by Jo Baker
Wickham saluted.
James gave him a nod in reply, then continued with his work. He unfastened the buckle, then lifted the side-saddle away, the stirrup and girth dangling, and went to stow it with the others. He felt Wickham follow him with his eyes. James wedged the saddle down onto the saddle-rack, wiped it over with a cloth.
“What are you doing here?” Wickham said eventually.
The mare blew warm breath. “Getting on,” James said, taking the spitty bit from between her teeth. Wickham pushed away from the doorway and wandered closer. James quietly continued removing and cleaning off the tack.
“All this”—Wickham gestured around with a trailing cigar: the clean cobbles, the heaped straw, the leather gear, the glossy horses’ hides—“this is all boys’ stuff; it’s for young lads and old codgers. It’s not proper work for a man.”
“If you say so, sir.”
“And there’s plenty of proper work to be had, isn’t there, if you want it.”
James straightened up; he looped the tack together. Wickham was just a puppy, all unearned swagger and needle-teeth. Growling at nothing.
The young officer tilted his head now, making a show of deliberation. “I mean, the old butler here’s a bag of bones, he’s no use to anyone, so he may as well be buried up to his neck in the country, doing nothing.” And then he jerked his cigar towards James. “But you. Sirrah. You are a different matter.”
“Is that right, sir.”
Easing the mare’s head collar on, James kept his eyes on his work, freeing the mane where it was caught under the strap.
“A man without dependants, and without other prospects—” Wickham drew on the last of his cigar, then spoke over the smoke. “You should get yourself down to the recruiting officer. That’s what you should do. That’s what any able man, who cares about his country, should do, at times like these.”
“I am quite right here,” James said, hanging up the bridle, then brushing his palms together.
“Well, then. There we are.” Wickham dropped his cigar-end and ground it out with the toe of a gleaming boot. “You are an inveterate coward, I see, and there is no help for it.”
“Is that so?”
“That is so.”
“Then tell me, sir,” James heard himself ask. “If you would …”
Wickham, who had been turning to leave, now paused, and glanced back. “What?”
“Just so I know.”
“Yes—”
“Where was it that you last saw action?”
Wickham went blank, half shook his head.
“Was it in Spain or Portugal?”
He frowned. “What’s your meaning, boy?”
“Perhaps you were there at the Siege of Roses? Or did you fight at the Battle of Vimeiro? Or did you stand against the French at La Coruña?”
Now the young officer’s cheeks flushed red. “How dare you—”
James just looked at him, all innocence. “I only wished to know where you earned the right to call me a coward.”
“If I had had the good fortune—I would have served—”
James bowed. “I do apologize, sir. I was forgetting you had just recently bought your commission.”
“I will undertake anything required of me—”
James took the mare by the halter; passing Wickham, he led her out into the yard.
“I dare say you will get your hands bloody soon enough. Situation’s promising in the North. Slaughtering mill-hands: proper job for a man, that.”
“The Luddites are a menace—”
James turned to fetch the old piebald stallion, who stepped out proudly with his feathered hooves.
Wickham found his flow now: “They’re a threat, those croppers, Luddites, all of them, a threat to property, to their own kind, to the prosperity of the nation—”
“I bow to your better understanding, sir.”
And James did bow; then he led the two horses off across the yard and down to the low field, where they were wanted for the winter ploughing. They huffed steam in the cold air, their heads nodding along on either side of him, in a kind of tacit, companionable approval.
But James had been a fool, and he knew it. If he was lucky, Wickham would decide it not worth his trouble to pursue his grievance, a footman being by rights so far beneath his notice. Come the spring, the Militia would be billeted elsewhere; and so the spring, for James, could not come too soon.
Nor, for that matter, could the end of the Christmas festivities.
