by Riana Everly
But it was not the tavern that Mr. Darcy and Richard seemed to concern themselves about, nor was it the crush of unwashed humanity that slunk past the carriage. Rather, the men were staring across the street, several buildings further along, at a plain dark brick structure that stood four storeys high, with a heavy dark door in its centre, the exact colour of which was undetermined in the dying light of the day, and solid shutters closed tight on all its few windows. Elizabeth could barely make out the number plate at the door that read 132B.
“Is that the place?” she asked breathlessly, afraid to speak in more than a whisper. “Is that the building of which Sammy spoke?”
It was Richard who replied, his voice equally quiet. “I believe it is, Elizabeth. We have had the rooming house watched ever since we heard of Wickham’s desertion, but none of our men have seen him there; we had not thought to retrace his entire route from what your cousin described. But from my faint knowledge of the area, this building is as likely a place for the rat to have holed up as any. And Will is correct; it backs onto the rooming house, and may even be connected through the mews.” He had been consulting a map as they had travelled, nodding all the while. “Still, my men are here. The lad I sent will have seen to that.” He pulled aside a chink in the sheer curtains that allowed them to see out but blocked the view of those seeking to peer in, and nodded to an old crippled man in rags, sitting against a building seeking alms.
“Captain Donnell,” he murmured in explanation. “Injured on the Continent, lost a leg, but still a fine man and a good officer. Fear not for his appearance; he is pleased to be doing useful work, even after his injury. He is being well-compensated for his task.”
Donnell, for his part, barely glanced up, but tugged his cap further over his filthy face and scratched an ear. Richard nodded and let the curtain drop. “No sign of Wickham today either,” he sighed. “We have not been granted entry to the other building and have not wished to show our hand without knowing whether he is there. Should we enter and not find him immediately, it would not only alert him to our intentions, but would also present him with the chance to flee and hide more deeply. We have not wanted to take that chance. But now that Sammy might be involved, and now that we have located this other building, matters have changed. We will enter by the back after night falls whilst doing everything in our power to ensure Sammy’s safety.”
It was all Elizabeth could do to bow her head in acknowledgement of the colonel’s statement. Suddenly she felt a touch on her bare hand—she had forgotten, in the rush to leave Gracechurch Street, to bring her gloves—and she looked down to see Mr. Darcy’s hand gently resting on her own. “I care for the boy too,” he whispered to her, “and would do anything to see him returned safely to his family. All will be well.”
The three resumed their silent vigil as the last rays of daylight faded and were replaced by the uneven lights that shone through warped glass windows or that reached the cobblestones from the street lights on the cross street some several yards away. Shapes turned into shadows and shadows into gaping abysses, where light vanished into nothingness. Elizabeth shivered and found herself wrapped in a rough but clean-smelling blanket. Mr. Darcy reached for her hand again and squeezed it for a moment, then let his hand relax in hers, not relinquishing contact. For a very long time they sat thus, watching and listening, being silent and still, letting the world believe their carriage was empty of passengers.
Then, at last, a sound permeated through the shell of the carriage, rousing the three watchers from their trance-like states. The front door to the brick house opened slowly and a woman stepped out, looked around carefully, peering most curiously at the carriage. The three inside held their breaths, as if hoping to convince the woman by power of thought, that the carriage was indeed empty. At last, confident that she was not being watched, she then returned inside and called out in a relieved voice. “It’s clear,” the three watchers heard through the darkness. “Toss the garbage out!”
The next moment, a small shape was shoved out of that same door, and a man’s voice snarled after it, “Be gone, idiot child. Whether you understand me or not, if I see your face again, I shan’t be so gentle. Out!” Then, presumably to the woman, “The child is an imbecile, too feeble-minded to speak, should he even realise what he saw. I don’t wish his blood on my hands. He shan’t cause problems. He…” and the door closed on the rest of his words.
