Lydia (16 page)

“Why, she is making you a dress! And not demanding payment for it – that is a great concession for her, you know. She says she will only do it for friends.”

“She is making it because you asked her to.”

He coloured slightly at that, and I did not pursue the conversation further, but I smiled to myself inside.

The Comtesse de Fombelle may not like me, but her brother does.

Harriet was annoyed again when I came home, and asked where I had been. “I went to the library after Munro's,” I told her, waving Alaric's book. “I was so engrossed, I did not see the time.” I think she believed me, and no wonder, with that great pile of books all over my floor. And now I have
another
book to read.
Macbeth
– more dreary Shakespeare! It sits on my bed, glaring at me. Oh dear, Alaric's library! However much I try to
read, I don't suppose that I shall ever catch up. Well, I am not going to think about that now – or read any more books tonight. I will write a long letter to my sisters instead, and tell them about my new dress.

Friday, 3rd July

I
was right to worry that Wickham has no intention of honouring the promise he made me on my birthday.

He called again just after breakfast. “You again!” Harriet said with a sniff. “If you are come to take Lydia for another of your drives, I shan't allow it. And you are not to allow her to wander off to that library, either. She brought another book home yesterday!”

“Just a short walk by the sea,” Wickham said, and pushed me out of the cottage before Harriet could object.

It was lovely, at first. Wickham tucked my hand in his arm, and as we walked, he told me a long silly story about an argument between Carter and Pratt over a racing bet. He was so easy and amiable I thought how delightful it was to be taking a stroll on a sunny day with a handsome officer in a smart uniform, talking of this and that and knowing that all the disapproving looks we got concealed hearts absolutely green with envy. We turned right when we reached East Cliff and began to walk away from town. Gradually, the crowds thinned,
and we were quite alone – and everything changed.

“Tell me, how was your visit yesterday?”

“Most excellent,” I said, and proceeded to tell him all about it.

“And so they are grown very fond of you, are they?”

“Monstrous fond!” I boasted.

“I wonder,” he said, “if you could introduce me to Miss Lovett.”

I gasped. I honestly felt as though he had slapped me.

“But you promised!” I stammered.

“What exactly did I promise?”

“That you would not . . .” I tried to remember. “That you would not pursue rich young women, or try to ruin them.”

“I have no intention of ruining Miss Lovett.”

“But you mean to pursue her.”

“I mean to
marry
her,” he corrected.

Wickham's teeth are very pointed. I never noticed before today. Sometimes, when he smiles, they make him look exactly like a wolf.

“I hardly know her,” I said.

“Oh,
that
doesn't matter! No one ever knows anyone in a place like Brighton, and yet everyone is bosom friends – people who wouldn't be seen dead together in other circumstances!”

“And she is all wrong for you, Wickham! She is no fun at all, you know. She is polite and quiet and accomplished and . . .”

And she spills her wine at the mention of the Derbyshire militia.

I remembered the first time we saw her, at the card party at the Ship Assembly Rooms – the expression on her face as she
gazed across at Wickham. Oh God – it was too late – she had already fallen! Esther Lovett, with her mild manners, and her mousy looks . . . If Wickham is a wolf, she is a lamb to the slaughter.

“You mustn't,” I said. “And I won't.”

Wickham said nothing – only waited.

“She is all wrong!” I repeated desperately. “She speaks French, and paints watercolours, and recites Shakespeare . . .”

“Ah,” he said. “Shakespeare.”

I knew then he would do something awful. I bit my lip, waiting to hear what it would be.

“I wonder,” Wickham said thoughtfully, “how the Comte and Comtesse de Fombelle would feel, knowing how their new friend has lied to secure their affections.”

“Lied?”

“The books, Lydia! Shakespeare, Saint Augustine . . .”

“How do you know what I'm reading?”

He smiled, pulled a coin from his pocket. Tossed it in the air, caught it, held it up so it glinted in the light.

“Maids talk.”

“You bribed Sally!”

“A useful ally,” he agreed. “So, Lydia. What do you say? What would your new friends think, if they knew your reading was all for show?”

At home at Longbourn, the farm boy has this way of catching rabbits. He knows where all the warrens are, and he blocks all the entrances off with thorns and brambles, all except one. Then he sits there by the one unblocked entrance with his gun and his terrier Mabel, and kills them as they come out. People tease him about how long he's prepared to wait, and Hill even
once bought him a ferret from a peddler, but he just says the rabbits always come out in the end, and you've just got to be prepared to wait.

