Longbourn (17 page)

Mrs. Hill folded her arms under her bosom, conscious that she could stand up to only about three-fifths of what she was saying. Conscious, too, of her husband looking up from his work, and James coming in from the hall but halting on the threshold, and of Polly sloping off into the scullery before anybody could start blaming her for anything, and realizing that this much should have been allowed Sarah at the very least: that she be scolded in private.

Because Sarah was bristling now; she rolled her shoulders, planted her feet, rearranging herself. “And when he’s sent here?”

Mrs. Hill did not like this. The defiance. She bristled too. “Absent yourself.”

Sarah raised her eyebrows, and just looked at Mrs. Hill.

“What do you expect me to say?” Mrs. Hill’s voice rose with her temper. “Do you think I should give you permission to make an exhibit of yourself? To make us all a laughingstock?”

“So I can’t even have a friend? Is that what you are saying?”

“He is not your friend.”

Sarah hesitated. Then she nodded. “Will that be all?”

“If you will take heed and mind it, I think that it will do.”

Sarah curtseyed. Biting her lip, she turned to get on with her work, since it was all that she was allowed to do. She carried the teapot through to the scullery, poured the slops into the bucket for mopping floors with, straining out the dregs and slapping them into the stone jar where they were kept for sweeping. She fumbled them, scattering wet leaves.

Her hands shook. She wiped them on her apron, then rubbed her face, her calluses scratching against her cheeks.

Whatever was done with bad grace was done badly: how often had Mrs. Hill told her that?

Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Hill was frowning over her sponge cakes, which had not risen, and looked like biscuits. She only meant the best for Sarah, but of course the girl would not see it that way: she could not. She did not know what she was risking.

When Sarah brought Mr. Collins his hot water the following morning, he was already awake, and sitting up in bed. She was just going to set the heavy jug down on the washstand and slip out—there were four more of these ewers to convey to the other bedchambers, and of course one did not speak unless required to do so—but he cleared his throat and asked her, with an unconcerned air, and as if apropos of nothing, “Have they been brought up very high, the young mistresses, would you say?”

“Sir?”

“It turns out that they have nothing to do in the kitchen, which is something of a concern, and a surprise, if I may say so; but I think they must have
some
responsibilities about the house, some actual
work
to do. A family of this size, with Mr. Bennet’s income, I don’t see how they could all be idle. Or, indeed, what good it would do, to bring up a child to be of no practical use to herself or anybody else.”

He busied himself fussily with the sheets across his lap. He looked like a little boy.

“They are kind and sensible, clever girls, sir,” she said. It was true in some measure of some of them.

“But are they biddable?”

She hesitated. Nobody ever bade them do anything that went against their own desires, so it was hard to say; but still, she hated to disappoint him. She nodded.

He brightened. “And Miss Elizabeth: is she an active, useful kind of person? She would be able to make a modest income go a good way?”

Sarah tilted her head. She wished she could be more encouraging.
Think of Mary
; that might be the most helpful, and kindest, thing to say. In interests and temperament, and degree of personal loveliness, Mary and Mr. Collins were a far more likely match; but if he could not see that himself, it was not her place to point it out to him.

“It is a matter of some importance. You must speak your mind to me, child.”

Elizabeth did have Sarah making over her evening-gown for the Netherfield ball. And she was always fashioning flowers and headdresses out of offcuts for herself. Not a bit of twist or a slip of Persian or a scrap of Irish ever went to waste.

“They are
thrifty
,” Sarah suggested. When it came to matters of their own adornment, this was true. They were obliged to be.

He grasped this eagerly, hitching himself more upright in the bed. “And Miss Elizabeth, is she as amiable as she seems to be?”

Elizabeth’s hair curled naturally, which was vastly in her favour. And they being of a similar age, and having grown up alongside each other, Elizabeth always had an ear for Sarah, and an interest in her, and a book to lend her; but Elizabeth also had a core of ivory, and Mr. Collins should really realize it for himself, because there was no way on earth that he could be told, not by Sarah, that Mr. Collins would never do for Elizabeth.

