April 27, 2012 11:35AM | Registered: 2 years ago Posts: 122 |
All the action is at the alternate Pemberley (blue type) this time. The more bloodthirsty among you will probably enjoy the next couple of chapters.
Chapter 25
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Damn it all! One by one, Wickham tried the latches on the windows; all were securely fastened. What was more, he knew, the fenestration of Pemberley was of the strongest, fashioned with reinforced sashes, casings and muntins, not to be broken into without a deal of noise and considerable time, especially by one lacking the proper tools. This place is built like a fortress, he grumbled to himself. And some even of the bottom storey windows were high enough above the ground to require him to climb, hanging onto the sills with his fingertips and scrambling for purchase on foundation stones or bushes, in order to try them. It was most frustrating, and with tired fingers, sore ribs and a game leg, not in the least comfortable.
He paused beneath the old oak tree whose branches, he remembered, grew close to the window to the nursery on the first floor. Perhaps it might still be possible to climb from them to that or a neighboring window: it had been so in the past. But quite certainly the windows would prove to be locked —the Pemberley staff were careful about such things, as his current investigations were confirming—, and he would have wasted considerable time and risked a nasty fall in the darkness only to confirm that discouraging fact. He would attempt it if all other options failed, but he was not yet in such straits.
It came to his mind, moreover, that he had an ace up his sleeve. Years ago, while old Mr. Darcy (the gaumless fool) was yet doddering around and he still had access to the house, Wickham had had the foresight to press in wax the key to the servants’ entrance, which he then had copied by an ironmonger of his acquaintance in one of the less savoury sections of Manchester. This key he had buried in a niche in the foundation just south of the northwest corner of the house. Now he abandoned his futile search for an openable window and went to find it. It took him but little time to do so; the key was indeed still there where he had hidden it. Rejoicing inwardly but wary still, he flitted like a shadow to the entrance, only to find that his key would not fit the lock—it would not even enter it, much less turn after being introduced. Damnation!, he thought, his irritation doubled and trebled, leave it to Darcy to change the locks on me! Why does he have to be so bloody thorough and conscientious in all he does? Why does he always manage to interfere with my plans? With a muffled oath, he flung the key into the woods. There was nothing for it but to return to the windows and see if there might yet be one left ajar, and then, if necessary, try the tree as a last resort.
Still fuming in his frustration, yet moving with stealthy skill from one window to the next, he came around the southwestern corner of the mansion, and immediately saw a dim light, as from a single branch of candles, emanating from the library. Wondering who would yet be awake at such an hour, he crept closer until he could peer into the nearest of the windows. As his vision adjusted, he descried the back of a wide and high armchair facing the fireplace, in which were glowing the coals of a fire now in the final, contemplative stage of its life. On a small side table to the right of the chair a small glass gleamed with the rich colour of port, and, as he watched, a man’s hand reached out from the chair to take the glass, as the top of an open book briefly appeared to the left of the chair back. He could imagine (though he could not hear) the sigh of satisfaction with which the glass, now empty, was returned to its place.
Wickham decided to wait and see who the reader might be before trying anything else, and so settled back into the shadows. Before many minutes had passed his patience was rewarded. The hand that had reached to the glass reached out to it again, and finding it empty, toyed idly with the pull on the drawer in the side table. Wickham sucked a sudden breath into his chest and held it. Perhaps the drawer still, as it had years ago, held a key to the French windows in the library. Might this person …?
Only a few moments later, the hand pulled the drawer open; a grizzled head leaned over to see what was in it, and the hand reached in to extract something small and then held it up for the head to examine. It looked as if it might be … in very deed it was! … it was the key. Oh, please! Wickham thought, with the intense concentration and desire that he usually reserved for a throw of the dice upon which high stakes were riding. God and all saints, please!! And, as occasionally happened with the dice, his intense supplication was followed by the desired result. The elderly gentleman stood up from his chair, stretched, and walked over to the fireplace, picked up the poker in his left hand and stirred the fire with it. Then, after a few minutes, key still in one hand and poker in the other, he ambled contemplatively over to the window and gazed out into the darkness. Please! Oh, please!! Wickham’s mind repeated the prayer in quite a heathenish, mindless fashion, even as it registered the identity of the old man. It was Lydia’s father, Thomas Bennet, which reinforced Wickham’s conviction that it was Lydia who had him caught in the parson’s mousetrap. His thoughts became clearer as he accepted and adjusted to this reality.
