But these self-same eyes began to make out an approaching dray. The driver and a man who sat next to him also began to perceive her, and something in the way they both came to attention alerted some instinct of self-preservation in Lydia. She was already standing, but now she reached down for her nearly empty bag and bolted away into the adjoining field of half-grown barley. Hampered by her nightgown flapping behind, she threw it off.
“Oy!” cried the carter. “Come back ?ere, partridge!” She heard both men calling after her with some appalling descriptions of what they would like to do when they caught her, and she stumbled pell-mell away until she was certain they no longer followed.
Defeated, she fell into the barley, thinking—like a girl of fifteen who had never had the slightest challenge in all her life—that she would be found dead in this pitiful field in a couple of hours. The carpet bag had been a casualty of her flight, as had her nightgown. And so, after catching her breath, she arranged her dresses just so and tried to tuck up her hair in her poke bonnet. Unfortunately, the wretched hat would not cooperate and, indeed, it was most uncomfortable for a lie down. And so, she placed it on her chest, crossed her arms, and hoped her face was pretty in spite of all she had suffered, so that when she was found dead, someone would remark on her looks at least.
“Cor! ?Tis a twirl, John.”
Lydia awoke to see two men silhouetted against the morning light as they leaned over and examined her.
“How’d she git in yer barley then?”
They seemed to puzzle over this and then jumped back as Lydia struggled to her feet and braced herself, fists forward, for a struggle. “I will scream,” she said through clenched teeth.
The older of the two shook his head bemusedly. “Daft is she, John?”
The younger man propped himself on his hoe and looked at her as if considering this question.
“I am Lydia Bennet,” she huffed. “A man I took to be a gentleman tried to—he-he pushed me out onto the road! And I wish to see the magistrate!” Lydia’s voice was defiant, but the shaking of her knees betrayed her.
“Daft,” the younger man concluded. “What do we do with ?er, Scoot?”
“Clear off!” commanded the elder man to Lydia. “Shoo!”
The two farmers, deaf to her screeches of protest, alternated between making herding noises and chasing her with their hoes until Lydia was routed back toward the menace of the crossroads. She scuttled along in the ditch, wary of carts and drays, and hoped for a respectable looking coach to hail. Ahead of her, she saw a scraggly hedge and thought to shelter in it while she waited for deliverance.
The day turned warm. Her second dress, now as filthy as her primary garment, had been pulled off and rolled into a ball. Lydia regretted her carpet bag, of course, and her bonnet. Both possessions, along with her nightgown, were somewhere deep in that horrid Scoot’s barley field. She was also, she noticed, as she felt around her head, missing some pins. They must have come loose as she ran. She did what she could, which was not much, to straighten her hair and appear respectable for the respectable coach or curricle that would soon come down the road. How grateful she would be to drink a pitcher of lemonade! She was parched, she realized. Dying of thirst in the dirt, in fact, on the side of the London Road north of Brighton.
The mail passed, as did the Brighton stage, followed by the coach-for-hire posting down from London with private passengers. After the first encounter, Lydia suffered no urges to hail them. She had learnt that coaches with teams of four passed at speed and would as soon run over her as stop. A single rider also flew past, an express most likely, but to him she would have been a blur.
Eventually, she saw on the horizon a promising vehicle, a perch phaeton driven by a smartly dressed man with a stable boy standing behind. She jumped to her feet from the shade of the hedge and ran to the middle of the road where she flailed her arms.
But, the man in the phaeton snapped his whip and neatly drove right round her where she stood in the road, while the hideous child on the back thumbed his nose and stuck out his tongue. “Well!” she cried out at the retreating man. Lydia, enamored of soldiers, was often enough in their company that she could search around in her head for an epithet befitting the callous wretch who was now out of earshot. “You bastard!” she roared, cursing aloud for the first time in her young life.
Swearing at the top of her lungs offered no relief, however, and only made her throat dryer than it had been. And when her eyes swept downward over her filthy dress and broken shoe, she realized that her hair was bedraggled, she had no bonnet, and she had slept in the dirt. She wondered whether, perhaps, she had better not curse lest she convince passersby that she was not really a gentleman’s daughter.
Considerably cowed by repeated signs of the heartlessness of mankind, Lydia retreated to her shelter in the straggly hedge and searched the sky for a cloud that would drop a little rain and quench her thirst. But the day was fair and dry. She wondered, in a fatalistic and impartial way, whether she would be found shriveled up—a bag of bones in a crisp casing of skin—all possibility of remarks on the prettiness of her face, gone.
Chapter 3
Lydia had been jolted, thrown, frightened, and tested by the elements, and by late afternoon she was once again in a semi-swooning sleep. A donkey braying directly in front of her roused her with a heart-pounding start, and only after blinking hard to clear her vision, did she become aware of a cart passing by her hedge. The driver was bent, solitary, and smallish. If he were to try something with her skirts, she thought she could knock him to the ground, and so she staggered out to the road just in time for him to see her from the corner of his eye.
“Whoa, hey,” he said to his beast. When the slowly moving cart came to a stop, both man and donkey swiveled their heads and blinked at her with slightly rheumy eyes.
“Pray, stop,” she squawked. “Might you have some water or anything to drink? I need you to take me up in your cart.”
The man shrugged his rounded shoulders and pointed his long crop at the back of his cart. “They’s a pump at the Red Lion,” he growled.
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr.—?
“Parch.”
Lydia scrambled into the cart, loaded with sacks of what might be potatoes. Did he say Perch or Parch? She could not tell. She would call him Parch because she was so thirsty. “Thank you Mr. Parch,” she said.
He ignored her and drove on.
“I am a gentleman’s daughter,” she croaked from the cart. “I was—a man I took to be a gentleman—” Pointless! Parch was not listening, and her tongue was too thick and sticky to use properly. She adjusted herself upon the multiple lumps beneath her, pulled her knees up to her chest, and put her face down to shade it from the late afternoon sun.
Eventually, Parch’s donkey pulled them to a stop. “Where are we?” she asked faintly.