The four Gardiner children disported themselves about the house like a pack of puppies, wriggling in everywhere. Sarah and James could not pass each other in a hallway, or even on the servants’ stairs, without a bundle of little ones clattering up or down, or shrieking past them, on some great adventure through the house. Either that, or Sarah had a little one dragging on her apron strings and whinging, while she smiled lopsidedly at James and continued on her hobbled way.
There was not a moment, and no peace to be had, not even at night. Sarah and Polly were obliged to share their room with the Gardiners’ maid, Martha, who had ginger curls that she was very proud of, and a pallet on the floor, which, she complained, was stuffed with broken pots, and who talked about London, about dances and alehouses and beaux, Cock-and-Hen clubs and bullock-hunting on a Sunday. Polly sat bundled up in her shawls and blankets, looking like a caterpillar in its cocoon, her mouth hanging open at the girl’s tall tales. Sarah propped her head on a hand, smiled stiffly, distracted, dreading that at any moment there would be mention of one Ptolemy Bingley, Esquire, former footman to the Bingley household, who had opened a new tobacco shop that was all the rage with the gentlemen-about-town; dreading too that she would blush and be noticed and be teased for it; regretting not him, but that she had once thought of him as a possibility.
The Gardiners’ youngest was not yet breeched, and so a bucket of nappies soaked by the scullery door, the stink leaking out from underneath the lid. Someone had to scrape and rinse and then boil them every day—they simply could not be left longer, the smell was so terrible—and, if it was wet outdoors, they must be hung to drip-dry in the scullery. Some days the task fell to Polly, her face a picture of disgust—she was too young to have had the seasoning experience of cleansing the Bennet nappies—sometimes it was Sarah: the Gardiners’ maid seemed to think this stay at Longbourn was her own holiday from scrubbing. And then one crisp still day, when Sarah went to lift the pail, she found that it was empty, and when she walked out down to the paddock she saw a row of nappies flapping white on the line, like a ship’s signal flags, an unconditional surrender; James was pegging out the last of them, and when he saw that he was watched, and who watched him, he looked a little sheepish, but finished hanging out the linen squares.
“That’s kind,” she said, coming close.
“Your hands looked sore.”
Sarah could not account for it herself, but her eyes welled up and her nose prickled, and she was obliged to turn away and pick up the basket. They walked side by side back up to the house, and she felt, for those brief moments, a lightness and an ease that she only realized afterwards was simply happiness.
Wickham was always the focus of much attention at the table; the ladies all seemed fascinated with the tragedy of him. Sarah overheard it in scraps as she brought forth the plates and platters. The church he should have preached at, the living that he should have had. The position he should occupy in the world, if it were not for the abominable pride of that great tall gentleman Mr. Darcy. She tried to imagine Wickham in clerical black, like Mr. Collins. Surveying his congregation from the pulpit with those knowing eyes. Eyes that seemed to see not just the surface of things, not just the clothes, the outward aspect, the veneer: eyes that saw through all of that, and knew everything that went on underneath.
When they had returned the guests’ hats and cloaks to them in the vestibule that evening, Polly wandered down the hallway, jingling coins in her apron pocket. Once in the kitchen, she trick
led farthings from one hand to the other.
“Where did you get all that, then?” Sarah asked.
Polly tossed her head. “You all think that I am just a little scrub, fit for nothing but laying fires and emptying chamber pots. But I shall have you know that there are some as think me very fit indeed to serve on gentlefolk, and are very much appreciative of me, yes they are, for taking care of them, and giving them their dinner and their hats.”
The truth of Mr. Wickham’s predicament, Sarah was in no position to judge, but she was certain of one thing: she did not like him. She did not like the coins that chinked in Polly’s pocket, nor, now that she came to think about it, the way that he had taken off his glove that time, to touch the girl’s baked-custard cheek. But there was no danger in it, how could there be? Polly was just a scrap of a thing, a gangling foal; she had not even got her monthlies yet—she could not be an object of interest to him, surely? Not in that kind of a way.