“Miss Elizabeth is as amiable as anyone could wish her to be.”

He nodded again, rubbed his hands together, and seemed satisfied; heaving back the covers, he swung his legs out of the bed. His feet padded pale and bare across the carpet; he tugged back the curtains and gazed out, and seemed to have forgotten that she was there. Sarah remembered the billowing dust as she and Polly had beaten the carpet that he was standing on now, the choke and sneeze of it. Then she
remembered the heavy ewers waiting for her in the scullery, their water cooling.

“Sir?”

He turned, looked at her, startled but benign.

“Sir, might you advise me, too? As a man of the cloth, I mean.”

He fluffed himself up like a winter bird at this. “What troubles you, my child?”

“I work hard.” She shifted on her feet. “I try to be good. I do as I am told.”

“Well, you do your duty then, and that’s just as it should be. Work is sanctified and sanctifying. Consider the Parable of the Vineyard.”

She nodded, though uncertain. That story was about being as well rewarded for doing very little as you were for doing a great deal: it always made Sarah feel dispirited, and hopeless.

“But what about Martha?” she asked. “From Martha’s story don’t we learn that there must be pause, that there must be time to listen and be still, and to learn.”

“Ah, yes—” His eyes narrowed at her.

“And what about the Lilies of the Field, that neither toiled nor spun nor did anything very much at all?”

“Yes, yes, but—you must see that to work is your duty, and like all of us you will find satisfaction in doing your duty.”

“But it does not make me satisfied—” Sarah wanted to stamp. “It makes me feel tired and sore, and though I work so hard, it seems I cannot even take a moment, even a moment’s pleasure, but I am scolded, I am found to be in the wrong.”

“
Pleasure?
” Mr. Collins moved towards her, eyes wide now. He smelt of bed, and hair-oil and bad teeth. “Have you committed some error, my child?”

Sarah took a step back. She had run away with herself, and now was far beyond what she had intended.

“I’m sorry, sir, I should not have spoke.”

He stayed her with a soft hand. “What error is it, child? Upon your soul. You must tell me.”

All that had been done and seen and thought and felt, since James’s arrival in the household—the collision with the barrow, the chalky disks and spirals in his bag, his spare clean room; Tol Bingley and daydreams
of Vauxhall Gardens and Astley’s; the dark and dirt of the back lane in Meryton, the soldier’s naked skin and his cries; the dizzy sick feeling of tobacco smoke—it all came down upon her at once, and was too much, was far too much to make sense of and explain and offer up to Mr. Collins, tied with a neat bow.

“I spoke to the neighbour’s footman.”

He recoiled, his features squashing up together in a frown. “Is that all?”

She nodded.

“Just—spoke?”

She nodded again.

“Well, I expect that must be necessary from time to time.” She watched as his thoughts shifted and fixed. “Did you experience an unwonted pleasure in speaking to him?”

She’d experienced something; that much was certain. But what she’d felt had not been an unwonted pleasure. It had, perhaps, not even been pleasure at all, but, rather, the dawning realization that pleasure was a possibility for her.

“Not unwonted, I don’t think so, sir.”

“Well then,” he said, “you would be better speaking to the housekeeper, I think, than to me; it seems more a matter of domestic discipline, than a religious or moral concern.”

He waved her away, and turned back to the window, looking out across the wide green lawns, the shrubberies and woods of his inheritance. As she was leaving, Sarah lifted his chamber pot out from underneath the bed, and carried it out, her head turned aside so as not to confront its contents too closely.

This, she reflected, as she crossed the rainy yard, and strode out to the necessary house, and slopped the pot’s contents down the hole,
this
was her duty, and she could find no satisfaction in it, and found it strange that anybody might think a person could. She rinsed the pot out at the pump and left it to freshen in the rain. If this was her duty, then she wanted someone else’s.

