The Deception at Lyme: Or, the Peril of Persuasion (Mr. And Mrs. Darcy Mysteries) (14 page)

The breeze strengthened. The gust lasted only a moment, but in that moment it caught the thin woman’s bonnet. As the wind carried it off, she tried to recapture it, but the effort upset her already precarious balance on the unstable sand, and she fell.

Elizabeth and Georgiana rushed to her.

“Are you all right?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, yes.” The woman laughed self-consciously. “Merely clumsy.”

The bathing attendant retrieved a stool from inside the machine, and Elizabeth and Georgiana helped the woman onto it. She thanked them profusely, rubbing one of her calves through the fabric of her gown.

“Are you certain you are not injured?” Elizabeth asked.

“I will be fine. I suffer from rheumatic fever in my legs,” she explained. “Earlier this year I could not even walk, but having benefited from the hot waters in Bath, I have come to Lyme in hopes that the sea will advance my recovery still more. I try to bathe every morning, but with the recent rain, I have missed several days, and I suppose I overexerted myself.” She sighed. “I think when my nurse returns, I shall tell her I wish to go directly home. Usually after bathing we sit a while looking upon the harbor, simply inhaling the saline air. Both my doctor and Nurse Rooke claim it is quite medicinal.”

“Apparently, it can also be quite strong,” Elizabeth said.

The woman laughed. “That, it can. I do love to feel it on my face, though. It reminds me that despite ill health and other difficulties, I am yet fairly young, and among the living, and that is something to be grateful for.”

Her bonnet lay on the sand several yards away, and Georgiana went to retrieve it. When she returned, the woman thanked them again for their assistance. “Do not allow me to trouble you further—I am keeping you from your own seabathing.”

“You are no trouble,” Elizabeth said. “We will wait with you until your nurse comes back.”

“You have both been so kind. May I ask your names?”

“Mrs. and Miss Darcy.”

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Mrs. Smith.”

Tendrils of fine brown hair had come loose when her hat took flight, and they now blew round Mrs. Smith’s face as she put the bonnet back on her head. She tried to tuck them beneath, but they defied her.

“Would you like some assistance?” Elizabeth asked.

“If you do not mind. My hands are sometimes stiff after bathing, and the water was cold this morning.”

“We do not mind in the least,” Elizabeth said. Georgiana removed Mrs. Smith’s bonnet and held it while Elizabeth used Mrs. Smith’s hairpins to secure the wayward locks. When she had done, she put Mrs. Smith’s bonnet back on her head and tied the ribbons for her.

“I am much obliged to you, Mrs. Darcy. Nurse Rooke should return soon with the chair to take me home.”

“Is your house very far?”

“It is not my house, actually, but that of my friends the Wentworths—the most thoughtful, generous friends one could wish for! Mrs. Wentworth is a former schoolmate of mine. We fell out of communication for many years, but last winter we discovered ourselves both in Bath at the same time and renewed our friendship. She has been very good to me. When my physician advised me to try seabathing, she and Captain Wentworth invited me to come to Lyme and stay with them, despite their being recently married and just establishing their home.” She laughed. “I told them that newlyweds did not need a poor widow intruding on their privacy, but they so kindly insisted that I could not decline.”

“They sound like very good friends, indeed,” Elizabeth said.

“Oh! There is the chair now.”

Nurse Rooke approached, leading two bearers carrying a sedan chair. The conveyance—a windowed box with a seat inside, borne on two long poles—was as common a sight in Lyme as it was in Bath, for it offered advantages over horse-drawn carriages. Often, the chair men could negotiate the town’s narrow lanes and steep hills more easily than drivers of wheeled vehicles, and they could collect and deliver their passengers in places such as sandy beaches or inside buildings. Elizabeth found the chairs confining and generally used them only in the rain, but for a debilitated person such as Mrs. Smith, they were an ideal form of transport.

“Here we are at last!” the nurse called out cheerfully. “I am sorry to have taken so long—a chair was not immediately to be had. Are you ready to go to the Cobb?”

“No, let us simply return home today.”

