by Jo Baker
They turned onto a broad avenue, and the driver pulled up the horses. The carriage waited for them while they went into the shops.
Sarah followed Elizabeth and her aunt down one arcade, and then up another, and in and out of stores stacked high with bolts of coloured cloth and patterned paper and rolled carpets—Mrs. Gardiner was soon to redecorate a sitting room, and had solicited Elizabeth’s opinion in the selection of patterns and colours. Sarah was soon lugging pasteboard boxes, paper packages and rolled samples of wallpaper. She had seen all of this before; she had daydreamed it. It was all very fine, but it was not as lovely as the daydream, and the packages slithered and slipped from her grip, and a box dug into her side, and how could it be that a person needed so much of all of this, and how could it be that one printed paper was so vitally, importantly lovely and another was entirely dismissable, or that any of it really mattered so very much, or indeed at all?
Then they returned to the carriage, and drove a little further, to another terrace of white houses, where Mrs. Gardiner then went to get her teeth filed—she had had it done once before, and now must have it done again. Elizabeth declined the offer to have hers looked at too. She sat in the carriage outside Mr. Spence’s establishment, and waited with Sarah and the coachman, and asked what Sarah thought of London.
“It is not what I imagined, miss.”
“How did you imagine it?”
Sarah shook her head. The real now overlaid the daydream, blurring it. “I cannot rightly say, now, miss.”
They watched as the fashionable folk clipped smartly up the bright steps, past the polished brass plaques, and in through the smart blue door; they watched them stumble back out with bloodied handkerchiefs to their faces.
“I think I made the better choice,” Elizabeth said.
“Indeed so, miss.”
Elizabeth’s decision was further vindicated by the uncomfortable aspect of her aunt, who emerged from Mr. Spence’s offices rather swollen about the lips, having had to have all her lower front teeth rasped away considerably.
Then there was dinner, which Mrs. Gardiner could not eat at all, and Jane only picked at, and which Sarah partook of with strangers in the tiny servants’ hall, struggling not to yawn. Then the family went out to the theatre in the Gardiners’ coach, and Martha packed the children off to bed, and the household loosened its collective collar, and collapsed into fatigue.
London. The crowded heart of the city. Where there should be dancing bears and frolicking beggars and fireworks fit to scare a soldier. Sarah lay down on the pallet, and drew the blankets up to her chin. Martha blew out the candle, and it was dark.
Sarah curled onto her side. The mattress was thin, stuffed with old hair, and her hip and shoulder pressed against the wooden boards beneath. Despite her tiredness, she could not sleep: the noise—the sheer depth of it, layer after layer of sound—cabs rattling along the street in front, drays rumbling down to the docks, cats fighting or mating in the alleyways, the creak of rope from the wharves, a dog barking, a clock, and another clock, and another still more distant clock chiming out hour after hour of the night, into the darkness, as the Gardiners’ housemaid snored oblivious in her bed, and Sarah twisted and turned and tangled herself up in blankets that smelt of someone else.
Kent was wide and green; those were hop-vines planted, and over there was lavender, which looked grey now, but later in the year would make the fields quite purple. The barns stood on those stone footings, Sir William said, to keep out the rats: he was a fount of information, and supplied it freely to his two young charges within the chaise; Sarah overheard everything through the umbrella-skin of the calash.
At a toll-house, the keeper’s accent was so strange that Sir William could make himself understood only by speaking loudly and slowly, and with grand gestures, which rocked the chaise on its springs. The transaction complete, Sir William drove away saying that it was a mark of true breeding to be able to make oneself understood by the lower orders wherever they were to be found, and that he himself was particularly fortunate to have the happy knack of it. Sarah, seeing, as it were, the aftermath of everything, watched the keeper spit on the ground and say something that she could not hear, but the meaning of which was perfectly clear to her, though she had no claim to any breeding whatsoever.
