Elizabeth’s hands fluttered up to him. She slipped out of her chair onto her knees, took up his hand and caressed his fingers against her damp cheek. “God bless you, Mr. Darcy,” she whispered tearfully.
“Oh, my darling girl,” he said, lifting her up to her chair and sinking into a crouch in front of her. She looked so fragile and diminished, a twisting, searing pain shot through his heart. He blinked as he took both her hands in his and kissed her knuckles. “Do you not know that I love you, Elizabeth?”
“How can you still?” she whispered.
“How can I not?” he replied gently. “I have tried, my love. But I cannot give you up.”
They were staring into each other’s eyes, on the precipice of a moment of great import, when Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner burst into the room. Darcy knew better than to scramble upright. He stood up calmly, and only when he turned to face Elizabeth’s relations, did he relinquish her hands.
“What is this?” demanded Mr. Gardiner. “Lizzy?”
“May I speak with your uncle, Miss Bennet?” Darcy asked.
She nodded and went with her aunt into the adjacent bedroom. Before Mr. Gardiner could say anything about the gross impropriety he had just witnessed, Darcy handed him Elizabeth’s letters. “You will want to have read these before we decide what to do,” he said grimly.
Chapter 12
Methodist House, Horsham…
The girl in the cracked mirror of the dingy closet referred to as the women’s bathing room was a stranger to Lydia Bennet. Her eyes, once dancing with mischief, were red rimmed, sunken, and glittering. Streaks of dirt and patches of grime disfigured her once pretty, heart-shaped face, and her hair hung in tangled hanks.
“What has happened to me?” she whispered.
“You have gone with the devil, Bennet,” Mrs. Hart replied matter-of-factly. “Here.”
She handed Lydia a strange, close-toothed comb. Lydia turned it over and over in her hand and puzzled over it until the Matron threw up her hands and said, “For the nits, girl.”
“Nits?”
“Crawlers. Surely you itch.”
Now that she mentioned it, Lydiadiditch. She had itched for days but she had also ached, shivered, and suffered severe pangs of hunger. The worst of her miseries had simply prevailed over small inconveniences such as cracked lips and an itching head. “Oh my lord!” she cried, clawing at her scalp as if a spider crawled in her hair. “Get them off, Mrs. Hart! Get them off!”
“What nonsense is this? Be quiet, you dratted girl. There is a basin of water and a lump of soap. Wash yourself, and then I shall get someone to come and help with your hair washing.”
Lydia could hardly move. She felt as if legions of bugs marched across her skull, down her back, under her arms, and between her toes. In desperation, she took a linen towel and wound it around her head to keep any creatures from migrating elsewhere, and then she took the rough cloth and the hard soap and scrubbed herself raw. Mrs. Hart returned with a bundle and a woman of indeterminate age, neither young nor old.
“This is Carver, Bennet. She will help with your hair and settle you in your ward. Carver, here are the scissors if it comes to that.” With that ominous statement, the matron left the room.
Lydia stared at the woman who looked back at her indifferently. “Right,” she shrugged, “I ain’t got all night. If we don’t cut it off, we will miss our supper.”
“Cut it off,” Lydia said with a whimper. “There are things in it!”
“You ain’t lying. Bend over the dry bucket then.”
The procedure was hasty and rough, but Lydia could hardly argue with the result. Her head was relieved of its heavy burden of infested tangles and she felt clean—truly scrubbed—deliciously, stingingly clean. The clothes she was given were also clean, and though her shift was made of fustian and coarse to the touch, she was glad of it. After tying a gray linen scarf into a kind of pauper’s turban around Lydia’s shorn head, Carver helped her pull on a simple gray dress and handed her a white apron.
“Good luck keeping it white,” she grumbled. “Least ways, you ain’t got to wear the yellow here.”
“I look well in yellow,” Lydia said wistfully. “What is all this talk of a yellow dress?”
“In the parish ?ouse, whores wear the yellow. Heaps the shame on ?em, it does.”
“But I am not a—I am not that!” Really! All this talk of her being fallen, consorting with the devil, and lucky not to be put in yellow was more than Lydia could stand.
“No, countess. Ain’t none of us ever been whores,” snorted Carver. “Matron said to try these ?ere shoes.”
“Are there any socks?”
