Longbourn

by Jo Baker

  Sarah, being in many ways a practical person, had known all along that she was working with insufficient information. That one kiss, deep in drink, with Ptolemy, was all she had to go on: it had not been very nice, but she simply could not know if that was what kisses were generally like, or if it was just that particular kiss, or that kisser. She could not know whether what she had felt—dizzy, her pride gratified, her body uncomfortable—about Tol Bingley amounted to love, or even anything very much at all. And here was James, now, with his hand wrapped around her arm, and his touch and his closeness and his voice pitched low and urgent, and it all seemed to matter, and it was all doing strange and pleasant things to her. She felt herself softening, and easing, like a cat luxuriating in a fire’s glow. And there was just now, just this one moment, when she teetered on the brink between the world she’d always known and the world beyond, and if she did not act now, then she would never know.

  She caught him, as it were, on the hop. Her lips colliding with his, surprising him; he swayed a little back, against the arm she’d reached around him. Her lips were soft and warm and clumsy, and her small body pressed hard against his. It was too much to resist. He slid his arms around her narrow waist, and pulled her to him, and let himself be kissed.

  There was just the warmth of his mouth, and the warmth of his lean body against hers. Her breath grew quick; her body grew eager, wanting—then she dropped back to her heels, heart pounding; she leaned in against him, shaken by this.

  “Oh,” she said.

  She could feel his hand on the back of her neck, the other arm around her waist, holding her to him. Her head lay against his chest; she could hear his heart beat. She blinked in the darkness, her eyes wet. She had not been held, not by anyone, not since she was a little child.

  “Will you go?” he asked, after a while, his hand on her nape, where her skin was warm, and her hair was cool.

  For a long moment she didn’t move or speak. Then he felt it against his chest: she shook her head.

  They made their way back down to the house, he lugging her box on his shoulder, her hand in his hand. It was deeply dark, down off the hill and low between the hedges, now the moon had set. Stumbling, she felt the pressure of his palm and the pad of his thumb, the wrap of chill fingers across the back of her hand. She was more aware of that than the rocky track beneath her feet, the cold air, or any other thing around her.

  Their feet crunched on stone; they slithered over ice, and, where it had thawed, into mud. She held up her skirts, and when a foot skidded out from underneath her, his hand tightened on hers, halting her fall. This made her glance round at him, think how strange, how good it was that he was there. She could feel the living certainty of his hand, but could only see a vague shape of him in the dark.

  The house loomed out of the night, a dark hulking mass. They stopped at the corner of the stable, and peered round into the yard. She could see the glimmer of the kitchen window; other than that, the yard was a great pool of shadow.

  It was impossible. She could not go to her room without Polly noticing she had been gone; she could not get her box back under her bed without somebody seeing it on its way there; her boots and petticoats must be filthy: everyone would know what she had done.

  “It is too late. They will know. They will throw me off.”

  “Here,” he said. “Give me …”

  And he knelt down at her feet, and cupped his hand around her ankle; she let him lift it, felt the movement of his hands as he scraped the mud off her boot. She could see just the dark shape of him, the curve of the back of his head. He let go of her ankle, and reached for the other, and she let him take it too, his hand warm.

  He looked up at her. His face was now palely visible.

  “Let down your skirts over your petticoat.”

  She shook them out, to cover up the mud.

  He got back to his feet.

  “Just go and be,” he said softly, speaking close to her ear. “Just be in the kitchen. Put your head on your arms and have a sleep if you can.”

  She nodded, her hair brushing against his cheek, catching on stubble.

  “When the household’s stirring, just get up too and go about your business as though you slept your night in your bed just like anybody else.”

  “What about you?”

  He lifted the wooden box again onto his shoulder. “I’ll shift this later, when the coast is clear.” He touched her, just lightly, at the waist. “Sarah,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  Then he was gone. He slipped round the corner, and into the deep shadow, skimming round the side of the stable. He must have ducked straight inside, because she heard the horses whinnying their greetings.

  At half ten, when she handed him his cup of tea at breakfast, he smiled straight at her, and her heart did a little flip, and her own smile went all uneven.

