Longbourn (39 page)

He thought differently now; he no longer thought in houses, farms and fields, in enclosed spaces; now it was all distances and trajectories. He daydreamed of the lines that he had traced across the land, the threads that drifted off over the seas.

“Fine-looking fellow, that one,” he overheard a dairymaid telling her companion.

“Shame that he’s a simpleton. Can hardly talk.”

“Don’t mean you can’t have him, though, do it?”

They cackled together; he walked on.

As the autumn came down upon him, he returned to familiar territory, to the landscape of his childhood. He followed the drovers’ road past Old Misery’s farm, and there was the spreading sycamore that he had used to climb, and the farmhouse still peering out suspiciously
from under low eaves. He didn’t stop. He picked blackberries, hips and haws, and ate them as he went, staining his fingers and his lips with juice.

He asked at the inn in Meryton if Mr. Bennet still lived thereabouts; he muttered something about work, about hearing something from another fellow on the road—but the landlord was a ready talker, and no explanation was required: indeed, the Bennets did still dwell in the neighbourhood, he was happy to inform him—the Bennets’ home was but a mile away, at the village of Longbourn. Theirs was the principal household. Mr. Bennet, and his wife, and their five fine daughters were currently in residence.

James watched from the lane, hidden by a patch of holly hedge. A stream of young ladies flowed out of the house and across the paddock; they foamed over a stile, and flurried off like sparrows along the field path and out of sight. He watched as Mr. Bennet himself—older, stooping—came out of the house, and strolled aimlessly in the shrubbery, hands clasped behind his back. James must pick his moment, choose his words; he made his way down the lane cautiously. As he passed a bare patch of the hedge, he saw two figures in the paddock down below. One was a child, the other a young woman, who was hanging white linen on a line. She paused in her work, and shielded her eyes, and stared across the space between them.

He had come halfway across the world for this. This was home.

“But it is all, all too late now.”

Mr. Hill, when he was roused and consulted, sat up in bed and pulled the blankets up to his chest. He readily confirmed that he had not sent the manservant on any errand, nor had James previously informed him of an intended departure for Meryton, or anywhere else, that morning.

“It doesn’t mean he didn’t go, though.” Mr. Hill wiped his crusted eyes, and then his spit-gummed lips. “There might have been a mend to be made at the blacksmith’s, or he might have gone on to the coach-maker’s in Harlow, for new gear.”

His nightshirt was old and thin and he felt exposed under all this female scrutiny. He peered at his wife and the two girls, blurred in the shaft of early-summer sun from the casement. They could at least have let him get his britches on before they started all this.

Mrs. Hill sank down on the bed beside him, tightening the blankets over his lap, making the boards creak underneath.

“He didn’t mention anything. He didn’t say a word.”

“They’re not wanting the carriage at this hour, are they? I’ll do it. You lot clear off while I get dressed.”

“He would never leave the horses,” Sarah said.

“Eh?”

“The horses,” Sarah said. “No fodder, no water. He just—left.”

Mr. Hill felt for his wife’s hand, lying by him on the covers. He took it, held it. She looked down at his old paw, wrapped around hers.

“He can’t have just gone,” he said.

Mrs. Hill nodded. His hand tightened around hers; her eyes welled.

“I’m so sorry,” the old man said.

Polly, hovering in the doorway, bit her finger and looked from one of them to the other, baffled and upset. Sarah just swayed there, in a patch of sunshine, looking as though a breeze would knock her over. Mrs. Hill had gone grey, and Mr. Hill was suddenly all soft and concerned. All was out of order. Polly didn’t like it, not one little bit.

“Will you speak to Mr. Bennet?” he asked.

Mrs. Hill shook her head: she did not know.

“What will you do?”

She squeezed his hand, then let it go, and heaved herself up from the bed. She passed Sarah, then Polly, and set off with a heavy tread down the stairs. Sarah followed her; Polly took hold of Sarah’s arm as she passed by.

“Why would she do anything?” Polly hissed. “What has it to do with Mrs. Hill anyway, whatever James is up to?”

“Not now.”

Sarah gently pushed Polly aside.

“Mrs. Hill—” Sarah called.

The older woman paused on the turn of the stairs. Sarah clattered down the treads between them.

“Missus—”

Mrs. Hill looked up, waited.

Sarah had no words to hand, but the logic of it, however inarticulable, was strong: the soldier flogged in the rain and the scarred man that she loved; the departure of the Militia and James’s disappearance—each explained and substantiated the other, and made a kind of intuitive sense.

“Missus, the Militia, they left last night too.”

Mrs. Hill swallowed, nodded. “Go on.”

“I do not know what he had done—”

“What he had done?” The older woman’s brow crumpled.

“James. Mr. Smith. You would think once he had been punished—”

“I don’t follow you.”

Sarah’s lips were dry. “I am sure, I know, that he is good; he has always been—”

Mrs. Hill grabbed her shoulder, and shook her. “Spit it out, for God’s sake.”

“He had been flogged.”

Mrs. Hill turned away. She pressed her forehead to the cool distempered wall.

“Mrs. Hill—”

She shook her head, rolling her brow against the plaster. This was not the deal. This was not what she had paid so dearly for.

What did she expect him to do, Mr. Bennet wanted to know. What exactly did she expect him to do about it, after all?

