Louisa cringed. “We were distracted by the promise of Miss Darcy’s playing, I think. I did think of it, Elizabeth, I promise that I did. I shall send Jennifer over this time.”
Elizabeth could not help it. She was very tired and very hungry, and had been recently uprooted twice—once to the cottage and secondly to this dower house. The cottage had been a better situation for her than this, which was proving utterly dreadful. She began to cry.
“Excuse yourself,” said Caroline in a severe voice. “It will not do to fall apart in public.”
She was right, of course. Elizabeth nodded. Tearily, she said, “Pray, excuse me,” and she left and went upstairs to her room.
There, she lay in the darkness, the fire of the fireplace waning yet again, for what seemed a very long time.
Finally, there was a knock at the door. It was Louisa. She had brought a plate of food, everything from dinner—meat and potatoes and yams and dinner rolls, all of it.
“Thank you,” said Elizabeth.
“Yes, I had to go myself,” said Louisa. “I went to the kitchen and said I was with child and quite hungry and they gave me whatever I asked. Jennifer was worthless. What have you done to turn both of our maids against you?”
“Nothing,” said Elizabeth. “Well, just gotten myself with child, I suppose. They think I am sinful.”
Louisa sighed. “I see.” A pause. “I shall not be able to do this every night. And neither Caroline nor I can come up with a plausible reason to have an entire dinner delivered here every night.”
“Well, we are here because of me,” said Elizabeth. “Because of this babe. I must be fed.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Louisa.
But Elizabeth wondered if Louisa cared overmuch about the babe. Maybe if Elizabeth lost it, she would be happy enough with the situation. And Elizabeth had wanted to lose it as well, but not this way, not this slow and awful way. She must eat.
CAROLINE’S SOLUTION WASto make sure there was extra food for breakfast and luncheon and to say that Elizabeth must make three meals out of it, which Elizabeth did, as best as she could.
The days settled in a routine. She would wake, and the servants would be in the house, and she would not be able to draw attention to herself. She would have to wait to build up the fire in her room until they were far enough away that they would not notice.
Then, shivering, she would get up and work on that. She kept a bit of food in her room from the night before to eat just as she woke up, or she would be famished. She would alternate between eating and working on the fire. When she had a nice blaze going, she would pull a chair up, wrap herself in a blanket, and read the morning away.
She had a good supply of books here, that was the only good thing about the dower house. It had a small library which was well stocked, crowded with book shelves, each filled with a number of books.
She reread all sorts of classics, poems and plays from ancient Rome and Greece. And she readEvelina. She readPamela. She readThe Scottish ChiefsandThe Lady of the Lake. She escaped into worlds where things worked out, where there was sensemade of suffering, where the guilty were punished, where the righteous were rewarded.
And then, when she must come back to reality, she had to fetch her own water—discreetly, so what she tended to do was to take a bit of water from all the other water basins—and then dump her own chamberpot out a window where no one would notice it.
Finally, the servants would be gone, and she could go to the kitchen and put together her own meals for the day. Much of it was cold meats and bread, some cheese, and a few fruits. It was enough to keep her alive, to give her sustenance, and to keep the babe in her growing, but she could not think it was the best way for her to be eating while increasing. However, she must do as she must, so she did not complain.
In the afternoons, she was allowed to be in the sitting room with the Bingley sisters, but she was often just as happy to go back to her room and read, and they were just as happy to pretend she did not exist.
Once, in the afternoon, she slipped outside when they were not looking. She did not go towards the main house of Pemberley, though she had seen it when they had come to the dower house, seen the stately enormity of it through a window and thought that she could have been mistress ofthis, and that if she had, she should never have been in Brighton with Lydia, and she should never have been taken advantage of by Mr. Wickham and none of this would have happened.
She wished for a bit of fresh air. She always had liked her walks, and she went into the wooded area nearby, walking along a path, and she tried to clear her head, to remind herself this would not last.
This was miserable. She was little better than a servant, truly, for she must see to herself entirely. Her hair was a rat’s nest. There was a tangle in the back that she could not get to, nomatter what she did, and she needed someone else to get it out for her, but she had no one to see to her, so she kept braiding it in such a way that no one would see the tangle, and then doing her best to work at it, intermittently, while she was reading. She liked to tell herself that it was getting smaller, but the truth was that it worsened every night when she slept on it, and that all she was doing was getting it back to the same size each day.
She was not really getting enough to eat, but she was surviving, she reminded herself. And it would have been miserable in any case. True, if she could have been here with her aunt, it might have been more bearable, but it was never going to have been good to be carrying an illegitimate child in hiding.
She tried to look forward to the future promised her by Louisa. Well, not promised, actually. The possible future that might be yanked away from her at any time. However, it would be good if she could stay with the babe, in an out-of-the-way country house somewhere, have all the moments with her child that a mother might have, seeing her first steps, hearing her first words, playing dolls with her, watching her run in the summer sun, all of that.
Of course, it might not be much better than this, in some ways. She would practically be a servant. She would not be able to tell her child that she was her mother.
It went through her, then, the way it sometimes did, the force of all of this. How her entire life had been destroyed in one moment, and that Mr. Wickham had no care over it. He had done it for pleasure or for vengeance, but how could this be worth it, what he’d done to her, how could she have ever hurt him so badly to have taken her entire life?
She had to pause and hold onto a tree for a moment.
But then it was simply too much. She could not handle thinking like that. So, she distracted herself, but not with something pleasant. She distracted herself with a half-formedset of questions she had not really allowed herself to think through, for she knew she would draw horrifying conclusions.
