George, George!” The tears began to pour down her face, her body rocked. “I am a widow at a mere thirty-six!
“To become the talk of that place? No,” said Elizabeth, more iron erupting from beneath her pity and grief. A bought woman! Was that how her friends from Longbourn days saw her? Head turned by the material things Fitz could give her? “You will go to Leek and live at Hemmings with Miss Maplethorpe, there to drink yourself silly if such is your desire! Accept it, Lydia. The alternative, I have been informed, is to see you dumped in Cornwall with nothing more than the clothes you stand up in.”
The lids dropped over Lydia’s pale blue eyes, shielding her thoughts from her sister. “Let me hear this from Fitz.”
“Lydia insists upon hearing her fate from you,” Elizabeth said to her husband in the small library.
“I take it she doesn’t like her fate?”
“‘Like’ is too mild a word. She’s full of wild threats, and wants to go to Bath to live.” The smoky eyes turned up to his, full of an agonised pleading. “Couldn’t she be allowed that, Fitz? In no time she would become a joke to all and sundry, and no one would heed her.”
“A joke who is known to be my sister-in-law. No, Elizabeth, she cannot go to Bath, and that is final. She goes to Hemmings.”
“I fear it won’t hold her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’ll venture out in search of men. There is a side to Lydia that I don’t understand, and it involves lovers. The drink is only part of her trouble. She is-on heat.”
“Indelicate, coming from you, wife, but a very good description. I would prefer to call her a strumpet.”
“I don’t believe it can be so lightly dismissed.”
“Oh, grow up, Elizabeth! Your family always showed a lack of propriety. That Kitty turned out so well was a minor miracle, but not one I can hope for with Lydia. She always was self-willed, and would go to any lengths to achieve what she willed. I knew George Wickham very well, and I can tell you that eloping with Lydia wasn’t his idea. She was crazed about him, and could see only one way to keep him-an elopement. George consented to the marriage only because I agreed to pay his debts. And have been paying his debts ever since, thanks to the identity of his wife.”
“Yes, Fitz, I understand all that,” Elizabeth said steadily, “but it is past history. You won’t keep Lydia at Hemmings.”
“Miss Maplethorpe comes highly recommended. Most of her work has been with the mentally afflicted, and so I regard Lydia.”
A cold sweat broke out on Elizabeth’s brow. “I cannot permit you to imprison my sister, sir.”
“That will not be necessary, madam. Miss Maplethorpe will not attempt to limit Lydia’s drinking, which will answer, I believe. She’ll be too drunk to go in search of lovers.” His eyes had turned to obsidian, a black, hard glitter. “It is a year since the Prime Minister was assassinated in the very halls of the Commons, and things have been in flux ever since, with Wellesley guarding the bone. I am within an amesace of becoming Mr. Perceval’s true successor, and I am not going to be cheated of office by a trollop like your sister!” The cold fire died out of his eyes. “I suggest you go back to Lydia and explain the facts more harshly than, it is apparent, you have thus far.”
“Oh, Fitz, what is this passion to be prime minister? Couldn’t you abandon public life in favour of your family? Of me?”
He looked astonished. “Family and wife are excellent in their place, but they cannot fulfil an ambitious man’s aspirations. I am determined to be prime minister and lead my country to a position of unparalleled power and respect. Our British reputation was severely damaged when we conceded the war in America to the rebels of the thirteen colonies, and we seem unlikely to win this fresh conflict there. However, we have beaten Bonaparte, and that must outweigh all else. Our navy rules the oceans, but strong action must be taken to turn our army into a body of soldiers even the French would quail to meet.” His chest swelled, he looked invincible. “I intend to turn Britain into
“Hear, hear!” Elizabeth cried, clapping derisively. “I am so pleased you think me excellent in my place. Of late I have come to realise that you are every bit as proud and conceited as I thought you when first you came into Hertfordshire!”
“It’s true that I had no basis for self-satisfaction in those days,” he said stiffly, “but the situation has changed. I knew well that I was marrying beneath me-oh, the follies of youth! Were I to have it to do all over again,” he said deliberately, “I would not marry you. I would have married Anne de Bourgh, and fallen heir to the Rosings estate. I do not grudge it to Hugh Fitzwilliam, but by rights it was mine.”
White-faced, she swayed, but righted herself without the help he probably would not have given her. “I thank you for that frank explanation,” she said with a stiffness quite the equal of his. “Would you prefer that I removed myself from Pemberley and your life? One of your minor estates would suit me very well.”
“Don’t be a fool!” he snapped. “I am simply trying to deal with the damnable nuisance your family represents. Lydia will go to Hemmings tomorrow, and very willingly. Not a difficulty, my dear. Ned will dangle a bottle of some lethal liquor under her nose, and she, donkey that she is, will follow it into the carriage.”
“I see.”
“However, I have another embarrassment looming. Namely, your sister Mary. She’s disappeared.”
“Yes. Somewhere between Chesterfield and here.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“If you had paused in your ministrations to Lydia, Elizabeth, you might have learned much from our son. Yes, we’ve all been worried about her, but he and Angus-and Ned, independently of them-have established beyond a doubt that she’s been abducted. Charlie can tell you the story.”
“He has grown in all sorts of ways, Fitz,” she said, sidetracked.
“I am not blind! I’m very pleased at what Oxford and young Griffiths have done for him.”
“I suspect Angus has had some influence too.”
Fitz laughed. “That is an alliance of mutual affection, my dear Elizabeth. Angus hopes to be your brother-in-law. Were it to come about, the last threat your family represents would be no threat at all, and I would have the
“As to the union of Angus and Mary, I rejoice, but if you think that would put his newspaper at your political disposal, then you very much mistake your man. As well as my sister.”
Elizabeth quit the library and left her husband to his dreams of grandeur. Leopards don’t change their spots, she thought. Oh, but you fooled me, Fitz! I genuinely thought I had cured you of your pride and conceit. And when you began to assume the leopard’s hide again, I blamed it on my inability to give you the sons you wanted. But it was never that, I see now. The leopard has stayed the leopard throughout our twenty years together. While I, if I may believe Lydia, have turned into a mouse. A
The velvet curtain was drawn back to reveal a gap in the iron bars that confined her, formed when a section was let down to make a shelf. Stacked on this she would find fresh food, small beer, a jug of water for her ablutions, and a tin with a pouring spout containing an oily liquid. The last, she soon discovered, was to replenish the reservoirs of her lamps. Terror of being plunged into utter darkness stimulated her dazed mind into deducing this, after which she learned how to do the filling: take off the glass chimney, unscrew the metal centre holding the wick, and pour new oil on top of what remained in the glass reservoir. The little lamp burned for longer than the big ones, and she found to her relief that, when she held its weak flame to the wick of a big lamp, it kindled readily.
Twice she had found clean nightgowns and socks on the shelf, once a clean robe, but never outer wear of any kind. She was warm enough, as the chamber never seemed to grow freezingly cold any more than it grew very hot. About the temperature of a cool spring day, she concluded.
If only she had some way to gauge the passage of time! The highwayman must have taken her fob watch; they
