The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

I have missed Angus acutely, she admitted, not quite the same Mary after five days on the road in public coaches. I like the way his beautiful blue eyes sparkle with enthusiasm or humour, I like the way he watches out for me when we walk, I like his kind nature and his dry comments. Nor did he spoil it for me by speaking words of love-oh, I could not have borne that! Had he said them, I would have had to send him away. In the ordinary scheme of things I do not overly care for men. They are either overbearing and self-opinionated like Fitzwilliam Darcy, or stuffed with romantic rubbish like Robert Wilde. But I do not think of Angus as a man. I think of him as a friend more satisfying by far than female friends, who care only for eligible marriages and clothes.

The ducks had gathered, expecting bread, and she had none; turning from the river with a sigh, Mary walked back to the inn and spent the rest of the day reading Henry VI-apart, that is, from spending half an hour devouring a steak-and-kidney pudding and a rhubarb tart with thick cream. Only six days into her journey, and she was losing weight! How could that be, when she had spent them sitting down? Yet another lesson for the student of humanity: that sometimes a sedentary occupation could be more gruelling than mixing mortar.

And hey-ho, back to the stage-coach on the morrow! Aware that she was heading west now, and that Nottingham was a much shorter distance from Grantham than Stamford, she had climbed into the conveyance in a sanguine mood, rested enough to be at the depot early, thereby securing a window seat. Unfortunately such desirous objects depended upon the coachman, and this day’s coachman was a surly brute who stank of rum. Not five minutes after she was ensconced in her window seat, Mary found herself evicted from it to make room for a party of five men. As they were downy fellows up to every trick of travel, they had tipped the coachman threepence for the best seats. The sole female passenger, she was relegated to the middle of the backward facing seat, and was subjected to leers and pert remarks from the three opposite her and groping hands from the two flanking her. When they realised that she had no intention of talking to them, let alone flirting with them, they judged her above herself and proceeded to make her journey the worst misery she had suffered to date. When the coach stopped to change horses she was imprudent enough to complain to the coachman, and got naught for her pains except to like it, or walk. Advice that the men on the roof and box thought brilliant: no help there. Everyone on this stage was drunk, including the coachman. A furious Mary took her place in the cabin afterward sorely tempted to hit the fellow on her right, stroking her leg; but some instinct told her that if she did, she would be overpowered and subjected to worse.

Finally Nottingham arrived. All but one of her companions shoved her aside in their hurry to alight, while the stroking one held back, bowing to her mockingly. Head up, she descended from the coach and went sprawling in a heap of reeking, watery manure; the stroking man had tripped her. She fell headlong, tearing the palms of her gloves as she tried to save herself, and her reticule flew to land feet away, its contents spilling out. Including her nineteen gold guineas. Bonnet dangling around her neck and twisted to half blind her, she lay staring in horror at her precious coins, subsiding into more muck. What a slipshod place, an unruly little corner of her mind kept repeating: no one sweeps or cleans.

“Here, let me,” said a voice.

In the nick of time. The glitter of gold had attracted much attention, including from the coachman and the stroking fellow.

The owner of the voice was a big man who had been watching the coach come in. He reached Mary before the others could, gave them a cold glance that saw them back away, then lifted her to her feet. Quick and lithe, he gathered up her guineas, her reticule and its other contents. The reticule was handed to her with a smile that transformed an otherwise menacing face.

“Here, hold it open.”

Handkerchief, smelling salts, Argus’s letters, coin purse and all nineteen guineas were dropped into it.

“Thank you, sir,” said Mary, still gasping.

But he had gone. The driver had tossed her handbags into yet another pile of watery manure; Mary picked them up with an effort and walked out of the yard vowing that she would never again set foot in Nottingham.

The room she hired at an inn down a back street possessed a mirror that showed Mary what havoc the day’s disaster had wrought. Her greatcoat and dress were soaked in horse urine and covered with remnants of manure; when she fished it out, she found to her horror that the sheet of paper authorising her to draw upon her funds from any bank in England was an illegible mess of run ink. How could that have happened, when her greatcoat should have shielded it? But it had not, nor had her dress. How much water did one of those huge horses produce? Gallons, it seemed. She was wet to the skin. Her palms were sore as well as dirty, and her tapestry bags were stained, damp on their bottoms-but not, thank God, wet.

Trembling, she sank onto the edge of the lumpy bed and buried her face in her hands. How dared those men treat her so? What was England coming to, that a gentlewoman of her age could not travel unmolested?

There was cold water in a ewer on a small table, and by now she had sufficient experience of cheap inns to know that this was the only water she would get. The dress was beyond wearing again until she could wash it, so she draped it over the back of a small chair to dry, and put her greatcoat on the larger chair that said this room was the best the inn could offer. In the morning she would roll dress and greatcoat together, wrap them in paper if she could beg some, and put them in the false bottom of the bigger bag. The water in the ewer would have to be for her own use, though she suspected that it would take a tub of hot water to rid her of the stink of horse excrement.

Dining in a corner of the taproom was positively congenial after such a day, especially when she discovered that the leg of mutton was fairly tender and the steamed pudding tasty. Let us hope, she said to herself, that my ordeal is over. Even if I have to pay half-a-crown or more a night at the best inn in town, I am doomed to travel by the public stage-coach. A hired carriage, even drawn by one horse and of the least expensive kind, still costs three guineas a day before gratuities. There is no point in writing my book if I cannot afford to pay to have it published. However, when I get to Derby I am going to put up at a place can offer me that tub of hot water.

Two coaches were waiting in the yard when Mary entered it at six the next morning, having had no sleep thanks to the ammoniac smell wafting off her own body. A dull ache at the back of her head ran through it and made her ears ring, her eyes water. There must be something in the Nottingham air, she decided, that makes people so unhelpful, so rude, for no one in the yard paid her any attention. Desperate, she grabbed at a fleeing groom’s sleeve and forcibly detained him.

“Which is the coach to Derby?” she asked.

He pointed, twisted free of her grasp, and ran.

Sighing, she gave her two handbags to the coachman of the vehicle indicated. “How much is the fare?” she asked.

“I’ll ticket you first stop. I’m late.”

Praying that today would be more pleasant, she climbed up and occupied the forward-facing window on the opposite side. Thus far she was the only passenger, a state of affairs she didn’t think would last. But it did! Thank you, God, thank you! The coach, an old and smelly one pulled by four slight horses only, rolled out of the yard. Perhaps, she thought, developing a sense of humour, I am so fragrant that no one can bear my company. Which went to show how much Mary was changing; the old Mary had found little in life to laugh at. Or perhaps the new Mary was so beset by ill fortune that she thought it better to laugh than to cry.

The sheer luxury of having the cabin all to herself sent her mood soaring. She swung her feet onto the seat, put her head against a herniating squab, and fell asleep.

Only the cessation of movement woke her. Feet down, she stuck her head out of the window.

“Mansfield!” roared the driver.

Mansfield? Mary’s geography did not extend to a list of every town in England, but it was extensive enough to tell her that Mansfield was not on the road from Nottingham to Derby. She scrambled out as the coachman was descending from the box.

“Sir, did you say Mansfield?” she asked.

“That I did.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, eyes gone as grey as the lowering sky. “Isn’t this the coach from Nottingham to Derby, sir?”

He looked at her as if she were mad. “Marm, this is the stage to Sheffield. Derby was t’other one!”

“But the groom pointed me to this one!”

“Grooms point at the sun, the moon, the stars and stray dogs, marm. This is the Sheffield stage-coach, else it wouldn’t be in Mansfield.”

“But I don’t want to go to Sheffield!”

“Happen you’d best get off, then. You owe me sixpence.”

“Is there a coach back to Nottingham?”

“Not today, there ain’t. But if you step inside yon inn and wait, happen you’ll find someone going in that direction.” He thought hard, grunted. “Or else going to Chesterfield. A lot of traffic between here and Chesterfield. From there you could get to Manchester, but knowing you, marm, you won’t want to go to any of them places.”

“I do want to go to Manchester! It is my ultimate destination!”

“There you are, then.” Out came a callused paw. “Cough up sixpence, if you please. Right or wrong coach, it’s sixpence from Nottingham to Mansfield.”

Seeing his logic, she loosened the drawstrings of her reticule to give him the coin, and recoiled: the bag reeked! Her guineas! She had forgotten to wash them!

Off trundled the Sheffield stage-coach, the two men on its roof flat out and snoring. Judging by the clouds, they would soon be soaking wet. Mary walked into the taproom of a small, very respectable inn, resigned to accepting a lift from some farmer who would make her sit in the tray with his pigs. That would contribute an interesting overtone to her aroma!

The place smelled of strong soap, and the floor was still wet. The landlord’s wife, wielding a scrubbing brush, got to her feet in a hurry.

“Be off with you, dirty creature!” she cried, nostrils flaring. “Go on, be off!” She waved the brush like a native his club.

“I will gladly depart, madam,” said Mary icily, “if first you will furnish me with the name of an establishment from which I may secure transportation in the direction of Chesterfield.”

Unimpressed, the woman eyed her contemptuously. “There’s only one place for the likes of you! The Green Man. You stink the same.”

“How may I find the Green Man?” As she asked, Mary found herself being hustled out into the road by a nerve-pinching grasp around her elbow. “Unhand me, you pitiless and worm-eaten female dog!” she cried, wrenching free. “Have you no charity? I have had a nasty accident! But instead of being kind, you are unkind. Female dog? That is a euphemism! I will call you what you are-a bitch!”

“Sticks and stones! A mile down that road,” said the landlady, and shut the taproom door with a bang. Mary heard a bolt slide.

“It is easy to see that Eau de Cheval is not anyone’s favourite perfume,” said Mary to no one, and, a bag in either hand, set out down “that road.”

A cottage stood to right and to left, but after them, the countryside went not to fields but to forest. Frowning, she looked up to find the sun, but no sun peered through the dense overcast. Unless the Green Man was very close, she was going to be drenched. She walked faster. Was she in truth heading west? Or did this road lead into the thickets and impenetrable glooms of Sherwood Forest? Nonsense, Mary! Sherwood Forest is long gone to a figment of the imagination, its great trees felled to make room for the country seats of newly enriched gentlemen, or else to form the strakes and ribs of His Majesty’s ships of the line. Only small tracts of it remain, and those some miles east of Mansfield. My reading has informed me of these facts.

Even so, this nameless wood stretched away on either side, the ground coppered with dead leaves or bottle-green from clumps of bracken, and the road itself was as dim as twilight.

Came the sound of hooves clopping behind her; Mary turned to see if perhaps a pig-carting farmer was upon her, only to see a solitary rider astride a tall, fleet-looking bay horse. What do I do now? Pretend he does not exist, or ask him if I am going in the right direction? Then as he drew closer she went limp with relief. It was the kind gentleman who had picked her up in the Nottingham coach yard, retrieved her guineas.

“Oh, sir, how glad I am to see you!” she cried.

He descended from the saddle as easily as if it were but a foot off the ground, looped the reins around his left forearm, and stepped in front of her.

“I could not have asked for anything better,” he said with a smile. “You have no luck, do you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I had no chance to steal your guineas in a busy coach station, but here? Like taking a rattle off a baby!”

Obeying an impulse, her hands dropped the bags and fastened tightly about her reticule. “Kindly forget what you have just said, sir, and permit me to find the Green Man,” she said, chin up, eyes steady and unafraid. Yes, her heart was beating fast and her breathing had quickened, but they were prompting her to fight, not flight.

“I can’t do that.” The black hair, worn long enough to be tied back with a ribbon, stirred in a sudden gust of rainy air. “Besides, the Green Man is my ken-you’ll get no succour there, just a trip to a bawdy-house. You’re not young, marm, but you are uncommon pretty. Trust old Beatty’s wife to throw you out! She’s a Methodist, of whom there are many in these parts, more’s the pity. Who are you, to have so much money? When you fell in the muck I thought you a sad apology for a governess, forever running from the master’s amorous advances. Then I counted your guineas. Now I don’t know what to think, except that the money is no more yours than it is mine. Stole it, you did.”

“I did not! Step aside, my man!”

She may as well not have spoken. Head to one side, he looked her up and down in a considering way, eyes half closed, lips peeled back from equine teeth. “The question is, do I just take your guineas, or must I murder you? Were you bathed and better clad, might you be in a fact a gentlewoman? If ’tis so, I’d best kill you. Otherwise when Captain Thunder is maybe caught one day, you’d bear witness against him, eh?”

Prudence commanded her to be quiet, not to betray her origins, but that low she had not sunk. “Is that your name, Captain Thunder? Yes, indeed, Captain Thunder, I would bear witness against you in a court of law! You deserve the gibbet as well as the gallows!”

Clearly she puzzled him, gave him pause; women were prone to scream the house down, not answer him back. Skinny, filthy, alone, yet not reduced to terror.

“Give me the money.”

Her fists knotted over the reticule until their knuckles went white. “No! It is my money! I need it!”

The horse was patient and placid; when he laid hands on her the animal stood its ground as its reins were jerked about, apparently uninterested in the developing struggle. The plan Mary had been forming to set the horse plunging and kicking evaporated. Until now nothing in her life had revealed how physically strong she was; she surprised him with that strength as she fought to keep her money. He couldn’t even bend her fingers back to break them, so convulsive was their grip on her reticule. Wiry and agile, she slipped from his hold. Off down the road she ran, yelling, but within yards he overtook her, gripping her shoulders cruelly.

“Bitch! Cow!” he said, swinging her around and taking her throat in his left hand. His right crushed her wrists together until, nerveless, they released her hold on the reticule. It began to fall, was scooped up.

Mary went quite mad. One foot lashed out at his shins, a knee tried to reach his groin, her nails clawed at his face and drew blood-how dared this brute rob her!

But he had not let go her throat. A roaring invaded her ears, his face in front of her goggling eyes grew darker, less distinct. All fight left her; just as a crashing blow landed on her brow, Mary lost consciousness.

Moaning, sick to her stomach, she woke to find she was crumpled at the base of a huge tree, almost hidden by its buttresses. Drear light percolated through the leaves from overhead, and it was raining. Had been raining for some time, if her soaked clothing was anything to go by.

About an hour elapsed before she managed to drag herself into a sitting position on one buttress, there to ascertain her injuries. A very sore and bruised throat, bruised wrists, a great swelling over her right brow, and a piercing headache.

When she felt able to stand she began to search for her bags and reticule, but in vain. No doubt Captain Thunder had taken them off the road and pitched them into thick bracken, probably well removed from her own site. Though no wind blew on the forest floor, her teeth were chattering and her skin chilly to the touch; she was cold and hurt, and everywhere she looked were massive trees. This was no secondary-growth forest, for its denizens looked a thousand years old. Perhaps it was Sherwood; in which case, she was miles from where she had been. Then good sense reasserted itself-no, this was not Sherwood! It was some other immensely old forest in a county famous for them. Probably not even very extensive, except that when one was in it, all concepts of dimension were lost.

If she was to live, she had to find shelter against the encroaching night. After walking a small distance she found a beech rotted from within. It offered her enough protection to shield her from the rain; squeezed into the narrow cavity, Mary felt her spurt of energy peter out, and lost consciousness again.

The blow to her brow had been more severe than she understood, and would plague her for days to come with lapses of consciousness; when next she roused, night prevailed. She had slipped to sit upon the ground, but at least it was not raining. Then she fell into a kind of coma, restless and haunted with horrible dreams, but when her eyes opened, they found daylight. An experimental walk told her that she was not well; her whole body was in pain, and she fancied she was running a fever. I am coming down with a chill, and I am hopelessly lost. What to do, what to do? If only my head would stop throbbing!

He had meant this, she was sure. Captain Thunder, some local highwayman whose headquarters lay at the Green Man. By abandoning her in the depths of the forest, he intended she would perish from starvation and exposure, thinking thus to absolve himself of guilt for her death. Well, Captain Thunder, she thought, I am not going to oblige you by tamely lying down and giving up! Somehow I will find my way to the road.

The nook in the beech tree that had sheltered her was soft, mossy-didn’t moss grow on the north side of trees? And if it did, then the moss-free side was south. Only the woods lay left and right of the road! To walk south or north depended upon which side of the road he had chosen to dump her. Oh, the wretch! A true disciple of Satan! Eyes closed, Mary tried to put herself in the mind of a highwayman, and decided he would favour the left hand because that was the hand governed by Satan. But was left facing Chesterfield, or facing Mansfield? Mansfield, because the inn he frequented had been ahead of her, not behind her, when he accosted her. Therefore, said she, I will go south on the side of the trees not covered in moss.

How far would he have taken her? The trees did not allow a horse passage, so he would have had to carry her. Was he chivalrous enough to carry a lady as a lady ought to be carried-in his arms? No. Captain Thunder would have slung her over his shoulder, which meant he might have tramped as much as a mile inward from the road.

She marched along resolutely, but the pain in her bones was worse and the headache splitting. When she looked up, the lacy vault above wheeled ominously, and her legs seemed to drive though piles of wool. I am not going to die! she cried over the pounding of her heart. I am not going to die, I am not going to die!

Then in the distance she saw a break in the trees filled with sunlight-the road! She began to run, but her traitorous body was done with running; she tripped over a buried root and pitched flat out. The world went black. It is not fair! was the last thing she remembered thinking.

When she roused the next time she was across the withers of a horse, bent like a staple. She stirred and muttered unintelligibly, then realised that she was at the mercy of another captor, not a rescuer. Rescuers held a lady in their arms, captors put them across the horse’s withers. I never knew England was so stuffed with villains, she tried to say. Whoever rode behind her lifted her head and shoulders and forced a fiery liquid down her gullet. Choking, spluttering, she flailed at him, but whatever he had made her drink set her bruised brain to whirling; back she slid into that world of darkness and nightmare.

Oh, she was warm! Exquisitely comfortable! Mary opened her eyes to find herself on a feather bed, a hot brick at her feet. Her limbs felt light, and she didn’t smell of horse excrement. Someone had washed her thoroughly, even to, as her fingers discovered, her hair. The flannel nightgown was not hers, nor the socks upon her feet. But the pain in her body had diminished, and her headache was gone. The sole reminders of her ordeal were the bruises on her wrists, throat and brow, and the ones on her wrists, which she could see, had faded from black to a rather repulsive yellow. Which meant that considerable time had gone by. Where was she?

She swung her feet out of the bed and sat on its edge, eyes wide in the gloom. All around her were stone walls, not man-made, but natural; a gap in them was covered by a curtain, and a natural stone seat had a wooden plank across it with a hole-a commode of sorts. There were two tables, one piled with simple food, the other with books. Both had a chair tucked beneath them. But by far the most magical thing about this place was its lighting. Instead of candles, which she had believed to be the only form of lighting, glass lamps stood giving off a steady glow from a flame protected by a chimney. She had seen such chimneys before, when a candle needed protection from a wind, but never this broad, steady flame poking through a metal slot. Below the slot was a reservoir of some sort of liquid in which the wide ribbon of wick swam. One of these lamps, she thought, intrigued, gave off the same amount of light as ten candles.

Reluctantly abandoning her inspection of the lamps-there were four large and one small-she saw that a rug covered the floor and the curtain was of heavy dark green velvet.

Hunger and thirst asserted themselves. A jug of small beer sat upon the food table together with a pewter mug, and while Mary disliked beer of any kind, this, after her travails, tasted like nectar. She broke chunks off a crusty loaf, found butter, jam and cheese, and some slices of an excellent ham. Oh, that was better!

Stomach satisfied, function returned to her mind. Where was she? No inn or house had stone walls. Mary went to the curtain and pulled it aside.

Bars. Iron bars!

Horrified, she tried to see what lay beyond, but a massive screen blocked her view. And the only noise was a high, thin, shrill and constant howl. No sounds of human beings, or animals, or even plants. Under the howl was a heavy silence, as of a grave.

It was then that Mary realised her prison was under the ground. She was buried alive.

DERBYSHIRE AND HIS Duchess were to set off for their own seat on the morrow, so was the Bishop of London; Elizabeth made a special effort with the dinner on the night before. Her chef was French, but not from Paris; rather, he hailed from Provence, and could therefore be expected to produce an array of dishes that titillated the jaded palates of diners who sat at the best tables. There were still pockets of snow on The Peak itself, and Ned Skinner had gone west to the Welsh coast for shrimps, crabs, lobsters and swimmy fish, availing himself of the snow and ice on Snowdonia’s lofty crags as packing. Fish that did not produce gastric upsets were all the rage, and here at Pemberley the theme could be fish in digestive safety.

