Page 24 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

O nce I had secured the lady in her room, I returned to the bench in the kitchen.

I stripped off my coat with a mighty wince, raised my shirt sleeves, and sat with my fists plunged in a bucket of cold water.

I cannot say I thought of much and do not rightly know how long I sat there.

The events of the evening had been too bizarre and I, too, had suffered a shock.

But I was not left to my stupor for very long. A soft knock on the kitchen door alerted me to the return of Keller with the coach, and I roused myself. There were still decisions to be made.

Sam came into Mrs Jennings’s kitchen with the linen straps used in the stable for splinting horse bones, and as I stripped off my shirt and allowed him to bind my ribs, I said to Keller, “Take the coach up the road a bit and walk the team if need be. I do not want any more attention drawn to this house. I shall send Sam with instructions momentarily.”

“Aye, sir. ”

Wrapped, my ribs were less painful, though putting on my coat was not. Sam was unsympathetic.

“Well, if ye’d a let me do what needed doin’,” he began, with a cluck of his tongue.

“Have I not already said I should have? I have no excuse, except that my fists did not think to call you.”

He relented with a grunt, and having had my fill of his mothering, I turned his attention to what remained to be done.

“Take the coach back to Pemberley. Do not wake the house, but rouse Parker and tell him to send me a dozen candles, milk, cream, tea, and brandy. Be sure to tell him it is my wish that the fewest people possible know there has been any trouble tonight.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Come back in the dog cart, dress for watch duty, and bring my horse when you come. And Sam?—”

“Aye, sir?”

“Feel free to beat the memory out of anyone who speaks of what took place here, will you?”

His scowl was replaced with a leery grin. “Aye, sir,” he said, stepping out the back door.

Once again, I was left to the silence of deep night in a strange kitchen. Elizabeth Bennet slept somewhere above my head, and I took stock of the situation.

There was nothing redeeming about the place.

It was not a cheerful house, nor was it terribly comfortable.

It stood alone at the edge of the village with its broken gutters dripping into a poorly gravelled yard full of mud.

There was no pianoforte, no library, no decent place to walk and enjoy the rare but shockingly beautiful, sunlit days of winter in Derbyshire. Dismal.

I made a long list of plans. I would arrange to remove Mrs Jennings and her great-niece to Pemberley.

Miss Bennet would then write to her uncle to make him aware of the circumstances in which the widow had been left, and he would arrange for her care.

Meanwhile, they would be my sister’s guests.

There was a neat little parlour on the second storey much preferred by my mother in winter, for when the rain stopped, sunlight poured in and cheered her.

The room boasted a petite marble hearth that drew well and threw off a merry warmth when it burnt.

Even in the dead days of winter, the view was lovely on that side of the house.

Mrs Jennings would be happy there, with Mrs Annesley coming to sit with her, with the diversion of the pleasurable melodies that so often drifted down the hall from the music room, and with the overbearing nurturance Mrs Reynolds would naturally apply.

In short, she would be coddled, and by association, so would Miss Bennet.

And at long last, I would be able to relax.

It was this last notion that made me realise the extent to which I had been anxious for the lady, inwardly for the most part, but with no less intensity.

I continually worried for her, I wanted better for her than she had, and it was this obsession with her comfort that had kept her constantly in mind.

That I cared for her was now beyond denying, but I still felt I could escape a lifelong commitment by—well, by caring for her, by making her comfortable, and by assuring her safety until she could be returned to her family and promptly forgotten.

Roughly an hour and a half later, Sam returned with a box and set it on the table.

I found a tin candle holder near the stove, lit a taper, and was setting the cream on the cool shelf above the empty bread box, when I heard a thump.

Sam heard it too, and with surprising swiftness for such a large man, he disappeared outside, returning almost immediately with an old man dangling from his grip.

Sam threatened to strangle him slowly if he made a fuss before setting him down, and seeing a toothless old man incapable of bending at the knee, I spoke sternly.

“Are you Mrs Jennings’s backhouse man? ”

“No-no, yer honour. Ain’t me.”

“Who are you then?”

“The Missus Edmonton’s man. I return’t Smith’s barrow,” he said.

“At this time ‘a night?” Sam demanded.

“I heard a commotion?—”

“That there commotion happent hours ago, ya nosy bone.” Sam hissed. After a violent shake by the scruff we ascertained him to be guilty of nothing more than idle curiosity, and so I sent them both away—Mrs Edmonton’s man to recuperate next door and Sam to set up a watch.

We had not been loud, but perhaps loud enough, for not even five minutes later, I heard a creak above my head. I went to the parlour and met Miss Bennet at the bottom of the stair.

She squeaked in surprise.

“Forgive me, I did not mean to startle you.”

She could not sleep and so we returned to the kitchen where I made her a cup of hot milk while I sipped another tot of my best brandy.

We talked in low, intimate voices, and even shared a joke about her experiences with strong drink. I enticed her to tell me exactly what had taken place, and was inordinately relieved to hear no hint she had been fondled or passed around in the way crude men have with barmaids. Or worse.

