by Jo Baker
He looked up from their little bodies, ruffled and broken, and over towards the edge of the woods, to the tree-line, and the open hillside beyond, where the cool winter light gleamed through. A glimpse of distance, of the wide world beyond.
It didn’t do to get dependent. It didn’t do to get attached.
He scrubbed himself at the pump, then went up to his loft and dressed in his livery, changing his shirt, lifting his chin and closing his eyes to tie the neck-cloth right. Tonight was a simple family party, and as such it was no great demand upon his nerves. There had been—and there would yet be—much more trying occasions than this. He pocketed his gloves, tugged his sleeves straight. He had not expected to encounter the Militia in this quiet place; he had certainly not foreseen such ready intimacy between the officers and the Bennet household. Neither had he anticipated how much Mrs. Bennet would like to show him off.
He left the bundle of little pheasants on the cold slate shelf in the scullery. He turned round, and Polly was there, sitting with her back against the warm wall, watching him, keeping out of Mrs. Hill’s way. He slid down beside her.
“Fox had ’em?” she asked.
He nodded. “You lying low?”
“It’s Bedlam in there.”
She jerked her head towards the kitchen. The clatter of crocks and the rattle of spoons in pans. And then something was fumbled and dropped and hit the stone floor with a clang.
“Sarah!”
“Sorry!”
“Why can’t you have more sense?”
They could hear the jostling and bustle as Mrs. Hill snatched up whatever it was that Sarah had dropped, and swiped a cloth at the spill; she did not for a moment pause in her scolding. James would, he decided, leave telling Mrs. Hill about the pheasants until later. It was not, after all, an urgent matter.
Sarah, flushed and cross, slunk into the scullery soon after. She flumped down on the boards in front of Polly and James, crossed her ankles, blew a huff of breath upwards, which made the fringe of her cap flutter.
“Missus is in a bloody awful one.”
He turned his head away to hide a smile.
They sat a while in silence, listening as Mrs. Hill did something at the oven, rattling away just behind them, on the other side of the dividing wall. There was a waft of cooking chicken and the sweet, almost floral scent of roasting parsnips. Polly’s belly growled. She clutched it, rolled her eyes, making James smile openly and Sarah cover up a laugh.
“You lot!” Mrs. Hill yelled.
A collective flinch. “Yes, missus—” Sarah called tentatively.
“Shift your lazy backsides. James, go and lay that table! Girls, get yourselves in here.”
The three of them exchanged a glance, and scrambled to their feet.
It was not so very long ago that dinner had meant swallowing down whatever you could get your filthy hands on: filched vegetables that left you crunching grit for hours afterwards, or a bit of bread that was hard as a husk and blue with mould, or scraps of stuff scraped off the bottom of the pot that you couldn’t quite identify. And you pushed it down your gullet fast as you could: if it wasn’t in your belly then it wasn’t yours.
Dinner meant something different here. It meant half a day’s work for two women. It meant polished crystal and silver, it meant a change of dress for the diners and a special suit of clothes for the servants to serve it up in. Here, dinner meant delay; it meant extending, with all the complexities of preparation and all those rituals of civility, the gap between hunger and its satisfaction. Here, now, it seemed that hunger itself might be relished, because its cessation was guaranteed; there always was—there always would be—meat and vegetables and dumplings and cakes and pies and plates and forks and pleases and thank-yous, and endless plates of bread and butter.
And this was, already, becoming normal for him; he was already becoming used to this.
So when a fox—or a fox’s equivalent: a keen-sighted somebody, with a nose for trouble—came creeping up behind him, what then? Would he be too habituated, too fat, too silly, his senses too blunted by this comfort, to sense the danger? Would he even realize that it was on its way before it had him in its jaws?
