At this point I thought it best to interrupt and tell Hill that Mrs. Bennet’s instructions need not be carried out just yet and that she might go, so as to leave us time to discuss the matter in a more reasonable fashion.
After the appropriate congratulations on the good news, we were left to ourselves, and I found myself with the unenviable task of talking sense to the wife of my bosom.
This was made all the more difficult by the lurking knowledge that I must at all costs avoid reference to the ‘scraps of oakum’ which I had swept into the fire, and which were obviously the strands of her latest grandchild’s hair, meant to be fitted up into a ring or a locket.
“You are to consider, Mrs. Bennet,” I said, “that Mr. and Mrs. Golightly are already on their way to London, where they propose to stay the night at Marlborough Street before carrying on to fulfill Kitty’s lifelong ambition of visiting Brighton for their honeymoon. I dare say it has escaped your recollection that the Fitzwilliams are living there now that the Colonel has a post at Horse Guards, Darcy having given the house to his sister as a wedding present. An express to Georgiana will arrive before Kitty and Golightly leave, I am sure, and acquaint them of the situation. Indeed, Georgiana may know of it already, her husband being so au fait with everything that goes on in London, and, if so, we can rely on her sense to delay the Golightlys until we have at least had a family conference. I shall send that express instantly, and we shall follow on in the morning to London, where all may be resolved. It is Lizzie and Jane who are my chief concern. What a pity they left so soon after the ceremony! I shall have to send a servant to seek for them on the road north, and deliver a letter. Fortunately we know where they intended to stay en route. Even so, it will be touch and go whether they can get back in time, assuming they wish to. Darcy may quite well decline the meeting, and could not be blamed if he did. But leave all this to me, my dear, and go and settle what you shall pack for your day at court.”
“Oh, Mr. Bennet, you always know just what to do. You are right, of course. I was sorry that Georgiana could not come to the wedding, but now it is just as well.”
“Well, there you are, my dear. Do you go put up your mantuas and settle the trunks. Meanwhile I have letters to write.”
Those letters caused me some little – not precisely anxiety, but some little thought. Mrs. Fitzwilliam’s was easy enough. Georgiana Darcy, as was, has always been just the same sort of straightforward, no nonsense girl as my Lizzie, and the news that we were about to descend on her would give her, I was sure, nothing but pleasure. Similarly, the note to Lizzie and Jane, on their travels to the North, posed no problems, although it was necessary to leave it up to them whether to turn round and retrace their steps for the pleasure of watching their sister lord it over their family on her return.
It was Lydia’s that gave me some pause. Should I send her a letter in the first place? The expense of a second express would not be inconsiderable, and the whole course of her present actions was predicated on our arriving in London before she did. If she were already there, then we might even now be too late for her big day. And what to say in it was a dilemma. Congratulations were necessary, of course, but I could not bring myself to wax too fulsome about Wickham’s unwarranted good fortune. Indeed, the proverb about what rises to the top in sewers crept unbidden into my mind. But I reasoned that I was being unjust. The Wickham I had seen in the North East was not the same as the Wickham we had known in Hertfordshire, and perhaps Australia had changed him further. Perhaps it had even changed Lydia, although her latest letter gave no grounds for believing so.
In the end I compromised, adding a codicil to Georgiana’s letter, bidding her pass on the news and our love and congratulations to the Wickhams should they already happen to be staying with her.
Then I set off to the stables, in search of a trustworthy boy to carry my letters to the Post and ride on after the Darcys and the Bingleys.
Chapter Two: London Town
It is not so very far from Meryton to London that it is perhaps reasonable to suppose that the Bennet family might be more intimately acquainted with the capital than in fact they are. The reason they are not is very easy to explain. I hate the place.
It is not merely a case of nec possum dicere quare. I have never set foot in the benighted city save in circumstances of the most unpleasant nature, the latest being my unsuccessful search for Lydia and Wickham after their elopement from Brighton.
