Elizabeth's Refuge

by Timothy Underwood

  Parliament was still in session, and Lachglass had an important position with the government, but he rarely bothered to do much work associated with his position — though he had been able to turn it into thousands of pounds of income through emoluments and the sale of favors to his friends.

  These past three months had not been kind to Lord Lechery.

  He often had a ringing in his ears, and his memory was not quite right. He sometimes felt as though he lived in a strange fog. The doctors, when he demanded they fix everything, suggested he had acquired a nervous complaint.

  A nervous complaint! Like a weak willed woman?

  Real men did not have nervous complaints.

  The doctors laughed at him once they were away.

  He knew they must. They sneered behind their hands, and chuckled when they went home to their stupid ugly wives. “Dearest, I saw the Earl of Lachglass today, quite a womanly man, you could beat him to a pulp like that governess who fucking married fucking Darcy.”

  That worm infested, slatternly, sluttish, worm infested whore. He hoped she gave Darcy the French disease.

  How dare she undo her refusal of that upright, disgusting, tall arse Darcy? That had been the sole beauty of the matter — that the woman who had refused his kindly blandishments had also refused Darcy when he offered marriage to a governess, and Lachglass had giggled to himself every time he thought about it.

  Somehow it wasn’t funny when he heard that the woman was now married to Darcy.

  She was delightfully happy in Paris. His agent sent to the city returned with the full information: She was the darling of the city. She dressed so fashionably. She danced at a ball at the Tuileries.

  She was happy.

  The worm infested whore.

  And Lachglass? A laughing stock. And worse, he knew it.

  How could a man who allowed a woman to beat him to a pulp be anything but a matter of humor at every man’s club in London? Everyone somehow knew the story. Not only those in the clubs, but his doctors. His footmen. The street urchins who stared at him when he drove his curricle round Hyde Park. They knew too, and they thought as they watched him. They thought: Even a woman could draw his cork and leave him bleeding.

  Lachglass obsessed over his nose. His ugly, ugly nose. Never straight again.

  He had taken to going out rarely, practicing with his boxing master for two hours each day, with a vague sense that he would pummel her into a bleeding, crying, gasping pulp if he ever met Elizabeth Bennet again.

  However this day Lachglass was present at home for a different reason, one of Lord Liverpool’s chief ministers had demanded the pleasure of an audience with Lord Lachglass.

  It was twenty minutes after the specified time for the appointment that the gentleman’s carriage rolled to a stop in front of Lachglass’s townhouse.

  Lachglass this day was particularly irritated, his room was hot, stuffy, and he had one of the frequent headaches which tormented him since he’d been attacked by that vicious wormy whore, Elizabeth Bennet.

  He wanted to throw the painting that stood over the fireplace through a window.

  That would show them.

  That would show the hot weather. That would show the disdaining, maddening crowds.

  The great politician stepped into Lachglass’s drawing room, without having taken off his gloves.

  “To what may I attribute the pleasure of your company,” Lachglass said, stiffly standing to meet him.

  “No pleasure, lad. No pleasure.”

  “So then what deuced reason do you have to demand my time—” Lachglass took a deep breath. This was an important man who he could not shout at like he could Mr. Blight. This man was senior to him in the government, and he did not wish to lose the extra income he gained from his position. “I mean, sir, I await your pleasure.”

  “You are done. We have no place for you.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Lachglass replied haughtily.

  The angry white-haired man stomped back and forth, not caring about the value of Lachglass’s carpets. “You are finished. Nothing in our government for you anymore. Your position is to be given to Windham. I will see your resignation tomorrow. Tomorrow. In the hands of Liverpool. We can’t have you anymore, not with these stories. And I dare say, for my own part, I don’t want you.”

  “I have provided my support to the government consistently. There is no stauncher defender of our British institutions than I, and—”

  “Coddleswop. Think I give a damn? Think I give a damn!”

