Longbourn (44 page)

“… she has got over the most trying age.”

They gathered the sweet green plums in silence, Sarah on a high rung of the ladder, plucking them from their twigs, Polly standing at the ladder’s foot to receive them and lay them gently in the basket. The Wickhams were gone; gone without imparting the slightest scrap of useful news, but also without any further harm done. He had brought no sweets with him for Polly, and gave her no more halfpennies or farthings—and so Polly now thought of him as a man who made empty promises, and could not be trusted, and was much less fun than she had remembered him to be. In the event, the Wickhams did not press for a maid to accompany them to Newcastle. For the sake of those northern scrubs and skivvies, it was to be hoped his young wife would be enough for him, for the time being.

From her perch high up in the greengage tree, Sarah glimpsed movement, and pulled aside a branch to peer out. Two gentlemen approached on horseback; they leapt the fence into the paddock, and the Longbourn horses joined them for a little canter, and then one after the other they leapt the nearer paddock gate and rode up the track towards the house.

“Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley,” Sarah said.

Blue coat, black horse: that was Mr. Bingley. The great tall fellow in the green was Mr. Darcy again. They clipped past the orchard, in profile and oblivious to the housemaids: Sarah felt herself fade. She could see the leaves and branches through her hand; the sun shone straight through her skin.

They had had early rumours of Mr. Bingley’s return to Netherfield. Mrs. Philips had had the news off Mrs. Nicholls, and had relayed it in short order to Mrs. Bennet. Sarah and Polly were then detailed to keep
an eye out for the Bingley carriage, since it was vital that Mrs. Bennet have the earliest information of its arrival. Sarah had bobbed and said, “Yes, ma’am,” but her thoughts had been scattered like seed—Mrs. B. would surely miss her footman now, and as her every slightest thought found its way into speech, Sarah expected her mistress to bewail the inconvenience of the situation loudly and at length. But Mrs. Bennet just wafted Sarah away, to go about her business, and did not say a word about James. That they had ever had a footman here at Longbourn, was, it seemed, already quite forgot.

“Was it my fault?” Polly asked, calling up from the base of the ladder.

“What?”

“Was it my fault that James went when he did? Was it to do with Mr. Wickham liking me and giving me pennies, and all that? Should I not have took them? Was it because he promised me sweets?”

Sarah scrambled down the ladder, and, at its foot, wrapped her arms around the girl’s thin body. The basket of greengages swung precariously on Polly’s arm; the girl laid her head on Sarah’s shoulder, and sobbed.

“It is my fault. I know it is. He said we must steer clear of the officers, but—”

Sarah’s anger—at James, at Polly, at Wickham and Elizabeth and Lydia and Colonel Forster, at Longbourn and Fate and the whole world in general—melted away in the face of the child’s misery. Sarah rubbed her back, and soothed her.

“It was not your fault, my sweetness. Don’t believe that even for a moment.”

Ptolemy Bingley arrived on Tuesday, when the gentlemen came to dine at Longbourn. He stayed smoking in the yard, throwing dice with his companions, whilst the party dined upstairs. It had not even occurred to Sarah that he might still be in service with the family.

With all the business of a large party to dinner—sundry neighbours had to be invited for form’s sake, along with the desired gentlemen, and there was much roasting of venison and simmering of soup and broiling of partridges—there was no possibility of absenting herself, as Mrs. Hill had instructed her to, half a lifetime ago. But there was also no cause to speak with Ptolemy that afternoon, and, for that, Sarah was grateful.

But from time to time Ptolemy must have glanced at her; Sarah kept catching the tail of his gaze as he looked away; he was undeniably beautiful. She felt ashamed of herself, of the callow selfishness of her behaviour towards him. And then she thought of James standing there, on the drovers’ road that cold night, and her cheeks grew hot and she fell still. She stroked her lips with a thumbnail in recollection of his kiss.