I fear I have become quite superstitious about the place and cannot bring myself to look for anything but disappointment there at best, and with every turn of the coach wheels that brought us nearer to my destination I felt my anxiety grow. Call it the increasing morbid timidity of a man growing old if you will, but this I know, and know full well, as well as I know non amo te Londini that in this case my forebodings were not disappointed.
Georgiana met us in the hall at Marlborough Street. I had looked to see Kitty there to greet us, but she, it transpired, was out with her husband, visiting the shops.
“I am very glad to welcome you to my house, Mr. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet,” said Georgiana, “but I fear you are come too late for the fair, as I told Mr. and Mrs. Golightly yesterday. Your daughter Lydia and her husband have come and gone but two days ago. Did you not get my letter?”
“We did not,” I replied. “We came as soon as we got Lydia’s, however, and it is all too good of you to put up with such a gathering of the Bennet clan as we have wished upon you. There may be more to come even yet.”
“Oh, we have acres of room,” she replied, “and company is always welcome, or at least some company is. But you will meet Miss Bingley again when she returns from making her calls. Meanwhile, come into the drawing room and sit down. We have enough to talk about, have we not?”
We did, although it was Mrs. Fitzwilliam who did most of the talking, since she was comfortable in her own home, and her news was the latest.
“It was a flying visit,” she continued, “here and gone in three days. I sent you an express the minute they arrived, but where it can have got to I have no idea. The postal service in London is not the most reliable, I fear. For my own part I was very glad their stay was no longer. One very quickly becomes disenchanted with all those dreadful children roaming about wrecking the place. Their nursemaid – indeed, all their servants – had to be left behind, being forbidden to return to England on pain of death. A high notion of discipline they must have in those parts, I should say. They pitched up here on Monday, without a word of warning, but plenty of entreaty and florid gratitude. I should not have known Lydia, of course, but there was no mistaking her husband.”
The implications struck me at once, of course.
“I am so sorry, my dear Georgiana, that you should have been put to all this trouble,” I said. “It must have been very awkward for you, to say the least.”
“My guests did not appear to find it at all awkward, and I resolved not to accord Wickham any more importance than he deserved, and to treat him as no more than the husband of my sister Lydia, making no reference to anything which may have occurred in the distant past.”
“This did not deter him in the least from referring to ‘our glorious days in Margate’ as soon as his wife had taken the infants upstairs, but I recollected what Elizabeth had once told me, and replied,
‘Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know. Do not let us quarrel about the past. In future, I hope we shall be always of one mind.’
“He took the reference immediately, and coloured a little, but came straight back to me with his usual impudence and -
‘I recollect to have heard such words before, from the only lady whose opinion I value as much as yours, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, and I trust our future relations may be much the same.’
“I say nothing of the conversation provided by Mrs. Wickham throughout their stay. It was as meaningless as it was incessant, and consisted mainly of invitations to admire her outfits and complaints that no-one was waiting to attend her t
o St James’s. I believe she could not quite credit her own elevation unless it was witnessed by as many of her family as might be. Both Edward and I declined the honour, however, and they were obliged to rely merely upon the Royal Household and the rolls of the Order of the Bath for reassurance. Then, the next day, they were gone, being of such consequence to Sir Thomas Maitland and his ordering of the Heptanesian Protectorate that they could not possibly dally any longer.”
“Their wisdom in this respect was proved but hours after their ship sailed, with the arrival of various bailiffs with writs for ancient debts, whom Edward had the pleasure of sending away unsatisfied. Lydia left a letter for her mother, which I shall hunt out for you presently. But here is Edward now, and he will want to tell you all the same things again, so I shall stop now and be the silent, demure wife for a while.”
Colonel Fitzwilliam had filled out considerably since the last time we met, at his marriage to Georgiana. Running errands about Whitehall for the Horse Guards obviously suits him better than galloping about Spain cajoling native guerrilla units, and who can blame him. I should not care to be involved in that sort of thing himself, but his work was obviously valuable. The Horse Guards do not hand out pensions of £2000 a year to everybody.