  The piercing shout cut through Lachglass’s headache, and somehow, against his desire to be angry and defend his own rights, it cowed him into a silence, and he despised himself for that. He despised himself for it even more than he already despised himself.

  “Bother the maids if you must.” The politician’s voice fell quiet and conversational. “A gentlewoman in reduced circumstances? An actual lady of breeding — someone a man like Darcy would marry? You disgust me. I’d not let my daughter attend a ball you were present at. And then to bring the matter to the courts when you were just a damned fool.”

  “She robbed me and beat me, and—”

  “I don’t believe that. You don’t believe that. Nobody believes that. It makes you even less of a man if it is true. No jury will believe that — Jove, pathetic. You are pathetic. We have the Hampden clubs organizing against us. The lack of work drives vagabonds to the streets. Secret groups whisper revolution and you must prove every false claim about the excesses and wrongs of our aristocracy true? You are the sort of man who led to our French friends meeting Monsieur le Guillotine. You are one of the chiefest problems with the state of Britain at this time.”

  “I will not listen to such insults. I will not listen to such lies about—”

  “You were beaten by a woman. And you planned to force her, which you could not even manage. You are done. Done!” The old politician’s voice snapped again loudly enough that Lachglass vibrated.

  The minister added in a disgusted tone, “If you must bother anyone, let me say it again: bother the damned maids. They can’t write to the papers. They don’t have rich friends who are politically useful. Have you any idea how much trouble a man like Darcy could cause for us if he threw his lot in with the Whigs? He has two boroughs in his own pocket and he is exceedingly well respected. Exceedingly. If he talks about a need for reforms to curb the excesses of the peers, others amongst the commons will listen, and then where will we be?”

  “I don’t give a damn. You show yourselves to be low dogs deserving of being shot like low worm infested whores deserve to be shot. You show no loyalty to a man disdained and despised, viciously and violently, by the low seditious scribblers of the press, who deserve to be shot.” Lord Lachglass sneered at the powerful government man before him.

  The politician sneered back. “For once the scribblers speak sense. I don’t want a man who’ll let a woman knock him on his ass in my government.”

  The minister was such a short man. With an ugly folded and wrinkled face, he’d never been handsome. Never been much of a man either.

  And now that was how everyone saw Lachglass. Ugly, with his bent nose, and the scar whose fringe was visible on the top of his forehead. No longer handsome.

  SHE had thrown him from the position of power and influence he’d cultivated for himself.

  They’d tossed him aside. Without so much as a “by your leave”. With a simple, “You can take yourself and the votes you provide, and we’ll manage nicely without them, because we want to court Darcy more. Darcy is respected, unlike you.”

  Darcy, who married a governess whore.

  Shouldn’t that make him a laughing stock? Wasn’t Darcy the one who was less of a man, who would ask the same woman twice to marry him?

  Darcy was seen as a romantic hero by the newspaper eating crowds of cits. Darcy was seen as a man worth cultivating. Lachglass knew how pathetic Darcy was. He couldn’t do a damned thing with a woman without someone lite
rally holding his baby hands to propel him into the room with her. And he’d probably still not manage to stick himself in her.

  And now Darcy had the upper on him.

  Lachglass wanted to murder the politician in front of him. He rather wanted to murder everyone in London.

  But instead he did the only thing he could, he sneered. “You have earned my permanent hatred, and one day you’ll rue this.”

  The man laughed. “Going to hurt me like you hurt Mrs. Darcy, eh? Just make sure your resignation letter is handed in by tomorrow midday or we’ll have a cabinet vote to throw you out of office.”

  He left out, chuckling, his grotesquely oversized stomach wiggling side to side with each wormlike laugh. “Scared of your revenge? A man who lets a woman beat him up? What a molly.”

  Lachglass clenched and unclenched his fists as the sound of the minister’s laughing departure faded. And then, without thought, he picked up a vase, almost as expensive as the one Miss Bennet bashed over his head, and he threw it through his gilt mirror. He picked up the fire poker and he bashed out each of his windows, the shards of glass falling onto the scurrying pedestrians on the road below his townhouse.

