by Jo Baker
The following day, Mrs. Hill dispatched Sarah to Meryton with a request for a loaf of good sugar from the grocer. There was not a scrap of the stuff left in the house. She must have it home in time for dinner, as it was needed for the baked apples. Mrs. Hill was very sorry to inconvenience her, but she was obliged to ask the favour. She was far too busy to go herself. And so the girl now would be out of the way, when that fellow next came calling.
“Can I go too?” asked Polly.
“No. I can’t have everyone gadding about. I need you to scrub. Get the rags out, and the cold tea. We’re doing the hall and vestibule floors.”
“Bah,” said Polly. “When Miss Jane marries Mr. Bingley, there’ll be no need to go to Meryton for sugar. We will have mountains of sugar-loaves, we’ll build a house out of it. We’ll bathe in syrup.”
“That,” said Sarah, “would not be very pleasant.”
She took off her apron, and fetched her bonnet, before Mrs. Hill could change her mind.
Sarah, with the ragged old crow of an umbrella folded under her arm, and the old blue pelisse warm on her shoulders, walked out of the kitchen light of heart: this seemed as good as a fête-day. To be out, with nothing but a mile of fresh air ahead of her, with nothing very much to carry and no one to tell her what to do, this was a pleasure indeed. Mrs. Hill wouldn’t notice if a crumb of the sugarloaf went missing. The walk back would be sweetened: the prospect of a dinner she had not made herself, on her return, was really quite delightful.
Her boots were soon heavy and damp, and the left one rubbed a blister on her heel, but the way through the fields was better on foot than the turnpike, where the post-chaises and mail-coaches bowled by, making you throw yourself into the ditch, or risk the pounding hooves, the flying wheels.
The handsome footman—he so dazzled her that she kept on forgetting to ask his name—didn’t like the mud. He was a pretty bird, a parakeet; the weather weighed him down. And if he was a parakeet, then Mr. Smith was a collie-dog: the weather made no impression on him at all, however much cold or dirt or rain was flung at him: his mind and soul were fixed upon the work in hand. And she—well, the weather didn’t bother her that much either way. If you got wet, you’d get dry again. There was no point in complaining in the meantime.
She thought, though, how beautiful those Vauxhall Gardens must be, after the rain.
The footpath joined the riverbank, and followed it into Meryton. The river was fat and full and dimpling; the millpond brimmed and the wheel thundered round on its frothing race.
It was not raining now, but the sky was heavy and low, and it brought a strange dusk to the backstreets; the shadows were bruised and purple, the stones and walls and cobbles a queasy green.
She passed the tannery, with its death-and-dogshit reek, and the blind walls of the poorhouse, where no lights were lit despite the darkness of the day. Back-alleys opened off to left and right, where half-naked children made dams and pools in the gutters and women hunched on their doorsteps under shawls, bundled babies in their arms. The shambles, when she passed them, were deserted, but were filled with their usual miasma of terror, of ammonia-and-blood.
It was so quiet.
She moved on, through the backstreets. It was usually lively and familiar here: the weavers leaning in the doorways, talking politics; the women in a cheerful cluster at the pump. They knew who she was, whose daughter she had been. Today only those who could do no better were out of doors. Today there was just defeated silence, and the drip from patched rooves.
It started to rain again, a drenching haze; she opened her umbrella. On the corner ahead stood one of Meryton’s principal inns, its half-timbered face turned towards the buying and selling of Market Street, its flank towards this damp lane. Round the corner, and she’d be out into the wider, more populated streets. She quickened her pace. She’d go straight to the grocer’s and get the sugar, then she’d call at the apothecary’s and see what report Mr. Jones could give of Jane. And then—she’d brought her own penny with her—she’d buy a bun at the pastry-cook’s and she’d march straight home along the turnpike eating it, and take her chance with the carriages, rather than come back this dark way again.
