Longbourn (9 page)

In the kitchen, Mr. Smith leaned by the fire and chewed an apple, looking stiff in his livery. He caught Sarah’s eye, and looked away, and crunched again.

“Where’s missus?” she asked.

He swallowed, spoke: “Upstairs with madam.”

So Sarah went straight through the kitchen and down into the dim blue scullery, where Polly was sitting on the duckboard, legs stretched
out in front of her, boots at odd angles, back against the wall. Sarah slid down and sat beside her. It was their mutual secret: this spot was unfrequented at certain busy times, and so here they could snatch moments of respite.

“Do you ever think,” Sarah asked, “that it would be good if there was somewhere else you could go?”

Polly raised her eyebrows, lifted a finger to her lips: from the kitchen they heard Mrs. Hill’s voice, Mr. Smith’s reply; she had come back, and was asking where the girls were.

Sarah dropped her voice, whispered, “That’s what I mean: somewhere you could just
be
, and not always be obliged to
do
. Somewhere where you could be alone, and nobody wants or expects anything of you, just for a while, at least.”

Polly wriggled her narrow shoulders against the bare brick; it was the chimney wall—on the other side the kitchen range flared and sparked—and so was dry and warm.

“Stop moaning and shut up,” she said. “Someone will hear you.”

Polly had herself come through a frozen January night in a basket on a farmer’s doorstep, then the precarious neglect of a parish wet-nurse, and a few rough and hungry years in the poorhouse, and she had come through all of it alone; she had survived, it seemed to Sarah, simply by failing to notice how unlikely it was that she should. It also meant that Polly did not possess the capacity for nostalgia, wishful thinking or regret; it was not worth trying to solicit her sympathy in this, because to her
this
was as good as things ever got, and were ever likely to: there were no golden memories for her.

Sarah, though, could still summon her ghosts, blurred with summer sun and dim with shadow: chickens scuffing at the cottage door beside a little boy who was still unbreeched and smelt of piss and milk; of the woman in a red dress who had whisked her off her feet and kissed her; of a man who sat indoors over a shuddering loom, a book balanced on the frame, and got up from his seat so stiffly in the dark; of lying in her box bed, her brother curled warm and damp beside her, listening to her parents’ voices in the night, weaving back and forth, holding the whole world together.

Happiness was a possibility for Sarah; she had a fair idea of what she missed.

The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole family
.

Candlelight spilt out of the front door, making a warm pool in the blue moonlight. Mr. Bennet stood on the threshold, a shawl over his powdering gown, to see his family off. James, seated up on the carriage box, lifted his hat to his new master, who gave him a gentlemanly nod in reply; Mr. Hill was handing the ladies into the coach; their gowns frothed up over the doorsill like breaking waves.

Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids waited on the gravel, as was expected, to watch the ladies leave; the older woman’s expression was benign and fond, Polly bounced on the spot to keep warm, and Sarah, with her wrecked hands tucked under her armpits, was looking off into the moonlit night, a frown creasing her forehead.

“Don’t they look lovely!” Mrs. Hill said. “My beautiful girls!”

Mr. Hill clapped the carriage door shut, and stepped away. And now it was up to James.

James clicked his tongue, flicked the reins, and the horses stirred themselves. There was that moment’s pause as the slackness in the tack was taken up, and then the tug into movement, gravel crunching under wheels, the carriage lamp swinging, and from inside one of the girls gave a little shriek of excitement, and a bubble of conversation swelled, and they were under way.

Sarah did not see it, because she avoided looking at him; and Mrs. Hill did not see it, because she only noticed how fine he looked in his livery; even Mr. Hill did not remark upon it, and he tended to be on the lookout for shortcomings; but James was all too aware of how his hands shook, and that the trembling would be communicated down
the reins, all the way to the delicate flesh of the horses’ mouths, and could make them all skittish and jumpy.

But they knew the way better than he did, so he let them get on with it, enjoying the comfortable sway of the carriage, and intervening only so as to keep them on the left, in case something brisker than their own conveyance might thunder through. And the horses, sensing they were trusted, held their heads high, picked up their feet smartly; and Jane, inside the coach, said to her mother what a capable young fellow James had turned out to be, and Mrs. Bennet agreed that the ride was both brisk and comfortable, much more so than when old Mr. Hill had driven them about.

James turned up his greatcoat collar, and tugged his sleeves down over his hands, and gazed out at the silvered landscape, at the soft slopes, dark copses, the fields studded with sheep. Everything seemed clean and clear and fresh. James smelt the spearmint growing in the wet ditch, and the sweetness of a hay barn as they passed, and these were, he realized, the old scents of home.

Below him, the ladies’ voices twittered; the carriage was a cage filled with pretty birds. How could he ever show sufficient care? How could he ever repay the trust that that good man had placed in him? Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind. He would do nothing to risk the loss of this. He would keep his head down, draw no attention to himself. He would not even
look
at Sarah, for all she was so very good to look at.

They descended through woods, into the nutty scent of beech-mast and the peaty smell of this year’s first fallen leaves.

After the quiet of the road, Meryton was a bombardment. Iron-shod hooves and iron wheel-rims on cobbles; shouts, catcalls, laughter. The streets were choked. Ostlers and footmen yelled, horses whinnied; passers-by rapped on carriage windows, passengers waved frantically at acquaintances spied across the street.

