Longbourn (22 page)

The Bennets were engaged to dine with the Lucases the very same day that the news had been received, which provided some distraction for the miserable, mortified and disgruntled amongst them, and a respite from cooking for the others. James was occupied with ferrying the family around; Polly swept and polished in her perfunctory way; Mrs. Hill contented herself with mending Mr. Collins’s trousers, the buttonholes of which had become sorely stretched, the buttons hanging on by just a thread: too much, perhaps, in the way of cake. Sarah cleaned the girls’ boots, muddied from the excursion into town; she scraped off crusts and clots of mud with her fingers, wiped the leather clean with damp rags, and then rubbed it with greasy dubbin.

Three miles away, in Netherfield’s cold drawing room, Mrs. Nicholls was wafting dustsheets over furniture, while downstairs Mr. Nicholls locked the wine cellar, and then the gun room, and then the plate room, jingling the keys as he ambled off along the echoing corridor. And the Bingleys’ remaining trunks, along with the few bits of furniture that were wanted in the Hursts’ Grosvenor Street house, were creaking along on a canvas-covered wagon down the London road, and Tol Bingley was watching the wide wet muddy world go by from his seat beside the wagoner, and beginning to reconsider—vaguely yet, and still in a resistant way, surprised at the grey ache he felt on leaving this place, on leaving that girl, Sarah—what he wanted most in all the world.

That night, Sarah listened to the scratch and scrape of Mrs. Hill locking the place tight, and watched in the moonlight as Polly twitched like a puppy in her sleep. When all was perfectly quiet, and Polly was snoring, Sarah drew her wooden box out from underneath the bed, and packed her comb and slippers and a chapbook in it. In there, always locked safe, was a worn old rag-doll with unmatched button eyes.

A fox barked somewhere out across the frosty countryside; downstairs, the clock struck one; she sat silent and listening, a blanket around her shoulders. The clock struck two, startling her out of a shallow sleep. She sat for a few minutes more. The house was now quite still.

She crept from her room, her boots in one hand, her box heavy under her other arm; she softly shut the door behind her. In the kitchen she laced up her boots, gave the cat a stroke. “Bye-bye, Puss. Good luck.”

Tol Bingley had left for London; Sarah would not be far behind.

There had been a story in the newspaper about a young Spanish woman who dressed herself in britches and went off to be a soldier; even now she was leading skirmishes against Boney’s troops in Spain. The paper also said—Sarah had been baffled by the circumlocutions for a time, but had then started to see through them and understand—that she had taken lovers; not from amongst her fellow soldiers, but women, from amongst the camp followers. And there were other stories too, of Mother Ross, who had gone for a soldier back in the olden days,
and was fierce and foul-mouthed and who would never have been found out if she’d not got wounded in the thigh, so that when they stripped her to search and dress the wound, the surgeon’s apprentice had seen her private parts and thought for a moment that it was another wound and a worse one; the boy had fainted: only on examination by a man who had seen what he was looking at before, was Ross understood to be a woman. And those Irish women who had long and profitable adventures as privateers, and dodged the noose—for a time, at least—by getting themselves in the breeding way.

It was a thought, that. Not to attach yourself to a man, but to confront instead the open world, the wide fields of France and Spain, the ocean, anything. Not just to hitch a lift with the first fellow who looked as though he knew where he was going, but just to
go
.

A seed of unease: as she walked on in the dark, it sprouted and grew.

The sheep shuffled themselves into a tighter pack in the field beyond. Her feet skidded on ice, scuffed on stones; trees stood bare against the starry sky, the pale shape of an owl swept overhead. She climbed up as high as the drovers’ road; she stopped there, on the crossroads, on the edge of everything she had ever known. The hillside stood wide and empty, and it seemed that there was nothing but the stars and night-birds.

But there was also, unknown to her, James. He followed her secretly, unnoticed, as he had learned to do.