The lightness of our conversation waned with her frank retelling, and the reality sank home. She raised her eyes to me, no less deep than they always were, but now shadowed with strain and glittering from fatigue.

“What would I have done had you not come?” she asked in a forlorn whisper.

My imagination baulked to consider the likely answers to such a question, and I could not entertain the images that threatened to break through.

What I knew for certain was that Elizabeth Bennet would have fought like a tigress.

She would have thrown herself between anyone and Mrs Jennings and likely even the maids.

She was recklessly courageous and stupidly brave, and in a voice warm with my overwhelming admiration, I said, “Whatever you did would have been equally brave.”

She confessed having come to the end of her courage, and after a tentative inquiry as to what happened to her assailants, she looked satisfied they would not be free to plague anyone else. It was then I decided to present my plan for her and Mrs Jennings to go to Pemberley.

This provoked her to a most unexpected degree. Where I anticipated her relief, she only raised her voice in protest. In answer, I raised my own. Her resistance was silly and mulish, not to mention fairly insulting.

Unbeknownst to me, however, Miss Bennet’s furlough in Lambton had been a kind of test for her—the female equivalent of a boy’s tramp in the wilderness. My suggestion that she seek shelter at my estate as my sister’s guest smacked of surrender—failure—and she would not see reason.

Adding fuel to the fire of her independence was a terror for her reputation.

In this, at least, she had cause, for the fact was she had spent half the night alone with five men, myself among them.

She made a bitter case for staying, asking hotly if we would marry in haste if she became my dependent and the subject of the worst kind of gossip.

Never one to spare the sharp edge of her tongue, she profoundly wounded my feelings with her words, and I did not disguise the pain in my voice when I cried, “Is my assistance so offensive to you?”

“I would rather not be under an obligation to you, sir!” she cried hotly in reply.

And then lowering her voice, she reminded me that she, too, had a pride worth salvaging, and rather than allow me to rob her of it, she would submit herself to the indignity of being ruled by her male relations.

This last declaration was spoken with her back to me, and in a tone of wretched exhaustion.

Had she not then begun to tremble again while scraping madly at the invisible traces of the men who had intruded upon her sense of safety, I might have continued to entertain my insulted feelings.

Instead, I reached for her almost reflexively.

Her argument for the case of her dignity struck home.

I understood her, and though she did not want my help—or even me, it seemed—I would support her cause to salvage her hard-won self-respect.

But first, she must be made to rest by force, so I swept her up and carried her to her room, deposited her on her bed, and in the stern, no-nonsense voice of my father, I said, “Go to sleep.”

She apparently did so the instant her head touched the pillow, or perhaps she had simply collapsed from exhaustion. I put a blanket over her inert form and closed the door silently behind me.

Back in the kitchen, I stood by the stove and stared unseeing at its grease-stained grate as I thought what to do. First things first, I decided, stepping out to find Sam.

“Fetch the ancient next door.”

The poor man returned with cowering reluctance and stood before me with a sullen, downcast expression.

“Do you know Mrs Jennings’s man?”

“Smith, sir.”

“Do you know where he lives?”

“He and Cook stay at the Reaches.”

“The boarding house behind the saddlery?”

“Aye.”

“Go first thing, before they come. Tell them the mistress is feverish and does not want them here for fear it is catching.”

“Is she, then?” he asked, looking around him fearfully .

“You had best not stay. Sam will take you in the dog cart and explain things on the way.”

As we stood under the sodden night sky on the back step, with Mrs Edmonton’s man sat huddled in the cart, I spoke to Sam with the required bluntness.

“How much will be necessary to buy his silence?”

“Hmm. Well, sir, not too much, lest he think he owns a better secret than he do. Ten bob would set ‘im up fer life.”

I retrieved my coin purse and handed over the required amount. “Make him understand he cannot speak of any commotion here—ever.”

“Aye, sir.”

“After you have made sure the cook and backhouse man will not come for a few days, I need you to stay here meanwhile. I shall send a maid from?—”

“Maggie is a right one, sir.”

“Er, thank you. I shall send Maggie and have Keller make up your bed roll.”

“And you, sir? Nearly daybreak now.”

“I shall go as soon as you have come back, so do not dawdle.”

I rode home in a stupor of exhaustion and melancholy.

With the faint and familiar jingle of the bridle rings, the creaking of my saddle, and my horse’s occasional snorts of contentment to be clopping his way back to the stable, we picked our way through the field behind Mrs Jennings’s house and made for the road home.

By the time I had crossed the chalk hills, the wind picked up and swept away the clouds, leaving what remained of the night both clear and frigid.

Under a blanket of fading stars, I thought of how little I knew of hard things, how seldom I witnessed the sombre depth of a winter night, and how hard I had fallen in love.

When and how I had crossed over into a country from which there was no return was a mystery.

She had given me no hope—yet, I loved her unshakeably, and this bewildered me as much as fatigue and the aftereffects of fighting.

As I came down into the valley, Pemberley welcomed me like the ancient mother she was. The doors came open quietly, the groom stepped out of the shadow to take my horse to the stable, and I was met discretely by people I trust.