by Jo Baker
“To think, Hill, when I last saw you, I was still a girl of fifteen and unmarried, and now I am a married woman. It seems an age since I last saw you, and yet here you are, not changed at all! Nothing here is changed, indeed, this old inn is just as I left it, and I wager Longbourn will be just the same too—”
“Don’t rattle on at the servants, Lydia.”
Wickham climbed down from the coach behind her, in a light-blue dress coat, which he tugged fastidiously straight.
She turned to him, anxious. “My dear?”
“It is a country habit and I do not like it.”
She looked from her shiny new husband to the lined old face that she had known all her growing life, and then back to Wickham. “But it is a fine thing, is it not, to be married, and only just sixteen?”
Mrs. Hill peeled out the few chemises and petticoats and nightgowns that Lydia had bundled away with her from Brighton: she tried not to look too directly at them, or inhale the odours of cheap lodging houses, sweat and sex.
She steeped the soiled linen—blood and sweat and spunk and travel dust, and the shiny grubbiness of things that have gone too long between washings—in lye, prodding at it with the laundry tongs, swirling it through the murky grey water. And all the time bitterness, like the eating-up acridity of the lye, welled up in her, though she kept pushing it down and pushing it back and nailing boards down over it. If Mrs. Hill had the ruling, and not just the maintenance, of Lydia, the little madam would be obliged to wash her own dirty linen just this once, and see what other people saw of her.
In the yard, Polly was set to clean the baggage. She wiped down the inside of the boxes and bags with camphor, to get rid of pests; she was at it so long that the lining paper smudged and bled along the seams. Lydia, when she finally came to unpack properly in her new lodgings in Newcastle, would exclaim at Polly’s carelessness. But every time Polly saw fit to stop, Sarah would gesture vaguely and say, “Think you missed a bit.”
After dinner, Lydia galloped down to the kitchen to show off her wedding ring to Mrs. Hill and the housemaids, and boast of being married. Polly looked on, wide-eyed, lips parted; Mrs. Hill peered at the plump little hand and the flower of tiny diamonds, and murmured along with Lydia’s talk, and then, when she could bear it no more, gave her a stick of barley-sugar to shut her up, all the while thinking that if the girl did not run back off upstairs she stood a good chance of getting a proper slap. Sarah, barely glancing at the ring, wanted to ask, What of Mr. Smith, the footman, did you see him at all in Brighton? But it was like an ulcer in her throat, and eating inward: what if Lydia had seen him? What if she had seen him in manacles, dragged through the camp, and flogged raw before a crowd? What if he were shot for what he’d done? And then Lyddie was off back upstairs in another flurry of excitement, and Sarah had not asked her, and it was too late, for now at least.
Mrs. Wickham wafted a fashion plate at Sarah.
Sarah set the curling-irons to heat at the fire, then peered at the picture of a baby-featured, heavy-limbed woman squeezed into a flounced evening-gown; the hair was braided high at the back, and thick ringlets hung about the face like bundled sausages, or like those clags of wool that get stuck around sheeps’ backsides.
“Shall do my best, ma’am.” And she began raking through Lydia’s heavy hair.
Lydia squirmed in discomfort as Sarah braided and pinned. “I wish you could have seen it, Brighton.”
Which meant Lydia wished to talk about it: she might mention James.
“Oh yes, ma’am. I think it must be very fine.”
Sarah folded a curling-paper into place, lifted the hot curling-irons and scissored them around a lock. She twisted tight; there was a huff of smoke, the smell of singeing hair.
“What a sight, I can tell you!” Lydia spoke awkwardly, her head dragged sideways by the pull on her hair. “A whole camp full of soldiers, officers as far as the eye could see, and my dear Wickham the finest of them all.”
“How lovely.”
“Let me tell you: it is just the place for getting husbands. You should go, you know, since you won’t ever find one here.”
