Chapter 1
The London Road north of Brighton…
The coach had just passed the track that led to the hamlet of Hickstead when the trouble began. Lydia Bennet had been chirping like an ecstatic bird, having run away from Brighton with George Wickham, lately of the Middle Counties Militia. He had some business in town, he said, and teased that he would be lonely. They were at an assembly when he told her he must go, having just come out of the card room. And Lydia, neither shy nor prone to think deeply, had giggled and flashed her eyes at him. “But why should you be lonely, Wicky?”
On a lark, she had packed her bag made of Turkish carpet and slipped out of Colonel Forster’s house just past dusk when the servants were all busy with lighting the lamps and her friend Mrs. Forster was dressing for an evening out with her husband’s stodgy old friends. Lydia had never been so happy in her life. To elope! With Wickham! And what would her dear mama say when she heard that her youngest— the favorite of all her five girls—had married first?
“Can we not go any faster, Wicky?”
“It is dark, my dear.”
“And where shall we stop for the night? Oh, how much fun it will be to hear you tell the inn keeper that I amMrs. George Wickham!”
“I doubt I shall say so.”
“Not say so?! But why will you not? I may as well be Mrs. Wickham, you know. Mrs. Wickham! How well that sounds! And how jealous my sisters will be. Lizzy will turn green, fly up to her room, lie down and weep, and demand a cold cloth for her head. But what will I wear? Mama always says the wedding clothes are the most important thing. Wicky, I must have wedding clothes.”
He took a swig from his flask and lit a cheroot.
“And where should we marry? I suppose we shall have to go to Gretna Green. I doubt the blacksmith will have seen a prettier girl than me this whole year. La! Is there anything more romantic? Scotland must be very cold even in summer. Oh dear. I wish I had brought my pelisse. But you can buy me one in London, can you not? Will it take very long, do you think? I mean, I have never heard how long it takes to elope…” Lydia Bennet was a voluble girl and she unleashed her bouncing high spirits in a torrent of words.
George Wickham, who had taken her on a whim, began to wonder what the devil he had been thinking. He had lost heavily at cards—so heavily in fact that he was compelled to ditch his lieutenancy in the militia in haste. He had been plagued by Lydia Bennet since he first made her acquaintance in Hertfordshire. She had followed him to Brighton and flirted with him outrageously, and he doubted he could shake her off if he tried. He knew—because he had asked her—she had nearly five pounds to spend on holiday; so here he was, trapped in a coach with her for that paltry sum alone.
But the noise! Thinking only to silence her, he crushed his cheroot under his boot on the floor of the coach and reached for her.
***
Lydia Bennet was a girl with fixed ideas about what marriage, elopement, and such things were like. She would be kissed, complimented, and cosseted and spoiled with presents. Naturally, she would go out dancing as often as possible and decide on what was for dinner. She would boss the servants, tease her husband’s friends, and generally do whatever she wanted to do. So, when Wickham reached for her and began to kiss her, she was only slightly annoyed to have been interrupted in her conversation.
“You are very impatient,” she said, averting her face to catch her breath. “My goodness, but you are positively carried away! You should sit over there until I am called Mrs. Wickham.”
Little could she know that this was just the irritant required to make Mr. Wickham decide to be rid of her shortly after he ruined her. He drank the last of the brandy from his flask, untied his cravat, threw it aside, and set upon her in earnest, determined to shut her up for once and punish her for thinking he would ever give his name to a penniless, jabbering nitwit with a large bosom.
When Wickham’s lovemaking became more assertive, Lydia began to protest. She did not prefer to be handled this way. He answered her with a roughness she had never experienced in her life, much less expected of her dear Wickham. Her temper flared even as he wrestled with the bodice on her dress, and she slapped him resoundingly on the cheek. George Wickham had a temper of his own, and he slapped her resoundingly in return and, grabbing handfuls of her skirt, began to show her who was to be her master.
Lydia Bennet was not as terrified as she should have been. She hardly understood what he meant to do to her, only perhaps vaguely realizing that he meant no good by ripping her shift, and she was livid at this unexpectedly horrible treatment. With her hands being uselessly pinned behind her back by his left arm, she fought the only way she knew how: she bit George Wickham savagely on his exposed neck.
