“It?” Lydia echoed weakly and then curtseyed blindly to the bed. “Miss Darcy, please forgive us. We had no idea…! When did you return from Bath? Had we known…”
“Stop babbling, you little idiot.” Caroline interrupted, “Look at her! Look at her eyes! She isn’t listening. How could she? There’s nothingthere!”
Lydia swallowed hard, “What do you think happened in Bath? I am sure thatIshall never set foot there after this!”
“Didn’t I tell you to be quiet?” Caroline’s eyes snapped to Lydia’s white face. Her lips curled like a snarling tiger, “She was never in Bath! Look at her - a stiff wind could blow her away!”
The younger girl looked once more at the girl in the blankets. She could see what Miss Bingley meant. Apart from the eerie, burning eyes Lydia had never seen anything so close to a corpse. Miss Darcy looked much like the Gothic sculptures she had seen in old churches: skeletal crypt-keepers holding tomes of Revelation.
“What… Miss Bingley, what should we do?” Lydia gulped, “What if somebody finds us here?”
Caroline glanced up at the door and stood up. Lydia raised a hand to stop her from striding past.
“What if she tells on us?”
A thin smile made Miss Bingley’s fire-licked face almost as unsettling as Georgiana’s. She leaned over the girl in the bed, blocking out all the light until all Georgiana could have made out were the red pinpricks in her oily eyes. Then, slowly and deliberately, Caroline pressed her long-nailed finger down on the girl’s nose.
“Tell on us?” she hissed, smiling slickly, “Oh no, Georgiana. We were never here. But if you want to glare and grunt at your lying, drunken brother then feel free. No wonder you made him drink, you spoiled little brat.”
“Miss Bingley…”
“What?” Caroline snapped, reeling round to glare at the other irritation in her presence. Lydia bit her lip hard and stepped back.
“She is stillthere,isn’t she. Look, she can see us. She… she looks like she’s crying. You are being so… how can you talk to her like… ugh! You are a horrible,horriblewoman!”
The older woman scoffed and stood up straight, smoothing down her skirt as if she had just finished dancing with a duke instead of bullying a child. “I will not be lectured to by an uppity chit who spends all of her time spying and sneaking around. How dare you claim any moral superiority?” Caroline saw that Lydia was frozen in place, sneered and pounced: “You will stop your nonsense, Miss Bennet, if you don’t want anyone to know that you were here.”
I could expose you, too.
Lydia thought the words, but her throat closed up before she could say them. Instead, she humbly asked, “What do we do now, Miss Bingley?”
“You can go and play with your dolls, little girl.” Caroline bit, “As for me, I am going to find my maid. I am going to find out what turned Miss Georgiana Darcy from the darling of her brother’s eye into…that.”
Chapter 54
The bedside novel had failed Elizabeth once more.
She sat in the middle of her huge bed, arms wrapped around her knees like a frightened child. She had not moved from that spot in hours. She had fled there, pulled the blankets up over her trembling body, and closed her eyes tight.
After the first few hours she recovered enough to ring the bell. Word had been sent to Mrs. Reynolds to please care for the guests and pass on her apologies. Some vague references towards feminine complaints had been enough to dispel the housekeeper’s concern… she assumed. When Mrs. Reynolds sent a comforting hot drink instead of willow tea, Lizzie knew that she had not been fooled for a second.
Well, what of it? As long as she was left undisturbed, Elizabeth could not make herself care about anything else. She felt utterly detached from her duties and the delicate rituals that surrounded them.
No, not detached.Removed.
Removed from her sisters, and their exhausting,constantneeds for help.
Removed from her plans, and the great weight of duty and brick that they called Pemberley.
Removed fromhim,with his foul temper and his ceaseless need to blame her and argue and make her stomach feel like an ice-cold rock.
Removed from all of it, and good riddance.
Elizabeth could not cling to her resolve. She longed to let herself slip away into indifference, to shrug her shoulders and let somebody else pick up the pieces. How blissful such a solution would be! But she could not stand the thought ofgiving up.Her spirit would not allow it.
So far, however, it seemed that all of her attempts to help anyone had been all pride and no sense. She was well meaning enough, but never thought past the surface. As she reflected on this, Elizabeth locked herself into an unfair prison of self-loathing and tortured herself thus:
Everything the mistress of Pemberley did was doomed to fail.