And then there were the palings of a park rippling by, and she watched a fieldfare call from its perch on the fence, its beak open like a jug, pouring out song; and then they descended into the village, past cosy low-eaved cottages, and beds dug for spring planting. Sir William pulled up in front of a pleasant, decent house, perhaps a third the size of Longbourn, with green fencing, and laurels, and the garden sloping down towards the village street, and then Mr. and Mrs. Collins were coming out of the front door to greet them.
When the little group had gone in through the gate, she followed after with the bags. At the front door, Mr. Collins stood aside to let her pass.
“Well, well—” He searched, but could not find her name. “My child.”
The housekeeper at Hunsford Parsonage was like a horsefly at Sarah’s ear, buzzing, always threatening to bite. Every scrap of work must be observed and its results scrutinized; everything must be done to perfection and beyond. She would drop to her hunkers to look along the length of a polished tabletop; she would peer, head cocked like a hen, into scoured pans; she held up drinking glasses to the light. The Collinses’ housemaid was consequently a timid, rabbity thing, always on the hop. Sarah tried conversing with her that first afternoon, in the scullery, where they had been set to clean the brass and copper together. The girl just stared at Sarah, her mouth falling slowly open, rag in one hand, and a cup of salt-and-flour-and-vinegar paste in the other. Then, realizing she had stopped working, she shuddered back into life, rubbing at the samovar as if she was trying to wear a hole in it. Sarah, eyebrows raised, scooped up some paste, and continued with her own work, and did not trouble the girl again. But she could not make sense of all this agitation: Mrs. Collins was sensible, and Mr. Collins very easily pleased, so why should it be that the Hunsford servantry lived on hot coals like this; you would think they suffered the most exacting of employers.
And then, one morning, Lady Catherine de Bourgh came to call. The master’s patroness, the housemaid whispered, eyes goggling; she curtseyed deeply. Sarah dipped a curtsey herself, and observed from under her eyelashes as the grand lady trod slowly past, her eyes assessing each girl in turn from cap to boots.
Lady Catherine roamed the parsonage. She climbed stairs and opened cupboards. She lifted a vase from the mantel to see that it did not leave a footprint in an otherwise too-faint-to-notice fall of dust. She peered and picked at Mrs. Collins’s embroidery and said that really she should be concentrating on her needlepoint, and not wasting her time on this wild satin-stitch stuff. Then she deigned to accept the offer of refreshment, and all was thrown into frenzy in the kitchen; the tea had been considered far too strong on the last occasion that Lady Catherine partook of it, and the servants had been accused of profligacy with the leaves.
This time, the brew passed Lady Catherine’s lips without comment, which caused the poised and anxious housekeeper actually to sigh, and then blush at having sighed. Lady Catherine’s opinions on the state of the tray-cloth were, however, heard by all; they caused the housemaid to shrink still further, and scurry off to be busy elsewhere, so that she might not be found till some of the immediate burn of shame and fury had subsided: “If your housemaid cannot remove a simple stain like that, you really must replace her.”
About a fortnight later, not long after Sir William’s return home to Lucas Lodge, they killed a sow. Mr. Collins looked on, arms folded as it struggled and squealed, then bled out, twitching, and then went silent and still.
“Fine pig, that Berkshire is. Was. Finest in the county, I should say. Good and fat.”
Sarah carried the bucket of blood back to the kitchen, where the sow was also carried, trotters in the air, for butchering. It b
eing heavy work, the manservant jointed the beast; the housekeeper stripped off fat and dropped it into a tub. She nudged at it with a toe.
“You get that sorted for us, eh, Miss Sarah?”
Sarah blinked at her.
“You do know how to make soap, I suppose? You do have soap in Hertfordshire?”
“Where’s the lye?”
“Where you’d expect it to be.”
In the parsonage scullery, Sarah measured the lye into the water with an old cracked cup. She lit the fire beneath the copper, and set the fat to melt. The porkiness of it bubbled off a little bit, or she just got used to it, for it did not seem to smell quite so like Sunday dinner after a while. She poured out the liquid fat, then lifted down a bunch of lavender, and tucked it into her apron pocket. It had never failed to astonish her, down the years of helping Mrs. Hill, how soap that made things clean was such a foul thing in its own making. She stripped the pale dried lavender, and dropped the buds into the curdling porridge.
