Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens

Elizabeth was annoyed. She shouldn’t be feeling like this on the day of the Midsummer Ball. It should be a jolly occasion, with lashings of good humour and merriment, but at the present moment, she felt neither good humoured nor the slightest bit merry. What was worse, she wasn’t even sure why it was that she felt like this.

In the old days when she’d felt out of sorts, she would simply have poured her heart out to Jane. But Jane was tied up with Charlie’s financial complications and wasn’t coming to the Ball this year. Mary was … well, she had lost touch with Mary lately – not that she had ever been much help in this type of circumstance anyway. Besides, Jane had hinted that all was not well with her either.

As for Kitty, the least said about her the better. This year’s invitation to the Ball had gone unanswered until the arrival of a bow-tied messenger running up the drive the previous afternoon. Elizabeth had groaned at the sight of him, wondering how much Kitty was spending on tux’d messages. She knew that all the young girls were obsessed with them, but they were hideously expensive, even when you paid for them in a monthly bundle. The message was almost unintelligible anyway:

“CANT DO BALL TOMOZ. GOIN 2 MRYTN DNCE W BF CAPT BRIERS HES WELL FIT LOL. SOZ”

Elizabeth read it three times before giving up. Frankly, the only one of them who ever managed to understand Kitty at all was Lydia – and who knew where she was now? Poor Lydia. Would she ever see her again?

Perhaps that was what was distracting her, deep down. For the first time in her life, she was truly alone in the world. She had no sisters to turn to, she had managed to offend her mother and even dear Charlotte was many miles away in Glastonbury, in the company of that dubious Byron fellow. Fitzy, of course, would have been no help to her whatsoever even if he had been behaving normally – and his behaviour at the moment was curious indeed. For one thing, he was presently refusing to take any meals in her company, preferring to stay in his room instead. And he would insist on continually raising the question of his heir in a most unbecoming manner.

Elizabeth looked out of the window and watched the willow trees by the lake swaying backwards and forwards in the breeze and the suddenly realised what it was that was disturbing her.

Tentacles!

Last night she had dreamed again of tentacles. Hundred of slimy tentacles swarming over her, caressing her skin. Oh, where were these frightful nightmares coming from? It had all seemed so real – as if some ghastly alien creature had been lying next to her. This was madness!

She turned away from the window and then she became aware of something that she had failed to notice before – something that chilled her very soul. There were trails of green slime on the bedclothes – trails that were as if they had been made by tentacles swishing back and forth. She almost screamed but managed to stop herself in time: there had to be a sensible explanation for this. Gothic fantasies of monsters in the night were for impressionable girls like Kitty and Lydia, not for her. Surely she was made of sterner stuff?

But try as she might to dismiss it, in her deepest being she knew that something was wrong. She felt different. Something had happened to her during the night – something unnatural. Something … alien. And the awful truth began to dawn on her that there was only one person who could possibly help her now.

“Oh, Wickham,” she said out loud. “Why on earth did I ever doubt you?”