Page 23 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I did not have a set plan, other than to make Miss Bennet aware of the danger, put her backhouse man on notice to arm himself with his wood axe, and if I could overcome the lady’s inevitable objections to interference of any kind, I would leave a man behind as a further deterrent to a most unlikely intrusion.
When we arrived at Mrs Jennings’s house, the street was dark and silent, and a freezing mist had begun to settle on the rooftops and trees.
It was nearly eleven o’clock, and I entertained a moment of doubt.
There is nothing more upsetting than to be rousted out of bed by a frantic knock at the door.
But I had come this far out of duty, out of an urgent need to forewarn the lady, and setting my misgivings aside, I left my retainers with the coach and went to the door.
That I did not have a plan was likely for the best, since nothing could have prepared me for what then took place.
Miss Bennet tore open the door, her eyes wide and haunted, pulled me into the darkened hall, and whispered that the very men I had come to warn her about were in Mrs Jennings’s kitchen!
“Where's me trollop, eh?” one of the villains called out impatiently. “Bring us a tipple, girlie. Ya can sit on me lap and kiss me while ya do.”
That bit of insolence was sufficient cause for murder, and without once thinking of the men I brought for rough work, I proceeded into the hall alone to beat the four of them and with a passionate, vengeful glee that might have startled me if only I had not relished the breaking of heads to such a degree.
These were men who had learnt to fight in the alleyways, and as such, they were vulnerable to the skills in the art of self-defence I had learnt as a young man.
Those skills, the element of surprise, the narrowness of the passage that did not allow them to surround me, and a few dastardly tricks my cousin Richard had learnt in Spain, were sufficient to give me the advantage against such odds.
I suppose it was fortunate that one of the beasts managed to land a serious kick to my ribs right before I ground him into the floorboards, otherwise I might have continued to punish them long past what was reasonable or required.
In any case, none remained standing, and I went quickly to the front door, executed a piercing horse whistle to summon my people, and ushered them towards the hall.
My coachman’s brother Sam, who had been a career bruiser in the taverns of Manchester, took one look at the heap of bodies, and in a tone ripe with disappointment, said, “Aye, sir, ye might ha’ called fer us.”
“I should have,” I conceded, tenderly palpating my ribcage.
“Ye’ll need a wrap, I reckon,” he said, and then, looking critically at me from the perspective of a professional, he remarked, “The question is if ye broke yer hands.”
“I kept my gloves on. ”
“Then ye’d best let me take ‘em off a’fore the knuckles swell, and we have to cut ‘em.”
We had by then moved outside and stood in the circle of pale light from the carriage lantern. Throughout this conference, the four roughs , to use Sir Hugh’s designation, were tied up and piled onto the floor of my coach.
One, emitting a constant groan, cried out, “Me arm! He broke me arm!”
“Yer lucky to still have yer arm,” Sam replied dispassionately as he worked off my gloves. “Best dash ‘em in a bucket of cold water, sir,” he said, before mumbling something about ‘demmed delicate swells’.
“What now, Mr Darcy?” my coachman, Keller, asked. The groom stood at the heads of the team and the footmen had already stepped up onto the back of the coach in readiness.
That was an excellent question to which I had not yet formulated an answer. The one thing I knew for certain was that I did not want the miscreants anywhere near Lambton.
“I believe they should be returned to Sheffield and entrusted to the care of the press gang with my compliments. Send James and a few of your boys in the market cart, will you? There is no need for them to be too comfortable.”
“Tonight, sir?”
“I see no reason to offer them our hospitality. It will be slow and cold, but tell the men it will be worth their misery. When you have set that in motion, come back for me.”
I was still surging with what Richard calls the dark, red blood of war , when I saw my coach disappearing into the night towards Pemberley.
In the half-minute of dead silence that followed, the reality of what had taken place began to penetrate my residual rage, and I wheeled around and went in grim search of Elizabeth Bennet.
In truth, the belated realisation of what might have been terrified me, and I confronted her in that perverse mood of outrage levied against the person of our greatest concern for having been in danger in the first place.
