Lady Catherine's Necklace (15 page)

‘I believe you are in the right of it, Lord Luke,' Mr Stillbrass acknowledged, though he seemed a trifle scandalized at the matter-of-fact way in which Lord Luke laid plans to deal with his sister's abduction.

Colonel FitzWilliam said: ‘My Aunt Adelaide in Great Morran was, so far as we know, expecting her sister-in-law for a visit. Presently she will be writing to ask why Aunt Catherine has not arrived. What should we do then?'

‘I will advise you when that happens. I shall be in constant touch, never fear,' said Mr Stillbrass, and took his leave.

‘Prosy old ass!' said Lord Luke. ‘Anne, my dear, will you send for Joss? I may as well continue with my researches. And my old trouble forbids my passing any more time in those villainously dusty attics.'

Letter from Miss Maria Lucas to Mrs Jennings

My dear madam,

Mr Collins is at last come back into Kent, but my sister Charlotte has begged me to remain here at Hunsford parsonage for some weeks yet, as Lady Catherine is gone off to visit her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Anglesea, and, lacking her rule up at Rosings House, Mrs Jenkinson and the housekeeper come at all times asking Charlotte's advice, so she is glad to have help with the children.

Mr Collins has let Longbourn Manor to a Captain Price, and seems very well satisfied with his tenant, who will be at sea most of the time, but who is an active, capable and sensible young man. Mr C. is somewhat dismayed to find Lady Catherine gone from home, as he has a great regard for her and hardly knows how to go on when she is not at hand to give him his instruction. (By the bye, it seems there is some mystery about Lady C.'s whereabouts. We at the parsonage are not supposed to know about this, it is kept a secret up at Rosings, but the news leaked out through Smirke the head gardener whose mother, Mrs Smirke, lives in Hunsford village and comes up to do the heavy laundry at the parsonage. Smirke, says Mrs S., received a letter which he was to hand to Lord Luke; this letter did not come through the post but passed from hand to hand. What the contents were we do not know, but we surmise that it related in some way to Lady C.'s whereabouts, for Col. FitzWilliam's valet, a very well-set-up young man who is a nephew of my sister's housekeeper Mrs Denny, avers that a letter came to his master from the latter's aunt, the Duchess of Anglesea, inquiring why Lady C. had not yet arrived to visit her as expected. She, the duchess, is much distressed at this, for she lies sick abed and nigh to her end, so was wishful for her sister's company. All this is a great enigma, which has us quite in a puzzle.)

Meanwhile, affairs in this neighbourhood go on much as before. Poor Mr Mynges the painter is still in his cottage, Wormwood End, for since Lady Catherine's departure his notice to quit has been withdrawn. Charlotte and I go to visit him and take him small comforts. He is a very gentle, sincere man; not, I think, such a gifted painter as was his friend Mr Finglow, but who am I to pronounce? Strangely enough, one of his most frequent visitors, often to be found there when we call, is Mr Ralph Delaval, who was, in a way, the author of his misfortune, for it was Mr Delaval's imprudent and inconsiderate suggestion of pulling down the cottage to improve the view that led to the older man's illness and death. I believe Mr Delaval feels this a great deal, for he is very different in his manner from when he first came to Rosings; he is downcast and sober and does not rattle on as he was used to do. I think he would be glad to leave the neighbourhood, but seems incapable of making the decision to do so. The prime cause of the Delavals' lengthy visit – Miss Priscilla's ankle – must, by now, have been used up, though she still makes a great palaver about the pain the ankle gives her, and requires to be wheeled about in a basket-chair.

Charlotte says, and I do not entirely disagree, that Miss P. is setting her cap at Col. FitzWilliam, and that if he could get Miss Anne to cry off, she would have him before the cat could lick its ear. If that is so, I think the worse of the colonel – yet how can I judge? Miss Delaval has known him for some time. She told me she met him first in Derbyshire at the house of a Mr Bingley, where her brother was giving advice to Mr B. about improving his grounds. Miss P. gave me to understand that she quite lost her heart to the colonel on that occasion; and so persuaded her brother to travel into Kent at a time when she knew the colonel would be here, in hopes of meeting him again. Some parts of this tale are plainly true; yet it seems the Delavals must have contrived their accident so as to be invited within the gates of Rosings. I hardly know what to think … But I cannot like the air of artifice and machination that hangs over the business. Can there be any connection with the apparent disappearance of Lady Catherine? Surely not! There must be some quite different explanation for that. Her absence from home seems to leave the Delavals in a most equivocal situation, for no one at Rosings welcomes them, yet none can give them notice to go.