Finally, Mr. Bennet extended his hand, the key still in it, to the locking mechanism that secured the bars across the rightmost of the French windows leading to the terrace. He unlocked it, raised the bars, and, with a sigh, stepped out on to the flagstones of the terrace, gazing up at the clouds which were chasing by overhead, and shrugging his tired shoulders.
Wickham seized his chance. He sprang upon the terrace, intending to catch Mr. Bennet from behind and cover his eyes and mouth before he knew what had happened or could protest. However, he had forgotten his game leg, or perhaps yet again one of the bushes caught his foot. He fell sprawling on the flagstones a yard and a half short of his target, who with a cry swung around to deliver a back-handed blow with the poker, catching Wickham most unpleasantly on his already sore ribs. The poker was not steady in Mr. Bennet’s left hand, however; it bounced back and then connected, again painfully though not as strongly as at the first blow, with Wickham’s head. His ear throbbing ardently and his skull ringing, Wickham was yet quite able to grasp the poker and wrest it from old man Bennet’s grip. He swung it around and pointed it at Bennet’s torso. Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, like a punch-drunk prizefighter, he moved closer towards the old man, foreshortening his grip on the poker so that he could instantly thrust it forward, and saying to him in a voice barely above a whisper, “Surprise, Mr. Bennet. I daresay you did not expect to see me out here when you opened that window. Do not move a muscle or raise an outcry, or I shall use this instrument as a lance, and you shall rue it.” He prodded him with the poker to drive the point home, so to speak.
Mr. Bennet held very still, but after a second or two responded intrepidly enough, “Indeed I did not expect to see you, and in fact I am still unsure whether I have done so, or have now met someone else, given that I had not previously had the pleasure of your acquaintance. Who are you, then, sir? Why did you lie in wait and to what end do you even now assault me?”
Does the man truly not know me? Or is this one of his little games in which he preens himself on his intelligence whilst he makes mockery of his daughters and son-in-law? “Keep your mouth well closed, Mr. Bennet,” Wickham responded. “If you do not know, I will leave you where you shall be able to meditate on it and perhaps come to enlightenment. Come now, back into the library.”
Once they were within, Wickham divested both Mr. Bennet and himself of their cravats, and bound his hands and feet as efficiently and effectively as he could. But then he apparently changed his mind, and removed the cravat from Mr. Bennet’s hands, substituting for it Mr. Bennet’s leathern belt, tying the cravat around the lower part of Mr. Bennet’s face so as to hold in place the handkerchief he had extracted from Bennet’s pocket and stuffed within his mouth. He dragged him back into the space between two large sets of bookshelves, well out of sight from the library door, and left him there on the floor.
During the following hour Mr. Bennet experienced, as he later described it jestingly to his daughter, a special sort of purgatory apparently tailor-made to torment him. Here he was, surrounded by whole shelves, hundreds of shelves, full of wonderful books, virgin to his touch, and yet he was unable to lay a finger to a one of them, much less take it down and explore the delights to be found within its covers. He knew that just around the corner was a decanter of an extraordinarily fine port, awaiting a reverent pouring out, after which one might slowly and lovingly savour it, yet he could not sip a drop or even relish the smell. He was even, for various reasons, blocked from indulging, according to his wont, in the lustful contemplation of such pleasures in imagination. For one thing, he had an itch beside his nose which he was unable to scratch, and for another he was developing a cramp in his right side, which was threatening to become truly painful. Perhaps most pressing of all, he had already drunk several glasses of the port, and it was now several hours past midnight; he was urgently conscious of a need for a water closet, and of being totally unable to relieve that need. Beyond such tangible frustrations was the contemplation of what was happening, of the fact that a criminal lunatic, or someone of a similar bent, was loose, by his own action, within Pemberley, and he was unable to do a thing about it. Of course, this last trial was of a sort which he was well-prepared by habit to endure with equanimity and even by choice—many a crisis at Longbourn, of at least apparently similar magnitude, he had dealt with by similar inactivity, and it was by no means certain that if he had been unbound he would have known what to do about the intruder, much less been minded to do it. Still, he thought he might have tried to do something.
He did try his bonds constantly, and was able to achieve a slight freedom of movement for his hands, though it was at the price, he could tell, of further tightening the belt which bound them. He managed, with tongue and teeth, to compact the handkerchief in his mouth and to push it against the cravat which held it in place, but was unable to completely dislodge them. But he pursued these activities quietly.