Elizabeth chose to wear lilac chiffon, as she would not come out of mourning until November. No need for black during the second six months, but white was insipid and grey depressing. Easy for gentlemen, she thought; a black armband, and they could wear what they liked. Fitz would prefer her decked in her pearls, quite the best in England, but she preferred a collar of amethysts and wide amethyst bracelets.

At the top of the staircase she met Angus Sinclair and Caroline Bingley.

“My dear Elizabeth, you are the personification of your own gardens,” Angus said, kissing her hand.

“That could be taken to mean sprawling and tasteless,” said Miss Bingley, very pleased with her amber-bronze spangles and stunning yellow sapphires.

Elizabeth’s hackles rose. “Oh, come, Caroline, can you honestly think Pemberley’s gardens tasteless?”

“Yes, I can. I also fail to understand why Fitz’s forebears did not use Inigo Jones or Capability Brown to lay them out-such an instinct for everything that is of the first mode!”

“Then you have not seen the daffodils smothering the grass beneath the almonds in full bloom, or the dell where lily of the valley are almost met by tendrils of weeping pink prunus,” said Elizabeth tartly.

“No, I confess I have not. My eyes were sufficiently offended by beds of orange marigolds, scarlet salvia and blue somethings,” said Caroline, not about to concede defeat.

Angus had regained his breath, and laughed. “Caroline, Caroline, that is not fair!” he cried. “Fitz has been trying to emulate Versailles, which does have some hideously mismatched flower beds. But I am all with Elizabeth-it is Pemberley’s flowering glades that are the haunts of Oberon and Titania.”

By this time they had reached the bottom of the grand staircase and were entering the Rubens Room, sumptuously crimson, cream and gilt, its furniture Louis Quinze.

“Now this,” said Angus, sweeping his arm around, “you cannot criticise, Caroline. Other gentlemen’s seats may be littered with portraits of ancestors-most of them very badly executed-but at Pemberley one sees art.”

“I find fat nudes repulsive,” said Miss Bingley disdainfully, saw Louisa Hurst and Posy, and went off to join them.

“That woman is as sour as a Lisbon lemon,” said Angus under his breath to Elizabeth.

In lilac her eyes were absolutely purple; they gazed at him gratefully. “Disappointed hopes, Angus dear. She so wanted Fitz!”

“Well, the whole world knows that.”

Fitz entered with the Duke and Duchess, and soon a merry pre-prandial congress was underway. Her husband, Elizabeth noted, was looking particularly complacent; so was Mr. Speaker, a great crony of Fitz’s. They have been carving up the empire and Fitz is to be prime minister as soon as the crowned heads of Europe can force Bonaparte’s abdication. I know it as surely as I know the bodies of my own children. And Angus has guessed, and is very unhappy, for he is no Tory. A champion of Whiggery is Angus, more progressive and liberal. Not that there is much in it; the Tories defend the privileges of the landed gentry, whereas the Whigs are more devoted to the entitlements of business and industry. Neither can be said to care about the poor.

Parmenter announced dinner, which necessitated a rather long walk to the small state dining room, decorated in straw-coloured brocade, gilt and family portraits, though not poorly executed-these were Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Holbein.

Charlie and Owen had arrived early enough to earn no censure from Fitz, secretly pleased. He had last set eyes on his son at Mrs. Bennet’s funeral, and he saw now that Charlie had grown both physically and mentally. No, he would never be entirely satisfactory, but he no longer looked like a bum-boy.

Elizabeth put Charlie on one side of the Bishop of London and Owen on the other; they could converse about Latin and Greek authors if such was their pleasure. However, it was not. With a scornful look at Caroline Bingley, his chief traducer, Charlie chose to entertain the entire table with stories of his adventures showing Owen the Peak District; the subject was irreproachable and the emphasis on gentle humour, just right to amuse such a disparate audience. No mention of sister Mary was made, though Elizabeth feared they had found no trace of her. If Manchester was her goal, she had not yet reached anywhere near it.

The lobster, plainly broiled and dressed only with drawn butter, had just been removed when a disturbance outside came to all ears in the dining room. Someone was screaming and screeching, Parmenter was shouting, and a confused babble of men’s voices said that he had several footmen with him.

The double doors flew open; all heads at the table turned.

“Lydia!” said Elizabeth on a gasp, rising to her feet.

Her sister looked shocking. Somewhere she had been caught in a heavy shower of rain, for her flimsy dress was soaked, clung to her corseted body shamelessly. If she had set out wearing a bonnet it had gone, nor did she have gloves, and it was obvious that she had ignored the conventions of mourning. Her dress was bright red-branding her a harlot-and cut very low. No one had done her hair, which stuck up wildly in all directions, and her face was a bizarre pastiche of mucus and smeared cosmetics. In one hand she clutched a piece of paper.

“You bastard, Darcy!” she shrieked. “You heartless, cold-blooded monster! Fucking bastard! Fucking bugger! Cunt!”

The words fell into a silence so profound and appalled that the women forgot to swoon at mention of them. As was the custom, Elizabeth sat at the foot of the table adjacent to the doors, while Fitz occupied its head fifteen feet farther away. At sight of Lydia he had tensed, but did not rise, and when she uttered the unutterable his face registered nothing but a fastidious disgust.

“Do you know what this says?” Lydia demanded, still at a shriek, and waving the paper about. “It tells me that my husband is dead, killed in action in America! You heartless, cruel bugger! Bugger! Bugger! You sent George away, Fitzwilliam Darcy, you and no one else! He was an embarrassment, just as I am an embarrassment, your wife’s relatives that you wish did not exist!” Head thrown back, she emitted an eldritch wail. “Oh, my George, my George! I loved him, Darcy, I loved him! Twenty-one years we have been married, but always out of sight and out of mind! The moment Bonaparte gave you an excuse, you used your influence to send George to the wars in the Peninsula, left me to exist as best I could on a captain’s pay, for you refused to help me! I am your wife’s sister!” Another of those awful wails. “Oh, my George, my George! Dead in America, his bones in some grave I will never see! You fucking bastard, Darcy! Cunt!”

Charlie had moved, but Elizabeth detained him. “No, let her say it all, Charlie. She has already said far too much. Try to stop her now, and we’ll have a fight on our hands.”

“I was so happy when he survived the Peninsular wars, my George! But that wasn’t enough for you Darcy, was it? He was supposed to die in Spain, and he didn’t. So you used your influence to send him to America! I saw him for less than a week between those two awful campaigns-now he’s dead, and you can rejoice! Well, not for long! I know things about you, Darcy, and I am very much alive!”

Suddenly she collapsed. Elizabeth and Charlie went to her, helped her to her feet and out of the room.

“Heavens above, what a performance,” said Caroline Bingley. “Where does your sister-in-law pick up her vocabulary, Fitz?”

That reminded the Duchess, Mrs. Speaker and Posy of the words Lydia had used; the three of them fell to the floor.

“I imagine,” said Fitz in a level voice after the ladies had been taken to their rooms, “that the covers are considerably reduced for the rest of what has been a memorable meal.”

“Un-for-gettable,” said Miss Bingley on a purr.

Angus chose to ignore all of it. “Well, I for one refuse to forgo the turbot,” he said, determinedly cheerful.

Charlie came back looking very concerned, as Owen noted. “I bring Mama’s apologies, Pater,” he said to his father. “She’s putting Aunt Lydia to bed.”

“Thank you, Charlie. Do you stay to finish dinner?”

“Yes, sir.”

He sat down, secretly feeling desperately sorry for his father. There was no excusing Lydia’s conduct-oh, why did that nasty piece of work Caroline Bingley have to be present? The scene would be all over London the moment she returned there.

The Bishop of London was dissecting the etymology of obscenities for Owen’s benefit, and welcomed Charlie’s participation.

“Do you know the poetry of Catullus?” the Bishop asked.

Charlie’s face lit up. “Do I?”

Having returned with his cartload of fish and crustacea, Ned Skinner was at home, and reported to Fitz in his parliamentary library as soon as the rather shattered guests had gone to their various suites.

“What possessed Parmenter and his minions to let her get as far as the dining room?” Ned asked.

“Fright. Apprehension. A reluctance to lay hands on the sister of their mistress, whom they love dearly,” said Fitz with scrupulous fairness. “Besides, I imagine they had no idea what would happen in the dining room-she saved her choicest verbiage for my guests, the bitch. And she was drunk.”

“Is it true? Is George Wickham dead?”

“The letter says so, and it’s signed by his colonel.”

“A pity then that she didn’t go to America with him. She would undoubtedly have battened on to some colonial yokel and remained there. It baffles me why she’s not poxed.”

“It baffles me why she’s never had children,” Fitz said.

“Well, she doesn’t fall easily, but when she does, she knows where to go to get rid of it. She’s never sure who the father is.”

Fitz grimaced. “Disgusting. As to why she didn’t go with him to America, she was involved with his colonel at the time the regiment was shipped, and the fellow was desperate to shed her.”

“Aye, she’s a difficulty wherever she is.”

“That’s putting it mildly, Ned.” Fitz beat his fists on his thighs, an angry and frustrated tattoo. “Oh, what an audience! And I with the prime ministership all but in my pocket! Derbyshire had promised to deliver the Lords, and the Commons has been inclined my way for a year now. The assassination of Spencer Perceval still reverberates, thanks to the Marquis of Wellesley, running everything. Oh, rot the woman!”

“Miss Bingley will spread tonight’s tale far and wide.”

“Anything to get back at Elizabeth-and me.”

“And what of Sinclair? Will the Westminster Chronicle air your private troubles in its Whiggish pages?”

“He’s a good friend, so I’ll hazard a guess that he’ll not put my private troubles in his paper.”

“What exactly do you fear, Fitz?”

“More scenes of this nature, especially in London.”

“She wouldn’t dare!”

“I think she would dare anything. The booze has addled what few wits she ever had, and I feature in her mind as the chief villain. While ever she looks like something the cat dragged in, people will spurn her as crazed, but what if she cleans herself up, dresses respectably? As my wife’s sister, she could manage to secure an audience with some powerful enemies.”

“Saying what, Fitz? That you conspired to have her husband sent overseas to do his military duty? It won’t wash.”

Out came one shapely white hand to rest on Ned’s sleeve. “Ah, Ned, what would I do without you? You demolish my fears with plain good sense. You are right. I will simply dismiss her as a madwoman.”

“You’d best put her in a decent house. Line its walls with bottles, have a few men on hand to fuck her, and she’ll give you no trouble. Though,” Ned added, “I’d make sure she has what in Sheffield they’d call a minder. Someone strong enough to control her, persuade her not to go to London, for instance. I think comfort, clothes, men and booze will keep Lydia happy.”

“Whereabouts? I sold Shelby Manor, though it’s too close to London. Nearer here, yes?” Fitz asked.

“I know a place the other side of Leek. It housed a lunatic, so it should suit. And Spottiswoode can locate a minder.”

“Then I may leave it to you?”

“Of course, Fitz.”

The fire was dying; Fitz stacked it with wood. “Now it only remains to persuade my wife not to give her shelter for too long. Can you move quickly?”

“Depending upon Spottiswoode, I can be ready in five days.”

Two glasses of port were forthcoming. “I repeat, Ned, that you are my saving grace. When you walked in tonight, I was almost on the verge of echoing Henry the Second’s cry about Thomas а Becket-‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ Substituting wench for priest.”

“Things are never as bad as they seem, Fitz.”

“What of the other sister?”

Ned scowled. “A different kettle of fish entirely. At first it was easy. She went from Hertford to Stevenage, thence to Biggleswade, Huntingdon, Stamford and Grantham. There, it seems she decided to head west to Nottingham. I traced her that far, and lost her.”

“Lost her?”

“Don’t worry, Fitz, she can’t go far without being noticed, she’s too pretty. I think she intended to take the stage-coach to Derby, but it left without her. The only other coach that morning was to Sheffield via Mansfield. It may be that she changed her mind about her destination-Sheffield instead of Manchester.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment. Sheffield has always been a manufacturing town-Sheffield steel and silver cutlery. Its practices are set in stone.”

Grinning, Ned wriggled his brows expressively. “Then, knowing her, she got on the wrong coach. In which case, we will see her emerge either in Derby or Chesterfield.”

“Have you time to look for her?”

“Fear not, yes. The house for Lydia is called Hemmings, and I’ll have your solicitors deal with it. Leek isn’t far from Derby.”

It took a long time to calm Lydia down and persuade her that what she most needed was sleep. Elizabeth and Hoskins stripped her of her indecent apparel and put her into a bronze bath tub by the fire, there to wash her ruthlessly from the hair of her head to between her grimy toes. Warming pans had been put in the bed, and Hoskins had had a brilliant idea, though it was not one Elizabeth could like: a bottle of port. However, it did the trick. Still weeping desolately for the loss of her beloved George, Lydia went to sleep.

Fortunately Ned had gone when Elizabeth entered the small library; Fitz had his head bent over a pile of papers on his desk, and looked up enquiringly.

“She is asleep,” said Elizabeth, sitting down.

“An unpardonable invasion of our home. She deserves to be whipped at the cart’s tail, the harpy.”

“I don’t want to quarrel, Fitz, so let us avoid all such futile animadversions. Perhaps where we have always erred is in our estimation of Lydia’s devotion to that dreadful man. Just because we think him dreadful does not make him so in her eyes. She-she loves him. In twenty-one years of rackety behaviour and feckless decisions, she has never swerved in her devotion to him. He taught her to drink, he rented out her body to those who could be of use to him, he struck her senseless with his fists when he was frustrated-yet still she loved him.”

“Her loyalty would do credit to a dog,” he said acidly.

“No, Fitz, don’t disparage her! I think it admirable.”

“Does that mean I’ve gone about you all the wrong way, my dear Elizabeth? Ought I to have turned you into a drunkard, rented you out to Mr. Pitt, beaten you senseless to ease my frustrations? Would you then truly love me more than you do my possessions?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Why do you have to do that to me, Fitz? Belittle my compassion, sneer at my sympathy?”

“It passes the time,” he said cynically. “I hope you’re not cherishing hopes of keeping her here?”

“She must stay here!”

“Thereby preventing my using my seat as a valuable adjunct to my political career! You are my wife, madam, that is true, but it doesn’t mean you are at liberty to foist guests on me who are social and political suicide. I have instructed Ned to find her a house not unlike Shelby Manor, at sufficient distance from us to posit no risk or threat,” he said coldly.

“Oh, Fitz, Fitz! Must you always be so detached?”

“Since it is an excellent tool for a leader of men, yes.”

“Just promise me that if Charlie should seek you out on this same errand, you’ll treat him more kindly,” she said, eyes sparkling with tears. “He means no harm.”

“Then I suggest you deflect him, my dear. Especially as I begin to hope that Caroline Bingley’s canards about his-er-proclivities are simply the product of her fevered imagination.”

“I loathe that woman!” cried Elizabeth through her teeth. “She is a malicious liar! No one, including you, ever doubted Charlie’s proclivities until she started whispering her poison in various ears-chiefly yours! Her evidence is specious, though you can never see that. She deliberately set out to traduce our son’s character for no better reason than her own disappointed hopes! Not that she confines her malice to us-anyone who mortally offends her is sure to become her victim!”

He looked amused. “You make poor Caroline sound like Medea and Medusa rolled in one. Well, I have known her far longer than you, and take leave to inform you that you are mistaken. It is Caroline’s nature to say what she thinks or has heard, not to fabricate lies. I invite her to our functions and house parties because not to do so would hurt Charles, who is our son’s namesake. However, though I cannot summon up your unfounded indignation at her, I am beginning to believe that Charlie’s looks and mannerisms belie his true nature. I daresay that both have been magnets to certain fellows whose proclivities are undeniable, but Ned says that he rejects their overtures adamantly.”

“Ned says! Oh, Fitz, what is the matter with you, that you are more disposed to believe that man than your own wife?”

Seething, she said a stiff goodnight and left.

Charlie was waiting in her rooms, flirting outrageously with Hoskins, who adored him.

“Mama,” he said, coming to her side as Hoskins slipped away unobtrusively, “have you seen Pater?”

“Yes, but I beg that you do not. His mind is made up. Lydia is to go to a Shelby Manor situation.”

To her surprise, Charlie looked approving. “Pater is right, Mama. No one has ever managed to wean drunkards off the bottle, and Aunt Lydia is a drunkard. If you kept her here, it would wear you down. Poor little soul! What did George Wickham ever do, to earn such love?”

“We will never know, Charlie, because the only people who can see inside a marriage are the two people in it.”

“Is that true of you and Pater?”

“For a child to ask, Charlie, is impudence.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I take it that you and Owen have seen nothing of Mary?”

“Nothing. Today we rode to Chesterfield, thinking she might come that way, but she has not. Nor has she been seen in Derby. Tomorrow we think to ride toward Sheffield.”

“Tomorrow the Derbyshires and the Bishop depart. You must be on hand to farewell them. The Speaker and Mrs. Speaker go the day after. It will be Monday before you can search.”

“When Fitz married Elizabeth, I knew I was going to have some sport,” said Caroline Bingley to Louisa Hurst, “but who could ever have credited that the sport would grow better year by year?”

They were walking sedately across Pemberley’s gargantuan front, their heads turned toward a stunning vista of the artificial lake. A zephyr breeze blew, just sufficient to tickle the surface of the water and turn Pemberley’s reflection from a mirror image to a fairy-tale castle blurred by the approaching giant’s footsteps. Not that all their attention was focused on the view; each of the ladies reserved a small corner of her mind for a different vision: that of the picture they themselves presented to any admiring gaze that might chance their way.

Mrs. Hurst’s slight figure was swathed in finest lawn, pale spearmint in colour and embroidered in emerald-green sprigs with chocolate borders; her hugely fashionable bonnet was emerald straw with chocolate ribbons, her short kid gloves were emerald, and her walking half-boots were chocolate kid. She wore a very pretty necklace of polished malachite beads. Miss Bingley, being tall and willowy, preferred a more striking outfit. She wore diaphanous pale pink organdie over a taffeta under-dress striped in cerise and black; her bonnet was cerise straw with black ribbons, her short gloves were cerise kid, and her walking half-boots black kid. She wore a very pretty necklace of pink pearls. If Pemberley needed anything to set off its glories, it needed them; they were convinced of it.

“Who, indeed?” asked Mrs. Hurst dutifully; she was her younger sister’s sounding board, and did not dare have thoughts of her own. One Caroline was all any family needed; two would have been utterly insupportable.

“Oh, the bliss of being present at that scene last night! And to think I very nearly refused Fitz’s invitation to Pemberley this year! The language! How can I possibly convey its obscenity without employing the actual words she used? I mean, Louisa, is there a genteel sort of equivalent?”

“Not that I have ever heard of. Female dog does not begin to approximate those words, does it?”

“I will have to bend my mind to the problem, for I vow I will not be silenced by convention.”

“I am sure you’ll find an answer.”

“I cannot allow people to think Lydia’s language was less infamous than it actually was.”

“Who will be the most shocked?” asked Mrs. Hurst, moving the subject on.

“Mrs. Drummond-Burrell and Princess Esterhazy. I am to dine at the Embassy when I return to London next week.”

“In which case, sister, I doubt you need regale others. Mrs. Drummond-Burrell will do your work for you.”

A tall and stalwart form was marching toward them; the ladies paused in their stroll, reluctant to let motion destroy the effect they knew they were making.

“Why, Mr. Sinclair!” Miss Bingley exclaimed, wishing she could extend her hand to be kissed, as Louisa was doing; an absurd shibboleth, that unmarried ladies could not have their hands kissed.

“Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley. How fresh you look! Like two ices at Gunter’s-one pink, one green.”

“La, sir, you are ridiculous!” Miss Bingley said with an arch look. “I refuse to melt.”

“And I fear I have neither the charm nor the address to melt you, Miss Bingley.”

Louisa took her cue flawlessly. “Do you publish last night’s scandalous goings-on in your paper, sir?”

Was that a flicker of contempt in those fine blue eyes? “No, Mrs. Hurst, I am not of that ilk. When my friends have their private trials and tribulations, I stay mum. As,” he continued blandly, “I am positive you will too.”

“Of course,” said Louisa.

“Of course,” said Caroline.

Mr. Sinclair prepared to move on. “What a pity we cannot hope for universal silence.” he said.

“A shocking pity,” Louisa said. “The Derbyshires.”

