by Jo Baker
When the footman came back, he held out a little letter, folded and sealed in a slapdash fashion, the direction written in a scruffy hand.
“I do hope there is a reply to the reply,” he said.
Sarah did not know what to say to that. She bobbed a curtsey, and she fled.
“So he’s not coming?”
“He won’t even be at home at all!” Eyes wide at the thrilling news: “He’s going to London!”
And at the drop of a hat, as though it were something and nothing, as though it were a thing one might do every day!
“He’s fetching some people back for the ball.”
“Gallivanting about!” Mrs. Hill tutted, resumed her darning. “And I’ve already ordered the beef.”
“Oh, the Bingleys do have good money for gallivanting,” Polly said. “Everybody says so. I heard their old daddy was in sugar.”
“And there’s a fair deal of money to be found in sugar.”
James was cleaning the cutlery; Sarah should be grateful, since it saved her doing it. But it felt like a slight: was her work no longer considered up-to-scratch, that the new man was required to do it for her?
“It must be a very profitable trade,” Mrs. Hill said. “We can’t seem to do without the stuff.”
“I would love to be in sugar,” sighed Polly. “Imagine!”
“You’d go sailing out”—James traced a triangle in the air with a fork—“loaded to the gunwales with English guns and ironware. You’d follow the trade-winds south to Africa—”
Polly smiled excitedly at this. But then she blinked. “What’s ironware?”
“Shackles and chains, pots, knives,” James said. “In Africa, you can trade all that, and guns, for people; you load them up in your hold, and you ship them off to the West Indies, and trade them there for sugar, and then you ship the sugar back home to England. The Triangular Trade, they call it. I dare say the Bingleys will be out of Liverpool, or Lancaster, since it’s said that they hail from the North.”
“I didn’t know they paid for sugar that way,” said Polly, shuffling her chair forward at the table.
“What way?”
“With people.”
“Well,” he said, and rubbed at the fork, and gave a little shrug. “They do.”
“You seem to know a good deal about it.”
He glanced up at Sarah, who had said this. He shrugged again. “I read a book.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Why not?”
“It just seems unlikely.”
“Why would it seem unlikely?”
“Just, it doesn’t sound like you.”
“What? That I might read?”
“Well—”
The feel of things had changed, Polly noticed, though she could not quite understand why, since it had all been going so swimmingly just moments before. James and Sarah’s voices shuttled back and forth, Polly’s attention darting between them; Mrs. Hill’s hands had fallen still, her needle tucked through the loops of worn thread; Polly saw her glance at Mr. Hill, saw Mr. Hill raise his bristling eyebrows back at her.
“So you just assumed me to be ignorant.”
“No, but—”
“But it never occurred to you that I might read more widely than, say, you, for example?”
“I read all the time! Don’t I, Mrs. Hill?”
The housekeeper nodded sagely.
“Mr. B. allows me his books, and his newspaper, and Miss Elizabeth always gives me whatever novel she has borrowed from the circulating library.”
“Of course, yes. Miss Elizabeth’s novels. I’m sure they are very nice.”
She set her jaw, eyes narrowed. Then she turned to Mrs. Hill.
“They have a black man at Netherfield, did you know?” she announced triumphantly. “I was talking to him today.”
James paused in his work, then tilted his head, and got on with his polishing.
“Well,” said Mrs. Hill. “I expect Mrs. Nicholls needs all the help that she can get.”
“But to think,” said Polly, anxious to return to the earlier ease, “all of that loveliness, all that money, and all of it comes from sugar; I bet they have peppermint plasterwork, and barley-sugar columns, and all their floors are made of polished toffee, and their sofas are all scattered with marchpane cushions.”
“The columns are just the local stone, I am sorry to inform you.” Sarah lifted up her sewing, picked at the stray loops. “As for the cushions, I cannot say. But marchpane would get rather sticky by the fire.”
Polly nodded, smiled dreamily, swallowing her spit.
