Longbourn (12 page)

“No, no, not that gown, for Mr. Bingley saw her in it at the Lucases’, and will think she has not another one as good.”

What Miss Jane would want with chilly evening-gowns or worked muslin or fancy bonnets when she was confined to her room by sickness, or why Mr. Bingley would be expected to concern himself with what she wore, since he would not see her anyway, Mrs. Hill could not imagine, but she was too absorbed in wardrobe mathematics to pay her mistress any real attention: Jane had arrived at Netherfield in a good dinner-dress and cloak, which would have been soaked through; the servants there would have dried them out and sponged off any mud by now, and meanwhile the ladies would have lent her a gown and shawl for the evening, as well as a nightgown on seeing she was to stay the night. So what Jane needed now were nightclothes of her own, a couple of shawls and a good day-dress for when she was able to sit up
again. Elizabeth, on the other hand, would have arrived muddy after her walk: she would need a good gown to dine in, a plain day-dress to nurse her sister in, and a pair of decent shoes for around the house, and linen. For all she understood Mrs. Bennet’s eagerness to make a good impression, anything else was just silliness, and would be seen as such by the servants over there.

When Mrs. Bennet turned away, saying she would just find Jane’s dancing shoes, Mrs. Hill slammed the valise shut and buckled it. If she did not get that black dandy out of the kitchen sharpish, who knew what trouble would come of it. He’d have Sarah’s head turned entirely.

At Mrs. Bennet’s outraged glare, she said, “We’d risk spoiling the gowns, ma’am, if we crammed anything more in there.”

Then Mrs. Hill hurried off with her burden, before Mrs. B. could either protest, or congratulate her housekeeper on her good thinking.

The pair of them—Sarah and the mulatto—were facing each other in the chairs by the fire, he stretched out and at his leisure, she leaning forward, hands on knees, eyes bright, her kerchief falling away to reveal rather too much of her bosom. The talk stopped the moment Mrs. Hill came into the kitchen. Sarah looked flushed and far too animated for Mrs. Hill’s liking; the housekeeper strode over and dropped the valise in the footman’s lap. He winced.

“There you go,” she said. “Safe home, now.”

He made charmingly heavy weather of his new burden, pretending to puff and crumple under its weight, shaking his head and tutting in mock outrage. This made Sarah laugh, which seemed to satisfy him; he left, doffing his hat to her. Mrs. Hill closed the door on him; then, hands on hips, she watched Sarah brushing the ashes together on the hearth, swirling them into patterns, heaps, then sweeping them out flat again. The girl’s thoughts were, clearly, not on her work.

The following day, Mrs. Hill dispatched Sarah to Meryton with a request for a loaf of good sugar from the grocer. There was not a scrap of the stuff left in the house. She must have it home in time for dinner, as it was needed for the baked apples. Mrs. Hill was very sorry to inconvenience her, but she was obliged to ask the favour. She was far too busy to go herself. And so the girl now would be out of the way, when that fellow next came calling.

“Can I go too?” asked Polly.

“No. I can’t have everyone gadding about. I need you to scrub. Get the rags out, and the cold tea. We’re doing the hall and vestibule floors.”

“Bah,” said Polly. “When Miss Jane marries Mr. Bingley, there’ll be no need to go to Meryton for sugar. We will have mountains of sugar-loaves, we’ll build a house out of it. We’ll bathe in syrup.”

“That,” said Sarah, “would not be very pleasant.”

She took off her apron, and fetched her bonnet, before Mrs. Hill could change her mind.

Sarah, with the ragged old crow of an umbrella folded under her arm, and the old blue pelisse warm on her shoulders, walked out of the kitchen light of heart: this seemed as good as a fête-day. To be out, with nothing but a mile of fresh air ahead of her, with nothing very much to carry and no one to tell her what to do, this was a pleasure indeed. Mrs. Hill wouldn’t notice if a crumb of the sugarloaf went missing. The walk back would be sweetened: the prospect of a dinner she had not made herself, on her return, was really quite delightful.

Her boots were soon heavy and damp, and the left one rubbed a blister on her heel, but the way through the fields was better on foot than the turnpike, where the post-chaises and mail-coaches bowled by, making you throw yourself into the ditch, or risk the pounding hooves, the flying wheels.