  Polly took two lumps of sugar from the bowl, and then, when no one seemed to notice, took a third and slipped it straight into her cheek. She shunted the sugar on to Mr. Hill, who loaded up his tea with sugar crumbs. Polly, sucking her sugar lump, eyed James and Sarah, intrigued by their silence.

  “I don’t like this, sloping off without a word, without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  Sarah and James both looked up, alarmed; but Mrs. Hill was squinting peevishly out of the kitchen window.

  James cleared his throat. “What’s that you say, Mrs. Hill?”

  Mrs. Hill nodded to the window. “Where is he off to now, I wonder?”

  Sarah turned to follow her line of sight, and watched as Mr. Collins, in his sober black, scurried across the yard like a lost mole. She let out a careful breath.

  “Wherever it is, it can’t be far,” James said, “or he’d have called for the carriage.”

  He lifted his cup and drank. Sarah got up and moved to the dresser, but then couldn’t think what she might reasonably need there.

  Mr. Hill stirred his tea with much clinking of spoon and china, and Mrs. Hill muttered on about their unpredictable guest. But Polly still just looked from James to Sarah, Sarah to James, and back again. She knew something was afoot. It had to do with the morning’s cold bed, the dark circles beneath both pairs of eyes. They were twitchy as rabbits, the two of them. Something was up, and although she didn’t know quite what, she was perfectly willing to speculate.

  That night, when Sarah stumbled up the stairs to her attic room, she found her box was waiting underneath the bed, a little more scuffed than before, perhaps, and a bruise in the wood where she had dropped it; but it had been cleaned of mud, and there was nothing about it to suggest it had borne witness to any impropriety. She undressed and sank into bed, the boards creaking underneath her. Despite her deep fatigue, her mind was alight. She was very far from sleep.

  This world was a maze. She’d turn this way and then that, race on a few steps, make her choice; but then she’d find herself turned quite around, and sliding back to the start, back into her place. To Longbourn.

  But for now, that did not seem entirely bad.

  Saturday … Sunday

  Mr. Collins departed early that Saturday morning, to be back in Hunsford in time for divine service the following day.

  Despite the disappointments of his visit, the day of Mr. Collins’s departure brought a fresh hope to Mrs. Hill’s parched and anxious breast, in the unlikely form of Sir William Lucas, puffed up with pride and the news of his eldest daughter’s engagement. He followed hard on Charlotte’s heels, who had called in the morning, and sat awhile alone with Elizabeth, though this was such a common occurrence that Mrs. Hill had not suspected anything of it at the time. Charlotte’s main object had been to forewarn her friend: when Sir William made his announcement, while Mrs. Hill served the tea, Lizzy looked uncomfortable, but she did not look surprised. Mary, though, looked miserable, and was obliged to leave the room soon after.

  Poor Mary; she must take some blame for that. But—it was as though a sack of bri
cks had been lifted from Mrs. Hill’s back. The future was no longer such a terrifying place. Charlotte Lucas was a steady young woman, who knew the value of a good servant, and who had far too much sense to replace staff simply for the sake of appearance or fashion. Nothing was certain, of course—for nothing is certain in this life, except that we must leave it—but Charlotte had been in and out of Mrs. Hill’s kitchen since she was a little girl, asking for recipes, a loan of sugar or a jelly mould, and was known to be particularly partial to Mrs. Hill’s lemon tarts, and indeed had on several occasions been heard to say that nobody could make a lemon tart like Mrs. Hill.

  Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Hill set about whipping up a batch of lemon tarts to send back with Sir William. These little attentions were more than worth the effort.

  The next day was a blustery, blowy day, the first Sunday of Advent, and so the Advent candle burnt by the lectern and their breath smoked in the cold nave.

  The Bennets sat together in the family box-pew, and the servants sat in the free seats at the back, James on one side of the solemn bulk of Mr. and Mrs. Hill, and Sarah and Polly on the other. Mr. Hill sucked his few teeth, and Mrs. Hill tucked her chin in, as she always did when she was feeling pleased. In the shuffle and creak of kneeling, the young ones managing it rather more quickly than the older pair, Sarah took the chance to glance past the Hills and catch James’s eye. The aftermath of this made her feel quite distracted throughout the aptly named Mr. Long’s sermon.

