Longbourn (33 page)

Mr. Hill, the butler, having some notion of Margaret’s distress, and not feeling any need to enquire further into it, asked if she could bear at all to marry him. He would expect nothing of her, he said, his strange rook-like head tilted to one side; he certainly would not expect the kinds of things a husband usually expected from a wife, by way of bed and babies. But between them, they might botch together some sort of a life; they might make a good name for the two of them, if they would both share his.

So she married him, with his thin arms and his long hands and his uneasy eyes, that cold day in February; that night they lay side by side in their shared bed as still as carvings on a tomb. All down the years since, he had talked decently to her, and he had been mostly kind, though sometimes careless, and he had never struck her, not once in all those years. Which was more than many wives could say, of husbands they had married for love.

He had his own arrangements, did Mr. Hill. She met them from time to time. A man that Mr. Bennet employed one autumn on the farm; another who’d been labouring just across the valley. They came and went with the seasons; sometimes she would see he was heartbroken, and she would comfort him with sweetmeats or other small kindnesses.

So Mrs. Hill knew that she would never have another child. Mrs. Bennet, though, it seemed, simply could not stop having them.

Her first pregnancy was interminable; she was heavy and clumsy and
did not like it. She, who was used to being lively and sociable, spent whole days on the sofa in her dressing room. She would drift off to sleep of an evening by the fire, Mr. Bennet looking on with fond concern, and sometimes shifting a cushion to support her pretty drooping head.

The delivery was a bloody battle. It exhausted everyone.

The midwife cleaned the child and wrapped it and put it in the cradle, and Mrs. Hill was set to rock it until the wet-nurse arrived from the village. The afterbirth lay in a washbasin by the bed, dark and thick as liver; Mrs. Bennet was white; she whimpered as the midwife cleaned and wadded her. Mrs. Hill had never seen a woman so shocked. It was as though she could not accept what her body had just done to her, its callous betrayal of her best interests.

The baby, though, seemed quite content. Mrs. Hill stared at her, entranced. She was a plump, curled bean of a girl, with soft gold-red hair, and tiny ridged fingernails like freshwater pearls. Then the woman from the village came in, gabbling at the midwife, loosening her bodice, scooping the baby up in one arm. She slumped down on a low chair, lifted her fichu, and slid the baby in there to suck.

The midwife covered the washbasin with a napkin, and took it away. Mrs. Hill straightened the sheets, leaning over Mrs. Bennet to tuck them in.

Mrs. Bennet, her throat dry, whispered, “Is it always like that?”

Mrs. Hill hesitated. “I don’t know—”

The young woman shook her head, rolling it on the pillow.

“Never again. He can beg, and I won’t do it, not again. Not for diamonds.”

But three months later, with the baby at wet-nurse in the village, Mrs. Bennet threw up her morning tea at the washstand, and Mrs. Hill held her hair for her, then cleaned up the spittle-thick streaks from the marble top.

If Mrs. Bennet had had her boy, he would have been Jane’s little brother, and elder brother to the rest of them. If the rest of them had been bothered with at all, since one sturdy male was all that was required.

That child would have been a perfect baby, a strapping toddler, a wilful lad; he would have been bundled off to school while his sisters stayed at home and sewed him shirts; he’d have been back for Christmas
and Easter and the summer, running riot and getting into scrapes and being adored and spoilt rotten. Then he’d have been foisted off on one of the Universities, and there he’d have indulged in all the japes, jollies and misdemeanours considered a necessary part of a gentleman’s education; he’d have acquired some useful acquaintance, no doubt, and, almost incidentally, a degree. Then he would have lived at leisure, accruing debt, and waiting to inherit.

But Mrs. Bennet did not have her boy; she had, instead, her mishap.

It was a mishap with ten toes and ten fingers and perfect dark eyelashes, though the eyes never opened. A mishap who had seemed in every way correct and in good order, apart from being so very small, and so still, and so blue, and cooling so quickly, having only his mother’s heat in him. He never took a breath.

Mrs. Hill, surprised by a sudden gasp, and a fall of blood, delivered her mistress of the tiny scrap herself, and knew before she held him, light as a kitten, skin thin as the skin on milk, that there could be no chance for him: he had come far too soon.

She wrapped him, and laid him aside, on the coverlet. Her mistress still crouched beside the bed, head buried in her arms. Mrs. Hill held Mrs. Bennet through her sobs, and, when he was fetched, through the agony of the surgeon’s rummaging and scraping. She tended her through the lassitude and low spirits that followed. She administered those first three drops of laudanum, that first half-glass of Cordial Balm of Gilead. And she held her mistress’s head for her when, three months later, Mrs. Bennet started retching up her own night-time swallowed spit at the washstand. The sickness was, for her, so much worse each time.

“I do not know how I shall bear it, Hill. I really do not know at all.”

From time to time there was news of her boy. They called him James Smith; the farmer and his wife had put it about that he was a cousin’s child, orphaned; everything was taken care of, Mr. Bennet assured her. Mr. Bennet would ride over from time to time, to pay the farmer for his services, and see how the boy got on. It was all very discreet. But the farmer’s wife would have nicer things than other farmers’ wives; there would be more sugar, a better quality of tea; neighbours would notice,
Mrs. Hill knew; it was the kind of thing neighbours always noticed. They would notice and they would talk.

On his return from his jaunts, Mr. Bennet would ring the bell for Mrs. Hill and she would go up to the library and listen to her employer’s report on the boy’s health and increasing height and understanding, and she would nod, and would not cry, but the dark pool inside her would swell, and tug at her. It was better this way, she’d tell herself, as she let herself out of the library and went back down to the kitchen. It was better that he have fresh air and milk and Sunday school than a place in the poorhouse, or a life on the roads, which was all that she would have been able to give him on her own. And whatever she might have done or said or threatened to do, Mr. Bennet was never going to have offered her better than this. He had never even once, during her time of difficulty, so much as mentioned the possibility of their marrying.