  He kicked five holes in each wall of the drawing room.

  A giant globe with a map of the earth painted on it that had cost more than ten pounds was beaten until its remains looked like a giant wooden cracked egg that had been painted blue and brown for Easter.

  If one of his servants had entered the room at this moment, Lachglass would have tried to kick them to death.

  And then, the cold wind blowing through his ruined windows, Lachglass curled up in a corner of the drawing room and cried.

  Naked and exposed.

  Everyone could see straight through to him. Humiliated, worthless, he’d shamed the family name. He was known by everyone as the man who was beaten up by a woman, and who then wanted to set the courts on her for his own crime.

  He rocked back and forth unable to speak. Everything had fallen completely apart.

  Tears flooded his cheeks, dripping in big puddles onto the ground on either side of Lord Lachglass. His legs were too weak for him to stand, and he felt dizzy, as if the whole world spun around him, and he was going to fall off and choke on his own vomit, like a vagrant drunk given a guinea by an impecunious and foolish gentleman.

  His ribs squeezed together.

  Lachglass tried to vomit, but nothing but acid flooded up into his throat.

  The door opened and Lachglass put his hands back on the ground, and like a cat in a corner he hissed at the intruder.

  Mr. Blight stood in the door. The tears made it impossible for Lachglass to see clearly, but he thought that the back alley knifer who had become his man of business had a look of contempt upon his face.

  He’d show Spitey Blighty. He’d show them all. He’d show every one of them.

  He’d make them regret everything.

  With a stumble Lachglass rose to his feet and said to Mr. Blight, “Call my boxing master. I need to beat someone.”

  The attempt to resolve his emotions through fighting did little good for Lachglass. He realized almost instantly he did not want training.

  He wanted to use his fists to pummel a man.

  The training room had pastel painted walls, and it smelled of sweat. Lachglass held his hands out, and the servant wrapped heavy leather around the fists to protect them.

  As soon as he was ready, in a thin linen shirt and flexible pants to fight, he swung an angry wild punch at the heavily muscled professional pugilist who he’d hired to train him. But even though he hadn’t waited for the signal to start, the man had simply stepped out of the way of his fist, and with a cluck of his tongue he said, “Bad form, bad form.”

  Lachglass angrily swung at him. Again and again.

  No matter how furiously he punched, the pugilist always kept his hands interposed, or he ducked below the punch. Several times he punched back, though not hard enough to do more than wind Lachglass, but it knocked him back.

  Lachglass became more and more frustrated. More and more hateful.

  “Damn you, man. You work for me. Let me get a clear blow!”

  “You’ll not learn anything that way. Aim for the torso, Milord, unsporting to hit a man in the head.”

  “Damn you, man. I do not want to learn a damn thing.”

  His face was flushed with raw anger, and his veins throbbed.

  “You’re in no fit state today.” The boxing master stepped back. “In no fit state at all to benefit from a lesson today.”

  Lachglass snapped five more punches towards the man, all of which were easily blocked, leaving his hand sore and tired despite the heavy gloves wrapped around them.

  Lachglass motioned for the servant who watched them to wipe off his sweaty forehead with his fine towel. “My damned man. Let me beat you over the head with my fists, or I will dismiss you and tell everyone of my acquaintance to have nothing to do with your instruction.”

  “Ha, you think your acquaintance any longer gives a pence for your opinion?” The boxer sneered at him. “Is that what you want? A helpless opponent? That why you like raping little girls? But found one who knew how to fight better than you, and she beat in that misshapen nose of yours. Well I’m no women. But then it seems you can’t even beat a woman.”

