by Jo Baker
“Is it Wickham? James, what is it? What do you suspect?”
He shook his head, and then just turned away. He darted round the end of the kitchen table, and out into the scullery. Sarah, leaving the almonds unfinished, followed him into the cold damp of the outer room. He had gone straight to the window, and stopped there, looking out. He looked so stricken. She glanced along his line of sight. Outside, chickens scratched at the moss between the flagstones, and nothing was happening at all.
“James?”
A jaw muscle worked, but still he did not speak.
“James. What is it?”
She touched his arm. He looked down at her hand, and then he looked up, and met her eyes. She could not read his expression at all.
“The officer is gone,” she tried.
He blinked at her.
“We are all quite well.”
Then, after a moment, he nodded.
“Are you all right?”
He took in a big shaking breath, and let it go again. He leaned to look past her then, back to the warm light of the kitchen: she followed his line of sight. Polly crossed the doorway with her basin of whipped eggwhite, both arms wrapped around its girth.
Then James just pushed away from the window, and gave Sarah a thin smile, and went back to his work.
… a little change was not unwelcome for its own sake.
March came—with a gentle hint of spring in the breeze, thick mud in the lane-ways, and a royal rash of purple and gold crocuses across the orchard floor, planted when Mrs. Bennet was a young bride, confident of her future happiness—and Elizabeth was to leave.
She was to go to Kent, where she had never been before, and to London on the way, where she had already been many times to stay with her uncle and aunt Gardiner, and where, now, Elizabeth finally offered to take Sarah.
“I have spoken to Sir William, and mentioned it in a letter to Mrs. Collins, and since neither of them has any objection to the scheme, and indeed Mrs. Collins is quite relieved, since she only has, beyond her housekeeper and a manservant, one little girl to scrub, and indeed says in her letter that she had been concerned how they were to manage, particularly when it came to laundry, if we did not bring our own maid with us, but did not wish to deprive my mother of her help—and everyone knows that the Lucases really cannot spare another body, not since they lost Charlotte’s assistance in the kitchen.”
Sarah set the trunk down on the floor, and wiped her dusty hands on her apron, and waited, since she had not yet the pleasure of fully understanding her young mistress.
“But as we are to travel there in the Lucases’ chaise,” Elizabeth continued, turning a book round to examine the spine, then offering it to Sarah, who took it mutely and without looking, and slipped it into her own apron pocket, “we shall be crammed in quite tight, so mind you pack lightly for yourself, just a small bag, or that old box of yours, if you prefer. Though I suppose if you had some other little items they could go in a corner of my trunk, which is to follow by stagecoach.”
“I am coming with you?”
Elizabeth lit up. “Oh, did I not say? It is not quite the wide world, Sarah, dear, but it is the best that I can do for you for the time being. We shall pass through London, and stop there one night on the way, and we shall stay there again on the return, and that should be of interest, and if nothing else it will be a change of scene.”
Sarah sank down on the trunk, and then was obliged to remove the book from her pocket, as it dug into her thigh. London. Kent. That this should happen now, when it was not simply a delight. It was as though Elizabeth had said, We are off on our travels, and you may come, but you must leave your leg behind.
“Are they near the sea, the Collinses?”
“No. I suppose they are somewhat nearer than we are here. You shall have to travel on the rumble-seat, so you must wrap up well and pray for good weather.”
Sarah nodded. She looked down at the book in her hands. It was Pamela, Volume II.
“Do you not like my little scheme?”
She glanced up. Elizabeth looked puzzled, and a little hurt. “Oh, I do, miss, I really do. It’s just a surprise, coming now, all of a sudden like this.”
“I was not sure of it, till I heard from Mrs. Collins. I thought that you would be pleased.”
“I am, miss. I am. Thank you.”
Elizabeth nodded, and murmured her acceptance, and returned to her books. Sarah watched her for a moment, her head bent, her gaze thoughtful, as she considered which volumes to take with her and which must be left behind. Sarah wondered what it could be like, to live like this—life as a country dance, where everything is lovely, and graceful, and ordered, and every single turn is preordained, and not a foot may be set outside the measure. Not like Sarah’s own out-in-all-weathers haul and trudge, the wind howling and blustery, the creeping flowers in the hedgerows, the sudden sunshine.