Meanwhile, I play my piano diligently and am practising some Beethoven sonatas which I hope to perform to you, dear Mrs Jennings, when I return through London. Mr Delaval was so kind as to procure them for me when he rode into Tunbridge Wells last week. He often comes and listens to me when I play the organ in Hunsford church (Mr Moss, the regular organist, is laid up with gout). Mr D. has said some very civil things about my playing, and he is a well-informed and clever man, so I value his praise (yet I cannot really like him).

Charlotte is of the opinion that, if Mr Delaval should make me an offer, I should accept him. She says that my chance of happiness would be as great as most people can expect on entering the state of matrimony. But what can she know about it? She is married to Mr Collins, who is tolerably good-natured, to be sure, but so prosy and self-satisfied that it is a penance to be together with him in a room for above five minutes. If Charlotte had not her children, her household and village affairs, her poultry and the advantage of interesting company at Rosings House, I do not know how she would tolerate her existence. Compared to Mr C., it is true, Mr D. is a positive paragon. And Charlotte insists that I should do my best possible to secure him. But, dear Mrs Jennings,
I do not love him,
and my heart instructs me that marriage without love is a sin against the Holy Ghost. Must I, then, remain unwed all my life? I wonder if I could ever support myself by my music? Charlotte says such an idea is quite ineligible, and yet – and yet!

Your affectionate friend,

Maria Lucas

PS Oh, dear Mrs Jennings, how I
wish
that you were here to give me your cordial, fair-minded, unprejudiced advice!

IX

‘Sir!
Sir!
' said Lady Catherine.

The bearded man stirred and snored, but offered no other reaction to her prodding and exhortations.

At this moment Lady Catherine almost fell into despair.

An uncountable, unmeasurable amount of time had passed, it seemed, since her first awakening in this rude habitation. Darkness had blanked out the two small windowpanes and then, later, daylight of a sort had come back again.

Meanwhile – a very frightening phenomenon – water had continued to penetrate under the door, pulsing in slowly but steadily in small rippling waves. A pool about the size of a card-table had collected, and more kept coming. This made Lady Catherine profoundly uneasy. Suppose more and more came in, until it had filled the entire cabin? Was such a thing possible? Could enough water to
drown
her and the stranger flow under that door? More immediate and worrying was the likelihood that the incoming tide would submerge the man who lay on the floor, and put out the fire which Lady Catherine had with such difficulty persuaded to burn.

There was no means of preventing the water's entry – she considered laying her sable cloak against the crack, but immediately dismissed this expedient. The only remedy she could fix on was bailing. There was a shovel by the hearth, and a pail. With desperate energy, but no great skill, Lady Catherine scooped up water with the shovel and tossed it into the pail. When this was full, she emptied it down the drain hole. By such means, working at frantic speed, she managed to keep abreast of the water's inflow. The pool inside the door grew no larger. But it was punishing work for somebody wholly unaccustomed to physical labour. After two or three hours, however, she began to feel that the threat was diminishing; the ripples came more slowly, then they ceased. The pool inside the door gradually sank into the earth floor and left no more than a mud patch.

All this time the comatose stranger had not woken.

Lady Catherine leaned her aching back against the wall and contemplated him. At this moment he shifted slightly and let out a grunt, or moan.

‘Sir!' said Lady Catherine.

He made no reply.

With considerable reluctance, for she was as tired as she had ever been in her entire life, Lady Catherine knelt by him and introduced some spoonfuls of water, and then a dribble or two of apple pulp, between his yellow and battered teeth. She was mortally afraid of choking him, for he now began to struggle and groan, and received the nourishment without any sign of goodwill or gratitude, or without displaying any sign that it had benefited him.

Still he did not emerge into consciousness and now, exhausted and devoid of hope, Lady Catherine began to wonder if he ever would.