He did not keep us long in the dust of our journey, but urged us to refresh ourselves and rest in our apartments and join them for dinner later in the day, when future arrangements could be discussed-
“For, now that you are come at last to visit, we both hope to have your company for the rest of the month.”
We were shown to those apartments forthwith, and found them comfortable enough, to be sure. I had heard of the vast palace in London Darcy had bought for his sister, but never quite credited what I had heard. It was true, however. The influence of the Sun King lay heavily everywhere one went, although the furnishings, selected by Georgiana personally, were in the modern taste.
We all met again in the drawing room before dinner. Kitty and Golightly had by now returned and were waiting for us.
“Well, sir,” said Golightly, “ we got your letter and stayed for you as requested, but failed the meeting with our brother and sister from the colonies. Colonel and Mrs. Fitzwilliam more than made up for the disappointment, however. But, say, what is to be done now.”
“I fear I cannot say,” I replied, “or at least, I cannot say until we have heard what Lydia has to tell us in her letter. But, by the way, Mrs. Fitzwilliam, I fear I must warn you to expect yet more invasions. As soon as we got the news we sent after Lizzie and Jane, and they may be knocking on your door any day now. I can at least spare you Mary, since Casaubon intercepts all her letters, and I am not corresponding with him at the moment.”
“Let us hear no more of this ‘Mrs. Fitzwilliam, dear Mr. Bennet. We are all family, are we not, and I have always been Georgiana. And my husband is Ned, or Edward, if you must be formal. We shall both of us be very pleased to see Lizzie and Jane again, and my brother and Bingley. As I said before, we have acres of room. And by all means send for Mary. Let us have the whole family together for a council of war. I should send to Rosings for Cousin Anne, only I know her mother would never permit it. But I have kept you from Lydia’s letter too long as it is, Mrs. Bennet. Pray take it and read it.”
Mrs. Bennet made her usual fuss about not needing spectacles at all.
“But I fear my eyes are tired still. Do you read it, Mr. Bennet. You always read so well and so clearly.”
“Should we not wait awhile?” I asked. “Are we not keeping the company from dinner.”
“Not at all, Mr. Bennet,” replied the colonel. “We are still waiting on Miss Bingley. You should have more than enough time before she makes her entrance.”
I had a fair idea of the kind of nonsense any letter from Lydia would contain, and should have preferred the first reading, at least, to be in private, but there was no help for it now, so I removed the wafer and unfolded the paper.
“Dear Mama and Papa,” Lydia wrote, “what a shame you were not at the investiture yesterday. I made sure that you would be, and cannot think why you should not. Meryton is not so very far from London, after all.
It was all very splendid at the palace, and I felt so proud when I saw my dear Wickham kneeling before the king himself, and saw the king tap him on the shoulder and heard him say ‘Arise, Sir George’. So now, here I am, the real Lady Wickham at last, and you must all give me precedence when we meet. Will that not be a joke?
Alas, who knows when that meeting might be? My dear Wickham is so valuable – I might almost say invaluable – to his Excellency the High Commissioner that he has summoned him to his side forthwith, and we must leave today, without even time for a short trip into Hertfordshire.
Oh, why did the two of you not come? And Kitty, too? I can excuse my other sisters, stranded in the wilds of Derbyshire and Yorkshire and other such uncouth places, but I did think that you would make the effort. We should have had such fun, and you would have been so proud, too.
The children are longing to meet you, too, as you must be longing to make their acquaintance. It is all too bad, you know.
Still, I am a real lady now, quite as much as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and must make allowances for those less fortunate than myself. I cannot know what pressing concerns may have prevented your coming, no more than I can help feeling your absence.
Now that the war is over, however, they tell me it is but an easy voyage to Corfu, where we are to have a real Venetian palazzo for ourselves, and there will always be room for my family should you care to make the journey. Papa has always lamented that he never made the Grand Tour, and we shall not be so very far from Venice, you know.
