Longbourn (49 page)

“I don’t think you mind so very much, though, do you, miss?”

Mary smiled. “I shall reconcile myself to it, I dare say.”

And so Mary flourished and was happy in the warm glow of her mother’s attention. And to be flourishing, and happy, was to be a good way towards being beautiful. And being flourishing, and happy,
and
beautiful, was a good way towards being beloved—it seemed at least to suggest its possibility to Mary, and this made the world seem bright again. Such another as Mr. Collins could indeed be hoped for.

Mr. Hill died, as he had been promised that he would, at Longbourn—and died as he would have wished to, in the embrace of his lover, a hard-handed labourer of middle years from the next farm along. This man, wordless with shock and sorrow, brought Mrs. Hill to their trysting place in the little wilderness to the side of the lawns. There, between them, they managed to get Mr. Hill’s britches back on. They both wept, and Mrs. Hill rubbed the grieving fellow’s back and did her best to comfort him. They carried the old body back up to the house, and all the way to the attic, and laid him in his marriage bed, so that he might die as respectably as he had lived, and with the lie intact.

But they heard nothing from Sarah. After her flit from Pemberley, there was not a word. She might be dead, as the saying went, in a ditch, for all Mrs. Hill knew. Or she might have found James, and be settled somewhere with him. Or she might, even now, still be on the tramp, out on the roads looking for him. And the thing was, Sarah
must
know that Mrs. Hill would have gladly paid the postage, just to hear a word or two from her. And ink and paper could be got hold of, by hook or by crook; they could be begged from an employer, or a clergyman; a clergyman did not begrudge that kind of thing to a decent girl fallen on hard times, and missing her home.

But letters, in those restless and uneasy days, were often opened; everyone knew they might be scrutinized for sedition, for schemes and
plots and threats of revolution. A careless word, a clue, an intimation of a deserter’s whereabouts: it was not to be risked. And so, if Sarah
was
with James, she could not risk a letter. And still Sarah did not write. And over time, the idea began to grow, providing a kind of uncertain reassurance to Mrs. Hill, that the very absence of correspondence was telling: it seemed to say that all might yet be well.

Polly became, in Sarah’s absence, the kitchen’s scholar. She raided Mr. Bennet’s library for books to read to Mrs. Hill of an evening, to fill those quiet times, now there were just the two of them downstairs. She grew like a beanstalk too, racing through her hand-me-downs, becoming—almost overnight, it seemed—a woman. The farmhands—at least, those of them that tended towards the liking of women—stopped and stared, mouths hanging open, as she went by in Mary’s pretty cast-offs.

Polly, though, would have none of them; men were not for her, nor love, nor any of that nonsense.
She
was going to be a schoolteacher, she told Mary, who clapped her hands in delight and offered her every assistance (French! Geometry! I have
all
the books. Shall we try to learn a little Latin together?).

Polly would, in later years, come to teach all of these to the gaping rustics’ children, when they lined up attentively at the day-school, grasping their slates and chalk. It had been founded by Mr. Long, who, it turned out, held the very modern belief that children should be educated five days a week and not just on Sundays, and Polly was the first—and for a long time the only—teacher there, though she had by then been restored to her given name, and had become a well-respected, and in some measure feared, Miss Mary.

For now, though, the fathers of these as-yet-unconceived infants could stare all they liked: she would not be distracted.

And so it transpired that, after all those long years of wanting, Mrs. Hill was now possessed of her desired object: she had Mr. Bennet almost entirely to herself. Of an evening sometimes, the ladies being out, and Polly absorbed in her studies, Mrs. Hill would bring a bottle of Madeira and a slice or two of cake up to him in the library. Mr. Bennet, who had been struggling with his book perhaps, his sight and his intellect fading apace, would blink up at her with his rheumy eyes, and say, “Thank you, Margaret, my dear.”

He’d gesture to the armchair opposite, and she would sit. He would lay his book aside, and pour himself a glass of wine, and break off a fragment
of cake, and she would watch the slack flesh moving at his jaw, and the fastidious, fussy brushing of his lapels, and the moist snail-like mouth as he sipped his Madeira. She found that, after more than a quarter-century of keeping silent, there were no words waiting to be said.

