She sat in silence for a while, thinking hard. It was not as though these mysterious newcomers had done anything yet, and even if they did, who was to stop them? She looked up at Puttnam. “Who is the town constable?” she said.
“Bless you, ma’am,” he replied. “Poor old Jenkins? I reckon you could take him in a fight, begging your pardon. We did wonder about the lobsters in Meryton, but they’re not even marines. I don’t suppose the captain left a pistol in the house?”
She shook her head, beyond being shocked at the suggestion. “Perhaps Lieutenant Grace?” she suggested. She got to her feet in sudden decision. “I shall sleep with Miss Darcy tonight,” she said. “Please fetch me a large knife from the kitchen, just in case, and if you and Anderssen would keep watch tonight, we can decide what to do in the morning.”
Georgiana was sleepily surprised to see her but seemed to accept the idea that Elizabeth had had a bad dream and soon went back to sleep. She never noticed the boning knife Elizabeth hid under her pillow.
It was raining heavily the next day with a cold, gusting wind that sent leaves and rubbish swirling. Hardly anyone was voluntarily about in the streets, which made it easier to spot bandy-legs and prize-fighter. A third man joined them during the day, swathed to the eyebrows in an old-fashioned, caped driving coat, although he spent most of his time drinking in the King’s Head.
About half past ten in the morning, three ladies accompanied by a manservant came out of the house and hurried up the street to another house, some fifty yards away. The ladies were almost hidden in their bonnets and overcoats and could only be distinguished by the colours of their coats, brown, green, and blue. Halfway there, the lady in the dark blue surtout lost her bonnet to a gust of wind which released a mass of dark golden hair. She turned to chase after it, and green coat called out to “Georgiana” to be careful. Once the bonnet was retrieved, all three ladies linked arms and approached the other house. They knocked and were admitted by a maid.
Several hours later, red coat and green coat and the manservant went back to their own house. It had come on to rain even harder, and the ladies were huddled under an umbrella that threatened to escape their grasp at any time. Once they made their front door, two men came out and secured all the shutters.
Time passed. It started to grow dark, and the few passers-by there had been disappeared. Thunder rolled.
Suddenly, the door to the second house was flung open and blue surtout came out. A voice from inside called, “Oh, do come back, Miss Darcy! My husband will be here to take you home in a few minutes,” before the wind blew the door shut again. The coat headed off down the road and looked up. The three strangers were converging on its wearer and were already alarmingly close. She gave a cry of alarm and turned back, but seeing the closed door she had just left, she darted up a small lane between two houses instead.
The three scoundrels pounded after her, their coat tails blowing in the wind. They were just in time to see their quarry turning to the right at the top of the lane, so they headed after her, prize-fighter pulling an old sack from his pocket as they ran. They were halfway up when they were suddenly blinded by a wash of light.
Two men stood at the end of the lane, dark lanterns now opened and fully lit at their feet, holding stout cudgels that they smacked into their palms with looks not so much of menace as of satisfaction. Despite the fact that one of them had a false foot, they were both large and alarmingly calm. The three confederates looked to turn back, only to find that the other end was also blocked, this time by two large men in blacksmiths’ aprons with hammers in their hands.
There was a moment’s silence before prize-fighter and bandy-legs decided to make a fight of it. They rushed towards the first two men while driving coat tried to make a run for it.
Peeping round the end of the house, Elizabeth could see very little, especially when one of the lanterns was kicked over, but she heard sounds of a struggle, a lot of very bad language, and then silence. She tugged the blue coat closer to herself for comfort.
Lieutenant Grace came out of the shadows and uncocked the pistol Elizabeth had not even known he was carrying. Puttnam and Anderssen shook hands with the blacksmith and his son, and a small amount of money changed hands, despite protestations that it had been a pleasure. “To drink the captain and his lady’s health” was the finally successful argument. The lieutenant hurried Elizabeth back indoors where his wife was waiting, pale with fright. They both plied Elizabeth with currant wine, which she secretly thought very unpleasant, and compliments on her bravery.
“I admire your strategy, m’dear,” he said, as he walked her back to her own front door. “The true Nelson touch.”
That night, in her journal-cum-letter to her husband, she mentioned the weather and tea with the lieutenant and his wife, but nothing else. She had no desire to burden him with her thoughts and fears, for the day had been terrifying in the extreme. Georgiana was not nearly so discreet in her letter, admiration and gratitude spilling over the page.
Early the next day, Lieutenant Grace and Anderssen left Hatfield in the blacksmith’s cart, three large canvas-wrapped bundles in the back. They were, said the lieutenant’s wife to her particular friend Mrs. Watcham, going to visit a friend of the lieutenant currently stationed on the Press tender in the Thames. There were some things he had found lying around the house he thought Lieutenant Miller might be able to make use of.
Chapter Fourteen
Life settled down after this incident into something more closely approaching a routine. Georgiana’s masters came to the house regularly, and after a few weeks, both the Mrs. Darcys joined in the lessons, the elder having never learned French and the younger wishing to learn to draw so that she might send her husband the sort of delightful sketches he had sent her. It turned out not to be nearly as easy as she had hoped.