His circumspection was rewarded when he was surprised by a door opening somewhere in the direction of his head and very close to him. The door by which he himself had entered the library, hours earlier, and through which Wickham had left him, was towards his feet; other than that and the French windows he had been unaware of any entrance to the room. In fact, the door in question came from the Master’s study, where Wickham had been engaged in rifling the desk, looking for any and everything that might be profitable to carry off, when he was surprised by Wilkins. That elderly servitor, having heard, as he thought, a cry from outside the house near the library area, had arisen to investigate, had come upon Wickham, and had been subdued by much the same method as Wickham had used on Mr. Bennet. Now Wickham returned to the library, prodding the dishevelled, and most thoroughly incensed, old man with his poker. He shoved him into the same space between the bookshelves where Mr. Bennet lay, divesting him of cravat and belt, removing his shoes and stockings and using the stockings, along with the belt and cravat, to truss him up as he had Mr. Bennet. In the process he did not note (and Mr. Bennet certainly did not go out of his way to make it obvious) that Mr. Bennet’s bonds were no longer quite so secure as they had been.
Wickham abandoned the two almost immediately to return to his nefarious pursuits. Mr. Bennet immediately began to wriggle his way to where his hands could touch the knot at the back of Wilkins’ head, which did not look to be tied terribly tightly. After a few anxious minutes of effort he was able to pull it up over the man’s head freeing him from it, and Wilkins was able to spit his gag from his mouth and say “Thank you, sir!” in a voice made scratchy by a dry mouth.
Mr. Bennet was able to convey to him, despite the gag in his own mouth, that they should remain as quiet as possible. He then scooted down to where he was able to get his fingers on the buckle of the belt immobilising Wilkins’ hands. This took a bit longer, as the range of motion he could achieve seemed to be (it was difficult to tell, working by touch alone behind one’s back) just less than what was necessary to get the buckle tongue clear of the belt-hole, and it kept returning to its tightened position. Eventually Wilkins realized that he had been worsening the situation by flexing his elbows and wrists apart. He apologized and encouraged Mr. Bennet to try again, and this time he endeavoured to press his arms together at the critical moment. This action loosened the binding sufficiently that Mr. Bennet was able to undo the buckle, and once that was achieved, Wilkins was able to free his hands in short order. Although they shook badly and felt even more feeble than what his age had already accustomed him to feeling, he was able to use them to free his feet, whereupon he creakily stood to his feet and very cautiously walked to the small writing desk which Mr. Darcy maintained in the library, whence he retrieved a pen-knife. With its help he made short work of Mr. Bennet’s bonds, and within a few minutes they stood together, still between the book shelves, two elderly men rubbing sore places on their anatomies, thanking each other in whispers, and beginning to consider together what should be their next move.
Mr. Bennet chose to deal with the most urgent matter first. “Pardon me, but could you direct me to a water closet?” he asked.
The nearest such installation, as it turned out, was adjunct to and could be entered only from the billiard room, and they were able to make their way there without encountering Wickham, or indeed anyone else, though the latter fact was no great surprise: it was still very early in the morning. When he had accomplished what was necessary, Mr. Bennet returned to the billiard room to find the shaken butler standing in helpless indecision, and instinctively looking to him for direction. During much of the following adventure, and certainly in his recollections of the same, he was carried along, and at times almost overcome, by an undercurrent of mirth, a constant bubbling of laughter, an unbelief in the preposterous circumstance that he, Thomas Bennet, Eremite of the Longbourn Library, was not only being looked to for leadership, but actually found himself providing it quite effectively, albeit in the most absurd of manners and of circumstances.
“Who was he?” he asked.
Surprised, Wilkins nevertheless said succinctly, “That was Mr. Wickham. He is married to Miss Georgiana, but I fear he hates the Master.”
