by Jo Baker
It was Tuesday morning, and Sarah was lugging the swill bucket down to the sty, when she saw a man coming down the field path from the direction of town. She did not recognize him for a moment, and so stopped, and watched him approach, noting first his greatcoat, then tricorn hat and wig, and thinking him a gentleman, though it was strange that a gentleman would go on foot, particularly with the ground so wet and muddy.
But then he looked up—he had been watching where he placed his feet in the cattle-churned ground—and she saw that it was the black footman from Netherfield. And there was she, in her limp dress still patched with hogshit stains, carrying a swill bucket—she’d just keep going, and hope he hadn’t seen her—but then his foot slithered, and stuck fast. He had to pause to pull it from the mud, and for a moment he was teetering, arms flung wide for balance. Their eyes caught, his with a look of alarm, but also laughter—it made her smile. He stumbled up to the stile and was half over when he wobbled. She scrambled to help him, clattering down the pig-bucket to offer him her hand.
“Bless you.” He gripped it in his gloved fingers, and stepped down onto the drier ground of the track.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“I find I have been sadly duped!”
She blinked up at him. He still held her hand.
“I was told it was a much shorter way by the fields. No one mentioned the mud.” He showed her his boots, tilting one and then the other for her inspection. They were very fine, and very filthy. “I expect my friends at Netherfield are laughing heartily at me now.”
“I am sorry, sir.”
“And the beasts! Did you know? Have you seen them? Cows, roaming loose! Without so much as a by-your-leave! Would you credit it? They should be locked up!”
She laughed outright.
He really was astonishingly handsome, she admitted to herself: there was a degree of symmetry to his features that was not often seen; at least not by her. Those liquid eyes. The way they lingered on her made her feel a trifle hot and bewildered.
“What brings you here, sir?” she tried.
“Oh, please don’t ‘sir’ me—”
“Mister.”
He rifled in an inside pocket. “I’ve been sent with a communication,” he said, and made a show of peering at it. “For Miss Bennet.”
“Go on up to the house then, if you will. Everyone is at home.”
She gestured up the track. He bowed smartly, and went.
Swinging the pig-bucket, she strode on down to the sty. He was just a wonderment. His manners, his looks, the way he spoke to her; his colour was no longer a thing of note, compared with the stunning strangeness of all this courtesy. She slopped the peelings and scraps into the trough, and spun away, leaving the pigs to their snuffly munching. She raced back up to the kitchen with the empty bucket banging against her leg.
The new mister was sitting by the fire, and James had already taken the note—a folded and sealed little sheet of hot-pressed paper, very elegant, Mrs. Hill remarked—upstairs, to the noisy delight of the ladies assembled there. The noise and the delight reached them, even in the kitchen; its passage there was facilitated by Polly’s pushing the door open, and leaning on the threshold, the better to hear what was being said. Jane was invited to dinner at Netherfield! Unlucky that Mr. Bingley was dining out with the officers, but still; this was a very good thing indeed, that his sisters were keen to show her such particular attention.
“Can I have the carriage?” This was Jane.
“No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems likely to rain; and then you must stay all night.”
The mister crossed his legs, and his boot shed a clump of mud on the hearth. Mrs. Hill gave him an equally dirty look.
“I am,” he announced, “awaiting a reply.”
He looked around him in an interested kind of way, taking in the kitchen and its appurtenances with the benign air of a person of some substance visiting the poor, to assess what relief they might be granted.
“Pleasant little place, this,” he observed.
Sarah, having seen the Netherfield kitchen, felt the undertow of condescension, but also that what he said was kindly meant.
Then James returned with a note, written on the best paper the household could supply. He offered it to the footman, who took it, thanked him handsomely, and stood to stow it away in an inner pocket.
Sarah saw the place, and them all, as he must see them. It was so small and mean and poor, compared with Netherfield. The dark cramped kitchen, Polly staring like a frog, Mrs. Hill brusque to the point of rudeness, James stiff and formal and distant, and she herself a bundle of sticks wrapped in an old rag. What impression they must make, the shambling lot of them. Fortunately Mr. Hill was elsewhere, so they were at least spared his tooth-sucking and his scowls.