And then, once, he asked her, out of nowhere, “Do you sometimes wish, my dear, that things had been different?”

She considered this. If things had been different. If they had married. She might have had a glass of wine herself. She might have had a slice or two of cake, and someone to bring it to her. She might not have had calluses on her hands, or the swellings that pained her legs, or the bitter pool of grief that still seethed in her, at the loss of James. She might have had him with her; she might have cared for him and watched him grow; she might have had other babies to love and dandle since, who would all be grown young men and women now, with babies of their own to love in turn. And the Longbourn entail—that had once seemed to matter more than anything, and now did not signify at all—it would have melted away, all those long years ago, when James was born.

Still, still, but still: would they not just have ended up here, like this? In Mr. Bennet’s library, the family gone, and he slumped and slack, sipping wine and eating cake and being old, and needing to be taken care of, and needing her there to take care of him?

No matter how they got there, after all, she thought. The end was all the same.

It was not
the
end, of course; it was just
an
end. Mrs. Hill’s thread may have become snarled up into an intractable knot, but others were still unspooling. One had wound all the way out through the wild Derbyshire hills, and then along the gentler lanes of Cheshire, and then drifted across to the flat lands by the sea.

The sea. Her first sight of it came with Easter bells and a sharp, blustering wind, and the low call of sheep, and the lambs replying, and the murmuring talk of fellow travellers, and waiting, clipped saltmarsh-grass beneath one palm, damp rising through her skirts, and the other hand lifted to screen her eyes. It was a sweet brightness in the air that made her feel—despite the fatigues of the road, the nights of ragged sleep in barns and hedgerows, woken by the cold, and the nights of no
sleep at all, just walking on and on through the dark, trusting to the road beneath her feet—more awake than ever. It was a sheet of pale brilliance that peeled swiftly away, sucked out of sight by some irresistible persuasion, leaving behind an expanse of silvery mud, miles and miles of it, trenched with glittering rills and scattered with dipping, wheeling, crying birds. Beyond the bay, the lake-country hills stood stark against the sky. They were deep blue, and still creased here and there with snow.

“Is it time?”

Eyes shaded by the brim of his cap, the guide nodded. She scrambled to her feet, shouldering her bag, and paid him his penny. The silt gave under her feet, skinning itself with water; across the sands, a tracery of footsteps filled and faded out behind them. The crossing was brisk, of necessity, between the racing tides. Her feet bled.

On the far side, she changed her stockings and wadded her boots with moss.

She bought a bun and a cup of milk at a baker’s shop in the town there. She mentioned—as though it were something, and nothing—that she’d heard a road gang had come that way recently. The shopkeeper nodded. The cup stilled at her lips; where were they headed, did he know?

North. Kirkstone. Up over the tops, away past Windermere.

She swallowed the milk, stuffed the bun into her pocket. The bell jangled as the door fell shut behind her.

This was baffling country, veiled by rain that did not fall so much as hang in the air, and made distances impenetrable; the roads twisted like staircases up and down the hillsides, and every summit was a false one, and every lake or tarn that lay like grey stone underneath the lowering sky must be skirted round, and nothing could be approached as the crow flies, but must be sidled up on, and swerved away from, with only inching progress made.

So she could not have said how far it was, or how long it took. Time itself had become indistinct; nights shaded into day and out again, and sleep was an hour on a stone bench in a patch of sudden sunshine, or curled between the tree-roots of a spreading beech, her cheek on her arm; waking, she was back up on her feet and away, since there was no virtue at all to be found in stillness. But one day she found herself upon
a new road, climbing out of the tree-line, the limestone chippings fresh and chalky and coating her broken boots with white, the land falling sheer to her left and climbing abruptly to her right, the steep pasture studded with crags and fallen scree and stands of bracken; the road took her through the peaty wastes of the watershed, and the calls of curlews, and up into the cloud.