I felt exactly like those rabbits today.

“I ask only for an introduction,” Wickham said.

“You don't even know them,” I told him. “You couldn't tell them. You
wouldn't
.”

But I knew that he could, and would.

 

 

Longbourn,

July 2nd

Dear Lydia,

Mary says I have to write to you. She says she understands that I was friends with Harriet first and that you behaved very ill in making her invite you instead of me, but that I have to forgive you, just as Jesus forgave the Romans who nailed him to the Cross. If Jesus can forgive that, Mary says, I must be able to forgive you, but I bet if Jesus had wanted to go to Brighton, he would have. He would have walked right over the water from Galilee and had a lovely time, and I am sure it would have made all that came afterwards much easier to bear. I told Mary as much. “Explain to me why I should forgive her,” I said, “when she has stolen my friend and my happiness and is probably getting a husband as we speak.”

I am not very sure what it means, anyway, to forgive. If it means I hope you are enjoying yourself, I suppose I do. It would be an awful waste, for you to have been so nasty and selfish and
not
have a good time. Everyone else is vastly dull. Jane is still mooning over Mr. Bingley, and I don't know what is come over Lizzy, but she also spends a monstrous amount of time drooping about and sighing. By the way, I wish you would buy me a parasol like the one you described. I should like mine to be a different colour from yours, though, so people do not say I have copied you. And no bows, please. I have an abhorrence of bows, ever since Maria started wearing them on everything, because her London cousin told her they were fashionable.

There, I have done it and shown Mary the letter. She says that it is not exactly what she had in mind, but that it is a start. She is in a foul temper because she is learning German and wants Father to send her to Heidelberg. She says, “If Lydia can go to Brighton to buy umbrellas, why can I not go to Heidelberg to improve my mind?” but he says who would accompany her and a woman may not travel alone, especially through France, with all those soldiers about. She says she is going to run away, but I do not believe her.

Your forgiving sister,

Kitty Bennet

P.S. I must say, you are very mysterious. What is this great secret you can't tell me about? And are you actually in love with Wickham? Because you do write about him an awful lot. P.P.S. Hill says that all the she-cats for two miles around are pregnant. She says that it is all Napoleon's fault, and that we should drown the kittens. Father says we should drown Napoleon, too.

Saturday, 4th July

F
or a moment, reading Kitty's letter, I wished I could be home at Longbourn, where everything is boring but simple and there is little risk of finding yourself blackmailed by unprincipled pirate types you keep thinking are your friends but who turn out to be scoundrels.

I thought about them all night – Esther Lovett, the Comte, the Comtesse. It's not true that I want to go home. More than anything, I want to be here, I mean
there
– at Tara, with them. But I could not do it. I would not do it. I would not expose Esther Lovett to Wickham, and if it meant Wickham exposing me to them, then so be it. I would not be a party to his scheming. He says he wants to marry her, but I know what
that
means. I dare say he wanted to marry Georgiana Darcy, too, but unlike him, I have principles.

I felt very proud of myself for being so noble, but this morning there was a knock on the door, and the Comtesse de Fombelle stood on our step in her green dress and yellow jacket wearing a gentleman's top hat adorned with a matching
swathe of canary gauze. Harriet's jaw dropped so far it practically nestled in her cleavage.

“Er . . . this is the Comtesse de Fombelle,” I said. “We met, um, at the spa. Comtesse, this is Mrs. Forster.”

“Delighted, delighted!” Harriet gushed, obviously torn between admiration of a title and astonishment at that title's outfit. “What an . . . interesting hat!”

“Thank you. It is my brother's. What a . . . charming cottage.” The Comtesse quickly ran out of small talk. “I am come to take Miss Bennet for a drive,” she declared.

“A drive!” Harriet is become so entirely transparent to me now, I could tell what she was thinking.
A drive! With a countess! What an honour! What reflected glory upon me! But how does Lydia know her? Why should not I go, too? And how does she make emerald and canary look so stylish, and could I carry off a top hat?

The Comtesse – who may or may not also be a mind reader – did not extend her invitation, but said we had to leave
now
.

“I will fetch my coat and hat,” I said.

“We may bathe,” she whispered, and I ran from the room to hide my grin.