And then, suddenly, he opened his eyes.

They were large, grey and bloodshot, the whites dark yellow and threaded with red veins. He stared about him vacantly for several minutes. He was still lying on the mattress on the dirty floor, for there had been no means of hoisting him up into the hammock, and in any case Lady Catherine wanted the hammock for herself. But she had covered him with her sable cloak and managed to insert the solid and bulky sable muff under his heavy head so as to reduce the danger of choking while she fed him.

His eyes roamed the interior vacantly for a moment or so, then came to rest, with utter amazement it seemed, on Lady Catherine, who had seated herself beside him on the three-legged stool.

‘Who
are
you?' she demanded. ‘Where are we? Who are you?'

He took a long time to consider this question.

His answer, when it came, terrified her.

‘I am Azrael, the Angel of Death. That's who I am!'

Lord have mercy on me, thought Lady Catherine. I am locked up with a lunatic.

Only one thing about his answer reassured her in the least. He spoke with a rough, West Country accent, which, in the last few days of travel, she had become accustomed to hearing. This gave her, if nothing else, a feeling of location.

‘Where are we? Where
is
this place? Who has shut us in?'

Accustomed to being furnished instantaneously with all the information she required, she spoke with all her accustomed sharpness of manner. But his answer came in a slow, pondering tone, and after a considerable pause.

‘Where? Ay, that's a naggy one. In limbo, mayhap.'

Then he added, after a long, perplexed survey of Lady Catherine, in her draggled, drenched, crushed travel costume of silks and velvets:

‘If I am Azrael, who must you be? One o' the Furies? One o' the Friendly Ones?'

‘Speak sensibly!' said Lady Catherine. ‘I am not accustomed to being answered with this kind of idle talk. Don't give me such flummery, but tell me who you are and where this place is. First – what is your name?'

He gave a deep sigh, a long, long exhalation, as if he were saying goodbye to some precious bubble of air, cherished inside his lungs, or some beloved dream which he had hoped to hold inside him for ever.

‘Trelawny. Benjamin Trelawny.'

‘How did we come to be here?' Lady Catherine asked, cheered by this sign of sense.

‘Ah. I was on a ship. The
Sweet William.
From Santa Ana. She stove on a rock. All lost. All lost.'

He kept repeating ‘All lost', as if to convince his hearer of the large number of people who had lost their lives. ‘All crew. All lost. All passengers. All lost.'

‘You had friends? Family?' she could not help asking.

‘Wife. Little son Ben. Two daughters. Papers. Furnishings.
Poems.
All lost.'

He looked around the empty room as if still expecting to see the family, the furnishings, the children.

Something stirred in Lady Catherine's mind. I have never known a loss like that.

‘When did this occur, sir?'

He shut his eyes and covered them with his hands.

‘Time gone. They picked me up. Fishers. Picked up in sea.'

Plainly he would have liked to sink back into sleep, perhaps for ever, but Lady Catherine was determined to get more information out of him, no matter how ruthless she had to be in procuring it.

‘Where is this place? Why are we here?'

‘Brought in – harbour. Left with doctor. That's all. That's enough.'

‘No, sir, it is
not
enough! I wish to know why I am here. Why we are imprisoned in this dismal, comfortless cell; why we are not released. Who is responsible for this incarceration?'

‘Who is res – Oh,
send me patience!
'

He lay back on the mattress as if exhausted. From having been flushed, he had now turned deathly pale, and beads of sweat rolled off his brow. Alarmed, Lady Catherine administered the only remedy she had to hand – a spoonful of apple pulp.

His face twisted in disgust. His eyes, which had been resolutely shut, flew open again.

‘What the deuce is this – gnat's piss?'

‘Sir!'

Lady Catherine was outraged.

‘You should be thankful for what you have. There was nothing else in the place.'

‘Eggs out yonder. Outside.'

‘But the door is locked.'

‘Oh. Ay. True. Quite true.'

Slowly, and, it appeared, with excruciating stiffness and pain, he hoisted himself to a sitting, then to a standing position. Lady Catherine could now see that he was unusually tall, well over six feet, and so haggard and emaciated that she wondered if he had been in prison or had suffered some debilitating illness.