Longbourn (24 page)

When she was a girl, and still growing, ravenous, whenever there had been a cake—a sponge cake, dusted with sugar, which Mrs. Hill had conjured up out of eggs and flour and creamy butter—Sarah would never even let herself look at it, because she knew that it was not for her. Instead, she would carry it upstairs to be rendered into crumbs, and the crumbs lifted from the plate by a moistened Bennet finger, and the empty smeared plate carried back again. So Sarah would stare instead at the carpet underneath her feet, or at the painting of a horse with a strangely small head that hung at the end of the hall, or the rippled yellow curtains in the parlour, and would do her best not to breathe, not to inhale the scent of vanilla or lemon or almonds; even to
glance
at the cake was an impossible agony.

And for months, she realized, James had hardly looked at her at all.

It was a situation—though it occurred to neither of them to consider it this way—almost guaranteed to amplify desire. After that Sunday morning, there were no further opportunities for properly private communication; barely a word could be exchanged unobserved. Those first few weeks of December were, therefore, marked by the catching of eyes, the exchange of smiles, by fingers brushing as burdens were exchanged.

At night, Sarah twisted in her bedsheets, hot despite the winter weather, while Polly snored beside her. Her lips were haunted by his lips; her body remembered the press of his: her second kiss had been nothing like the first. Her mind conjured, unbidden, the unbuttoning of his shirt, the peeling back of linen, the press of lips to collarbones, the taste of skin and salt. She curled up to the edge of the bed, bunched up her shift, and let her fingertips dip into the wet between her legs.

So daylight, and his presence, made her flush. The things that she had done with him, in the dark, when he was not there.

Mr. Wickham, at this time, grew ever more present at Longbourn. He had, it seemed, a penchant for in-between places; for lobbies, vestibules, thresholds, from where he could observe both the gabble and swarm of company, and the bustle of the servantry; from where he could parcel out his Spanish money—his little bits of flattering nonsense—to each woman as she passed, no matter what her age, her marital status or her class.

On one occasion Sarah came upon him leaning in a doorway, when she was approaching it with a heavy tray. His foot was pressed back against the lower panel, so the door was pushed half open; his shoulder was against the doorjamb. He did not move out of her way. She did not like it, his lingering, assessing gaze; now that she had come to be a little more knowing herself, she knew knowingness when she saw it.

“Hard going, that,” he said, with a nod to the tray.

“May I pass, sir?”

He seemed not to hear. “Heavy for you, slip of a girl that you are.”

She shifted her grip on the tray. “Can I help you, sir? Is there something you need?”

“Oh no. You don’t need to worry about me, I’m a steward’s son, so …”

Sarah lifted her right foot, took her weight on the other, and so gained some relief for her tired ankles. So he was a steward’s son—so what? He wasn’t offering to carry her ton-weight tray down to the kitchen, was he?

“If you don’t actually require anything, sir …”

He shook his head, lips pursed beneath his moustache. “Nothing, no. I am admirably well provided for.”

She curtseyed carefully, so as not to shift the crocks, and moved towards him. He stepped back, to let the door open for her, but not quite wide enough, so that she must pass too close, her skirts brushing against his legs. She knew that he watched her go, too, but she would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her glance back.

Mr. Collins soon returned to Longbourn House. This was a bother and a trouble to Mrs. Hill: she still needed to secure him; she was as keen to please him as ever, but she now had much less time in which to do it, since he was engaged for a good part of every day in love-making at Lucas Lodge. And Mary was also a source of unease and guilt; Mrs. Hill should not have encouraged her interest in him, as it had done nobody any good. But there was nothing to be done about that now, at least not by her. Mrs. Hill contented herself with cramming as many good things as possible into the beginning and the end of Mr. Collins’s days. His washing water was fresh and hot every morning; his towels were the finest the linen closet could provide, and scented with lavender. He had the best ash logs for his fire, and warm sweet milk on his night-stand when he returned from wooing and went to bed. Whether he noted these little attentions, or attributed them to their proper source, Mrs. Hill had no idea, and was given no indication: he said nothing about it, but then he said very little to anybody at all at Longbourn, so occupied was he with his wedding plans and his bride-to-be.