So I shall live in hope that we may yet welcome you to the land where the lemons bloom, as that German poet has it. We are not entirely without culture in the Antipodes, you see, and I have been improving my reading with so little else to do.
Wickham bids me pass on his sincerest regards, while reminding me that time and tide wait for no man, and neither do the ships that swim upon the latter, so we must be off.
Do come to see us soon, and ease the heart of your illustrious daughter,
Lydia, Lady Wickham.”
“Well,” I said, as I laid the missive down, “it is good to see that Goethe has penetrated so far, although his lemons bloomed in Sicily and not in Corfu, but is not all that just like Lydia?”
“So it is, Mr. Bennet,” cried my wife, “just like my poor child, so full of concern at the pleasures we had missed, with never a thought for herself. Never has a mother had such a daughter, such a soul mate. I miss her sadly. Would it not be a fine thing if we could follow after her? I do not recall these Ionian Islands from when we did the Use of the Globes, but from what Lydia says they cannot be far off. Could they be the same as the Channel Islands, do you think, or the Scilly Isles?”
At this remark, so typical of the speaker, both Georgiana and the Colonel smiled indulgently, and it was left to me to prick the bubble of Mrs. Bennet’s hopes.
“Rather further than that, you will find, I think,” I began, but was saved by further comment by “but here is Miss Bingley, and we must all go in to dinner. Let us discuss this further tomorrow, when, who knows, we may have the benefit of the advice of Lizzie and Jane, and their husbands.”
It requires very little wit to guess the main subject of our conversation over the meal. Mrs. Bennet was in her glory, and must have mentioned ‘her daughter, Lady Wickham’ at least two dozen times. Our host and hostess took it well enough, having something of my own tendency to find amusement in the foibles of others, but, even for them, the subject began to wear. As for Miss Bingley, I am sure I observed her gritting her teeth. In such company, however, she was restricted in the comments she might make about Wickham, and ventured no more than that ‘he had always been a great favourite among the young ladies of Meryton’.
I thought it wisest, however, to use the fatigue of the journey as an excuse for retiring early to bed, whe
re I hoped for a chance of restoring something resembling calm to our proceedings.
Hope is always foolish, and very quickly becomes forlorn, and it was well after midnight before sleep overcame the fond mother, and well after that before my own thoughts would let me rest.
Chapter Three:Confabulations
We were none of us up very early the following morning, but that, I fear, is only the norm in London, and one of the things I hate the place for. I dare say it is unreasonable, but I had not yet been for twenty-four hours in that scene of dissipation and vice, and I began already to find my morals corrupted. On the great scale of things, succumbing to the pleasures of lying abed may not be of any tremendous consequence, but great oaks from little acorns grow, and I did not doubt that other deadly sins would follow on from that of sloth.
Extravagance was bound to be next, for in London nothing is more certain than expense. We were committed to waiting on the arrival – itself by no means certain – of Lizzie and Jane, and already Kitty and Mrs. Bennet could scarce contain their excitement at the thought of a day in the shops of Bond Street. Why could not Darcy have bought a house in a pleasant country area, such as Chelsea, or Hampstead? Why must Lydia go to a sister she had never seen, in Mayfair, rather than to her uncle and aunt in Gracechurch Street?
On reflection, that last question hardly needed answering. The attractions of the West End, and the proximity of Marlborough Street to St James’s would provide all the excuse Lydia needed for avoiding her relations somewhere near Cheapside, while Wickham might well have his own reasons for wishing to see Georgiana again.
It may be taken as read that that particular thought did nothing to improve my mood by its occurrence. I resolutely declined to follow the tortuous path of speculation that was thus opened in my mind, but found myself happier than I had expected that Wickham must now be well on his way to Corfu, even though he was taking my daughter and grandchildren with him.
Our Neighbours' Sport Beyond the Seas Page 2