There were voices coming from the drawing room as he laid the dining table; the family was seated there, with the newcomer, that soft young Mr. Collins. James watched the press of clean fingertips onto a wineglass stem, the pattern of the skin’s ridges and the gleam of the crystal. He had thought once that his hands would never come clean again. And yet, and yet, was he not more of an animal now than he had ever been back then? Content now to trudge and pull and carry and to serve, serene in the expectation that at the end of it all there would be a full belly and a safe warm place to sleep.
Mrs. Bennet was in the midst of what must pass for a discreet exchange of confidences with Mr. Collins. It came through only slightly muffled by the lath-and-plaster. They would be ensconced on the sofa. James set out the silverware and tried not to hear.
“… a grievous affair to my girls, you must confess …”
A peal of laughter further off—that was Lydia—and then Kitty chiming in with her giggles a moment later.
“Not that I mean to find fault with you, for such things I know are all chance in this world …”
Did she think that her voice did not carry? Did it not occur to her that at this hour someone would of necessity be next door, in the dining room, laying the table? He rattled a handful of cutlery, but the hint seemed to go unheard.
“There is no knowing how estates will go once they come to be entailed.”
And then Mr. Collins, a little lower in pitch but no lower in volume: “I am very sensible, madam, of the hardship to my fair cousins—and could say much on the subject, but that I am cautious of appearing forward …”
So young Collins was there to select one of the girls, as you’d choose an apple from a costermonger’s stall. A brisk look over the piled-up stock: one of the bigger ones, the riper ones—that one will do. They were all the same, after all, weren’t they? They were of good stock. All the same variety, from the same tree. Why bother looking any further, or making any particular scrutiny of the individual fruits?
James scraped a chair back and whacked it down, hoping the noise might communicate something to the speaker, but Mr. Collins burbled on oblivious.
“I can assure you that I come prepared to admire them. At present I will not say more, but …”
Poor virgin boy that he was; more to be pitied than despised. No notion of the strangeness of women, of how you could love and think yourself beloved, and yet find at the heart’s core something so practical and cold that it would turn your blood to stone. Of love, so little notion; and of love’s physical manifestations no notion whatsoever.
“… when we are better acquainted …”
James could stand it no longer. He swung out into the hallway and marched up to the drawing-room door. He flung it wide, making the whole family start and look round.
“Dinner is served.”
Mr. Collins rose to his feet, taken aback by this abruptness. This would never be tolerated at Rosings, nor indeed would it be at Longbourn, when he himself was master of it. But—and this was the much more urgent thought—he was very hungry indeed after his long journey; his posting-inn breakfast at Bromley was now long ago and far away. A lack of nourishment, combined with Mrs. Bennet’s probing conversation, had left him light-headed, nervous, and a tad more confessional than he had really intended. The footman’s announcement, though rather brusque, came, therefore, as very welcome news indeed.
… the coach conveyed him and his five cousins at a suitable hour to Meryton …
Mrs. Bennet’s sister and her husband were clearly popular with the Militia: the Philipses’ house—standing right on the street, its lit windows making pools on the pavement—crawled with officers like a beggar’s head with lice. James simply could not see the appeal of it himself; supper and cards at a poky townhouse in a dull provinc
ial English town, with a frowsty old attorney and his less-than-ample missus, who’d be serving up cheese toasts and nuts and thimblefuls of sherry wine and dull conventionalities to a bunch of matrons and old fellows. There’d be knots of badly shaven local gallants glaring from the sidelines, unable to get a look-in now with dim girls who considered it their God-given right to be flirted with, but who could never possibly be touched. He’d rather be where he was, waiting outside in the rain.
These officers, though: they skipped along from their billets about town, they gathered on the pavement, they scurried up the front steps; they seemed keen as flies for jam.
A few of them glanced at him in passing, making him turn aside, but the officers were just in a social mood—one nodded to him, another said good evening—so he touched his hat brim in reply, and then occupied himself with the horses, buckling them into their oil-cloth coats, while the men sauntered past him in their regimentals. The rain fell steadily, and made the manes and long eyelashes sparkle with brilliants.