She
does
like me! That was all I could think. She likes me!

She was waiting for me outside, in the small black trap.

“I trust you have no objection to being driven by a woman, Miss Bennet?”

“I do not!”

“Then step aboard, and let us go!”

Theo (that is how I think of her, though I daren't call her so to her face) drives better than Alaric, but the journey was not so
comfortable as with her brother. She did not declaim poetry while the mare meandered along the verges, and I knew better than to try to impress her. We neither of us spoke much until we passed the entrance to Tara, when I asked where we were going.

“You will see!” she cried. Suddenly, she was in great high spirits. She clicked her tongue, and the mare broke into a brisk trot.

We stopped at the very cove I had looked at with Wickham, the one with the sparkling sapphire water. Theo climbed down from the trap, tied the mare to a tree, and signalled for me to follow her down a narrow path to the beach.

“One of the first rules of swimming in open water, Miss Bennet,” she explained. “You may not undertake it alone. Alaric refuses to swim in this country because he says the water is too cold, and Esther, bless her, is too much of a goose. But my brother was sure you would be game. Are you?”

“Indeed I am!” I shouted, swallowing my fear.

“How I do detest those absurd bathing machines!” she continued. “And yet I must swim! You are about to taste a little bit of paradise, Miss Bennet. And please don't think that it is improper, for the road is hardly used, and anyhow you can barely see the beach unless you come right up to the edge of the cliff.”

The day was warm, the tide low. We changed into our shifts out in the open, with no fuss or jolting about, and the wind on my bare skin felt delicious.

“Are you afraid?” she asked as we walked down to the water.

“I am never afraid,” I lied, even though my heart was
thumping at the sight of all that open water. Swimming unassisted in the open sea! Janet never prepared me for this!

We picked our way over dry stones and pebbles. The beach turned to fine shingle at the water's edge, and I gasped as the cold water lapped my toes. Going into the water little by little is very different from jumping off the steps of a bathing machine. It is much more difficult and yet at the same time infinitely more delicious.

“I am a very new swimmer,” it finally occurred to me to inform her.

The Comtesse said it did not matter.

“What you must do,” she said as we stood up to our knees in the sea, with our arms spread out to the sides, and our hands beating the water, “is wait for a good-sized wave and dive straight underneath it just as it begins to break.”

“I am rather new to diving, too,” I admitted.

A wave broke. “Just watch me!” she shouted, and plunged beneath it.

She re-emerged beyond the breaking waves and began to swim parallel to the beach while I splashed about in the shallows. At first, I only jumped over the smaller waves, or fell backwards into the frothing foam. Then a larger wave knocked me off my feet. For a few terrifying seconds, I flailed about in tumbling water, until I remembered Janet's instructions and stamped my foot on the seabed. I shot back to the surface, realising to my surprise that the water came only as high as my thighs. From then on there was no stopping me, and I threw myself into the waves with abandon. I even taught myself to dive beneath them, as Theo had, and she was right – it was paradise.

The Comtesse returned from her swim, and we lay side by side at the water's edge. The wind raised goose pimples all over my body as it blew against my wet shift, and the sun burned my face and arms and legs, and the sea dug grooves and channels all about my body as it rushed in and out around me. I tipped my head back so that it rested in the sand, and stared at the gulls circling in the cloudless sky, and in my head I laughed and laughed and laughed, because this was me, on a beach with a countess a million miles from Meryton.

When we grew too cold, we left the water and lay upon the hot stones to dry.

“I would love to swim like you,” I said with a sigh.

“Mr. Lovett – our stepfather, you know, and Esther's uncle – believes that every person should know how to swim. It was he who taught us. There are miles of beaches in India. We used to ride out with him and
Maman
along the sand, and bathe wherever he deemed it safe.”

“He sounds wonderful,” I exclaimed.

“He has his moments,” she said.

“I nearly drowned once, trying to swim in our stream. A farmhand rescued me and brought me home, and my father hit me.”

“My stepfather struck me, too,” Theo said thoughtfully. “I found a snake in our garden – beautiful, patterned, with a hooded head. It was a cobra, and it was dead – but my brother did not know. He ran crying to Mr. Shelton, thinking that I would die, and Mr. Shelton hurled the snake into the bushes and smacked me.”

She rubbed her cheek as she spoke, possibly where Mr. Shelton had struck her. She was lying on her side, and her shift
had ridden up, showing off her long bare legs, and she had raked her fingers through her hair and spread it about her shoulders to dry.

