Page 101 of A Debt Inherited

Mrs Hill still stood by the dresser, her eyes fixed upon the bonnet.

“Mrs Hill.”

She looked at him.

“Put it away. Somewhere no maid will see it.”

Her mouth trembled once. “Yes, sir.”

She came forward, lifted Elizabeth’s bonnet from the table, and held it against her apron.

Bennet closed the journal again.

Chapter 38

Redbourn Heath, the following morning

Elizabeth woke to the loss of one pain and the discovery of another.

For several seconds she did not know where she lay. The ceiling above her was low and discoloured, crossed by one dark beam from which old cobwebs hung in grey threads. The air smelt of limewash, straw, damp wood, and the faint sourness of the pail in the corner. Then memory returned entire: the lane, Mr Wickham’s smile, the hand upon her jaw, the sack, the cart, Mr Kerr’s voice at her ear.

She closed her eyes.

No.

The word did not alter the room. It only steadied her enough to open them again.

Her hands remained bound before her, not so close as to numb the fingers, but close enough to make every motion clumsy. Her ankles had been untied, and no cord held her to the wall. She could stand, cross the room, and reach the door; she could not use either hand properly, nor move without the constant scrape of hemp against skin. That, she observed, meant they preferred her inconvenienced to maimed.

It was a narrow distinction.

She sat up slowly. Her head ached where the sack had pressed her hairpins against her scalp. She reached up. Her pins were gone. So were the combs. Part of her hair had loosened in the night and lay against her neck; the rest clung in a spoiled twist that pulled whenever she moved. Someone had searched her while she slept.

The shuttered casement stood too high for her to reach without dragging the pallet beneath it, and the pallet was too low to promise much advantage. The door had been made of old planks, thick and badly planed, with a narrow hatch cut into the upper part. The hatch was shut. A line of light showed where it did not quite meet the frame.

Elizabeth tested the knot at her wrists with her teeth and gained only a taste of hemp and dust. She stood very still until the first wave of despair had passed.

A foolish heroine in one of Lydia’s admired horrid novels would have sunk upon the pallet and expired becomingly. Elizabeth had never seen the advantage of expiring where there was bread within reach.

She crossed to the pail and attended to necessity with as much dignity as a locked room permitted. When it was done, she washed her fingers from the basin, though the water had already taken the taste of the room. She drank next—three careful swallows. She waited to see whether her stomach would revolt.

It did not.

She took two more.

The bread lay hard upon the stool. Yesterday she had despised it. This morning she broke it, found it coarse and stale, and ate every crumb she could manage. Strength, she told herself, had never yet been improved by disgust.

When she had finished, she sat upon the pallet and listened.

At first there was little to hear. A bird scratched at the thatch. Somewhere outside, a horse stamped and blew through its nose. The cottage creaked once as the day warmed its old timbers. Then came a man’s step across the yard: light, irregular, familiar enough to make her hands close in her lap.

Mr Wickham.

Another step followed, heavier and slower. Mr Kerr.

Elizabeth slipped from the pallet and moved as near the door as her bound hands and care allowed. The lower plank was warped; between it and the sill ran a narrow darkness where sound entered better than light. She lowered herself to the straw, turned her cheek from the dust, and listened.

“You must not smile when you leave it for him,” Kerr said.