from village happenings .

Absent any more pressing projects, I then applied myself to the entertainments on offer at my country home.

Mrs Annesley had returned, Georgiana’s kittens had opened their eyes, and my sister seemed more complacent than I had seen her since the catastrophe of Ramsgate. We never spoke of Wickham, and I believed she had put both the man and her misjudgment of him in the past.

My sister, I observed with a tinge of pride, had within her a capacity similar to my own—that of a long-suffering patience in the face of unpleasant circumstances, a stoicism if you will—of which she was not fully aware.

We were rich, but we were not immune to either grief or disappointment, and she had suffered her share of both.

That said, I began to hope that as time and distance did their work, she would regain some facet of a more joyful girlhood not entirely outgrown.

While I hoped for a longer childhood for my sister, I also opted to endow her with a little more worldly sense.

With this in mind, I began to teach her to play cards in earnest. She knew the fundamentals of Whist, and I then introduced her to Quadrille.

We forfeited increasingly higher stakes—not just imaginary gains and losses—but pound notes, and once, even a tower of golden guineas she had saved over time.

I did not believe Mrs Annesley approved, but in the process of taking Georgiana’s money, I strove to educate her about the kinds of deceits, cheats, flatterers, and adventurers one might encounter, not only at a card table, but in life.

Perhaps if I had done more in this vein, she might not have been such an easy target for Wickham’s oily compliments.

And, perhaps even more to the point, had she suffered less awe of me, she might have brought to my notice any misgivings she might have had with regard to her corrupt companion, Mrs Younge.

In any case, as Georgiana’s skills at both play and discernment gradually improved, I also used the time to practise a less patriarchal approach and even allowed a kitten or two to explore my lap.

This earned me a tender look from her, which I needed after having so often played the role of Captain Sharp and reaped her glares of resentment.

As night fell on the second Tuesday in February, my sister and I were again contesting our luck over a pile of valuable paper.

We had agreed to play for the highest stakes yet, and after she lost all her money, I taught her how to write a note of hand, as well as how to accept one in play, and later how to collect upon one.

When a game heats up to this point—when men will put up stakes they do not possess on expectation or as an act of desperation—there were many lessons to be learnt about a person’s character.

“But how awkward to have to pay you on quarter day,” she remarked with a small frown. Not unlike me, she had an aversion to losing.

“Equally awkward for me to remind you when you forget,” I answered with a wink.

“What if I do not have what I owe you on the day?”

“You must sell something of sufficient value to pay your debts. Or you might steal it, or worse, write out another note of hand and try your luck at Faro in a gaming house in London in hopes of recovering what you have lost.”

Georgiana considered this jest seriously and said, “Why would I gamble more when I do not have the knack of winning?”

“That is the lure of speculation, love. Know how to engage in it, and master it for the sole purpose of never getting caught up in its hopeless net. Now, for the next game, what will you wager? A basket of kittens?”

“Never!” she cried with a rare laugh.

We did not get a chance to start another game for kittens or notes of hand or my mother’s old jewels, for at that moment, the butler announced the arrival of Sir Hugh.

I met the squire in my study as was his wish, and without further preliminaries, he stated his purpose.

“Arneson just returned from Yorkshire and said that there is talk at the posting houses of a band of roughs making their way south to escape the admiralty’s press gangs.”

“I am not inclined to believe the navy would cast its net as far as Sheffield.”

“The admiralty is paying a bounty. They intend to launch the blue squadron a month from now.”

“And we are beset by these rumours of criminal gangs descending upon us from all directions twice a year.”

“It is, as you say, likely nothing.”

“In any case, I thank you for coming. I shall alert my people to be vigilant. What of the constable?”

“I am on my way to him now.”

As I walked Sir Hugh to the door, we spoke a little more about the information provided by Mr Arneson, who owned the local carrier for limestone and shale.

We commiserated on the man’s recent reversals, for he had suffered some loss of business with the mine closure, and before that, he had been duped by George Wickham into a scheme of investment in Canadian timber.

Needless to say, the only investment Arneson made was in lining the scoundrel’s pockets before he absconded .

“What was Arneson doing in Sheffield?” I asked, thinking about the man’s dented fortune and hoping he had not gone the way of the desperate speculators I had just discussed with my sister.

“Trying to raise capital to keep himself afloat, I imagine.”

We canvassed the subject of our mutual contacts in Yorkshire who might be of help to the man before again touching on the purpose of the squire’s call and the increasing restlessness of men in search of work.

I shook Sir Hugh’s hand in cordial appreciation for the news and began to climb the stairs to return to my sister.

As I went, I mulled over his report. Even if these gangs of thieves, or what my cousin called ‘roundhouse rats,’ were indeed headed towards Lambton, they would not stay.

The village was too small to attract men who require crowds to scrabble out their living and slums in which to hide.

They were likely making for Nottingham and would scuttle through the village at night, stealing whatever they?—

I stopped cold and in mid-step. They were seen travelling down from Sheffield and would scuttle through Lambton from the north, passing directly by Mrs Jennings’s house!

That house, sitting unprotected and exposed on one side, would be the first they encountered as they made their way down the high street.

“Parker!” I roared.

“Sir?”

“Have my horse saddled this instant! Tell my sister I have a small matter to attend to at Sir Hugh’s request. I-I must see to a-a breached fence or something. I do not know, but make some suitable excuse, will you? There is no cause for her to suffer any alarm.”

“Yes, sir.” He looked at me from the bottom of the stairs still in an attitude of expectation typical of when he was waiting for me to change my mind .

“Well?” I demanded.

“If there is any sort of trouble, sir, perhaps a coach with a footman or two might be of use?”

I harrumphed because he was right. This was not a moment for a romantic gesture. “The readier ones if you please, and roust out Sam if you can find him.”