With another glance down at his muddied boots, and a wry smile at Sarah, he buttoned up his coat, which he hadn’t taken off, and set his hat down on top of his wig.
“Back out into the mire,” he said. “Au revoir, then.”
“Goodbye.”
Mrs. Hill’s jaw shut tight like a trap; she did not so much as glance at him.
Sarah wanted to say something to him, to explain, to excuse. She wanted to tell him that she thought that he was lovely, and that she was very sorry they were not lovelier themselves. But she just bobbed her curtsey, and when he had left the kitchen, she leaned at the doorjamb, staring out after him. Mrs. Hill, scraping a vanilla pod into the cooling custard, watched her watching.
“Fancy the Bingleys keeping a mulatto as a servant,” the housekeeper said. “I wonder what Mrs. Nicholls makes of that.”
“Perhaps they couldn’t get an ordinary man,” said Polly.
“I hear it’s quite the fashion,” Mrs. Hill said. “Though I’m not sure I would care for it myself.”
“I think he’s lovely.”
Mrs. Hill glared at Sarah’s heedless back, then blew a puff of breath up her face. “You wouldn’t know what a man like that would get up to. You don’t know what kind of grudges he would be holding. You wouldn’t feel safe in your bed.”
Then James, who had been silent all this time, came and stood beside Sarah in the doorway. He stayed there a long moment without saying anything. And then he said, “It is coming on to rain.”
… several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.
It rained hard. It bounced off the flagstones, bumbled down the gutters, juddered out of the down-spouts. The women sat inside over their sewing. James mended the links on an old bridle. Mr. Hill hid in his pantry, cleaning glassware, and picking his remaining teeth with a long fingernail.
“Course, Jane might have beat the weather.” Polly let her darning fall to her lap. “She might be safe and dry. She might have galloped all the way to Netherfield.”
Silence between them, and the rain hissing down. Whether wet or dry, Jane would not be returning home tonight.
“I’ll take you for a ride one day, if you like, Pol?”
She grinned. She did not mind being called Pol if it was James who called her it.
“Not a gallop, mind, I don’t think the old girl’s quite up to it.”
And the footman—she had not yet thought to ask his name—Sarah wondered: would he have got back to Netherfield in time, or would he be soaked through to his barley-malt skin?
The rain continued all evening without a break. It was still hammering down when the servants retired for the night. James had to dash across the yard with a sack over his shoulders and head, to keep off the worst of the water. He could have gone to his room earlier, and read quietly there, since he had his own allowance of candles; instead he kept to the closeness and company of the kitchen. Today had seen something of an awakening: a quiet, unshared revelation. James had seen how the new man from Netherfield had looked at Sarah. He had noticed, too, how she had looked at him. An
d all of this gave James an unsteady feeling, as though the ground beneath him had started to swell and shift like the sea.
He would keep an eye out for her, he told himself, just friendly-like. He owed it to Mr. B. to be alert to anything that might disturb the household’s tranquillity. Which is why he’d sat on with the women when he could have been quietly reading in his room. And there was, he had to admit it, such a pleasure in her proximity. To feel her breathe, to hear the rustle of her skirts, a sweet word or two spoken to little Polly. It was good.
The footman returned the following morning. He was mucked up to the knees, his greatcoat heavy and wet, and his wig limp, its powder running down his coat in milky streams. Sarah had an armful of eggy plates from breakfast, and cast desperately around for some way to be rid of them. Still on the threshold, he took off his hat and shook the water off it. He reached inside his coat, and produced a rather damp-looking letter.
“For Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
James looked from Sarah to the footman and back again. Mr. and Mrs. Hill being occupied elsewhere, the three of them stood alone in the kitchen. It was clearly James’s duty to take the missive up, but then that would leave Sarah alone with the footman.
