she said, when she sat beside her sister once again, “as wretched as I feel to have so exposed myself to your friends, and on your behalf for having so awkward a sister, I cannot but be profoundly grateful for the good fortune which gave me my escape from a life of such intercourse. How can it be supported! Such idleness, mingled with such insipidity! I should far rather face a volley of rifle-fire than endure many more nights of like company.”
WITH JANE on the mend, Elizabeth had intended to return to the covert at the first hour of the next morning, but this aim was frustrated, when she woke, by a cold rain falling. She did not think the conditions so very bad; she would have set forth glad only for the loan of a cloak, and spoke of asking, but Jane expressed so much astonishment at the idea of her walking a few miles in spring rain that Elizabeth was forced to realize she would cut an even more peculiar figure with her company if she were to insist upon leaving the house straightaway.
“I must send a word to the covert, then,” she said, giving it up, and scribbled a few hasty lines to be read to Wollstonecraft. She enclosed the letter to Captain Winslow, and carrying it downstairs looked for a servant to take it—a great nonsense, she thought, that any domestic might be sent to Meryton with a note, and she forced to remain indoors, as though she would dissolve in a mild shower for having been born a gentleman’s daughter.
She encountered Miss Bingley downstairs and stopped briefly to assure that lady of her sister’s improving health. “We will of course take ourselves out of your way at the first opportunity,” Captain Bennet said. “You must long be wishing your house to yourselves, and I am sorry the rain must keep us here.”
Miss Bingley said all that was polite and necessary, with no great enthusiasm, and glancing at the letter said, “May I be of service, Miss Elizabeth? You are writing to your uncle, I suppose?”
“No, my uncle is gone to London,” Elizabeth said. “But I should be obliged to you if someone might take this letter to Meryton, for Captain Winslow.”
Miss Bingley looked briefly as astonished as if Elizabeth had asked for the moon and then with wooden face put out her hand and said, “If you please.”
Elizabeth wondered a little, but thinking little of Miss Bingley’s sense, and caring less for her opinions, she did not investigate her reaction; she merely handed over the note, and returned to Jane’s room to bear her company and chivvy her into swallowing a little more broth and bread.
Jane was so much improved that by the noon hour, she was able to rise and dress. Elizabeth saw her escorted downstairs, and sheltered from draughts in a place by the fire in the drawing-room. The rest of the company joined them shortly thereafter, with sidelong glances at Elizabeth which she did not understand. “My dear Miss Bennet,” Miss Bingley said to Jane, “how happy I am to see you so much better. We must have a private word, if the rest of the company can permit it.”
Elizabeth could hardly ignore so forceful a hint; she took herself to the other side of the room, relieved to be pursued only by Mr. Bingley, who also bore a curiously anxious look, but spoke to her civilly, until Jane raised her voice from the fire and said, “Lizzy, pray, is this your letter?”
“Good God!” Elizabeth cried, seeing the note in Jane’s hand, “Miss Bingley, I depended upon you to have it sent. They will have missed me at the covert this hour and more.”
“If you do not scruple to acknowledge it,” Miss Bingley said, rising from her chair with color in her cheeks, “I shall not to say that I wonder at your effrontery in attempting to make me your accomplice. As a guest in this house, you ask me to send an illicit letter for you to a gentleman unconnected with you in any way—”
“Impertinent nonsense,” Elizabeth said sharply, and turning to Mr. Bingley, “Sir, you must get your cattle in the stables at once, and tied, if you do not want them to spook: there will be a dragon here for me at any moment.”
“A dragon for you?” Mr. Bingley said, in plaintive confusion, but Elizabeth was already hurrying for the door, and stopped only long enough to turn back and kiss Jane’s cheek, and beg her to forgive the abrupt desertion.