“If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at Netherfield,” said Mrs. Bennet to her husband, “and all the others equally well married, I shall have nothing to wish for.”
“Here’s your dress, miss.”
Elizabeth looked round, her lips parting in that beautiful smile. And it was a beautiful dress, a dress to make you smile. Delicate muslin dyed duck-egg blue, which would set off the young lady’s complexion perfectly. Sarah carried it through the doorway, and laid it down on Jane and Elizabeth’s bed like a swooning girl.
Jane was already hooked into her evening-gown, standing carefully at a distance from the fire, so as not to scorch the fine muslin, and doing nothing, not even sitting down, so as not to crush it. Her hair was already dressed in neat, smooth bands and plaits; her expression was mild and revealed little of her inner workings. The main thing about Jane was that she could be trusted. She could be trusted not to spoil a gown, not to nag, not to scold, not to require any particular attention. Jane’s composure and self-sufficiency were as balm to Sarah’s frayed nerves. She was as sweet, soothing and undemanding as a baked milk-pudding, and as welcome at the end of an exhausting day.
The younger sisters’ die-straight locks had had to be tormented into ringlets, which wore out Sarah’s hands and everybody’s patience. The smell of hot hair and pomade followed her through the upper rooms and corridors. It was, to Sarah, the smell of resentment: her hands were already blistered from the flat-irons, her feet throbbed in her boots, her back ached; if provoked at all at this stage of preparations, she might even start deliberately burning hair.
Elizabeth’s hair curled naturally, though; it seemed a manifestation of her lively and obliging temperament. She had already pinned it up herself, and affixed a spray of artificial roses to it; she now waited, in shift and stays and petticoat, to be dressed. She raised her arms, exposing the dark musky fluff underneath; Sarah lifted the sheaf of muslin, and dropped it down over the young lady’s head. Between them, they shuffled Elizabeth into the gown, then Sarah plucked the little silky buttons, on the inner side of the arm, through their buttonholes. Elizabeth winced.
“Did that pinch?”
“A little.”
“Sorry.”
Sarah continued working in silence. She bobbed down on her haunches, straightening the hem, then was up again to fit the bodice, tugging the high waist neat beneath the bosom.
“Good?” Elizabeth asked.
Sarah nodded.
Elizabeth shuffled cautiously around, so that Sarah could settle her bodice there, and fasten the row of tiny covered buttons that ran up between the shoulder blades.
“Are we done?”
Skirts rustling, Elizabeth moved towards the dressing table, to see herself in the mirror. Sarah followed her, smoothed the dress’s yoke onto china collarbones, using only her left hand, so as not to risk staining the muslin. On her right, a blister had burst and was weeping.
“You look very lovely, Miss Elizabeth.”
“All your hard work, Sarah, dear.”
Sarah smiled and shook her head. Even to her long-accustomed gaze, Elizabeth was genuinely compelling: if she was in the room, you knew you were wasting your time if you looked anywhere else but at her.
“Though it is a shame for you, Sarah, dressing us up and not going anywhere yourself. And you are always so uncomplaining.”
Sarah shrug
ged; it did not do to talk about it. She could not go to their ball, no more than she could attend a mermaids’ tea-party; but still she felt herself get blinky, her nose tickling. She turned away.
“Do you ever get to go to a dance, Sarah, dear?”
It was Jane who had spoken, revealing the gentle stirrings of her mind.
“Once in a while, miss.”
“And what do you wear when you go?” Elizabeth asked.
“Whatever I have that’s best.”
Which was never very good, but then who was to notice, at those dances on the village green? The farmhands lumbering in their Sunday jackets, the church players sawing on fiddles and puffing their fifes and battering at their tambours. And Polly going feral, haring around with a pack of village children in games that Sarah was now too old to play, and Mr. Hill getting quietly drunk and having to be half carried home. And on the way home, the dairymaids giggling in the hedgerows with the lads, and Mrs. Hill barking, Eyes dead ahead, miss, eyes dead ahead, in case Sarah saw something that she shouldn’t see, though she had seen the bull at it with the heifers, and the boar with the sow, and so had a fair idea of what they were about.