“Will you take it?” he asked her.
“It’s for you to do, isn’t it?”
James bowed stiffly, took the note and strode off upstairs to the breakfast room, where Mrs. Hill was serving the family their coffee. He waited, fidgeting all the time that it was being read and exclaimed over.
Down in the kitchen, alone with the Netherfield footman now, Sarah said, “Terrible wet, this weather …” and then quailed at her own dullness. Thankfully he did not seem to notice it: he flumped down in the fireside chair, and stretched out his arms and booted feet, to show her the state that he was in.
“This Hertfordshire mud has a will of its own, I’d swear to it. It latches on and climbs. In London,” he said, “with the paving and the arcades, you can go about whatever the weather, it can rain stair-rods and you won’t even get your feet wet.”
“You’re from London, then?”
She handed him a cup of tea. He seemed mildly surprised by it, and glanced around the kitchen, but observing nothing more to his taste, he took the cup.
“I lived there for a time. With the old master, and then the new.”
She sat down opposite, and drew her chair a little closer.
“Tell me; what’s it like?”
He told her about Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, where they performed feats of horsemanship, and juggling and acrobatics. And then about the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, where there was music and dancing. He told her about a beggar that he knew, an acquaintance of his, quite a gentleman, who sang sea shanties and wore a model ship on his head, so that when he danced it was tossed around as though it rode upon a stormy sea.
“And there are fireworks at night, so splendid and noisy that even the old soldiers say they never saw anything like it.”
James returned more swiftly than Sarah could have anticipated.
“Do you wait for a reply?”
“If there is one.”
“Well, there isn’t.”
Buttoning up his greatcoat, the footman was gone with a wink, trudging off out into the grizzling morning. Sarah went to the window to watch him go. It was such a glorious thing, to know that he was around now, that he might wander in at any time, and want to have a cup of tea with her, and tell her about London.
“Miss Jane is ill.”
James said this with more emphasis than it really merited; after all, the young lady had only caught a chill.
He was rewarded with the barest glance.
“She got caught out in the rain like we thought she would, and now has a chill, and is laid up at Netherfield.”
“Oh,” said Sarah.
“So Miss Elizabeth is going to her.”
This was, as far as Sarah was concerned, not the worst news she could have heard. If Jane must be ill, then it was better that she be ill at the Bingleys’ house than at home: they had an army there to care for her, but at Longbourn sickness meant so much extra work to be shared between so few; the sickroom linen, the handkerchiefs, the special drinks and treats and little meals, the running up and down stairs with it all. It was considerate—just like Jane—to be ill away from home.
“All will be well, then,” Sarah said.
For him, the moment stretched like wool on tenters. There must be no slip, no hint, of the trouble she was causing him. The urge to speak, to touch: that must be bitten back and shoved down and locked away tight.
Sarah, on the other hand, was busily burying her guilt about going through his things, by heaping irritation and outrage over it: why could Mr. Smith not take her into his confidence like this new fellow did? Why did not James tell her about all his travels, about where he had come from, and where he had been? He did not volunteer anything, he just remained taciturn and uncivil. No wonder she had misunderstood him. No wonder she had spied …
He drew a breath; she flinched, and looked round.
He just said, “Well.”
And then he left, following the other man out into the rainy yard, and she tutted, and turned away, and went back to her work.
Elizabeth’s departure, once the rain had stopped, caused no particular trouble to anyone below stairs. She just put on her walking shoes and buttoned up her good spencer, threw a cape over it all, and grabbed an umbrella just in case the rain came on again. Such self-sufficiency was to be valued in a person, but seeing her set off down the track, and then climb the stile, Sarah could not help but think that those stockings would be perfectly ruined, and that petticoat would never be the same again, no matter how long she soaked it. You just could not get mud out of pink Persian. Silk was too delicate a cloth to boil.