“Very well.” The nurse picked up Mrs. Smith’s cane, which lay forgotten behind the stool she had been sitting on. “Here—I will help you into the chair.”

As the nurse handed Mrs. Smith her cane, Elizabeth realized that she herself might have seen Mrs. Smith once before. There had been a woman on a bench on the lower Cobb the morning of Lady Elliot’s accident. Elizabeth’s party had been on the upper wall, looking down from an angle, so the woman’s bonnet had prevented a clear view of her face, and even had it not, Elizabeth had no reason at the time to closely observe her. But the woman had possessed a cane.

Mrs. Smith rose. Leaning on her cane with one hand, she extended her other toward Elizabeth, which Elizabeth took. The widow’s hand was bony, her knuckles swollen.

“I feel so fortunate to have met you, Mrs. Darcy—and you, too, Miss Darcy. Thank you once more for your assistance. I hope our paths cross again while you are in Lyme.”

Elizabeth hoped so, too.

Thirteen

“No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages … a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.…”

—
Caroline Bingley,
Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth found that she enjoyed seabathing. Though shockingly brisk upon entry, the water temperature was not unpleasant after one became accustomed to it, and the dipper’s advice to immerse one’s whole self immediately rather than ease in proved sound. The water reached their shoulders, alleviating any modesty concerns Elizabeth had harbored, and the two sisters—though Georgiana was her sister by marriage, Elizabeth loved her like a sister of blood—conversed freely and cheerfully on all manner of subjects, their discourse drifting as unconsciously as the tide.

Boats dotted the waves farther out to sea. Most of them were small fishing vessels, but a larger passenger ship caught Georgiana’s attention.

“Do you think my brother is seriously contemplating a tour abroad for us all?”

“You know your brother—he would not have voiced the possibility aloud unless he were sincerely entertaining it.”

She smiled. “I am simply so delighted by the prospect that I can hardly believe he said it.”

“You are that eager to travel?” Elizabeth was pleased by the prospect herself, but Georgiana’s enthusiasm was palpable.

“I would like to see something of the world beyond Pemberley and London. I have wondered what it might be like to hear Mozart performed in Vienna, or see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Sir Laurence has traveled a great deal. He has mentioned a few of his trips, and Miss Ashford has shown me some of the gifts he has brought home for her. Did you notice the diamond ear-bobs she wore to the ball?”

“I did. They were lovely.” Elizabeth also noticed how animated Georgiana had become. Journeying abroad seemed a subject that had been in her thoughts for some time.

“Even if I do not travel, however, I am eager for some sort of alteration in my life. I enjoy my musical studies, our visits to London, the society of my friends. I adore my niece. I am blessed with an excellent brother, and you, Elizabeth—you have brought me the happiness of at last having a sister.” She looked at Elizabeth with such genuine affection that Elizabeth would have hugged her were she not expending so much energy simply keeping her head above water as the tide moved toward shore. “But I cannot exist forever in the manner I have been. I need more to occupy my mind and hours.” She looked out toward the sea again. “Whether that is the novelty of travel, or a home of my own of which to be mistress, or something else I have not yet discovered.”

Elizabeth understood. For all that polite society praised an “accomplished” woman, it offered few outlets for one to employ those accomplishments in a meaningful manner. Georgiana was fluent in four languages, but when did she ever have opportunity to use them? As it was, she was fortunate that her father, and in turn, her brother, had valued women’s education enough to encourage her to cultivate her mind as well as her manners. There were many ladies of richer birth with poorer intellects.

On the horizon, a ship of the line sailed east toward Portsmouth, and both could not help but admire the majestic image of a first-rate flagship under full sail.

“Do you think Lieutenant St. Clair will ever captain such a ship?” Georgiana asked.

“He might, in time,” Elizabeth answered. “Though now that the war is ended, I expect that opportunities to distinguish oneself for promotion will be fewer, and captaincies will not become vacant as frequently.”

“I suppose that is both good and bad for naval families. Advancement will be much slower, but there is a greater chance that one’s husband—or father, or cousin—will live to an old age.”