She came alongside the inn yard. Last time she had passed this way, it had been market day, and the yard had been alive with the come-and-go of farmers with their heavy, gentle horses. But today the space behind the curving lime-washed walls was different: they had been building there. The structure was rough, its unseasoned timbers streaked with damp. It looked like a cowshed. It covered half the yard.
The barracks, Mrs. Bennet had said. They were building barracks for the soldiers.
There was a new sound, too; she noticed it for the first time then. A hum of gathered voices. Men’s voices.
She quickened her pace, umbrella tilted to shield her from their notice. She passed the gateway, and though she could not see, she could feel that something was going on in there. That something was swelling up and ready to burst.
But a few more paces and she would be out into Market Street. She would go to the grocer’s and buy the sugar and talk about the weather and the shocking state of the roads. She didn’t have to look into the yard, where the men were gathered. She would be much better off not looking: they were all the more likely to notice her if she did. But she lifted the umbrella a little, and glanced in.
The yard was made narrow by the new building; it was now little more than a dank alleyway between the raw wood and the boundary wall. Red-coated soldiers were packed tight at the far end, corralled there by some invisible restraint. Not one of them even glanced at her. She kept on walking, though everything seemed to have slowed, every moment seemed to linger; she took a step, and the angle of her sightline shifted, and she saw what it was that kept the men pinned back there, their faces turned aside.
It was at the hitching post, just inside the gateway. It stood between them and her.
Her senses, briefly, could not accommodate the image.
Then it was a pig. A carcass. A great slab of meat waiting to be skinned.
Then her perceptions shifted again, true patterns formed: she saw the shape of human muscle, shoulder blade, a dark slick of hair, the cable-twist of neck.
In the instant that she saw, she looked away, but by then it was too late. The image pressed itself upon her sight like a die into sealing wax. His skin was lurid in the dull light, his cheek hazed with greying stubble and flattened against the dark weathered wood. His eyes were wide and rolling, his jaw clenched. His body, held immobile by the bonds, was fiercely at work: his arm muscles shifted and twisted, his feet trod and braced against the cobbles like a horse’s.
At the end of the yard, the redcoats stirred, muttered; some were very young—one, a boy of perhaps fourteen, looked as if he might cry, but not one of them could turn their gaze towards the shackled man. The crowd shuffled itself, and a man emerged; stripped to his shirtsleeves, coiling a whip in his hand, he did not look at the prisoner either.
She was almost past the gateway now, the rain chill on her cheek, and as she passed, she saw the point to which the men’s attention was fixed; the final point in this web of complicity. A clutch of officers stood to one side of the gateway, lolling by the wall, looking fine and bright in their regimentals. There were one or two of middling age, and a few who were younger. One of them was so smooth-cheeked he could almost have been a girl. He was looking green.
The officers were at their ease, engaged in discussion; the man with the whip, the prisoner, the boys in uniform, all waited on their word.
“Well, Chamberlayne, what d’you say?” This was an older man. “Are you fit for this?”
“Yes, Colonel Forster, sir.” Chamberlayne. This was the smooth-cheeked boy.
“He does look rather queasy.”
“I do not. I just—there was something wrong with that ale.”
“You haven’t got the stomach for something, that’s for sure.”
“Give over, Denny. Twenty l
ashes is not nothing.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, Captain Carter, sir.”
“They need it, you know, Chamberlayne,” said the older man—the colonel. “They’re nothing without discipline. They’re incapable of self-control, and so it falls to us to control them. We would be remiss in our duty if we neglected this. Failure to salute an officer; that’s rank insubordination, that is.”
Now Sarah was beyond the sight of it all, passing along the outside of the long whitewashed wall; she could still hear the voices coming clear through the quiet and the rain.
Chamberlayne’s piping tones again: “If we could but get it over with, I would be quite well.”
“Well then, Sergeant. You heard the officer, and you know your business.”
“Sir.”