“She shall have a new dress for the next one, I think, don’t you, Elizabeth?” Jane was moving towards the closet. “Shall we see—”
“Miss, that would be …” Such a delight that she couldn’t even finish her sentence. Maybe the footman would come from Netherfield to the next village dance; maybe he would ask her to dance with him. Mr. Smith might even be obliged to notice her then, dancing with a handsome man, in a new dress, on the village green.
“By some miracle of my mother’s devising,” Elizabeth now said, “we each have a new gown at the same time, so no one is clamouring for hand-me-downs, and you may have your pick.”
Jane lifted out an old evening-gown, in oyster-coloured satin, and laid it on the bed. Low-necked, short-sleeved. Elizabeth went to join her, shook her head.
“Or there’s this …”
An oak-leaf-print pelisse, in twilled silk, to wear indoors on cool evenings.
“She’s better with something less …” Elizabeth turned towards the closet, frowning. “A day-dress perhaps, simpler, I think, for village dances on the green.”
She lifted out a sprigged poplin day-dress, with long sleeves and a high neckline. The pattern was a repeat of green stems and tiny claret rosebuds on a cream background. Sarah had cut and stitched the stuff two summers ago, it was lovely then, and was pretty still; through every washing, every mangling and ironing, she had adored it. Then Elizabeth laid a sage-green tea-gown beside the poplin; it was trimmed with white velvet ribbon; you had to unpick the ribbon every time you washed it, to keep the dye from bleeding into the velvet.
“Here,” Elizabeth said, “whichever you prefer.”
“Really?”
“But just the one, or we shall have Polly in a sulk,” Jane said. “And none of ours will fit her yet.”
“She’d have to persuade Kitty or Lydia to give up a frock.”
Jane smiled. “Lydia would.”
“Lyddie would give anyone anything, just for the asking.”
From Mary’s room came the sound of the pianoforte, a rill of scales and arpeggios, and the muffled laughter of the youngest girls in their room across the landing. Quietly, Sarah lifted the sprigged poplin and laid it over her arm, and bobbed a curtsey, and said thank you, before anyone could change their mind. The pleasure of its acquisition made her breathless.
Elizabeth nodded to a book on the dresser. “And you might like to borrow that.”
Sarah tilted her head to look at the spine. Pamela, she read.
Then, dressed and coiffed and beautiful, Elizabeth and Jane wished her a good evening. They wafted out of the room and clipped softly down the stairs. Sarah laid her new gown reverentially down on the bed; she tidied away the brushes and combs, the spilt pins and ribbons. She smoothed the rumpled counterpane. The room was dull now, and meaningless, with the young ladies gone from it. They were both lovely, almost luminous. And Sarah was, she knew, as she slipped along the servants’ corridor, and then up the stairs to the attic to hang her new dress on the rail, just one of the many shadows that ebbed and tugged at the edges of the light.
In the kitchen, Mr. Smith leaned by the fire and chewed an apple, looking stiff in his livery. He caught Sarah’s eye, and looked away, and crunched again.
“Where’s missus?” she asked.
He swallowed, spoke: “Upstairs with madam.”
So Sarah went straight through the kitchen and down into the dim blue scullery, where Polly was sitting on the duckboard, legs stretched out in front of her, boots at odd angles, back against the wall. Sarah slid down and sat beside her. It was their mutual secret: this spot was unfrequented at certain busy times, and so here they could snatch moments of respite.
“Do you ever think,” Sarah asked, “that it would be good if there was somewhere else you could go?”
Polly raised her eyebrows, lifted a finger to her lips: from the kitchen they heard Mrs. Hill’s voice, Mr. Smith’s reply; she had come back, and was asking where the girls were.
Sarah dropped her voice, whispered, “That’s what I mean: somewhere you could just be, and not always be obliged to do. Somewhere where you could be alone, and nobody wants or expects anything of you, just for a while, at least.”