Sarah swapped the irons for the hot ones from the fire, and slid the papers around another lock. Lydia’s heedless, blithe expression was mirrored in the looking glass. Lydia did not possess much in the way of an imaginative faculty, and so did not construct possibilities, or look beyond her immediate moment, and the immediate moment was, to Lydia, very pleasant indeed, and so she was content. And this being so, she would not look for intrigues, or suspect a soul of anything, and she would not withhold anything, and she would not lie. Lydia was honest.
“And did you see … anybody … we know there, madam?”
Sarah unwrapped a curling-paper; a lock fell loose, lank, with just a hint of a curl.
“The officers, of course, all the officers, Denny and Pratt and Chamberlayne.”
Then Polly, who was supposed to be locked up safely in the scullery with the silver and the silver-polish, now sidled into the bedchamber. Sarah scowled round at the younger girl, mouthed: Go away.
Polly pretended not to notice. “Did you go to the sweetie shop in Brighton, madam?”
“Oh, I went to all the shops, I’m sure of it.”
“Haven’t you got work to be getting on with?” Sarah asked.
“Oh, I’ve done it all.”
This must be a lie. But Polly sat down on the floor, and drew up her knees, ankles crossed, big eyes fixed on the exotic splendour that was the new Mrs. Wickham; Mrs. Wickham picked up a little pot from the dresser, unstoppered it, and swirled rouge onto her cheeks. She touched her lips with it, too, and peered at herself in the mirror, and smiled. She looked glittery and hot, and not entirely well. She might have picked up something else in Brighton, or London, besides rouge and a husband.
“Did you see, did you hear of, the footman …?” Sarah tried. “Mr. Smith, who left—”
Lydia tilted her head. “Oh, I have not thought of him in an age—my goodness now, did he leave us?”
Elizabeth had not written. Or Lydia had not read.
“He did, and it was the same night that you—and the Militia—” But Sarah was cut across.
“What a pretty picture you do make.”
They turned as one, and saw Wickham lounging in the doorway, regarding them all with a complaisant smile.
“The young wife,” he said, “and maids in quiet reverie. It could be a print: Loyalty. Or The Young Mistress.”
“There he is, my dear, handsome Wickham!”
Lydia got up, papers scattering, and went over to fling her arms around him. Sarah looked away. The flesh of him, the sheen of him: it seemed almost indecent. She scooped up the hair-papers, briskly tidied the dresser. She saw, in their mirrored reflection, how Mr. Wickham, his arms wrapped around his sixteen-year-old wife, smiled over her head at Polly, and how Polly scrambled to her feet, and curtseyed, and stared, smiling, bare-faced and innocent, right back at him.
“You should bring one of them with you, to Newcastle.”
“You are all thoughtfulness, but Mama could not spare them.”
“Just the little one. Pop her in your trunk.”
Sarah, the papers and pins in their box, the hot irons gathered up and hanging from their handles, went to take Polly by the wrist.
“Come along now.”
Polly whispered, “I want to see if there are sweets.”
“Come along.”
Sarah, clutching the hair things to her, bundled Polly past the newlyweds, and out of the door.
… for, of course, they were to have a son.
Mrs. Hill found him, where she knew that she could always find him, in the library, having slunk away from the gathering. He was old and tired and drunk. He had scarcely opened his lips in company since the Wickhams’ arrival, and had avoided what he could of the engagements made in honour of the newly-weds. He felt the disgrace most sharply now, now that everybody else, it seemed, no longer noticed it
at all.
“I hope you’ve brought a fresh bottle of brandy.”
She closed the door behind her, showed her empty hands. A slow, red-eyed blink from him, a nod; and then, hearing laughter from the other room, a flinch. She drew a chair up to the desk, but just stood there, a hand resting on the top slat of the ladderback.
“I don’t know which is worse,” Mr. Bennet said. “My daughter’s disgrace, or my wife’s blindness to it.”
“Mrs. Bennet is …” Mrs. Hill hesitated. “Perhaps it is better that she is as she is.”
“It is hardly respectable.”
“That’s not quite the sum of it, though, sir, is it?”
He lifted his glass clumsily. “I fail to understand you, Mrs. Hill.”
