by Jo Baker
Polly collected up the smeared and sticky glasses in the now empty dining room while the party rumbled on elsewhere. She turned with a tray of rummers, and found Wickham lounging silently in the doorway. She came towards him, tired but easy, attempting a smile; he swirled a glass of blood-dark port in his hand.
“Are you going to congratulate me on my escape, Little Miss?”
It was his way of coping with society: he had to have these little releases, time with people who were like him, who understood him.
“Well done, Mr. Wickham, sir.”
He meandered further into the empty dining room, coming closer, still between her and the door. When he smiled, his teeth and lips were stained with drink.
“And how are you, Little Miss, tonight?”
Tired, footsore, wanting her bed. “Sorry that you’re going, sir.”
He nodded, woebegone. “It is very sad,” he said. “But I was thinking—”
“What, sir?”
“You know that we are off to Brighton?”
She shifted her weight, dropping a hip; her feet throbbed. If she was nice to him, one last time, chances were she’d get a penny off him before he went.
“Yes, sir.”
She glanced down at his waistcoat, the usual source of coin. He just swirled his port around, lips pursed. His hand still didn’t move towards his pocket.
“I’ll bet you don’t get as many sweet things as you’d like.”
She looked up at this, attention really caught now: she shook her head.
“D’you know, there’s a sweetshop in Brighton, where there are jars and jars of bonbons and comfits and rock, all the colours of the rainbow, any flavour you can think of.” He finished his drink.
“Is there pineapple?”
She had heard of pineapples; she had heard they had them in some grand houses, though she had never seen one herself. She imagined them to be a bit like russets, compact and very sweet, but with a skin covered with the sharp green needles of a Scots pine.
He nodded, smiled slightly, added his glass to her tray, and pocketed his hands. Britches pockets, though, not waistcoat.
“Really? Even pineapple?”
“And many more besides.”
She swallowed, dreamy and acquisitive. He leaned back a little, watching her, his eyes half closed.
“How old are you, Little Miss?”
“Don’t know quite. Twelve, thirteen, maybe. Why?”
“Shall I buy you some pineapple bonbons, then, and send them back to you?”
Polly stared up at his big face, which everybody said was handsome; the sprouting moustache, the open pores between his eyebrows, the broken veins on his nose. Grown-ups could be so very unpleasant to look at, if you got too close.
“Oh, would you, though? Would you really?”
She wanted to ask what the other flavours were, before she committed herself to pineapple; whether there would be lemon drops and cough candy, coltsfoot rock and aniseed.
“I would. I will. If you’ll be sweet to me now.”
He moved towards her, a little unsteady on his feet. She stepped back as he came closer, thinking he meant to go past her. But he leaned in, and very carefully and deliberately, took the tray out of her hands, and set it down on the tabletop. The goblets chinked against each other in his clumsy grip.
“You will be, won’t you? Sweet.”
“Sir?”
“The way you look at me, like butter wouldn’t melt—”
The table edge pressed into the small of her back; he leaned closer; his breath thick with wine and tobacco. She turned her face away, nose wrinkling. Then his hand came up and touched her cheek, and then ran down her throat. It stopped at the collar of her dress. Her heart was beating like a bird, and she felt gooseflesh rise on her arms, and she did not know what she was supposed to do.
“Polly?”
It was James’s voice. Wickham went still and cold. Then he took a step back from her, and turned towards the newcomer. James had an empty decanter in his hand, and a deep line between his brows. Polly took a sidelong step away from Wickham, who adjusted his coat-front, tugging it down.
James did not so much as glance at Mr. Wickham. “Mrs. Hill wants you in the kitchen.”
“In a minute.”
For all that this was strange, and not particularly pleasant, Mr. Wickham had always been kind to her before.
“You do not seem to understand. You are wanted now.”
Polly raised up her eyes to heaven, but complied. Lifting her tray, she walked out of the room with the bearing of a queen. Though she scowled, in passing, at James. He turned to follow, but then Wickham called out after him.
“A moment, Smith.”