  The Bennets were slow to leave, as always, shaking hands and nodding and talking with their neighbours, and clogging up the porch, the two youngest ones linking arms and giggling with the farmers’ daughters. Sarah, in the crush, was able to study Miss Lucas’s face discreetly; she wondered what it was like to know that you were to be married, that you would have a home, an income, that you were set up for life. To have achieved all this simply by agreeing to put up with one particular man until he died.

  Charlotte just looked awkward, and a little tired. Perhaps it was exhausting, to achieve so much at such a clip.

  “How are you now?”

  Sarah found herself, by accident, or by his design, near James. They passed together through the porch, and made their way to the edge of the crowd, and carried on a few paces side by side. He was a column of buff and grey in the corner of her eye. She held her bonnet to her head; the wind tugged at it: she saw the way the yews were combed by the breeze, the green parting and re-parting and rippling like a sheep’s fleece. She spoke low, looking dead ahead, so that it would not be obvious to Mrs. Hill or Mrs. B., or any other of the two-dozen or so matriarchs and busybodies assembled there, that she was actually conversing with him.

  “I can’t think,” she said, “any more, what I was doing. I can’t think who I was just then, at that moment. I no longer see how I could have thought it was a good idea, to go and do that, at all.”

  “When you kissed me?”

  She swung round, bright. “No!”

  His eyes creased, and she knew that he was smiling. He moved away, and was lost amongst the villagers, slipping between shabby farmgirls and broad labourers’ shoulders in their straining Sunday best.

  When she was a girl, and still growing, ravenous, whenever there had been a cake—a sponge cake, dusted with sugar, which Mrs. Hill had conjured up out of eggs and flour and creamy butter—Sarah would never even let herself look at it, because she knew that it was not for her. Instead, she would carry it upstairs to be rendered into crumbs, and the crumbs lifted from the plate by a moistened Bennet finger, and the empty smeared plate carried back again. So Sarah would stare instead at the carpet underneath her feet, or at the painting of a horse with a strangely small head that hung at the end of the hall, or the rippled yellow curtains in the parlour, and would do her best not to breathe, not to inhale the scent of vanilla or lemon or almonds; even to glance at the cake was an impossible agony.

  And for months, she realized, James had hardly looked at her at all.

  It was a situation—though it occurred to neither of them to consider it this way—almost guaranteed to amplify desire. After that Sunday morning, there were no further opportunities for properly private communication; barely a word could be exchanged unobserved. Those first few weeks of December were, therefore, marked by the catching of eyes, the exchange of smiles, by fingers brushing as burdens were exchanged.

  At night, Sarah twisted in her bedsheets, hot despite the winter weather, while Polly snored beside her. Her lips were haunted by his lips; her body remembered the press of his: her second kiss had been nothing like the first. Her mind conjured, unbidden, the unbuttoning of his shirt, the peeling back of linen, the press of lips to collarbones, the taste of skin and salt. She curled up to the edge of the bed, bunched up her shift, and let her fingertips dip into the wet between her legs.

  So daylight, and his presence, made her flush. The things that she had done with him, in the dark, when he was not there.

  Mr. Wickham, at this time, grew ever more present at Longbourn. He had, it seemed, a penchant for in-between places; for lobbies, vestibules, thresholds, from where he could observe both the gabble and swarm of company, and the bustle of the servantry; from where he could parcel out his Spanish money—his little bits of flattering nonsense—to each woman as she passed, no matter what her age, her marital status or her class.

  On one occasion Sarah came upon him leaning in a doorway, when she was approaching it with a heavy tray. His foot was pressed back against the lower panel, so the door was pushed half open; his shoulder was against the doorjamb. He did not move out of her way. She did not like it, his lingering, assessing gaze; now that she had come to be a little more knowing herself, she knew knowingness when she saw it.