“I may safely conclude, then, that he is up to no good here? Well, then, I believe we should seek some way to arm ourselves,” Mr. Bennet stated. “Have you any suggestions?” He himself looked around the room, and his eye was drawn to a decoration mounted above the mantelpiece, which consisted of (among other things) a small shield covering the intersection of two crossed swords. He began to pull a chair over to the fireplace, immediately assisted by Wilkins, and climbed upon it, only to discover that the swords in question were most solidly riveted, if not welded, to each other and to the shield. Abandoning the attempt, he cast his eye over the room and settled on the fireplace poker, which was somewhat lighter than the one from the library, which Wickham doubtless still retained. Then, with a chuckle, he caught up a cue and tossed it to Wilkins, before taking one up himself. He wielded it as a fencing foil, thrusting with the tip of it towards the billiards table, then reversed it, swinging the heavier end in such a way as to mimic a club light enough for such valetudinarians as themselves; Wilkins copied his movements, accustoming himself to this weapon. Mr. Bennet transferred both cue and poker to his left hand, and with his right put two billiard balls in each of the large pockets of his coat, encouraging Wilkins to do the same. Thus fearfully armed, the two musketeers sallied forth with commendable intrepidity to their encounter with destiny.
“Take me to the upstairs apartments by the most unobtrusive way,” Mr. Bennet requested, and Wilkins led him to one of the servants’ staircases, which brought them into the hall of the Family wing, not far from the Master’s suite of rooms. As they walked past the Master’s dressing-room they heard a thumping sound, and cautiously opened the door. There on the floor, tied up much as they themselves had been, they found Enderby. Wilkins still had with him the pen-knife, and between that and Mr. Bennet’s clever fingers, Enderby was soon freed, standing, and rubbing his wrists.
“Where is he?” asked Mr. Bennet, almost in a whisper.
“I do not know, but not far, I surmise. He had left me but a few minutes before you found me,” was the reply. “He had Grace, the nursery maid, with him.”
“Here.” Mr. Bennet thrust into Enderby’s hands the poker from the billiard room; he himself was feeling a quite irrational pleasure in wielding only a cue-stick against this redoubtable villain. The three men emerged, somewhat shakily, into the hall.
As they looked both ways they heard, muffled by its passage through a closed door but still unmistakable, a woman’s scream, suddenly cut off but then renewed. It came from their left, and so naturally they headed in that direction. They heard further sounds of feminine distress and fierce contention, and a man’s shout as well. While they were yet some ten yards from the entrance to Mrs. Wickham’s rooms, the door burst open, and George Wickham emerged, in a dampened, malodourous and thoroughly dishevelled condition, looking wildly about him, and pulling behind him a vehemently protesting Ellen Ingram, clad in nightgown and robe.
Chapter 25
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
Damn it all! One by one, Wickham tried the latches on the windows; all were securely fastened. What was more, he knew, the fenestration of Pemberley was of the strongest, fashioned with reinforced sashes, casings and muntins, not to be broken into without a deal of noise and considerable time, especially by one lacking the proper tools. This place is built like a fortress, he grumbled to himself. And some even of the bottom storey windows were high enough above the ground to require him to climb, hanging onto the sills with his fingertips and scrambling for purchase on foundation stones or bushes, in order to try them. It was most frustrating, and with tired fingers, sore ribs and a game leg, not in the least comfortable.
He paused beneath the old oak tree whose branches, he remembered, grew close to the window to the nursery on the first floor. Perhaps it might still be possible to climb from them to that or a neighboring window: it had been so in the past. But quite certainly the windows would prove to be locked —the Pemberley staff were careful about such things, as his current investigations were confirming—, and he would have wasted considerable time and risked a nasty fall in the darkness only to confirm that discouraging fact. He would attempt it if all other options failed, but he was not yet in such straits.
It came to his mind, moreover, that he had an ace up his sleeve. Years ago, while old Mr. Darcy (the gaumless fool) was yet doddering around and he still had access to the house, Wickham had had the foresight to press in wax the key to the servants’ entrance, which he then had copied by an ironmonger of his acquaintance in one of the less savoury sections of Manchester. This key he had buried in a niche in the foundation just south of the northwest corner of the house. Now he abandoned his futile search for an openable window and went to find it. It took him but little time to do so; the key was indeed still there where he had hidden it. Rejoicing inwardly but wary still, he flitted like a shadow to the entrance, only to find that his key would not fit the lock—it would not even enter it, much less turn after being introduced. Damnation!, he thought, his irritation doubled and trebled, leave it to Darcy to change the locks on me! Why does he have to be so bloody thorough and conscientious in all he does? Why does he always manage to interfere with my plans? With a muffled oath, he flung the key into the woods. There was nothing for it but to return to the windows and see if there might yet be one left ajar, and then, if necessary, try the tree as a last resort.