The Bingley carriage was ordered soon after dinner, while Sarah was still clearing the dishes from the dining room. She made no haste to complete the task; indeed she lingered over it rather longer than necessary, so that they all might get clean away.

After four days’ worth of dinners and shooting and teas and suppers, Jane was engaged to be married. The noise her mother made at the news was correspondent to the relief she felt. But, of course, Mrs. Hill told herself, such joy and noise were not unreasonable, because now Mrs. Bennet knew her baby girl was safe. Other good things could only follow this.

Mrs. Hill was as pleased for them all as she could be. She congratulated her mistress, and kissed Jane, and wished her all the luck in the world.

“She doesn’t need luck! She will have five thousand pounds a year!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hill, “a bit of luck will do her no harm.”

Though really Jane had only got what she deserved. She was a good and pretty girl, and so deserving of good and pretty things. As everybody knew, Mrs. Hill thought as she dusted off the wineglasses for a toast, the girls who did not get good and pretty things were themselves somehow deficient, either in their goodness or their prettiness.

The engagement was made three days before Michaelmas; Ptolemy Bingley was frequently at Longbourn. He accompanied his master whenever he drove there in the carriage, or he came on foot to deliver notes, and then he lingered downstairs, awaiting a reply. He was like a hawk in the autumn air: hanging still, distanced, but his interest fixed—and as with a hawk, this stillness was achieved only with constant effort and adjustment to the changing currents.

The inevitable moment came, when they two were alone, and she could not leave the kitchen before he stopped her with a look, a word.

“You came to London, I think.”

“Oh, I—” He must have heard about Jane’s stay there.

“But you did not look me up.”

“I never had the chance—”

“I am sorry for it.”

She looked down at her boots, dragged a toe across the flags.

“I think you would look the part, you know, in London,” he said. “Dressed up to the nines, out strolling of a Sunday, in the Park.”

“I do not, I would not know, anything about that, Mr. Bingley.”

She turned away. Mrs. Hill came in, and went over to examine the soup, doing her best to look as though she had not noticed anything. Sarah took this chance to slip out to the stables, where she picked up the currycomb, and rubbed down the horses for a while. The farmhands did not bother with it, not the way that James had.

On Michaelmas Day, Mr. Bennet doled out the servants’ wages in the library with all the usual ceremony. Sitting at his old black-oak desk, he recorded each payment in his ledger, and let each servant, both domestic and agricultural, make their mark, and those that could sign, sign. Sarah, coins clamped in her palm, carefully printed out her name.

“We find ourselves sadly diminished this quarter,” her master observed.

“Indeed so, sir.”

“What is life but constant change? Did not Heraclitus say—” He paused, and thought better of it. “Well. Well. You are a good girl, Sarah; thank you for all your hard work.”

“Thank you, Mr. Bennet, sir.”

She bobbed a curtsey, and took her money up to her room, and put it away in her wooden box, along with the previous quarter’s pay. If she could find it, and it was writ in English, she would borrow Heraclitus from the library, at the next opportunity, since Mr. Bennet had not told her what he had said. She locked the box, and shoved it back under her bed, and then got up and went to her window. The moon was up, a pale wafer in the daytime sky. It was more than a year now since James had first come to Longbourn, and four months since he had left. How long could she wait without a scrap, a crumb?

The household was thrown into panic that Saturday morning by the arrival of a chaise and four, which had travelled fast: the horses were clearly post. On Mrs. Hill’s answering the front door, the passenger, a lady, demanded to know where the family were gathered, then swept past her without waiting to be announced. Stunned, Mrs. Hill ran back to the kitchen to boil water for tea, since some courtesy must be shown, however discourteous the visitor.

It was the old lady from Kent, Sarah was able to explain, back in the kitchen, having heard the description of the traveller. It was Mr. Collins’s patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who peered at your sewing and told you what you were doing wrong.