Mr. Darcy, standing by the door, followed her into the corridor with a sharp frown on his face. “Miss Bennet!” he said, and when she paid him no attention and continued towards the front of the house, he caught up to her quick strides. “I cannot understand your behavior,” he said, “—it admits of no respectable characterization. At the very least, you owe your host an explanation.”
“What I owe my host,” Elizabeth said, without slackening her pace, “is to keep his house from being torn down about his ears—oh, damn and blast it all, there she is.”
They had come into the gallery, and with the rain slackening and the clouds thinning, Wollstonecraft’s shadow showed dark on the grounds outside, the enormous outspread wings throwing a rapidly increasing blot. Elizabeth gave over trying to find her way to a door and instead dashed to the nearest large window.
Climbing awkwardly to the sill, she managed to unhook the two heavy panes and throw them open to the air, while Mr. Darcy stared up at her with astonishment.
“Wollstonecraft!” Elizabeth called, waving a hand madly and with impatience thrust away Darcy’s arm: he had climbed up beside her and was trying to restrain her, and for a moment she thought she would have to knock him down. Wollstonecraft’s answering roar shook all the panes as she descended on the grounds and thrust her head towards the window.
“Elizabeth, Elizabeth,” she said, “—you did not come! You are quite well? You are not hurt?” She twisted her head to present one enormous and coldly slitted orange eye to Darcy, who to his credit did not immediately flee the scene, but stood with his arm still outthrust to shield Elizabeth from the jaws before her, although his face had gone pale. “Who is that gentleman? Have they kept you here?”
“No, no, my dear!” Elizabeth said hurriedly, “I wrote you a letter, only it went astray: pray don’t be alarmed. We must be back to the covert at once, though. Do give me your leg to get up.”
Wollstonecraft drew her head away from the window with a low grumble of dissatisfaction. “As long as you are with me again, and you are quite well.” She put out her foreleg to let Elizabeth climb out of the window and into her grasp, making a protective cage of her talons. “Is that Mr. Darcy?” she added, suspiciously.
“That is quite enough: I cannot have you snap at him,” Elizabeth said, with alarm.
“I will not snap, but before I go away, he shall say that you are not merely tolerable: and that he is
very sorry to have been so ungentlemanly and rude.”
She swung her heavy head back towards the open window; Mr. Darcy, still fixed upon the sill, stared up at the cold look bent upon him, at first only bewildered by such a reproof, coming from such a corner; then he understood the words and flushed deeply. He said awkwardly, “I beg your pardon, Miss Bennet
—”
“Captain Bennet,” Wollstonecraft hissed, angrily.
“Pray will you be silent, you miserable creature,” Elizabeth said despairingly. “You will have us in the soup directly. Mr. Darcy, I beg your pardon for her abominable manners, and hope that you will pay no attention to her; she is in a temper and does not know what she is saying. We must go! Pray make my apologies; good-bye.”
She kicked Wollstonecraft as hard as the slippers would allow, and with a final grumble the dragon withdrew from the house and took herself back aloft. “Well,” Elizabeth said aloud to herself in consolation, as the wind tore at her thin and useless gown, which she was sorry to take away with her in exchange for a pair of good boots and a sensible dress, “at least I will never have to look him in the face again.”
ALTHOUGH
THE name Pemberley had a vaguely familiar ring, Elizabeth was too weary, after the dreadful defeat and the long flight from London, to search her memory; she wanted only to put Wollstonecraft down somewhere, and get her formation some sort of fodder to share out for the night. The couriers were flying between the retreating formations with assignments: they were each of them assigned to one large estate or another, and granted liberty to hunt deer.
They landed upon a broad and beautiful green sward, in the last hours before sunset. Vindicatus laid down the four cannon he carried with a deep sigh of relief; the middle-weights and light-weights set down their two or one apiece, and Elizabeth slid from Wollstonecraft’s back with only a silent pat to her neck.
The crews busied themselves creating some kind of order out of the general confusion, and Elizabeth nodded to Rowling, her ground-crew master, who told off a few men to the great house high up on the hill, for supplies.