James, for himself, watched the officers depart that evening with the relief a condemned man feels at a stay of execution. He stood back, in the shadows, once he had brought round the horses and hitched them by the front steps. The officers mounted up and trotted off, and were waved away: those pretty, smart young gentlemen with their shiny buttons and dressed hair and their cheerful noise that carried out of Longbourn with them, and followed them down the drive, and off into the night, and all the way down the dark road to Meryton.
They were just boys, he told himself; they were just playing at soldiering. And Wickham was perhaps indolent and cowardly enough to let this slide—he would soon find much more useful projects than harassing the Longbourn servantry. But whatever James told himself, he could not be consoled: things could not be the same at Longbourn now; he could no longer be at ease. He had let his mask slip; his other self had glimmered out, and he could not bear to let that creature loose, not here.
“But do you think she would be prevailed on to go back with us? Change of scene might be of service—and perhaps a little relief from home, may be as useful as anything.”
Jane, of course, could go to London just like that, without it being any great thing: she could go, and having gone, she could still come back. She had a coach to take her there, her extended family to protect her, the Gardiners’ house in Gracechurch Street to accommodate her, and her aunt to chaperone her as she went about town and enjoyed its pleasures, and kept an eye and an ankle out for her Mr. Bingley.
That last was uncharitable of her, Sarah knew. She should not begrudge Jane her pleasures, simply because they were denied to her. Jane was sweet and beautiful, and so deserving of sweet and beautiful things. If you yourself were bitterish and scruffy—Sarah smiled as she blackleaded the breakfast-room grate, on her knees, her fingers sooty and her nose ticklish—then you got bitterish and scruffy in return: maybe you got James.
Christmas over, the house emptied; the Gardiners, their troop of little nuisances and Jane all departed. And Longbourn seemed to expand, to breathe out in relief.
Mr. Collins was returned to the vicinity, Mrs. Hill soon learned, though not to Longbourn. The wedding fast approaching, he took up his abode at Lucas Lodge. Mrs. Hill’s feelings on the matter were mixed. On the one hand, she was missing this opportunity to impress him; on the other, she was already exhausted by her efforts to impress—and disheartened, somewhat, since she was uncertain as to the level of her success.
She consoled herself with the knowledge that at Lucas Lodge there was nothing particularly to delight, unless it was his own wife-to-be’s mince pies, and Mrs. Hill was not in competition with his wife. Instead, she set about fashioning a little reticule for Miss Lucas, in a dove-grey Norwich bombazine, which was, she thought, very suitable for that young lady’s new position as a clergyman’s wife. She presented it to the young bride-to-be at Charlotte’s farewell visit to Longbourn that Wednesday. The young lady received it with her characteristic good grace, and what seemed like genuine pleasure. She was not above these little kindnesses, and there was likely to be but little pin-money in her settlement. The reticule would, it was to be hoped, see much use, and at every occasion cause her to think kindly of Mrs. Hill and the good servants at Longbourn.
Miss Lucas was married on the Thursday, and the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door. Mrs. Hill and Sarah and Polly stood in the road, just outside the lich-gate, to wave them off.
“Mrs. Collins does look lovely,” Sarah said, when the couple had climbed into the chaise.
“All brides are beautiful,” said Mrs. Hill. “It is the one day when any woman is allowed to be so.”
“What was your wedding day like, Mrs. Hill?”
“It was a cold day too,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”
They were joined, when the well-wishers had cleared from the churchyard, by the Bennet family, and they all walked together back up to Longbourn House. All the way, Mrs. Bennet kept saying that she wished they might be happy, though her tone made it clear to Mrs. Hill that her thoughts were occupied with her own girls, and not really Mrs. Collins, and that she was not at all sanguine in her hopes.
