Longbourn (13 page)

A little while later the grocer put his head round the door to inspect the two of them, and said they had succeeded in putting some roses back into Sarah’s cheeks at least, which was good, because earlier he had feared that the walk back to Longbourn would be entirely too much for her, and that she would be found dead in a ditch in the morning.

James, contrary to his habits, was getting under Mrs. Hill’s feet, and was suddenly talkative. He had been there and back to Netherfield with Mrs. Bennet and a carriage full of young ladies, and had passed through Meryton twice that day: why had she not thought to ask him to fetch the sugar, and save Sarah the trouble? He hovered at the window, and when she shifted him from there to get at the pot of parsley on the sill, he moved only far enough to get in her way when she turned back again.

“Excuse me please, Mr. Smith.”

He stepped aside to let her pass, and went back to his post. He rubbed the mist off a pane. “It’s getting dark.”

“It’s just overcast. It’s been grey all day.”

“Yes. And now it’s getting dark.”

Mrs. Hill heaved the fish-kettle onto the table. “She has another hour or so, I’d say, before the sun sets.”

He frowned, nodded. A moment later, though: “She should be back by now, really, shouldn’t she? She should have been back hours ago.”

The implications of his behaviour whirled around Mrs. Hill’s head like a flock of starlings as she lifted the dripping fish from the kettle and laid it on the platter. So he was taken with the little scrap. Well, fancy that. And if Sarah liked him back—so long as that mulatto could be prevented from turning her head completely—things could be very nicely settled here indeed. James and Sarah married. She would not object to that, no, not at all; and if she did not, how could anybody else?

“There,” she said, and tapped the platter with a stubby nail. “Fish is ready. Take it up now, please.”

He glanced noncommittally at the tench. Then he turned back to the window.

“She’ll be back before dinner’s eaten. Don’t fret.”

“I’m not fretting.”

His anxiety was becoming infectious: Mrs. Hill did now feel a faint stirring of unease. Could Sarah have somehow come to grief?

“The dinner’s getting cold.”

He heaved himself away from the window, caught up a tea-cloth, and lifted the dish.

“She’s a sensible girl,” Mrs. Hill said. “And we are very quiet around here. We are not used to any kind of trouble.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

“And who would bother a respectable young woman, with the Militia stationed so near by?”

There was a flicker of hesitation, but he nodded his agreement.

“We are fortunate in that,” Mrs. Hill said. “We may consider ourselves well protected.”

He looked at the fish, lying dull-eyed and blistered on the plate. He’d give it until the dinner things were cleared, and if Sarah wasn’t back by then, he’d go out looking for her.

He did not have to go far. From the blustery crest of the hill he spotted her. She was trudging along the low road that curved round the base of the hill. Why she’d chosen to come that heavy slow way, rather than by the footpath through the fields, he could not fathom.

The sight of her spun something suddenly loose inside him; he let a breath go, and it was borne away by the wind.

He hunkered down against the field wall and watched her labour on through the mud, skirts wind-torn and wrapping around her legs. She looked so slight and flimsy, as though she could be blown clean away.

When she was gone some twenty yards or so along the road, he got back to his feet and scrambled down the hillside. He tailed her home, keeping her in sight until she slipped through the gates; he waited by the gatepost while she trudged up the gravel drive and trailed round the side of the house; she looked deeply cold, and deeply tired. When she had passed round the corner, he scudded over to it, and crouched there
to watch her reach the stable buildings and cross the yard. Then she slipped inside the kitchen, and the door closed behind her.

He took himself into the stables, where the horses were twitchy with the rattling, gusting wind. He stroked their necks, and gentled them: it soothed his nerves as well as theirs. He rubbed his hair dry, and left his greatcoat to drip from a nail.

He had been concerned for her; that was all. No one here seemed to have any real notion of the world. This was innocence as deep and dangerous as a quarry-pit. He, though, he knew. He knew that men were capable of many things, and had come to believe, indeed, that some men were not really men at all, for all that they walked and talked and prayed and ate and slept and dressed themselves like men. Give them just time and opportunity enough, and they’d reveal themselves to be cold creatures with strange appetites, who did not care what harm they did in satisfying them.

While James was toiling through the wind and mud, out looking for Sarah, Mrs. Hill was climbing the stairs with a laden tray. She shouldered into the parlour; the remaining Bennet family brightened at the arrival of coffee and biscuits. Kitty and Lydia dropped their work—if picking apart perfectly good bonnets to make them up a little less well could really be considered work—and came over to the table. Mrs. B. and Mary peered across to inspect the refreshments; even Mr. B. folded his paper and put it aside and said, “Good, good.” It all seemed perfectly pleasant to them. But in Mrs. Hill now grew an unhappy preoccupation: James’s worry worried her. What had he seen, what had he done, what did he know that they did not?

Sarah was, of course, returned to them quite safe, though fatigued, bedraggled, and chilled. She set down the sugarloaf and sank into a chair by the fire. Polly came sidling through from the scullery, chewing a fingernail.

“We were just beginning to be worried, missy.”

Sarah blinked at Mrs. Hill; it seemed like an age since she had left; it seemed like a different world.

“The ways are heavy, missus; slow going in all that mud.”

Sarah shivered. Polly snuck up to her and huddled in close, looking for comfort. Her thumb slid into her mouth.

“Don’t do that, Polly, love. You’re a big girl now.”

Polly smiled around her thumb, nudged in closer to Sarah. The words came muffled: “You’re all hot!”

“Am I? I feel cold.”

Mrs. Hill frowned at this, and laid a hand on Sarah’s head. Her frown deepened. Sarah made no objection to being given warm milk with honey, and sent early to bed.