  “I’ll have you killed for what you say to me. You know who I am! You know what my position is. I can—”

  The pugilist screwed up his beefy face and spat on the wooden slats of the training floor. He stripped off his bulging leather gloves with his teeth and threw them to the floor, like a bizarre modern version of an ancient knight tossing his gauntlet to the ground in challenge. “I’ll not be insulted by a rapist. I’ll not teach a rapist either. Real gentlemen don’t use force on women. Real men don’t need force to get a woman’s favors. I’d rather starve than train a helpless, pathetic tyrant who wants to beat a man over the head without earning the skill to do it.”

  “I’ll destroy you! I’ll destroy you! You’ll never be employed again! Never! You’ll starve, and all those muscles will waste away to nothing, and you’ll sit on the side of the road, begging, and no one will give you any money or food. And you’ll rue the day you disobeyed the Earl of Lachglass!”

  Lord Lachglass ranted till he was red in the face.

  He ranted until the pugilist was long gone.

  And he stood there, abandoned in the training gym, alone except for Spitey Blighty watching him with his blank face and contemptuous eyes.

  “Kill him!” Lachglass clenched his teeth so hard that one of them audibly cracked and part of the tooth that had been hurting on and off for a month broke away. “Kill that damned, insulting boxing master. Stab a needle in his back.”

  There was the sneer again. Like Spitey Blighty was considering refusing the order. But he bowed and left the room.

  Lachglass rang for his valet to help him dress and gave orders for the carriage to be prepared. He had no purpose for London.

  “Also,” he ordered to the servant, “have the windows of the carriage blocked with black drapes, so no one can see within.”

  Now that he was dressed, Lachglass stepped up to a mirror to properly tie and arrange his cravat. He looked into his own eyes, red from his unmanly tears. His eyes, they glittered, speaking to him.

  They demanded revenge. His eyes demanded revenge on her.

  Lachglass bared his teeth at the mirror, and he growled at his own image.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Late at night early in June two women prepared to go to sleep in a solidly built house of three stories — the uppermost floor was only used by the staff of domestics. This building was called a “cottage” by the owners of the magnificent estate on which it rested. One of the women was middle aged, and one young.

  “Lord! I’m so fagged,” Catherine Bennet smilingly said to her mother. Kitty still luxuriated in the feel of cashmere shawls and tightly woven fabrics she now enjoyed because of Elizabeth�
��s excellent marriage, “we were up so late at the assembly last night.”

  The letters of introduction for his new family that Darcy had sent to all of his acquaintance, and the letters of praise for Elizabeth from Mrs. North and Becky to Mrs. Reynolds, had done a great deal to make the entrance of Kitty and Mrs. Bennet into the society round about Pemberley easy and smooth.

  Mrs. Bennet’s middle daughter was not present with them, as Mary had taken her share of the money Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth gave them to stay in London with the Gardiners. She attended improving lectures, read the improving books she bought ample amounts of, and improvingly practiced the piano. And she described all this in improving letters to her mother, written in perfectly straight lines.

  Mrs. Bennet was generally liked, as she was friendly and talkative, and if she was vulgar, the plain reality is that many of her new neighbors also were.

  Kitty was pretty, not so pretty as Elizabeth or Jane, but a fine looking girl, with bold flashing eyes, and an easy confidence about herself that had not been ruined by the years of poverty after her father’s death. She liked to be able to dance and wear pretty clothes once again, and to be seen as a Miss of modest consequence.

  Mr. Darcy had allowed it to become known through the medium of his lawyer that he intended to do something — though nothing exceptional — for his sister-in-law when she should marry. So Kitty’s circumstances were sufficient for those families not on the hunt for a splendid match for their sons, while her beauty and vivaciousness drew the attention of many of those sons.

  These were not the dark days of the war, when the absence of gentlemen off serving as officers with Wellington, or upon the wooden walls that barred the English channel from the little ogre meant that even a pretty girl would often sit out half her dances at a ball, or be reduced to making the circuit with one of her sisters or female friends. Kitty could dance often as she wanted at the assemblies, and she had made new eternal boon companions from amongst the other young women of the neighborhood.