Except the colonel did not remember her previous engagement and went to speak to her father about Elizabethcoming along, and her father, remembering their conversation, thought it just capital that Elizabeth go and keep her eye on Lydia.
He made it into a joke. “You were ever so worried, and now you can be sure that she does not misbehave!”
“But I cannot go to Brighton,” she said. “I do not wish to go to Brighton. I wish to go to the Lakes.”
“Aha!” said her father. “There it is, you see. You do not want to be in the presence of such shrillness either. You would visit it upon me, go off to the Lakes yourself, and as I have said, I have been shut up with Lydia’s whining for months. No, my darling, it is your turn now. You have made your bed, and now you must lie in it.”
She tried to treat it as a jest, as if he were not truly serious, but he seemed to take a bit of perverse pleasure in it, in forcing her to Brighton. And the Gardiners, her aunt and uncle, it turned out, could not go to the Lakes as they had planned, but had to alter their plans for a much shorter trip, in the late summer, going only as far north as Derbyshire. So, perhaps, in the end, it shouldn’t have mattered.
There was little for it.
Elizabeth went to Brighton.
Brighton was hot. There was little to do in the day except go and watch the water. The men in the regiment were also doing shockingly little. There was, occasionally, an attempt for the men to be called together for maneuvers, but primarily the regiment seemed to be engaged in playing cards and drinking port. The activity often began early in the day, even as early as eleven o’clock, and it raged late into the night.
Lydia and Mrs. Forster thought it great fun, and they drank too much port, too, and they joined in the card games, and it was all revelry and laughter and the terrible singing ofutterly inappropriate songs (rather badly offkey, moreover) and Elizabeth was miserable.
The worst of it was Mr. Wickham.
There was a complicated tangle that involved Mr. Wickham.
Before Elizabeth had left for Kent, as her father had spoken of, earlier in the year, she had been rather enamored of Mr. Wickham, to the degree that people had noticed.
Mr. Wickham had paid her enough mind that everyone expressed pity to her when Mr. Wickham was said to be engaged to a woman named Miss King, an heiress. But when Elizabeth got back from Kent, it turned out that Mr. Wickham was not engaged to anyone and that Elizabeth knew exactly what sort of man Mr. Wickham was.
He was a fortune hunter, one not above debauching fifteen-year-old girls if it suited him, and a liar. He had spoken very badly of a man named Mr. Darcy, so badly that Elizabeth had been determined he was the worst sort of man and had denied his marriage proposal.
Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal, that was.
Truly, there had been a number of reasons why she had denied Mr. Darcy’s marriage proposal, but she had come to regret the fact that she had done so. Mr. Darcy, upon reflection, had begun to seem to her not so very bad at all, and perhaps even rather good, and perhaps even a man she might have been able to fall in love with.
She had refused him, and she had not been kind about it, and she often turned the matter over and over in her mind and wished she could have known then what she knew now and made some other choice.
Perhaps not to accept him outright, perhaps not that, for there were other objections to the man.
For one thing, he had declared that she was “not handsome enough to tempt him” to dance, which settled rather strangelyagainst his declaration when he proposed to her, that he ardently loved and admired her.
For another, he had separated her dear sister Jane from a man she truly had fallen for, Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Darcy had bragged about it, calling it a triumph. Of course, he claimed that was only because he thought that Jane did not have any true feelings for Mr. Bingley, and Elizabeth supposed she might be inclined to believe his motives were good ones.
So, perhaps she could have said she needed time to think about it, instead of outright telling him that she would not marry him if he was the last man in England or something of that nature. She did not remember her exact phrase, but she knew it was dreadful.
At any rate, Mr. Wickham had fueled her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and now she knew that Mr. Wickham was a snake of a man, and she told Lydia this when Lydia teased her about Mr. Wickham.
For Lydia thought that Elizabeth still had feelings for Mr. Wickham, and since he was not engaged to be married to anybody, that Elizabeth would wish to continue to flirt with the man, and Lydia was not at all shy about saying this, both in private and in public, in front of positively anyone at all.
Elizabeth took her sister aside and said she had learned things about Mr. Wickham that meant he was not a man to be trusted. She did not give Lydia specifics, for she knew better than to think her sister could keep such information quiet.
And, indeed, Lydia could not keep it quiet. Lydia went directly to Mr. Wickham and wanted to know what absolutely terrible things he had done, and Mr. Wickham was all innocence, but Elizabeth saw his expression when he looked at her, saw that he was not at all pleased that she would be spreading anything negative about him.
And soon after that, one evening, she had very little to drink and she nodded off anyway.
Elizabeth thought that Mr. Wickham put laudanum in her drink on purpose, as a sort of revenge for whatever it was she had said, but she had no proof.
She remembered that night, that she had fallen asleep in a chair in the sitting room while the men were playing loo, and she remembered Lydia laughing over her that she’d drunk too much. She remembered Lydia and Mrs. Forster saying they would help her to bed. She remembered fighting them off and limping off to her bedchamber, falling down on top of the covers, still dressed, and then…
The next thing she knew, she was waking and there was a body settled heavily against her own.
She was sluggish as she tried to struggle.