Then he was gone, called from Longbourn and his amiable Charlotte by the arrival of another Saturday. Mrs. Hill was in a turmoil of frustrated intentions: if she could but get her hands on Charlotte Lucas, even for a little while; if she could but give her a good dinner, and another batch of lemon tarts, she’d feel that much easier for it. Charlotte Lucas knew the value of a good dinner; she would not resent being reminded of it.

But it was not to be hoped for: Charlotte, for obvious reasons, stayed away from Longbourn.

Two days after Mr. Collins’s latest visit, the Gardiners arrived. Mrs. Bennet’s brother, his wife and their young family had come to spend Christmas at Longbourn. They were to stay a week, and Mrs. Bennet had so carefully provided for their entertainment that they did not once in all that time sit down to a quiet family dinner together: either the house was teeming with visitors, or its inhabitants were rushing to be ready for some public or private entertainment in the neighbourhood, or it stood empty of all but servantry.

Entertainments must be prepared for in the kitchen; it being the Christmas season, there was always some particular dainty to be constructed,
some special meal to prepare and serve, some item of adornment to be laundered; the kitchen was cluttered and hazardous with additional servants: the Gardiners’ maid, visitors’ coachmen, a to-and-fro of neighbouring families’ servants with invitations or replies. All of them with bodies to get between you and the thing required, legs and feet to trip over, and elbows to nudge precious things to the teetering brink of dressers and shelves. There was never a moment to be had alone, even when the house was quiet, for James and Sarah. She and Mrs. Hill both went about soaked in sweat, teeth gritted, chilled to the bone the moment they stepped outdoors.

Mr. Wickham seemed to get in everywhere, turning up in the most unexpected places, like spilt quicksilver. You’d round the stairs and he’d be there, on the half-landing, apparently studying a painting; you’d come into an otherwise deserted breakfast room, and find him lounging by the sideboard nibbling a bit of kipper and running a nail along the joins in the veneer. And, once, James caught the scent of a cigar, and looked up, the end of a girth in one hand, the buckle in the other, the horse’s belly at his cheek, and saw the young officer there, standing silently in the doorway, watching, perfuming the winter air with his tobacco.

Wickham saluted.

James gave him a nod in reply, then continued with his work. He unfastened the buckle, then lifted the side-saddle away, the stirrup and girth dangling, and went to stow it with the others. He felt Wickham follow him with his eyes. James wedged the saddle down onto the saddle-rack, wiped it over with a cloth.

“What are you doing here?” Wickham said eventually.

The mare blew warm breath. “Getting on,” James said, taking the spitty bit from between her teeth. Wickham pushed away from the doorway and wandered closer. James quietly continued removing and cleaning off the tack.

“All this”—Wickham gestured around with a trailing cigar: the clean cobbles, the heaped straw, the leather gear, the glossy horses’ hides—“this is all boys’ stuff; it’s for young lads and old codgers. It’s not proper work for a man.”

“If you say so, sir.”

“And there’s plenty of proper work to be had, isn’t there, if you want it.”

James straightened up; he looped the tack together. Wickham was just a puppy, all unearned swagger and needle-teeth. Growling at nothing.

The young officer tilted his head now, making a show of deliberation. “I mean, the old butler here’s a bag of bones, he’s no use to anyone, so he may as well be buried up to his neck in the country, doing nothing.” And then he jerked his cigar towards James. “But you. Sirrah. You are a different matter.”

“Is that right, sir.”

Easing the mare’s head collar on, James kept his eyes on his work, freeing the mane where it was caught under the strap.

“A man without dependants, and without other prospects—” Wickham drew on the last of his cigar, then spoke over the smoke. “You should get yourself down to the recruiting officer. That’s what you should do. That’s what any able man, who cares about his country, should do, at times like these.”

“I am quite right here,” James said, hanging up the bridle, then brushing his palms together.