Still fuming in his frustration, yet moving with stealthy skill from one window to the next, he came around the southwestern corner of the mansion, and immediately saw a dim light, as from a single branch of candles, emanating from the library. Wondering who would yet be awake at such an hour, he crept closer until he could peer into the nearest of the windows. As his vision adjusted, he descried the back of a wide and high armchair facing the fireplace, in which were glowing the coals of a fire now in the final, contemplative stage of its life. On a small side table to the right of the chair a small glass gleamed with the rich colour of port, and, as he watched, a man’s hand reached out from the chair to take the glass, as the top of an open book briefly appeared to the left of the chair back. He could imagine (though he could not hear) the sigh of satisfaction with which the glass, now empty, was returned to its place.
Wickham decided to wait and see who the reader might be before trying anything else, and so settled back into the shadows. Before many minutes had passed his patience was rewarded. The hand that had reached to the glass reached out to it again, and finding it empty, toyed idly with the pull on the drawer in the side table. Wickham sucked a sudden breath into his chest and held it. Perhaps the drawer still, as it had years ago, held a key to the French windows in the library. Might this person …?
Only a few moments later, the hand pulled the drawer open; a grizzled head leaned over to see what was in it, and the hand reached in to extract something small and then held it up for the head to examine. It looked as if it might be … in very deed it was! … it was the key. Oh, please! Wickham thought, with the intense concentration and desire that he usually reserved for a throw of the dice upon which high stakes were riding. God and all saints, please!! And, as occasionally happened with the dice, his intense supplication was followed by the desired result. The elderly gentleman stood up from his chair, stretched, and walked over to the fireplace, picked up the poker in his left hand and stirred the fire with it. Then, after a few minutes, key still in one hand and poker in the other, he ambled contemplatively over to the window and gazed out into the darkness. Please! Oh, please!! Wickham’s mind repeated the prayer in quite a heathenish, mindless fashion, even as it registered the identity of the old man. It was Lydia’s father, Thomas Bennet, which reinforced Wickham’s conviction that it was Lydia who had him caught in the parson’s mousetrap. His thoughts became clearer as he accepted and adjusted to this reality.
Finally, Mr. Bennet extended his hand, the key still in it, to the locking mechanism that secured the bars across the rightmost of the French windows leading to the terrace. He unlocked it, raised the bars, and, with a sigh, stepped out on to the flagstones of the terrace, gazing up at the clouds which were chasing by overhead, and shrugging his tired shoulders.
Wickham seized his chance. He sprang upon the terrace, intending to catch Mr. Bennet from behind and cover his eyes and mouth before he knew what had happened or could protest. However, he had forgotten his game leg, or perhaps yet again one of the bushes caught his foot. He fell sprawling on the flagstones a yard and a half short of his target, who with a cry swung around to deliver a back-handed blow with the poker, catching Wickham most unpleasantly on his already sore ribs. The poker was not steady in Mr. Bennet’s left hand, however; it bounced back and then connected, again painfully though not as strongly as at the first blow, with Wickham’s head. His ear throbbing ardently and his skull ringing, Wickham was yet quite able to grasp the poker and wrest it from old man Bennet’s grip. He swung it around and pointed it at Bennet’s torso. Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, like a punch-drunk prizefighter, he moved closer towards the old man, foreshortening his grip on the poker so that he could instantly thrust it forward, and saying to him in a voice barely above a whisper, “Surprise, Mr. Bennet. I daresay you did not expect to see me out here when you opened that window. Do not move a muscle or raise an outcry, or I shall use this instrument as a lance, and you shall rue it.” He prodded him with the poker to drive the point home, so to speak.
Mr. Bennet held very still, but after a second or two responded intrepidly enough, “Indeed I did not expect to see you, and in fact I am still unsure whether I have done so, or have now met someone else, given that I had not previously had the pleasure of your acquaintance. Who are you, then, sir? Why did you lie in wait and to what end do you even now assault me?”
Does the man truly not know me? Or is this one of his little games in which he preens himself on his intelligence whilst he makes mockery of his daughters and son-in-law? “Keep your mouth well closed, Mr. Bennet,” Wickham responded. “If you do not know, I will leave you where you shall be able to meditate on it and perhaps come to enlightenment. Come now, back into the library.”
Once they were within, Wickham divested both Mr. Bennet and himself of their cravats, and bound his hands and feet as efficiently and effectively as he could. But then he apparently changed his mind, and removed the cravat from Mr. Bennet’s hands, substituting for it Mr. Bennet’s leathern belt, tying the cravat around the lower part of Mr. Bennet’s face so as to hold in place the handkerchief he had extracted from Bennet’s pocket and stuffed within his mouth. He dragged him back into the space between two large sets of bookshelves, well out of sight from the library door, and left him there on the floor.
