by Jo Baker
James kept his counsel, and himself to himself. He kept his shirt on, too, though no doubt there would be those amongst his crewmates who had scars like his. It was better to avoid the question, to be unremarkable, to leave as light an impression as he could upon the world.
They sailed from Lisbon to Rio, with the mail and a cargo of linen cloth. He was too busy to feel sick, too exhausted not to snatch whatever sleep he could in his swaying hammock. They returned from Brazil to Portugal with coffee; the whole ship was heady and fragrant with it.
Back in the familiar port, James kept quiet, and pocketed his pay, and closed his eyes tight to the sights of the land beyond, the memories it conjured. They loaded the Snapdragon’s hold with casks of port wine, and barrels packed with blue-painted china. They sailed next for Antigua.
At English Harbour, the air was thick and warm and smelt of vegetation and rot. Slaves never crossed the gunwales nowadays, not since the new law, but they were still traded, they were still worked: slaves farmed the sugar and cut it and refined it; slaves carted it to market. Slaves made the carts that it was carted on, they iron-rimmed the wheels, they shod the horses, mortared the bricks, and shingled and thatched and cooked and stoked the fires and treated the sick and sweated.
James, rolling barrels by their bases, wiped the sweat from his own forehead and watched, as off the ships, and down the quays, the new captives trickled past from the foreign ships, their chains clinking; they were filthy, sick, half-starved, but he could see—in the way they held their heads, the looks they gave the place—what they were thinking: This cannot be real, I do not accept this.
The slaves that came down from the plantations looked different, withdrawn; you could not see what they were thinking at all.
An English voice, harsh above the susurration of the footfalls, made James start and look round. Amongst those dark skins, a white man’s face—though not white, but pink and puffy with heat and drink—was unnatural and gross. An English agent or a steward; he moved through the crowded market with a riding crop and high boots, assessing the flesh, saying a word here or there, striking a bargain, gathering up the goods. Looking out for the interests of an English gentleman who would rather stay at home, and spend the money there.
When James hung in his hammock, eyes closed, he could still see it all again: the black shuttered eyes; the pink man’s sausage-skin sweat; the column shambling off to the inner dark of the island. If it were not for the rifle and the lash, someone could just lift their chains and wrap them around the nearest sweaty pink throat, and squeeze.
Loaded with sealed casks of sugar, the Snapdragon sailed for the port-town of Lancaster, in the far north of England. One night, out on the cold Atlantic, James dreamed of an endless march in the mud and snow; from a vulture’s circling flight he saw himself, his detachment, the thousands of men in a shambling trail across the land. He woke shivering and sick, and with a new, instinctive understanding of the mathematics of the world.
I handed my freedom right over. I signed it clean away. I sold myself.
It had seemed like such a small thing at the time; it had seemed to be no use to him at all.
They were chased home by the trade-winds, and docked at Lancaster, at Saint George’s Quay, in August 1811. By then, James had been with the Snapdragon for nearly two years. The war seemed like a lifetime ago; those dark memories could not really be his.
He stared out at this busy city from the deck. The nearby warehouses were six storeys high, spanking-new; their fronts were slung with winches; creaking ropes hoisted crates up to their stores. The quayside bustled with dockers—men, and women too, with their skirts hitched and sleeves rolled on knotted muscle, matching the men for work and noise, matching them obscenity for obscenity. Above this clamour the city rose, built out of golden stone; the castle was lowering and ancient, but below that, on the hillside, everything seemed elegant and new. There were bright church spires and grand flat-fronted houses with big glazed sashes; the African Trade had been profitable for this place.
But, if he just turned and looked a little to the left, on the far side of the river, the rye fields stretched flat and silky, and further off, the hills swelled blue and purple like the backs of rising whales, and if you could get out there, beyond these bustling mercantile streets, and walk out through those fields, and up to those hills, and climb up through their heath and heather—the peace of that would be so deep, and so clean. He felt again that impulse that had come upon him in Spain, which had been lying suspended in him all this time at sea: to be in England, and in the service of a good man. To be at home.