He paused, looked back. Wickham leaned across the sideboard, lifted the decanters one after the other, and examined them, plucking out the stoppers, sniffing.
“You’ll excuse me, sir, I—”
“No, I won’t excuse you. Damn you.” He held a decanter up to the light. “D’you know, I was just going to leave it—”
He found a glass, slopped in an inch of whisky. Despite everything, James winced for him: he would feel like death itself tomorrow.
When Wickham spoke again, over his shoulder, the words were nonchalant, a little blurred. “Because I thought, what’s the point, really? We’re leaving, and I thought, why bother myself with that? Why not just let a man go about his business, live and let live? Why not? Too much trouble to do otherwise.”
James felt a prickle of unease.
Wickham turned back to face him, rather unsteadily, reaching out a hand to lean on the sideboard. He missed, but he recovered and steadied himself, though he listed now a little to the left.
“See, a man like me,” he said carefully, “ ’s not so easy for me to get along. Neither fish nor fowl, me. Frog, really; or a toad. No place in the world for me but in the mud. You, you’ve got yourself nicely set up here. Cosy little billet. Well supplied with comforts. But you’re a dog-in-the-manger, and you begrudge me mine.”
James went to speak, but found that words escaped him.
“Can’t see how you get away with it, truth be told. Anyone can see that little doxy’s getting a good going-over; she’s just oozing with it—”
Afterwards, the only way that James could think of it was that he had taken, somehow, a step away from himself. He knew what he was doing, and knew what would come of it, and yet he did it anyway. He watched his hand set the decanter down on the dining table, and it all looked perfectly steady and cool. He took two brisk steps up to the sloping officer. The loss of his temper was an active thing; like shedding a heavy coat on a hot day, it was a relief to shrug it off.
His fist landed on Wickham’s temple. A nice sharp crack that the officer did not attempt to deflect, or even flinch away from, because he simply didn’t see it coming. Wickham staggered back against the sideboard. He fumbled at it for support, making the decanters shake and jingle.
And there, James thought, as he shook the sting out of his knuckles, shifting his balance and then bringing both hands up to ward off any retaliatory blow, that was the line that I must not cross, and I have just gone and vaulted right over it.
“You can’t touch me.” Wickham sounded more puzzled than angry. He struggled upright, touched his fingertips to his temple, then looked at them. The skin was not broken. There was no blood. “There are rules, dammit. Don’t you know the blasted rules?”
He touched his temple again, and then, to James’s astonishment, he began to laugh. He patted down his pockets, and drew out a case of cigarillos, and lit one from a candle.
“See, thing is,” he said, “I had my suspicions, but it had just seemed like too much trouble before. But then you go and cross me, and now you go and hit me, and it just seems like no trouble at all.”
“You’re a green boy,” James said. “Your boots aren’t even broken in yet. I’m not afraid of you.”
Wickham tucked his chin in, raised his eyebrows:
Really? He turned to the drinks tray, topped up his glass, and then poured another, and sloshed it towards James. James just looked at it.
“Go on. One soldier to another.”
James saw his hand reach out, felt his raw knuckles sting as his fingers wrapped around the tumbler, saw the glass brought to his lips. He sipped. The whisky burnt. He set the drink down on the table, beside the decanter. This time, his hand was unsteady, and the glass rattled on the tabletop. There was no going back from this.
“It is just your word,” he tried. “You have no proof.”
Wickham shrugged. “I could find your attestation; I could hunt down the Justice of the Peace who witnessed it. Though I’ll bet there’s no legal discharge to be found, is there? If I could take the trouble to go looking for it. But I am by nature one of life’s lilies, I’m not keen on either toiling or spinning, so all I can really think I’ll bother with is this: I’ll just mention it, to Mr. Bennet, and then to my colonel. This little exchange of ours. My suspicions, and then what transpired here. That’s the jam on this, you see: I wouldn’t even have to do a hand’s turn.”