“I have sometimes wondered how the wives of sailors and soldiers bear the long absences and uncertainty,” Elizabeth admitted. “My younger sisters, before they were married, would have said that the uniforms make up for it.” Kitty, now wed to a clergyman, had developed more maturity, but the ever-flighty Lydia likely still held that opinion. Elizabeth hoped for her youngest sister’s sake that something made marriage to her untrustworthy militia officer tolerable.

“I think it takes more than a uniform,” Georgiana said. “Though … Lieutenant St. Clair did look terribly handsome the other night, did he not?”

“He did indeed—second only to your brother, of course. If Darcy had first appeared to me with a gold epaulette, I might have been utterly lost.”

The climb up Broad Street toward their lodgings seemed steeper following their exertions in the sea. Elizabeth and Georgiana paused to catch their breaths before continuing, and found themselves in front of a fossil shop that they had passed numerous times since their arrival in Lyme but had never entered.

“Sir Laurence says that Lyme is becoming as famous for its fossils as for its seabathing,” Georgiana said.

“Indeed?” In the reflection of the shop window, Elizabeth regarded her with an arch look. “What else does Sir Laurence say?”

“That the region’s landslips uncover extraordinary specimens that attract collectors. He owns several himself.”

“Sir Laurence is a fossil collector?”

“Not specifically—he collects all manner of things. He has a great interest in history, and art, and antiquities. He admires Lord Elgin tremendously for having rescued the Parthenon marbles.”

Elizabeth read the esteem in Georgiana’s eyes and doubted they glowed for Lord Elgin. “Does Sir Laurence admire anybody else?” she asked softly.

Georgiana turned away from the shop window to look directly at Elizabeth. “He says he would like to show me his collection one day.”

“And would you like to see it?”

She smiled.

Elizabeth was tempted to ask whether a title enhanced a gentleman’s appearance to the same extent as did an officer’s uniform, but forbore, not wanting to chance Georgiana’s misconstruing her gentle teasing. Whatever feelings about a certain baronet might be developing in Georgiana’s heart, Elizabeth left it to her sister-in-law to confide them to her when and if she chose.

Their tête-à-tête was interrupted by the emergence of one of the shop’s customers, a spectacled man in his middle thirties whose clothing boasted an extraordinary number of pockets. A man whose countenance lit with delight upon recognizing Elizabeth.

“Why, Mrs. Darcy!”

“Professor Randolph!” Elizabeth’s pleasure matched that of her friend; she and Darcy had not seen Julian Randolph in two years. They spent more time at Pemberley than in London, and even when they were in the city, the professor’s work as resident archaeologist of the British Museum often took him away from it.

“And Miss Darcy,” he continued. “Imagine, meeting you here in Lyme. This is the very best of surprises.”

“Indeed, it is,” Elizabeth said, “though I cannot say I would be altogether surprised to meet you anywhere.”

A specialty in New World artifacts—Professor Randolph was American by birth—had earned him the attention of the museum, but a scientific passion that comprehended artifacts of all cultures and eras had taken him around the world. His eclectic knowledge had proved critical in assisting Elizabeth and Darcy in two adventures early in their marriage.

“I am here at the invitation of the Philpot sisters—have you met them?”

“I have not had the pleasure.”

“Lovely ladies, all three—prodigious fossil-hunters. Their collection is considered one of the best, and includes several discoveries that are the first of their kind. Lord Chatfield introduced me to Miss Elizabeth Philpot at one of his dinner parties. We had a most enjoyable conversation about paleontology and archaeology—how they are really quite similar, both sciences in which their practitioners sift through earth searching for evidence of those—be they creatures or men—who lived before us.” He paused. “But
you
—how are you and Mr. Darcy? And your little one? I regret that I have not yet had an opportunity to meet her.”

“We are all well, thank you. Lily-Anne is here in Lyme with us. Perhaps you would like to come to dinner one evening?”

“I should enjoy that above all things. I am engaged this evening—the Philpots have invited some promising local young people for a scientific salon—but I am otherwise at your disposal.”

“Tomorrow evening, then, at six?” Lyme, she had found, did not keep London hours.