“I concur,” said Caroline. “The Speaker of the House.”

And your own two viperish tongues, thought Angus as he tipped his hat in farewell.

He was meeting Fitz at the stables, but before he got there Charlie waylaid him, very cast down because he had to stay home.

“Are you available for a long ride on Monday?” Charlie asked. “Owen and I are for Nottingham. Best pack a change of raiment in your saddle bags in case we are delayed.”

Angus promised, then walked off.

Mary’s disappearance frightened him more than he had let anyone suspect; she was such a mixture of sheltered innocence and second-hand cynicism that, like a cannon loosed on the deck of a first-rater, she could go off in any direction, wreaking indiscriminate havoc. If she had adhered to her schedule, she ought to be in Derbyshire by now, so why wasn’t she? Love, reflected Angus, is the very devil. Here I am in a lather of worry, while she is probably snug in some inn fifty miles south taking copious notes on farmers and the evils of enclosing common land. No, she is not! Mary is a stickler for being in the correct place at the correct time. Oh, my love, my love, where are you?

“Mr. Sinclair?”

He turned to see Edward Skinner approaching, and frowned. An interesting fellow, deep in Fitz’s confidence-a fact he had always known, yet somehow on this visit that fact was reinforced. Perhaps thanks to Mary and Lydia? Not an ill-looking man, if your tastes ran to massiveness and swarthiness. His eyes bore the same cool detachment as Fitz’s, yet he was too old to be Fitz’s by-blow-nearing forty, was Angus’s guess.

“Yes, Mr. Skinner?” he asked, giving Ned his due.

“Message from Mr. Darcy. He can’t bear you company today.”

“Oh, too bad!” Angus stood still for a moment, then nodded to himself. “Well, no matter. I feel like a gallop to blow the cobwebs away, so I’ll ride alone. Would you tell Mrs. Darcy that I will be back in time for dinner?”

“Certainly.”

A vain hope, that he could do anything significant in the time; it was already noon when Angus set out for Chesterfield, which he didn’t reach. His horse cast a shoe, he was obliged to seek a blacksmith, and all he had for his pains was a headache from facing the setting sun as he returned.

“I know your mind is occupied with Mrs. Wickham,” he said to Elizabeth before dinner, “but I am more perturbed about Mary. I never met a person more meticulous, more addicted to the minutiae of timetables and schedules than Mary, yet she has disappeared in spite of informing me how she meant to go.”

“I think you dwell upon it too much, Angus,” Elizabeth said, her mind indeed preoccupied with hideous thoughts about Lydia. “Give Mary two or three more days, and she’ll emerge from her hiding place unaware that she has caused consternation. She was ever thus, you know. Her meticulousness was usually to do with mere trivia, and her concentration upon the timing of events was not sensible. Life always surprised her, however hard she tried to strip it of its astonishments.”

“You do not know her!” he said in tones of wonder.

She flushed, annoyed at his reaction. “She is my sister, sir. I do know her, and better than you.”

He lifted his brows, leaving them to say without words that he did not agree, but Parmenter’s announcing dinner saved them from a serious falling out.

On Monday, Angus, Charlie and Owen started for Nottingham shortly after seven, determined that they were going to find out whether Mary had been seen there. It was a logical place for one going north from Hertford to Manchester, given the stage-coach routes. If Huckstep the horse master was puzzled when they chose strong, steady horses rather than the goers Mr. Charlie always rode, he knew better than to ask. Embarrassed that Mr. Sinclair’s last mount had cast a shoe, he made sure that would not happen today.

The distance from Pemberley to Nottingham was about fifty miles; by riding conservatively they hoped to reach the town in four or five hours without exhausting their steeds, though, said Charlie, “I warned Mama that we may not be back tonight. We are hot on the heels of the notorious Sheriff of Nottingham of Robin Hood’s day, and may choose to spend the afternoon quizzing the locals.”

“What do they teach at Oxford?” Angus demanded of Owen.

“Myths and legends, among other airy-fairy things. Was it not so at Edinburgh?”

“Very sedate, very down-to-earth. Is there a decent inn at Nottingham?”

“The Black Cat,” said Charlie, who knew the country north of Birmingham intimately.

Their horses having held up very well, they reached Nottingham at noon, and ate luncheon at the Black Cat before setting out for the coach station posting house on foot.

And finally, news!

“Yes, sirs, I remember the lady,” said Mr. Hooper, manager of the stage-coach company in Nottingham. “She come in from Grantham last Thursday-one of them unfortunate journeys, I gather. Five louts shared the cabin with her, and I can imagine what a time she had of it! I was busy when the Grantham stage come in, but I run a decent sort of establishment here, and that were a coachload of bad trouble-them on the top were drunk and brawling. In fact, I sacked Jim Pickett the coachman for not running things shipshape. Threw the lady’s bags in the dung pile. Hard to find coachmen that don’t drink, and Jim drank. Well, he’ll have no more rums on me!”

The three men listened in growing horror, but when Charlie would have interrupted the flow, Angus trod on his foot.

“Seems the lady wouldn’t have nothing to do with them five louts,” Mr. Hooper went on, hardly drawing a breath. “So they got their own backs, they did. Tripped her when she was getting out-flat in the muck she went, poor lady! Knocked the wind clear out of her. Ruined her coat and dress-horse piss. I was told a man helped her up, dusted her off. But the muck ain’t prone to be fixed by a dust-off. Her reticule went flying, but she got it back, and the man put her gold guineas back into it too. I only saw her a-going out of the yard-a regular mess.”

Charlie’s face was a study in grief; he gulped, held onto Owen’s sleeve. “The curs!” he cried, almost in tears. “I-I cannot credit it! Five men picking on a defenceless woman in a public stage-coach? Wait until my father hears! There will be hell to pay from the highest to the lowest!”

A look of acute apprehension on Mr. Hooper’s face did not bode well for further information; Angus trod on Charlie’s foot again. “Was that the last time you saw her, sir?” Angus asked “No. She come back at seven next morning-I were busy again, always am busy. London don’t give me enough help, expect the whole thing to run like clockwork. Well, it don’t.” He fulminated for a moment, then returned to his tale. “Two stages. One bound for Derby, one for Sheffield. The lady got on the Sheffield coach and away she went. Looked fairly tuckered, she did. No coat, new dress, but it weren’t no great shakes, and Len told me she stank of horse piss. Still, sir, she had gold in her reticule. Daresay she’ll be right and tight.”

A groan wrenched itself out of Charlie. “Sheffield! Oh, Mary, why Sheffield?”

“Something must have drawn her there,” said Owen, trying to see the bright side. “A factory she heard of, perhaps?”

“So tomorrow we’re for Sheffield,” said Angus with a sigh. He dropped a guinea in the manager’s hand. “Thank you, sir. You’ve been a great help.”

Eyes round at the sight of the coin, Mr. Hooper closed his fist on it; by the time he recovered his breath, the three gentlemen-terrific swells!-were walking away.

“Here!” he called after them, the guinea working magic on his memory. “Don’t you want to know the rest, good sirs?”

They stopped in their tracks.

“The rest?” from Angus.

“Yes, the rest. My coachman told me yesterday. The lady got off in Mansfield. Turns out she thought she were on the Derby stage, not the Sheffield stage. My man had to charge her for the fare from Nottingham to Mansfield-sixpence-then went on to Sheffield without her. Last he saw of her, she were going into the Friar Tuck. Looking for transport to Chesterfield.”

The richer by a second guinea, Mr. Hooper could find no more to tell his auditors until long after they had gone. So enthused was he at the prospect of earning a third guinea that he trotted off to the Black Cat at once to impart his afterthought. Too late! The three gentlemen had ridden off.

“Oh, well, ’tain’t important,” said he to himself. Just that it was very peculiar to have two lots of enquiries about the same lady inside three days. Big, surly, black bugger, last Saturday’s enquirer had been. Blotted out the sun. Did not bestow guineas-his idea of largesse had been a shilling. A shilling, and he the manager!

All of which left Mr. Hooper with some questions of his own: who was this lady, why did she have gold in her reticule, who were the gentlemen in search of her, why were there two lots of them, and who was the pretty young man’s dad?

They rode for Mansfield at once, Charlie having decided that their horses were rested enough to survive another fifteen miles. Neither Angus nor Owen disputed Charlie’s authority in the matter of horseflesh; Owen’s father was a farmer, but topnotch mounts were as far from his ken as they were from Angus’s.

By six that evening they were dismounting in the yard of the Friar Tuck, and agreed that they would go no farther that day.

When they entered the inn they found its proprietor hovering expectantly.

“Your three best bedchambers, landlord,” said Angus, every bone in his body aching; a carriage-based London existence was not conducive to careering around the countryside with Charlie Darcy. His rump was very sore, but he could still sit down; heaving a sigh of content, he did so.

“It’s too late for ale-your best wine, landlord!”

“Ask him, ask him, ask him!” Charlie kept muttering.

“In due time. First, we wet our whistles.”

“Lord, I’m tired,” said Owen.

“Cawkers, both of you.” Charlie subsided with a scowl.

The cellars of the Friar Tuck yielded an excellent claret; after consuming two bottles of it, they repaired to their rooms to freshen up. In the kitchen Mrs. Beatty, exhorted by Mr. Beatty, was cooking what she termed a “tidy meal.”

After doing the tidy meal justice, Angus finally broached the subject of Mary.

“We are in search of a lady,” he said to the landlord. “We believe she came in on the Sheffield stage last Friday, it seems thinking she was on the Derby one. On learning her mistake, she alighted, apparently to seek some means of going to Chesterfield. Did you see her?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“I thought the Sheffield stage-coach stopped here?”

“It does. But I weren’t here, sir. I was visiting my son at Clipstone, didn’t get back until well after the Sheffield stage. It don’t wait, sir, just sets down and picks up.”

“Surely it changes horses here?”

“No, sir. It does that in Pleasley, two mile farther on. Another of my sons has the King John there, and we split it-he changes the northbound coaches, I change the southbound.”

“And does your son in Clipstone have an inn?” Owen asked, fascinated at so much nepotism.

“Yes, sir. The Merry Men.”

Charlie sat looking as if the world was ending. “If you did not see her, landlord, did anyone else?” he asked curtly.

“I could ask my wife, sir.”

“Kindly do so.”

“Is there a Robin Hood hostelry in the family?” Owen asked while Mrs. Beatty was being sent for.

“How amazing of you to know that, sir! The Robin Hood belongs to my son Will, over in Edwinstowe, and the Lion Heart to my son John, in Ollerton. Though it’s a tavern, not an inn.”

Expecting praise for her dinner, Mrs. Beatty bustled in engaged in a private debate-did they like the roast venison or the stew delicately flavoured with sage and lamb’s kidneys? But the faces of her diners, she now discovered, did not belong to gentlemen with food on their minds. In fact, all three looked forbidding. She began to stiffen, some instinct telling her that she was in trouble.

“Matilda, did a lady get off the Sheffield stage on Friday?”

“Oh, her!” Mrs. Beatty sniffed. “I would have to call her a woman, for a lady she was not.”

Charlie yelped; Angus’s foot had made contact with his already bruised toes.

“What happened to her, madam?” Angus asked, heart sinking.

“I sent her about her business, that’s what! She stank! Dirtying my clean floors, and them not even dry! I’ll have none of you, I said, and marched her out my door.”

“Do you know where she went?” Angus asked, swallowing an ire quite as hot as Charlie’s.

“Only that she wanted to go to Chesterfield, but first she needed a room. I sent her to the Green Man.”

“Oh, Matilda!” cried Mr. Beatty, looking horrified. “She was a lady! Our guests are in search of her.”

“Happen they’ll find her at the Green Man. Or Chesterfield by now,” said Mrs. Beatty, unrepentant. “She didn’t look no lady to me. She looked like a dirty drab. Too pretty for her own good.”

“Charlie, hold your tongue!” Angus snapped. “Then we go to the Green Man in the morning. Prepare an early breakfast.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Beatty.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Go to the Green Man. ’Tis a felons’ haunt. Every rogue and thief on both sides of the Pennines congregates there. As well as the highwayman Captain Thunder.” He rounded on his wife. “Which is why, Matilda, I take leave to say that you are a sour and bitter woman, to send a lady anywhere near the Green Man. You are always prating about God and you won’t even let your daughters dance, but mark my words, God will punish you for your lack of charity! Methodism! Making it impossible for your daughters to find husbands outside of the church, and a more dismal lot than those young men I don’t know! Well, this episode is the last straw for me! My daughters will wed men who like a drink and a dance!”

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, Angus yawned until his eyes watered and shepherded Charlie and Owen bedward before the domestic storm could break.

“There is no point in fretting, Charlie” were his final words to that indignant young man. “We’ll be on our way early tomorrow, so get some sleep.”

“Just as well I brought my pistols,” Charlie said, eyes sparkling. “If the Green Man is half as bad as the landlord says, we may be glad of a pair of barkers.”

“I’d feel better about that if I knew you could shoot.”

“I can culp a wafer at twenty paces. Pater may deem me bellows to mend in a boxing ring, but he’s seen me shoot too often to despise my skill with a pistol. In fact, he had Manton make me my own pair.”

Angus’s staunch faзade fell once he was safely inside his room; surprised because he had felt no pain, he found that his nails had cut into the palms of his hands, he had clenched them so hard. Oh, Mary, Mary! Turned away as a common trollop by an imperceptive bigot like Mrs. Beatty! Filthy from her fall-wherever she had stayed in Nottingham had not offered her a bath, probably not even hot water. Well, no doubt Nottingham’s inns were stuffed with Mrs. Beattys too. He had good reason to think that his Mary would not be intimidated, including by a pack of felons, but worry he must.

A state of mind Mr. Beatty did not improve when he knocked softly on Angus’s door a few minutes later.

“Yes, sir?” Angus asked irritably, clad in his nightshirt.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Sinclair, but I judged you the leader of your search party, and did not want to wait until the morning-we have a group of visitors arriving to view Sherwood Forest, and I may not get the time.”

“What is it you want to say?” Angus asked, feeling a qualm.

“My wife told me that Captain Thunder was lurking last Friday noon when the Sheffield coach arrived. To do her a meed of justice, she was frightened, and very anxious to bolt the door. Though why she couldn’t shout for the grooms I have no idea.” He scratched his head, dislodging his wig. “After the coach went north to Pleasley she took a peek outside, and there was your lady walking down the road to the Green Man. Captain Thunder was following her, but at a distance. It seems that under her dirt the lady was very pretty, which, my wife being what she is, led her to make a false judgement. So she never called the grooms. Instead, she bolted the door.”

“I see,” said Angus quietly. “What can you tell me of this Captain Thunder, sir?”

“No good, and that is certain. Folks are afraid of him, and with reason. ’Tis said he is a murderer, though I never heard of him killing anyone he bailed up. Shot one courageous old geezer through the shoulder, but he lived.”

“Then whom does he murder, Mr. Beatty?”

“Rumour has it, women. The Green Man is a bawdy-house as well as an inn, and Captain Thunder has first choice of new light-skirts. If one goes all shrewish, like, ’tis said he kills her.”

“Thank you.” Angus shut his door.

He had no sleep that night.

When he stepped into the parlour to partake of breakfast, he still had not made up his mind how much of Mr. Beatty’s news to impart to Charlie and Owen. Only when he saw their fresh, rested faces did he decide to tell them virtually nothing. If Charlie went off half-cocked their troubles would multiply, but he needed to be sure that pair of Manton pistols were ready for use.

“I do not wish to sound unduly pessimistic,” he said in the Friar Tuck stable yard amid the racket of unharnessing several carriages that had brought the sightseers, “but have you loaded your pistols, Charlie? For that matter, where are they? Can you reach them in a hurry if you have to?”

Grinning, Charlie lifted one saddle bag to reveal an elegant, silver-mounted pistol beneath it, a neat firearm ten inches long. “There’s one in the other holster too. They’re loaded and almost ready to fire. Flick the frizzen up off the powder pan, cock the hammer, and pull the trigger. I assure you they’ll not hang fire or flash in the pan-Manton don’t make second-rate pistols.”

“Good,” said Angus, smiling apologetically. “There’s more to you than meets the eye, Charlie.”

“I’m not afraid to throw my heart over.”

“Let us depart this chaos.”

When Angus nudged his roan into a trot, Owen restrained him. “Since the Green Man is but a mile away, might it not be better to walk our horses that far? We should look for signs that Mary passed this way.”

Seeing the sense in that, Angus reined in his steed to a walk and the three of them separated to spread across the road, Angus down the middle, Owen near the right ditch, Charlie near the left. The thickness of the woods to either side dismayed them; no chance of riding in to investigate.

Perhaps a half a mile from the Friar Tuck, Owen gave a loud whoop. “Hola! I see something!”

He swung from the saddle and hopped down into the ditch, hands scrabbling in the weed-choked grass, and came up holding a tapestry handbag. Angus opened it without a scruple upon sad women’s under-things and the Book of Common Prayer. Her name was neatly written upon the front endpaper. Every item of clothing stank of horse excrement; he remembered Mr. Hooper’s saying that the coachman had thrown her bags onto the dung pile. Poor, poor Mary! Armed to fight the injustices of the world without dreaming that she too might fall prey to them.

“Well, that answers one question,” he said, and tossed the bag back into the ditch; the book went into his saddle bag. “There’s no point in carrying what’s in there-we’ll buy her much better at the nearest draper’s.”

“Oh, Lord, the villain must have set upon her!” Charlie said, winking at tears. “I’ll have his guts!”

“You’ll have to share them with me,” said Owen.

They could find no sign of the other handbag, but her plain black reticule was lying on the road just as the Green Man came into view around a bend.

“Empty,” said Angus. “However, we’ll keep it as proof, despite its aroma. See? She embroidered her name upon the lining. Black on black-her eyesight must be magnificent.”

Perhaps because the hour was early and felons traditionally lay abed until noon or later, the Green Man looked the very picture of innocence. It was tucked into a pocket of land where the trees had been removed, had stables of a kind down a driveway to one side, and numerous dilapidated out-buildings that seemed to store everything from firewood to barrels and crates. The building itself was large, had a thatched roof and half-timbered walls; the Green Man had been sitting there for at least two centuries. Hens and ducks picked at the ground outside its entrance doors.

No one peered through its bullioned windows as they rode up; clearly the Green Man did not cater to pre-noon patrons.

“I’ll go in alone,” said Angus, preparing to dismount.

“No, Angus, I’ll go,” said Charlie with authority. “I’ll allow you precedence in civilised places, but this is my country and I know how to go about things.” He flipped the frizzen off one pistol, made sure the powder pan was well primed, tucked the weapon horizontally in his breeches waist and then carefully cocked it. “Angus, take the other pistol and stand watch. The frizzen’s up, but it’s not cocked.”

Angus watched in horror at the youth’s insouciance, carrying a cocked, primed pistol like that, especially after he draped his coat across it. A slip, a trip, and he would be a Mozart castrato. How familiar he must be with pistols! For himself, Angus made sure he held his pistol level, and made no attempt to cock it.

When Charlie entered, he had to bend his head, and blinked in surprise; he had grown inches this past year!

“Hola!” he called. “Anybody at home?”

Came the sound of someone moving, then the distinctive clop-clop of clogs, popular footwear in the north.

At sight of Charlie, the evil-looking fellow who appeared stopped abruptly, frowning at the expensive clothes and very beautiful face. “Yes, my pretty boy? Lost, are you?” He made an effort to smile, showing the rotten teeth of a rum drinker.

“No, I am not lost. I and my two companions are looking for a lady named Miss Mary Bennet, and we have reason to think that one Captain Thunder-a fearsome name!-set upon her between the Friar Tuck and this establishment.”

“There be no ladies here,” said the man.

“But might there be a Captain Thunder?”

“Never heard of the cull.”

“That’s not what people hereabouts say. Kindly fetch the fellow, landlord-if landlord you are.”

“I be the landlord, but I don’t know no Captain Thunder. Who might be asking?” His hand inched toward an axe.

Out came Charlie’s pistol, absolutely level. “Don’t bother with such antics, please! I am the only son of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley, and the lady I am trying to find is my aunt.”

The mere mention of “Darcy” and “Pemberley” worked upon the landlord so powerfully that his hand flopped to his side as if felled by a stroke. He began to whine. “Sir, sir, you be mistook! This is a respectable house that has no truck with bridle-culls! I swears to you, Mr. Darcy, sir, that I ain’t never heard of your aunt!”