But the shape that now lay sprawled on the dark street began to move, and before she could comprehend what was occurring, Richard had darted from the carriage and scooped up the shape, rushing towards the door to the tavern. “Quick, Elizabeth, we must follow,” Darcy urged.
As quickly and silently as they could, the two alighted from the carriage and hustled into the drinking house. Loud noises and the heavy smell of stale stew and yeasty ale assaulted her, but rather than being led into the main room of the tavern, Elizabeth found herself being pulled into a small room towards the back of the building. Three men whom she had never before seen stood around a table, poring over plans and maps, and the rough cot in the corner now held Richard and the dark shape from the street. The shape was shaking and mewling like a lost kitten, and Elizabeth immediately recognised her young cousin.
“Sammy!” She gasped in horror. “What have they done to you?” She approached slowly, knowing the boy’s peculiarities, and examined him from a small distance. “Are you hurt? Did they injure you?” The boy did not answer, but merely stared into the air and mewled, his hands flapping before him, his eyes distant, displaying no awareness of the others in the room.
“I do not believe him to be physically hurt, Elizabeth,” Richard said quietly, “but you see he is not himself.”
“Alas, Richard,” she explained to him, “this is what I feared we might find. I have not seen him in so bad a state for many years, but this is what we strove to overcome, Miss Pierce and myself. When he is badly upset, when he feels he has no control over his situation, or when events overwhelm him, this is how my poor cousin responds.”
“He’s worse even than you, Will,” Richard smirked at his cousin, but Mr. Darcy did not grace him with even the hint of a smile.
“Let me near him, perhaps I can help calm him,” Elizabeth suggested. “I have helped in the past. He knows me.” Quietly and very slowly, she edged closer to the boy, now lying on his side on the cot. The three unknown men had moved to the far side of the room, and stood silently, watching the drama. “Sammy,” Elizabeth whispered. “Sammy, everything is well now. You may return. You are not in danger. I am here, and Mr. Darcy. You are safe. Everything is well.” She continued murmuring quiet words of reassurance to him, coming closer and closer, until she was sitting on the bed beside him. She reached into her reticule and slowly drew out a small object no larger than a grown man’s fist. It seemed to be covered in dark hair, like a wig without a head. “Fur,” she mouthed to the others in the room. The men all watched in silence as she placed the object in the boy’s restless hands. At first he batted it away, his hands never ceasing their spasmodic motion, flapping up and down, but as she gently pressed the ball of fur to his hands again and again, the flapping slowed and at last he grasped the ball in one hand and the flapping of the other hand became a gentle stroking motion. Elizabeth continued her quiet monologue, her voice soothing and low, and after a great many minutes, the shaking lad on the bed stopped mewling and settled into a strange calmness. From the corner of her eye, she observed Mr. Darcy’s own fingers flexing compulsively as if he, too, wished for something to worry at or stroke, and realised that for him, his dog Cabal was akin to Samuel’s fuss toy that the lad used to calm himself from severe agitation.
“Sammy, you are well, all is well,” she repeated again and again in a calm and soothing voice, and then asked, “Can you tell me how you are feeling?”
After a very long time—perhaps a quarter hour or more—the lad fell into a fitful sleep. It was another half hour before he awoke. The previously unseeing eyes bli
nked rapidly and then opened fully, focusing on the young woman on the cot beside him. “Cousin Lizzy,” the boy breathed at last, his hands resuming their unceasing stroking motion over the ball of fur.
Seemingly from nowhere, one of the men produced a cup of hot sweet tea and some biscuits, which Samuel consumed hungrily, and at last he had calmed himself enough to relate his adventures, although he resumed stroking his ball of fur and at no point did he allow his eyes to meet those of anyone else in the room. His voice remained distant and emotionless, but he responded to his companions and Elizabeth smiled tentatively.
“Mr. Darcy,” he called to his friend, “sit by me, please, so I can tell you what I did. Cousin Lizzy said you would not wish to be my friend any longer, but I did not believe her and you are here now.” Darcy looked quickly up at Elizabeth, confused, but said nothing and perched himself on the edge of the cot, next to the boy.
