Longbourn Read online

  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.

  www.aaknopf.com

  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 o
ver 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.”

  Sarah huffed a sigh, and plucked at the seam under her arm; she had already sweated through her dress, which she hated. It was a poplin described by Mrs. Hill as Eau de Nil, though Sarah always thought of it as Eau de Bile; the unpleasant colour itself did not matter, since there was no one to see her in it, but the cut really did. It had been made for Mary, and was meant for pastry-soft arms, for needlework, for the pianoforte. It did not allow for the flex and shift of proper muscle, and Sarah only wore it now because her other dress, a mousy linsey-woolsey, had been sponged and dabbed and was patchy wet, and hanging on the line to air the piggy stink out of it.

  “Dump them shifts in next,” she said. “You stir for a bit, and I’ll scrub.”

  Save your poor little hands, Sarah thought, though her own were already raw. She stepped back from the copper to the duckboards by the sinks, stood aside to let Polly pass. Then she scooped a neck-cloth out from the starch with the laundry tongs, and watched its jellied drip back into the bowl.

  Polly, thumping the stick around in the copper, plucked at her lower lip with blunt fingernails. She was still sore-eyed and smarting from the telling-off she had had from Mrs. Hill, about the state of the yard. In the morning she had the fires to do, and then the water to take up, and then the Sunday dinner was under way; and then they had ate, and then it had got dark, and who can go shovelling up hog-doings by starlight? And hadn’t she had the pans to scour then anyway? Her fingertips were worn quite away with all the sand. And, come to think of it, wasn’t the fault in the person who had let the sty’s gate-latch get slack, so that a good snouty nudge was all it took to open it? Shouldn’t they be blaming not poor put-upon Polly for Sarah’s fall and wasted work—she glanced around and dropped her voice so that the old man would not actually hear her—but Mr. Hill himself, who was in charge of the hogs’ upkeep? Shouldn’t he be obliged to clean up after them? What use was the old tatterdemalion anyway? Where was he when he was needed? They could really do with another pair of hands, weren’t they always saying so?

  Sarah nodded along, and made sympathetic noises, though she had stopped listening quite some time ago.

  By the time the hall clock had hitched itself round to the strike of four, Mr. and Mrs. Hill were serving a washday cold collation—the remnants of the Sunday roast—to the family in the dining room, and the two housemaids were in the paddock, hanging out the washing, the damp cloth steaming in the cool afternoon. One of Sarah’s chilblains had cracked with the work, and was weeping; she raised it to her mouth and sucked the blood away, so that it would not stain the linen. For a moment she stood absorbed in the various sensations of hot tongue on cold skin, stinging chilblain, salt blood, warm lips; so she was not really looking, and she could have been mistaken, but she thought she saw movement on the lane that ran across the hillside opposite; the lane that linked the old high drovers’ road to London with the village of Longbourn and, beyond that, the new Meryton turnpike.

  “Look, Polly—d’you see?”

  Polly took a peg out from between her teeth, pinned up the shirt she was holding to the line, then turned and looked.

  The lane ran between two ancient hedges; the flocks and herds came that way on their long journey from the north. You’d hear the beasts before you saw them, a low burr of sound from cows still in the distance, the geese a bad-tempered honking, the yearlings calling for mothers left behind. And when they passed the house, it was like snow, transforming; and there were men from the deep country with their strange voices, who were gone before you knew they were really there.

  “I don’t see no one, Sarah.”

  “No, but, look—”

  The only movement now was of the birds, hopping along through the hedgerow, picking at berries. Polly turned away, scuffed her toe in the dry ground, turfing up a stone; Sarah stood and stared a moment longer. The hedge was thick with old tea-coloured beech leaves, the holly looked almost black in the low sun, and the bones of the hazel were bare in stretches where it had been most recently laid.

  “Nothing.”

  “But there was someone.”

  “Well, there isn’t now.”

  Polly picked up the stone and lobbed it, as if to prove a point. It fell far short of the lane, but seemed somehow to decide the matter.

  “Oh well.”

  One peg in her hand, a second between her teeth, Sarah pinned out another shift, still gazing off in that direction; maybe it had been a trick of the light, of the rising steam in low autumn sun, maybe Polly was right, after all—then she stopped, shielded her eyes—and there it was again, further down the lane now, passing behind a stretch of bare laid hedge. There he was. Because it was a man, she was sure of it: a glimpse of grey and black, a long loping gait; a man used to distances. She fumbled the peg out of her mouth, gestured, hand flapping.

  “There, Polly, do you see now? Scotchman, it’s got to be.”

  Polly tutted, rolled her eyes, but turned again to stare.

  And he was gone, behind a stretch of knotted blackthorn. But there was something else now; Sarah could almost hear it: a flicker of sound, as though he—the scotchman that he must be, with his tallystick scotched with his accounts, and a knapsack full of silliness and gewgaws—was whistling to himself. It was faint, and it was strange; it seemed to come from half a world away.

  “D’you hear that, Pol?” Sarah held up a reddened hand for quiet.

  Polly swung round and glared at her. “Don’t call me Pol, you know I don’t like it.”

  “Shhh!”

  Polly stamped. “It’s only ’cos of Miss Mary that I have to be called Polly even at all.”

  “Please, Polly!”

  “It’s only ’cos she’s the Miss and I imnt, that she got to be called Mary, and I had to be changed to Polly, even though my chr
istened name is Mary too.”

  Sarah clicked her tongue and waved for her to shush, still peering out towards the lane. Polly’s outbursts were all too familiar, but this was new: a man who walked the roads with a pack on his back and a tune on his lips. When the ladies were done with his wares, he’d come down to the kitchen to sell off his cheaper bits and pieces. Oh, if only she had something nicer to wear! There was no point wishing for her linsey-woolsey, since it was just as ugly as her Eau de Bile. But: chapbooks and ballads, or ribbons and buttons, and tin-plated bracelets that would stain your arm green in a fortnight—oh, what happiness a scotchman represented, in this out-of-the-way, quiet, entirely changeless place!

  The lane disappeared behind the house, and there could be no further sight or sound of anyone passing by, so she finished pegging out the shift, snapped out the next and pegged it too, clumsy with haste.

  “Come on, Polly, pull your weight there, would you?”

  But Polly flounced away across the paddock, to lean on the wall and talk to the horses that grazed at liberty in the next field. Sarah saw her rummaging in her apron pocket and handing over windfalls; she stroked their noses for a while, while Sarah continued with their work. Then Polly hitched herself up onto the wall and sat there, kicking her heels, head bowed, squinting in the low sun. Half the time, Sarah thought, it is like she has fairies whispering in her ear.

  And out of tenderness for Polly—for a washday is a fatiguing thing indeed, while you are still growing, and while you are not yet yourself quite reconciled to your labours—Sarah finished off the work alone, and let Polly wander off unreprimanded, to go about whatever business she might have, of dropping twigs into the stream, or collecting beechnuts.

  When Sarah carried the last empty linen basket up from the paddock, it was getting dark, and the yard had still not been cleaned. She slopped it down with grey laundry-water from the tubs, and let the lye-soap do its work on the flagstones.

  Mrs. Hill was burdened with a washday temper; she had been alone at the mercy of the bells all day: the Bennets made few concessions to her lack of assistance while the housemaids were occupied with the linen.