During the following hour Mr. Bennet experienced, as he later described it jestingly to his daughter, a special sort of purgatory apparently tailor-made to torment him. Here he was, surrounded by whole shelves, hundreds of shelves, full of wonderful books, virgin to his touch, and yet he was unable to lay a finger to a one of them, much less take it down and explore the delights to be found within its covers. He knew that just around the corner was a decanter of an extraordinarily fine port, awaiting a reverent pouring out, after which one might slowly and lovingly savour it, yet he could not sip a drop or even relish the smell. He was even, for various reasons, blocked from indulging, according to his wont, in the lustful contemplation of such pleasures in imagination. For one thing, he had an itch beside his nose which he was unable to scratch, and for another he was developing a cramp in his right side, which was threatening to become truly painful. Perhaps most pressing of all, he had already drunk several glasses of the port, and it was now several hours past midnight; he was urgently conscious of a need for a water closet, and of being totally unable to relieve that need. Beyond such tangible frustrations was the contemplation of what was happening, of the fact that a criminal lunatic, or someone of a similar bent, was loose, by his own action, within Pemberley, and he was unable to do a thing about it. Of course, this last trial was of a sort which he was well-prepared by habit to endure with equanimity and even by choice—many a crisis at Longbourn, of at least apparently similar magnitude, he had dealt with by similar inactivity, and it was by no means certain that if he had been unbound he would have known what to do about the intruder, much less been minded to do it. Still, he thought he might have tried to do something.
He did try his bonds constantly, and was able to achieve a slight freedom of movement for his hands, though it was at the price, he could tell, of further tightening the belt which bound them. He managed, with tongue and teeth, to compact the handkerchief in his mouth and to push it against the cravat which held it in place, but was unable to completely dislodge them. But he pursued these activities quietly.
His circumspection was rewarded when he was surprised by a door opening somewhere in the direction of his head and very close to him. The door by which he himself had entered the library, hours earlier, and through which Wickham had left him, was towards his feet; other than that and the French windows he had been unaware of any entrance to the room. In fact, the door in question came from the Master’s study, where Wickham had been engaged in rifling the desk, looking for any and everything that might be profitable to carry off, when he was surprised by Wilkins. That elderly servitor, having heard, as he thought, a cry from outside the house near the library area, had arisen to investigate, had come upon Wickham, and had been subdued by much the same method as Wickham had used on Mr. Bennet. Now Wickham returned to the library, prodding the dishevelled, and most thoroughly incensed, old man with his poker. He shoved him into the same space between the bookshelves where Mr. Bennet lay, divesting him of cravat and belt, removing his shoes and stockings and using the stockings, along with the belt and cravat, to truss him up as he had Mr. Bennet. In the process he did not note (and Mr. Bennet certainly did not go out of his way to make it obvious) that Mr. Bennet’s bonds were no longer quite so secure as they had been.
Wickham abandoned the two almost immediately to return to his nefarious pursuits. Mr. Bennet immediately began to wriggle his way to where his hands could touch the knot at the back of Wilkins’ head, which did not look to be tied terribly tightly. After a few anxious minutes of effort he was able to pull it up over the man’s head freeing him from it, and Wilkins was able to spit his gag from his mouth and say “Thank you, sir!” in a voice made scratchy by a dry mouth.
Mr. Bennet was able to convey to him, despite the gag in his own mouth, that they should remain as quiet as possible. He then scooted down to where he was able to get his fingers on the buckle of the belt immobilising Wilkins’ hands. This took a bit longer, as the range of motion he could achieve seemed to be (it was difficult to tell, working by touch alone behind one’s back) just less than what was necessary to get the buckle tongue clear of the belt-hole, and it kept returning to its tightened position. Eventually Wilkins realized that he had been worsening the situation by flexing his elbows and wrists apart. He apologized and encouraged Mr. Bennet to try again, and this time he endeavoured to press his arms together at the critical moment. This action loosened the binding sufficiently that Mr. Bennet was able to undo the buckle, and once that was achieved, Wilkins was able to free his hands in short order. Although they shook badly and felt even more feeble than what his age had already accustomed him to feeling, he was able to use them to free his feet, whereupon he creakily stood to his feet and very cautiously walked to the small writing desk which Mr. Darcy maintained in the library, whence he retrieved a pen-knife. With its help he made short work of Mr. Bennet’s bonds, and within a few minutes they stood together, still between the book shelves, two elderly men rubbing sore places on their anatomies, thanking each other in whispers, and beginning to consider together what should be their next move.
