Longbourn (32 page)

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 goodbye 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.

When she was strong enough, she walked the twelve miles back to Longbourn. Her tears had stopped by the time she saw the chimneys from the lane, and the smoke rising.

Her milk still came, though. It welled out of her; it stained her shifts and blotched her stays. She folded rags and laid them between her skin and her clothes, until the flow of it diminished, and then was gone; then she missed it, and mourned its passing, because it had been for him. The blood dwindled, too, though sometimes, even months afterwards, when she lifted something that was beyond her strength, it would seep anew, bright red, and mark her clothes.

Her grief, though: the flow of that never dwindled, never ceased, though it could not be allowed to seep out into the light. She forced it down inside herself; it became a hidden pool, swelling, ebbing, full of sudden twists and undertows. She wanted the baby so badly; it would sometimes knock her breathless, and she would stand, silenced by pain, a hand out to support herself on mantelpiece or table. She shrugged off Mr. Bennet’s attempts at comfort; when he spoke to her she could not hear the words; she would not be touched. All that mattered was her little boy, out there in the world.

Miss Gardiner was a pretty girl; she was sweet and full of laughter.
Her attorney father just happened to have her accompany him—she did so like to walk to Longbourn and take the air—almost every time he called on business. Margaret, hard-handed, hair under a cap, watched the girl’s curl-tossing, her coquettish glances; she saw through the lickspittle father in an instant. She watched Mr. Bennet, blind to stratagem, make a pet of the girl, and a fool of himself, and she felt numb.

Then they were married. She just thought, Well, at least that is over now.

The girl had Mr. Hill dig little holes for crocus-corms in the orchard. The flowers came up the next spring, and seemed magical things, and far too soft and pretty to endure the February chill. The young mistress’s belly was already big by then.