He asked for shore leave, and having never yet caused one bit of bother, it was readily granted. After all, what harm could he get up to in a place like this? Why would a Spaniard go and slip his traces in a place like Lancaster?
His pay in his pocket, his bag on his shoulder, he had one drink with his shipmates in the Three Mariners, an ancient ramshackle building on the quayside, easing itself down into the mud on which it had been built. He drank a pint pot of beer while they toasted their safe return to England, and the restoration of health to the poorly king whose piss had apparently turned quite purple, and whose fat-arsed son had—it now transpired—been in charge since February; then they drank to the health of the milk-complexioned girl behind the bar, who smiled at James, and had pretty dimples. He looked away.
When they were ordering a second round of beer, he got up and said he was going for a piss. He walked out of the side door of the inn, and took his piss in the stinking privy, and then he buttoned himself up and walked away, and just kept on walking, crossing Cable Street, and then New Street under the shoemakers’ signs, passing the tea-merchants’ offices, and a rocking horse that hung creaking above a toyshop, its spots quite faded, its mane and tail worn scrubby by the weather. On Market Street, James stopped a young gentleman of Indian complexion to ask the way, but found that he could put the words together only with some difficulty. The young man tamped his pipe, and listened kindly, and then answered him precisely with directions out of town. James was soon striding out along South Road, the carriages bowling by, and ladies with parasols out taking the air, and chattering away to each other in their muddy dialect.
It took him a month to reach Hertfordshire. When his shoes fell apart he haggled over a scuffed old pair of English boots with a toothless woman in Bolton who reeked of gin. When his shirt fell to rags he bought another in a vile shop in Digbeth, and English britches too, so that he might no longer be taken for a foreigner. He scorched the seams with a candle stub, to rid the cloth of lice.
He walked the lane-ways dressed in strangers’ clothes, his black canvas pack fading now to grey. He slept in shepherds’ bothies, hedgerows and church porches; while his pay held out, and it was still summer, none of this was a hardship to him. He spoke to very few—a labourer in a field to check his road, a yeoman to beg a day’s work from him, a farmer’s wife to buy a sup of milk. Silence became habitual, and when he was called upon to speak, the confluence of languages in his thoughts made him pause and struggle for words.
He thought differently now; he no longer thought in houses, farms and fields, in enclosed spaces; now it was all distances and trajectories. He daydreamed of the lines that he had traced across the land, the threads that drifted off over the seas.
“Fine-looking fellow, that one,” he overheard a dairymaid telling her companion.
“Shame that he’s a simpleton. Can hardly talk.”
“Don’t mean you can’t have him, though, do it?”
They cackled together; he walked on.
As the autumn came down upon him, he returned to familiar territory, to the landscape of his childhood. He followed the drovers’ road past Old Misery’s farm, and there was the spreading sycamore that he had used to climb, and the farmhouse still peering out suspiciously from under low eaves. He didn’t stop. He picked blackberries, hips and haws, and ate them as he went, staining his fingers and his lips with jui
ce.
He asked at the inn in Meryton if Mr. Bennet still lived thereabouts; he muttered something about work, about hearing something from another fellow on the road—but the landlord was a ready talker, and no explanation was required: indeed, the Bennets did still dwell in the neighbourhood, he was happy to inform him—the Bennets’ home was but a mile away, at the village of Longbourn. Theirs was the principal household. Mr. Bennet, and his wife, and their five fine daughters were currently in residence.
James watched from the lane, hidden by a patch of holly hedge. A stream of young ladies flowed out of the house and across the paddock; they foamed over a stile, and flurried off like sparrows along the field path and out of sight. He watched as Mr. Bennet himself—older, stooping—came out of the house, and strolled aimlessly in the shrubbery, hands clasped behind his back. James must pick his moment, choose his words; he made his way down the lane cautiously. As he passed a bare patch of the hedge, he saw two figures in the paddock down below. One was a child, the other a young woman, who was hanging white linen on a line. She paused in her work, and shielded her eyes, and stared across the space between them.