“For someone to be quite respectable,” she said, “I think they must be shown respect. We build ourselves like the caddis flies in the river do, out of the bits and pieces that wash around us.”
He raised his eyebrows at this. Then he nodded.
She drew out the chair and sat down.
“Now it is settled,” she said, “and she is married, I just want note made. I want it noticed, between the two of us at least, what you would do for your daughter, that you would not do for your natural son.”
He wiped his face with his hand. He poured more brandy into his glass. “If you knew, if you knew what I have suffered, Margaret …”
The intimacy of her name on his lips: the years fled like starlings. She leaned forward and took his hand.
“I thought about it every night,” he said. “All the time that he was gone. Every night till the night that he came back.”
She pressed her lips tight.
“All I wanted, from when he was little, from the moment you told me you were—all I was trying to do was be practical.”
She nodded.
“But there was no practical solution, was there?” he said. “Being practical didn’t solve anything.”
After a moment, Mrs. Hill spoke again: “I realized why he did it, you know. Why he took it; the King’s shilling.”
Mr. Bennet blinked up at her, his eyes sore; he nodded for her to go on.
“No one ever seemed to care, so he didn’t really care either. He didn’t know that he could be loved. That’s why he didn’t think twice about throwing himself into harm’s way.”
Mr. Bennet screwed up his mouth, his features blurred. He drew another glass towards him, slopped in brandy, and slid it across the desk to Mrs. Hill. She took it by the stem. She touched the wet from her eyes. They drank.
“… she has got over the most trying age.”
They gathered the sweet green plums in silence, Sarah on a high rung of the ladder, plucking them from their twigs, Polly standing at the ladder’s foot to receive them and lay them gently in the basket. The Wickhams were gone; gone without imparting the slightest scrap of useful news, but also without any further harm done. He had brought no sweets with him for Polly, and gave her no more halfpennies or farthings—and so Polly now thought of him as a man who made empty promises, and could not be trusted, and was much less fun than she had remembered him to be. In the event, the Wickhams did not press for a maid to accompany them to Newcastle. For the sake of those northern scrubs and skivvies, it was to be hoped his young wife would be enough for him, for the time being.
From her perch high up in the greengage tree, Sarah glimpsed movement, and pulled aside a branch to peer out. Two gentlemen approached on horseback; they leapt the fence into the paddock, and the Longbourn horses joined them for a little canter, and then one after the other they leapt the nearer paddock gate and rode up the track towards the house.
“Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley,” Sarah said.
Blue coat, black horse: that was Mr. Bingley. The great tall fellow in the green was Mr. Darcy again. They clipped past the orchard, in profile and oblivious to the housemaids: Sarah felt herself fade. She could see the leaves and branches through her hand; the sun shone straight through her skin.
They had had early rumours of Mr. Bingley’s return to Netherfield. Mrs. Philips had had the news off Mrs. Nicholls, and had relayed it in short order to Mrs. Bennet. Sarah and Polly were then detailed to keep an eye out for the Bingley carriage, since it was vital that Mrs. Bennet have the earliest information of its arrival. Sarah had bobbed and said, “Yes, ma’am,” but her thoughts had been scattered like seed—Mrs. B. would surely miss her footman now, and as her every slightest thought found its way into speech, Sarah expected her mistress to bewail the inconvenience of the situation loudly and at length. But Mrs. Bennet just wafted Sarah away, to go about her business, and did not say a word about James. That they had ever had a footman here at Longbourn, was, it seemed, already quite forgot.
“Was it my fault?” Polly asked, calling up from the base of the ladder.
“What?”
“Was it my fault that James went when he did? Was it to do with Mr. Wickham liking me and giving me pennies, and all that? Should I not have took them? Was it because he promised me sweets?”
Sarah scrambled down the ladder, and, at its foot, wrapped her arms around the girl’s thin body. The basket of greengages swung precariously on Polly’s arm; the girl laid her head on Sarah’s shoulder, and sobbed.
