Longbourn (47 page)

It became apparent almost immediately that she was not to be trusted with anything beyond the simplest work. Fabrics arrived in parcels;
Sarah unfurled the cloth and checked it over for flaws, and inhaled the scents of London shops—exotic, spicy, faintly unclean—before folding them and leaving them aside to be taken to the mantua-maker’s in town; she did not have dealings with them again until she hung the finished dresses up in the closet and was done. She was kept at mending, and the making of underthings. She worked with fine white lawn and silk, which she would once have thought a pleasure, but either it was tiny and fiddly, hard on the fingertips and eyes, or it was simply dull: she stitched on ribbon and lace; she re-sewed fallen hems; she joined up the slipped seams of shifts and petticoats. It was novice-work, and it gave her little satisfaction. She would surface to find herself gazing out of the window, with its view out across the side lawns, towards the countryside beyond. Sewing abandoned in her lap, she would stare across the frosted park, to the wooded hills, and the wide expanse of sky.

Her hands grew softer with the softer work. The hours languished. The days ticked by.

More parcels arrived from London, little, lightweight parcels: darned stockings and mended shifts were crumpled to the back of a drawer.

Her body grew soft too: she had never eaten so well in all her life. Eggs at breakfast, meat or fish at dinner, something sweet and comforting at suppertime. Mrs. Hill had been a good plain cook, but this was a different order of a thing, a whole course served in the great cavern of the servants’ dining hall, where she ate carefully and without speaking and did not know where to look, and could make out little of her fellow servants’ thick Derbyshire accents. Tea was brought up to her by a housemaid, with a tray of clinking servants’ china and a filthy look, because no one wanted to play servant to the servantry. Sarah, conscious of this, blushed when the maid clattered the tray down in front of her, and said, “Thank you so much, Lucy,” and then was not sure that the girl was called Lucy after all.

But there was some consolation to be found, in having her own little china pot of hot tea, and her own jug of milk, and there was even a little bowl with three lumps of sugar in it. She slipped a couple into her pocket, and later sent them off to Polly, carefully wrapped in tissue-paper, in her next letter.

The Gardiners came to stay at Christmas. Sarah sat by the window of Mrs. Darcy’s dressing room, and sewed, listening to the distant sounds of the family gathered in the grand parlour below. She could hear voices, and the pianoforte, and the laughter of the Gardiner children as they spun and raced around the expansive apartments.

Beyond the confines of Mrs. Darcy’s closet, the house stretched open and accommodating: those spacious rooms, their comfortable furnishings, their warmth and the diversions they contained, of art and music and conversation and books. And beyond its walls unfurled the ordered grounds, the well-managed park, the woods and farms, all full of purpose and comfort and prosperity, and all she could do was be here, in this seat, at this window, stitching a ribbon back onto a petticoat that, for all that Sarah knew, might never be worn again.

If she just put her sewing aside, and went out into the corridor, and opened a few doors and looked inside; if she wandered around some of the unused rooms downstairs, examining miniatures and marbles; if she stepped out through the French windows and out into the air, and followed the gravel walks, dawdling along between the frosted box hedges, and then through the shrubbery; if she strolled out across the lawns to the riverbank to gaze at a slothful trout in a patch of winter sun, and then slipped past the gate out into the woodlands, and climbed the paths worn into the hills beyond—how long could she last, how far could she get, how much could she
be
in this place, before she was stopped and sent back to this seat here, this little corner?

This was hers: a view of bare elms, a heap of light sewing, a place to sit, a tray set out with things for her tea.

It was not bad. It was far better than could be expected. But it was not enough.

“… you must be very happy.”

It was a shock—an actual bodily shock like a fall or a stumble, or walking into the edge of a table—to see Ptolemy Bingley roll into the park, that bright morning in March, the day before Lady Day.

Sarah’s needle dropped from her grip, swung a moment on its thread, then slipped and hit the floor. She stood up. The Bingley carriage wheeled down the drive; Sarah’s breath misted and then faded from the windowpane. There was no mistaking him, even at such a distance. Not his colour, but his bearing, his stature marked him out amongst the other men. She saw, too, how the daffodils were dragged sideways by the wind, and the bare branches tore at the sky, and the clouds bundled up and were teased apart above. The year had turned, and she had not noticed its turning.

Behind her, in the room, the clock struck the half-hour.

“Are they here?”

Sarah glanced round. Mrs. Darcy had turned in her seat at the dressing table.

“Believe so, ma’am.”

Her mistress got up and came over to the window. Sarah moved aside to make space. Together, they watched the carriage approach. Sarah had known that the Bingleys were coming—this was a long-anticipated visit—but in her mind’s eye Ptolemy had been weighing out tobacco in his gleaming shop in Spitalfields; she had even conjured up a pretty, plump young wife for him: she had assumed he would be happy, but had thought of him as quite, quite gone.

“My India shawl, Sarah, if you please.”

Sarah moved away from the window, slid open a drawer. “Which one, ma’am?”

“One of the new ones.”

Sarah lifted out a cream cashmere shawl, its ends worked with twining leaves and flowers; her thoughts were quick. The Bingleys’ visit was to be of a fortnight’s duration: two weeks of anxious dinners in the servants’ hall, and nervousness at corners, and in corridors. Ptolemy would avoid her too—it would no doubt be uncomfortable for both of them, but then it would be over. At least, it would be over for now, but who knew what would follow after, down all the years to come?

