Chapter One
The delicate blue and white decorative Chinese vase splintered into shards as Elizabeth Bennet smashed it over Lord Lachglass’s head.
He collapsed to the ground, like a dropped sack of manure.
Elizabeth panted desperately as she stared him.Her heart raced with pain and fear.
What now?
Half a minute earlier, when Elizabeth’s employer, the Earl of Lachglass, hurled her through the ornate doorway into his bedroom, the terror she’d felt dissolved as she stumbled painfully into the heavy oak of his bed frame.
Her sudden calmness had surprised Elizabeth greatly.
She would fight, she determined.She would fight, whether she lost or won.She would fight whether he killed her or not, and she would fight whether he succeeded in his aim or not.She would fight Lachglass with everything in her being.
Elizabeth had only been in the employ of Lord Lachglass for three months.He was a handsome man of an average height and age, with a modest paunch and cruel thick lips.
Her meetings with him had been infrequent.He had only once sat with them for a quarter of an hour to observe how his daughter’s studies progressed with her.Lord Lachglass was a widower with one unwanted and generally uncared for daughter.This daughter was an unpleasant and spoiled child, and mostly unremarkable.
After Papa’s death, Elizabeth had lived as a dependent on her uncle Mr.Gardiner’s generosity, until reverses suffered during the economic crisis following the most recent peace with the French obliged her uncle to dismiss half the servants and take lodgers at his own house.It became preferable that the number of gentlewomen dependents upon his now slender income be reduced as far as possible.
Had the Earl interviewed her in person for the position as governess, rather than his kindly and ineffectual old housekeeper, Elizabeth would have known to refuse the offer of employment immediately, good as the wages were.
Mr.Blight, Lord Lachglass’s man of business, had sat in the room with Mrs.Peterson.His manners should have provided warning enough to Elizabeth of what sort of a house she was agreeing to enter.
Mr.Blight was a thin, short man with a wicked scar across his cheek that he claimed had been received in service in a war, leering eyes that watched her uncomfortably close, and a greasy goatee he stroked endlessly.
During the course of the interview Mr.Blight had not spoken once.But his eyes.It surprised Elizabeth not at all to learn all of the servants lived in terror of him.
After he had thrown her into the room, Lord Lachglass followed Elizabeth into his bedroom on softly stalking shoes that made barely a sound on the thick fur rugs.Wildly, a phrase fromMacbethcrossed Elizabeth’s mind, “With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design he moves like a ghost.”
Lord Lachglass laughed as he shut the door behind him.“I’ve waited for this,” he said with a leering smirk on his sensual lips, spreading his arms out wide so he might grab her if she ran towards the door.“At last, just us, Miss Bennet.”
The way he used her name made Elizabeth’s skin crawl, as if his voice slimed “Bennet” with rot.
No point in screaming.When Elizabeth returned from her half day holiday, she found all the other servants gone from the house, and soon as she entered, Mr.Blight grabbed her arm, pulled her up the stairs, and explained the master wished a special interview with her.
She had been brought up to the sitting room between the master’s suite and the empty mistress’s suite, and Mr.Blight stepped out of the room as soon as she entered it.Behind her she heard the click of the door locking.
The room felt too warm, stuffy, and hazy, as though it were filled with smoke from the fire.
Lord Lachglass demanded she disrobe, and slapped her when she refused and attempted to leave, despite knowing it was pointless to leave the room by the door.
Elizabeth’s heart raced thumpingly in her chest as Lord Lachglass stepped towards her in the bedroom.Her heart beat so fast it nearly exploded with each pattering painful beat.The hair on the back of her arms and neck stood straight.She trembled.Part of her wanted to freeze and let the Earl do whatever he wished to her body, while she stared at the wall or ceiling silently begging the world for it to be over.
But there was a voice in her mind.
It was the voice of Elizabeth’s best self.It combined the sound of Jane’s voice, her long dead father’s voice, and the voice of her uncle, Mr.Gardiner.This voice told her to pretend to be helpless and entirely under control of the fear, and to be ready to strike like a cobra when the moment came.
As a child many years before, Elizabeth pestered a professional pugilist who gave lessons on the noble art of bare fisticuffs to the interested gentlemen of the neighborhood to teach her something as well.
The muscled pugilist refused at first, and in the end he did refuse to teach her how toproperlybox.Instead he at last observed that even though she was a gentlewoman, gentlemen sometimes didn’t notice such things when they decided to become handsy, and it was best she know how to crush a man’s unmentionables and knock him silly, just like he’d taught both his nieces.
Elizabeth had since never thought upon those lessons more than once or twice with a laugh.
She had always deep down seen herself, despite the death of her father and her precipitous decline in consequence over the past five years, as a fortunate creature who could expect matters in life to turn out generally for the best if she put forward a fair effort and waited patiently for her work to bear some fruit.
Really bad things, such as being the victim of a serious attempt by a titled gentleman to ravish and rape his governess, occurred mostly in novels and the fictive stories worried women passed amongst themselves.