“Master Samuel,” he asked, “may the colonel also sit by us and take an account of your tale? It might be of great importance.”
Nodding his acceptance, Samuel started his story, stroking the ball of fur all the while.
He had, he told the gathered company, overheard his father’s discussions with the officers two nights previous, whilst heading towards the kitchens for something to eat. Intrigued by what little he had heard, he sat silently by the door until much of the situation had been revealed to him. He understood little of why Cousin Lydia should not marry whomsoever she wished, or why visiting London with Mr. Wickham were necessarily a bad thing, but what he did understand quite clearly was that the men were seeking Wickham, and he knew where Wickham was!
It had never occurred to the boy that Wickham might have chosen other quarters for his sojourn in town; once a behaviour had been settled upon, there seemed to be no need to change it. And so, the following day, as he had done before the holiday at Margate, Samuel walked the streets of London until he stood before the building he was certain housed the missing officer. He had, at first, made up games with his periscope, observing the street from behind carriages and around corners, but as darkness began to fall, he walked out openly into the street, and then, seized by some strange notion, walked up to the rooming house door and opened it.
The house, he informed them, was empty, but the corridor in which he found himself led past a staircase, past doors to rooms off the sides, and directly to another door at the back of the building, which was ajar. This, in turn, had led across the mews, directly to another door at the building behind it—the building from which he had been ejected so rudely not long before.
From that point, the tale became less clear; Elizabeth explained to the others that as the lad had become more agitated, his perceptions of events altered. However, a rough story emerged. He had entered this second building and, hearing voices, walked up the staircase to locate the source. On the second storey of the building, he found the appropriate room and opened the door without knocking. There was one occupant in the front room, whom he identified as Mr. Wickham, and he saw through a doorway leading into another room that there was a lady whom he thought might be Cousin Lydia, although he could hardly tell with her hair done the way it was.
Wickham had immediately grabbed him and begun to yell, which caused Samuel the greatest anxiety. Like Mr. Darcy, Sammy retreated behind barricades when greatly upset, but his defences made Mr. Darcy’s seem like the walls of a sand castle on the beach. Sammy himself could not explain how he reacted under extreme stress, but his cousin explained to the others.
“He gets most extremely agitated, and loses the ability to speak,” she told them. “He might make noises of the sort we heard when he first was brought in here, but he says no intelligible words. He stares into the distance, as if no one or nothing were in the room, and he sometimes spins in circles or rocks backwards and forwards, as if on a toy horse, or moves his hands compulsively and repetitively, in that flapping motion we all observed earlier. This is how he protects himself against what he perceives as an attack.”
Mr. Darcy nodded. He clearly understood.
“To anyone who does not know my cousin,” Elizabeth continued in a sad voice, “he would seem a feeble-minded halfwit, an idiot, the sort of child who should be in an institution or madhouse.”
Samuel looked at her and said, “Those were nearly exactly Mr. Wickham’s words. The lady who might have been Cousin Lydia asked what the commotion was, and Mr. Wickham told her not to worry and dragged me to another room on that same floor of the house where he locked me in. Every time he, or that horrible lady who lives on the first floor, would come to me, I found myself too upset to look at them. It was as if the waves we saw at Margate were all crashing down upon me and I could not breathe. I had to go somewhere safe, where I could not be hurt, and I went to my safe world behind my eyes. Then I awoke here, with my fuss toy.” He held up the ball of fur, never ceasing to stroke it.
“It calms him,” she explained unnecessarily. “The soft beaver fur is from his father’s warehouses, a tiny remnant too small to use or sell, but soft and comforting. The motion of petting it calms him.”
“So if I understand,” Richard asked serenely, “eventually Wickham decided you were a mute idiot and posed him no threat, and threw you out of the house?”