There were nights when sleep was fitful for him; there were nights when sleep came not at all, when the old pain flared and shivered through him and would not let him rest. It seemed somehow to be attuned to the weather; the shift from clear skies to cloud and back again sent ripples of red flame through him, so that on some nights he gave up even the attempt to sleep and would distract himself instead with books, reading by a low light, hunched in blankets, grateful for the good fortune and generosity that bestowed a new candle on him every time the old one burnt itself to drips and puddles. Those nights, it was as though his flesh was dreaming; as though his body was remembering other times and other places. It made him vividly aware that nothing was for ever: that even pain had its tides, its pauses.

And it kept him alert to the world; he felt the scrape when the kitchen door was opened and then shut; her footfalls across the yard were like
the pad of fingertips on his skin, and when she passed the end of the stable building, and was gone, he felt the tug of her away into the night. The lopsided drag of her gait suggested she was carrying a weight—the wooden, lockable box that all women and girls like her possessed; their only private space beyond their bodies in a life of shared bedchambers and scrutiny. And if Sarah had taken her box, she was not just sleepless, restless, wandering: she was gone.

His thoughts lit in turn on the immediate causes—Netherfield’s being shut up, Ptolemy Bingley’s departure for London—and then bundled into a downhill helter-skelter, through the chances of her happiness, fears for her safety, the dangers of the world beyond, her ignorance of them; and then on into an image of this place without her, without a glare or shrug or roll of her eyes, without a glimpse of her slim figure slipping round a corner; without her unyielding, breathing flesh beside him in the room—to arrive at the shock of a full stop: he loved her.

Oh.

It could have no effect on anything at all.

What he felt did not matter: it changed nothing.

But it interested him.

He held the phrase in his mind as a priest might hold a chalice, dazed by what it conveyed beyond its practical reality. If he loved Sarah, then it meant that he was, despite all that he had done, and all that he had failed to do, capable of feeling, and capable of good. Because he wanted nothing from her: this was a generous, expansive feeling, unattached to the possibility of gratification; it was a simple happiness that came from knowing that one particular person was alive in the world. He felt grateful for it; grateful that she had, however unwittingly, enabled him to feel like this.

And though love might not matter, gratitude did. It brought with it a sense of obligation.

He twisted himself up from his bed, pulled on his britches, stuffed his feet into his boots, and dragged his coat on over the snare of pain. Then he headed out into the night, scanning the grainy darkness for her moving shape. He caught it—a blue shadow amongst the wider blue—flitting across the paddock. He followed obliquely, slipping along the boundary wall, hanging back as she opened the little gate into the lane.

No difficulty in this. She did not expect to be followed; she was artless, and did nothing to disguise her progress. And she went slowly, so small in all this darkness, under the wide sky; she was sloped by the weight of her burden. She came up to the woods, and stepped out of sight into the deeper dark. He still followed, but with a more hesitant and uncertain tread now.

What, after all, was he hoping to achieve by this? That at a few choice words of his, she would see her mistake, understand the danger, and come back with him to a life of quiet drudgery at Longbourn? And even if she did, could he wish that for her? Could that really be a proper expression of his gratitude?

Who knew: she might be happy with Ptolemy.

She came out of the woods, onto the open hillside; the moon was bright. He paused at the tree-line; she climbed on doggedly towards the drovers’ road. He watched, lips pressed tight; she was gone; she was her own woman, and who was he to stop her? He might have turned then, and gone back to his bed, and feigned surprise when, in the morning, she was found to have done a moonlight flit. He might have just jogged on through the days, and kept his head down, through weeks and months and years, and begun to forget about her, forget how she had made him feel—
that
she had made him feel—if she had not, at that moment, reached the junction with the drovers’ road and stopped dead, and stood there silhouetted against the stars. Then she let the box fall to her feet, and rubbed at her forehead with the heel of her hand, looking out across the open silent country.

The way was clear; the night was calm: the only thing to stop her was her own uncertainty.