“Do you think you could hunt for everyone, my dear Wollstonecraft?” she asked, low: she hated to ask for more, after Wollstonecraft had been aloft all day, but she alone of the dragons in their company had not been burdened with cannon, kept free to maneuver in case the French beasts should catch them.
They had been detailed off by Admiral Roland to cover the Corps’ retreat.
“Of course,” Wollstonecraft said stoutly, and took herself into the forest; in a little while she came back with five limp deer, and all the dragons tore into the lean frames without any hesitation. “I have eaten another,” Wollstonecraft said, licking her chops clean of blood, “and there is a lake just over the hill when we are thirsty: and oh! Elizabeth! The loveliest house imaginable.”
“I will go and have a look, Winslow, if you have no objection,” Elizabeth said, wanting badly to wash her face, and when she had gone up and rinsed her mouth and spat, she took off her flying hood and patted down her blown hair. She looked across the water, tiredly, at the great golden expanse of Pemberley House standing there, as wide across as the lake itself. It seemed to her almost dreamlike after the fury and struggle of the day. And as she stood there, the master of the house came out of the wood around the edge of the lake, walking swiftly towards the encampment, and halted when he saw her.
Captain Bennet stared at him blankly and said without thinking, “Mr. Darcy!”
“Miss Bennet,” he said, in equally instinctive answer, then stared at her. She was in flying-gear, of course: trousers, Hessians, her long leather coat with the split tails and her sword and muskets belted at her hip.
“Were you coming to the camp?” she said after a moment. “We can walk down together.”
He fell into step with her, silenced momentarily by the very number of questions provoked by her appearance. He had not forgotten Miss Elizabeth Bennet in the intervening three years, and indeed had long wished to see her again, and to demand of her some rational, if not respectable, explanation for the incident which she had caused at Netherfield House.
He knew that the elder Miss Bennet had confided some explanation to Mr. Bingley in apology for the scene which had been visited upon his house, and the confusion of his stables. But Bingley refused to communicate that explanation, having received it in confidence; he could only say he was himself perfectly satisfied, and that Miss Elizabeth Bennet had acted as she ought. Yet his character was sufficiently complaisant and generous to have made Darcy doubt this conclusion exceedingly, and to continue to desire a confrontation with the guilty party.
He knew he was to blame for having so enthusiastically pursued the society of the Bennets, in seeking that confrontation, that he had neglected to preserve his friend from the danger of that same society. Darcy had gone to half a dozen assemblies and house parties where Miss Elizabeth Bennet might have been expected to appear. Finding her gone on one excuse after another, he had brooded on her absence without attention for the progression of Bingley’s courtship. When Darcy had finally been roused to alarm, Bingley, emboldened by Miss Jane Bennet’s confidence, had already persuaded himself of his place in that lady’s affections, and he refused to be moved therefrom by all the entreaties which Darcy and his sisters could make. Darcy could afterwards only console himself for this failure by considering that the lady was as admirable in every other regard excepting her connections as she was lamentable in those, and that the match was already proving a remarkably happy one.
But the Seventh Wing had departed for Edinburgh even before the wedding, and in so doing had put an end to all hope of further intercourse between Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Not, however, an end to his thoughts of her. The mode of her departure from Netherfield House might have been sufficient to fix her in his memory as a figure of scandal, but without his wishing it so, another feeling also had secured her place as a woman of whom he had not ceased to think, and against whom he found himself comparing all others of his acquaintance.
From time to time, against his will, he recalled as plainly as though he stood there in the gallery again her slim figure standing upon the broad window-sill, heedless of the rain and wind which billowed the thin gown against her body and tore her hair loose—recalled her arm outstretched to calm the savage beast bending towards her, and felt her once more slip away from beneath his grasp as she stepped into its talons. He had struggled again and again to conquer the unruly sentiment which made so disreputable a scene nevertheless impossible to forget, without success.