She felt it in the air, her skin bristling. A breath’s pause, as the men fell into alignment. Then the whip hissed. The thwack and slice of it.
The prisoner cried out. Sarah pressed a hand to her mouth.
“One,” the sergeant called.
Another hiss and thunk of the whip. The man screamed. Sarah let the umbrella fall aside. She put her hand to the wet stone wall.
Another pause. The lash snapping out again. Another cry.
She was sure she would be sick. She stood there, heart pounding. Twenty? If they went on like that they would kill him. She should go back, put herself between him and the pain; they would have to stop. The whip cracked out again. She closed her eyes, and the darkness swam. The snap; the scream. Again, and again. His cries getting weaker now.
And she just stumbled away, feet tangling in wet skirts, hand tracing the wall, unsteady, the umbrella swinging out to one side, rain in her face.
Soon after Sarah had left, the mulatto (why always him? Did not Mr. Bingley possess a single other footman to send scampering about the countryside?) arrived with another note from Miss Elizabeth.
He chucked Polly under the chin, shook James’s grudging hand, looked around the kitchen with an enquiring air.
“Where’s, um—”
“The skivvy?” Mrs. Hill asked.
“Um, I suppose yes. The pretty chick.”
Mrs. Hill handed Elizabeth’s note to James, and jerked her head in the direction of the parlour. He went.
“Elsewhere,” she said.
She offered the footman nothing; not tea, not even a seat, and certainly no further information about Sarah. They could have met each other on the path, she realized; it was mere good luck that they had not. She would have to think of some other means of keeping Sarah out of his clutches. And he would have to satisfy himself with a quick reply in the form of a folded note from Mrs. Bennet, and be on his merry way.
But as she watched him off the premises, Mrs. Hill congratulated herself on the effectiveness of her scheme. He’d soon fix his interests elsewhere, on more likely prospects. He wasn’t the kind to hang around.
In the grocer’s shop, Sarah folded the umbrella and asked for a loaf of sugar, and the grocer, instead of simply parcelling it up and noting it to the Bennets’ account, peered at her and said, “My dear, are you quite well?”
“I am, thank you kindly.”
“You are as white as salt. You must take something.”
He called his daughter out from the back kitchen; a plump dark-eyed thing, she ushered Sarah through to warm herself and drink tea.
A little while later the grocer put his head round the door to inspect the two of them, and said they had succeeded in putting some roses back into Sarah’s cheeks at least, which was good, because earlier he had feared that the walk back to Longbourn would be entirely too much for her, and that she would be found dead in a ditch in the morning.
James, contrary to his habits, was getting under Mrs. Hill’s feet, and was suddenly talkative. He had been there and back to Netherfield with Mrs. Bennet and a carriage full of young ladies, and had passed through Meryton twice that day: why had she not thought to ask him to fetch the sugar, and save Sarah the trouble? He hovered at the window, and when she shifted him from there to get at the pot of parsley on the sill, he moved only far enough to get in her way when she turned back again.
“Excuse me please, Mr. Smith.”
He stepped aside to let her pass, and went back to his post. He rubbed the mist off a pane. “It’s getting dark.”
“It’s just overcast. It’s been grey all day.”
“Yes. And now it’s getting dark.”
Mrs. Hill heaved the fish-kettle onto the table. “She has another hour or so, I’d say, before the sun sets.”
He frowned, nodded. A moment later, though: “She should be back by now, really, shouldn’t she? She should have been back hours ago.”
The implications of his behaviour whirled around Mrs. Hill’s head like a flock of starlings as she lifted the dripping fish from the kettle and laid it on the platter. So he was taken with the little scrap. Well, fancy that. And if Sarah liked him back—so long as that mulatto could be prevented from turning her head completely—things could be very nicely settled here indeed. James and Sarah married. She would not object to that, no, not at all; and if she did not, how could anybody else?
