Longbourn (10 page)

… they were well supplied both with news and happiness by the recent arrival of a militia regiment in the neighbourhood; it was to remain the whole winter, and Meryton was the head quarters
.

The Militia had marched through the town, men on foot, officers on horseback. It was, Mrs. Bennet announced while Mrs. Hill was helping her off with her bonnet in the vestibule, quite as good as a circus.

“Oh, I wish you could have seen it, Hill. The officers in their regimentals, looking so handsome and brave.”

Outside, James heaped the pile of Mrs. Bennet’s purchases into Sarah’s arms, then went to lead the coach away. Mrs. Hill glanced out after him. There was something different about him; he looked—his features darkened by the shadow of his tricorn hat—quite washed out.

He had been worked hard, from the moment he had joined the household. Every time the coach was brought out, it was James that must drive it. Whenever there was company, it was James that must wait on them. Long drives, late nights, days spent darting around the place like a shuttlecock, serving dinners and teas to the Longs and Gouldings and Bingleys and Lucases; even when not actually in the presence of the family and their guests, he could never be properly at rest, but was obliged to wait in readiness for the bell; he could be summoned at any instant to supply further jam, or hot water, or another bottle of that excellent sherry wine, late into the night. The poor boy must be exhausted.

“What’s the matter, Hill? I don’t believe you are even listening!”

“I am, ma’am, of course.”

Sarah picked her way up the steps with the pile of packages, watching James’s departure from the corner of her eye. She also had noted his
changed demeanour. Sarah, though, did not think that he looked tired; she thought that he looked worried. As though something had crawled in under his skin, and left him feeling itchy and unclean.

“Well, take notice, Mrs. Hill, for I am determined that Mr. Bennet will call on the officers, and we shall invite them for a Family Dinner, two full courses, mind …”

People just kept on not saying. This was what Sarah could not understand. She slipped past Mrs. Hill, who was helping Mrs. B. out of her pelisse, and carried the purchases down the hall. She could not comprehend how it was that nobody, not Mr. Bennet, not even Mrs. Hill, both of whom could usually be relied upon for their perspicacity, had noticed anything untoward about this young man. The very fact that he was happy to work as an underservant at Longbourn, when he could have commanded better wages at a better house or in other trades, was suspicious in itself. And he had appeared out of nowhere that day, as if he’d been hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. And ever since, in all the weeks that he had been with them, they had learned nothing of him, beyond the stories—or rather the
lies
—that he had chosen to tell them.

She pushed the breakfast-room door open with a hip, crossed the carpet, and tumbled the packages down on the tabletop.
And
he slogged away like a navvy; it was unnatural, the way he went at his work: this was not the begrudging half-arsery they were used to from the local labourers; he was brisk and thorough, as though shovelling out the necessary house was a task that merited method and precision, rather than just a strong stomach and a clothes peg on the nose.

She arranged Mrs. Bennet’s purchases on the table, righting the paper-wrapped bottle from the apothecary’s, smoothing out the haberdasher’s parcel and turning the neat flat box from the confectioner’s shop the right way up. So what was different about today? What had made him so distinctly uncomfortable?

He would have seen what Mrs. B. had seen in Meryton: the officers on horseback, sabres glinting at their sides; the soldiers marching smartly, muskets shouldered.

Sarah, a hand dimpling the soft package from the draper’s shop, went cold.

The Militia.

So he might be a criminal. He could be a
murderer
. He might have slipped the noose at Newgate, for all they knew—she’d read about it in the newspaper: those desperate men, the scapegallows and chancers who bribed or sneaked or fought their way out of gaol, dodged the hangman, and made a run for it. He’d fled London and made his way into the country, deep into Hertfordshire, where nobody would know him or know what he had done. He’d probably wrung a good character out of some poor victim or dupe, or an accomplice had written it for him, and then he’d used it to worm his way in here at Longbourn—a shiver grew at the back of her neck—and now he’d rob the house while they slept.

He’d murder them in their beds.

After all, what did anybody really know about him?