Lying there next to her felt like being with one of my sisters.

“We do what we must for the people we love, even if we hurt them,” she said. “I think, Miss Bennet, that your father did not beat you because you tried to swim. I think he beat you because you nearly drowned, and he could not bear to lose you.”

It was a remarkable thought. I pondered it for a while in silence.

“May I ask you a question?” I said at last.

“That rather depends on the question.”

“Why do you talk of wanting a profession?”

She was silent, too, then sighed, and began to pull her dress on straight over her shift. I dressed, too, worried that I had offended her, but eventually she spoke.

“When we came over from France,” she said, “we had nothing. Our home was confiscated, our father was dead, our mother was able to smuggle only a few pieces of jewellery she sold for a pittance when we arrived, barely enough to rent a small cottage. So she worked. She was a talented seamstress – she taught me everything I know – and she took in sewing. She began to work for old Mr. Shelton – my stepfather's father, who was a tailor. I used to watch her as she sewed. I saw how her neck hurt from continually bending over, how tired her eyes were from working in dim light, how her head ached, but I saw, too, how clever she was, and how much better than he, though she was never credited for her work, and how he grew rich while we remained poor. Those were hard times, Miss
Bennet. Exiled, bereaved, with no money and no future . . .”

“But then she met Mr. John Shelton.”

“Indeed. My stepfather met her when he returned from India, and she came to his father's shop to deliver a dress. He is . . . he is a passionate man, given to grand gestures. He fell violently in love with my mother and married her within six weeks of their meeting. And so we were elevated out of poverty, and into a new life. But even as a girl, I made myself two promises.”

“What were they?”

“I promised myself that we would never be poor again, and that one day, I would show the world that a woman can be as good in business as any man. I don't mean to be just a seamstress, Miss Bennet. I intend my drawings to be published, and to become a person of influence.”

We had been walking up from the cove as she spoke, and now stood on top of the cliff. Theo frowned as she looked back down at the beach.

“Alaric is three years younger than me – too young to remember any of this. He has a romantic notion that we were happy in our poverty. He is more carefree than I. He believes that life will always come out well, but he is not a fighter, like me. It falls upon me to protect him. Do you understand?”

I did not, but I nodded anyway, and she appeared satisfied. I had hoped that we would stop at Tara on the way home, but she said that Alaric was not well, and could not receive visitors. She set me down again near the library.

“Thank you for accompanying me today, Miss Bennet,” she said. “I have not enjoyed such a swim for a long time, and I was impressed by your prowess in the water.”

“I was rather impressed myself,” I admitted.

She drove away, calling out that we would meet again soon, and I watched her go, warm with the feeling that, contrary to all early indications, the Comtesse Théodorine de Fombelle might actually like me. The way she lay there on the beach – as easy and natural as if she had been my sister! The confidences we shared! I have never had a friend like her.

It was only once she had gone and I had returned to our lodgings, where Harriet told me somewhat grumpily Wickham had called again while I was out, that I thought again about Esther Lovett and my promise to him.

How can I be close to Alaric and Theo if I am betraying them behind their backs by helping Wickham meet Miss Lovett? And yet how can they know the truth, when I have lied to them so convincingly? This is my chance – my one chance. And it isn't so very much to ask, is it? An introduction?

Wickham is Wickham – he will break promises, and he will do whatever it takes to advance himself, and he will not give up.

If I don't do it, somebody else will.

 

 

Longbourn,

Wednesday, 8th July

Dear Lydia,

How happy your last letter made us! We are so thrilled for you, my pet! To think, that you should have a dress made for you by French nobility! Infinitely preferable, I am sure, to having a dress made by an English lady, because in fashion the French, for all their faults, are still superior to us, I think, and your aunt Philips agrees. And to think you are so very friendly with them! I am not surprised. With her good looks and amiable nature, my Lydia makes friends wherever she goes! You must let us know, dear, if there is anything at all you need. I am sure you are being a credit to your family.

Send my regards to Mrs. Forster, and to the colonel, and Denny and Carter and dear Wickham. How lonely we are without them! And now Lizzy is gone away with your aunt and uncle. She was to go to the Lakes but your uncle must return to town earlier than planned, and so they are gone into Derbyshire, and the house is very empty.

Ever your loving

Mamma