Mr. Wickham roared in pain, grasped his bleeding neck with one hand, and flung her viciously away from him with the other. Her back slammed against the forward wall with a thud, and the coachman, hearing the ruckus, pulled to a stop. Before she knew what was up or down—for she was well and truly stunned—Lydia Bennet found herself on her bottom in the road.
“You…you!” she stammered, struggling unsuccessfully to stand. She could see Wickham in the faint lamplight. Still clutching his neck with one hand, he ripped open her reticule, crumpled her money into his pocket, turned her purse upside down to shower coins on the floor, tossed it and the carpetbag out the door, and was gone.
Chapter 2
Shock, having taken hold, suspended even the silliest thoughts that were prone to arise in the mind of Miss Lydia Bennet, age fifteen, of Longbourn, Hertfordshire. She was acutely aware of the rumble of the wheels of the retreating coach, the low chuckle of the outrider, the subsequent chirping of crickets in the ditch, a few stars shining through the humid haze, and the throbbing in her rear from being thrown onto the hardened clay of the ruts in the road. How long she sat slumped and uncomprehending in this state she could not guess, but eventually, outrage replaced shock, and she staggered upright and screamed at the top of her lungs.
After venting the worst of her rage in roars and unholy howls of indignation, she devolved into sobs, hiccoughs, and moans. Lydia Bennet stood—alone—upon the London road in the dark. Surely Wickham would come back for her, she began to reason, although reasoning was not her strong suit. He could not be so lost to honor and duty that he would abandon a gentleman’s daughter in the wilds of West Sussex in the middle of the night.
Roughly two hours later, Lydia began to think that perhaps Mr. Wickham was not a gentleman after all. When he finally returned for her, she would tell him off at the top of her lungs! This seemed a paltry punishment for what he had done to her, and yet, as she would be dependent upon him to restore her to Colonel Forster’s home, she could hardly tear out his liver with her bare hands. The image of doing so, however, was quite sustaining. Consequently, Lydia—thinking darkly of throwing George Wickham’s beloved Hessians into the fire, cutting his pomaded curls off his head as he lay in a drunken stupor, seeing him bound, pale and weeping, in a tumbrel headed for the guillotine, or paying a thoroughly disreputable sea captain to press him into the lower decks of a second-rate ship headed for Java—finally looked around her. She could hardly remain standing in the road. If the night mail were to pass, she would be plowed down by a team of six at the gallop.
Perhaps the night mailwouldpass, she thought. She would flag it down, and the passengers and coachman would all gather around her, and after hearing what had been done to her, they would support her as she limped aboard, make room for her to lie down on the forward facing seat, ply her with biscuits and tisanes and the like, and drive her straight to the magistrate’s house in Brighton. Yes. This became her fixed plan.
And indeed, the night mail coach did come. But it roared past her in a flash. She yelled and waved her handkerchief for nothing. She may as well have been a cricket in the ditch! She coughed for a quarter hour on the dust left behind and began to limp down the road. By the time she reached the cross post marking the intersection of the London Road with the track to Cowfold, she had walked more than two miles. She arrived at the marker—which she could only dimly make out on account of the gibbous moon making its way across the sky—with two blisters, a stone bruise, and the sole come halfway off her right slipper.
Sinking gratefully to the ground with the cross post supporting her back, Lydia felt around in her carpet bag for an extra pair of shoes. She knew she had not packed any, thinking her favorite and prettiest slippers were all she would need to be married in, but she looked anyway. The night was mild, and she did not carry a shawl, but she had suffered a shock and naturally began shivering the moment she stopped walking. There was nothing for it, she thought, but to put her second dress over the one she wore and to throw her nightgown around her shoulders for warmth; thus, dressed like the rag seller at the Hertford fair, she fell into a state between sleep and a swoon.
***
The sound of wheels and horse hooves on the road startled Lydia awake. She saw by the lightening of the gloom that dawn was near breaking, and she stood up, anxious to hail the means of her rescue. Oh, how her papa and her uncles would make Wickham pay for his infamy, she reflected with grim satisfaction. Indeed, the morning had broken upon Lydia Bennet in an unprecedented state of flinty-eyed determination.