“I am glad that Jane is come to see me.”

Sarah smoothed the cashmere over Mrs. Darcy’s shoulders. There was a woman far away who’d worked this cloth, and, stretching, had gone outside into the warm air, and wandered amongst leaves and flowers just like these, under trees that were alive with birds.

Elizabeth turned from the window; she was bright now. “Well, come along then.”

“Madam?”

“Come downstairs, make haste. You will wish to welcome Jane.”

When Mrs. Bingley spotted Sarah, standing in line with the other servants in the blustering March wind, she greeted her warmly, and kissed her cheek, and said she hoped that she was happy, then continued on up the steps, and went into the house, her arm linked through her husband’s, and her sister’s arm hooked through the other, and did not wait to hear Sarah’s reply.

Sarah gathered up the small possessions abandoned in the coach—the gloves and reticules and books—and carried them indoors; as she climbed the steps she watched Ptolemy from the corner of her eye. He was busying himself with the luggage, and conversing only with his fellow footmen, and she did not once catch him looking over towards her. She had no idea if he expected to find her here. It was going to be awkward until she spoke to him, but then it could hardly be otherwise afterwards.

In the event, it was all over and done with more swiftly than she could have hoped. Sarah spoke to Ptolemy that same evening—for they dined fashionably late at Pemberley; it was nearly six o’clock before the family sat down, it was only once they were served that the servants ate—when she found herself seated beside him at dinner in the servants’
hall. She was fiercely conscious that she was being observed by Mrs. Reynolds, who was a stickler for proper conduct, and by Anne, who was always looking for intrigues and passions, and by Lucy (if that was indeed her name), who always seemed to be looking for trouble, and by a stable boy, who had taken to turning up whenever Sarah happened to be downstairs in that part of the house, and smiling, and talking to her, while she blushed and failed to understand his thick accent, and he hers.

When she had finally mustered the courage to enter the servants’ hall, Ptolemy was just drawing out a chair to seat himself beside one of the prettier maids; the only place remaining was to his left. Sarah, hesitating on the threshold, had considered for a moment the possibility of turning and running back to the sanctuary of Mrs. Darcy’s dressing room, but it was not to be attempted—everyone would see, and everyone would know, and so this must be faced. She drew in a breath, and let it go, and marched across the bare flags towards him. He glanced up at her approach, stiffened, and then looked away, turning to his pretty neighbour, and saying something that made the girl’s eyes widen, and her cheeks dimple.

So Sarah found herself sitting right beside him, by his shirtsleeve and collar and his canary waistcoat, and the twist of his nape, and the back of his head, while he kept his attention fixed entirely on the young woman to his right, who blushed now, and stammered a few ungainly words. Sarah had been just the same, she realized—confounded and thrilled to be noticed by a man like him—when he had first come to Longbourn.

After a while, the conversation fell away, as it must, there being so little in common between him and a country girl like that. Sarah was, for a time, obliged to reply to the stable boy seated near her, which was an ordeal all of its own, because he had nothing to tell her that was not about himself, and his old pa, and the horses, and she could make out only one word in three. Then they too fell into silence, though there was, all around them, a fug of chatter, cutlery on china, chewing, scraping chairs when a bell was rung and someone must go and answer it. She lifted a hand to her hot cheek, her food untouched.

Ptolemy spoke softly, under cover of the general noise; he did not look at her. “Are you well?”

“Quite well,” she said. “Thank you.” Then, after a moment: “And you?”

He nodded.

Then he turned back to the young maid, and asked her if she had had anything to do with the cooking of the beef, because it was excellent, and he had never had such good beef anywhere before, not even in London town itself. It was a valiant attempt, but this topic, too, soon flagged. He was left looking into space, and rearranging his cutlery.

“I did not think to see you here.” She spoke quietly. “I thought you would be all set up by now.”

“Oh, you know me.”

She turned to look at him now. He was staring straight across the room, at a row of headless hares that hung by their back legs, dripping blood into the dishes set out below.

“Keeping my options open,” he said. “Keeping an eye out.”

“I wish you all the best of luck, Mr. Bingley.”

He huffed a breath, half shook his head: she thought for a moment that he was going to accuse her of cruelty, of destroying his hopes, his happiness. But he just turned his head, and looked at her. His eyes were still beautiful, and black as coffee, but now they were swimming wet. When he spoke next, it was hardly above a whisper.

“I didn’t want …” he said. “When I heard you were here, I thought that when I saw you, I could make you feel something. Hurt you. But—”

“Mr. Bingley. I am sorry, I—”

He shrugged. “But it’s not your fault.”

She folded her hands together in her lap. She looked down at them.

“That footman,” he said. “Smith.”

She swallowed, tried to clear her throat, but then all she could manage was a nod.

“And you are quite fixed upon him. No one else will do.”

Her face felt sore; she could not look up.

“I have given up all hope,” she said.

He plucked at his white gloves. “Have you?”

A slow blink; she nodded.

“But if you knew where he was? If you had a chance of finding him?”

“Mr. Bingley. Ptolemy. Please.”

“But it would matter to you, more than all this”—he wafted a hand, taking in her work, the servants’ hall, the house beyond—“more than anything—”