I found her huddled in the darkened hall where I had beaten her assailants into submission, and I roared at her. “Are you out of your mind to be letting men like that in this house? Where is your backhouse man?”
What I then heard enraged me further. Mrs Jennings’s backhouse man did not sleep on the premises.
This was an inexcusable lack of caution which had led to the very peril Miss Bennet had just endured.
When I voiced my disbelief, however, she heatedly defended herself on the basis that he was too old to have done her any good had he even been present.
Unbelievably, the lady then added a pithy reflection that it was ludicrous of me to rank a creaking elder at ten times the value of a strong and healthy woman, in other words, to have classed her as useless in comparison.
Unable to disguise my exasperation, I clapped back. “You choose now to enter into a debate?”
It had all been too much, however, and she slumped against the wall.
Was she on the verge of fainting? Good lord!
I grasped her around the waist before she fell, and newly chastened and extremely sorry to have admonished her at such a horrible moment, I helped her to sit in the kitchen on a bench by the warmth of the stove.
Even before I got Miss Bennet to the kitchen, she began the violent trembling characteristic of a shock.
I could only think of brandy, which she did not have, and so I thought to make her a cup of strong, sweet tea as a poor replacement.
To the dregs of righteous anger which still circulated within me was added a further dose of irritation, for the condition of Mrs Jennings’s kitchen was little better than that of a tenant farm.
Perhaps worse. The kettle was dented, the tea tin nearly empty, and the cream pitcher utterly so, and as I inwardly complained, Miss Bennet sought to come about.
“Do you indeed know how to make tea, Mr Darcy?” she asked, but in such a trembling voice, I hardly felt as teased as she intended.
I thought back to the many times I had sat over a twig fire as a boy, boiling water in a can and steeping leaves before heaping the brew with sugar and a few drops of stolen brandy I hoarded in a small glass bottle.
“Every boy has been on a tramp at least once in his life,” I replied, striving not to sound as harassed as I felt. I could not find the teapot anywhere.
“There, by your left hand,” the lady said, in a slightly stronger voice. If she were not shivering uncontrollably, I am certain she would be laughing behind her hand at me.
I vented my annoyance. “Is there a reason this room is so dark?”
In response, and to my utter horror, she began to cry.
While sobbing out her heart, she emptied her budget. I heard about the tallow candles and the chicanery of the butcher, the baker, and even the laundress, which surprised me because I had known Ruth Watkins all her life, and she had never struck me as the least bit mean.
Her face fell into her hands, and she spoke in a mumble of disjointed sentiments, all of which led me to understand Miss Bennet had not had a moment of leisure, nary a kind gesture, or the merest hint of welcome from anyone in Lambton.
The weather, as I feared it would, had daunted her, and without beeswax for candles or lamp oil, which was too dear to burn for pleasure, she could not even retreat into the comfort of a book—one of her principal diversions.
I offered her my handkerchief, and as I sat crouched before her, I melted into a pudding of dismay.
The day I had seen her dishevelled in this kitchen, I had never seen anyone more beautiful.
Now, in that very room as she wept out her troubles to me—and to me alone—a deep tenderness arose within me.
I felt the sting of sympathetic tears in the back of my eyes.
“And?” I asked gently, for I wished to hear the whole of her heart.
What I heard made me smile at her bent head—the artless and passionate disclosures that she had enraged the cook, was declared fit to be a charwoman by her mother, and had entertained the busybody next door, who had her living from a brothel.
Even in the grip of a shock, with its attendant storm of emotions and bitter memories, she found humour in the ridiculous.
Somehow, in the course of this torrent of tears, I found myself sitting next to her on the bench, and once or twice I thought—I hoped—she would rest her head on my shoulder.
But she happened to turn to face me, and raising her eyes to mine, she let me look my fill.
A light rain began, water dripped from the eaves, and a dog barked somewhere far away.
We sat staring at one another, breathless and entranced, until she spied the cut on my lip.
Had I not stopped her from touching my mouth, I am certain we would have ended that encounter in a prolonged, fevered kiss.
“Were you hurt?” I asked, fending off this tender attack.
My question surely reminded her of what she had endured. When she slumped in fatigue as her only reply, I helped her up the stairs to her room.