Longbourn (28 page)

Mrs. Bennet could only nod, and thank him, and go to join her remaining family on the steps.

“If you had but insisted on Lizzy marrying Mr. Collins,” Mrs. Bennet hissed to her husband, “it would have been
me
off in that chaise, going to visit
her
.”

“If Lizzy had married Mr. Collins, I very much doubt Sir William would be driving you to Kent, good neighbour though he is.”

“You take pleasure in deliberately misunderstanding me.”

A tendon flickered in Mr. Bennet’s temple: he set his jaw. Mrs. Hill could see what was coming before it was said. The words were hard, and fell like marbles.

“Believe me, my dear, there is precious little pleasure to be taken in it.”

Mrs. Bennet coloured, and began to protest at his mordant wit; her noise was as inevitable as his provocation of it.

Mrs. Hill moved in beside her, and offered her arm. “Madam.”

Mrs. Bennet looked at her housekeeper, blinking, her chin crumpled. She took her arm. “Thank you, Mrs. Hill.”

Mrs. Hill nodded. She kept her gaze fixed on the chaise, and would not look at Mr. Bennet.

“There she goes, then,” Mrs. Bennet said to her companion. “My little girl. Well, I hope that she is happy.”

And then she turned away. Together they climbed the steps towards the house, Mrs. Bennet continuing her soft complaining, and Mrs. Hill doing her best to soothe her with bland consoling nonsense, though all the while inwardly seconding her sentiments: Elizabeth had better be happy. If Elizabeth was not going to be happy, she may as well have married Mr. Collins, and then they all would have been safe.

Sarah now got to see something of the wide world. She saw it backwards, reeling away from where she sat, feet dangling, jolted by every rut and pothole.

Longbourn shrank; the house was soon screened by shrubs and trees, and then, at the bend of the drive, was gone. Then they were at the crossroads; they turned, rattled on, and then the crossroads too was lost to sight as the road fell away; then the stump-limbed tree was there, and passed, and was shrinking, shrinking, gone. They rumbled on to Meryton along the turnpike, and then through the town, past the pastry-cook’s and the Assembly Rooms and the haberdasher’s and the inn on the corner; the grocer’s daughter was out with a basket, making her deliveries; seeing Sarah on her perch, she waved and smiled and Sarah waved back at her excitedly; then they were out beyond the little town, clattering past a drill-ground where the soldiers, scarlet against the green, marched, halted, span round and stood stiff as pegs, while an officer barked out orders at them. Onto the new toll-road there, a coin tossed to the keeper and the creak of the pike, and then they were bowling along, the chaise springs complaining. Swaying on the back perch, Sarah was soon out beyond anything she knew.

The ground blurred between the humming wheels, and the sky was pale blue and clear above her, and from the other side of the calash she could hear the voices of the more comfortably situated passengers, and Sir William, who cried out, when they crossed a simple sluggish river choked with reeds, “The mighty Thames!”