Mrs. Hill, however, was warm enough in hers. Mrs. Collins had held her new dove-grey reticule on her lap, in the hack-chaise: this augured well. The marriage of Mr. Collins and Miss Lucas was not the worst possible outcome for the servantry, not by a long chalk. Though Mary, poor Mary, walked a little ahead of the others, and went straight upstairs to her piano, and played melancholy airs all afternoon.
“She is a good girl,” Mrs. Hill said, nodding over her needlework later on. “I always liked Miss Lucas, and I think we are a little more secure, because of this.”
But the whole thing left Sarah feeling very ill at ease. It was all as arbitrary and as far beyond their control as the weather. To live so entirely at the mercy of other people’s whims and fancies was, she thought, no way to live at all.
That night, the branches cracked in the frost, and the ice deepened itself by inches, and the sheep huddled close together on the hillside and steamed. Sarah lay awake; the church clock had just struck midnight; her breath plumed and her nose was cold. All was quiet. Quiet, apart from Polly’s breathing, and the bronchial wheeze from Mr. Hill across the landing.
In the stable loft, ice climbed across the inside of the windows. The cold made James ache, and tightened the knots in his flesh, which made it impossible to sleep. His candle offered only an illusion of warmth, and but little light, along with the rank smell of old mutton fat. Faint body-heat rose from the horses below, which kept him from perishing entirely; with it came the stable smell; meadowy, dungy, with the warm musk of horse sweat.
He had become used to all of this. He had barely noticed it for weeks. Now, though, the scents of the place seemed to nudge their way back into his consciousness: they were so particular to this place, and his thoughts had been stretching far away from there.
He sat on his bed, still in shirtsleeves, with a blanket over his shoulders, and a book of Scottish maps on his lap. This way of rendering the hard facts of landscape was new to him: the little upward flicks of the pen for mountains, the tiny clustered trees for woodland, the blue patches of lochs. He wanted maps of other places, he wanted maps of places he had been, he wanted to follow routes across terrain that his feet had trodden. If he could show Sarah—but he must not think of Sarah. He could not let himself be drawn to her again; he could not let her risk herself like that. Every time Sarah stepped into his thoughts, he would lift her up and set her aside, and return to the happy details of the map. Oh look, a forest, he’d think. Oh look, those crags. And then there she’d be again, with hair escaping from her cap, stomping up towards him with a frown and a slopping bucket— No. He lifted her up, set her aside. He must not think of Sarah.
He smoothed the paper, settled his blanket around his shoulders again. Dumfries and Galloway. Fascinating.
Then he heard the kitchen door go; he stilled, listening. It was her; he knew her tread. What could
she be up to, out at this time of night? He got up and crossed over to the window, pulled back the curtain just in time to see her ice-clouded shape pass below. She ducked in through the stable door beneath him.
He threw off the blanket, reached for his coat, started to pull it on, then slowed down, wincing, his muscles locked; he eased into it. The blanket was tumbled on the chair; he whisked it up and folded it and laid it on the foot of his bed. Then he sat down on the bed again and pretended to look at the map.
And she was there: there she was. True as life and twice as terrifying. Dark head and bird-shoulders and then body, all wrapped up in that ratty old blue coat they kept by the back door, the colour of it just so good against her skin. She hitched herself up to sit on the edge of the trapdoor, legs dangling down into the musk of the stables, and her face sweet and troubling in the candlelight.
“Good morning,” she said.
His mouth had gone dry. “What?”
“Good morning.”
“Why—?”
She swung her legs round and got up. She wore no stockings; her bare feet were wedged into her boots.
“Sarah—”
She clomped right up to him. She looked down at the map. “What’s that?”
“Sarah—”
“Is that a picture?” She sat down beside him.
“It’s a map.”
“Of where?”
“Scotland.”
“Scotland?” She leaned in to look at it. “Oh, it’s beautiful.”
A curl fell forward; he glimpsed a curve of skin as the blue coat fell open. Underneath it, she was just in her shift. He looked away, but she was so close that he could smell her; the day’s work, hard soap, vanilla.