  “Hard going, that,” he said, with a nod to the tray.

  “May I pass, sir?”

  He seemed not to hear. “Heavy for you, slip of a girl that you are.”

  She shifted her grip on the tray. “Can I help you, sir? Is there something you need?”

  “Oh no. You don’t need to worry about me, I’m a steward’s son, so …”

  Sarah lifted her right foot, took her weight on the other, and so gained some relief for her tired ankles. So he was a steward’s son—so what? He wasn’t offering to carry her ton-weight tray down to the kitchen, was he?

  “If you don’t actually require anything, sir …”

  He shook his head, lips pursed beneath his moustache. “Nothing, no. I am admirably well provided for.”

  She curtseyed carefully, so as not to shift the crocks, and moved towards him. He stepped back, to let the door open for her, but not quite wide enough, so that she must pass too close, her skirts brushing against his legs. She knew that he watched her go, too, but she would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her glance back.

  Mr. Collins soon returned to Longbourn House. This was a bother and a trouble to Mrs. Hill: she still needed to secure him; she was as keen to please him as ever, but she now had much less time in which to do it, since he was engaged for a good part of every day in love-making at Lucas Lodge. And Mary was also a source of unease and guilt; Mrs. Hill should not have encouraged her interest in him, as it had done nobody any good. But there was nothing to be done about that now, at least not by her. Mrs. Hill contented herself with cramming as many good things as possible into the beginning and the end of Mr. Collins’s days. His washing water was fresh and hot every morning; his towels were the finest the linen closet could provide, and scented with lavender. He had the best ash logs for his fire, and warm sweet milk on his night-stand when he returned from wooing and went to bed. Whether he noted these little attentions, or attributed them to their proper source, Mrs. Hill had no idea, and was given no indication: he said nothing about it, but then he said very little to anybody at all at Longbourn, so occupied was he with his wedding plans and his bride-to-be.

  Then he was gone, called from Longbourn and his amiable Charlotte by the arrival of another Saturday. Mrs. Hill was
in a turmoil of frustrated intentions: if she could but get her hands on Charlotte Lucas, even for a little while; if she could but give her a good dinner, and another batch of lemon tarts, she’d feel that much easier for it. Charlotte Lucas knew the value of a good dinner; she would not resent being reminded of it.

  But it was not to be hoped for: Charlotte, for obvious reasons, stayed away from Longbourn.

  Two days after Mr. Collins’s latest visit, the Gardiners arrived. Mrs. Bennet’s brother, his wife and their young family had come to spend Christmas at Longbourn. They were to stay a week, and Mrs. Bennet had so carefully provided for their entertainment that they did not once in all that time sit down to a quiet family dinner together: either the house was teeming with visitors, or its inhabitants were rushing to be ready for some public or private entertainment in the neighbourhood, or it stood empty of all but servantry.

  Entertainments must be prepared for in the kitchen; it being the Christmas season, there was always some particular dainty to be constructed, some special meal to prepare and serve, some item of adornment to be laundered; the kitchen was cluttered and hazardous with additional servants: the Gardiners’ maid, visitors’ coachmen, a to-and-fro of neighbouring families’ servants with invitations or replies. All of them with bodies to get between you and the thing required, legs and feet to trip over, and elbows to nudge precious things to the teetering brink of dressers and shelves. There was never a moment to be had alone, even when the house was quiet, for James and Sarah. She and Mrs. Hill both went about soaked in sweat, teeth gritted, chilled to the bone the moment they stepped outdoors.

  Mr. Wickham seemed to get in everywhere, turning up in the most unexpected places, like spilt quicksilver. You’d round the stairs and he’d be there, on the half-landing, apparently studying a painting; you’d come into an otherwise deserted breakfast room, and find him lounging by the sideboard nibbling a bit of kipper and running a nail along the joins in the veneer. And, once, James caught the scent of a cigar, and looked up, the end of a girth in one hand, the buckle in the other, the horse’s belly at his cheek, and saw the young officer there, standing silently in the doorway, watching, perfuming the winter air with his tobacco.