She heard voices then, coming out of the mist: men singing to the heave and thwack of work. She rounded one bend, expectant, but there was nothing—then the road swung past an outcrop, and the land fell away, and a green valley and a brilliant blue lake and sunshine opened out beyond. And there were figures silhouetted against this sudden light. Pickaxes hefted and swung, hammers dinged on rock, shovels shunted into the broken stone. They were not fifty yards ahead of her now, where the gravel petered out and stopped: the end of the road.

She put a hand out, touched nothing, her head adrift like dandelion seed. Because there he was. He swung a pickaxe high over his shoulder; it jarred onto rock; he swung again, and again, and again; dust puffed, grit flew. She watched as he paused, and set the pickaxe down; it rocked on its head. He unknotted his neckerchief and wiped his face, then reached round to the back of his neck, and looked up. She saw the moment that he saw her, how he went entirely still.

She picked her way down to him; the slope caught her; stones slid and rolled out from underneath her feet.

He was stripped to his sweat-sodden, filthy shirt. He was bone-thin, hard, and weather-burnt. She noticed this all as she came close, and how his face was deeply lined, and how he looked years older, and how he seemed withheld, hidden inside himself, as though he accepted now that this was all there was, and all there ever could be.

But she was close now. She reached out, rested her fingertips against his chest. The rise and fall of his breath under her fingertips, the wet of his sweat, the warmth of him. She could see a pulse throb in his throat, and his eyes brightening. He reached out to touch her. She shoved his arm away, and grabbed handfuls of his shirt. She shook him.

“Don’t you ever, ever,
ever
dare do that again.”

Threads that drift alone will sometimes simply twine themselves together, without need for spindle or distaff: brought into each other’s
ambit, they bind themselves tight with the force of their own torsion. And this same torsion can, in the course of things, bundle the resulting cord back upon itself, ravelling it up into a skein, returning to the point of its beginning.

Some years had passed—Mr. Hill was already mouldering in his grave, but Polly was yet unfixed and unfinished and still had much left to strive for—when the travellers made the turn from the drovers’ road, and strode down the lane between high hedges. These were years filled with work, and moving on when work was done, and finding friends and leaving them behind, and borrowing books and passing them on, and keeping quiet, and keeping their heads down, and doing their best to go unnoticed, and waiting for the peace that was to come; and always, always moving on.

There were long blue autumn shadows, and the trees were on the turn. In the fields, cows stood motionless; rabbits scudded through the grass, then stopped and disappeared. Smoke rose from the high chimneys; she caught the scent of washday fires. She breathed it in.

“D’you know what Heraclitus said?”

He plucked a green cobnut from a bush in passing, and cracked it between his palms. “I don’t recall.”

“He said,” she scuffed a stone, sent it rolling, “you can’t step into the same river twice.”

Nodding, he picked away the shell and pith, conscious of the small neat shape of her, the rustle of her skirts as she walked beside him; the simple fact of her was every day a miracle. He offered out the kernel on his calloused palm; the nut was green-white, and milky, the first of the turning year.

“Here.”

She took it, was about to thank him; but then movement caught her eye: she stopped in her tracks; cobnut curled inside her palm, she brushed her knuckles against his arm—white linen stirring down on the washing lines, and Polly, oh my goodness, was that
Polly
—a young woman now, pegging out a petticoat, who, noticing something going on up there in the lane, paused in her work, and stared, and then let the petticoat fall to the ground, and blundered right over it; hitching up her skirts, now racing at full tilt across the green paddock, towards them.

Sarah laughed, skipped a step, then broke into a dash herself, hurrying
to meet her. But the sudden shift in movement proved unsettling; inside her tight-bound shawl, a small, still bundle now began to stir and mewl. Sarah stopped and peered down into the folds. The baby, newly woken, gazed up with wide and startled eyes.

Sarah touched the perfect brow with a fingertip. “It’s all right, sweetheart. Not far now.”

She cupped the child’s head to her, steadying, and glanced back round for James. He ran a few steps to catch up with her, old canvas backpack bouncing. She smiled up at him; he took her hand. Together, they strode down the lane to Longbourn.