Well. She would know. She would find out. And they would thank her for it.

Her chance came one evening when James drove the family to Lucas Lodge, where there was a large party invited; the family was not expected back until after supper. This meant, as Mr. B. pointed out with some degree of resentment, as he clambered into the carriage, that it was Liberty Hall for the remaining servantry until then.

Some took more advantage of it than others.

Mrs. Hill took it as her chance to sort through the contents of the linen closet, which she had been meaning to do for some months; she would check for rust-mould, scare away the moths. Polly was to assist her in the folding and refolding; the child would benefit from the opportunity to practise the proper method. Mr. Hill, meanwhile, found a more pleasant use for his time, though in all fairness an audit of the wine cellar was also long overdue. He had his own little chair down there, and a corkscrew and a glass, and if Mr. Bennet happened to remark that his store of Canary or sherry wine had been depleted rather sooner than might have been expected, it was easily explained: a bottle had turned to vinegar, and was being made use of in the kitchen.

Sarah, finding herself thus briefly unobserved, snatched up a lantern, lit the candle with a spill and slipped out of the kitchen door.
She skimmed across the yard and into the stables. In the candlelight, the empty stalls looked clean and soft. The place smelt of fresh straw. Whatever else James was, he was thorough: before he came the place had used to look—and smell—like a midden. She bundled her skirts up, and climbed the ladder into the loft.

No one had ever told her
not
to go into a manservant’s lodgings. But then no one had ever told her not to fly up to the roof and perch beside the weather-cock. It was a thing that did not even need forbidding, being so very far beyond what could be reasonably expected of her.

She emerged, head and shoulders, into space, and set her lantern on the bare-boarded floor. The room was clean; it smelt of hay and horse and leather and sawn wood. She clambered fully up. Under the eaves was a neatly made bed covered with an old patchwork quilt. She recognized some of the patches: the blue sprig, the yellow stripe; it belonged to the house; Mrs. Hill must have turfed it out for him. Above the head of the bed he had fixed a shelf; he’d left a few books there, and a spare set of men’s linen, clean and carefully folded. She came close, holding up her lantern to read the books’ spines, her skirts pressing against the edge of the bed, her head tilted. Hooke’s
Micrographia
. Gilpin’s
Observations
—she had read that; she had followed Gilpin up one side of the country and back down the other. These were both from Mr. Bennet’s library—they were bound in his tan-and-red calfskin. The others were probably stolen.
A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade
. A cheap volume, well worn, by one William Wilberforce. He had not lied about that, then, at least. She turned, and lifted her light; she scanned the room. A chair, a table, his dark everyday coat hanging from a peg. Nothing of any great value or importance lying out; but if you had something you really needed to hide, you would put it—where? She ducked down and peeked under the bed. An old canvas backpack lay slumped on its side: there you go. She dragged it out, her skin prickling with anticipation. The straps were soft with wear; the bag had probably once been black but had faded out to grey. It could have been a pedlar’s pack: this seemed to confirm everything.

Something rattled inside. Money.

On her knees beside the bed, she worked to open the buckles. A man like him with a bag of coin? It could not have been honestly got. She would spill it out onto the kitchen table and announce where she had
found it. And Mrs. Hill would be all amazement, and then she would praise her, and then thank her, and then she would beg her to run as quick as she could all the way to Meryton for the constable, or—even better—the Militia. And Sarah would return with a platoon at her heels, and everyone would be astonished by her pluck, her quick wits, and her good sense, and they’d cart him off to gaol to wait for the assizes.

He would notice her then; he would find himself obliged to notice her. And everybody else, who had thought he was so wonderful, would now see that she was in the right.

The second buckle came undone and she reached inside; the handful was strangely light and sharp. She drew it out into the candlelight.