He had tried to persuade himself that he was shocked, more than any other emotion; when this effort failed him, he settled it with himself that he only acknowledged her courage, as one might admire a worthy foe—he had struggled himself not to be unmanned in the face of the dragon. But he looked at her again now in the twilight, and before they reached the camp he halted and said abruptly, “Miss Bennet!”
She looked at him with some apprehension. He said, “Forgive me—I would speak as the friend of
your brother Mr. Bingley, as he is not here; I hope you know that any protection I may offer you, on his behalf, I would be honored to do. I hope you will come to the house and stay with us as long as you wish.
My sister is presently at home with her companion, a widow of respectable character, and I will take the liberty to extend her invitation with my own.”
We may well be astonished at such a leap from condemnation to welcome, if we disregard the power of Mrs. Bingley’s assurances, Bingley’s own certainty, and an as-yet unnamed feeling in Mr. Darcy’s breast, which had joined forces to defend Elizabeth’s character in his mind. He knew enough, more than he wished, of Mrs. Bennet, and recalling her want of scruple began to wonder if perhaps her vulgar determination to see her daughters settled had sacrificed Elizabeth to some evil position. What this might rationally be, he could not conceive, but his suspicions were formed by dimly remembered fairy-stories of childhood, in which dragons figured as the devourers and gaolers of innocent maidens.
Elizabeth was entirely unaware of the direction of his thoughts. Having fled his society in lively dread of the consequences of having betrayed the respectability of her family, she had never considered that a brief exchange during a rainstorm, with a hissing dragon for accompaniment, might not have conveyed to Mr. Darcy a full and accurate understanding of her circumstances and her role in the Corps.
She answered him therefore without any of that ordinary caution which she might have used to conceal her position, from one she did not think aware of it. “I am very sensible of the kindness of your invitation, Mr.
Darcy—I beg your pardon most sincerely that I must refuse. I cannot leave Wollstonecraft or my men out in the cold.”
“Your men?” Mr. Darcy said, but they had reached the cam
p, where a fresh courier had landed, and Captain Winslow turning addressed Elizabeth and said, “Dispatches, Captain Bennet,” as he gave them to her.
“Thank you, Captain Winslow,” she said, and broke the seal to read them quickly. “Gentlemen, the scouts have swept the countryside behind us, and it is confirmed that Marshal Davout has fallen off our tails,” she said, to the general nods and relief of her formation-captains, who had gathered close around her to hear the news. “The Corps is falling back on Kinloch Laggan. Our orders are to hold here for the moment as a rear position, and secure our own supply as best we can.”
She gave a few further orders to that end, and then turned to Mr. Darcy, whose stares she once more misunderstood. “Mr. Darcy,” she said, “will you be so good as to walk with me a moment,” and taking his arm guided him back out of earshot. He yielded to the pressure of her hand, made unresisting by surprise.
She saw that surprise, but misjudged its source. “You must be wondering, sir,” she said soberly, “and I shall not attempt to conceal the evil news; there can be no hope of doing so for long. The worst you can imagine is true—Dover is lost—London lost.”
Although Elizabeth had misunderstood his looks, her news repaired her mistake: Mr. Darcy was not of a character to dwell upon his own confusion, when he had just received intelligence of so staggering a blow to his nation; all his questions were forgot at once, and he cried, “Good God!” in real horror.
Elizabeth shared that horror. She had lately been stationed with Wollstonecraft on the northern coast, an isolated posting she knew very well she had brought on herself by speaking too frankly to the Admiralty of her sentiments at the recent demotion of Admiral Roland. A frantic courier-message had brought them to the battle of the Channel too late to do more than bear witness to its conclusion: fifty thousand men already landed with a hundred French dragons circling for cover above them; and she was now fresh from the newest disaster outside London, where Napoleon had nearly snapped his jaws shut about the entire British Army.