Page 62 of The Fee Entail

The sight we saw demonstrated that nature had its own malevolent side. The trout stream where Darcy and I had played as boys with… well, I could not even finish that thought. At any rate, the stream overflowed its banks on the rise above the house, and the cascade ran in like a torrent. We could see a stream of debris littering the no longer finely manicured lawns on the high side, and again on the low side before rejoining the stream a few hundred yards away. The bridge I could imagine Elizabeth might love to wander over (not that I had even talked to the woman, but Darcy described her well enough) was long gone. A number of trees were down in the surrounding woods, and one had collapsed close enough that one branch took out a window. One of the walls of the orangery was crushed, and several of the fruit trees seemed damaged.

Darcy looked at the carnage critically, then started my lessons.

“You can see it went through most of the principal rooms. The more valuable paintings are on the first floor, so they should be protected for the moment, but they will have to be dealt with. The statues on the ground floor will be fine, but many of the finer artefacts might be damaged. This stream has never overflowed in living memory, so none of us anticipated it. Most of the furniture is stout wood and will need to be dealt with, but can be recovered, though the upholstery will be ruined. The rugs and wallpaper will be beyond hope, but the most pressing concern is getting everything, most especially my tenants, dried out. The damp will do serious damage if left unchecked.”

I asked a few questions about the extent of the damage, and he explained how we would need to worry about rot, mould, and mildew in tedious detail. The house would be seriously damaged, and the tenants could fall to disease. The damp was our most important and pressing concern.

“It is just like a battle wound,” he said as we pushed the plough horses into motion. “Leave it to its own devices, and you lose the leg. Tackle it straightaway, and there is some chance of saving it. You know as well as I do that the same wound you are whingeing about would have cost you at least your leg in battle, and more likely your life.”

Every once in a while, my cousin made some sense.

He sighed. “Now is when we show our mettle. Now we pay the price for our privileges. Every tenant, every child, every shopkeeper in this area is my responsibility. We must see to their needs first, then we must see to Pemberley.”

We carefully picked our way down to the house to begin the task.

Mrs Reynolds was waiting for us when we arrived, along with the butler, Thompson, and the steward, Foster.

“Well met, Mr Darcy, Colonel.”

Darcy smiled at Mrs Reynolds in greeting. She had been practically a mother to him when he was younger, and still looked at him with a fond eye.

“Good day, Mrs Reynolds. How fare things?”

He nodded to the two men as well, but they neither expected nor particularly desired more effusive greetings.

“I shall let Mr Foster tell you of the tenants’ cottages. Four were destroyed, and six more damaged. This storm was particularly malevolent, as you see. The damage to Pemberley is as you no doubt surmised from the overlook. Inside, I think you shall find things neither better nor worse than your perusal would suggest.”

I always loved Mrs Reynolds: sort of a cross between a mother and a sergeant. If boys needed ears boxed, she was the one for the job, unless of course you were at Rosings, where Mrs Hewes was ideal. When things were going well, she was the most pleasant woman in the world, but when things were difficult, she was a force of nature.

“We placed some of the tenants with others for the moment, and filled the inns in Lambton and Kympton with some of the other families, as you would have instructed had you been here. The numbers were too big, so we placed a dozen older folks in the guest rooms on the first floor.”

Darcy nodded as if having tenants in his guest rooms was an everyday occurrence, and I had to admit it was much of an improvement over having Bingley’s sisters, so perhaps the storm was not so terrible in the end.

Foster outlined in precise and quick detail exactly which cottages were damaged, which streams were still a danger, and which direction we would be riding at first light. Good man, that Foster, and I saw once again how Darcy showed him the respect of his position and judgement. Darcy would have to make a number of decisions, but he had no room to complain of what had been done in his absence.

At long last, we climbed up to the family wing to our thankfully damp but mostly undamaged rooms, and I finally had the pleasure of sinking into a hot bath, eating some supper from a tray Mrs Reynolds had the foresight to send up, and collapsing into bed.

On the morrow, I imagined, all talk of the lovely Miss Lucas would be superseded by the things I needed to learn to actually be worthy of her, so perhaps Darcy was right. I just had to trust my sisters, and that thought, oddly enough, sent me into the best sleep I had enjoyed in years.