The old man must be spared this. “Mr. Bennet—”
“Mr. Bennet needs to know, don’t ya think? Man like you. Put his trust in you. Needs to know what you’ve been up to. Despoiled the housemaid, struck a gentleman—” Wickham tilted the whisky in his glass, watching the slide of the meniscus. Then he looked up, and fixed James with his pale eyes. “Deserted the Army. And that’s a capital offence. This is a time of war.”
This had always been coming; it had always been sniffing along after him. He had got soft, he had got comfortable, and he’d got careless, and this had crept right up to him and sunk its teeth into his neck.
“So I think it would be best for everyone if you’d just scarper.”
Noise swelled from the drawing room; a roar of laughter; candlelight flared and the shadows shrank. But Sarah. He turned and made for the door.
“ ’Cos they’ll string you up, you know, if they get their hands on you. They’ll thrash you raw.”
In the hallway, candles burnt steadily in their sconces: just angled shadows, emptiness. Where was she?
Wickham called out after him, “They will break you on the wheel, my friend. On the fucking wheel.”
James blundered down the hallway, a hand skimming the wainscot. He stumbled down to the kitchen: the fire had burnt to ashes, a stranger servant slumbered by the hearth.
Oh God, Sarah. Where was she?
He slipped out across the stable yard. In the loft, he shoved his few things—books, linen, a bundled blanket—into his old canvas knapsack, on top of the rattling shells. He slung on the coat that Mrs. Hill had given him, pulled the bag onto his shoulder, and ducked out into the darkness; he slipped back round the side of the house.
At the parlour window he saw her, and it stopped him dead in his tracks. Inside, Sarah slid through the crowds and clustered furniture like a mouse making its way through a drawer. He watched her slim frame wind between the rich gowns and red coats, past the bosomy girls and stout dames and egg-bellied gents. He watched her fill a glass, then offer to fill another, and a fat hand flop over the top of the crystal and a ringleted head shake. He watched her turn away, and come towards the window. She was pale and tired, her eyes glittering; he ached to touch her.
She paused to set down the decanter on a side-table and then stepped right up to the sash.
She was so close.
If she sees me, he thought, I will beckon to her; she will slip out and join me here. I will tell her everything. I will beg her forgiveness and her understanding. I will say goodbye. And that will make leaving her just a little easier to bear.
But Sarah, inside the stuffy parlour, saw only the mirror of the room: the press of company, the crush of clothes and bodies, the wine-stained teeth and clammy-white skin, a clutter of furniture. So she reached up, and took hold of the curtains, and drew them closed.
And was gone.
He stood there in the sudden dark. He let a breath go. Then he dragged his bag up his shoulder, and walked on.
Lydia was to return with Mrs. Forster in their carriage to Meryton; they were to set out from there with the regiment early the next morning. When the party finally broke up, her departure from home was more noisy than affecting, and James’s absence was inconspicuous in all the fluster of leavetaking. The Forsters’ manservant brought their carriage round. Mrs. Hill and Sarah conveyed cloaks and hats to the flagging guests, then stood to watch from the front steps as they trailed away, the pack of officers on horseback, and the Forsters’ carriage rumbling off into the dark. Sarah pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, and rubbed. And that was that, she thought: they were gone, and James was safe, and Polly was safe, and now they would be left alone.
“Where is James?” Mrs. Hill wondered out loud, as they returned to the empty kitchen.
Sarah yawned luxuriously. “Gone to bed, I expect, missus. It’s well past midnight.”
Sarah was woken by the cockerel. She lay, relishing the warmth and ease of bed, the reassurance of Polly’s untroubled breathing beside her. She swung her feet out from under the covers, pulled on her stockings, and splashed her face.
Pattering down the stairs, she tucked her hair into her cap, calling back up to Mrs. Hill who was following cheerfully down behind her, both possessed of that particular kind of pleasure that comes with the prospect of a day’s fine weather, and of a core of hard-won, secret happiness: the expectation that things, after all, were turning out for the best.
