Elizabeth took a breath and tried to compose herself. “I know you are right, Uncle, only I am acquainted with the owner. I—I very lately met Mr. Darcy again in Kent and was several times in his company. How would it look were I to be following him around the country as if trying to be noticed by him? He is a very rich man of marriageable age. I myself saw Miss Bingley turn herself inside out to catch him, and I also saw how her machinations disgusted him. How many young ladies of his acquaintance must resort to similar antics to ensnare him? I do not want to be seen as that sort of lady.”
Aunt and Uncle Gardiner exchanged a glance, and Elizabeth had great hopes the subject would die. But as fate would have it, the innkeeper’s daughter came into the room to clear away the breakfast dishes, and so Elizabeth’s uncle asked her whether the family was currently in residence at Pemberley.
“Oh no, sir. The family is in London, so I am told.”
“Does the estate welcome visitors, Susan?”
“Constantly, sir, and no wonder. Beautiful as Windsor Castle, I hear.”
“Come, Lizzy,” Mrs. Gardiner said in a cajoling spirit, “let us go. I have been there several times, and I would be very sad not to see it again.”
With great reluctance, Elizabeth acquiesced and resigned herself to a visit to Mr. Darcy’s estate.
Chapter 6
St. Hugh’s Charterhouse, Cowfold, West Sussex…
Lydia Bennet was pushed forward to stand before a pinch-faced monk. He looked her up and down suspiciously before turning to lift his eyebrows at Parch. “What do you expect me to do about it?” the monk asked. His accent was heavily French, and he tucked his hands into his sleeves as if to protect himself from accidental contamination by a woman.
Parch shrugged, and Lydia—irritable, hungry, dirty, tired, sore, and exasperated—said, “Do about it! I am a gentleman’s daughter. You will bring me a piece of paper and a pen and I shall write to my father to collect me here just as soon as may be. That is what you will do about it!” Then, seeing the monk’s face pinch into a look of cold disgust, she changed tack. “But first I need a hot meal and some hot water too. I am very hungry and—and I have been brutally used…” Before she knew it, she was sniveling and feeling exceedingly sorry for herself.
“Can’t keep her me’self,” Parch said. “Can’t get ?er off the cart neither.”
“We are Carthusians here,” the monk replied coldly as if that explained all. “You might be better to take her to Horsham.”
“The ?ouse you mean?” Parch asked with a frown.
The monk nodded, handed Parch a few coins, and hoisted up a bag of potatoes. Parch sighed the sigh of the long-suffering pilgrim as he counted out his payment.
“Horsham, Mr. Parch?” Lydia sniffed, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She decided that calling him “mister” would inspire Parch’s better instincts. He was, after all, her only friend, though he wished to be rid of her. “That is a good-sized place, is it not? I have heard of Horsham, though I cannot recall where.” She spoke animatedly. “Perhaps Sir William mentioned it. He was forever prating about places he had visited once upon a time. There must be a magistrate in Horsham. You can take me there, and I shall tell him what Wickham did. Certainly, they will send someone at a gallop for Papa, and when he comes, I shall have Papa give you a purse of money.”
Parch shrugged and went to his cart. He untethered Bill from the post in the shade and hitched the poor beast up to the wagon. “Can we buy something to eat, Mr. Parch?” Lydia asked.
“I ain’t stoppin’ you,” he said balefully as they lurched forward. “You and yer purse of money. ?Spose I can go to Horsham, but I ain’t wantin’ to.”
“No, of course you do not want to go so far. How far is it Mr. Parch?”
“Two days a’ least.”
“Two days!” Lydia sank back on the potatoes. They had five sacks left. Having spent two days and nights on the potato cart, she had come to understand that Parch had not had a lucrative run from his plot of ground three miles east of the cross post. He was a cottager, she had learned. He had a hut and a few hills of potatoes. When he was not selling his potatoes, he carted vegetables from an adjacent farm to the market. He lived alone, he had told her darkly, and he was not looking to “git hitched.”
Lydia thought of all this and supposed that a detour to Horsham was truly a burden on the man. “Maybe, Mr. Parch,” she said trying to mollify him, “you will find a place to sell the last of your potatoes for a good price.”
Parch grunted. They bumped along in silence for a few hours, stopped for an hour’s rest by a stream so Bill could eat grass, and then they continued on to the Worthing Road. The signpost directed them northward to Horsham, but by this time, the sun was low, and Bill had decided that, if he were to walk at all, he would do so at the pace of a wounded snail. Parch pulled the wagon off the road by a stand of scrub willow. “Will we be safe here?” Lydia asked in a small voice. She dreaded another night in the elements—and on the road no less!
Parch shrugged and suggested she find a stick to sleep with, before he ploddingly went about starting a meager fire with a few twigs and a single branch he dragged up out of the ditch. He put two potatoes into the coals and when they were half-cooked, he gave Lydia one for her supper. After burning her fingers, brushing off a thick coating of ash, and then greedily consuming her potato, Lydia looked around her. “Where do you sleep when it rains, Mr. Parch?” she asked. She did not like the look of the sky to the south of them.
He shrugged. “I’ve sat under a time or two.”
“No, surely not. We shall not have to do so, shall we? Surely you could find a farm or some such where we could go?” Lydia did not think it possible that she would survive a night huddled underneath a potato wagon in a downpour. She had a strong idea that human beings were fragile and that ladies in particular were snuffed out as easily as candle flames when deprived of shelter from the rain. Her mother had often said so, and did not Jane almost die of a cold after riding to Netherfield in the rain? She shuddered and looked at the sky before climbing into the potato cart and curling into a miserable lump.
The first drops came as fat, plopping packets of water. She curled into a tighter ball, determined to ignore them. A few drops of rain did not always mean more would come, she told herself. Three minutes later, she was drenched and struggling to see as she scrambled down and crawled under the cart. Parch was already there, and though every instinct of comportment railed against it, she crept to sit directly next to him. She shivered, her teeth chattered, and boldly huddling up against Parch’s back, she burst into wracking sobs.
“Whist,” she heard him say over the thundering rain. “How’s a body to sleep?”
“We will die here,” she wailed. “Oh…oh! The ground is soaked! We are sitting in mud!”
She felt him shrug and subsided into shivering moans. Her second dress, crumpled into a soggy bundle and tied by a sash, was above her in the cart, and to hunger, desperation, and bewilderment was now added a drenching, bone-shaking cold. Dying, the idea of which had lately occupied center stage in Lydia’s mind, became a more friendly prospect when compared to such misery. She would be missed by her family, she thought, though she was numb with fatigue. They would have a funeral service for her at the church in Meryton, and the vicar, Mr. Rogers, would say that her young life was cruelly snatched away, yet they would always remember the brightness of her eyes, the youthfulness of her spirit…