They skimmed along past high hedges, through villages strung along the road like beads upon a thread. They passed between deep fields of watercress, trickling with rills of chalk-clean water, smelling sharp and peppery and green. They passed through market gardens, the raised beds thick with growth, mulchy and warm. The fields grew smaller, subdivided, the market gardens more closely packed, with sheds and lean-tos built of clapboard and rough timber. They slowed at a flock of geese that flapped and honked onto the broad grassy verge, chivvied there by a girl in a broad-brimmed hat who hissed back at them and swiped at them with a stick, and, after the chaise had passed, stared frankly back at Sarah, her face red and scrofulous. They splashed through a ford and
water heaved up on either side in fountains. There was a smell of shit from the brown-skimmed fields, and the cattle stood thin and unmoving as though cut from painted tin. And then the road was sloping down, and there was more traffic, trailing long-wagons, painfully slow, bouncing gigs and carts, and post-chaises, and then a mail-coach thundering past; and then there were houses, and there was smoky, dirty air; and then they were rattling over cobbles and deep into town, Sarah’s head tilting back and her mouth falling open as she looked up at the buildings rearing above her like cliffs that stared at each other across a stream; and the stream was the traffic, and she herself was part of the traffic, this great ebbing surging traffic of London, the cabs and barrows and drays and carts and the people, just the endless variousness of the people: fishwives in raucous stinking gangs; barrow-boys with their jaunty caps and their bold eyes; a beggar in a filthy rag of a red coat who scooted along on stumps then fists, stumps then fists; a milkmaid with pails swinging from a yoke, whose milk looked bluish grey, and slopped queasily, and left bits on the insides of the buckets, and did not look like the milk at home at all. The streets were slick with dung, and there was a taste of soot in the air, and the smell of cesspits, and bad vegetables, and fish. And the noise—iron-clad wheels, iron-shod hooves, the cries of costermongers and dockers, muffin-sellers and cabbies, and the crowds, and the jostling and pressing up close, and the horses of the coach behind nodding in tandem at her. Then a dirty-looking youth slipped between the carriages; he dodged up to her, and she thought he was going to say something, but he just made a grab for her skirts, ruffling them back: he slid his hand over the top of her stocking, and then in between her thighs. She pulled away, kicking out at him, fumbling her skirts down; he retreated, grinning, showing a black gap where his front teeth should have been. He was gone before he’d even really been there, and left her shaking.

And to think it had once seemed a good idea to come here alone.

They turned into Gracechurch Street, and after a hundred yards or so of cobbles, Sir William pulled up the horses. Sarah looked up at a fine, tall, flat-fronted townhouse. The steps were scrubbed quite white, and she felt a new sympathy for Martha, the red-haired Gardiner housemaid, who had seemed so wilfully idle at Christmas. How her hands would smart from the soap, how her shoulders would ache with
all the scrubbing, to get the stone that white in all this dirt. Sarah undid the buckle, loosened the strap, and slid down from her perch; she stood unsteadily at the back of the chaise, her legs quite numb beneath her.

Up above, Jane stood at a window. She looked pale and ghostly behind the watery pane: Sarah raised a hand in greeting, but Jane just turned away into the shadows, and a moment later she and Mrs. Gardiner, and the children, were trotting down the pristine steps, to meet the carriage.

Sir William, Maria and Elizabeth got out of the chaise, stiff from their journey. Sarah, pins-and-needles in her thighs, set about unbuckling the small baggages. She handed them to a waiting footman, who carried them indoors. The chaise and horse were left in the care of another footman, who walked the horse round through an archway into the mews beyond. Sarah climbed the scrubbed steps, now marked with footprints, and stood in the gloomy hallway, waiting to be noticed, and told what to do.

The house was all up and down and front and back, and nothing sideways to it at all. The windows were large-paned and lustrous, and looked out onto blank brickwork at the back, and at the front, stared across at the house on the far side of the street. Sarah, instructed by Martha, who seemed pleased to see her, climbed up and up and up to the servants’ attic, and set her wooden box on the floor there, beside the pallet that had been rolled out for her. She looked out of the window, across smoky rooftops; a few young trees were huddled shyly in a square. Further off, she saw the masts and bare rigging of ships at the quay. And then she had to scurry all the way back down again: they were going out.

Elizabeth was to go shopping with her aunt, and had told Sarah she could come with them; there was nothing immediate for her to do in the way of unpacking, et cetera, as they were off again on the morrow. Sarah rode up front with the coachman, an incomprehensible cockney, who persisted in pointing things out to her—landmarks, she supposed, and points of particular interest; she obliged him by staring off in the direction that he pointed, and nodding at whatever he said.

They crept in thick traffic along the mercantile roads, and then, when
they were in the calmer parts of town, they picked up the pace, clipping along the streets, round two sides of a square that had been laid out like a formal garden, and then looping into a crescent, where white-fronted townhouses stood like a row of fine white teeth. At the end, the work was unfinished and instead of a house there was an empty lot, raw, the foundation-troughs and cesspit already dug.