They were pale, and fine, and cool to the touch. She had seen these things before. They were not money. The young ladies made picture frames and decorated boxes with them. They were sea-shells. She tipped them out onto the floor. One was shaped like a fan; it was pink and ridged on one side, and smooth as a saucer on the other. One was pale, chalky, and twirled out like a poke you’d get hot chestnuts in. One had had its outside worn away, and she saw a tiny staircase spiralling up inside. One—and she really wanted to slip this one into her pocket—was a deep inky blue on the outside, and sheened like pearl on the inner surface. She shifted them around on the floor, lining them up; she held one and then another to the light to study it: a fan, a spiral, a donkey’s ear.

She should be gone. At any moment Mrs. Hill and Polly would be finished with their linen closet, or Mr. Hill would come stumbling up from the cellar, blurry with drink and wondering where everybody, and his supper, was.

She lifted the fan-shaped shell and turned it round, and ran a thumb down its ridged back. She sniffed it: it smelt neutral, clean, and a little of the canvas bag that it had been in. She touched it with her tongue and it was faintly salt. The mystery of James shifted and re-formed itself. She thought, How alone he is, that he must keep these secrets here.

She thought, I have no call to see this, not at all.

Sarah scooped up the shells, slid them back into the bag and buckled it. She bundled everything under the bed. Two rungs down the ladder, her lantern swinging, she stopped and looked round: had she left any sign that she had been there? But she had not stopped to think before she’d tugged the bag out and rifled through it, so there was now no way
of knowing if she had put it back as it should be. She could only hope and pray that she had.

And that, when he returned, James would not just take one look at her and see right through her, and see what she had done.

She need not have concerned herself that James would see through her, because, in the event, he did not look at her at all. He just scrambled down from the carriage box, and helped the ladies out, and then he led the horses off. She stood in the vestibule with an armful of bonnets and cloaks, shivering in the draught from the open door, and watched the rear carriage lamp swing in the wind as the coach moved away. How could it be, that he could occupy her thoughts so entirely for hours and days together, that he could be the first notion that crossed her mind in the morning, and the last niggling worry at night, when—it was perfectly clear to her—she did not so much as wander across his consciousness from one day to the next? She dragged the discarded clothes to the cloakroom, and hung them up. She would take a leaf out of his book, she decided; she would do her best not to think of him at all.

It was Tuesday morning, and Sarah was lugging the swill bucket down to the sty, when she saw a man coming down the field path from the direction of town. She did not recognize him for a moment, and so stopped, and watched him approach, noting first his greatcoat, then tricorn hat and wig, and thinking him a gentleman, though it was strange that a gentleman would go on foot, particularly with the ground so wet and muddy.

But then he looked up—he had been watching where he placed his feet in the cattle-churned ground—and she saw that it was the black footman from Netherfield. And there was she, in her limp dress still patched with hogshit stains, carrying a swill bucket—she’d just keep going, and hope he hadn’t seen her—but then his foot slithered, and stuck fast. He had to pause to pull it from the mud, and for a moment he was teetering, arms flung wide for balance. Their eyes caught, his with a look of alarm, but also laughter—it made her smile. He stumbled up to the stile and was half over when he wobbled. She scrambled to help him, clattering down the pig-bucket to offer him her hand.

“Bless you.” He gripped it in his gloved fingers, and stepped down onto the drier ground of the track.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“I find I have been sadly duped!”

She blinked up at him. He still held her hand.

“I was told it was a much shorter way by the fields. No one mentioned the mud.” He showed her his boots, tilting one and then the other for her inspection. They were very fine, and very filthy. “I expect my friends at Netherfield are laughing heartily at me now.”

“I am sorry, sir.”

“And the beasts! Did you know? Have you seen them? Cows, roaming loose! Without so much as a by-your-leave! Would you credit it? They should be locked up!”

She laughed outright.

He really was astonishingly handsome, she admitted to herself: there was a degree of symmetry to his features that was not often seen; at least not by her. Those liquid eyes. The way they lingered on her made her feel a trifle hot and bewildered.

“What brings you here, sir?” she tried.

“Oh, please don’t ‘sir’ me—”

“Mister.”

He rifled in an inside pocket. “I’ve been sent with a communication,” he said, and made a show of peering at it. “For Miss Bennet.”