Elizabeth's Refuge

by Timothy Underwood

  Elizabeth’s Refuge

  An Elizabeth and Darcy Story

  Timothy Underwood

  Copy edit done by DJ Hendrickson

  Copyright © 2019 by Timothy Underwood

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Afterward:

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my beta readers, Betty Kennedy, Mandie Schwaderer, and Brooke Till for reviewing the manuscript, and telling me both where they found problems and that they liked it a lot. I’d also like to thank DJ Hendrickson for editing the book, and as always my wife for supporting me in everything I do, and encouraging me to take the time to celebrate my successes. I love you dearest.

  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 from Macbeth crossed 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 to properly box. 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.

  She had always seen the chance of such a thing happening to her in actual, vivid life as a matter so remote as to not be wort
h worrying about.

  The moment was surreal, almost dreamlike. This unreality allowed Elizabeth, despite the grip of adrenaline and the sweat gathering in her armpits, to wait patiently to strike the earl at the first moment she thought his guard was let down.

  Movements that had been practiced to perfection for a few days with that pugilist flickered half remembered through her brain.

  The earl laughed as he shut the door behind him. His piercing, handsome, evil blue eyes looked through her. The sneer was one of command.

  He’d already slapped a purpling bruise onto her face. But Elizabeth could not feel any pain.

  Elizabeth pulled her elbows tighter against herself, in a way that made her feel helpless. She trembled, and made a pretense of looking every direction. The fireplace was next across from the bed, with red embers glowing. Iron poker and scoop. A Chinese style vase with delicate blue veins and accents sat on the marble ledge above the fire, glowing in thin light through the windows. There was a vivid painting of a naked woman with impossibly large breasts sitting atop the waist of an unrobed gentleman, her eyes rolled back in ecstasy as he grabbed her hips.

  Her mouth was dry.

  Silk hangings surrounded the bed, with its dense pillowed red silk coverlets.

  An absent part of Elizabeth’s brain thought this was all very cliché for a rake’s den.

  Lachglass leered at her, smiling softly, making his thick lips thicker, and his paunch a bit more prominent. He stepped forward to grab her arms. He squeezed them so tight they hurt. In the moment that he grabbed her, Elizabeth realized she could not drive her knee into his crotch. The angle was wrong, and he was seemingly tensed and ready for her to do that.

  The head.

  The pugilist’s voice snapped through her mind, in what was a long speech that seemed to take just an instant for her to relive. She felt again the warm summer breeze on her face, the scent of freshly mown hay, the callused hands of the pugilist, the coltish feel of her long legs and arms that the rest of her body had not grown into. The slow speaking voice of the pugilist, as he paused with every few words to make sure she had heard, and the way he repeated himself.

  “The head. That skull bone. Thick it is.” He had made her nod. “The skull is thick. You can bang a fellow up neatly if you hit a soft spot with it. The skull. There is power in the neck. Crack it forward, and you can break a man’s nose, or jaw. Just don’t hit him on his skull. ’Cause it’s hard, the skull is. Hit them with your hard parts on their squishy parts.”

  Lachglass laughingly pulled her towards him, planning to force his gross mouth against her.

  Crack.

  A loud crack, and a soft crumpling sound as the nose collapsed.

  Elizabeth’s eyes swam as the top of her head cracked against the earl’s face. He released her arms with an inarticulate moan of pain.

  Now grabbing his shoulders for leverage, Elizabeth kneed his groin.

  He oofed again, his eyes went wide in pain and then started to water as blood flowed freely from his nose.

  Elizabeth stepped back away from the earl. Her eyes flickered to the door.

  With an inarticulate grunt, Lachglass snarled at her, and unevenly spread one arm to catch her if she ran past him, as he continued to grotesquely grip his wounded groin with the other.

  Her heart pounded. The outside door was still locked. She could run past him.

  Elizabeth turned towards the mantelpiece, but because she was frightened in that instant that it would take too long to grab and draw the poker from out of the iron holding rack, she grabbed the out-of-placedly pretty vase from the mantelpiece with one hand. It was heavier than the delicate blue tracery made it look.

  Lord Lachglass stumbled towards her.

  Driven by all her terror and all her determination to not lose to this horrible creature, she brought it down on his head.

  Amidst shards of shattered fine china, Lachglass dropped like a sack of manure.

  Elizabeth’s eyes swam. She could not see anything. She panted hard. He wasn’t moving. She was dizzy.

  Not moving at all.

  What now?

  A new fear took her, and Elizabeth knelt down to the earl’s body. She couldn’t see him breathing. There was no sound of air moving in and out, his chest was still.

  Elizabeth tremblingly moved her hand to hold over his still mouth, to feel if there was any breath.

  A hard knock on the bedroom door startled her up.

  “Milord, Milord, are you well?” Mr. Blight’s nasal voice called out.

  Lachglass’s still and silent body made no reply.

  They’d hang her for this.