They turned onto a broad avenue, and the driver pulled up the horses. The carriage waited for them while they went into the shops.

Sarah followed Elizabeth and her aunt down one arcade, and then up another, and in and out of stores stacked high with bolts of coloured cloth and patterned paper and rolled carpets—Mrs. Gardiner was soon to redecorate a sitting room, and had solicited Elizabeth’s opinion in the selection of patterns and colours. Sarah was soon lugging pasteboard boxes, paper packages and rolled samples of wallpaper. She had seen all of this before; she had daydreamed it. It was all very fine, but it was not as lovely as the daydream, and the packages slithered and slipped from her grip, and a box dug into her side, and how could it be that a person needed so much of all of this, and how could it be that one printed paper was so vitally, importantly lovely and another was entirely dismissable, or that any of it really mattered so very much, or indeed at all?

Then they returned to the carriage, and drove a little further, to another terrace of white houses, where Mrs. Gardiner then went to get her teeth filed—she had had it done once before, and now must have it done again. Elizabeth declined the offer to have hers looked at too. She sat in the carriage outside Mr. Spence’s establishment, and waited with Sarah and the coachman, and asked what Sarah thought of London.

“It is not what I imagined, miss.”

“How did you imagine it?”

Sarah shook her head. The real now overlaid the daydream, blurring it. “I cannot rightly say, now, miss.”

They watched as the fashionable folk clipped smartly up the bright steps, past the polished brass plaques, and in through the smart blue door; they watched them stumble back out with bloodied handkerchiefs to their faces.

“I think I made the better choice,” Elizabeth said.

“Indeed so, miss.”

Elizabeth’s decision was further vindicated by the uncomfortable aspect of her aunt, who emerged from Mr. Spence’s offices rather swollen about the lips, having had to have all her lower front teeth rasped away considerably.

Then there was dinner, which Mrs. Gardiner could not eat at all, and Jane only picked at, and which Sarah partook of with strangers in the tiny servants’ hall, struggling not to yawn. Then the family went out to the theatre in the Gardiners’ coach, and Martha packed the children off to bed, and the household loosened its collective collar, and collapsed into fatigue.

London. The crowded heart of the city. Where there should be dancing bears and frolicking beggars and fireworks fit to scare a soldier. Sarah lay down on the pallet, and drew the blankets up to her chin. Martha blew out the candle, and it was dark.

Sarah curled onto her side. The mattress was thin, stuffed with old hair, and her hip and shoulder pressed against the wooden boards beneath. Despite her tiredness, she could not sleep: the noise—the sheer depth of it, layer after layer of sound—cabs rattling along the street in front, drays rumbling down to the docks, cats fighting or mating in the alleyways, the creak of rope from the wharves, a dog barking, a clock, and another clock, and another still more distant clock chiming out hour after hour of the night, into the darkness, as the Gardiners’ housemaid snored oblivious in her bed, and Sarah twisted and turned and tangled herself up in blankets that smelt of someone else.

Kent was wide and green; those were hop-vines planted, and over there was lavender, which looked grey now, but later in the year would make the fields quite purple. The barns stood on those stone footings, Sir William said, to keep out the rats: he was a fount of information, and supplied it freely to his two young charges within the chaise; Sarah overheard everything through the umbrella-skin of the calash.

At a toll-house, the keeper’s accent was so strange that Sir William could make himself understood only by speaking loudly and slowly, and with grand gestures, which rocked the chaise on its springs. The transaction complete, Sir William drove away saying that it was a mark of true breeding to be able to make oneself understood by the lower orders
wherever they were to be found, and that he himself was particularly fortunate to have the happy knack of it. Sarah, seeing, as it were, the aftermath of everything, watched the keeper spit on the ground and say something that she could not hear, but the meaning of which was perfectly clear to her, though she had no claim to any breeding whatsoever.