Sarah, crossing the yard a little later with the pig-bucket, saw Elizabeth passing the side of the house in Lady Catherine’s wake. They disappeared into the little wilderness. Sarah shifted the bucket from her right hand to her left, ran her sore palm down her apron, and then carried on towards the sty, where she would stay and watch the piglets play and scratch the sow’s ears, till she heard the chaise crunch away down the gravel, and could be sure that Lady Catherine had left.

And this was what money could do—it was a sort of magic. It turned thoughts into things, desire into effect: Lady Catherine had, for whatever reason, wanted to come here, and so she had just rung a bell, and spoken some words, and everything flowed from this. How many quarters’ pay would Sarah have to save, before she could turn any of her desire into anything at all?

Mrs. Hill watched Sarah drag herself and her empty bucket back across the yard, and felt for her. Work was not a cure; it never had been: it simply grew a skin on despair, and crusted over it. And the thing was, Sarah was still so very young, younger than even Mrs. Hill had been when she had lost her happiness. Sarah had, God willing, a good many years left yet to haul herself broken-winded through.

Something must be found for Sarah; something must be done.

Mrs. B.’s nightgown was warming at the dressing-room fire, and in the adjoining bedchamber, Mrs. Hill had already turned back the bed and
slipped in the warming-pan. Mrs. B. held up her arms for assistance with buttons and laces. She had had a few celebratory glasses of claret. It made her calmer and more self-contained than usual.

Then there was a soft knock on the door, and Elizabeth slipped into the close little room. Mrs. Hill bobbed her curtsey and moved out into the bedchamber, leaving mother—only a little unbuttoned at the back—and daughter to their confidences.

The mistress at first struggled to comprehend what Elizabeth was saying, but Mrs. Hill, quietly tidying the bedchamber, understood perfectly. Elizabeth had made a spectacular deal, and the household was to contract still further. With three girls married, and the elder two becoming, on their marriages, suitable chaperones for unmarried sisters, the younger pair would soon hardly be at home at all. The Longbourn household was shrinking apace.

She and Mr. Hill were safe there, she knew: it was part of her own deal. The two of them could get old, and die there, and with no fear of being forced to go upon the parish. But the girls: they would not be kept on at Longbourn, not both of them, not when they were no longer needed.

“To Mr. Darcy?” Sarah asked, on being told the news.

Mrs. Hill had steered her into the scullery. “Yes.”

“Right. And is she happy?”

“Her mother says, a house in town, and a house in the country, and everything that is good. Carriages and the Lord knows what. Jane’s match, she says, is nothing to it.”

“But is she happy?”

“I think so. She says so.”

Sarah nodded. “Well, then. Good for her.”

Sarah went back to her work, her jaw tight. She would have been content with so little. She would have been content with just his company.

When Ptolemy Bingley next appeared in the kitchen, one morning before breakfast, and cast his beautiful eyes around, and found the room lacked Sarah, and therefore also lacked interest, Mrs. Hill was minded for the first time to overlook the misfortune of his breeding, since he could not help it, and look on him with some measure of compassion. She would enquire a little deeper into his prospects and his intentions.
It could do no harm. It made sense to consider every possibility. One must—though the word grated even in her thoughts—be practical.

She had not expected him to open up to her the way he did, like a daisy in the sun.

“You have been almost a parent to her, I see that. You wish to protect her, which is admirable. I had myself hoped to win your good opinion.”

He had missed Sarah more than he had thought possible, he confessed. London and its amusements had afforded him but little pleasure, after that first brief stay at Netherfield. His thoughts were always returning here, to Hertfordshire, and to Sarah. Sweet, unworldly Sarah. There was not a girl like her to be found in all of London town.

He really had not expected it. It had not been part of his plan.

Mrs. Hill made him tea, and poured him a cup, and gave him milk and sugar too. He sipped his drink, and disclosed to Mrs. Hill the depths of his attachment, the heights of his hopes, the scope of his plans, and the steep trajectory that a woman, his wife, could expect to climb with him.