“Well, then. There we are.” Wickham dropped his cigar-end and ground it out with the toe of a gleaming boot. “You are an inveterate coward, I see, and there is no help for it.”

“Is that so?”

“That is so.”

“Then tell me, sir,” James heard himself ask. “If you would …”

Wickham, who had been turning to leave, now paused, and glanced back. “What?”

“Just so I know.”

“Yes—”

“Where was it that you last saw action?”

Wickham went blank, half shook his head.

“Was it in Spain or Portugal?”

He frowned. “What’s your meaning, boy?”

“Perhaps you were there at the Siege of Roses? Or did you fight at the Battle of Vimeiro? Or did you stand against the French at La Coruña?”

Now the young officer’s cheeks flushed red. “How dare you—”

James just looked at him, all innocence. “I only wished to know where you earned the right to call me a coward.”

“If I had had the good fortune—I would have served—”

James bowed. “I do apologize, sir. I was forgetting you had just recently bought your commission.”

“I will undertake anything required of me—”

James took the mare by the halter; passing Wickham, he led her out into the yard.

“I dare say you will get your hands bloody soon enough. Situation’s promising in the North. Slaughtering mill-hands: proper job for a man, that.”

“The Luddites are a menace—”

James turned to fetch the old piebald stallion, who stepped out proudly with his feathered hooves.

Wickham found his flow now: “They’re a threat, those croppers, Luddites, all of them, a threat to property, to their own kind, to the prosperity of the nation—”

“I bow to your better understanding, sir.”

And James did bow; then he led the two horses off across the yard and down to the low field, where they were wanted for the winter ploughing. They huffed steam in the cold air, their heads nodding along on either side of him, in a kind of tacit, companionable approval.

But James had been a fool, and he knew it. If he was lucky, Wickham would decide it not worth his trouble to pursue his grievance, a footman being by rights so far beneath his notice. Come the spring, the Militia would be billeted elsewhere; and so the spring, for James, could not come too soon.

Nor, for that matter, could the end of the Christmas festivities.

The four Gardiner children disported themselves about the house like a pack of puppies, wriggling in everywhere. Sarah and James could not pass each other in a hallway, or even on the servants’ stairs, without a bundle of little ones clattering up or down, or shrieking past them, on some great adventure through the house. Either that, or Sarah had a little one dragging on her apron strings and whinging, while she smiled lopsidedly at James and continued on her hobbled way.

There was not a moment, and no peace to be had, not even at night. Sarah and Polly were obliged to share their room with the Gardiners’ maid, Martha, who had ginger curls that she was very proud of, and a pallet on the floor, which, she complained, was stuffed with broken pots, and who talked about London, about dances and alehouses
and beaux, Cock-and-Hen clubs and bullock-hunting on a Sunday. Polly sat bundled up in her shawls and blankets, looking like a caterpillar in its cocoon, her mouth hanging open at the girl’s tall tales. Sarah propped her head on a hand, smiled stiffly, distracted, dreading that at any moment there would be mention of one Ptolemy Bingley, Esquire, former footman to the Bingley household, who had opened a new tobacco shop that was all the rage with the gentlemen-about-town; dreading too that she would blush and be noticed and be teased for it; regretting not him, but that she had once thought of him as a possibility.

The Gardiners’ youngest was not yet breeched, and so a bucket of nappies soaked by the scullery door, the stink leaking out from underneath the lid. Someone had to scrape and rinse and then boil them every day—they simply could not be left longer, the smell was so terrible—and, if it was wet outdoors, they must be hung to drip-dry in the scullery. Some days the task fell to Polly, her face a picture of disgust—she was too young to have had the seasoning experience of cleansing the Bennet nappies—sometimes it was Sarah: the Gardiners’ maid seemed to think this stay at Longbourn was her own holiday from scrubbing. And then one crisp still day, when Sarah went to lift the pail, she found that it was empty, and when she walked out down to the paddock she saw a row of nappies flapping white on the line, like a ship’s signal flags, an unconditional surrender; James was pegging out the last of them, and when he saw that he was watched, and who watched him, he looked a little sheepish, but finished hanging out the linen squares.