He had come halfway across the world for this. This was home.
“But it is all, all too late now.”
Mr. Hill, when he was roused and consulted, sat up in bed and pulled the blankets up to his chest. He readily confirmed that he had not sent the manservant on any errand, nor had James previously informed him of an intended departure for Meryton, or anywhere else, that morning.
“It doesn’t mean he didn’t go, though.” Mr. Hill wiped his crusted eyes, and then his spit-gummed lips. “There might have been a mend to be made at the blacksmith’s, or he might have gone on to the coach-maker’s in Harlow, for new gear.”
His nightshirt was old and thin and he felt exposed under all this female scrutiny. He peered at his wife and the two girls, blurred in the shaft of early-summer sun from the casement. They could at least have let him get his britches on before they started all this.
Mrs. Hill sank down on the bed beside him, tightening the blankets over his lap, making the boards creak underneath.
“He didn’t mention anything. He didn’t say a word.”
“They’re not wanting the carriage at this hour, are they? I’ll do it. You lot clear off while I get dressed.”
“He would never leave the horses,” Sarah said.
“Eh?”
“The horses,” Sarah said. “No fodder, no water. He just—left.”
Mr. Hill felt for his wife’s hand, lying by him on the covers. He took it, held it. She looked down at his old paw, wrapped around hers.
“He can’t have just gone,” he said.
Mrs. Hill nodded. His hand tightened around hers; her eyes welled.
“I’m so sorry,” the old man said.
Polly, hovering in the doorway, bit her finger and looked from one of them to the other, baffled and upset. Sarah just swayed there, in a patch of sunshine, looking as though a breeze would knock her over. Mrs. Hill had gone grey, and Mr. Hill was suddenly all soft and concerned. All was out of order. Polly didn’t like it, not one little bit.
“Will you speak to Mr. Bennet?” he asked.
Mrs. Hill shook her head: she did not know.
“What will you do?”
She squeezed his hand, then let it go, and heaved herself up from the bed. She passed Sarah, then Polly, and set off with a heavy tread down the stairs. Sarah followed her; Polly took hold of Sarah’s arm as she passed by.
“Why would she do anything?” Polly hissed. “What has it to do with Mrs. Hill anyway, whatever James is up to?”
“Not now.”
Sarah gently pushed Polly aside.
“Mrs. Hill—” Sarah called.
The older woman paused on the turn of the stairs. Sarah clattered down the treads between them.
“Missus—”
Mrs. Hill looked up, waited.
Sarah had no words to hand, but the logic of it, however inarticulable, was strong: the soldier flogged in the rain and the scarred man that she loved; the departure of the Militia and James’s disappearance—each explained and substantiated the other, and made a kind of intuitive sense.
“Missus, the Militia, they left last night too.”
Mrs. Hill swallowed, nodded. “Go on.”
“I do not know what he had done—”
“What he had done?” The older woman’s brow crumpled.
“James. Mr. Smith. You would think once he had been punished—”
“I don’t follow you.”
Sarah’s lips were dry. “I am sure, I know, that he is good; he has always been—”
Mrs. Hill grabbed her shoulder, and shook her. “Spit it out, for God’s sake.”
“He had been flogged.”
Mrs. Hill turned away. She pressed her forehead to the cool distempered wall.
“Mrs. Hill—”
She shook her head, rolling her brow against the plaster. This was not the deal. This was not what she had paid so dearly for.
What did she expect him to do, Mr. Bennet wanted to know. What exactly did she expect him to do about it, after all?
Mrs. Hill chewed at the inside of her cheek: how could she know? She was not an educated man, a gentleman, with time on his hands and a network of useful and eminent acquaintances about the neighbourhood. She did not even know what might be done; what enquiries could be made, which individuals consulted. But something must be done. Surely something must be done this time.