  And Elizabeth had no liking for the notion of being hung.

  She had to escape. Now. The apartment suite door must be unlocked again if Mr. Blight was at the bedroom door.

  Elizabeth silently stepped on the balls of her feet next to the door. Mr. Blight cautiously opened the door, saying, “Milord, apologies, sir,” again as he did so. And as the gentleman’s gentleman blinked at the earl’s still body, Elizabeth struck him in the jaw, just below an ugly scar on his face, with a hurled elbow, the force in it gained by twisting her body as hard and fast as she could. She’d kept her palm open, as taught, so that the bones in her arm pounded into him. The sharp point of the elbow gashed open his skin.

  The pugilist had told her that if she was ever in any serious danger, she must hit far harder than she even thought she could. She could not leave any shred of muscle power unused if she wished to protect herself. And he’d taught her that the elbow was a vastly better weapon than her soft and easily breakable hands.

  Elizabeth ran past Mr. Blight, not giving him a chance to recover, and she didn’t want to attack him with another weapon and kill a second man. The door was open, as she’d hoped, and she ran through it, and stumbling, hurled herself down the stairs.

  She tripped at the bottom and fell down the last four steps, but though she thought her foot should have been twisted from the fall, she peculiarly felt no pain.

  And then she was up, to the main door. Thrown open. The world seemed to appear in moments caught in portraiture or pencil sketches rather than as a smooth reality.

  She ran.

  The earl’s house was on a fashionable square, with an oval gated park in the middle surrounded by quiet cobblestoned streets shaded by tall elms and oaks. The buildings were made of a handsome grey and brown stone. The day had a grey sleety February sky. Elizabeth did not pause as she dashed out the house and down the staircase to the building’s entrance. She took the first street that turned away from the garden in the middle of the square.

  Elizabeth ran.

  Mr. Blight would recover, and come after her with anger and blood.

  And she ran from the dead sack of manure of a body she’d left behind in the room. Elizabeth took another turn, at random, except she was confident this alleyway kept her running away from the house. Then yet another turn. She barely had a sense of where she was.

  Without meaning to she hit a major road. Bond Street, emptier than in summer, but still full of carriages, and fashionable ladies and gentlemen strolling up and down and stopping in the expensive shops.

  Tall white plastered buildings, and handsome red brick façades on either side.

  She must appear so strange. The people she saw from the corners of her eyes stared at her. She full of fright ran across the road, without properly looking to both sides, or waiting.

  A careening carriage carrying two ladies gripping their ostrich feather hats tightly to keep them from flying away, and a laughing gentleman in a beaver hat missed her by bare inches. The extra thrill of coming close to death only made her run faster once more.

  Elizabeth had always been athletic, and she liked to run when she was in a park and not observed, but it had been years since she had run very much. In the cold air her lungs ached. They felt like they would collapse. They hurt so much, but she was still terrified, and she needed to get as far from the house a
s possible. As far away. Just get away.

  Her legs were rubbery and they wanted to give up with every hurtling step.

  She ran.

  She ran down a thin street lined on both sides with handsome buildings, and reached Grosvenor square, with its tall palatial buildings and townhouses, and the large garden square with many benches. She ran past the fronts of the expensive houses, a blue streak conscious of the curious who may be observing her. Her footsteps were strangely soft for how fast she ran, as she was wearing house slippers instead of proper boots.

  Out of the square.

  Her chest ached hideously with each and every gasping difficult breath.

  Elizabeth’s brain still dwelled on the sensation as the vase cracked over his head, splintering and leaving the top in her hands, pieces turning around in her palms and nearly cutting her. The thud of his body hitting the ground. Blood from his crumpled nose and head. So much blood.

  Elizabeth burst into a giant park.

  Gravel pathways and tree-lined boulevards were almost empty due to the cold of the day. A thin frozen drizzle wisped from the skies. In shady spots under grey, denuded trees patches of snow remained from a snowfall a week before. The cold sweat stuck to Elizabeth’s body and dress.

  Despite its dourness, nature, even nature trimmed to its best effect, was to Elizabeth an old, comforting friend.

  Gasping breaths.

  Elizabeth collapsed onto a wrought iron bench hidden by two trees overlooking the Serpentine lake in the middle of Hyde Park, where royal swans swam, and where in December the pregnant wife of Byron’s atheist friend Percy Shelley, abandoned by her new lover, had thrown herself in the lake and been found water logged and very dead the next day.

  Her lungs ached.

  Her fingers tingled. Her legs shook and screamed with pain. The twisted foot, after supporting her for the entire run, ached deep inside.

  Elizabeth was cold.

  Drizzles of rain mixed with ice and the occasional flurry of snow attacked her. The frozen water melted instantly on the ground or her soaked through cotton dress.

  The light crinkling sound of a breaking vase. The vase striking his head. Was that crack she now clearly remembered his head breaking, or the ceramic of the vase breaking?