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“I’ll not dine on their purses, Lydia,” her mother said, eyeing the officers suspiciously.

“You remember Denny and Carter, do you not? I fear you’ve offended them greatly.”

“Let them be offended,” her mother said with a wave. “They’re officers on half-pay, and the war’s over.”

The same could be said of her husband, but heaven forfend anyone say a word against George Wickham in her mother’s hearing. “I spotted a walk beside a stream. Let us adjourn there,” said Lydia, jaw tight.

All three of her men watched guardedly, torn between swooping in and ending this disaster and giving Lydia a chance to settle it herself. At a nod, they hung back and found themselves very interested in the horses in the yard, which offered a pleasant prospect over the walkway Lydia had selected.

This was a charming village bisected by a burbling brook, all manner of wildflowers growing on the banks. Beside her, Lydia’s mother burbled in close harmony. “Then Lizzy’s littlest had a cough, and you know how that is. Well, I suppose you don’t, being the youngest and only one of your sisters to not have birthed a child.”

Ahead, there was a stone bridge just large enough for a cart and horse to cross. It had the look of a painted scene of the sort ladies might select for a sitting room.

“Oh, but my poor nerves have been out of sorts since I heard from Kitty. As you know—”

“What brings you to these parts, Mama?” Lydia asked. It might unleash a deluge, but she needed to know, couldn’t bear waiting.

Mrs. Bennet came up short, her face blank. Perhaps she might not recall what had made her take to the roads she professed to hate. Traveling what must have been days to track down a daughter she visited only occasionally while stationed at nearby Meryton.

“It’s the strangest thing, impossible, I think. My sister wrote to me and claimed to have seen you in Brighton. When I spotted Wickham in the neighborhood the next day, he said he knew nothing of the sort.”

“Did he now?” replied Lydia, her voice flat. So her parents had both decided, independent of each other, to descend on their merry party.

“I thought to myself: ‘That’s unlike our dear Wickham to allow Lydia to run about without him!’ You should have made your friends invite him, too! He’s very popular with the other officers.”

Lydia weighed her options. It would be best to hear her mother’s woes and pack her into the return mail coach so they might carry on to the seclusion of Denny’s country house. Surely they’d have encountered enough of her family to earn some peace.

“I’m afraid he did not wish to come to Brighton, Mama.”

“Not wish to come to Brighton?” Mrs. Bennet asked, aghast at the idea. “Our Wickham? He so enjoys his diversions. One can hardly believe it, especially since he set out for the coast immediately.”

Of all the things. Would she be plagued by her relatives from one end of England to the other? How was their little party ever to make merry if Wickham was expected behind every hedge? “Believe it.”

“I fear you have done him a great ill,” her mother started, nearly tripping over a hedgehog as she worked herself into a lather. “Few men would be so kind as to allow you to traipse about with other officers and a curiously turned-out chaperone. Anyone but Wickham might be jealous. And after he’s been so understanding about keeping away when Lizzy’s husband visits Longbourn.”

It wasn’t so much a laugh as a huff that escaped her. Lydia had a hand at her waist as she attempted to keep her reaction in check. George stayed away from her girlhood home because Fitzwilliam Darcy was the only man who could reliably terrify him into an approximation of good behavior.

“I’ll not hear giggling from you when I am giving good counsel,” Mama cried. “It is unclear what has taken you away from Meryton, but I’ve secured two seats inside the mail coach, and we’ll be on our way this same day. I’ll not have one of my daughters haring about the country without her husband.”

If she knew the whole of it, her mother would shriek about the scandal.

“You didn’t mind when I traveled about with friends before my marriage.”

“What’s that? You had yet to secure a husband then. You have one now, and he’ll be waiting for you at home.”

“So you did not have a care for my reputation when I was a girl because it might earn me a husband.”

Mrs. Bennet looked over Lydia with an appraising eye. “Did my machinations not result in exactly what you wanted?”

The wind must have turned chilly. It couldn’t be an effect of seeing her mother’s calculations with clear eyes and the advantage of age.

“So you let Wickham have me.”

“Well, someone needed to take you, else you’d be living in poverty or on the charity of your sisters when your father dies, and I know how you’d despise both. You like ribbons too much to count your shillings for the occasional tea and sugar. Your elder sisters might have secured posts as governesses, but you younger girls…” Mama sighed and looked quite pleased with herself. She hummed a popular tune and squinted at a bird overhead.

“It was about ribbons?” asked Lydia. “That’s why you did not convince me to moderate my behavior?”

“Oh, Lydia, would you have been able to restrain yourself had I brought lectures down on your head? Don’t be silly.”