Mr. Bennet just played with his coffee cup and did not meet her eye. His hand, as it turned the cup in the saucer, shook a little.
“I suppose you want me to send out search parties? Scour the countryside?” He pursed his lips. “The young man has broken his engagement here, which he had signed up for until the quarter day at Midsummer at least. It is quite inconvenient and wrong of him: we can assume he does not wish to be found, or he would not have left the way he did.”
“The Militia—”
Mr. Bennet dropped his voice; he looked up at her now. “What would they want with him? He served his time honourably, did he not?”
“He was not gone long enough.”
He went still, staring at her.
“Not to have been discharged,” she said. “Not unless he was crippled beyond use.”
“A deserter, then—”
They just looked at each other, in silence.
“You could write,” she said. “You could write to Colonel Forster—”
“And what would that achieve?”
“Just to know. Whether he has been—taken.”
He lifted a paper from his desk, adjusted his pince-nez. “You wish me to write to that gentleman, and ask if they happen to have my bastard in their custody?”
“Your manservant.”
“What would people think if I did even that? What would people say? Mr. Smith makes his own decisions, and his own mistakes. He is a grown man, after all; who am I to interfere?”
He is a grown man now, Mrs. Hill thought; he has not always been. But there was no point opening all that up and picking through it again, so she just curtseyed, as she always did, and turned away. She went out of the library, and left the door standing wide.
Mr. Bennet called out after her: “Close the door, Mrs. Hill—”
But she carried on down the hallway, and out of the front door and left it wide too, and down the steps and crunched over the drive and through the gates, and was out walking along the main road of Longbourn village, where she began to be aware of herself, and that someone might notice her, walking out without a shawl or bonnet or apparent purpose. She climbed a stile, and sank down in the lee of a hedge. There was wood sorrel growing on the bank, and harebells, and there were cowslips nodding in the meadow grass at her feet, and a young cow ambled over, head swinging low, considering her with a bulging eye. It blinked its long lashes, and licked its nose with a rasping sticky tongue.
Where
ver you are, Mrs. Hill thought, God watches over you. He just looks on at you, with a strange eye and an uncaring heart.
… her letters were always long expected, and always very short.
There was a packet, addressed to Mrs. Bennet in Lydia’s careless, blotty hand. Inside would be a fat, thickly sealed letter for Kitty and a thin, more carelessly sealed one for Mrs. Bennet: there always was. There was also a separate, neatly folded envelope with perhaps one extra sheet inside, which had come all the way from London to sit in Sarah’s dry little hand and be regarded with bitter disappointment. From Mrs. Gardiner to Elizabeth.
Sarah did not know what she had expected, but clearly she had expected something, or her chest would not feel as hollow and grey as it now did. She did not believe that he would have left her, without a word of warning or a promise of return, and no word from him since—not unless he entirely could not help it. And this chilled her, despite the sun on her face and the warmth of the day that made her sweat through her old yellow-green poplin. It was ice in her heart, to think that something dreadful had befallen him, and that he might even now be suffering terribly, and all alone, and that she could not go to him.
She trailed back to the house through the meadows; the grass was long and brushed against her skirts, giving off puffs of pollen. At Longbourn, the young ladies were out on the lawns, taking the air. There had been a resumption of summer finery, of lace and muslins; there were new summer bonnets to be worn: the ladies looked light and delicate as butterflies. Sarah, though, trudging up the driveway, felt as though she had been chained to a rock, and must drag it along with her, inch by inch, yard by yard.
“When you write next to Miss Lydia, miss,” she asked Elizabeth, “would you mind asking her, if it is not too much trouble, if there is any news of Mr. Smith at Brighton?”
Elizabeth was looking through her letters, and had brightened beautifully at the sight of the envelope from her favourite aunt. She paused now in breaking its seal.