Neighbours called during the day. Sir William Lucas and his daughter Charlotte sat a while, but they were no trouble either, and did not stay to dinner. Elizabeth was expected back for the meal, but as preparations—and the clock’s hands—advanced and there was still no sign of her, Mrs. Hill began to despair of her returning in time to assist with the eating of the gravy-pie; if only the Lucases had been prevailed upon to remain. At half past four, when the pie was waiting on the kitchen table, and would, if not served promptly, have to be eaten cold, that same mulatto footman of Mr. Bingley’s flung open the kitchen door and stood there letting out the warmth while he scraped the mud off his boots. It seemed he did not find this amusing anymore.
“It is blasted cold out there.”
He had brought a note from Elizabeth this time. She would not, she informed the family, be returning for dinner, but would instead remain at Netherfield to take care of Jane until she was well enough to travel. Elizabeth requested a supply of clothes for them both. On hearing this news—Mr. Bennet reading it aloud over the dinner table for the benefit of the assembled family, and to shame his wife for her recklessness with her eldest daughter’s health—Mrs. Hill set off immediately to pack a bag for the young ladies. Mrs. Bennet followed a little after, once she had finished up her dinner.
She arrived in the girls’ room when Mrs. Hill’s work was almost done, and proceeded to undo it, whisking one gown away to exchange it for another, demanding that Mrs. Hill cease packing and wait while she had a think, and then standing lost in calculation and a drift of clothes as she considered the benefits and disadvantages of each of Jane’s bonnets, gowns, caps and capes. The contents of the valise spilt out like an over-boiling pan.
“No, no, not that gown, for Mr. Bingley saw her in it at the Lucases’, and will think she has not another one as good.”
What Miss Jane would want with chilly evening-gowns or worked muslin or fancy bonnets when she was confined to her room by sickness, or why Mr. Bingley would be expected to concern himself with what she wore, since he would not see her anyway, Mrs. Hill could not imagine, but she was too absorbed in wardrobe mathematics to pay her mistress any real attention: Jane h
ad arrived at Netherfield in a good dinner-dress and cloak, which would have been soaked through; the servants there would have dried them out and sponged off any mud by now, and meanwhile the ladies would have lent her a gown and shawl for the evening, as well as a nightgown on seeing she was to stay the night. So what Jane needed now were nightclothes of her own, a couple of shawls and a good day-dress for when she was able to sit up again. Elizabeth, on the other hand, would have arrived muddy after her walk: she would need a good gown to dine in, a plain day-dress to nurse her sister in, and a pair of decent shoes for around the house, and linen. For all she understood Mrs. Bennet’s eagerness to make a good impression, anything else was just silliness, and would be seen as such by the servants over there.
When Mrs. Bennet turned away, saying she would just find Jane’s dancing shoes, Mrs. Hill slammed the valise shut and buckled it. If she did not get that black dandy out of the kitchen sharpish, who knew what trouble would come of it. He’d have Sarah’s head turned entirely.
At Mrs. Bennet’s outraged glare, she said, “We’d risk spoiling the gowns, ma’am, if we crammed anything more in there.”
Then Mrs. Hill hurried off with her burden, before Mrs. B. could either protest, or congratulate her housekeeper on her good thinking.
The pair of them—Sarah and the mulatto—were facing each other in the chairs by the fire, he stretched out and at his leisure, she leaning forward, hands on knees, eyes bright, her kerchief falling away to reveal rather too much of her bosom. The talk stopped the moment Mrs. Hill came into the kitchen. Sarah looked flushed and far too animated for Mrs. Hill’s liking; the housekeeper strode over and dropped the valise in the footman’s lap. He winced.
“There you go,” she said. “Safe home, now.”
He made charmingly heavy weather of his new burden, pretending to puff and crumple under its weight, shaking his head and tutting in mock outrage. This made Sarah laugh, which seemed to satisfy him; he left, doffing his hat to her. Mrs. Hill closed the door on him; then, hands on hips, she watched Sarah brushing the ashes together on the hearth, swirling them into patterns, heaps, then sweeping them out flat again. The girl’s thoughts were, clearly, not on her work.