Longbourn
Authors: Jo Baker
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Romance, #Historical, #Regency, #Classics
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Jo Baker
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.
Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baker, Jo.
Longbourn / By Jo Baker.—First U.S. Edition.
pages cm
“Originally published in Great Britain by Transworld, an imprint of the Random House Group Ltd., London.”
“This Is a Borzoi Book.”
ISBN: 978-0-385-35123-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35124-9
1. Families—Great Britain—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Pride and prejudice.
PR6102.A57L66 2013 823′.92—dc23 2013016430
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.
Jacket painting after Jean-Étienne Liotard. Private Collection.
Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library
Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson
v3.1
For Clare, with thanks
for her attention, forbearance, patience
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Volume One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Volume Two
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Volume Three
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?
The butler … Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids …
There could be no wearing of clothes without their laundering, just as surely as there could be no going without clothes, not in Hertfordshire anyway, and not in September. Washday could not be avoided, but the weekly purification of the household’s linen was nonetheless a dismal prospect for Sarah.
The air was sharp at four thirty in the morning, when she started work. The iron pump-handle was cold, and even with her mitts on, her chilblains flared as she heaved the water up from the underground dark and into her waiting pail. A long day to be got through, and this just the very start of it.
All else was stillness. Sheep huddled in drifts on the hillside; birds in the hedgerows were fluffed like thistledown; in the woods, fallen leaves rustled with the passage of a hedgehog; the stream caught starlight and glistened over rocks. Below, in the barn, cows huffed clouds of sweet breath, and in the sty, the sow twitched, her piglets bundled at her belly. Mrs. Hill and her husband, up high in their tiny attic, slept the black blank sleep of deep fatigue; two floors below, in the principal bedchamber, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet were a pair of churchyard humps under the counterpane. The young ladies, all five of them sleeping in their beds, were dreaming of whatever it was that young ladies dream. And over it all, icy starlight shone; it shone on the slate rooves and flagged yard and the necessary house and the shrubbery and the little wilderness off to the side of the lawn, and on the coveys where the pheasants huddled, and on Sarah, one of the two Longbourn housemaids, who cranked the pump, and filled a bucket, and rolled it aside, her palms already sore, and then set another bucket down to fill it too.
Over the eastern hills the sky was fading to a transparent indigo.
Sarah, glancing up, hands stuffed into her armpits, her breath clouding the air, dreamed of the wild places beyond the horizon where it was already fully light, and of how, when her day was over, the sun would be shining on other places still, on the Barbadoes and Antigua and Jamaica where the dark men worked half-naked, and on the Americas where the Indians wore almost no clothes at all, and where there was consequently very little in the way of laundry, and how one day she would go there, and never have to wash other people’s underthings again.
Because, she thought, as she fixed the pails to the yoke, ducked into it, and staggered upright, really no one should have to deal with another person’s dirty linen. The young ladies might behave like they were smooth and sealed as alabaster statues underneath their clothes, but then they would drop their soiled shifts on the bedchamber floor, to be whisked away and cleansed, and would thus reveal themselves to be the frail, leaking, forked bodily creatures that they really were. Perhaps that was why they spoke instructions at her from behind an embroidery hoop or over the top of a book: she had scrubbed away their sweat, their stains, their monthly blood; she knew they weren’t as rarefied as angels, and so they just couldn’t look her in the eye.
The pails slopped as Sarah stumbled back across the yard; she was just approaching the scullery door when her foot skidded out from underneath her, and her balance was gone. The moment extended itself, so that she had time enough to see the pails fly up and away, off the yoke, emptying themselves, and see all her work undo itself, and to realize that when she landed, it would hurt. Then the pails hit the ground and bounced, making a racket that startled the rooks cawing from the beeches; Sarah landed hard on the stone flags. Her nose confirmed what she had already guessed: she had slipped in hogshit. The sow had got out yesterday, and all her piglets skittering after her, and nobody had cleared up after them yet; nobody had had the time. Each day’s work trickled over into the next, and nothing was ever finished, so you could never say, Look, that’s it, the day’s labour is over and done. Work just lingered and festered and lay in wait, to make you slip up in the morning.
After breakfast, by the kitchen fire, feet tucked up under her, Lydia sipped her sugared milk, and complained to Mrs. Hill.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, Hill. Hidden away all nice and cosy down here.”
“If you say so, Miss Lyddie.”
“Oh, I do say so! You can do what you like, can’t you, with no one hovering over you and scrutinizing you? Lord! If I have to listen to Jane thou-shalt-notting me one more time—and I was only having a bit of fun—”
Next door, down the step into the scullery, Sarah leaned over the washboard, rubbing at a stained hem. The petticoat had been three inches deep in mud when she’d retrieved it from the girls’ bedroom floor and had had a night’s soaking in lye already; the soap was not shifting the mark, but it was biting into her hands, already cracked and chapped and chilblained, making them sting. If Elizabeth had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.
The copper steamed, a load of linen boiling away in there; in front of her the fogged window was laddered with drips. Sarah stepped neatly from the duckboard by the sinks to the duckboard by the copper, over the murky slither of the stone floor. She slopped the petticoat into the grey bubbling water, lifted the laundry stick, and prodded the fabric down, poking the air out of it, then stirring. She had been told—and so she must believe—that it was necessary to wash a petticoat quite white, even if it was to be got filthy again at the next wearing.
Polly was elbow-deep in the cold slate sink, sloshing Mr. Bennet’s neck-cloths around in the rinsing water, then lifting them out one by one to dunk them in the bowl of cold rice-water, to starch them.
“How much more we got to go, d’you think, Sarah?”
Sarah glanced around, assessing. The tubs of soaking linen; the heaps of sodden stuff at various stages of its cleansing. Some places, they got in help for washday. Not here, though; oh no. At Longbourn House they washed their own dirty linen.
“There is sheets, and pillowslips, and there is our shifts, too—”
Polly wiped her hands on her apron and went to count the loads off on her fingers, but then saw how startlingly pink they were; she frowned, turning them, examining her hands as if they were interesting
but unconnected to her. They must be quite numb, for the time being at least.
“And there are the napkins to do, too,” Sarah added.
It had been that unfortunate time of the month, when all the women in the house had been more than usually short-tempered, clumsy and prone to tears, and then had bled. The napkins now soaked in a separate tub that smelt uneasily of the butcher’s shop; they’d be boiled last, in the dregs of the copper, before it was emptied.
“I reckon we have five more loads to do.”