Page 18 of Wickham Likes 'Em Young
She did not have to work at withstanding the after-dinner period in the drawing room, because Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst chose to play several songs apiece on the pianoforte.Their play was not, perhaps, expressive, but their technique was flawless. When she retired for the night, she took an armful of books up to her chamber, hoping that at least one of the aged volumes would turn out to be well-written and engaging.
Lingering outside her sister’s chamber, which turned out to be four doors down from her own, Elizabeth asked Jane, “Do you want to chat in my bedroom?” Elizabeth hoped she would say yes, but her sister claimed exhaustion. Elizabeth went to her room alone and rang for a maid to help her exchange her borrowed gown for borrowed sleepwear. She then nestled down in the carefully warmed bedsheets, enjoyingThe Idea of a Patriot King, which she had never happened upon in her father’s library.
She felt quite comfortable. But she still hoped she and Jane could return home early the next day.
They could not.
The rain had been unrelenting all night. The road to Meryton looked like a small stream, and the road to Longbourn seemed to have utterly vanished under a pond.
Remembering that she had been the one who had organised the call to Netherfield, Elizabeth was determined to buoy up her own spirits.
It was not in the least bit surprising that neither her sister nor Mr Bingley seemed to mind that the storm continued so violently.
Of course, Miss Bingley was thoroughly upset that the Bennets could not yet return to Longbourn, but Mrs Hurst seemed eager to distract her and head off any blatant insults. Elizabeth tucked herself into a cosy chair in the library tocontinue readingPatriot Kingwhile Mr Hurst slept and the others played cards. Everyone was quiet except Miss Bingley, but her complaints were so constant, they made a kind of background drone that was easy to dismiss.
Finally, in the early afternoon, the rain stopped. Mr Bingley sent a servant to ascertain the likelihood of the roads being passable before nightfall.
Elizabeth waited in the drawing room with Jane and all the Netherfield residents to hear his report. He expressed doubt that the roads could be used before the next morning.
Miss Bingley cried out, “No!”
Elizabeth turned towards Mrs Hurst and said, “I do apologise on behalf of myself and my sister. We have borrowed your clothing, eaten your food, and taken time from your servants, and I thank you for your every attention.”
Mrs Hurst waved away her apology and thanks, saying, “Of course, we have only done what any hostess would have done. It is no one’s fault that the storm was so unexpected and so violent.”
Elizabeth looked around to where Jane sat near Mr Bingley, by the fire, but her sister was no longer there. She swept her eyes around the room and then asked, “My sister was just here, Mr Bingley. Do you know where she went?”
“No, I was wondering that,” he said.
“Excuse me,” Elizabeth said to everybody and nobody in particular, and she swished upstairs to see if Jane had retired to her room. There was no response at her door, and a passing maid indicated that she had not seen any resident or guest upstairs since late morning, so Elizabeth returned to the ground floor and checked every room.
Finally, entering the kitchens, she spotted Jane emerging from the servants’ kitchen entrance. She had very pink cheeks and hurried past Elizabeth without speaking.
“What were you doing here, Jane?” Elizabeth asked in a low voice.
Turning back, she replied, “Nothing of importance. I have a slight megrim and wished to drink some willow bark tea.”
There was something about the way her sister said it that made Elizabeth disbelieve her words. She peeked out the door from the kitchen to the stableyard.
Seeing a movement out of the corner of her eye, she turned her head to see a man striding around a corner. There was no way that Elizabeth could identify him, because she just saw the flash of a retreating tailcoat and one muddied heel of a boot.
Of course, given Jane’s pinked cheeks, Elizabeth immediately supposed that the man rapidly leaving the area was Mr Wickham, but she was far from understanding how Jane and Mr Wickham could have arranged to have met, or what they would have said to one another with so brief a meeting. Obviously, it may not have been Wickham at all. Perhaps some man had come to the stables to consult with Netherfield’s steward, and Jane really had come to the kitchens to beg relief for a headache. That made much more sense than Mr Wickham magically knowing that Jane was at Netherfield, and him miraculously capable of traversing impassable roads, and Jane somehow having the psychic power to sense that Mr Wickham had come to the kitchen door of the manor house, and either of them needing or even just wishing to speak together for approximately five minutes?—?
That all sounded like so much nonsense.
Elizabeth was heartily tired of being house-bound. She so loved her walks, her communion with nature, that every major storm made her restive, no matter where she was.
But this particular storm had stranded her away from home, and she was quite interested to analyse her feelings in contrast to how she had dealt with other, similar periods of confinement.
On the one hand, she found her father’s small but overstuffed bookroom far more interesting than the sparse library of Netherfield. She had quite enjoyedThe Idea of a Patriot King, but most of the books were not only old, but outdated—the agricultural practices in one volume having been proven less effective than four-crop rotation, for example—and the library lacked any of the classics that she could enjoy over and over again. What she would not give for the poetry of Shakespeare or Milton, or even Homer. Where wasTom JonesandHamlet? Where wasDon QuixoteorGulliver’s Travels?
On the other hand, there was no question that the bathtub and bed Elizabeth enjoyed at Netherfield Park were far larger and more comfortable than those she shared with her sisters at Longbourn. She laughingly told herself that she should become mercenary so that she might always enjoy the opportunity to stretch out and languish in a warm bath and a comfortable bed.
Of course, she was not all that practiced at languishing. Instead, she was more of a jump-out-of-bed lady, and even at Netherfield in the middle of a storm, she rose at first light, dressed simply, and slipped almost soundlessly down to the kitchen to sneak a warm roll before walking endless circles in the ballroom. Rather than walking through breeze-bent grasses and past the year’s last asters, as she preferred, at Netherfield she walked past chairs and tables covered with dust sheets and the musicians’ gallery at one end. Rather than clutching a book of Wordsworth’s poetry, which she might read from the lowestbranches of an oak tree or atop Oakham Mount, Elizabeth merely daydreamed.
Early in the morning, the day after she had spied the retreating form of a man and had hoped that it wasnotMr Wickham, Elizabeth found herself daydreaming again as she circled the ballroom. This time she wondered about Georgiana Darcy’s endeavours to break through her shyness, which Miss Darcy had expressed with poignancy in her last letter. She wondered about Jane’s true feelings about Mr Wickham…or, for that matter, about Mr Bingley and Mr Goulding…or about life itself! She found herself accidentally slipping into considering her own feelings about Mr Darcy.
And that was a danger zone. If she let herself contemplate her feelings, she found that the feelings deepened and became more entrenched. And since she would never be deemed a possible wife for a man of Mr Darcy’s wealth and consequence, there was simply no point in pining for him! She ruthlessly wrested her mind off of that man and pivoted to contemplating when she might be able to visit the Gardiners in London, again, and what she might do on her next sojourn in Town.