“I’d be more prone to believe you if you admitted that you do know Captain Thunder.”

“Only in a manner of speaking, Mr. Darcy, sir, only in a manner of speaking. The cull is known to me in a like way to what he’s known elsewhere in the district. He terrorises us! But I swears he brung no lady here! No woman of any kind, dear sir!”

“Where may I find Captain Thunder?”

“They say he got a house in the woods somewhere, but I don’t know where, sir, honest! I swears it!”

“Then next time you see Captain Thunder, you may give him a message from Darcy of Pemberley. That his nefarious career is over. My father will hunt him down-from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, if necessary. He will hang, but worse than that. His body will rot in a gibbet.”

Charlie turned on his heel and left, the pistol still in his hand. At sight of him Angus sagged in relief; it seemed the young rascal did indeed know how to deal with Nottinghamshire villains. Concern for his aunt was honing him into the kind of man his father should have been, and was not; Fitz’s iron strength was there, but without the coldness. How could Fitz be blind enough not to see what lay in his son?

“No luck,” Charlie said tersely, remounting. “I doubt Mary was ever taken there. The rogue who is the landlord knows Captain Thunder very well, I hazard a guess, but isn’t privy to all his business. Which makes sense. If he participated in the Captain’s every scheme, he’d be entitled to at least a quarter share of the spoils, and the Captain is too fly for that.”

“Then we’re for Chesterfield?”

“Yes. I won’t seek anyone official out-I’d rather sool my father onto the slugs of the constabulary from Nottingham to Leek to Derby and Chesterfield. If nothing else comes of it, Captain Thunder’s career is at an end.”

“What I haven’t told you,” Angus confessed, “is that Mr. Beatty told me his wife saw the Captain lurking that Friday noon. And he followed Mary down the road toward the Green Man. He must have known she had guineas for the taking-but then, it seems that everyone in the Nottingham coach station knew that. Either the Captain was there to witness Mary’s fall, or some paid informant told him. The woods hereabout were perfect for his purpose.”

“Mrs. Beatty deserves a dose of her own biblical retribution-may she be eaten by worms!” said Owen savagely.

“I agree,” Angus said in soothing tones, “but the sentiment doesn’t help us find Mary. I’ll exhort Fitz to have the constables descend upon the Green Man armed with writs for the arrest of all in it, but like you, Charlie, I don’t think Mary was ever there. The Captain didn’t want to share his spoils, or tell a soul what he had done.”

Owen had listened in growing horror. “Oh! Does this mean she’s dead?” he blurted.

His question hung unanswered for a long time before Angus sighed. “We must pray she isn’t, Owen. Somehow I can’t see Mary giving up her life without a colossal struggle, and I don’t mean a physical one. She would have striven to convince the cur that she was too important to kill with impunity.”

Tears were rolling down Charlie’s cheeks.

“How do we begin to search the woods for her, Charlie?” Angus asked, to give the young man something to think about.

One hand brushed the tears away. “We ride for Pemberley before we do anything else,” he said. “My father will know.”

Even taking into account an overnight trip to Sheffield, Ned Skinner was ahead of them by two full days. While Charlie (and perforce, Angus and Owen too) kicked his heels waiting to farewell Derbyshire and the Speaker of the House, he had ridden from Sheffield to Nottingham. His technique was different; while both Angus and Charlie tended to apply to the top echelons for information, Ned knew better. So upon reaching the freight depot and coach yard in Nottingham, he spoke very briefly with Mr. Hooper, then located a groom who had seen what had happened with his own eyes. As it turned out, he was the same fellow whom Mary had accosted trying to find out which coach went to Derby. Without a scrap of surprise, Ned learned that the youth had maliciously directed her to the wrong conveyance, thinking it a huge joke.

“One day,” said Ned, towering over the groom, “I will make sure you get your comeuppance, you thoughtless moron. The poor lady deserved the most tender compassion-a gentlewoman thrown upon the world. Were I not in a hurry, you’d get a beating right now.”

Desperate to save his skin, the groom came out with a gem he had mentioned to no one, including Mr. Hooper.

“I know who the man was that picked her up when she fell in the horse piss,” he said.

Ned loomed even more menacingly. “Who?”

“A highwayman. Captain Thunder’s his road name, but his real name’s Martin Purling. He has a house hidden in the forest.”

“I want directions-talk, you pathetic lump of inertia!”

The pathetic lump of inertia babbled so incoherently that he had to repeat himself several times.

Now what do I make of that? Ned wondered as he made his way to the Black Cat. A bridle-cull who gave her back her guineas? Why? The answer’s simple-he couldn’t rob her in Nottingham. Then the next morning she got on the wrong coach, but I’ll bet he was following her no matter which stage she boarded. Nineteen guineas, the groom said-Miss Mary Bennet, you are a fool! Captain Thunder would kill you for a quarter that sum!

It was too late to pursue his quarry that day, but next morning Ned was mounted on his beloved big black Jupiter, and riding at a canter.

Knowing more or less where Mr. Martin Purling’s domicile was, he didn’t go anywhere near Mansfield or the Friar Tuck, though he headed in that general direction. The rutted cart track he took into the forest suddenly stopped, blocked by a huge clump of brambles, but Ned had been warned. Gloved, he dismounted and found a place where one set of the long, thorny canes grew from one side of the track and another set from the opposite side met it; dragging them apart was not very difficult for such a big man. Having ridden through it, he pulled the brambles back into place-no need to warn anyone of his presence quite yet.

Four hours from the Black Cat, brambles and all, he was at Captain Thunder’s hideaway. What a hideaway! A snug cottage sat in a clearing like an illustration for a children’s fairy tale. Thatched, whitewashed, surrounded by an exquisite garden in full early summer flower, it was so far from popular imagination of a highwayman’s lair that, even if found, those who saw it would admire, then pass it by. The back yard held stables, a neat shed for firewood, and an outhouse; a clothes line flapping shirts and sheets, under-drawers and moleskin breeches spoke of some careful wife-now why had he assumed Mr. Martin Purling would live alone? Clearly he did not. A complication, but not an insuperable one.

Even as Jupiter stopped at the barrier of a picket fence, a woman emerged from the house. What a beauty! Black hair, pale skin, vivid blue eyes smutted by black lashes and brows. Ned felt a pang of regret at the sight of her long legs, tiny waist, swelling bosom. Yes, she was a rare beauty. Not a light-skirt crying out to be murdered, either. Just, like Mary Bennet, a virtuous woman cursed by beauty.

“You’re on the wrong road, sir,” she said in a Londonish accent, eyeing Jupiter with appreciation.

“If this is the house of Mr. Martin Purling, I am not.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, taken aback. “’E ain’t ’ere.”

“Have you any idea when he’ll be back?”

“Tea time, ’e said. That’s hours away.”

Ned stepped from the saddle, tied the reins to the gate post, loosened Jupiter’s girth and followed the girl-she was more girl than woman-down the flagged path to the front door.

At it she turned to face him. “I can’t let you come in. ’E wouldn’t like it.”

“I can see why.”

So quickly she had no idea what was coming, he took both her wrists in his left hand, clamped his right over her mouth, and pushed her through the door.

The kitchen yielded meat twine to tie her up temporarily, with a long, narrow cloth for her mouth; the lovely eyes stared at him in terror above the gag, it never having occurred to her that anyone would tamper with Captain Thunder’s property. Ned carried her into the parlour, dumped her in a chair, and drew up another close to hers.

“Now listen to me,” he said, voice calm and level. “I’m going to remove your gag, but don’t scream or shout. If you do, I’ll kill you.” He withdrew a knife from his pocket.

When she nodded vigorously, he removed the gag.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Martin’s wife.”

“Legal, or common law?”

“What?”

“Did you have a wedding ceremony?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you relatives in these parts?”

“No, sir. I am from Tilbury.”

“How did you get here?”

“Martin bought me. I was going to the Barbary coast.”

“A slave, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A twelvemonth.”

“Do you go into town? Into the village?”

“No, sir. Martin does that, but in Sheffield.”

“So no one knows you are here.”

“No one, sir.”

“Are you grateful to Martin for saving you from slavery?”

“Oh, yes, sir.”

Satisfied, he put the gag back into her mouth, then went to the yard in search of something less cruel than meat twine to bind her, and found thin rope. Ideal. Poor soul. Her beauty was of an order that had made her stand out in a maritime village like Tilbury. Undoubtedly her parents, soaked in gin, had sold her for enough money to satisfy their liquid passion for months to come. Had she gone to the Barbary pirates, she would eventually have arrived in the harem of some Ottoman Turk, there to wither away from homesickness and a form of subjugation more alien than any in England. Poor soul. I hate to do it, but I must. For Fitz’s sake, if for no other reason. No loose tongues, no matter how ill-born.

This time he trussed her so efficiently that she could not move, stuffed a small potato in her mouth behind the gag, and left her to watch the meeting between her Martin and this stranger.

Martin Purling returned shortly after three, whistling cheerfully. His horse, exactly the right kind for a highwayman, was put into its stable and rubbed down; then he strode up the back path toward the kitchen, calling for her.

“Nellie! Nellie, love! Whose is the black gelding? I hope he’ll part with it, for I have a mind to own it. Do a hundred miles with a big man up, I’ll warrant.”

“The black gelding is mine.” Ned appeared just inside the doorway with a pistol levelled at Captain Thunder’s heart.

“Who are you?” Purling asked, displaying no fear.

“Nemesis.” Ned’s left hand came up holding a small sandbag, and struck the Captain on the nape of the neck. He went down, only stunned, but it was long enough for Ned to bind him hand and foot. Then he picked him up as if he weighed nothing and carried him into the parlour, where he was thrown into a chair some distance from Nellie. As he came around, the first face he saw was hers, and he began to struggle, trying without success to free himself.

“Who are you?” Purling repeated. “I thought you were a fellow knight of the road, riding that horse, but you’re not, are you?”

“No.”

“It is despicable to be so cruel to Nellie.”

“Probably two days ago, Mr. Purling, you did far worse insult to a far greater lady than yon strumpet.”

Enlightenment dawned; Captain Thunder nodded slowly, all his questions answered. “So my instincts were right. She’s from an important family.”

“I’m pleased to hear you employ the present tense.”

But fright was creeping into the Captain’s dark eyes; he was remembering how he had disposed of her. “Naturally I speak in the present tense! I am not a murderer of women, sir!”

“That’s not what they say in Nottingham.”

“Stories! The highways and byways of Derbyshire, Cheshire and Nottinghamshire are mine and mine alone. They have been for nigh on fifteen years. Time enough for Captain Thunder to have acquired a mythology. Well, the stories are false, sir! And who are you?”

“I’m Edward Skinner, Darcy of Pemberley’s man. The lady you robbed of nineteen guineas is his sister-in-law.”

The breath hissed through the Captain’s teeth, his face mottled, he drummed his bound feet upon the floor. “Then what the hell was she doing on the common stage? How can a man sort the sheep from the goats if carriage folk ride in public coaches? Serves her right, the silly cow!”

“You have a bad temper, Captain. I’m astonished that no one has caught you in fifteen years, though this bolt-hole must be a help. What did you do with Miss Bennet?”

“Left her in the forest. She’ll find the road.”

“Today is Sunday. That must have been Friday, early afternoon. But no one has seen her, Captain, I assume because she didn’t find the road. You never intended that she should. I’ll wager you left her a mile inside the trees with no idea of direction. Did you harm her when you took her money?”

The Captain gave a bitter laugh. “I, harm her? Look at what she did to me!” Since he couldn’t point, he waggled his head about. “The woman is a fiend! She went for me like a terrier with a rat! Choking her didn’t work! I had to knock her out.”

“Whereabouts did you abandon her?”

“Five miles east of here, on the north side of the road to Mansfield. If you look in my left pocket, you’ll find all nineteen of her guineas. Take them. They’ve brought me naught but ill luck.”

“Keep them.”

Ned had primed his pistol, but didn’t bother bringing the frizzen down to shield the powder pan; instead he cocked it, walked to the girl, put its muzzle against her head, and blew her brains out. It was done so suddenly it took time for the Captain to produce a thin scream of grief. The spent weapon went down on the table; Ned unearthed a second pistol from his other greatcoat pocket and proceeded to tip a few grains of powder into the pan to prime it, brought the hammer back, pulled the trigger, and shot Captain Thunder, also known as Martin Purling, in the chest.

“Never leave witnesses,” he said to the parlour as he went about the business of cleaning both pistols, then reloading them; the weapons went into his pockets together with the tiny powder horn he used for priming. “Sorry about that,” he said to Nellie as he prepared to leave, “but it was quicker by far than hanging. I hope you go somewhere fairer, but you, Mr. Purling, are bound for Hell.”

Jupiter ready to ride again, Ned mounted and rode off, being very careful to pull the brambles together. Any with business at Mr. Purling’s house would take one look, and run. No one would report their deaths.

An hour later he found Mary. She had tripped over that root and fallen not yards from the road. What he saw were her white face and red-gold hair; the rest of her blended into the shadows. He made light work of picking her up and carrying her to Jupiter, but when he reached the beast he put her down and conducted a careful examination. No, not desperately injured, but seriously, yes. A huge swelling over her right brow worried him most, the more so because she failed to rouse. What to do? Were she any other female, he would have taken her to the nearest doctor, but well he knew Fitz’s dislike of gossip. Deciding that she would fare no worse for the ride to Pemberley, he put her across Jupiter’s withers and mounted.

What he hadn’t counted on was tainted meat in the pie he had had for breakfast at the Black Cat. Like many big and powerful men, he could work indefatigably for hours, even days, at a time. But that demanded good health, and he began to feel not quite himself just after he passed to the north of Chesterfield.

Jupiter disliked bearing a burden across its withers, but did so for Ned’s sake. Just after darkness fell, Mary stirred. The consciousness she regained was confused and irritable; thinking him Captain Thunder, she tried to fight. Having, as he saw it, no alternative, he tipped neat cognac down her throat, and was only content when she slipped back into oblivion. Once Mary sagged, Jupiter neighed softly and settled down.

Not half an hour later he lost the ability to control his gut, pulled Jupiter up, threw the reins over its head and lifted Mary down to lie on a soft patch of short, pungent grass and herbs. Tugging at his breeches, he went into a small copse of trees and endured some minutes of uncomfortable cramps and diarrhoea. Oh, what a bother! Lucky it hadn’t made him heave, but the runs were bad enough. Tidying himself as best he could, he stood waiting to see if there was more to come, but apparently not. How long had he been? A glance at his fob watch reassured him; no more than ten minutes. How bright the stars were, out in the middle of nowhere! Even without a moon, he fancied he might have been able to read the larger print in a newspaper. Certainly he could see his watch face.

Jupiter was standing in a grateful nap when he returned to the bridle-path, but Mary Bennet had disappeared. Confounded, he stared at the squashed herbs where her body had rested-God, no! No, no, no! Where had she gone? Into the trees to relieve herself, as he had done? She could hardly go far in ten minutes, not in her parlous condition.

But she was nowhere in the grove, nowhere on the bridle-path, and nowhere within an easy walk in any direction. Trembling, Ned stopped to think things through without panicking, and decided it was time to mount Jupiter, from which elevation he could see better and farther.

Two hours later he put his head against Jupiter’s mane in dull despair. Mary Bennet was nowhere to be found. And now he would have to report to Fitz that he had rescued Mary, only to lose her to some new, unknown peril. She had been stolen while she slept beside the bridle-path; nothing else made any sense, for walk off on her own two legs she had not.

“It is not your fault, Ned,” Fitz said when Ned reached him before breakfast on that Monday. “I blame myself and no one else. I gave you Lydia and Mary. So terribly unfair!”

“’Twas not you who lost her.”

“No, but how could you predict a bellyache? And why would you think her in danger on a deserted bridle-path well beyond Chesterfield? You are a rare man, Ned. You can plan well ahead, then seize the opportunity of a moment in a moment. I can trust you with these exceeding delicate matters, and in turn that leads me to overburden you. What undid both of us was a bellyache, but who could have predicted its outcome? Don’t blame yourself. And I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. As you say, who could have predicted a bellyache?”

He hesitated, then decided that he would have to tell Fitz about the fate of Captain Thunder and Nellie: a laundered version that would not upset Fitz’s own principles.

“Captain Thunder and his light-skirt are dead. When I found their house, a rather wild mкlйe ensued that proved me better prepared-and the better shot.” He grinned sourly. “In fact, I begin to think that it’s the element of surprise and the pistol already cocked and levelled have made Captain Thunder the terror of these parts for fifteen years. The poor girl threw herself in the way of the first ball to save her love. Blew her brains out. I managed to prime and fire my second pistol while the Captain was still fiddling with his powder horn. He took my ball in the heart. I doubt anyone ever goes near the place-they had even hidden the track to it with a formidable hedge of brambles. With your consent, I would rather not divulge the events. Especially because I have to deal with Lydia for the next few days. Could we simply let the pair of villains rot?”

There was no pleading in Ned’s voice; Fitz considered his tale carefully, and decided he did not disapprove of the way Ned had handled things. Clearly it had been a matter of life and death, and the only other man he knew was as knacky as Ned over the exasperating business of getting a pistol ready to fire was Charlie. Even had their capture been peaceful, he could see where keeping the pair for the hangman’s noose would cause unwelcome publicity. Mary was too involved, and now Mary was missing yet again, which necessitated a new search for her.

Fitz shrugged. “I agree, Ned. Let them rot.” He poured Ned fresh coffee. “Today you must rest. Nurse your belly, yes, but most of all get a long sleep. Charlie, Angus and Owen Griffiths went out at seven this morning in search of Mary. They don’t know your story, but they might find out something interesting. I predict that they won’t return until tomorrow evening, which gives you plenty of time to recover. And yes, I could send someone to bring them home at once, but I would rather not. They will approach the task a different way than you, and we don’t know who took Mary off you.”

“As you wish, Fitz.”

Fitz got to his feet, came around the table and gave Ned a warm hug. “I thank you for your splendid work, Ned. Were it not for you, Mary would have died in the forest. As it is, I think we may safely assume she is still alive. I am deeply in your debt.”

“When do you want Mrs. Wickham escorted to Hemmings?”

“Thursday, I hope. Spottiswoode has had a letter from the proprietress of the agency in York he uses, saying she has someone on her books, but first must thoroughly check the woman’s recommendations. Now go home and sleep.”

Ned rested his cheek against Fitz’s hand on his shoulder, then got up wearily. He departed glowing, despite his sense of failure. Fitz had hugged him, the love was still there. Could anything destroy it? This business had been the most acid test of it, yet still it survived. Oh, Fitz, what would I not do for you?

All of Elizabeth’s time had been taken up in caring for Lydia, whose health was quite broken down. Nor did she see why she should be shifted from Pemberley, where there was always someone else to do the irksome tasks like keeping herself and her clothing clean. Who knew what other premises would yield?

“Lydia, in your heart of hearts you must know,” Elizabeth said, secretly sharing her sister’s sentiments about removal. “Pemberley is Fitz’s seat, famous enough to seem a pinnacle of social achievement. An invitation to stay here is an aspiration fulfilled. He needs Pemberley to further his political career. You did untold damage when you burst into the dining room mouthing disgusting obscenities and accusing Fitz of murder. Your audience included some of the most important people in England-and Caroline Bingley, who remains in residence here. She will use your behaviour to belittle and denigrate Fitz. How can you blame him for wanting to be rid of you?”

“Easily,” said Lydia sulkily. She surveyed herself in a mirror. “What dreadful clothes you wear, Lizzie! I want money to buy new things-fashionable things. And I refuse to wear black!”

“You may have the money and the clothes, but not here. Fitz has found a nice house called Hemmings, outside Leek. There you may live in the same sort of comfort as Mama did at Shelby Manor. You may shop for apparel in Stoke-on-Trent or Stafford-Fitz has given you accounts at certain modistes in both towns. Your companion, Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe, has a list of the shops.”

Lydia sat up straight. “Companion? What can you mean, Lizzie, companion? I have no need of one!”

“I think you do, dearest.” Oh, what a wretched situation! Fitz had been happy to explain matters to Lydia himself, but that would have led to such ructions! So Elizabeth had begged to tell Lydia the news herself, thinking it best she wear the witch’s hat. She tried again. “My dear, your health is not what it should be. That means you must have company, if only until you build up your health. We have engaged a respectable lady to look after you-part nurse, part companion. As I have already said, her name is Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe. She hails from Devonshire.”