The soap was poured into the mould, the mould wrapped around with cloths, and the bundle hidden in a cupboard to continue cooking on its own. Sarah stepped out blinking into the yard. A bay horse scratched its neck against the top of the stable door. Above the tiled roof she could see the tops of plane trees, and a white bird soaring up into the blue. She watched it skim away, over the wide patchwork of fields, copses and forests—and beyond all that, the sea.
The sea. Elizabeth had said that they were closer—might she catch a glimpse of it from here? What was the point of her being in Kent at all, if all she got to see was the innards of a pig, and of the parsonage?
She pulled her apron off and slipped out of the back gate. Breathless down the village street, she strode past bantams scratching in the grit, and bare-twigged rose bushes in a garden, and a woman who came out of a cottage and leaned heavily on her broom and stared at her.
Beyond the dwellings, the hedges were high and budded with green; she climbed up onto the cross-tread of a stile, to see beyond. There was a clayey ploughed field, sprigged with early growth. Here and there, across the weald, she could see smoke twining into the air, church spires, barn rooves with baked-clay tiles, and layer after layer of green, until it melted into the distance. But she could not see the sea.
And it was all so very like Hertfordshire. Here, though, there was no trace of the associations that had made Hertfordshire the centre of the world.
At the parsonage, the housekeeper was standing at the back door with her fists jammed into her scrawny waist.
“The soap was done, so—” Sarah began.
She was silenced by a cuff round the head, and was shoved indoors.
This was a respectable household! What would people think! More importantly, what would people say! More importantly still, what would Lady Catherine think and say, when she found out? Gadding about the countryside like a proper dollymop.
Sarah smarted with outrage—the housekeeper couldn’t hit her: Sarah wasn’t hers to hit; and how dare she call her names? But the woman was not to be argued with; she marched Sarah down to the kitchen, still scolding, because Lady Catherine was bound to find out, and Sarah need not think that anybody would stand between Sarah and the full force of Lady Catherine’s disapproval.
The doorbell rang. It made her jump. As instructed by the housekeeper, Sarah had scattered tea leaves and was sweeping them, and the dust that they had laid, up into a pile. But she had no instructions regarding the parsonage door; back at Longbourn it would be James’s or Mr. Hill’s job. So she waited, with her broom, for the thud of the manservant’s feet. But he did not come.
She chewed a snag of skin by her thumbnail. Whatever she did, she was bound to be in the wrong. Run for assistance, and leave the visitors waiting; open the door, and be found to have overstepped herself. And what if it was Lady Catherine, looming on the threshold, come to admonish the Collinses for keeping an unruly household; what would she say on finding the door opened by the miscreant herself?
Sarah glanced down the empty hallway. Not a footfall, not a creaking door. She could hear Mr. Collins’s voice from outside, and brief, lower-pitched replies. Mr. Collins must have gone out earlier by a side door, and now was returning with visitors. They must be people of some standing, since they must wait at a locked main entrance, rather than be brought in some other way.
Every ticking moment made it worse.
She leaned her broom in the corner. Then she drew the bolt, and opened the door.
In the event, it did not matter whether or not she had overstepped herself, because in the instant the door was opened, she ceased to exist. One moment she was there, creaking the door back on the bright morning, and the next she was gone; the two grand gentlemen filled the doorway, and stepped through it, and moved past her, and did not so much as glance her way—for them the door had simply opened itself. Mr. Collins bustled through behind them.
“Just through there, Mr. Darcy, Colonel Fitzwilliam, if you would be so kind, the second door on the left.”
A blur of rich colours—one green velvet coat, one blue—and the soft creak of good leather, and a scent off them like pine sap and fine candlewax and wool. She watched their glossy boots scatter her tea leaves across the wooden floor. The two gentlemen were so smooth, and so big, and of such substance: it was as though they belonged to a different order of creation entirely, and moved in a separate element, and were as different as angels.