Mary came to stay for a month, and at Georgiana’s request, her music master listened to her play. Elizabeth would probably have prevented this had she known in advance, for Mr. Haskins was an irascible gentleman. However, while he shook his head and tutted, he also suggested some simple improvements in technique and posture, which made a tremendous difference to Mary’s playing. Elizabeth was touched to see how grateful Mary was for even a little attention and consideration, and since Georgiana and she soon became friends, she suggested that Mary share with Georgiana rather than herself. That night she could hear the two girls whispering and giggling together and wondered whether either of them had ever done that before. Marooned between Elizabeth and Jane on the one hand and Kitty and Lydia on the other, Mary had often been left out and, as Elizabeth wrote to her husband, “I am ashamed of how little consideration I have extended to my poor sister. She is not naturally clever or talented, and in trying to be both, she has made a variety of wrong tacks that Jane and I must endeavour to amend. Is that correct? Tacks?”
When it was time for Mary to go home, Mrs. Bennet and her remaining daughters came to collect her, bearing letters from Mr. Bennet for Elizabeth to read.
From the first letter:
“The seas were beyond anything I saw when I went to Ireland, even the sailors thought it uncommon rough. I truly thought my cot would be my coffin. However, my son-in-law was very attentive and did everything he could for my comfort. I am fairly certain the Physician to the Fleet thought tending to mere civilians an imposition, but Captain Darcy was not to be gainsaid. Pray tell Lizzy that she has an excellent gentleman for a husband, although I dare say she knows it already.”
From the second, headed The Crown and Anchor, Valletta, Malta:
After a few paragraphs of description of “an absurdly English inn in the middle of a Mediterranean town” and of reassurances about his health, “the cough almost gone and the ability to breathe deeply I had thought lost forever, regained,” he again talked of the captain:
Seeing him at his work, I realised what a considerable
man he is. The crew he has been given is raw and discontented, the old hands resenting the arrival of the new, and the new confused about their business. However, he has so mixed their duties and their mutual obligations that when he instituted a series of competitions in the various motions that make up their daily activities, such as striking and hoisting the many masts and sails, they were obliged to cooperate and teach the unhandy so as not to lose the match. The prizes are trifling—a bottle of wine, extra duff (a sort of solid pudding), release from punishment—but the good-humoured rivalry is beginning to make an appreciable difference in the feeling amongst the crew.
The officers of the ship have told me of the many cruel and tyrannical captains that abound, men who would enforce obedience with the lash, seeing no other way to control so various a group of men, many of them deeply reluctant to serve, and it is true that I have seen the “grating rigged” for punishment more than once. However, in view of the number of thieves and worse that were included in the latest draft, I am convinced that, on each occasion, it was an absolute necessity and have already noticed that the number of such occasions is sensibly diminishing as time passes.
He sails on his mission—which he refuses to discuss—next week, and I shall miss his company, even though I am very comfortably situated here.
Please send Plotinus, the Eudemian Ethics, and “The Rape of the Lock.”
While Elizabeth could have done with more of such information, she could not help but note that her father was quite obviously feeling a great deal better, and she settled down to wait for the next letter from her husband with considerable anticipation.
As she waited, she recruited the small boys of the town as her spies. Every stranger who entered the little town was followed by half a dozen children until he would leave again. The knives-to-grind man had never before worked with an apparently admiring crowd about him and was by no means sure he liked it. The journeyman joiner on the tramp was followed from one end of the town to the other and was glad to leave, although his journey was entirely innocent and his character mild. The potboys at the King’s Head and the Eagle and Child and the boy who worked for Mrs. Cope at the little alehouse all reported to Puttnam and received their extra few pennies for doing so. The system was inexpensive and efficient, and Elizabeth was secretly rather proud of it.
After a number of increasingly anxious weeks waiting, two letters arrived from Captain Darcy at once. Lieutenant Grace explained that the ship carrying the first was delayed at sea by an action with a French privateer, which it had chased to Madeira before boarding.
She was feeding the hens when Lieutenant Grace stumped over with the letters and a parcel from her husband. Hurriedly wiping her hands on her apron, she rushed indoors to receive him, scarcely remembering to be civil. Luckily, he seemed to understand, for he soon excused himself and left. Georgiana was at the rectory, learning to dance with the vicar’s daughters and some other girls from the town, so she had the letters to herself.
They were numbered “2” and “3,” so she opened them in order, glad she had remembered to number her own. The first began, “Dear Madam,” and her heart sank.
He began by assuring her of her father’s continued improvement. “I have settled him in the Crown and Anchor, a respectable, quiet place where English is spoken but where he can get the dishes of the region if he so desires. I always think it a shame to visit a place and insist on eating ‘the roast beef of old England’ and, unlike many of my shipmates, he seems to have no rooted objection to garlic, a herb of the region much used in cookery. He has two rooms and one for Jessup, and he has set his books and papers out quite comfortably. Yesterday, I called to see him and found him sitting outside under an awning, drinking chocolate and watching the life of the port. His breathing is still rather shallower than seems to me quite right, but he can climb the stairs to his room without aid and is taking language lessons from a local schoolmaster.”