The Philipses’ young scrub, a sweet little freckled child, twined her hands together and asked him if he’d like to come into the kitchen for a drink and a bite, and to warm himself, since, as she said, he must be froze to the bone. Downstairs, the kitchen was stuffed to the walls, she said; and very jolly it was too: all the other coachmen were waiting down there.
She made him smile, with her market-town tones and her shyness and her chat, but he just thanked her and said he wouldn’t leave the horses.
She came back a little later with a mug of beer and a bit of pork pie for him.
James thanked her again, and ate his supper, and set the mug and plate on a windowsill when he had done. Through the rain-streaked glass, he saw the guests standing around in little knots; he watched a young officer approach Miss Elizabeth and take a chair beside her. He watched the officer speak, smoothing his moustache, one side and then the other; he watched Elizabeth’s happy reply, a warmth flushing her cheeks. James could only guess at what they were talking about—the weather, no doubt; it was indeed a wet night, and yes, she did think it likely to be a rainy season—but Miss Elizabeth was clearly finding it all very agreeable. That officer smiled, exposing creamy teeth, and it might have just been the damp that caused a creeping chill at the back of James’s neck, that made him rub his nape and pull his collar up, or it might have been real and knowing unease. But there was, after all, nothing to be done about these intimacies. He unhooked the coach lamp and got up inside the coach, closing the door on the wet night and the worry. He settled back into the upholstery, making the springs creak; he opened his book. He had brought Gilpin’s Observations with him, borrowed from Mr. Bennet’s library. He had got as far north as Lancaster with it, and, found himself in some disagreement with the author’s taste.
It grew late, and it grew cold, and the noise from the Philipses’ house swelled and shrank and grew again. He was just drifting off, head back against the padding, when the girls bounded out with Mr. Collins in tow, all bright chatter and noise. James stirred himself and climbed out of the carriage, folded the steps down and was there waiting with the lamp to hand them in. He felt the warm, damp, excited squeeze of five pairs of white kid gloves. Mr. Collins, he left to shift for himself: the young man clambered in.
The journey back was noisy. Lydia could be heard chattering on about the games she had played that night, the fish that she had lost and the fish that she had won. From Mr. Collins came a low drone about the wondrous civility of the Philipses and the dishes there had been at supper, and his losses at whist. Nobody actually mentioned the officers on the journey home, at least as far as James could make out, though that did not necessarily mean that nobody was thinking about them. Perched up on top of the carriage, wet wind in his face, he felt brittle. One sharp knock would shatter him to fragments. The horses, sensing his unease, twisted back their ears, their flanks twitching as though troubled by summer flies.
“I beg your pardon;—one knows exactly what to think.”
Sarah was summoned from the scullery by the furious jangling of the breakfast-room bell. She traipsed up: the morning meal was done and cleared away; now was a time for peaceful pursuits, for needlework or music or reading or calling on the neighbours. For not bothering the servants. What could possibly be required so urgently of her now?
Mrs. Bennet was flushed and flustered, and needed her excitement acknowledged and participated in, as well as lots of things done with all possible speed. She had, from the window, spied the Bingleys’ carriage as it turned into the drive.
“Oh, this is wonderful, this is quite wonderful, do not you agree?”
Sarah peered out with her: there he was—Bingley, Ptolemy Bingley, perched at the back of the carriage, along with the other footman, and the whole equipage was rolling up the drive towards Longbourn’s front steps. Her stomach did a little swooping dive. She had no name for the sensation; she had no time to pause and consider and find a name for it, either—Mrs. Bennet dug an elbow in her ribs, bringing her back to the moment, the breakfast room, the next thing to be done. Her mistress wore a girlish grin, was almost bouncing on the spot with joy. Sarah smiled despite herself.
“Run and get Jane, will you? I mean: do actually run,” said Mrs. Bennet. “She’s wandering out in the shrubbery, I think. Quick now; quick as you can, my dear. Go fetch her.”