March is a terrible time for the cleaning of boots; worse even than the depths of winter. In March, gentlemen and ladies start to sniff the air like rabbits, and decide it is fine enough to risk a morning walk. A turn about the park might even be taken after dinner; nicely shod feet slither oblivious in mud and mire, while their owners try to get a closer look at a clump of pale wild daffodils, marsh marigolds, or violets turning their tiny perfect faces up towards the spring sun.
James had the Bennets’ boots lined up in a row, in diminishing order of size. He had brushed the dried mud off one small pair, and was now rubbing down the leather, scooping a rag into the greasy dubbin-pot and smearing it onto the instep, the toe, the cuff, then buffing it hard with another rag. He whistled under his breath, beautifully absorbed. She sat down beside him, and he noticed her. He did not look round, but his eyes creased, and she had come to know that this was how he sometimes smiled.
“You’re almost out of dubbin,” she observed.
He nodded.
“I’ll make you some more when I get the chance. There’s that old ewe that died yesterday, she’s to be boiled down for tallow.”
She picked up a boot—one of Elizabeth’s, delicate and prettily made, but all stuck and clabbered with mud. Elizabeth’s were always the worst. Sarah pushed off clots with a thumb, peeled away flakes of dried mud, turning the boot round in her hands.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I used to have to do all of them, before you came.”
His eyes creased again, and he started up his whistling once more, low, and breathy, and familiar.
“You know she’s off?” Sarah asked.
“Miss Elizabeth? Yes.”
“She said I could go with her.”
“Oh yes?”
“She said, London, and then Kent.”
He paused, and then nodded. “You’ll like that, I should say. You’d like to stretch your wings a little. Do you good.”
He tilted the little boot in his hand, examining the toecap, the little buttons, the delicate curve of the instep. The brown leather had a dull sheen to it now, like an old conker.
“But,” she said, “six weeks, it is to be. More or less.”
He turned to her, and simply smiled. “I shall still be here when you get back.”
They were collected, early on the day appointed—so early that the cockerel was still doing his pieces from the pitched roof of the henhouse—by Sir William and Maria Lucas in their chaise. The party was to journey the twenty-four miles to Gracechurch Street that morning, stay there overnight, and be with the Collinses the following day.
Screened from view by the blue leather calash, James hitched Sarah up onto the rumble-seat on the back of the chaise, his hands gripping her waist. It was not really a seat as such, but the platform where a groom might stand and to which, now, beside her, the overnight bags of the travellers were lashed. Her feet dangled. She touched her bonnet into place, and then tucked the skirts of her pelisse in under her thighs, so that the hem might not trail and catch. James cast an eye towards the heavens.
�
��I think it will stay fair.”
“Yes.”
“And the worst of the mud will miss you.”
“I shall be quite all right.”
James passed a baggage-strap behind the post, and fastened it around Sarah’s waist, buckling her safely in. He had to lean close in to do this. The scent of him—leather, horse, hay—the angle of his cheekbone—she would keep the memory with her.
“It’s not far, London,” he said.
“I know. You told me.”
“Sorry. I’m insufferable.”
She shook her head. Then tilted it, smiled. Maybe. A little bit.
“You’ll be there by midday.”
He touched her cheek with a rough fingertip. Then he stepped away, his face gone blank, avoiding Mrs. Bennet who was bustling around the carriage, calling out superfluous instructions, making her second daughter, waiting to be handed in, flush with irritation.
Mrs. Bennet was, she’d informed Mrs. Hill, entirely resigned to the marriage of Mr. Collins to Charlotte Lucas, but the picture she was now confronted with—proud father and excited younger sister off to visit the newlyweds, with one of her own daughters cast in the role of the spinster friend—was simply too much to bear. Sir William’s affable demeanour she found particularly provoking. When he bowed to her from inside the chaise, and commented favourably on the day, she would not hear of it being pleasant at all.