When James came into the kitchen a little later, perfectly dry and tidy and looking as though he hadn’t been up to anything much at all, Sarah was not there, and Mrs. Hill had a stiff and defensive air about her. Polly informed him with a kind of awe that Sarah had gone and got herself tired out and frozen stiff and had had to be sent off early to bed.

The sugarloaf, well wrapped at the grocer’s, kept close all the way home, was sitting on the table, nestling in its unfurled wrappings. He touched its smooth translucency with a fingertip, expecting ice, but finding it neutral, with a hint of her body’s lingering warmth.

Upstairs, in the attic, stripped out of her wet clothes and ducked into her nightgown and with a shawl around her shoulders and bedsocks tugged up to her knees, Sarah lay shuddering beneath her blankets. Eyes shut tight, she saw the deathly white of the man’s skin. She heard still his outraged cries, the sickening way they weakened and died away.

Bingley urged Mr. Jones’s being sent for immediately; while his sisters, convinced that no country advice could be of any service, recommended an express to town for one of the most eminent physicians
.

On Friday, Sarah burnt to the touch; her head rolled on the pillow; she muttered. Mrs. Hill came up, or sent Polly, when she could, with broth or tea, and they would prop her up and spoon a little between her chattering teeth. But the attics were a long way from the kitchen and it was not often that someone could get away, and there was certainly little time to stay and comfort her.

If Sarah was not better in a couple of days, Mrs. Hill would ask Mrs. Bennet if she might send for the apothecary. Or she might beg a drop of the mistress’s Cordial Balm of Gilead. That preparation had never been known to fail Mrs. Bennet, but at half a guinea a bottle you didn’t go dishing it out to servants without very good cause.

Downstairs, James chewed at the inside of his cheek, and got on with his work, and asked after Sarah much more frequently than either Polly or Mrs. Hill were able to go and check on her. If Mrs. Hill had known the truth of it—that he allowed himself to enquire only a tiny fraction of the number of times that he actually wanted to—then she would have considered her suspicions about his feelings to be entirely confirmed.

On Saturday, Sarah was cooler, and could sit up. Polly brought apples and nuts, and when Sarah couldn’t eat them, Polly cracked and crunched them herself and looked at the older girl appraisingly.

“Is there anything you
would
like?”

“I can’t think of a thing.”

Polly held up a finger, got up, and dashed off. She returned a few minutes later with a jar of bramble jelly and a spoon.

“Missus won’t miss it,” Polly said.

As sparrows to Our Lord, so the contents of her larder to Mrs. Hill. Every single item must be accounted for; Sarah knew it. She made Polly promise to return the jar unopened.

“Only if
you
promise to hurry up and get better. It’s miserable with you stuck in here. I miss you.”

Polly was, for the duration of Sarah’s illness, obliged to share the Hills’ bedroom. She had a little pallet on the floor.

“They both snore like pigs! And he’s a terrible old crack-fart.”

“Polly!”

“He
is
. He’s windier than the horses.”

On Sunday, when Mrs. Hill came into the kitchen to stoke up the fires and get the kettle on, for a quick cup of tea before the morning service, she found Sarah already there, up and dressed and kneading dough for the breakfast rolls. She was, though, seated at the table; she must be feeling as yet unequal to being on her feet for any length of time. And she was still waxy-looking. She would have to stay home from church.

“Well,” said Mrs. Hill, laying her hand on her forehead, and finding it quite cool, “I am glad to see you up and about.”

“I wanted to be busy,” Sarah said.

The long, dull Sunday morning was broken neatly in two by the arrival of the Bingleys’ carriage, with Elizabeth and Jane inside it.

Sarah stood shivering in the thin wind, her shawl wrapped around her, as the family bustled up the steps and indoors. Jane herself was wan and weak-looking, but she withstood her mother’s protests—about the trouble she had put the Bingleys to, in using their carriage—with her usual calm resolve. The noise, the bother: it washed over Sarah without touching her. The family’s concerns, though they were flapped and fussed over and made the most of, seemed far away and tiny now; they did not signify.

The Netherfield footman handed the valise down to James, and
James carried it indoors, and she, with a quick glance to see she was not observed—and everyone was gone inside—came up to him.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” he said. “Not these past few days. And I’ve been back and forth like a fiddler’s arm.”

“I’ve been poorly.”

“What’s your name? No one tells me anything.”

“Sarah.”

He touched his hat. “Ptolemy Bingley. At your service.”

His first name was strange enough, but: “How can you be a Bingley?”

“If you are off his estate, that’s your name, that’s how it works.” He climbed back up to his place on the footplate, and took a long look at her. “They’ve worn you out, have they?”

“I caught a chill.” She wrapped her shawl tighter, goosepimpling.

“You have to take care of yourself, chick. No one else is going to do it for you.”

She was conscious of the other Netherfield men—the second footman and the coachman—and the silent communication between them, of glances and raised eyebrows.

“Where is this place,” she asked, “where everyone’s called Bingley?”

“Ah, God, now, you wouldn’t catch a chill there.”

“Is it warm, then?”

“As a bath.”

She hesitated. The coachman clicked his tongue, and the horses stepped and blew.

“I hope you’ll be back to Longbourn soon, Mr. Bingley,” she said.

“Ptolemy. Tol. They do seem to keep finding me good cause.”

Then the wheels started to ease round, the gravel crunched; he touched his hat to her again, and then was under way. She watched the carriage roll off, and felt an uneasy kind of gratification. The only thing of which she was certain now, was that she would not go on like this for ever. Things were cut adrift, and shifting, and nothing could continue as it had been.