Sarah, though he could not know it, was thinking of sea-shells, and of his sleeves rolled back when he was drying dishes, and the taste of smoke and onions and a kiss that she wasn’t sure that she had liked, but which had seemed at least to mean something, to suggest that there was a germ of possibility in a life that had hitherto seemed entirely barren of it. She was considering, too, the difference between hitching a lift for a lifetime, and not just for the journey home. And then she turned, and looked back, and her big eyes caught the starlight.

The word was out before he knew that he was going to speak: “Stay.”

She stiffened, turning towards the sound of his voice. He came closer,
scuffing his boots on the rocky track, so that she could hear him, and so locate him. He saw the moment that she recognized him—the softening of her body—but then she drew herself up again, and shifted her box to one side with a foot, as though she could hide it from his notice. As though that would make any difference now. But it made him smile.

“You had much better not go,” he said. “You will be missed.”

“They will hardly notice. They will get another maid.”

She looked away. She seemed again resolved. From somewhere off to the north, a curlew called. When James went to speak again, he found his mouth had gone quite dry.

“Well then,” he said. “If that is how it is, then bless you both.”

Silence still from her. She dug at the turf with a toe, staring away across the downs.

This was the chink, the uncertainty. She was not sure of Tol Bingley. He felt it.

“Or—”

“Or what?”

“I mean, I have no wish to interfere—”

“Then you go an odd way about it.”

“—but if you are not entirely sure, of your—of your feelings, or of his intentions, you might delay this, you might write …”

She tilted her head, still not looking at him.

“It would be a little less final than this.”

She did not speak.

“Or,” he said, “perhaps you would like me to write for you?”

At that, she fixed her eyes on him. “You are very certain of yourself, aren’t you, Mr. Smith?”

She came marching up towards him, pushed the hair back from her forehead.

“You think you are the only one in this place who has any intelligence at all, don’t you? I may as well not be alive. I may as well be a puppet or a doll, for all you’d notice.”

“No, indeed, I do not for a moment—”

“Well, you clearly assume I cannot write.”

“Not everybody can.”

“Sunday-school taught, you think me—learned to read the Gospels and that’s that? Well, in fact my father was a thinking man, and he
taught me to write, when I was little. But it doesn’t occur to you, not for a moment, that I might have that side to me, now does it? Of course not. Because you think me beneath your notice. You think me nothing at all.”

He found his sense of her was skewed again. There was an innocence about her, and an independence, but there was also this ferocious need for notice, an insistence that she be taken fully into account, and it made him feel so tenderly that it almost choked him. He wanted simply to tell her, It really does not matter what I think of you, it does not matter in the least.

“You think you’re so clever because you have your books; because you’ve travelled and seen something of the world, and you have your fancy sea-shells to prove it, and now that I am trying to do something for myself—”

“My
shells
?”

She stood, open-mouthed, realizing what she had done. “I was cleaning …”

It was as though a poultice had been ripped off him, had taken the skin with it. He let a breath go.

She shuffled.

“I haven’t told anybody, if that’s what you’re so worried about.”

A thrill ran through him. The empty hillside, the sky infinite above them, and she speaking so freely to him, of things that came from a different life, from half a world away.

She wandered back to her wooden box, nudged it with a toe, as a distraction. “I could be halfway to London by now.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

She folded her arms, looking across the open countryside. Her profile was precise against the paling sky. And then, suddenly, she ducked down, swept the box up into her arms and was off, striding along the high turf road.

“Sarah!”

He ran to catch her, grabbed her arm. She twisted, trying to shrug him off. He felt the slender strength of her, the shift of tendon and muscle.

“Sarah.”

She pulled away from him; he held on, not hard, but unyielding.

“Write to him. I’ll beg a frank for you. I’ll even take your letter to the post office. If he will come for you here, and marry you, and take you off to London, and if you think that that will make you happy—” The words were tumbling out of him now, unanticipated, surprising even him, making her eyes fix on his face, and widen. “Of course I will not stand in your way. I couldn’t. But I will
not
let you go tonight. Not like this. On my conscience, I cannot.”