The household continued to expand, girl upon girl, and each more trouble than the last. Lydia at a year old was already a tumbling ball of mischief, and her elder sister Kitty was still not reliably clean and dry. Worn to a shadow, Mrs. Hill was told she might have a child from the parish, to train up as a housemaid. It would, after all, save the trouble and expense of getting the woman in from the village to help on washdays. So Mrs. Hill got herself an orphan, a bird-boned girl of six years or so, who said her name was Sarah, and who had survived six months in the poorhouse, and therefore could be confidently said to be free of the typhus that had done for her parents and her brother. The little thing was all eyes; Mrs. Hill ached with sympathy, more for the parents than the child herself: how terrified they must have been to leave her all alone. For their sake, as well as the girl’s, Mrs. Hill determined that she would love her. And she did, as much as it was possible for her to love.

And then, one day, when Mr. Bennet called Mrs. Hill into the library, he did not wear his usual expression of practical, straightforward calm. He would not even look at her; his face was set.

The boy had run off, he announced. It was to be presumed that he had joined the Army.

“And he is being looked for—what is being done to recover him?”

Mr. Bennet played with his paper-knife, then set it down and picked up some documents; he pretended to look at them.

“He is no longer a child, Mrs. Hill. He is grown. He makes his own choices now.”

“But why—why would he choose that? It makes no sense; he must be found, you must buy him out.”

Eyes closed, a shake of the head. “It is not to be contemplated, Mrs. Hill.”

People would talk.

The scandal. Of course. He could not bear the scandal.

It had been a dreadful miscalculation, she saw that now: that all of them should be unhappy, so that he should not be disgraced.

1808

James had never even seen the sea before the day they trooped, a bunch of raw recruits, of ploughboys and runaway apprentices marching clumsily, unaccustomed to shoes, into Portsmouth to take ship. Glimpsing it for the first time, he was astonished by the silver brilliance of the sea, the way it just kept moving, but never shifting from its place. It seemed at once beautiful and monstrous.

He lost sight of it in the heaving streets, and was dazed by the crush and noise. They knew they were heroes because the crowds cheered them and the girls threw flowers. They were heroes because they were going to ship off to Portugal, and from there they’d fight their way to Spain, restoring rightful monarchs, and freeing the people from tyranny. If the Corsican Ogre was not stopped—well, it must not be thought of—he would be stopped, and before he could muster men and ships for England again.

Heroism had been prepared for by hours of drilling, of learning the Bess and the bayonet and the workings of the field gun, of fettling horses, of being shouted at by men whose accents he could barely understand, but who expected immediate compliance with their orders. New skills were bedded down by repetition; James became a gunner: the No. 2, the spongeman. He liked the sound of that. He liked having a name and title and designated role. Before this, he’d been nobody; that’s what Old Misery had always told him.

Sergeant Pye was in charge of their detachment. He was from Ratcliffe. James really had to stare at him to understand what he was saying, and Sergeant Pye was averse to being stared at. James himself soon learned to avoid catching an eye, and barely opened his mouth in his
company: when he spoke, the words came out all soft and country. People laughed.

The gunners wore dark blue, not red like the ordinary soldiers. They wore shakos on their heads. It made you stand up tall. It made you somebody.

They landed in a wide bay, stumbling from the boats on to the drifting sands. A day’s dry hot march later, eyes narrowed in the glare, a halt was called at a deserted house, and they made camp. It was a grand place with wide cool rooms and high ceilings. The war had already swept through there.

James led his pair of horses through marble halls, following the whisper of water, shocked at the charcoal scrawlings—incomprehensible phrases, perfectly comprehensible images. The banisters had been pulled down and a fire made of them; the floor was scorched and soot patched the vaulted ceiling above. A human shit lay on a marble hearth. He found the doors out into the courtyard, led the horses up to the fountain and let them dip their heads and drink.

They were villainous, the French: he had heard it many times, but he saw it now, he felt it. They were corrupting. They had no respect for their superiors, for property, for anything at all.

Later, when they came upon another house, he saw the curtains heaped as bedding on the floor, the campfires made of splintered furniture; he smelt the latrine stench, and his opinions of the enemy were confirmed. Until he noticed that the obscenities scrawled there were in a language that he understood. This was the work of English soldiery, a troop that had gone through there before them.

At Vimeiro, they were posted on the hills, amongst the holm oak and olive groves. Sergeant Pye’s orders skimmed over him; James’s training took over, shifting and clicking him into place through all the necessary sequences of the gun. And his concentration was absolute—carelessness could lose him his hands; he had not seen it happen yet, but he had been told: you got your hands blown off, and you bled out at the stumps. It could lose him his feet, too, as the gun leapt back
on her wheels with the force of the charge. He was not going to be careless.

By the time a barrage had been fired, and the infantry were stumbling forward through the rocks and scrub, James’s throat was raw and his ears rang; the taste of black powder was in his mouth and nose. His hands were burnt and stained. They shook. He flexed them, rippled his fingers. Still there.

Lisbon stank. It was a blundering muddle of nastiness, of ragged paupers and processions of papish mummery, the streets so filthy that the priests carried their skirts held up like ladies and showed their pale hairy ankles. The blue-coated boys streamed through the foul streets, they drank and sang, their sense of superiority confirmed: they had their shiny buttons, and their good strong shoes and black gaiters, and their bread and beer and their sense of purpose, and they had seen off the French. This was something of which they could be proud.