The kitchen was quiet. The fire, Sarah noticed, was dead. She unhooked her apron from the peg, slipped it on. Walking through to the scullery, she passed the strings around her waist and then knotted them in front. The water-tank, she knew just by the look of it—dull, unmisted—was empty, but she rested a hand on it anyway, and tapped its hollowness with her fingertips. She stood still. She listened. Silence but for a wood pigeon’s call, and Mrs. Hill rummaging in the kitchen.
No.
She went straight back through into the kitchen, and opened the door onto the yard. The morning was cool and golden, and there was the wood pigeon again, and a blackbird singing. She heard the clunk of hoof against the stable door. A scrape. No human sounds at all.
She ran, her boots clattering across the flagstones.
Mrs. Hill peered through the open doorway, and across the yard; she saw the girl’s streaming tangling skirts, and her cap as it fell, and landed on the flags, and lay there white as a mushroom in the fields. Polly came thumping down the back stairs, singing softly to herself. She fell silent, seeing Mrs. Hill standing there, staring, and the door flung wide open on the morning.
At the stables, Sarah swung round the doorjamb, into darkness. The horses whinnied, scraped, anxious.
Mrs. Hill came out blinking into the yard. Polly followed her.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
They crossed the yard, approaching the stable door. They could hear the sounds of Sarah’s movements inside, scrambling feet on the ladder, stumbling footfalls across the loft room above.
“What’s happening?”
Mrs. Hill shook her head, not because she did not know, but because she was afraid to think. The knowledge was shoving and elbowing its way in, unbidden, but she would not let it through.
There was a pale shape through the inner darkness: Sarah slithered down the ladder, and came out from the back of the stables towards them. She swayed there, clutched at the doorjamb. And Mrs. Hill knew—deep inside her, in the hollow beneath her rib cage, where her baby had curled, his little feet pressed against her inner flesh, had slept and stretched and heaved himself about—what Sarah knew already, but could not yet find the words to say.
That he was gone. That James had gone. That he was lost to her again.
1788
When her belly grew too big to go unnoticed, even with her corsets pulled tight, she packed a bag and said goodb
ye to him, and walked out along the drovers’ road to the distant farmhouse where they expected her. Though her body was a hard discomfort to her, and the season was bitter, she went on foot, because if she went with the carter or was took in the carriage, then someone was bound to observe it, and there would be talk, and they would be discovered.
The shame of it. It was more than anyone could be expected to bear. She must be reasonable.
At the strange house she kept to her room. Mrs. Smith, the farmer’s wife, attended to her, and that was all. The weather was savage cold. She had a fire and a shawl and was allowed a Bible, which she scratched her way through, line by difficult line, searching for consolation, wishing she had had more schooling when she was a girl.
Mrs. Smith was a lean woman of middle years, and the land they farmed was hard and dry. She had a baby half-weaned, a big stumbling brute of a girl with twin trails of snot between nose and lip. The woman was silent, her attentions purely practical. It did not matter: Margaret did not expect to make a friend of her.
In the witching hour of a winter night, she brought forth a tiny scrap of a boy, who opened blue-black eyes and studied her with a sleepy wisdom, and whose suckling was a dragging ache in her breast, and whose tiny ruddy fists kneaded at her as though he was quite deliberately reshaping her and making her into someone altogether new. What had hitherto seemed a problem to be solved was now revealed to be the answer: the very fact of the child made everything that had gone before shift and ripple and settle differently, because it all now led to this, and him. And he was as perfect as a syllabub, or a pillowslip straight off the line.
This could not be dealt with reasonably. Reason had nothing to do with it.
Still, she watched herself hand him over to the woman of the house, to wet-nurse, and she knew as she passed him from her arms that she would not hold him again, but also that he would be fed and kept warm and safe and brought up in the fear and love of God, and taken to Church and Sunday school, and given work when he was old enough to work, and would die, God willing, an old man by a fire; that he would, in short, have as decent a life as she could hope for, and that was so much more than she could do for him by herself alone. It still seemed a fair kind of deal: she would pay for the baby’s safety with her broken heart, and Mr. Bennet would pay for it with his money, so that he need not pay for it with his name.