“I thought you might.”
“Does it please you to think I might somehow win her? Even if her sister—”
“How can you ask me that? After what I have done?”
“Then you know why I must leave you with those two,” he said, flicking his head toward the parlor.
“You had better go straight away.” As he kissed her forehead, she said, “And you had better marry Elizabeth to make up for what I am about to endure with Caroline Bingley. She will be inspecting the mistress suite tomorrow morning.”
***
“What is your history with this Wickham fellow, Mr. Darcy?”
Mr. Gardiner’s question startled Darcy from his recollections of his sister. He sighed and looked down at his hands. He hated the whole sordid story, and he hated recounting any version of it.
“I am sure you understand that I find your involvement with my family’s difficulty curious?” Mr. Gardiner pressed.
“I owe you the full story, sir, and you shall have it. Only you will forgive my reticence since it is, in every way, unpleasant for me to speak of it.”
But he did speak of it in blunt detail, after which they hashed out their plans, and eventually, out of the need to think of something less devastating than Lydia’s situation, they spoke in a general way about business. By the time they reached London, exhausted and none too fragrant, they were solid friends.
Chapter 14
Methodist Workhouse, Horsham…
Lydia was still partly a child, and she was, as a result of not having fully hardened into adulthood, more resilient than she knew. She had begun to fit in without really thinking about it. Several advantages began to show themselves to her as she adjusted to her new life. First, she had been taught to sew and had worked much more complicated, fiddly things than half-shilling gloves worn by shop girls and governesses.
The work was not challenging. Sitting still, however, and bending over in poor light for the whole of a day was a trial. More than once did Lydia think of jumping up from her bench and running out the door. Only the remembrance of the terrors of the road, the weather, and unrelenting hunger kept her pinned to her place. The aching in her back and boredom in her mind could only be countered by thinking, and for once in her life, Lydia began to think deeply.
She did not think about home in these silent hours lest she weep and stain the linen over which she huddled. Instead, she contemplated her advantages. Besides being able to sew, she had a second advantage she could clearly discern: that of being something like Carver’s personal token, and Carver was one of the half-dozen dominant females in the place. Sure, everyone teased Lydia and called her a countess because they thought she had been someone’s mistress. And certainly, she was ridiculed for being used to much better than she was getting and for being naively stupid about poverty. But no one ever dared mistreat her because Carver was squat, solid, and patently vicious when pushed.
Thankfully, Lydia found Carver rather more likeable than not. She was blunt and honest, and she had a strict, understandable moral code that derived from having whored for money when she was young and deciding she would rather starve to death. Carver’s backbone was pretty unbreakable, and Lydia unconsciously emulated her mentor by trying to be a bit more stoic than she was brought up to be.
When she was not contemplating her luck in having snagged Carver as her particular sponsor, Lydia reflected that her upbringing as a gentleman’s daughter, while vastly impractical most times in a workhouse, also graced her with multiple advantages. For one thing, she was educated—not extremely well but sufficient to be a veritable sage in comparison with her ward companions.
Her wisdom showed itself accidentally at first. Dora Jameson had been bemoaning her husband’s death in the war. “Stabbed, he was, by a Spaniard, so’s I’m told.”
“But we’s fightin’ the French,” Margaret Ferguson said with a snort of derision. “He weren’t in no Spain.”
“Napoleon invaded Spain and made it part of the French empire,” Lydia remarked offhand. “Portugal too. Half the army is in the Peninsula—that is Spain and Portugal.”
“Oh? And you would know, would ya?”
“Well, I did not really want to hear about it at all, if I am honest. But Papa would read to us from his newspaper at the breakfast table for ten whole minutes. He said he would be able to hold up his head in the neighborhood if we were only half stupid.”
The members of the second wardroom fell silent and looked over at Lydia, who was trying to pare her toenails with the one pair of sewing scissors allotted to the house for grooming. Carver spoke first. “So’s the war’s more than agin the French?”
“Oh, the French are the enemy, of course. But they took Switzerland, trounced the Russians and the Austrians, and captured Portugal and Spain, and if we are not careful, Napoleon will have us too.”
“Lordy!” cried Dora. “I ?spose Bill died of a purpose!”
“He most certainly did, Dora,” Lydia said as she put on her newly constructed linen socks. “I suppose he killed a dozen Frenchmen and Spaniards before he was taken down. Sir William says one of our boys is worth twenty of theirs.”
Shortly after this, she was approached regularly by those who were not embarrassed to appear ignorant. Even Carver had asked her a question yesterday morning over porridge. “What’s the ?change, Bennie?” Lydia was “Bennie” when Carver was feeling affectionate.
“Oh, do you mean the Exchange?”
“What I said, ain’t it?”