Mrs. Hill chewed at the inside of her cheek: how could she know? She was not an educated man, a gentleman, with time on his hands and a network of useful and eminent acquaintances about the neighbourhood. She did not even know what might be done; what enquiries could be made, which individuals consulted. But something must be done. Surely something must be done this time.

Mr. Bennet just played with his coffee cup and did not meet her eye. His hand, as it turned the cup in the saucer, shook a little.

“I suppose you want me to send out search parties? Scour the countryside?” He pursed his lips. “The young man has broken his engagement here, which he had signed up for until the quarter day at Midsummer at least. It is quite inconvenient and wrong of him: we can assume he does not wish to be found, or he would not have left the way he did.”

“The Militia—”

Mr. Bennet dropped his voice; he looked up at her now. “What would they want with him? He served his time honourably, did he not?”

“He was not gone long enough.”

He went still, staring at her.

“Not to have been discharged,” she said. “Not unless he was crippled beyond use.”

“A deserter, then—”

They just looked at each other, in silence.

“You could write,” she said. “You could write to Colonel Forster—”

“And what would that achieve?”

“Just to know. Whether he has been—taken.”

He lifted a paper from his desk, adjusted his pince-nez. “You wish me to write to that gentleman, and ask if they happen to have my bastard in their custody?”

“Your manservant.”

“What would people think if I did even that? What would people say? Mr. Smith makes his own decisions, and his own mistakes. He is a grown man, after all; who am I to interfere?”

He is a grown man now, Mrs. Hill thought; he has not always been. But there was no point opening all that up and picking through it again, so she just curtseyed, as she always did, and turned away. She went out of the library, and left the door standing wide.

Mr. Bennet called out after her: “Close the door, Mrs. Hill—”

But she carried on down the hallway, and out of the front door and left it wide too, and down the steps and crunched over the drive and through the gates, and was out walking along the main road of Longbourn village, where she began to be aware of herself, and that someone might notice her, walking out without a shawl or bonnet or apparent purpose. She climbed a stile, and sank down in the lee of a hedge. There was wood sorrel growing on the bank, and harebells, and there were cowslips nodding in the meadow grass at her feet, and a young cow ambled over, head swinging low, considering her with a bulging eye. It blinked its long lashes, and licked its nose with a rasping sticky tongue.

Wherever you are, Mrs. Hill thought, God watches over you. He just looks on at you, with a strange eye and an uncaring heart.

… her letters were always long expected, and always very short
.

There was a packet, addressed to Mrs. Bennet in Lydia’s careless, blotty hand. Inside would be a fat, thickly sealed letter for Kitty and a thin, more carelessly sealed one for Mrs. Bennet: there always was. There was also a separate, neatly folded envelope with perhaps one extra sheet inside, which had come all the way from London to sit in Sarah’s dry little hand and be regarded with bitter disappointment. From Mrs. Gardiner to Elizabeth.

Sarah did not know what she had expected, but clearly she had expected something, or her chest would not feel as hollow and grey as it now did. She did not believe that he would have left her, without a word of warning or a promise of return, and no word from him since—not unless he entirely could not help it. And this chilled her, despite the sun on her face and the warmth of the day that made her sweat through her old yellow-green poplin. It was ice in her heart, to think that something dreadful had befallen him, and that he might even now be suffering terribly, and all alone, and that she could not go to him.

She trailed back to the house through the meadows; the grass was long and brushed against her skirts, giving off puffs of pollen. At Longbourn, the young ladies were out on the lawns, taking the air. There had been a resumption of summer finery, of lace and muslins; there were new summer bonnets to be worn: the ladies looked light and delicate as butterflies. Sarah, though, trudging up the driveway, felt as though she had been chained to a rock, and must drag it along with her, inch by inch, yard by yard.

“When you write next to Miss Lydia, miss,” she asked Elizabeth,
“would you mind asking her, if it is not too much trouble, if there is any news of Mr. Smith at Brighton?”

Elizabeth was looking through her letters, and had brightened beautifully at the sight of the envelope from her favourite aunt. She paused now in breaking its seal.

“Mr. Smith?” she asked.

“I thought perhaps he might have gone to Brighton too, or been—took. I thought perhaps Miss Lydia might have heard tell of him there, or seen something of him.”

Elizabeth frowned, half shook her head. “I’m sorry. Of whom?”

“Mr. Smith. You must remember him?”

Elizabeth’s eyebrows crept up; Sarah had moved closer, her hand was reaching out: she had forgot herself. She remembered now, and brought her hand back to clasp the other.

“I am sorry, miss. I really am, but he was here just a little while ago, and so much in our lives. A fine young man, your father said so. Everybody said so. A fine, upstanding young man.”

Elizabeth’s expression cleared. “Oh!
Smith!
You mean the
footman
!”

“Yes.”

“You called him
Mr
. Smith, that’s why I misunderstood you; I thought you meant someone of my acquaintance. I thought you meant a gentleman.”

“I am sorry I was unclear.”

“Yes. He did leave quite abruptly. Perhaps he heard of more remunerative work. But you think for some reason he has maybe gone to Brighton?”

It was something, Brighton: it was a word, a place, a possibility. “He may have.”

“Well then, I shall mention it as you ask, when next I write to Lydia. And I shall let you know if she has anything to report of him. But I fear her thoughts are so occupied with officers that it will be unlikely she would spare much notice for a footman.”