… the very shoe-roses for Netherfield were got by proxy
.

Sarah sewed by the window. Elizabeth and Jane talked low, their heads close together by the fire; they were sewing too, wrapped in their dressing gowns and shawls, the firelight glowing through their hanging curls.

It was Monday, the day before the ball. Sarah had a blister on the soft flesh between her index finger and her thumb, where the flat-irons had worn the skin away. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the minnow-dart of her needle through muslin, the drag of thread through the open weave.

Wickham
, she heard, and
Wickham
and
Wickham
and
Wickham
. It sounded like the clack of knitting needles.

The wind buffeted the chamber window; outside bare branches rattled. The shrubbery beyond was glistening and wet, and all the gravel walkways were pooled with rainwater; the little wilderness was sodden, and the sky low and laden with clouds, and the wind just brought more clouds, more rain. It matched Sarah’s mood—grey, with no glimmer of better things to come, now that she was forbidden to see anything of Ptolemy Bingley.

Then the door slammed back, and Lydia tumbled into her sisters’ room; she could not, it seemed, be trained to knock. There had been no opportunity for her to run off any of her natural ebullience for days: confinement to the house was a perfect torment for her. Lydia needed to be taken out for a wild gallop; she needed someone to throw sticks for her to chase, poor love.

“No morning visitors, no officers, no news, nothing! Lord! I don’t know how I shall bear it.”

She flopped down on her sisters’ bed, kicking her feet against the patchwork. All pent-up and fiddly-idle, she picked up a length of pink ribbon and ran it through her fingers.

“Put the ribbon down, please, Lydia, you’ll spoil it.”

She pulled a face, let the ribbon slip and coil onto the quilt. “You two have done well, hiding yourselves away up here, out of Mr. Collins’s way.”

“Lydia! That’s not true. We’re working.”

Lydia shrugged, kicked off her slippers and trod into Jane’s dancing shoes, which were lying out on the floor.

“Oh, it’s only Sarah to hear, and she’s as good as gold, she won’t tell a soul, will you, Sarah?”

Lydia flashed Sarah a grin, making Sarah smile back. Then she turned her feet this way and that, appraising the shoes. “Anyway, I’m not staying down there to be read sermons to, and that is that.”

There was a moment’s pause, and then Jane said gently, “He follows Papa into the library, you know.”

“And that,” said Elizabeth, “is trespass indeed.”

“There, you see! Even Papa tries to escape the dreary fellow, so I don’t see why I should not. Lord! What a bore he is. I don’t know how anyone can stand him.”

Sarah peered closer at her sewing, her lips pressed tight: Mr. Collins could not help his awkwardness. He could not help where he had come from, or what chances nature and upbringing had given, or failed to give, him. And if he did not know the by-laws of the household, it was because nobody had told him; he was expected to intuit them, and then was blamed for his failure.

“Papa never receives company in there.”

“If he can help it, Papa never receives company at all.”

“Yes, but the
library
. My goodness.”

Sarah glanced up at the pretty, plump faces, so delighted with their own daring; she was transported back to that morning before Michaelmas, to the cold hallway and the smell of urine, and the tangled voices coming through the firmly shut library door. Mrs. Hill was allowed in there, she thought, though obviously Mrs. Hill did not count as company.

Lydia sniffed, kicked her heels, swinging Jane’s shoes out in front of
her. “Mr. Collins is his cousin, so if anyone must suffer the fellow, it should be Papa.”

Then she peered harder at the shoes, as if somehow struck by them. She looked up.

“Did we order new shoe-roses?”

Every gaze now turned to the dancing shoes dangling from Lydia’s toes. One rose hung loose, ragged and greyed, its sorry state a testament to Mr. Bingley’s enthusiasm for dancing with Jane at the Meryton ball. The other one was gone.