Mr. Bennet chose to deal with the most urgent matter first. “Pardon me, but could you direct me to a water closet?” he asked.
The nearest such installation, as it turned out, was adjunct to and could be entered only from the billiard room, and they were able to make their way there without encountering Wickham, or indeed anyone else, though the latter fact was no great surprise: it was still very early in the morning. When he had accomplished what was necessary, Mr. Bennet returned to the billiard room to find the shaken butler standing in helpless indecision, and instinctively looking to him for direction. During much of the following adventure, and certainly in his recollections of the same, he was carried along, and at times almost overcome, by an undercurrent of mirth, a constant bubbling of laughter, an unbelief in the preposterous circumstance that he, Thomas Bennet, Eremite of the Longbourn Library, was not only being looked to for leadership, but actually found himself providing it quite effectively, albeit in the most absurd of manners and of circumstances.
“Who was he?” he asked.
Surprised, Wilkins nevertheless said succinctly, “That was Mr. Wickham. He is married to Miss Georgiana, but I fear he hates the Master.”
“I may safely conclude, then, that he is up to no good here? Well, then, I believe we should seek some way to arm ourselves,” Mr. Bennet stated. “Have you any suggestions?” He himself looked around the room, and his eye was drawn to a decoration mounted above the mantelpiece, which consisted of (among other things) a small shield covering the intersection of two crossed swords. He began to pull a chair over to the fireplace, immediately assisted by Wilkins, and climbed upon it, only to discover that the swords in question were most solidly riveted, if not welded, to each other and to the shield. Abandoning the attempt, he cast his eye over the room and settled on the fireplace poker, which was somewhat lighter than the one from the library, which Wickham doubtless still retained. Then, with a chuckle, he caught up a cue and tossed it to Wilkins, before taking one up himself. He wielded it as a fencing foil, thrusting with the tip of it towards the billiards table, then reversed it, swinging the heavier end in such a way as to mimic a club light enough for such valetudinarians as themselves; Wilkins copied his movements, accustoming himself to this weapon. Mr. Bennet transferred both cue and poker to his left hand, and with his right put two billiard balls in each of the large pockets of his coat, encouraging Wilkins to do the same. Thus fearfully armed, the two musketeers sallied forth with commendable intrepidity to their encounter with destiny.
“Take me to the upstairs apartments by the most unobtrusive way,” Mr. Bennet requested, and Wilkins led him to one of the servants’ staircases, which brought them into the hall of the Family wing, not far from the Master’s suite of rooms. As they walked past the Master’s dressing-room they heard a thumping sound, and cautiously opened the door. There on the floor, tied up much as they themselves had been, they found Enderby. Wilkins still had with him the pen-knife, and between that and Mr. Bennet’s clever fingers, Enderby was soon freed, standing, and rubbing his wrists.
“Where is he?” asked Mr. Bennet, almost in a whisper.
“I do not know, but not far, I surmise. He had left me but a few minutes before you found me,” was the reply. “He had Grace, the nursery maid, with him.”
“Here.” Mr. Bennet thrust into Enderby’s hands the poker from the billiard room; he himself was feeling a quite irrational pleasure in wielding only a cue-stick against this redoubtable villain. The three men emerged, somewhat shakily, into the hall.
As they looked both ways they heard, muffled by its passage through a closed door but still unmistakable, a woman’s scream, suddenly cut off but then renewed. It came from their left, and so naturally they headed in that direction. They heard further sounds of feminine distress and fierce contention, and a man’s shout as well. While they were yet some ten yards from the entrance to Mrs. Wickham’s rooms, the door burst open, and George Wickham emerged, in a dampened, malodourous and thoroughly dishevelled condition, looking wildly about him, and pulling behind him a vehemently protesting Ellen Ingram, clad in nightgown and robe.
| Subject | Author | Posted |
|---|---|---|
| Nat KC | April 27, 2012 11:35AM |
| Adelaide | April 27, 2012 01:51PM |
| Nat KC | April 27, 2012 03:39PM |
| little Nell | April 27, 2012 01:38PM |
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