There was another charming drawing of her father, in loose trousers and a light jacket over an open-necked shirt, sitting at a table, looking about him, a broad-brimmed hat on the table beside him.
This letter, like her own, was in the form of a journal and it was obvious when her letter arrived, for he broke off a description of a festival in the town for some saint’s day or other.
“My Dear Elizabeth, your letter arrived his morning on the Endymion and was more welcome that you can probably believe.” For a moment, she read no further, a strange feeling in her chest, a sort of hollowness that was still oddly happy. She shook herself and read on:
Not since my mother died have I received a letter so full of home. It was as though you were sitting beside me telling me of your day. I could almost see Anderssen and Grace mending the roof as though it was the foretopmast yard in a heavy swell. If Grace, bless him, has a fault, it is that he does tend to make a fuss when there is anything to be done. I know you will not say anything to him, for he was monstrous kind to me when I was a master’s mate, growing out of my uniform and constantly hungry. It was not until many months after I left the Lincoln that I realised that he could not possibly have been sent too much food from home, I was too glad to get the pots of jam he gave me.
You ask why I was sent to sea so very young. It was, I suppose, a mistake. My father was the county MP, and another member, Mr. Gallgrave, mentioned he was sending a lad to sea and did my father want to send his youngest along with him? I found out later that Mr. Gallgrave thought I was rather older than I was, as I was somewhat tall for my age. You must not distress yourself, however. While nine is young, it is by no means unheard of—lads of that age are rated “Captain’s Servant” and it is something like an apprenticeship. One learns one’s trade by watching and gradually doing more and more as time goes on. Then, when one is twelve or thirteen, one is rated midshipman and given some little authority.
I was luckier than most. The “Illustrious” was a well-run, happy ship, I had a regular allowance of £50 a year sent out, so I was not entirely reliant on ship’s stores, and my Uncle Matlock, my mother’s brother, was very kind and sent regular presents. So all in all, it could have been a lot worse, especially since I found the mathematics of navigation interesting and, if not easy, then at least possible to be learned, unlike one poor fellow who could never get his brains round it and had to be sent home.
Now, that is a tale from my childhood. You can tell me what your father meant by “never out of a tree.”
This seemed to Elizabeth to beg more questions than it answered. Why would a father send a child that young to war? And why did no one write once his mother died?
The rest of the letter was about his life at sea as he tried to mould his miscellaneous crew into an efficient fighting force. “We have begun to make a little progress at last. The more intelligent amongst the new draft have realised that, although this is a hard life, failing to learn their duty can only make it harder, and they have begun to make an effort to learn. There are still half a dozen hard cases who refuse and a couple of inveterate thieves I have had to have flogged and flogged again for the sake of the ordinary, decent sailors who have little enough without having it stolen. I have always loathed a flogging captain—I see no reason to beat a man for not performing a duty no one has taught him—but any weakness on my part only serves to reduce my authority and make life harder for those who can or wish to do their duty.
“I would not express any of this aboard, and it is an unexpected comfort to be able to write it to you, my dear Elizabeth.”
The end of the letter was abrupt. In the middle of a description of the sailors dancing on the forecastle before hammocks were piped, he broke off to write, “Williams of the Swiftsure calls to say he is homeward bound and will deliver this. Please accept my very best wishes for your continued health and happiness and give my love to Georgiana. Yours, Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
Swiftly, she turned to the second letter:
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My Dear Elizabeth,
What on earth is this Georgiana writes about you all being attacked? I read your letter, and I was charmed and soothed by your description of life in a English country town, and the next thing I read is that there was an attempt to cut her out and carry her off!
Please write at once and let me know what really happened. Georgiana wrote something about your wearing her coat, then Puttnam and Anderssen beating some London roughs and turning them over to the Press. I have read the letter half a hundred times and can make neither head nor tail of it.
My only consolation is that you appear to have emerged unscathed. Please extend my thanks to all concerned, but please do not ever hide such things from me again. At least your (very welcome) letters are intelligible, and I would rather by far know what is happening at home to those I love than have to guess it from my sister’s letters (perhaps you ought to engage a writing master).
Please write and tell me immediately that you are all safe and well. I have made some more money available. Tell Anderssen to call in a few more shipmates, decent reliable men like Haslam and Rattray if he can find them, and billet them in the stables. A couple of guineas a month and all found would not be too much for my peace of mind and your safety.
It took several more paragraphs like this before the letter calmed down enough to contain any news, and Elizabeth was convinced that the first page had been added to another, rather calmer letter. Her father continued well, and to everyone’s amazement, Jessup was now walking out with the widow of Mr. Chambers, the former gunner of the Agamemnon. “The lady runs a laundry in Valletta and is a much larger woman than he is a man. However, this does not seem to worry either of them, and they have been seen in the marketplace, carrying her basket between them, exchanging tender glances over the handle.”
The crew continued to settle, with only a few exceptions:
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