“There,” she said, and tapped the platter with a stubby nail. “Fish is ready. Take it up now, please.”
He glanced noncommittally at the tench. Then he turned back to the window.
“She’ll be back before dinner’s eaten. Don’t fret.”
“I’m not fretting.”
His anxiety was becoming infectious: Mrs. Hill did now feel a faint stirring of unease. Could Sarah have somehow come to grief?
“The dinner’s getting cold.”
He heaved himself away from the window, caught up a tea-cloth, and lifted the dish.
“She’s a sensible girl,” Mrs. Hill said. “And we are very quiet around here. We are not used to any kind of trouble.”
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
“And who would bother a respectable young woman, with the Militia stationed so near by?”
There was a flicker of hesitation, but he nodded his agreement.
“We are fortunate in that,” Mrs. Hill said. “We may consider ourselves well protected.”
He looked at the fish, lying dull-eyed and blistered on the plate. He’d give it until the dinner things were cleared, and if Sarah wasn’t back by then, he’d go out looking for her.
He did not have to go far. From the blustery crest of the hill he spotted her. She was trudging along the low road that curved round the base of the hill. Why she’d chosen to come that heavy slow way, rather than by the footpath through the fields, he could not fathom.
The sight of her spun something suddenly loose inside him; he let a breath go, and it was borne away by the wind.
He hunkered down against the field wall and watched her labour on through the mud, skirts wind-torn and wrapping around her legs. She looked so slight and flimsy, as though she could be blown clean away.
When she was gone some twenty yards or so along the road, he got back to his feet and scrambled down the hillside. He tailed her home, keeping her in sight until she slipped through the gates; he waited by the gatepost while she trudged up the gravel drive and trailed round the side of the house; she looked deeply cold, and deeply tired. When she had passed round the corner, he scudded over to it, and crouched there to watch her reach the stable buildings and cross the yard. Then she slipped inside the kitchen, and the door closed behind her.
He took himself into the stables, where the horses were twitchy with the rattling, gusting wind. He stroked their necks, and gentled them: it soothed his nerves as well as theirs. He rubbed his hair dry, and left his greatcoat to drip from a nail.
He had been concerned for her; that was all. No one here seemed to have any real notion of the world. This was innocence as deep and dangerous as a quarry-pit. He, though, he knew. He knew that men were capable of many things, and had come to believe, indeed, that some men were not really men at all, for all that t
hey walked and talked and prayed and ate and slept and dressed themselves like men. Give them just time and opportunity enough, and they’d reveal themselves to be cold creatures with strange appetites, who did not care what harm they did in satisfying them.
While James was toiling through the wind and mud, out looking for Sarah, Mrs. Hill was climbing the stairs with a laden tray. She shouldered into the parlour; the remaining Bennet family brightened at the arrival of coffee and biscuits. Kitty and Lydia dropped their work—if picking apart perfectly good bonnets to make them up a little less well could really be considered work—and came over to the table. Mrs. B. and Mary peered across to inspect the refreshments; even Mr. B. folded his paper and put it aside and said, “Good, good.” It all seemed perfectly pleasant to them. But in Mrs. Hill now grew an unhappy preoccupation: James’s worry worried her. What had he seen, what had he done, what did he know that they did not?
Sarah was, of course, returned to them quite safe, though fatigued, bedraggled, and chilled. She set down the sugarloaf and sank into a chair by the fire. Polly came sidling through from the scullery, chewing a fingernail.
“We were just beginning to be worried, missy.”
Sarah blinked at Mrs. Hill; it seemed like an age since she had left; it seemed like a different world.
“The ways are heavy, missus; slow going in all that mud.”
Sarah shivered. Polly snuck up to her and huddled in close, looking for comfort. Her thumb slid into her mouth.
“Don’t do that, Polly, love. You’re a big girl now.”
Polly smiled around her thumb, nudged in closer to Sarah. The words came muffled: “You’re all hot!”