“I am afraid the London road will be terribly dirty after all this rain.”
“What trouble is a little mud when we have a nice cosy little chaise, and good friends waiting at the end of the journey?” He waved her concerns away. “We’ll take good care of your dear Lizzy, don’t you worry.”
Mrs. Bennet could only nod, and thank him, and go to join her remaining family on the steps.
“If you had but insisted on Lizzy marrying Mr. Collins,” Mrs. Bennet hissed to her husband, “it would have been me off in that chaise, going to visit her.”
“If Lizzy had married Mr. Collins, I very much doubt Sir William would be driving you to Kent, good neighbour though he is.”
“You take pleasure in deliberately misunderstanding me.”
A tendon flickered in Mr. Bennet’s temple: he set his jaw. Mrs. Hill could see what was coming before it was said. The words were hard, and fell like marbles.
“Believe me, my dear, there is precious little pleasure to be taken in it.”
Mrs. Bennet coloured, and began to protest at his mordant wit; her noise was as inevitable as his provocation of it.
Mrs. Hill moved in beside her, and offered her arm. “Madam.”
Mrs. Bennet looked at her housekeeper, blinking, her chin crumpled. She took her arm. “Thank you, Mrs. Hill.”
Mrs. Hill nodded. She kept her gaze fixed on the chaise, and would not look at Mr. Bennet.
“There she goes, then,” Mrs. Bennet said to her companion. “My little girl. Well, I hope that she is happy.”
And then she turned away. Together they climbed the steps towards the house, Mrs. Bennet continuing her soft complaining, and Mrs. Hill doing her best to soothe her with bland consoling nonsense, though all the while inwardly seconding her sentiments: Elizabeth had better be happy. If Elizabeth was not going to be happy, she may as well have married Mr. Collins, and then they all would have been safe.
Sarah now got to see something of the wide world. She saw it backwards, reeling away from where she sat, feet dangling, jolted by every rut and pothole.
Longbourn shrank; the house was soon screened by shrubs and trees, and then, at the bend of the drive, was gone. Then they were at the crossroads; they turned, rattled on, and then the crossroads too was lost to sight as the road fell away; then the stump-limbed tree was there, and passed, and was shrinking, shrinking, gone. They rumbled on to Meryton along the turnpike, and then through the town, past the pastry-cook’s and the Assembly Rooms and the haberdasher’s and the inn on the corner; the grocer’s daughter was out with a basket, making her deliveries; seeing Sarah on her perch, she waved and smiled and Sarah waved back at her excitedly; then they were out beyond the little town, clattering past a drill-ground where the soldiers, scarlet against the green, marched, halted, span round and stood stiff as pegs, while an officer barked out orders at them. Onto the new toll-road there, a coin tossed to the keeper and the creak of the pike, and then they were bowling along, the chaise springs complaining. Swaying on the back perch, Sarah was soon out beyond anything she knew.
The ground blurred between the humming wheels, and the sky was pale blue and clear above her, and from the other side of the calash she could hear the voices of the more comfortably situated passengers, and Sir William, who cried out, when they crossed a simple sluggish river choked with reeds, “The mighty Thames!”