“It is my fault. I know it is. He said we must steer clear of the officers, but—”
Sarah’s anger—at James, at Polly, at Wickham and Elizabeth and Lydia and Colonel Forster, at Longbourn and Fate and the whole world in general—melted away in the face of the child’s misery. Sarah rubbed her back, and soothed her.
“It was not your fault, my sweetness. Don’t believe that even for a moment.”
Ptolemy Bingley arrived on Tuesday, when the gentlemen came to dine at Longbourn. He stayed smoking in the yard, throwing dice with his companions, whilst the party dined upstairs. It had not even occurred to Sarah that he might still be in service with the family.
With all the business of a large party to dinner—sundry neighbours had to be invited for form’s sake, along with the desired gentlemen, and there was much roasting of venison and simmering of soup and broiling of partridges—there was no possibility of absenting herself, as Mrs. Hill had instructed her to, half a lifetime ago. But there was also no cause to speak with Ptolemy that afternoon, and, for that, Sarah was grateful.
But from time to time Ptolemy must have glanced at her; Sarah kept catching the tail of his gaze as he looked away; he was undeniably beautiful. She felt ashamed of herself, of the callow selfishness of her behaviour towards him. And then she thought of James standing there, on the drovers’ road that cold night, and her cheeks grew hot and she fell still. She stroked her lips with a thumbnail in recollection of his kiss.
The Bingley carriage was ordered soon after dinner, while Sarah was still clearing the dishes from the dining room. She made no haste to complete the task; indeed she lingered over it rather longer than necessary, so that they all might get clean away.
After four days’ worth of dinners and shooting and teas and suppers, Jane was engaged to be married. The noise her mother made at the news was correspondent to the relief she felt. But, of course, Mrs. Hill told herself, such joy and noise were not unreasonable, because now Mrs. Bennet knew her baby girl was safe. Other good things could only follow this.
Mrs. Hill was as pleased for them all as she could be. She congratulated her mistress, and kissed Jane, and wished her all the luck in the world.
“She doesn’t need luck! She will have five thousand pounds a year!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Hill, “a bit of luck will do her no harm.”
Though really Jane had only got what she deserved. She was a good and pretty girl, and so deserving of good and pretty things. As everybody knew, Mrs. Hill thought as she dusted off the wineglasses for a toast, the girls who did not get good and pretty things were themselves somehow deficient, either in their goodness or their prettiness.
The engagement was made three days before Michaelmas; Ptolem
y Bingley was frequently at Longbourn. He accompanied his master whenever he drove there in the carriage, or he came on foot to deliver notes, and then he lingered downstairs, awaiting a reply. He was like a hawk in the autumn air: hanging still, distanced, but his interest fixed—and as with a hawk, this stillness was achieved only with constant effort and adjustment to the changing currents.
The inevitable moment came, when they two were alone, and she could not leave the kitchen before he stopped her with a look, a word.
“You came to London, I think.”
“Oh, I—” He must have heard about Jane’s stay there.
“But you did not look me up.”
“I never had the chance—”
“I am sorry for it.”
She looked down at her boots, dragged a toe across the flags.
“I think you would look the part, you know, in London,” he said. “Dressed up to the nines, out strolling of a Sunday, in the Park.”
“I do not, I would not know, anything about that, Mr. Bingley.”
She turned away. Mrs. Hill came in, and went over to examine the soup, doing her best to look as though she had not noticed anything. Sarah took this chance to slip out to the stables, where she picked up the currycomb, and rubbed down the horses for a while. The farmhands did not bother with it, not the way that James had.
On Michaelmas Day, Mr. Bennet doled out the servants’ wages in the library with all the usual ceremony. Sitting at his old black-oak desk, he recorded each payment in his ledger, and let each servant, both domestic and agricultural, make their mark, and those that could sign, sign. Sarah, coins clamped in her palm, carefully printed out her name.
“We find ourselves sadly diminished this quarter,” her master observed.
“Indeed so, sir.”
“What is life but constant change? Did not Heraclitus say—” He paused, and thought better of it. “Well. Well. You are a good girl, Sarah; thank you for all your hard work.”