Scrubbed clean of its paint, Lydia’s face looked curiously bald, for her fairness was extreme enough to extend to her brows and lashes, absolutely colourless. The puffiness had vanished; she had had no further access to wine or other intoxicants since Hoskins had given her port, and that had been six days ago. Which meant Lydia had now reached craving point, and was ripe for mischief.

“I want two bottles of claret with my lunch,” said Lydia, “and I warn you, Lizzie, that if I do not get it, I will create a scene that will pale the last one to insignificance. Is Fitz afraid of Caroline Bingley, then? Well, not as afraid as he will be of me!”

“No wine,” said Elizabeth, iron in her voice. “Gentlewomen do not drink to excess, and you were born a gentlewoman.”

“This gentlewoman drinks! Like a fish! And I am not the only one! Why do you think Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst are so prim and proper? Because they drink-in secret!”

“You know nothing about either lady, Lydia.”

“It takes one to know one. Is Fitz really afraid of Caroline? He won’t be after I get through with her!”

“Lydia, compose yourself!”

“Then give me claret with my lunch! And if you think that I am going off tamely to Leek or anywhere else with a dragon for my companion, you are mistaken!”

“You go tomorrow, Lydia. Fitz insists.”

“He can insist until he turns in his grave, I will not go!”

Elizabeth fell to her knees, tried to take the clammy, restless, plucking hands in hers. “Lydia, please, I beg you! Go to Hemmings willingly! If you do not, you will go anyway. That fearsome man Ned Skinner is to escort you, and he puts up with naught. Try him, and you’ll be treated as he treated you when Mama died. For my sake, Lydia, please! Go willingly! Once you are ensconced at Hemmings, what you do will be your affair provided you are quiet and discreet. I am led to believe that there will be plenty of wine, though you will not be permitted to entertain men.”

“What a mouse you are, Lizzie! Did the jewels, Pemberley and enough pin-money to buy the Royal Pavilion strip you of all spirit? Fitz snaps his fingers, and you scurry, squeaking. Once you used to stand up for yourself, but no more. You are a bought woman. Well, I would rather be an army wife than the chatelaine of Pemberley! Oh, George, George!” The tears began to pour down her face, her body rocked. “I am a widow at a mere thirty-six! A widow! Doomed to black crepe and veiled bonnets! Well, I won’t! How can I find another husband if I’m shut up at Fitzwilliam Darcy’s dictate? Do you really want to be rid of me? Then send me to Bath!”

“To become the talk of that place? No,” said Elizabeth, more iron erupting from beneath her pity and grief. A bought woman! Was that how her friends from Longbourn days saw her? Head turned by the material things Fitz could give her? “You will go to Leek and live at Hemmings with Miss Maplethorpe, there to drink yourself silly if such is your desire! Accept it, Lydia. The alternative, I have been informed, is to see you dumped in Cornwall with nothing more than the clothes you stand up in.”

The lids dropped over Lydia’s pale blue eyes, shielding her thoughts from her sister. “Let me hear this from Fitz.”

“Lydia insists upon hearing her fate from you,” Elizabeth said to her husband in the small library.

“I take it she doesn’t like her fate?”

“‘Like’ is too mild a word. She’s full of wild threats, and wants to go to Bath to live.” The smoky eyes turned up to his, full of an agonised pleading. “Couldn’t she be allowed that, Fitz? In no time she would become a joke to all and sundry, and no one would heed her.”

“A joke who is known to be my sister-in-law. No, Elizabeth, she cannot go to Bath, and that is final. She goes to Hemmings.”

“I fear it won’t hold her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’ll venture out in search of men. There is a side to Lydia that I don’t understand, and it involves lovers. The drink is only part of her trouble. She is-on heat.”

“Indelicate, coming from you, wife, but a very good description. I would prefer to call her a strumpet.”

“I don’t believe it can be so lightly dismissed.”

“Oh, grow up, Elizabeth! Your family always showed a lack of propriety. That Kitty turned out so well was a minor miracle, but not one I can hope for with Lydia. She always was self-willed, and would go to any lengths to achieve what she willed. I knew George Wickham very well, and I can tell you that eloping with Lydia wasn’t his idea. She was crazed about him, and could see only one way to keep him-an elopement. George consented to the marriage only because I agreed to pay his debts. And have been paying his debts ever since, thanks to the identity of his wife.”

“Yes, Fitz, I understand all that,” Elizabeth said steadily, “but it is past history. You won’t keep Lydia at Hemmings.”

“Miss Maplethorpe comes highly recommended. Most of her work has been with the mentally afflicted, and so I regard Lydia.”

A cold sweat broke out on Elizabeth’s brow. “I cannot permit you to imprison my sister, sir.”

“That will not be necessary, madam. Miss Maplethorpe will not attempt to limit Lydia’s drinking, which will answer, I believe. She’ll be too drunk to go in search of lovers.” His eyes had turned to obsidian, a black, hard glitter. “It is a year since the Prime Minister was assassinated in the very halls of the Commons, and things have been in flux ever since, with Wellesley guarding the bone. I am within an amesace of becoming Mr. Perceval’s true successor, and I am not going to be cheated of office by a trollop like your sister!” The cold fire died out of his eyes. “I suggest you go back to Lydia and explain the facts more harshly than, it is apparent, you have thus far.”

“Oh, Fitz, what is this passion to be prime minister? Couldn’t you abandon public life in favour of your family? Of me?”

He looked astonished. “Family and wife are excellent in their place, but they cannot fulfil an ambitious man’s aspirations. I am determined to be prime minister and lead my country to a position of unparalleled power and respect. Our British reputation was severely damaged when we conceded the war in America to the rebels of the thirteen colonies, and we seem unlikely to win this fresh conflict there. However, we have beaten Bonaparte, and that must outweigh all else. Our navy rules the oceans, but strong action must be taken to turn our army into a body of soldiers even the French would quail to meet.” His chest swelled, he looked invincible. “I intend to turn Britain into Great Britain!”

“Hear, hear!” Elizabeth cried, clapping derisively. “I am so pleased you think me excellent in my place. Of late I have come to realise that you are every bit as proud and conceited as I thought you when first you came into Hertfordshire!”

“It’s true that I had no basis for self-satisfaction in those days,” he said stiffly, “but the situation has changed. I knew well that I was marrying beneath me-oh, the follies of youth! Were I to have it to do all over again,” he said deliberately, “I would not marry you. I would have married Anne de Bourgh, and fallen heir to the Rosings estate. I do not grudge it to Hugh Fitzwilliam, but by rights it was mine.”

White-faced, she swayed, but righted herself without the help he probably would not have given her. “I thank you for that frank explanation,” she said with a stiffness quite the equal of his. “Would you prefer that I removed myself from Pemberley and your life? One of your minor estates would suit me very well.”

“Don’t be a fool!” he snapped. “I am simply trying to deal with the damnable nuisance your family represents. Lydia will go to Hemmings tomorrow, and very willingly. Not a difficulty, my dear. Ned will dangle a bottle of some lethal liquor under her nose, and she, donkey that she is, will follow it into the carriage.”

“I see.”

“However, I have another embarrassment looming. Namely, your sister Mary. She’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Oh, what other shocks would he produce?

“Yes. Somewhere between Chesterfield and here.”

“What are you doing about it?”

“If you had paused in your ministrations to Lydia, Elizabeth, you might have learned much from our son. Yes, we’ve all been worried about her, but he and Angus-and Ned, independently of them-have established beyond a doubt that she’s been abducted. Charlie can tell you the story.”

“He has grown in all sorts of ways, Fitz,” she said, sidetracked.

“I am not blind! I’m very pleased at what Oxford and young Griffiths have done for him.”

“I suspect Angus has had some influence too.”

Fitz laughed. “That is an alliance of mutual affection, my dear Elizabeth. Angus hopes to be your brother-in-law. Were it to come about, the last threat your family represents would be no threat at all, and I would have the Westminster Chronicle in my pocket.”

“As to the union of Angus and Mary, I rejoice, but if you think that would put his newspaper at your political disposal, then you very much mistake your man. As well as my sister.”

Elizabeth quit the library and left her husband to his dreams of grandeur. Leopards don’t change their spots, she thought. Oh, but you fooled me, Fitz! I genuinely thought I had cured you of your pride and conceit. And when you began to assume the leopard’s hide again, I blamed it on my inability to give you the sons you wanted. But it was never that, I see now. The leopard has stayed the leopard throughout our twenty years together. While I, if I may believe Lydia, have turned into a mouse. A bought mouse. S passed, but Mary had no idea how many, for the lump on her brow seemed to have provoked a series of faints or comas from which she recovered slowly. Sheer exhaustion had entered into it too, and being deprived of daylight, she had no way of knowing how regularly she woke to drink, eat, use the commode.

The velvet curtain was drawn back to reveal a gap in the iron bars that confined her, formed when a section was let down to make a shelf. Stacked on this she would find fresh food, small beer, a jug of water for her ablutions, and a tin with a pouring spout containing an oily liquid. The last, she soon discovered, was to replenish the reservoirs of her lamps. Terror of being plunged into utter darkness stimulated her dazed mind into deducing this, after which she learned how to do the filling: take off the glass chimney, unscrew the metal centre holding the wick, and pour new oil on top of what remained in the glass reservoir. The little lamp burned for longer than the big ones, and she found to her relief that, when she held its weak flame to the wick of a big lamp, it kindled readily.

Twice she had found clean nightgowns and socks on the shelf, once a clean robe, but never outer wear of any kind. She was warm enough, as the chamber never seemed to grow freezingly cold any more than it grew very hot. About the temperature of a cool spring day, she concluded.

If only she had some way to gauge the passage of time! The highwayman must have taken her fob watch; they were expensive and not easily come by. Hers had been a gift from Elizabeth, greatly appreciated. No external elements penetrated her prison apart from that tiny, moaning whine, which she no longer consciously heard. If it reminded her of anything, it was of a window left carelessly open a crack in a high wind, but if there was a window behind that gigantic screen, she could not see it-and doubted its existence besides. Windows meant light, and she had none.

Rummaging among the books on the second table brought steel pens into view, as well as several pencils; there was a standish containing black ink and red ink, and a shaker full of sand for blotting. Also several hundred sheets of paper, hot-pressed and with the ragged edges that spoke of a pure linen-cotton mixture. The titles of the books were interesting yet uninformative: Dr. Johnson on the poets of his time, Oliver Goldsmith, Sheridan, Trollope, Richardson, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Milton; also works on chemistry, mathematics, astronomy and anatomy. Nothing popular, nothing religious. Nothing that her swimming brain could compass. Time, it was evident, was best expended in curative sleep.

Finally there came an awakening that saw her mind alert, her bruises faint, and the swelling on her brow vanished. Having eaten, drunk, and used her peculiar commode, she took up a pencil and made a series of seven strokes upon the smooth wall at the back of her cell, adjacent to what looked like iron hinges set into it. Since no one had left her clean sheets as yet, she decided that no more than a week had gone by since she had been put here, for whoever had put her here apparently believed in cleanliness, and that meant clean sheets would be forthcoming.

Though the oil that fuelled them had an elusive aroma, the burning wicks of her lamps gave off no smoke of any kind, nor made it hard to breathe. She took the chimney off her little lamp and toured the cell to see if a stray puff of air caused its flame to wobble, but none did. Even when held over her commode hole, it remained steady. What was down there? No cesspit, certainly, for no odour of human wastes floated out of it. When she thrust the flame down into the hole, it revealed something unexpected: not a narrow vent, but a broad round vertical tunnel, like a well. Her light had not the power to illuminate its bottom, but as she bent close above the wooden seat she heard what sounded like swiftly running water. So that was why the privy did not smell! The matter she voided tumbled free to be borne away on a stream.

A river? She remembered dearest Charlie talking about the caves and underground rivers of the Peak District, and suddenly knew where she was. Imprisoned in the caves of the Peak District of Derbyshire, which meant not very far from Pemberley. But why? Instinct said that her virtue was not threatened, and Captain Thunder had stolen everything she possessed, so it was not money either. Unless she had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom? Ridiculous! replied common sense. Nothing on her person gave away more than her name, which was not Darcy, and her condition would have told her captor soon enough that she was a nobody, most likely a governess. Who could know of her connection to Darcy of Pemberley? The answer was no one. So whatever her captor’s reason for this abduction, it was not ransom.

Yet for this unknown captor she did have a purpose, else he would not have succoured her, striven to keep her alive. Not rape and not ransom, so what?

It was while she was replacing the chimney on her little lamp that she saw him, sitting comfortably on a straight wooden chair on the far side of her bars-how long had he been watching her? She put the lamp down and faced him, her eyes busy.

A little old man! Almost gnomish, so small and wizened was he, his legs crossed at the knees on spindled shanks ending in open brown sandals. He wore a heath-brown, cowled robe cinched around the waist with a thick cream cord, and on his breast sat a crucifix. Had the colour been a browner brown, he might have been a Francisan friar, she thought, staring at him intently. His wrinkled, buffeted scalp was bald everywhere, even around his ears, and the eyes surveying her with equal interest were so pale a blue that their irises were only marginally darker than their whites. Rheumy eyes, yet with an unnerving quality because they seemed always to look sideways. His thin blade of a nose was beaky and his lips a thin, severe line, as of a martinet. I do not like him, thought Mary.

“You are intelligent, Madam Mary,” he said.

No, said Mary to herself, I refuse to display any sign of fear or confusion; I will hold my own against him.

“You know my name, sir,” she said.

“It was embroidered on your clothing. Mary Bennet.”

“Miss Mary Bennet.”

“Sister Mary,” he corrected.

She pulled the chair out from under her book table and set it exactly opposite his, then sat down, knees and feet primly together, hands folded in her lap. “What leads you to think me intelligent?”

“You worked out how to replenish the lamps.”

“Needs must when the devil drives, sir.”

“You are afraid of the dark.”

“Of course. It is a natural reaction.”

“I saved your life.”

“How did you do that, sir?”

“I found you at death’s door. You had, Sister Mary, a mortal swelling of the brain that was squeezing the life-juice out of you. The gigantic fellow who had you was too ignorant to see it, so when he went about his business, my children and I stole you. I had developed a cure for just such a malady, but I was in sore need of a patient to try it out on. You nearly died-but nearly only. We got you home in time, and while my children bathed you and made you comfortable, I distilled my cure. You have been the answer to many prayers.”

“Do you belong to an order of monks?” she asked, fascinated.

He reared up in outrage. “A Roman? I? Indeed, no! I am Father Dominus, custodian of the Children of Jesus.”

Mary’s brow cleared. “Oh, I see! You are the leader of one of the many outlandish Christian sects that so afflict northern England. My Church of England newsletter is always inveighing against your like, but I have not read of the Children of Jesus.”

“Nor will you,” he said grimly. “We are refugees.”

“From what, Father?”

“From persecution. My children belonged to men who exploited and ill-treated them.”

“Oh! Mill and factory owners,” she said, nodding. “Well, Father, you stand in no danger from me. Like you, I am the enemy of men like them. Release me, and let me work with you to liberate all such children. How many have you freed?”

“That is no business of yours, nor will it be.” His eyes drifted past her shoulders to gaze at her prison walls. “I saved your life, which therefore belongs to me. You will work for me.”

“Work for you? Doing what?”

Apparently in answer, he stretched out his hands to her; they were crabbed with age and some disease had swollen their joints. “I cannot write,” he said.

“What is that to the point?”

“You are going to be my scribe.”

“Write for you? Write what?”

“My book,” he said simply, smiling.

“I would be glad to do that for you, Father, but of my own free choice, not because you keep me a prisoner,” she said, feeling the stirrings of alarm. “Unlock the door. Then we can come to some mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

“I think not,” said Father Dominus.

“But this is insane!” she cried, unable to stop herself. “Keep me prisoner to act as a scribe? What book could be so important? A retelling of the Bible?”

His face had assumed a patient, long-suffering expression; he spoke to her now as to a fool, not an intelligent person. “I do not despair of you, Sister Mary-you are so nearly right. Not a retelling of the Bible, but a new bible! The doctrines of the Children of Jesus! It is all here in my mind, but my hands cannot turn my thoughts into words. You will do that for me.”

Off the chair he sprang with a laugh and a whoop, ducked around the corner of the screen, and was gone.

“How fortunate that I am sitting down,” said Mary, looking at her hands, which were shaking. “He’s mad, quite mad.”

Her eyes smarted; tears were close. But no, she would not cry! More urgent by far was to review that bizarre conversation, try to construct a footing, if not a foundation, upon which to base the talks sure to come. It was indeed true that northern England was the breeding ground of all kinds of peculiar religious sects, and clearly Father Dominus and his Children of Jesus fitted into that mould. Nothing he had said revealed a theology, but no doubt that would come, if he meant to write his beliefs down in the form of a religious text. His name for himself and the name he had given her smacked of Roman Catholicism, but he had denied that strenuously. Perhaps as a child he had been exposed to Papism? “Children of Jesus” had rather a puritanical ring; some of these sects were so heavily concentrated upon Jesus that God hardly ever got a mention, so perhaps there was some of that in it too. But were there actually any children? She had seen none, heard none. And what kind of cures did he practise? To speak of a swelling of the brain with such authority argued a medical background. And the statement about their being refugees was illogical; if he had taken his children from mill and factory owners, those men were more likely to seize upon new children than search for escapees. The source of children was almost limitless, so Argus said; having borne them, their parents were only too happy to sell them into labour, especially if they had no parishes.

“Hello?” said a little girl’s voice.

Mary lifted her head to see a small figure clad in a heath-brown, cowled robe staring at her through the bars of her cage.

“Hello,” said Mary, smiling.

The smile was returned. “I have something for you, Sister Mary. Father Dominus said you would be pleased.”

“I would be more pleased to know your name.”

“Sister Therese. I am the oldest of the girls.”

“Do you know the number of your years, Therese?”

“Thirteen.”

“And what do you have for me that will please me?”

The child didn’t look her age, but nor did she appear poorly nourished or weighed down by fear. When she attained full maturity her nose and chin would be too large for prettiness, but she had a certain charm of colouring, this being light brown of eye, skin and hair. Two small hands clasped a tripod stand which they put on the shelf; a kettle with steam curling out of its spout stood upon the ground next to her, and was lifted up in its turn. Then came a small china teapot, a cup and a saucer, and a little jug of milk.

“If you take the chimney off one of your lamps and put it under the stand, it will bring the kettle to the boil, and then you may make a pot of tea,” said Sister Therese, producing a tin of tea leaves. “Father Dominus says tea will do you no harm, but you are not to ask for coffee.”

“Therese, that is wonderful!” Mary cried, setting a lamp beneath the tripod and putting the kettle on its top. “Tea! So refreshing! Thank Father Dominus for me too, please.”

Therese turned to go. “I will be back later with your clean sheets, and will collect the kettle then. You can empty the leaves down the privy and keep the pot and stand.”

“Wait!” Mary called, but the little brown-robed girl was gone. “I will talk to her when she comes back,” she said, and went about making herself a much needed cup of tea.

Is this the carrot for the donkey? she asked herself as she sat sipping the scalding liquid. “Oh, this is so good! Father Dominus keeps an excellent sort of tea.”

Therese returned some time later; Mary gave her the kettle, but dallied about it, eager to learn what she could from this little member of the sect.

“How many children does Father have?” she asked, making a show of wiping the outside of the kettle.

The wide eyes looked into hers trustfully. “He says, fifty, Sister Mary. Thirty boys and twenty girls.” A shadow crossed her face, of grief or fear, but she squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath of resolution. “Yes, fifty.”

“Do you remember your bad master?”

Bewilderment! Sister Therese frowned. “No, but Father says that is usual. Brother Ignatius and I were the first, you see. We have been with Father a long time.”

“Do you like your life with Father?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, but automatically; it was not a question aroused emotion in her. “Please, may I have the kettle?”

Mary handed it over. Hasten slowly, she thought. I have a strong feeling that there will be more than enough time to quiz her.

Not a prisoner in the way she, Mary, was a prisoner, she was forced to conclude. Therese had the run of wherever they were, so much was sure. Nor was she inclined to escape. Her life seemed to be the only one she knew, which set Mary to wondering. Mill and factory owners didn’t enslave very young children, who were too much trouble; they might take on an eight-year-old, but Argus said nine or ten was the ideal age for a child to commence a life of unpaid labour, existing for the food scraps and sordid shelter offered in return. Therefore Therese should recollect a life before being rescued: why didn’t she?

