Page 14 of Reckless, Headstrong Girl
“Well, I do not really know very much about it except that is where a gentleman puts his money. Like a pool. Suppose we all put our week’s wages together in a box. Like that.”
“Why’d we do that?” Carver scoffed.
“I think it has to do with what the Town men do with it. They grow the money and send the gentlemen the extra.”
“Huh?”
“Suppose we put our week’s wages in a box. And then we went out and bought eggs and butter and flour and made cakes with it. And suppose our cakes were really good and that the mayor’s wife had to have them, then we could charge a pretty penny for them. We would get back our wages and then some.”
“I ?spose…”
“And then we put back our week’s wages into the box and keep the extra to spend on ourselves. We then take the what is in the box and go out the next week and make our cakes. The money in the box is our Exchange.”
“Well I’ll be. T’would ne’er work though. We ain’t got no oven, nor do we know the mayor’s wife.”
“No, that was only an example. Suppose our Exchange was used to buy a bit of linen, and we made gloves in our spare time and sold them on the side.”
Carver shrugged. “With wat light girl? Spend all our pennies on tallow.”
“Yes, but the Town men are very smart, and they think up schemes thatdowork.”
“Like wat?”
“I have no idea, Carver. Something to do with ships, I think, and the East India Company.”
Lydia sat thinking over her unlikely reputation as an expert as she hemmed the last seam on the first glove of the afternoon. She wished she had paid much more attention to—well, to everything. She wished she had read more books like Lizzy and flirted less. Men, who had once been as irresistible as spun-sugar comfits, were classed with the lice that always threatened to invade Lydia’s scalp again. But, if she were not careful, her murderous thoughts of George Wickham would cause her to stab her finger. Consequently, she thought of her other advantages, a curiously satisfying way to survive the tedium of her work.
In regards to her person, Lydia knew that her gentle upbringing gave her a much different idea of general hygiene than everyone else around her. By comparison, she was fastidious, and she took her grooming seriously. At Longbourn, she had been casual about these things. She was pretty and she knew it, and what could rub the bloom off the rose anyway? Having seen herself looking like a mole just dug out of the dirt, Lydia knew now that her genteel looks were easily lost and akin to currency, and if she did not want to end up a workhouse lodger for the rest of her life, she had better preserve what she had.
Lydia Bennet, of all the people in the world to work a flat iron, learned to press her dress and her apron, and she did so with determined precision. If she must wear a pauper’s dress, she would look well in it. She went meekly to Mrs. Hart and begged for scraps of linen for socks, and these she made carefully so the seams would not cut into her feet and make corns. She combed for nits twice a day, fought with determination for first use of the water, and washed vigorously. She had a sliver of wood from underneath the work table that she used every day without fail to scrape her teeth, and she was the only person in her ward to use the foul-tasting tooth powder provided by the house. With the remaining linen scraps, Lydia fashioned her own gloves, which she used to empty the foul bucket. She was careful to tuck up her dress and to wash the soles of her boots in the gravel by the pump after she had been out to the offal dump. She rinsed the bucket until it no longer reeked, and after seeing wild mint growing at the edge of the muck pond, she brought sprigs of it back to the ward and crushed it into a small pouch made from floor sweepings and wore it around her neck.
Soon enough she had set a fashion. Everyone wore scrap gloves and carried mint sachets around their necks. When Lydia once took a tiny bit of butter from her allotment at dinner and rubbed it on her hands before bed everyone else took to applying this homely emollient to relieve their chapped skin. Swiftly, Lydia began to think beyond these beauty rituals and to consider the state of her hair. Had Carver sheared her with a dull saber she could not have done a worse job. Lydia’s hair was anywhere from half an inch to a spike of three inches long, all helter-skelter, and she began to look around her for a solution to this travesty of style.
Sally Watkins, a quiet lady of thirty or so, had decent-looking hair, and Lydia found herself increasingly jealous. One day, after the first ward had passed on the communal scissors to the second ward, Lydia asked Sally whether she would give her head a little trim. “Wat’ll you give ?er for it, countess? She ain’t yer slave,” challenged Carver, miffed that her handiwork was deemed insufficient.
“I shall tell her a story,” Lydia said unthinkingly.
Everyone in the room came to attention. A story seemed just the thing. The day had been dreary, the light in the workroom dismal, the dinner mostly turnips and a meager quantity of pickled pork, and no one’s spirits were high. And so, as Sally Watkins carefully coiffed Lydia’s poor head, she told them how she had come to the Methodist Workhouse in Horsham.
***
Lydia was not a careful person. Her history proved her to be heedless at the very least. But some instinct of intuition told her that, while she could tell true stories all day long, she really should not disclose anyone’s real name. Bad enough they all knew whoshewas, Lydia did not feel she had the right to tell anyone her oldest sister was Jane Bennet or that Charlotte Lucas had married Mr. Collins. Her friends and loved ones did not deserve to be dragged into the workhouse alongside her.
With this in mind, she began her first story, deciding that George Wickham would be “John Wickstead” and that Longbourn was to be “Longbridge,” Jane would be “Julie,” Lizzy would be “Ellen,” and so on. Other names would be adjusted as she went along. Her imagination, after all, was not an insufficient instrument, nor was she ever at a loss for words. The description of evil Mr. Wickstead pushing her bum-first from the coach and stealing her fortune offive whole poundsproved to be absolutely riveting.
For the first time since her travails began, Lydia felt that every single word she uttered was wholly believed. When they blew out the candle, she felt her head and thought she must look much better, and she felt a surprising burst of warmth—of security. Her ward mates believed her! She was surrounded by seven people who deplored what Wickham had done and did not scorn her openly for being ruined.
The following morning during the washing up and dressing ritual in the gray light of morning, Carver said to Lydia, “Did ye really not know, Bennie, what that man ?ad in his mind?”
Lydia shook her head. “He tried something rough with my skirts I did not like. I have no idea why.”
“Relations he were after.”
“What are ‘relations’?” Lydia asked. The occupants of the room howled for some time, but that evening, they collectively explained in gross, embellished detail, everything she could possibly wish to know aboutrelations, and a great deal she would rather not have known.
“Do you mean kissing is like the aperitif?” she asked in horror.
“The wat?”