Polly wriggled her narrow shoulders against the bare brick; it was the chimney wall—on the other side the kitchen range flared and sparked—and so was dry and warm.
“Stop moaning and shut up,” she said. “Someone will hear you.”
Polly had herself come through a frozen January night in a basket on a farmer’s doorstep, then the precarious neglect of a parish wet-nurse, and a few rough and hungry years in the poorhouse, and she had come through all of it alone; she had survived, it seemed to Sarah, simply by failing to notice how unlikely it was that she should. It also meant that Polly did not possess the capacity for nostalgia, wishful thinking or regret; it was not worth trying to solicit her sympathy in this, because to her this was as good as things ever got, and were ever likely to: there were no golden memories for her.
Sarah, though, could still summon her ghosts, blurred with summer sun and dim with shadow: chickens scuffing at the cottage door beside a little boy who was still unbreeched and smelt of piss and milk; of the woman in a red dress who had whisked her off her feet and kissed her; of a man who sat indoors over a shuddering loom, a book balanced on the frame, and got up from his seat so stiffly in the dark; of lying in her box bed, her brother curled warm and damp beside her, listening to her parents’ voices in the night, weaving back and forth, holding the whole world together.
Happiness was a possibility for Sarah; she had a fair idea of what she missed.
The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole family.
Candlelight spilt out of the front door, making a warm pool in the blue moonlight. Mr. Bennet stood on the threshold, a shawl over his powdering gown, to see his family off. James, seated up on the carriage box, lifted his hat to his new master, who gave him a gentlemanly nod in reply; Mr. Hill was handing the ladies into the coach; their gowns frothed up over the doorsill like breaking waves.
Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids waited on the gravel, as was expected, to watch the ladies leave; the older woman’s expression was benign and fond, Polly bounced on the spot to keep warm, and Sarah, with her wrecked hands tucked under her armpits, was looking off into the moonlit night, a frown creasing her forehead.
“Don’t they look lovely!” Mrs. Hill said. “My beautiful girls!”
Mr. Hill clapped the carriage door shut, and stepped away. And now it was up to James.
James clicked his tongue, flicked the reins, and the horses stirred themselves. There was that moment’s pause as the slackness in the tack was taken up, and then the tug into movement, gravel crunching under wheels, the carriage lamp swinging, and from inside one of the girls gave a little
shriek of excitement, and a bubble of conversation swelled, and they were under way.
Sarah did not see it, because she avoided looking at him; and Mrs. Hill did not see it, because she only noticed how fine he looked in his livery; even Mr. Hill did not remark upon it, and he tended to be on the lookout for shortcomings; but James was all too aware of how his hands shook, and that the trembling would be communicated down the reins, all the way to the delicate flesh of the horses’ mouths, and could make them all skittish and jumpy.
But they knew the way better than he did, so he let them get on with it, enjoying the comfortable sway of the carriage, and intervening only so as to keep them on the left, in case something brisker than their own conveyance might thunder through. And the horses, sensing they were trusted, held their heads high, picked up their feet smartly; and Jane, inside the coach, said to her mother what a capable young fellow James had turned out to be, and Mrs. Bennet agreed that the ride was both brisk and comfortable, much more so than when old Mr. Hill had driven them about.
James turned up his greatcoat collar, and tugged his sleeves down over his hands, and gazed out at the silvered landscape, at the soft slopes, dark copses, the fields studded with sheep. Everything seemed clean and clear and fresh. James smelt the spearmint growing in the wet ditch, and the sweetness of a hay barn as they passed, and these were, he realized, the old scents of home.
Below him, the ladies’ voices twittered; the carriage was a cage filled with pretty birds. How could he ever show sufficient care? How could he ever repay the trust that that good man had placed in him? Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind. He would do nothing to risk the loss of this. He would keep his head down, draw no attention to himself. He would not even look at Sarah, for all she was so very good to look at.