The need for exercise had driven her to pacing her cell-four double steps encompassed its dimensions. By walking thus for what she judged to be at least two hours, Mary tired herself out sufficiently to sleep when her eyelids grew heavy. When she woke she ate-the bread was always fresh, she noted-and sat down with John Donne to pass this dreadful inertia.

Which didn’t last very long; Father Dominus appeared.

“Are you ready to start work?” he asked, seating himself.

“In return for the answers to some questions, yes.”

“Then ask.”

“Describe my situation when you took me more fully, Father. Where exactly was I? With whom was I?”

“I know not the identity of your captor,” he said readily, “but he was big enough to suffer from some glandular anomaly, I concluded.” He tittered. “He had a bellyache, and set you down to relieve it. I happened to be gathering medicinal herbs in the vicinity, and had Brother Jerome and our handcart with me-the water in a spring nearby is unique, and I intended to fill my jars there. But you were fitting, and any fool could see you were not epileptic by nature. Brother Jerome put you on the handcart and-away we went! That is all.”

“Are you a physician, Father?”

“No. I am a druggist-an apothecary. The finest in the world,” he announced in ringing tones. “I cannot cure epilepsy, but I can keep it in abeyance, and that is more than anyone else can say. Some of my children are epileptic, but I dose them and they do not fit. Just as some of my children have been riddled with worms, parasites, flukes. But no more! I can cure almost anything, and what I cannot cure I can keep controlled.”

“From what did Therese suffer?”

“Sister Therese, if you please! As an infant, gin instead of milk, as a small child, lack of food. It affects their memories,” he said, sounding glib. “Now may we begin?”

“Begin what, precisely?”

“The story of my life. The story of the Children of Jesus. The fruits of my labours as an apothecary.”

“I am sure I will be consumed with interest.”

“It matters not, Sister Mary. Your task is to take down my dictation with a pencil on this cheap paper,” he said, producting a thick wad of it that went down on the shelf with a faint clang.

“My pencils will blunt,” she said.

“And you would like a knife upon which to sharpen them, you imply. But I have a better idea, Sister Mary. Each day I will give you five sharpened pencils in exchange for blunted ones.”

“I would appreciate a shelf for the books,” she riposted. “This table is not overly large, Father, and I would like to move it closer to the bars to take dictation. Books should not lie on a floor to get damp and mildewy.”

“As you wish,” he said indifferently, watching her transfer the books to the ground and move the table closer to him.

“Is your new bible also an autobiography, then, Father?”

“Of course. Just as the Old Testament is the story of the doings of God among men, and the New Testament the story of the doings of Jesus among men, so the Bible of the Children of Jesus is the story of God’s younger son-I-among men and the children of men,” Father Dominus explained.

“I see.” Mary sat down, pulled several sheets of cheap paper toward her and picked up a pencil.

“Here!” cried the old man with a faint screech. “One sheet at a time, madam! It is too difficult to bring in my supplies to permit of wanton waste by anyone.”

“Sir,” she said with like irony, “my pencil will go through one sheet of this paper, for the table surface is quite rough. I intend to use the dozen or so sheets under my writing sheet as a cushion. If you are a man of science, you should know that without needing to be told.”

“It was another test of your intelligence,” he said loftily. “Now commence, as follows: ‘God is the darkness, for God existed before the coming of light, and is not Lucifer the Bringer of Light? He was Lucifer first, Satan only afterwards. He falls every day in the person of the Sun, does battle with God through the darkness, and rises every morning on another bootless journey into nothing. The scales, he thinks, are evenly matched, but God knows better. For long after light is a spent force, the darkness will continue, and the darkness is God.

“‘This revelation burst upon me when, in my thirty-fifth year, I chanced upon the Primal Cave, the Omphalos, the Navel, the Universal Womb, that place I still call the Seat of God, His dwelling place. For where in this world of light is God to be found? Only when I chanced upon the Seat of God did I understand at last. There, in a blackness so profound mine eyes shrivelled for the lack of even one mote of light to see, there, in the silence so profound mine ears shrivelled for the lack of even one whisper, there, I stepped into the very belly of God. I was one with Him, and underwent the first of what were to be many revelations as He unfolded His darkness to me layer upon layer.’”

Father Dominus ceased while Mary’s pencil laboured to catch up and her mind, reeling, kept a part of itself for her own thoughts and reactions.

“Layer,” she wrote, and stopped, instrument poised, eyes on the seamed face and its smeared pale eyes with the pinpoint pupils. Why are they pinpoint? that exclusive-to-self segment of her mind asked. Has he drugged himself with something? The subject suggested it, certainly, yet-was it possible that he couldn’t see much? That it was not the crabbed hands forbidding his authoring his own treatise, but the quality of his vision?

Say nothing derogatory, Mary! Say nothing that mocks him, or otherwise impugns his theology. “I am humbled,” she said, “to be the scribe of such a mind, Father.”

“You see it?” he asked, leaning forward eagerly.

“I see it.”

“Then we will go on.”

And go on he did, at great length; as the pages piled up to the right of her makeshift scribe’s cushion, Mary’s knees began to shake and her hand to cramp. Finally, when he paused for breath, she put her pencil down.

“Father, I can write no more today,” she said. “I have a writer’s cramp, and given that you want all of this transcribed in a fair, copperplate hand, I must beg you to stop.”

He seemed to come back into himself from a different place, blinked, shivered, parted his thin lips in a mirthless smile. “Oh, that was wonderful!” he said. “So much easier than trying to get meaning out of looking at words.”

“What do you call this theology?” she asked.

“Cosmogenesis,” he said.

“Greek roots, not Latin.”

“The Greeks thought. Those who came after imitated.”

“I look forward to our next dictation, but there is no need to lock me up,” she tried again. “I need exercise, for one thing, and pacing a cell is not adequate. A shelf for my books, please.”

“Think yourself lucky that I have given you the means to make a cup of tea,” he said, rising to his feet.

“You are a bad master, Father Dominus, no better than those from whom you took your children. You feed me and shelter me, but deny me freedom.”

But she said it to empty air; he had gone.

She sat on her bed to give her body a change of posture as well as substance, and tried to come to grips with the fantastic drivel he had spoken. To Mary, a staunch adherent of the Church of England, he was apostate, worse than any heretic, for he talked of God as no Christian ought, and thus far Jesus had not even entered the theological world he painted. Which meant he had little in common with almost all the sects northern England could boast. If she, who never counted the cost of saying what people didn’t want to hear, had kept a tight rein on her thoughts and striven mightily not to offend him, she had done so because, by the end of their very long session, she had become convinced he was absolutely mad. Remained only for him to say that he was God, or perhaps Jesus, and her judgment would be irrevocable. Logic had no part in his way of looking at things, which seemed to be purely for his own comfort or convenience or aspirations. Though what his aspirations were, as yet she had no idea. He claimed to be God’s younger son!

Privately she put his age at somewhere around seventy, but if she erred, it was on the younger side, not the older. He had been well-looked-after, whether by his children or by others was moot; it was even possible that he was eighty. So had he always been a madman, or was it a symptom of old age? Though he was not senile in any way; his memory was excellent and his reasoning powers acute. It was more that his reason was not reasonable nor his memory unwarped. What she had been exposed to was a person whose self owed nothing to the ethics and structure of English society. Were there really fifty children, thirty boys and twenty girls? Why had Therese’s face changed when she spoke those numbers? How rigorously would the little girl be quizzed by Father Dominus as to what questions Sister Mary asked? She had a duty to the child not to put her in harm’s way, and perhaps that expression had hinted at dread punishments.

So Mary went gently with Therese, whom she could interrogate about less perilous things than numbers and punishments. Since Father Dominus had made no secret of his caves, Mary concentrated upon that aspect of her imprisonment. According to Therese, there were many, many miles of caves, all interconnected by tunnels; speaking with awe, Therese told her that Father Dominus knew every inch of every tunnel, every cavern, every nook and cranny. One system was called the Southern Caves, another the Northern Caves; Mary and the Children of Jesus lived in the Southern Caves, but the work went on in the Northern Caves, which also contained God’s Temple. What exactly the work consisted of took time to elucidate, but gradually Mary pieced it together from Therese and a new friend among the Children of Jesus, Brother Ignatius. He had appeared with an awl, a screwdriver, some screws, several iron brackets and three planks of wood.

It was then that Mary learned what the iron hinges in her far wall were: a second cowled youth, tall and slender, had helped Brother Ignatius carry his load inside-but only after he had stood Mary against the wall and closed the hinges on her ankles to form fetters. Then, having used a rule to mark the screw holes for the brackets, he took himself off and left Ignatius to do the actual work. Brother Ignatius was shorter than the other lad, whom he called Brother Jerome, but more powerfully built, and very close to puberty. When Mary asked his age, he gave it as fourteen.

“Therese and I be the eldest,” he confided, screwing his screws into the soft rock.

“Why did Brother Jerome measure and mark, if he wasn’t to help you in aught else?” Mary asked.

“Can’t read nor write,” said Ignatius cheerfully. “Jerome’s the only one of us who can.”

She suppressed a gasp. “None of you can read or write?”

“’Cept Jerome. Father brought him from Sheffield.”

“Why hasn’t Father taught you?”

“We be too busy, I expect.”

“Busy doing what?”

“Depends.” Ignatius set a plank on two brackets, wiggled it and nodded. “Nice and level. Jerome’s a fussy one.”

“Depends?”

The rather dull brown eyes clouded with the effort of remembering something uttered a few seconds before. “Might be pounding powder, or steeping herbs, or filtering, or distilling, or thickening, or putting in a dab of colour. Blue’s for liver, lavender’s for kidneys, yaller’s for bladder, mucky green’s for gallstones, red’s for heart, pink’s for lungs, brown’s for guts.” His mouth opened to say more, but Mary stopped him hastily.

“Medicaments?” she asked.

“What?”

“What does filtering mean?” she countered. “Or distilling?”

He shrugged his broad and sturdy shoulders. “Dunno, ’cept we does ’em, and that’s what they’re called.”

“He did say he was an apothecary,” said Mary to herself. “Do you make potions and elixirs for Father Dominus, is that it?”

“Aye, that’s it.” He began to stack her books on the bottom shelf, and put what volumes were left on the middle one. “There, Sister Mary! You can fit as many again.”

“I can indeed. Thank you, Brother Ignatius.”

He nodded, gathered up his tools and prepared to leave.

“Just a moment! I am still fettered.”

“Jerome will come back for that. He’s got the keys.”

Off he went, leaving Mary to wait what seemed an eternity for Brother Jerome to unlock the hinges binding her ankles.

This lad, she thought looking down on his head, which displayed the bald spot of a tonsure on its crown, this lad is very different from Brother Ignatius. His eyes, almost as light as Father Dominus’s, were sharp and intelligent, and displayed that peculiar lack of emotion people usually call “cold.” That he was fond of inflicting pain became evident as he unlocked her, grazing her flesh on the iron until he drew blood.

“I wouldn’t, Brother Jerome,” she said softly. “Your master needs me healthy, not laid low with some infection from a wound.”

“’Twas you did it, not I,” he said, disliking the threat.

“Then watch that you-or I!-do not do it again.”

“I hate him!” said Therese through her teeth after Jerome had gone. “He’s cruel.”

“But Father Dominus’s pet, am I correct?”

“Yes, they’re thick,” she said, but would say no more.

“What kind of work do you girls perform for Father Dominus?”

“We bottle the liquids, put the pills in boxes, fill the tins with ointment, label everything, and make sure the corks are tight in the bottles,” she said, as if by rote.

“And this work keeps twenty of you busy?”

“Yes, Sister Mary.”

“Father Dominus’s cure-alls must be famous.”

“Oh, yes, very! Especially the choler elixir and the horse ointment. We have a special arrangement for those.”

“Special arrangement?”

“Yes, with an apothecary’s warehouse in Manchester. They go there, and then to shops all over England.”

“Does Father have a brand name?”

“A what?”

“A name that every different kind of product you make has in common. Father Dominus, for instance?”

Therese’s brow cleared. “Oh, I know what you mean! Children of Jesus. Everything is called Children of Jesus this or that.”

“I have never heard of it.”

“Well, lots must have, or we wouldn’t be so busy.”

When Father Dominus appeared, Mary was able to hand him forty pages of exquisitely neat, handwritten manuscript. The hand that plucked it from the shelf trembled slightly; the sheaf of paper went up to his eyes and there was pored over, his face registering an awed delight that was not, she divined, counterfeited in any way. “But this is beautiful!” he cried, looking up before tucking the top sheet under all the others. “You write straight across the page, and have marginated perfectly without ruling it.”

So he does see something, she thought, but not the sense of the words; she had deliberately put the pages out of numerical order. He can see the straightness and apparently a pencil line, but only if he holds a page five inches from his nose.

“A publisher will be happy,” she said. “Where do we begin today? Is it to be darkness, lightness, or how God has formed caves?”

“No, no, not today! I must take this and read it properly. I will see you tomorrow, Sister Mary.”

“Wait! If I am to be idle this day, give me exercise!”

Not long afterward, Brother Ignatius appeared carrying a coil of thin rope and two lanterns. Grinning like a conjurer about to pull a rabbit from a hat, he made a trumpeting noise and produced her boots from behind his back.

“Exercise!” carolled Mary, leaping off her chair.

“Of a sort,” he said. “Father will allow me to take you down to the river and back, but you’ll need your boots-’tis very wet in places. But I dasn’t let you keep the boots-they’re to go back to him after I lock you up again. And please don’t think of running away,” he said as he unlocked the door and came into her cell, loosening the rope. “There’s none place to go, and without a lantern it’s God’s Insides. I have to tie one end of this around you and the other around me, and we got a lantern each. The oil lasts long enough to do the round trip with a rest by the river, but there’s naught in it after that.”

“I won’t try to escape, I promise,” said an ecstatic Mary, allowing him to knot the rope around her waist while she laced up her boots.

Hoping to see what lay beyond the screen, she was disappointed to find herself led into the maw of a tunnel that, had she known it was there, she could actually see; she had dismissed it as a dense black shadow. At first the path, illuminated by his lantern in the lead and hers coming on behind, was dry and strewn with rubble, but perhaps ten minutes into the downward-sloping tunnel appeared the first puddle, and after that the floor grew steadily moister. At the end of half an hour Mary found herself standing on the bank of a rushing turbulence, a considerable body of water that formed the bulk of the floor in a cavern so vast that the puny light from their lanterns gave the merest hint of its dimensions. Now she could see what Charlie had sometimes talked about! Great glistening fingers pointed down from above, their encrusted surfaces glittering and sparkling; an occasional formation that looked for all the world like semi-translucent, scintillating cloth was flung across the abyss like a shawl; long crystal whiskers sprouted out of pools or from some source hidden in the shadows.

“Beautiful!” she breathed, stunned.

Now I begin to understand how Father Dominus formulated his bizarre concept of God. To be caught down here lightless might well trigger insanity, nor would the kindling of a tiny light remove the terror from such an immensity. I pray I am never lost down here.

“It be pretty,” said Brother Ignatius, “but we got to go back now, Sister Mary.”

Tramping upward was harder work, but Mary relished it; if she did not exercise, she would not keep up her strength.

“How long have you been with Father Dominus?” she asked.

“Dunno. Don’t rightly remember being anywhere else. Me and Therese are the oldest, been with Father the longest.”

“So Therese said. Also that Father brought Jerome from Sheffield. Do you come from Sheffield too?”

“Dunno. Jerome’s a special case, Father says. Reads ’n’ writes.”

“Did you suffer a bad master?”

“A bad what?”

“A bad master. A nasty man who whipped you to make you work.”

“Father Dominus don’t whip” was the answer, sounding puzzled.

“What do you eat?”

“Fresh bread we bake. Butter ’n’ jam ’n’ cheese. Roast beef for dinner on Sundays. Stew. Soup.”

“What kind of soup?”

“Depends. Good, but.”

“Who cooks?”

“Therese. Camille helps, so do the other girls in turns.”

“So you don’t starve.”

“What’s starve?”

“Feeling hungry from too little food.”

“No.”

“What do you drink?”

“Small beer. Hot chocolate on Sundays.”

“Do you get pudding?”

“Treacle tart. Steamed pud. Rhubarb tart. Cream.”

“Have you cows?”

“No. Jerome brings the milk ’n’ cream.”

“Do you have a day of worship?”

“Worship?”

“Saying hello to God. Thanking Him for His kindness.”

“No. We thank Father.”

Well, that was interesting! So Father Dominus’s god was his god, did not belong to the children. Apparently they belonged to Jesus, though it would be interesting on their next walk to ask Brother Ignatius what he had been taught about Jesus.

But when Father Dominus appeared the next day Mary feared that she might not be allowed to walk again. The Founder of Cosmogenesis was not pleased with his secretary.

“You put my pages out of order!” he accused, still standing.

“Oh, my goodness, did I?” asked Mary, looking blank. “I do apologise, Father. Not having a watch or a timepiece of any kind, I am afraid that I become confused. I was sorting the pages out to make sure that every single one was free from error, and you caught me unaware. I gathered them together in such a hurry that I forgot I hadn’t collated them. Pray forgive me, please!”

His pose relaxed a little, though his face did not soften. “As well for you, then, that you had numbered the pages,” he said stiffly. “A pity that you cannot print, as in a genuine book.”

“The only persons who ever did that, Father,” she said, her temper tried, “were medieval monks. I do not say I could learn to do it, but do you have the time to permit me to learn?”

“No, no, no! Today we work. Begin as follows: ‘Light is evil, created by Lucifer to his own image. God has no eyes, but Lucifer took two sparks off his body and made them into eyes so that he could see his own beauty. That is the evil of light-its beauty, its seductiveness, its capacity to dazzle, to daze and numb the mind, throw it open to Lucifer to work upon.’” He stopped to look at her. “You have Lucifer’s hair,” he said. “I warn you, Sister Mary, that I saw the devil in you even while you lay comatose upon that bank. Yet God gave you to me to answer my prayers, and forewarned is forearmed. You proved the efficacy of my treatment for oedema, and now you serve me as a scribe. But I know your origins! Never forget that!”

Then back he went to his dissertation upon Lucifer, a jumble of hatred for the ordinary phenomenon of light that served to convince her that, in losing his sight, Father Dominus’s profound experience in the cave during his thirty-fifth year had translated into a rejection of the world he could no longer see save poorly. There were people throughout the globe who revered caves, even thought of them as the home of their god, but few had gone on from that concept to loathe and fear God’s most thrilling creation, light. All the near-infinite shades of grey had bled out of Father Dominus’s philosophy, leaving him with the black of God and the white of Satan, whom he called Lucifer because of its Latin meaning-Bearer of Light. The pitiless creed of a fanatic, and every religion had those. But not extreme enough for Father Dominus, whose mind besides was an original one.

What must he have been like in his thirty-fifth year, hale and hearty and brimful of genius? Those lamps! His nostrums and elixirs, his energies and enthusiasms. Once, she was sure, a truly extraordinary man. But now, a mad one. Old, near-blind, relying upon the adulation of a small group of children to plump out a juiceless heart. Even the adulation was second-rate; he wanted no developed mind among his worshippers, so had deprived them of letters and numbers, taught them an apothecary’s cant without ever explaining what the words meant, set himself up as being far above them-and left his minion, Brother Jerome, to apply the more unpleasant aspects of discipline, thus deflecting fear and loathing onto Jerome as if it had no origins in him.

Jerome…The odd one out, the foreigner brought in from Sheffield at, Mary presumed, a more advanced age than any of the other children. Therese and Ignatius insisted that they remembered no previous master, good or bad, and said flatly that none of the children did. A potion that obliterated memory in them? That was possible, of course. Or did he never steal them from bad masters?

These caves! In other places those who lived in them were called troglodytes, but they were entire communities from the very old to newborn babes, not an artificial group like the Children of Jesus. From Therese she had learned that her own prison cell was quite close to the kitchen in which Therese and her little helpers made bread, stews, roast beef, tarts, soups, puddings. No Child of Jesus grew ill, or wasted away from consumption; provided they did their work in the laboratory (one of the big words he had taught them without explaining what it meant) if they were boys or the packing room if they were girls, they were free to roam from the Southern to the Northern Caves, and even outside if they chose.

“Brother Jerome’s too busy to take notice,” said Ignatius. “We go where we want.”

