Longbourn (43 page)

Little Lyddie pressed a bare and grubby hand into Mr. Hill’s old thin one; a gold-and-diamond ring glittered. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright as he helped her down from the coach, and she seemed very much the girl that she had been. He was reminded of the farmyard ducks, the way they gabbled and jostled, the way that water beaded up and rolled right off them. He did not know what to say, but it hardly mattered, since she didn’t pause long enough in her chatter to let him speak.

“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.