Dreams

Elizabeth

The hallucinations were the worst. That is not to disparage the sheer awfulness of the pain or the fever-dreams or what felt like being thrashed or stamped by horses; but the hallucinations were the very worst part of the ordeal. I had no true concept of time during the stretch I was away. I may have lain in complete indifference for the entire few months, then suffered every circle of Hell within five minutes that stretched to eternity; or perhaps, all the pain and terror happened that first night lying on the floor in the parsonage and the rest was all restful, blissful sleep. I shall never know, and I doubt I will ever truly remember all the details of the pain and the dreams, but I remember enough.

My family tells me I lay thrashing and burning up with fever for three or four weeks while Anne did the same. Anne now says she spent that time in quiet and not-so-quiet negotiations with the Reaper. Perhaps that is the case, and he divided his time equally between us because we were so conveniently located in the same county and wounded with the same weapon. At the time, we were a half-mile apart, and from what I was later told, it is fortunate we can still traverse the path, since Fitzwilliam practically turned it into a ditch a yard deep pacing back and forth between the two.

The nightmares that either happened during the fever or perhaps another time were truly horrible; but I cannot begin to judge one versus the other for sheer terror. One time, Collins was swinging the fire iron and killed every single person at that supper before finally walking away, leaving me staring in horror at the corpses. Another time, he hit me again and again and again and again while I felt the pain of every single blow in great detail, but I could not succumb to death or even to unconsciousness. Another time, he would use an axe or a tree branch or a woodsman’s saw. Another time, he burnt the parsonage to the ground with all of us inside, and I had to watch the destruction of my family yet still lived. Another time, he gave me one of his long-winded lectures on how he truly appreciated my intelligence and my fortitude and my cleverness but mostly was enamoured with my ability to choose suitable weapons for him. The discussion droned on for hours in his nasal voice, with him repeating the same thing over and over and over and over, then he finally left to go show the poker to his noble patroness and ask her opinion of its cost and which of the chimneys at Rosings might supply something even deadlier.

All these and more haunted my rest. In one dream, I was in bed, completely unable to move when he came to have his way with me as I lay kicking, screaming, or crying, depending on the dream. Even worse was the one where I was lying there welcoming him with open arms and a look of love and adoration, or at least a look of acceptance of my duty. I would have woken up screaming and crying from that one if I could, but alas, I could only repeat it and suffer.

I can remember one dream where I was lying on the bed with a smile of acceptance, and perhaps even happiness or even passion, but the man was Fitzwilliam. That one just left me perplexed. I certainly did not hate the man as I had, or like I still hated Mr Collins, but why him, not one of my more amiable acquaintances? However, at that point, I was willing to accept any fever dream that did not include Collins, so I dwelled on that one and its perplexity as long as I could, fearing what might come next; and frankly, I welcomed it the next time it came, and the next. Perplexity beats terror.

Mixed in the dream were the hallucinations. It may seem like quibbling, since a dream and a hallucination are really the same thing, but they were very different experiences. Dreams were a matter of sights and sounds and pain and terror and screaming… ever so much screaming. Nobody could ever scream like I did in those dreams without hacking their very lungs out of their throat.

The hallucinations included feelings that were not pain, and sometimes smells or sounds of other people. They would have been very comforting, but they were all incongruous, all clearly impossible, and they made me fear my grip on sanity. Fever dreams have been described many times by many people worthier than I for the task, so they were easy enough to understand. You are sick, you have a fever, fever dreams come, and you either succumb or you die. The dream does not tear away your very soul, because it is just the fever talking, and no matter how terrible, it is something else that is attacking while you defend.

The hallucinations made me feel I was losing my mind entirely, losing the part of myself that made me ‘ME’. The woman who had chosen such an awful weapon and left it within reach of a madman was a silly and careless woman, but she was me. The woman who had danced with a man who despised her or berated the most powerful man she had ever met for his duty was me. The woman who nearly got two relatives of the two most powerful people she knew killed was me. The woman engaged in the worst inheritance scheme in history was me. That woman may or may not have been worthy, may or may not have been intelligent or clever, may or may not have been honourable; but she was me, and I could accept her so long as I could identify her. The hallucinations made me feel I might awaken as someone who was not me, who had lost something essential, who was no longer truly the woman I was; and that terrified me more than any of the fever dreams. It terrified me far worse than death ever could, because many times during the terrors, I felt I would have welcomed the Reaper with open arms.