The handsome footman—he so dazzled her that she kept on forgetting to ask his name—didn’t like the mud. He was a pretty bird, a parakeet; the weather weighed him down. And if
he
was a parakeet, then Mr. Smith was a collie-dog: the weather made no impression on him at all, however much cold or dirt or rain was flung at him: his mind and soul were fixed upon the work in hand. And she—well, the weather didn’t bother her that much either way. If you got wet, you’d get dry again. There was no point in complaining in the meantime.

She thought, though, how beautiful those Vauxhall Gardens must be, after the rain.

The footpath joined the riverbank, and followed it into Meryton. The river was fat and full and dimpling; the millpond brimmed and the wheel thundered round on its frothing race.

It was not raining now, but the sky was heavy and low, and it brought
a strange dusk to the backstreets; the shadows were bruised and purple, the stones and walls and cobbles a queasy green.

She passed the tannery, with its death-and-dogshit reek, and the blind walls of the poorhouse, where no lights were lit despite the darkness of the day. Back-alleys opened off to left and right, where half-naked children made dams and pools in the gutters and women hunched on their doorsteps under shawls, bundled babies in their arms. The shambles, when she passed them, were deserted, but were filled with their usual miasma of terror, of ammonia-and-blood.

It was so quiet.

She moved on, through the backstreets. It was usually lively and familiar here: the weavers leaning in the doorways, talking politics; the women in a cheerful cluster at the pump. They knew who she was, whose daughter she had been. Today only those who could do no better were out of doors. Today there was just defeated silence, and the drip from patched rooves.

It started to rain again, a drenching haze; she opened her umbrella. On the corner ahead stood one of Meryton’s principal inns, its half-timbered face turned towards the buying and selling of Market Street, its flank towards this damp lane. Round the corner, and she’d be out into the wider, more populated streets. She quickened her pace. She’d go straight to the grocer’s and get the sugar, then she’d call at the apothecary’s and see what report Mr. Jones could give of Jane. And then—she’d brought her own penny with her—she’d buy a bun at the pastry-cook’s and she’d march straight home along the turnpike eating it, and take her chance with the carriages, rather than come back this dark way again.

She came alongside the inn yard. Last time she had passed this way, it had been market day, and the yard had been alive with the come-and-go of farmers with their heavy, gentle horses. But today the space behind the curving lime-washed walls was different: they had been building there. The structure was rough, its unseasoned timbers streaked with damp. It looked like a cowshed. It covered half the yard.

The barracks, Mrs. Bennet had said. They were building barracks for the soldiers.

There was a new sound, too; she noticed it for the first time then. A hum of gathered voices. Men’s voices.

She quickened her pace, umbrella tilted to shield her from their
notice. She passed the gateway, and though she could not see, she could feel that something was going on in there. That something was swelling up and ready to burst.

But a few more paces and she would be out into Market Street. She would go to the grocer’s and buy the sugar and talk about the weather and the shocking state of the roads. She didn’t
have
to look into the yard, where the men were gathered. She would be much better off not looking: they were all the more likely to notice her if she did. But she lifted the umbrella a little, and glanced in.

The yard was made narrow by the new building; it was now little more than a dank alleyway between the raw wood and the boundary wall. Red-coated soldiers were packed tight at the far end, corralled there by some invisible restraint. Not one of them even glanced at her. She kept on walking, though everything seemed to have slowed, every moment seemed to linger; she took a step, and the angle of her sightline shifted, and she saw what it was that kept the men pinned back there, their faces turned aside.

It was at the hitching post, just inside the gateway. It stood between them and her.

Her senses, briefly, could not accommodate the image.

Then it was a pig. A carcass. A great slab of meat waiting to be skinned.

Then her perceptions shifted again, true patterns formed: she saw the shape of human muscle, shoulder blade, a dark slick of hair, the cable-twist of neck.

In the instant that she saw, she looked away, but by then it was too late. The image pressed itself upon her sight like a die into sealing wax. His skin was lurid in the dull light, his cheek hazed with greying stubble and flattened against the dark weathered wood. His eyes were wide and rolling, his jaw clenched. His body, held immobile by the bonds, was fiercely at work: his arm muscles shifted and twisted, his feet trod and braced against the cobbles like a horse’s.