“Then why hasn’t anybody ever seen you?” Mary asked

“It be the dark of God,” said Ignatius simply.

“You mean the nighttime?”

“Dark, yes.”

“But don’t you love the day?”

Brother Ignatius shuddered. “No, daytime’s awful! Hurts our eyes, Sister Mary, like red-hot pokers.”

“Yes, of course it would. I had not stopped to think about that,” Mary said slowly. “I daresay that my eyes would hurt too, after so many days immured in lamplight. If you do go outside in the dark of God, where do you go? What do you do?”

“Run around, play chasings. Skip with a rope.”

“And no one sees you?”

“Ain’t no one to see,” he said, deeming her dense. “Them’s the moors outside the Northern Caves. We don’t go outside the Southern.” He looked conspirational, leaned closer and spoke in a whisper. “We ain’t staying in the Southern Caves, moving everything to the others. Father says there be too many busy-bodies in the south-cottages going up everywhere.”

“How do you get your supplies, Ignatius? The food? Coal for fires? Substances for the laboratory? The tins, boxes and bottles?”

“Dunno, exactly. Brother Jerome does it, not Father. We got a cave full of donkeys. Sometimes Brother Jerome goes off with all the donkeys and comes back loaded up. The boys unpack the donkeys-coal, all sorts of stuff.”

“And Father Dominus stays with you all the time?”

“No, he goes out a lot, but while Lucifer is in the sky. He takes the orders and collects the money. If Lucifer is there, he walks, but if he goes out in the dark, Brother Jerome drives him in the donkey trap.”

“What is money, Ignatius?”

He rubbed his tonsure, where the scalp was quite glossy from much rubbing. “Dunno, Sister Mary.” A Owen returned to Pemberley on Tuesday after dark, too late for dinner. Accepting Parmenter’s offer of food for a little later, they sought Fitz out in the small library.

Fitz listened in something of a quandary, not sure how much of Ned’s story he should tell them.

His mood was bitter, mostly because of Elizabeth, who he knew was a tender creature, yet, yet…Something about her brought out the worst in him, made him say things to her that no wife would relish hearing, least of all Elizabeth. It was not her fault that her relatives were such a ramshackle lot. In fact, what puzzled him more and more as time went on was how Mr. and Mrs. Bennet had ever produced five such disparate offspring. Two absolute ladies in Jane and Elizabeth; a nonentity in Mary; and two blatant trollops in Kitty and Lydia. The miracle lay in Jane and Elizabeth, who simply did not belong in the Bennet litter basket. From whom had they got their refinement, their propriety? Not from their mother, or from their father. Nor from Mrs. Phillips, their aunt who lived in Meryton. The Gardiners had only visited once in each year, so could have had no real influence. It was as if a Gypsy had put Jane and Elizabeth in place of two trollop-babies. Changelings, not Bennets.

Yet marriage to one meant marriage to the whole family. That, he had not fully understood, thinking to spirit his wife away to Derbyshire and make sure she never saw her family again. But she hadn’t seen it that way. She wanted to remain in contact with them!

With a huge effort he dragged his thoughts away from his wife and listened to Charlie, whom Angus was letting speak for them; he spoke well too, neither illogically nor emotionally.

“I do not believe that Mary ever entered the Green Man,” he was saying, “though she definitely encountered Captain Thunder. Here.” He laid out the reticule. “Empty. We found it on the road, and one of her handbags in the ditch nearby. The cur who claimed to be the landlord of the Green Man says that Captain Thunder has a house in the woods, but no one knows whereabouts. There is a reward on his head, and he cannot be sure that one of his fellow villains will not betray him. In the end we decided it was best to seek your advice and help before doing anything else.”

“Thank you, Charlie,” said his father, very pleased at how the young man had handled things. Of course Angus would have been a steadying influence, but only if Charlie did not resent him. Clearly he and Angus had got along together very well, and it had not escaped him that Angus had consented to let Charlie enter the Green Man alone.

He got up to pour Chambertin. “They say this is Bonaparte’s favourite wine,” he said, handing glasses around. “Now that the French are desperate for foreign currency, we are seeing some very good wines again, and I think I shall move in the House to lighten the import duty on cognac.” He sat down and crossed his legs. “You have done well, the three of you,” he said, with a special smile for Owen. “Knowing that by the time you would be able to set out, the trail would be cold, I put Ned Skinner on the problem too. In many ways he’s more skilled at this sort of thing than you, but his investigations haven’t advanced us much beyond yours-no mean feat on your parts.”

Too concerned to hear what Ned had learned to bother with compliments, Charlie leaned forward. “Did he find Captain Thunder?”

“Yes, he did. And your deductions are correct. Captain Thunder did indeed set upon Mary and rob her, but he didn’t take her to the Green Man. He left her in the midst of the forest, presumably there to wander in circles until she died. However, Charlie, your aunt is made of sterner stuff than most ladies. How she managed to find the road I do not know, just that she did. Ned found her not yards away from it.”

“Oh, bravo!” Charlie cried, face transfigured. “So she’s safe? She’s well?”

“As to that, neither Ned nor I can hazard a guess,” Fitz said, frowning. “Ned had had a very heavy day of it, and by the time he found her, he was not feeling himself. A bellyache, he thinks due to bad food at the Black Cat.”

The others were hanging on Fitz’s words, eyes round.

“Mary was unconscious, and continued in her faint. She had been badly beaten, including a blow to the head. When Ned asked Captain Thunder for the details, he was informed that she had put up a terrific fight.”

Growls and imprecations greeted this, but Fitz continued.

“Ned put Mary across Jupiter’s withers, and rode for home. But as he approached the beginning of the Peaks he had to answer an urgent call of nature-the bad food had caught up with him. Not knowing how long he might be, he put Mary down on the bank beside the bridle-path he was travelling, and went into a grove of trees. When he returned, Mary was gone.”

“Gone?” asked Angus, paling

“Yes, vanished. Ned’s watch told him that he had been away for ten minutes, not a second longer.”

“Ten minutes?” Charlie asked. “How could she vanish in just ten minutes?”

“How, indeed? Ned searched as only Ned can, and I do assure you that his bellyache did not interfere with his thoroughness. He could find no trace of her. He mounted Jupiter and looked from that height, as well as farther afield. To no avail. She had been spirited away as a conjurer deals with his assistant at a circus.”

“Captain Thunder!” Charlie cried, pounding his thigh.

“No, Charlie. Whoever it was, Captain Thunder it was not. By that time his corpse was cold. Ned killed him in a struggle after he found the fellow’s house.”

“How did he find it if none knew its whereabouts?” Owen asked.

“He was told where it was by a spy in the Nottingham coach yard who must sniff out likely victims and share in the proceeds.”

“Could she have regained consciousness and walked off?”

Angus asked, hating to see Charlie’s pain, and hating to feel his own. Oh, Mary! You and your fool crusade!

“Ned says not, and I believe him. The injuries to her wrists and even her throat did not matter, but the blow to her head was severe enough to cause prolonged unconsciousness. If she roused, which is possible, she would have been confused and stumbling, not fleet of foot. Ned scoured every inch of the countryside for five miles in all directions. One must assume that she did not walk off, but was carried.”

“Why?” asked Angus, despairing.

“I do not know.”

“Who?” asked Owen. “Who would do such a thing?”

“At first I thought whoever took her must have acted on some chivalrous impulse, perhaps thinking that Ned was on foul business. Since Chesterfield is the nearest town, I had extensive enquiries made there yesterday, hoping that a woman had been brought in and the mayor or the sheriff notified. But no one had brought in a woman. I had my people ask every doctor, with the same result. So whoever did steal Mary was not acting chivalrously. He has some nefarious scheme in mind. Were she known to be my relative, I would have thought, kidnapping, and have been waiting for a ransom demand. None has come. Because, I believe, no one knew who Mary was. Her condition was parlous. She was filthy and badly bruised.”

“And all this because of a bad breakfast at the Black Cat?” cried Charlie. “Well, I know that place can produce bad food, but to find her, only to lose her again-!”

“I agree.”

“So what do we do now, Pater?”

“We make the whole matter public-with reservations, of course. We post notices that Miss Mary Bennet is missing, whereabouts she was last seen, and what her possible condition is. We say that she is Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy’s sister, and we offer a reward of one hundred pounds for information leading to her retrieval. As Mary is very like Elizabeth in the face, I will have Susie take a pen-and-ink sketch from Elizabeth’s portrait, and include that in the notice. As well as going up in every town hall and village hall, I will put the notice in all the newspapers of the region.”

“And I will put an article in the Westminster Chronicle that describes the perils a gentlewoman may face travelling by the public stage,” said Angus. “Its readers are scattered throughout England.”

“Thank you,” Fitz said, inclining his head regally. He turned to his son. “If you like, Charlie, you may take a party of Pemberley men back to the bridle-path where the abduction occurred. Ned can give you directions.” He looked grim. “The thing is that the bridle-path in question is neither well-known nor well travelled. It is basically a shortcut to Chesterfield from Pemberley.” He lifted a warning finger. “I do not need to tell you that we say nothing about the fate of Captain Thunder.”

“Agreed, Pater.”

“Choose men who know the southern Peaks.”

“Of course.”

“Now go and eat some dinner, please. What do you think of my Chambertin?”

“Smooth and fruity,” said Angus glibly. “Bonaparte has a good palate. Not unusual in a Frenchman,” he added demurely.

Fitz sneered contemptuously. “The man is no Frenchman! He is a Corsican peasant.”

The groom in the Nottingham coach station was a loose end that had to be tied, Ned Skinner realised, cursing his own lack of foresight. Why hadn’t he lingered long enough to discover the fellow’s name and origins? Because you had no idea how important they would be, he apostrophised himself wrathfully as he readied the light carriage and Jupiter for the journey to Hemmings with Lydia Wickham. Clearly the groom was Captain Thunder’s spy in Nottingham, took the highwayman’s gold in return for information about people who used the stage-coach. Not all such were on the verge of poverty; some could have afforded a private chaise, but thought that drew them to a highwayman’s attention, never dreaming of his network of informants. Shipments of coin to provincial banks also went by stage-coach, and the contents of some of the parcels were valuable. The groom in Captain Thunder’s pay knew the movements of every vehicle passing through the Nottingham depot, Nottingham being a big city with many industries, and therefore wealthy.

The journals carrying the advertisement about Mary with its hundred-pound reward would be published shortly, and the groom could not be allowed to read one or hear of it. Did he, he would be off in a trice to lay his information, and Ned Skinner’s neck might come into danger. For who could forget him, at his size? The last thing Fitz needed was to have his factotum thrown into a cell on suspicion of anything, no matter how easy to clear up.

Thus Ned did not enjoy his Thursday, spent conveying Mrs. Lydia Wickham to her new home, Hemmings.

Lured into the carriage by a bottle of cognac, Lydia had proceeded to drink at a rate that saw her stuporose by the time she passed through Leek. Hemmings sat ten miles beyond the town, a small mansion in ten acres of park. Its stables had been stocked with a barouche and two matched chestnuts, and a pony for a trap. Very much the kind of residence Shelby Manor had been, except that, despite the looming darkness, Ned’s sharp eyes noted iron bars over the ground-floor windows. Yes, of course! The last inhabitant of Hemmings had been a raving lunatic, but Ned had been present when Fitz told Matthew Spottiswoode to see that the bars were removed, so why? Still…he closed his eyes in thought, trying to see how he could put this omission to best use. The bars could not stay there, so much was sure, as Mrs. Darcy and Mrs. Bingley were bound to pay their sister visits, but…Yes, it might work!

He knew Miss Mirabelle Maplethorpe very well, and had no doubt that she would be up to the task of caring for Lydia. It had taken some shifting to procure her the position of Lydia’s lady companion, but he had succeeded and none the wiser, including Fitz.

Miss Maplethorpe opened the door herself. “Ah, Ned.”

“I have your charge, Mirry.”

“We are ready. Bring her in,” said Miss Maplethorpe, a tall, strapping woman of about forty whose face was debatably the reason why she was still single; it resembled the Judy in a Punch-and-Judy show. Poor Mirry! Rarely had face and occupation been so perfectly reconciled.

“She’s out to it. The only way I could get her here without binding her hand and foot was to give her a bottle of cognac.”

“I see.” Her glacial eyes surveyed him ironically. “You are quite big enough to carry her, Ned.”

“True. But I do not fancy wearing a coat of puke all the way home. It’s due to come up-she’s a puker.”

“Then wait a moment.” She left him on the step while she went somewhere deeper into the house, reappearing with two men who looked more like boxers than footmen.

“Come on, boys.” And he led them to the carriage, opened its door. “You are here, Mrs. Wickham. Hop to it!”

If she did not do that, she did move off the seat, put a foot on the step down, and fell in a heap, giggling. As Ned had prophesied, up came the cognac together with the contents of a hamper. The two men stepped back hastily.

“A hand under either arm, boys-look sharp!”

When Ned Skinner commanded, he was obeyed, puke or no puke. Still giggling and gagging, Lydia was half-dragged, half-carried into her new home, Miss Maplethorpe watching grimly.

“Best of luck, Mirry,” said Ned. “Return the carriage and men to us tomorrow. Mr. Darcy’s orders.”

He went to Jupiter and remounted.

“Cheer up, old boy,” he said to the horse as he rode away. “Just ten miles to Leek, then we’ll put up for the night.”

Shortly after dawn he was on the road again, not to ride toward the north and Pemberley, but cross-country, keeping well clear of main roads and even, when possible, side roads too. He knew exactly where he was going; it lay some twenty miles from Leek, on the outskirts of Derby.

In no hurry, he let Jupiter choose their pace, a treat for the big black horse that it relished.

At the prescribed spot beneath a signpost, he found his informant, a groom at a shady sort of hostelry in Sheffield, and a man who looked horsey enough to be instantly at ease among others of the same calling. Occasionally he did this kind of job for Mr. Skinner, whom he had known for a long time, and feared, and respected.

“Well, Tom?” Ned asked, reining in alongside him.

“No trouble, Mr. Skinner. His name is Ezekiel Carmody-Zeke for short. He works six days a week at the coach station, sleeps in the barn there. Sundays he goes home. His dad’s got a farm outside Nether Heage-big place, breeds coach horses.”

“The name of the farm?”

“Carmody.”

“Thank you, Tom.” Five guineas changed hands. “Go home now.”

And off went Tom, well satisfied.

The news was better than Ned had hoped for. With a name like Ezekiel, the groom was obviously a Methodist; to spend Sundays at home would have been mandatory. But I doubt, thought Ned, that the family knows their church-going son Zeke is hand-in-glove with a highwayman. Well, and who could blame a young fellow? No money to call his own with such a father, I’ll be bound; dad’s horses sold to the coach companies and Zeke’s wages garnished for family and church. No hope for a pint or a penny light-skirt. It’s a story I chance upon time and time again.

Gauging his progress accurately, Ned approached the Carmody farm at one o’clock-dinner hour. He found the main gate down the fourth lane he tried, with the name written upon it proudly: CARMODY FARM. Using his eyes to best advantage, he decided there was no other entrance worth taking if the farmstead itself was the goal; yes, this was the way Zeke Carmody would come. What kind of transport the groom would use Ned could not know; very likely he cadged a ride with someone going this way from Nottingham. But Ned took a bet with himself that Zeke walked the last quarter-mile of his weekly trip home.

On Saturday, while Jupiter dozed in its stall with oats in its manger, Ned worked very privately on a curious device: a post to which was attached a horseshoe of a size worn by light draughts, the kind of horse drew the extremely heavy public coaches.

On Saturday evening at ten o’clock he mounted Jupiter and set out for Carmody Farm, at first on the main roads, deserted at this hour. It was fifty miles as Jupiter went, but many a horseman rode a hundred and more miles in a day-couriers, ministers with a widely scattered flock, commercial travellers, those going in a hurry to a sickbed or a deathbed. There was no moon to speak of, but dense clouds of stars lit his way, and Jupiter was sure-footed.

They made good time; he reached his destination before dawn, and settled down to wait in the shadows beneath trees with pendulous leafy branches, not far from the farm’s main gate. His post-and-shoe untied from the saddle, Ned put that and some other things beside him. He was very much on his mettle, blaming himself for the loss of Mary Bennet, and determined that he would leave nothing for any nosy constable to unearth.

Zeke Carmody knew whereabouts Captain Thunder’s house was located, and his tongue wagged. Though the part of Ned that understood Zeke’s needs pitied his lot, which had to be death, not for a millionfold such pity would he have stilled his hand. Fitz was in danger through his, Ned’s, bungling, and that was all that mattered.

A cheery whistle from the end of the lane alerted him. Ned rose to his feet, stretching, and waited in the lee of the bushy trees for his quarry. As the groom passed, Ned swung the post and struck him on the side of his head. He fell without a whimper to sprawl in the lane. Moving quickly, Ned pulled the body under the trees, where he had spread out a sheet of canvas. Once the body was arranged on the canvas to his satisfaction, he put the horseshoe against the wound with accuracy and deliberation, and hammered the end of the post with a stone purloined from Farmer Carmody’s field. One imprint of the shoe was enough; looking at the pulped mess, he judged that anyone would deem the injury the result of contact with a big horse. Then he wrapped the body in the canvas, picked it up, carried it some distance down the lane, and emptied it out of its wrapping and into a field where four light draught horses grazed, their hooves and hairy skirts above muddied from a recent shower of rain.

No one had come out of the house, no dog barked. Breathing quite normally, Ned folded the canvas carefully to contain the very little blood, and dismantled his instrument of murder. The shoe was flung far into the field, the post tucked inside the canvas. He kept to the shadows until he reached the little road that led to Nether Heage; there he straightened and walked swiftly to Jupiter, grazing nearby. After saddling a horse delighted to see him, he mounted and rode away. In the far distance a church bell was tolling, but no one saw Ned Skinner, now cantering toward the road to Chesterfield.

Undoubtedly there were other grooms Captain Thunder used as sources of information-post house inns were ideal-but they could not matter. It was Ezekiel Carmody who had spoken to the gigantic fellow on the gigantic horse, told him whereabouts the Captain lived. With Zeke the victim of a shocking accident, no one was left who could connect Ned Skinner to the highwayman. It was always best to tidy up. The shire constables were a dozy lot, but…

The news that Mary had been abducted by parties unknown left Elizabeth winded, not least because Fitz had chosen to make his news public in the Rubens Room after dinner, just before Charlie, Angus and Owen had returned. Though Elizabeth had been aware of her disappearance for some time, Fitz hadn’t taken his wife to one side beforehand and told her privately of this abduction. Instead, he told her in the presence of Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst-and Louisa’s daughter, Letitia/Posy, perhaps the most vapid and cheerless girl of Elizabeth’s acquaintance. So she had no alternative other than to suppress her anger until a more appropriate moment to unleash it on Fitz’s chilly, unfeeling head. Under the shield of Caroline’s exclamations, Louisa’s faintness and Posy’s squeaks, she sat with a red spot burning in each cheek, but so composedly that no one could have assumed she did not already know. Pride, Elizabeth! You too have pride.

Her husband went on to explain the measures he proposed taking, much the same as he later outlined to Charlie, Angus and Owen: the notice, the reward, Susie’s pen-and-ink sketch, the style. He told them of Captain Thunder’s part in the business, and the insoluble mystery of her disappearance while she was under Ned Skinner’s care. He made no intimation that the Captain was responsible for this second disappearance, though he did not mention the Captain’s death at Ned’s hands. Only that it could not have been the Captain who kidnapped her.

“Shall you tell Susie of the sketch, or shall I?” she asked.

“I shall. I know what I want,” said Fitz.

“When do you ever not know what you want? I must go to Bingley Hall first thing tomorrow to tell Jane.”

“Oh, do let me keep you company!” cried Caroline. “Twenty-five miles there, and twenty five miles back again. You will need a truly sympathetic hand to hold.”

And Elizabeth literally saw red: a scarlet veil descended in front of her eyes. “I thank you, madam,” she said with a bite, “but I would rather hold the Devil’s hand than yours. It is more honestly malign.”

A collective gasp went up. Caroline sprang to her feet, Louisa flopped sideways in her chair, and Posy pitched forward onto the floor. Elizabeth sat with a sneer on her face, enjoying every moment of it. The bought mouse had suddenly turned into a large rat, and oh, it felt so good! After one amazed glance at her, Fitz fixed his gaze on a splendid Rubens nude above the fireplace.