Mr. Bingley and his sisters were ushered along the hall. Their voices could be heard trailing after them: they had come to bestow upon the Bennet family an invitation to the ball at Netherfield, which was fixed for the following Tuesday. Mrs. Hill wilted at the news.
Sarah, having fetched the girls in from their walk, now hung up the cloaks and laid the ladies’ bonnets carefully on the cloakroom dresser. She ran an ostrich feather through her fingers, touched a rosebud of vermilion silk. Then she took a swift look down the hall: it was empty, though she could hear Mr. Bingley’s clipped tones, his sisters’ chiming laughs. Sarah slipped out to the vestibule, and then through the front door.
The Bingley coach was waiting for its owner, the coachman sliding down from his seat to check some aspect of the harness; the footmen were round the back, standing at their ease, talking and sharing a cigarillo.
Now that she had come this far—actually outside, closing the door behind her, blinking in the cold morning light—Sarah was appalled at her own brazenness. She would just stroll past him, she could be on her way anywhere: it need not mean anything. He had no particular cause to think that it was his presence that had drawn her out.
But as she passed, she saw the way his attention shifted, and focused; the way a smile dimpled his cheeks. And it was wonderful to be noticed; it was giddying. She felt the gravel crunch beneath her feet; she felt too the shush of her skirts around her ankles, the press of her stays, the tickle of a curl at the back of her neck. She felt as though she was more there, simply because he noticed that she was. And then he took his cigarillo from his lips, and came towards her, a cloud spilling from the corner of his mouth.
“Pretty round here, isn’t it?”
“It is, sir, I suppose.”
“You’ll have time for a stroll, show me around, while the big folks are indoors.”
He offered his arm. She laughed.
He held out his arm still, nodded to it. “Go on.”
She looked at it, then up at him. “I can’t.”
“Course you can.”
“I’m working.”
“No, you’re not. You’re skylarking. It’s written all over your little face. And you’ve got this far; why not do it properly?”
“If I get caught—”
He smiled fully then; it was sunshine. “Don’t.”
She slipped her arm through his. It was warm and solid. His sleeve, lying against her own, was good blue twill. He moved off, and she, laughing nervously, was drawn after him, off the drive and onto the grass plait; she saw them as others would see them now, their figures jaunty and almost comically ill-matched: the
bulk of him in his good blue greatcoat, her slight figure in wilted linsey-woolsey, tagging along, a faint wisp of tobacco smoke following after them.
“This way—”
“Oh, I don’t—”
But he drew her along into the little wilderness, and they followed the path through the tangled dead grass. He lifted a low-hanging branch to let her pass. The rowans still had a few scarlet berries unpecked by the birds, and everything was hung with raindrops, and smelling of rot. Behind her, in her absence, the house was grinding along, its cogs turning and teeth linking, belts creaking, and there must come a moment—any moment now—when a cog would bite on nothing, and spin on air: some necessary act would go unperformed, some service would not be provided; the whole mechanism would crunch and splinter and shriek out in protest, and come to a juddering halt, because she was not there. And all the time she was pulling further and further away, like a spindle twisting out upon a thread of flax. Pull far enough, twist and stretch it too thin, and the thread would snap.
She squinted up at the grey clouds, conscious of the bulk of him so near to her, the scent of smoke. To think that it was the same sky that blanketed the whole world, that skimmed all across America and the Antipodes. That he had come from so far away, himself.
“Do you find it miserable here?” she asked.
“England has its own particular charms.”
She blinked round at him. “Really?”
“I was trying to be gallant.” He looked at her a long moment, which made her look away. “But, one thing about this country is that living here, you cannot be a slave.”
“You weren’t a slave?”
“I was born a slave.”
“Your mother—”
“Was one of Mr. Bingley—Senior’s—slaves.” Ptolemy lifted his cigarillo to his lips and sipped on it.