The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy Read Online Free PDF Page A

age; a flighty pair they were, in her opinion, with never a thought for anyone except themselves.
    Mr. Barcombe was a pleasant enough gentleman, though; maybe it was a pity that Miss Alethea hadn’t spoken to him. Mind you, given what Betty said, he might not have stood up against the strictures of his wife, even if he had believed Miss Alethea. Husbands and wives all had their ways, and no two marriages alike, that was what Ma always said. Most of any husband’s ways made a woman’s life a misery, in Figgins’s opinion. If it wasn’t blows and cuffs, then it was harsh words, and one almost as bad as the other to a young woman like Miss Alethea.
    No, Miss Alethea was in the right of it, for all that running away from the home of your lawful, wedded husband would be considered a great wickedness. She had no choice but to flee, and if it was madness to reckon on dressing up as a man and going abroad, setting sail to foreign parts, which only the freedom of the male would allow her to do, then let them both be mad and how she prayed that it would answer.
    They made a pretty enough pair of men, she thought, glancing at Alethea, who was sitting back on the squabs, her long legs in their pantaloons and boots stretched out before her, such female shape as she had left after all the weight she’d lost being married to that monster well disguised by the well-cut coat and folds of a neck cloth.
    As for herself, she’d always been thin. Scrawny, like a chicken, her brothers used to say, and also that no man would want to marry her, and wake up to find themselves cuddling an armful of bones. Very well, but now that she was clad in the unobtrusive, sober clothes of a manservant, no one would give her a second glance, or doubt for a moment that she was what she appeared to be.
    The tale of what Miss Alethea had said to her sister, relayed to Figgins in breathless tones by a round-eyed Betty, had galvanised Figgins into action. She recklessly gave in her notice to Lady Fanny, first having filched some notepaper to write herself a character. Then she’d tipped her savings out of the cotton stocking tucked into her mattress and had made her way to Bedfordshire, getting a lift on a wagon as far as Butley and then walking towards the small hamlet of Tyrrwhit.
    She had no definite plan in mind; all she wanted was to get near enough to Miss Alethea, by some means or other, and to be able to talk to her. Mind you, it wasn’t going to be easy, not if Betty hadn’t been exaggerating about the way Napier kept an eye on her.
    She was in luck, however. Walking along the grassy path that led to Tyrrwhit, she had met a sobbing girl coming the other way. Common humanity, apart from insatiable nosiness as to what her fellow human beings were up to, made her stop and offer comfort and find out why the girl was in such a state.
    Turned off by Napier, this Meg Jenkins had been; well, Figgins knew all about that. Without a character, and her only fifteen, and, the girl said between hiccoughs, she’d never agree to what Mr. Napier wanted to do with her, she’d sooner rot in hell for ever and ever, and what was she to do? Her da would never take her back into his house now she’d been turned off.
    That this was the reward for refusing to let your master have his way with you didn’t surprise Figgins in the least.
    â€œAnd that awful Mrs. Gillingham, as is Mr. Napier’s fancy piece, she was that rude to me, saying I was a silly, prudish miss who didn’t know which side my bread was buttered.”
    Figgins’s interest quickened. “Fancy piece?”
    â€œShe’s his mistress, has been for years, the others say, and they laugh at poor Mrs. Napier for having to put up with having such a woman as a guest under her own roof.”
    Laugh, did they? “What are you going to do?”
    The girl was intending to walk to London and seek employment there, as a maid in a respectable house.