The boy stared at him. It was the first time he had met anybody’s eyes since he arrived. “I suppose so. I do not recall.”
“What, then lad, do you recall?” The words were gentle and encouraging. “Surely a smart boy such as yourself made some observations before retreating to your safe world.”
“I know,” replied Samuel in definite tones, “the layout of the house, where Mr. Wickham’s room is, how to enter from the back, how many candle sconces line the walls, and the colour shoes the lady was wearing.”
Richard stood up and beamed at the other men. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “General Samuel Gardiner is about to draw up our battle plans!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Assault
From there, matters moved quickly. Samuel put his artistic skills to use and provided the men with a rather detailed plan of the house—much more detailed than even Lizzy believed was possible. The officers decided to wait until the dark hours of the morning before entering the house, so as best to catch Wickham unawares.
He also drew a sketch of each of the two women he had seen. Elizabeth identified the first as definitely being her sister. The expression Samuel drew suggested that Lydia was not being kept under duress; on the basis of his sketch, the only charges against Wickham would be desertion from the militia and kidnapping of a child, not the forcible confinement of a young woman.
The other woman Mr. Darcy identified as Mrs. Younge, late of his employ, and the woman responsible for leading his sister into the clutches of Mr. Wickham the previous summer. Her actions then had not been criminal. Now, however, she too was party to the kidnapping and confinement of young Samuel, and for that, he expressed satisfaction to believe she would see justice.
Shortly after these plans had been arranged, a noise came from a dark corner of the room Elizabeth had not previously examined in her concern and attention to her cousin. A small door, hidden behind a large cabinet against the wall, now creaked open from the alleyway behind the tavern, and through it stepped none other than her aunt and uncle.
“Mama! Papa!” Sammy cried when he saw them, and he rushed into their open arms. For the second time that evening, his eyes connected with another’s as he gazed upon his parents. Mrs. Gardiner seemed too overcome to speak and was content to stand there with her arms wrapped tightly around her son, who seemed in no hurry to break the physical contact. Her husband, in a broken voice, thanked the colonel and Darcy profusely for their help, and commended the other men on their efforts in resolving the entire matter, before joining his wife and son in their embrace.
“In truth, Gardiner, we did little,” Richard explained. “Samuel had already secured his own freedom. We merely happened to be present to help him af
terwards. And he has provided us with all the information we need to trap this scoundrel at last and see justice done.”
“And Lydia?” Mrs. Gardiner finally found her voice. “What will become of her?”
Darcy shook his head. “I do not know, Madam. Let us rescue her first, and see to Wickham, and then we shall consider her fate.”
The Gardiners soon retreated to their carriage in the alleyway with their son, and thence to home, this time taking Elizabeth with them. She begged to be permitted to remain, to see to Lydia when the girl was brought down, but Mr. Darcy insisted that she return to the house with her family. Nothing would change his mind, and when Richard added his voice to his cousin’s, only to be echoed by her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth knew she had little choice.
“We shall come to the house with Miss Lydia as soon as we have her,” Mr. Darcy assured her in a formal voice. “But it shan’t be before first light, if my guess is correct. You need to rest. Tonight has been long, and you have been of the greatest assistance, but I cannot, in good conscience, allow you to remain here, for there may be danger.” He then dropped his voice and added, for her ears only, “Please, Elizabeth. Be safe.”
And so she relented.
Sleep did not come easily to any residents of the Gardiner house that evening. Samuel was still too upset by his ordeal to rest and, in a manner unseen since he was a very young child, he begged his parents not to leave him alone. His mother was most happy to oblige, for she had despaired of ever seeing him again, and the two sat up late into the night in the sitting room attached to the bedchamber, drinking tea and reading to each other. The most severe symptoms of the boy’s agitation had passed, and he was alert and communicative once more, but Lizzy felt it would be some days before he returned to the more sociable habits she and Miss Pierce had spent so many hours teaching him. Time and comfort alone would now help her cousin, and these she determined to allow him.