They skimmed along past high hedges, through villages strung along the road like beads upon a thread. They passed between deep fields of watercress, trickling with rills of chalk-clean water, smelling sharp and peppery and green. They passed through market gardens, the raised beds thick with growth, mulchy and warm. The fields grew smaller, subdivided, the market gardens more closely packed, with sheds and lean-tos built of clapboard and rough timber. They slowed at a flock of geese that flapped and honked onto the broad grassy verge, chivvied there by a girl in a broad-brimmed hat who hissed back at them and swiped at them with a stick, and, after the chaise had passed, stared frankly back at Sarah, her face red and scrofulous. They splashed through a ford and water heaved up on either side in fountains. There was a smell of shit from the brown-skimmed fields, and the cattle stood thin and unmoving as though cut from painted tin. And then the road was sloping down, and there was more traffic, trailing long-wagons, painfully slow, bouncing gigs and carts, and post-chaises, and then a mail-coach thundering past; and then there were houses, and there was smoky, dirty air; and then they were rattling over cobbles and deep into town, Sarah’s head tilting back and her mouth falling open as she looked up at the buildings rearing above her like cliffs that stared at each other across a stream; and the stream was the traffic, and she herself was part of the traffic, this great ebbing surging traffic of London, the cabs and barrows and drays and carts and the people, just the endless variousness of the people: fishwives in raucous stinking gangs; barrow-boys with their jaunty caps and their bold eyes; a beggar in a filthy rag of a red coat who scooted along on stumps then fists, stumps then fists; a milkmaid with pails swinging from a yoke, whose milk looked bluish grey, and slopped queasily, and left bits on the insides of the buckets, and did not look like the milk at home at all. The streets were slick with dung, and there was a taste of soot in the air, and the smell of cesspits, and bad vegetables, and fish. And the noise—iron-clad wheels, iron-shod hooves, the cries of costermongers and dockers, muffin-sellers and cabbies, and the crowds, and the jostling and pressing up close, and the horses of the coach behind nodding in tandem at her. Then a dirty-looking youth slipped between the carriages; he dodged up to her, and she thought he was going to say something, but he just made a grab for her skirts, ruffling them back: he slid his hand over the top of her stocking, and then in between her thighs. She pulled away, kicking out at him, fumbling her skirts down; he retreated, grinning, showing a black gap where his front teeth should have been. He was gone before he’d even really been there, and left her shaking.
And to think it had once seemed a good idea to come here alone.
They turned into Gracechurch Street, and after a hundred yards or so of cobbles, Sir William pulled up the horses. Sarah looked up at a fine, tall, flat-fronted townhouse. The steps were scrubbed quite white, and she felt a new sympathy for Martha, the red-haired Gardiner housemaid, who had seemed so wilfully idle at Christmas. How her hands would smart from the soap, how her shoulders would ache with all the scrubbing, to get the stone that white in all this dirt. Sarah undid the buckle, loosened the strap, and slid down from her perch; she stood unsteadily at the back of the chaise, her legs quite numb beneath her.
Up abo
ve, Jane stood at a window. She looked pale and ghostly behind the watery pane: Sarah raised a hand in greeting, but Jane just turned away into the shadows, and a moment later she and Mrs. Gardiner, and the children, were trotting down the pristine steps, to meet the carriage.
Sir William, Maria and Elizabeth got out of the chaise, stiff from their journey. Sarah, pins-and-needles in her thighs, set about unbuckling the small baggages. She handed them to a waiting footman, who carried them indoors. The chaise and horse were left in the care of another footman, who walked the horse round through an archway into the mews beyond. Sarah climbed the scrubbed steps, now marked with footprints, and stood in the gloomy hallway, waiting to be noticed, and told what to do.
The house was all up and down and front and back, and nothing sideways to it at all. The windows were large-paned and lustrous, and looked out onto blank brickwork at the back, and at the front, stared across at the house on the far side of the street. Sarah, instructed by Martha, who seemed pleased to see her, climbed up and up and up to the servants’ attic, and set her wooden box on the floor there, beside the pallet that had been rolled out for her. She looked out of the window, across smoky rooftops; a few young trees were huddled shyly in a square. Further off, she saw the masts and bare rigging of ships at the quay. And then she had to scurry all the way back down again: they were going out.
Elizabeth was to go shopping with her aunt, and had told Sarah she could come with them; there was nothing immediate for her to do in the way of unpacking, et cetera, as they were off again on the morrow. Sarah rode up front with the coachman, an incomprehensible cockney, who persisted in pointing things out to her—landmarks, she supposed, and points of particular interest; she obliged him by staring off in the direction that he pointed, and nodding at whatever he said.
They crept in thick traffic along the mercantile roads, and then, when they were in the calmer parts of town, they picked up the pace, clipping along the streets, round two sides of a square that had been laid out like a formal garden, and then looping into a crescent, where white-fronted townhouses stood like a row of fine white teeth. At the end, the work was unfinished and instead of a house there was an empty lot, raw, the foundation-troughs and cesspit already dug.