“Pray excuse me, I am very tired,” said Caroline, with a venomous glare at Elizabeth, who returned it with a purple flash Miss Bingley’s brown orbs could not equal.

“I will come too, dear,” said Louisa, “if you help me with poor little Letitia. What a demonstration of ill breeding!”

“Yes, get yourselves away!” Elizabeth said fiercely.

“About the only thing I can be thankful for, Elizabeth,” Fitz said at her bedroom door, “is that Charlie, Angus and Mr. Griffiths were not present to hear you insult Miss Bingley with such vulgar coarseness.”

“Oh, a pox on Caroline Bingley!” Elizabeth opened her door and marched inside, her arm in position to slam it in Fitz’s face.

But he wrenched it from her and followed her, face as white as hers was red. “I will not hear you speak to one of my guests so-so contemptuously!”

“I will speak to that woman in any terms I please! She is a liar and a mischief-maker, and they are compliments compared to some of her other characteristics!” said Elizabeth, ending with a hiss. “Abominable! Reprehensible! Malicious! Cunning! Meretricious! I have suffered Caroline Bingley for twenty years, Fitz, and I am done with it! Next time you invite her to Pemberley or Darcy House or anywhere else I happen to be, kindly inform me in time for me to shift my person from her neighbourhood!”

“This is the outside of enough, madam! You are my wife, and in the eyes of God sworn to obey me! I order you to treat Caroline civilly! Do you hear me? I order you!”

“Do you know what you can do with your orders, Fitz? You can put them where the monkey puts his nuts!”

“Elizabeth! Madam! Are you as stark a lunatic as your younger sister? How dare you speak to me so disgustingly!”

“What a sanctimonious prig you are. At least I will say this for Caroline Bingley,” said Elizabeth in pensive tones, “what one sees is what one gets. No false faзade. Just a dripping sponge soaked in vitriol. Whereas you, Fitzwilliam, are the most duplicitous, the most underhanded of men. How dare you break the news to me that Mary has been abducted in front of two harpies like Caroline and Louisa? Have you no feelings? No compassion? No grasp of what is due to a wife as well as a sister? What was to stop you taking me to one side and telling me privately? What excuse can you tender for such cold-hearted stupidity? I could not even react! Had I, it would have been all over the best houses the moment Caroline returns to London. With a titter here, a sly look there, and everywhere an innuendo! Oh, cruel, Fitz! Abominably cruel!” Visibly shaking, Elizabeth ran down, could find nothing more to say.

He stepped into the breach. “Of course your criticisms of me are not a new phenomenon, I am aware of that. You first took delight in apostrophising me as-er-conceited, arrogant, proud and ungentlemanly twenty-one years ago. I congratulate you upon finding a new set of epithets. They leave me unwrung. As to why I did not apprise you privately of Mary’s missing state, blame yourself. I dislike women’s vapours and tears. Our marriage does not stand upon a rock, madam, it moves around on shifting sands. Sands that you have created. You do not obey me, though it is a part of your marriage vows. You lack a proper disposition, and your language is the height of impropriety. What’s more, your conduct is growing rapidly worse. I can no longer be sure that you will comport yourself with any more decency than your sister Lydia.”

“Whereas I suppose you find nothing to fault in your telling me that you wished you had never married me?” she asked, eyes blazing.

His brows rose. “I spoke the truth.”

“Then I think we should end this farce of a marriage, sir.”

“Death will do that, madam, nothing else.” He walked to the door. “Do not antagonise me further, Elizabeth. I will engage to soothe Caroline’s feelings by telling her that you are not yourself. A slight dementia brought on by worry for your sisters. She is aware of the weakness that runs through your family, so my tactful explanation will suffice.”

“I have not asked you to make a hypocrite of yourself by being sweet and reasonable to Caroline Bingley! In fact, I ask you not to bother! You are branding the Bennets!” she cried as he opened the door. “Lydia, Mary, now me!”

The door shut behind him with an audible snap. Legs giving way, Elizabeth staggered to the nearest chair and sat with her head between her knees, fighting dizziness. Oh, Fitz, Fitz! Where have we gone wrong? Who is your mistress? Who, who?

Her heartbeat began to slow, her head to clear. Elizabeth got herself out of her dove-grey silk gown, the jewels, the underwear, and into her gauzy nightgown. Why do I bother with such fripperies when Fitz never comes near my bed? Because they are comfortable is why. The flannel of my youth chafed and itched.

Somewhere outside a fox shrieked, an owl screamed. Oh, Mary, where are you? Who would have braved the wrath of Ned Skinner? And what is Fitz keeping from me? How has Lydia settled into her house, Hemmings?

After eating a bread roll crisp from the oven and drinking a cup of hot chocolate, Elizabeth set out the next morning for Bingley Hall and her sister Jane. Who had suffered yet another miscarriage-a mercy. Since Charles had written that he would be away at least another twelve months, perhaps Jane would recover her health before the whole business started again. What had Mary said? That she wished Charles would plug it with a cork. How mortified Fitz would be at such plain speaking from a maiden lady!

Bingley Hall lay in five thousand acres outside the village of Wildboarclough, well south of Macclesfield. It had been a happy purchase for one seeking to advance his social station from plutocrat to aristocrat, and had fallen to Charles for a good price thanks to Fitzwilliam Darcy, who stood as guarantor not for his wealth (that was proven) but for his respectability, his propriety. Charles Bingley would not use the wrong fork or put the port decanter on the table! The land was well tenanted and Charles an excellent landlord, but the chief glory of the estate was its mansion, a large white building of central pile and two wings. Its beautiful and imposing Palladian faзade dated it to the seventeenth century.

The boys were off somewhere-the youngest was now eight-which meant they knew their mother needed peace and quiet. The only girl, Priscilla, had come after William, Percival, Robert, James and Marcus, so there was no hope that Prissy, as she was universally called, would turn out in a feminine mould. Since Hugh and Arthur were her juniors, she had two brothers to dominate and bully, and hared about with quite as much vigor as her brothers, leaving havoc in her wake and a mountain of darning in the housekeeper’s mending basket.

“She’s always more difficult when Charles is away. He knows exactly how to deal with her,” said Jane, having gone through the Bingley litany for her sister’s delectation as soon as she arrived. Which she did in time for breakfast, served at ten o’clock, and dreading how to broach the subject of Mary.

William walked in, not to dine, but to pay his respects, for he viewed his favourite aunt with great affection; Aunt Elizabeth was uniformly loved, Aunt Louisa was tolerated, and Aunt Caroline feared. A year older than Charlie, he was a handsome young man who resembled his father and seemed likely to follow him into the labyrinthine corridors of plutocracy. Since he had elected Cambridge, he and his cousin never saw each other apart from Christmas, for which Elizabeth was glad. They would never have got on together. Charlie was brilliant, William a plodder. Charlie’s looks were spectacular, William’s orthodox. Charlie didn’t notice girls-or boys, curse Caroline’s slanders!-whereas William liked to break hearts and keep tally of his conquests.

However, he did not stay long, and none of the others appeared in his place, even Prissy.

“You’re not eating, Lizzie,” said Jane with disapproval. “I swear that you are as slender today as you were when you married, so you have no excuse. Have some bread-and-butter.”

“Just coffee, thank you. I ate at Pemberley.”

“That was hours ago. What is this I hear about Lydia?” Jane asked, pouring coffee.

“Lydia?” For a moment Elizabeth stared blankly-oh, too much had happened in the past few days! How could she possibly have forgotten Lydia? So she ploughed through that story first, while Jane listened in horror.

“Oh, it is too bad! Can’t you tell me the exact words she used to Fitz?”

“Believe me, I can’t. The foulest-mouthed soldier doesn’t say That Word-he would be flogged within an inch of his life. Truly, Jane, she used the worst words in the English language! And she was so drunk! Coaxing her with a bottle was the only way we could elicit coцperation from her.”

“Then she must be shut away,” said Jane with a sigh.

“So Fitz has decided, and what he decides is the law. Still, much and all as I condemn his highhandedness, I must confess I too can see no alternative other than to shut her up as Mama was. Her new address is Hemmings, ten miles the other side of Leek. Perhaps sixteen or seventeen miles from Bingley Hall. As soon as I can, I’ll visit her.”

“Let us go together. What is today, Wednesday? Shall we plan for this Friday?” asked Jane.

“We cannot,” said Elizabeth miserably. “Lydia isn’t the sum of my news. In fact, I’ve come for quite a different reason.”

“Tell me, please!”

“Mary has disappeared, we fear abducted.”

As Jane was still sadly pulled down after miscarrying, she fainted. Brought around by the hartshorn and vinaigrette, she began to weep, and half an hour passed before Elizabeth could calm her enough to give her the details.

“I came because I didn’t want you seeing it in a journal,” she concluded. “Fitz even had the notion of including a sketch of me because I look like Mary. There is a reward of one hundred pounds, large enough to stimulate a good search.”

“Lizzie, this is dreadful! Oh, poor Mary! All those years of looking after Mama, and now this. What was she about, to travel on the common stage?”

“We don’t know, even Angus Sinclair. Were it not for him and a disjointed letter she wrote to Charlie last year, we would be even more ignorant. They seem to think that she embarked upon some kind of investigation of the poor, with the intention of writing a book. Perhaps the stage-coach journeys were a part of it.”

“That would fit,” said Jane, nodding. “Mary never had a particle of sense, for all her goodness and piety. I thought her much improved when I saw her at Mama’s funeral, but perhaps the improvement was only skin deep-the festering spots gone, I mean. For surely her lack of good sense won’t have improved. She was a sad case.”

“No, I believe the improvement went all the way to her core. Certainly Ned Skinner admired her spirit, and he isn’t a susceptible man. She fought back when she was set upon, and she managed to find her way out of a dense forest. The real abduction took place on a bridle-path, not a road, and far from any big town. So Fitz has ruled out footpads or another highwayman. Whereas I begin to think of a madman, Jane.”

“A Bedlamite, you mean? But the nearest Bedlam is surely the one in Manchester.”

“Yes. Fitz is making enquiries to see if any inmate has escaped recently. From the Birmingham Bedlam too.”

They discussed the matter until every possibility had been exhausted, by which time Jane looked exhausted too.

“I confess that I’m glad Charles will be away for another year. You need time to recuperate,” said Elizabeth.

“He has a mistress in Jamaica,” said Jane, sounding quite her usual self. “Children by her as well.”

“Jane! No!”

“Yes.”

“Who told you that?”

“Caroline. She was very angry-the girl is a mulatto, which offends Caroline’s sense of fitness. It means the children are also tainted, poor little things.”

“Oh, I knew I was right to put my foot down about that bitch of a woman!” cried Elizabeth. “Jane, Jane, I beg of you, don’t grieve! Charles loves you, I would stake my life on it!”

The beautiful honey-coloured face broke into a smile that put dimples in its cheeks. “Yes, Lizzie, I know Charles loves me. I never doubt it for a single moment. Gentlemen are-well, strange in some ways, is all. Charles’s business interests in the West Indies require his presence there every eight or nine years, and he’s always away for months, sometimes a year or more. I would far rather that he had a decent woman as his mistress than flitted from woman to woman. I don’t want to accompany him on these trips, so how can I repine? I simply hope that he provides properly for this woman and their children. When he comes home this time, I’ll talk to him.”

Elizabeth was staring, amazed. “Jane, you are a saint. Even a mistress doesn’t have the power to shake you or your marriage. What did you say to Caroline when she told you?”

“Much what I’ve just said to you. You’re too hard on poor Caroline, Lizzie. Some people are so stuffed with malice that it bursts from them like a jet of water from a fountain. Caroline is such a one. I used to think that her poison was reserved for you and me, but it isn’t. It’s for anybody who offends her. Like Charles’s mulatto mistress, like Charlie, Prissy, and quite a few ladies in London.”

Elizabeth took the opportunity. “Do you happen to know the identity of Fitz’s mistress, Jane?”

“Lizzie! Not Fitz! He’s far too proud. What’s given you this idea? It isn’t true.”

“I think it must be. My resolution is crumbling-I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this charade,” Elizabeth said, her throat aching. “Very recently he informed me that he desperately regretted marrying me.”

“No! I don’t believe that! He was so passionately in love with you, Lizzie. Oh, not like Charles and me. We were cosy and comfy-passion was secondary to love. With Fitz, it was the very opposite. I mean that he had great passion, an overriding and unquiet passion. What have you done to disappoint him? If he said that to you, then you have disappointed him, and dreadfully so. Come, you must have some idea!”

Eyes closed, Elizabeth got to her feet and made a huge show of putting on her tight kid gloves, one finger at a time. When she opened the eyes, they were dark and stormy. Jane shrank away, terrified.

“The one person I have always been able to count on, Jane, was you. Yes, I use the past tense, for I see that I was mistaken. My husband treats me disgracefully! And I have done nothing to disappoint him! On the contrary. It is he who disappoints me. Last night I offered to leave him, but he won’t even let me do that! Why? Because he would have to answer questions about the wife who left him! What an obsequious crawler of a wife you must be, Jane! No wonder you can excuse little peccadilloes like mistresses.”

She peered through the window, ignoring Jane’s fresh bout of tears. “I see my carriage has come. No, don’t bother getting up, finish your snivelling in peace. I can find my own way.”

And out she stalked, outraged, quivering, to weep all the way home to Pemberley. There she went straight to her rooms and told Hoskins to draw the curtains.

“Convey a message to Mr. Darcy that I am laid low with the migraine, and will not be able to say farewell to Mrs. Hurst, Miss Bingley, and Miss Hurst.”

“I don’t wish to pry, Elizabeth, but are you quite well?” Angus asked the next morning when he found his hostess walking her favourite path through the woods behind Pemberley’s river.

She indicated the dell in which they were standing with one hand. “It’s difficult to be down in spirits, Angus, when there is such beauty within half a mile of the house,” she said, trying to deflect him. “It’s too late for flowers, but this spot is perfect at all times of year. The little brook, the dragonflies, the maidenhair ferns-delicate beyond imagination! Our gardener says that such tiny, lacelike leaves and fronds are peculiarities of the maidenhair that grows in this dell only. I know people who go into ecstasies over peacock feathers, but I would rather a frond of this exquisite fern.”

But Angus was not to be deflected. “We live in an age when the personal is exceeding private, and no one is more aware than I that ladies don’t confide in gentlemen apart from their husbands. However, I claim the privileges of one who would enter your family. I’m in love with Mary, and hope to marry her.”

“Angus!” Elizabeth smiled at him in absolute delight. “Oh, that is good news! Does she know you love her?”

“No. I did not declare my suit when I stayed in Hertford for ten days because I could see that she wasn’t ready for proposals of marriage.” His eyes twinkled. “The local solicitor tried his luck, and was turned down most emphatically, though he is young, affluent and handsome. I took my cue from him, and presented myself to Mary as naught save a good friend. It was the right ploy, in that she held nothing back from me about her ambitions and her ardent devotion to Argus the letter writer. In one way, girlish dreams, yet in another, valid aspirations. I listened, offered what advice I thought she would take, and mostly held my tongue.”

Elizabeth found a mossy boulder and sat on it. “I would be so happy to welcome you into my family, Angus. If you did not declare your suit, I’m sure your instincts were right. Mary has never had a high opinion of men, but how could she resist a man as personable and intelligent as you?”

“I hope not forever,” he said, a little wistfully. “I have gained her trust, and hope to gain her love.” Which was all he could say; the identity of Argus had to remain his secret.

“Why did you choose her to love?” Elizabeth asked.

His brows flew up. “Choose? That’s a strange word to couple with love! I don’t believe there’s much if any choice about it. I’m rich, I’m not decrepit, and my face is generally thought to be appealing to women. I say these things only to reinforce what is said about me in Society-that I can have my pick of eligible females. So why Mary, who is far from eligible? If it had a visible beginning, I suppose that was her beauty, which not even her dreadful clothes can disguise. But after I scraped an acquaintance with her, I found a prickly, misanthropic, fiercely independent soul who burns with the desire to make her mark on English thought. One cannot call her a philosopher; she hasn’t been grounded in its disciplines or educated in its theories or steeped in its evolution. But I could see that the seventeen years she cared for her mother had allowed her an unparalleled exposure to books normally kept away from women, and had imbued her with an almost frantic desire to be freed from customary female restraints. Ignorance is the best friend and ally of custom, particularly those customs foisted on lesser beings like women and blackamoors. Well, Mary lost her ignorance, she became educated. And had sufficient sense to understand that without experience, her education was still lacking. It is all of this, I believe, that led her to embark upon her project. When she settles down, I think she will espouse not the cause of alleviating poverty, but the cause of universal education.”

“But why travel on the stage-coach, why stay at inferior inns?”

“I don’t quite know, but I suspect it may have been in order to appear an impoverished governess. People don’t talk to their betters, Elizabeth, therefore Mary resolved not to seem a better.”

“How remarkably well you know this Mary! You tried to tell me that I didn’t know her at all, and I reproved you. But I was the ignorant one, not you,” Elizabeth said, sighing.

Angus pulled a face. “There’s one factor I failed utterly to take into account,” he said, “and that is her natural attraction for disaster. For that, I can find no logical explanation. The very poorest of governesses travel by public coach and stay at mean inns, but they aren’t set upon or abducted. Even the wee bit we know of her journey from Grantham to Nottingham confirms this tendency-she was harassed by five yokels, who pitched her into the mire of a coach yard and laughed at her plight. Her adventures are appalling! What caused them to be so? Her beauty? The guineas in her purse? That prickly misanthropy? Or simply a combination of everything?”

Elizabeth frowned. “She never got into trouble as a girl, though my father despised her. He persisted in lumping her with Lydia and Kitty as one of the three silliest girls in England. Which wasn’t really fair. She persisted in singing atrociously at functions, but while everyone, including Papa, complained about it behind her back, no one ever told her to her face. Which indicates that her mind heard the notes as true, rather than demonstrates stupidity. Mary wasn’t the kind of girl who excited admiration, but she wasn’t silly. She was earnest, hardworking and scholarly. Qualities that made her dull, though Lydia would have said, boring.”

She got up and began to walk, as if suddenly very uncomfortable. “In fact,” she went on, “the worst one could say of Mary then was that she had an inappropriate and unreciprocated passion for our cousin, the Reverend Mr. Collins. The most frightful man I have ever met. But Mary mooned and moped in his presence so obviously that I, for one, decided that our cousin wanted a beautiful wife. Mary’s face was covered in suppurating spots, and her teeth were crooked.” She laughed. “He didn’t get a beautiful wife. He married Charlotte Lucas-a very plain but eminently sensible woman. And when he did, Mary very quickly got over him.”

“Oh, I imagine that what attracted Mary to your cousin was his calling. She told me that in those days she was very religious.” Unwilling to torment himself to the point of tears, Angus returned to the subject of Elizabeth herself. “Well, there’s nothing we can do for Mary at this moment beyond Fitz’s measures, so let us change the subject. I’m more concerned about you, my dear. I esteem your friendship greatly, just as I do Fitz’s. But only an unobservant man of low intelligence could fail to see that you’re unhappy.”

“Purely on behalf of Lydia and Mary,” she parried.

“Rubbish! You have offended Fitz.”

“I am always offending Fitz,” she said bitterly.

“Is it to do with Caroline Bingley? I was told what you said.”

“She’s a secondary issue.”

“You did offer her an unpardonable insult.”

“And would be glad to do so again. My friendship with you is a mere ten years old, Angus, but I have had to put up with Caroline Bingley for twenty-one years. Fitz’s friendship with Charles Bingley is of such a nature that he’s prepared to suffer Caroline. So I’ve sat mumchance under her insults for so long that I suppose there came a straw that broke my back. I lashed out. Yet so hypocritical is our English society that veiled insults are tolerated, whereas frankness never is. I was frank.”

“How much does Charlie have to do with this?” Angus asked, thinking that it would do Elizabeth good to be-frank.

“A great deal. She sowed the seeds of discord between him and his father by implying that Charlie’s tastes in love are Socratic. And she spread it all over London! Instead of blaming Caroline, Fitz blamed Charlie. It is his face, of course, and the silly effect it has on some men who are indeed Socratic. But he’ll grow out of his youthful beauty-it’s beginning to happen now, in fact. If this business of Mary’s has anything to recommend it, it is that Fitz and Charlie are getting on together at last. Fitz is beginning to see that the reputation Caroline gave Charlie is undeserved.”

“Yes, you would be better off if Caroline were not a part of your lives,” Angus said. “However, she is Jane’s sister-in-law.”