The stream of gigs and chaises and cabriolets thickened and slowed at the Assembly Rooms, where they discharged their cargoes. People pushed eagerly up towards the doorway, the young and light and
keen weaving briskly around the grey, heavy older folk. Through the windows, James glimpsed the already teeming interior. He pulled up at the curved stone steps.

It was one of those strange handicaps that afflicted gentlefolk, that they could not open a door for themselves, nor get in or out of a coach without someone to assist them. An old man with a heron’s stoop and full livery stepped forward and opened the door, so that James did not have to get down and do it himself.

The young ladies streamed out like chicks from a hencoop, rustling gowns, each of them clasping the unknown servant’s hand for just a moment—a strange intimacy to allow him, it seemed to James—their faces radiant with the evening. And then Mrs. Bennet, splendid in mauve, clambered out, and sailed away, her daughters tucking themselves in around her, talking and laughing and waving to other new arrivals. Then they disappeared into the crush, where it already seemed too full to accommodate another soul.

“God’s sake, man! Get a move on! Get that old hulk out of the way!”

Someone slapped the back of the carriage. James clicked his tongue, told the horses to walk on.

Along the side wall of the Assembly Rooms a row of carriages waited, the overflow of the inn yard and the livery stables. The coachmen gathered there too, passing a bottle, calling out to him to join them for a sup, and he nodded them a good evening, but instead unhitched the horses and brought them back to a trough in the Market Square. When they had drunk, breaking the moon into shards and ripples, he led them back to the coach, to wait.

There was a hum of voices from inside the Assembly Rooms. Peals of laughter, and not words themselves but the shapes of talk in the air, the burr of it. Then the music started; voices fell away, and there was a thundering of feet on the wooden floor.

He buckled the horses up in blankets. Across the street, the coachmen sung out dirty words to the pretty tune. A pair of them performed a clumsy jig.

The mare clopped a hoof down on the cobbles. He patted her neck.

What was astonishing was the peace of this place. Like a pebble
dropped into a stream, his arrival had made a ripple in the surface of things. He’d felt that; he’d seen it in the way they looked at him, Sarah and Mrs. Hill and the little girl. But the ripples were getting fainter as they spread, and he himself was by now sunk deep and settled here; time would flow by and over him, and wedge him firmer, and he would take on the local colour of things.

But Sarah. Those clear grey eyes of hers; you could see she was always thinking. She peered at him like he was a slipped stitch: unforeseen, infuriating, just asking to be unpicked.

A yell startled him back to himself. One of the coachmen took a swing at another, and missed, staggering. There were shouted insults, laughter. James breathed on his hands, looked away.

There had been times, in the past years, when he had felt more acutely alive. When circumstances had conspired to keep him painfully alert, on his toes, on the
qui vive
, thinking three steps ahead. But that night, as he drove the carriage back from Meryton, the chill air on his face, the full moon low on the horizon and the call of a curlew across the high fields, he was happy not to think, and just to be.

And when the coach wheeled up the driveway and the horses stopped unbidden at the front steps, and Sarah, sleepy-eyed and holding a candle, opened the door and let the ladies in, he found himself strangely moved by it all. It was the warm candlelight, perhaps, after so long under the cool moon; it was also the girl’s face, all soft and frowning with sleep, and the young ladies shivering at the night air and speaking quietly now, so as not to disturb their father. A scene of such simple certainty that you would think the world was just like this all over, always had been, and always would be.

Sarah, having presented the family with the tea things, dragged herself up to bed, the candlelight dancing off the walls; she would clear up their cups and plates in the morning. Though it was, now she came to think of it, already morning. She had sat up late so that Polly and Mr. and Mrs. Hill could sleep; there was no point in them all being exhausted the next day. And so that she could read alone: she had raced guiltily through her newly acquired book, which was volume one of two, and which was, she was sure of it, not quite respectable, for all
Elizabeth had lent it to her. All those attempts on the young maid’s honour, all that convenient fainting; the mere thought of being asked to read any of that out loud of an evening made her feel hot and bothered.
Pamela
was clearly for private contemplation.

There was, however, another reason for her taking it upon herself to wait up. Until she’d seen it with her own eyes, she could not feel quite certain of James’s return. She would have lain awake half the night anyway, listening out for the carriage wheels on the gravel, the sound of the front door. Whatever anybody else might think of him, she knew him for the fly-by-night, drop-of-a-hat, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow fellow that he clearly was. And when he did finally go, flitting off no doubt just as suddenly as he had arrived, she wanted to be the first to have intelligence of it.

Polly was deeply asleep, breathing heavily, the whites showing through the slits of her eyes. Sarah blew out her candle and slid in beside her, shivering, clinging to the cliff-edge of the bed. She lay blinking in the darkness. What did it matter, anyway, if he stayed or went? What did it signify to her?

James lay awake too, cheek on his pillow, looking out sidelong at the dark. The old pain was bearable, because it had to be, because it would never be entirely gone. And it was something, was it not, to have this to come back to? A pillow, a pallet, a quilt. Four walls and a floor. A roof over his head. His breath plumed in the night air. It was something to come home.

Mrs. Hill was not asleep either. She lay looking up at the cold stars through the skylight, while Mr. Hill snored beside her, mouth gaping like the grave. She thought, Wherever you are in this world, the sky is still above you. Wherever you are, God still watches over you; He sees into your heart.