Mr. Collins, in his clerical black, closed the door behind them, and all was dim indoors. And she was there again, returning to her own flesh: he turned to Sarah with a terrified smile.
“To think, I was out for my walk, and came upon Colonel Fitzwilliam, and Mr. Darcy! And they would come here, my dear, back to my humble abode!”
She smiled encouragingly for him.
He went after them, rubbing his hands and muttering, baffled as to why such happiness should make him feel so distressed. He disappeared into the parlour; she could hear him offering seats, refreshments, jangling the bell. Summoned, the housekeeper came striding past, casting an accusatory glance at Sarah.
Sarah retrieved her broom and began, again, to chase the damp leaves around the floor.
“Clearly,” Elizabeth said, struggling out of her petticoat, “he takes after his aunt, Lady Catherine. He must be trying to find fault with me.”
“He will have his work cut out for him.”
Sarah set Elizabeth’s hot water down on the washstand, and unfurled a slice of soap from its muslin wrapper, while Elizabeth wafted the compliment away.
“Oh, I am not his idea of what a woman should be, not at all. I heard him once, you know, listing his requirements; a woman would need to combine all the Three Graces in one person, to stand any chance of charming him at all.”
“But he cannot be a reasonable man, miss, if he seeks you out simply to find fault with you.”
“Well, there we are, then. He is not reasonable.”
This soap was scented with rose petals, which had turned with age as brown and crumbly as tea. Her own lavender-scented batch had been drying now for a fortnight; it would be another month before it was safe to use on a lady’s skin. And by then they would be home! The thought was like a cool breeze to Sarah, as she laid out the towels, one on the marble top, another down on the floor for Elizabeth to stand on.
“And yet I cannot for the life of me understand why he keeps on coming here, with the colonel and without, or lurking around at Rosings, and just, well, looking.”
Sarah peered closer at the soap—a small fly was stuck there; it had seemed, for a moment, to be a scrap of petal. She picked it swiftly out, flicked it away; the young lady was too busy with her thoughts, and her undressing, to notice what her maid had just done.
“It cannot be for the society, since he sits ten minutes together without opening his lips. And it cannot be for the cakes, because they really are nothing very remarkable at all, for all Mr. Collins does go on about them—oh, these laces!”
> She threw up her hands in frustration. Sarah came close and unknotted the cord, then teased it out through the eyelets of Elizabeth’s short-stays. Once they were loosened, Sarah slid the stays down; Elizabeth put a hand on Sarah’s shoulder and stepped out of them.
“You have no notion at all, then, miss, why he might be looking at you so much?”
“Perhaps he is thinking about his dinner. I don’t know. I have no idea at all.”
Sarah laid the stays down on the bed; Elizabeth slipped her shift off her shoulders, let it fall to the ground too. She stepped out of it. Feet bare on the towel that Sarah had placed for her, Elizabeth wrung out a cloth, and washed her face, and then her neck and ears.
Sarah wafted the young lady’s gown out on the bed; perhaps Elizabeth was right, in a way; perhaps he did look at her hungrily; she just did not yet know the nature of the hunger. Elizabeth rinsed out her cloth, and rolled the soap in it; she lifted it, dripping, and washed her underarms. The greyed water beaded on her ribs, and ran down her; the towel darkened beneath her slender feet.
Sarah said, “You do not suppose he could be partial to you at all, do you, miss?”
“Oh, goodness me!” Elizabeth laughed, and sloshed her cloth back into the bowl again. “Don’t be such a silly, Sarah.”
Elizabeth had a headache. It was the second headache of the day. She had been rereading her letters from Jane, and they had made her tearful, and the tearfulness had brought on these headaches and there was no way that she was going to Rosings now, not since she had such an excellent reason to be excused.
Sarah would have loved to have a letter to look at herself; she would have loved to have the luxury of tears and headaches: the darkened parlour, a cool cloth for the forehead, and the peace that came with the family gone out to drink their tea.