At the end of the yard, the redcoats stirred, muttered; some were very young—one, a boy of perhaps fourteen, looked as if he might cry, but not one of them could turn their gaze towards the shackled man. The crowd shuffled itself, and a man emerged; stripped to his shirtsleeves, coiling a whip in his hand, he did not look at the prisoner either.

She was almost past the gateway now, the rain chill on her cheek,
and as she passed, she saw the point to which the men’s attention was fixed; the final point in this web of complicity. A clutch of officers stood to one side of the gateway, lolling by the wall, looking fine and bright in their regimentals. There were one or two of middling age, and a few who were younger. One of them was so smooth-cheeked he could almost have been a girl. He was looking green.

The officers were at their ease, engaged in discussion; the man with the whip, the prisoner, the boys in uniform, all waited on their word.

“Well, Chamberlayne, what d’you say?” This was an older man. “Are you fit for this?”

“Yes, Colonel Forster, sir.” Chamberlayne. This was the smooth-cheeked boy.

“He does look rather queasy.”

“I do not. I just—there was something wrong with that ale.”

“You haven’t got the stomach for
something
, that’s for sure.”

“Give over, Denny. Twenty lashes is not nothing.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, Captain Carter, sir.”

“They need it, you know, Chamberlayne,” said the older man—the colonel. “They’re nothing without discipline. They’re incapable of self-control, and so it falls to us to control them. We would be remiss in our duty if we neglected this. Failure to salute an officer; that’s rank insubordination, that is.”

Now Sarah was beyond the sight of it all, passing along the outside of the long whitewashed wall; she could still hear the voices coming clear through the quiet and the rain.

Chamberlayne’s piping tones again: “If we could but get it over with, I would be quite well.”

“Well then, Sergeant. You heard the officer, and you know your business.”

“Sir.”

She felt it in the air, her skin bristling. A breath’s pause, as the men fell into alignment. Then the whip hissed. The thwack and slice of it.

The prisoner cried out. Sarah pressed a hand to her mouth.

“One,” the sergeant called.

Another hiss and thunk of the whip. The man screamed. Sarah let the umbrella fall aside. She put her hand to the wet stone wall.

Another pause. The lash snapping out again. Another cry.

She was sure she would be sick. She stood there, heart pounding.
Twenty?
If they went on like that they would kill him. She should go back, put herself between him and the pain; they would have to stop. The whip cracked out again. She closed her eyes, and the darkness swam. The snap; the scream. Again, and again. His cries getting weaker now.

And she just stumbled away, feet tangling in wet skirts, hand tracing the wall, unsteady, the umbrella swinging out to one side, rain in her face.

Soon after Sarah had left, the mulatto (why always him? Did not Mr. Bingley possess a single other footman to send scampering about the countryside?) arrived with another note from Miss Elizabeth.

He chucked Polly under the chin, shook James’s grudging hand, looked around the kitchen with an enquiring air.

“Where’s, um—”

“The skivvy?” Mrs. Hill asked.

“Um, I suppose yes. The pretty chick.”

Mrs. Hill handed Elizabeth’s note to James, and jerked her head in the direction of the parlour. He went.

“Elsewhere,” she said.

She offered the footman nothing; not tea, not even a seat, and certainly no further information about Sarah. They could have met each other on the path, she realized; it was mere good luck that they had not. She would have to think of some other means of keeping Sarah out of his clutches. And he would have to satisfy himself with a quick reply in the form of a folded note from Mrs. Bennet, and be on his merry way.

But as she watched him off the premises, Mrs. Hill congratulated herself on the effectiveness of her scheme. He’d soon fix his interests elsewhere, on more likely prospects. He wasn’t the kind to hang around.

In the grocer’s shop, Sarah folded the umbrella and asked for a loaf of sugar, and the grocer, instead of simply parcelling it up and noting it to the Bennets’ account, peered at her and said, “My dear, are you quite well?”

“I am, thank you kindly.”

“You are as white as salt. You must take something.”

He called his daughter out from the back kitchen; a plump dark-eyed thing, she ushered Sarah through to warm herself and drink tea.