by Jo Baker
“Sarah.”
“Have you ever been there?” She sat down beside him now. “To Scotland, I mean.”
“No, but—Sarah, please—”
Her clear eyes studied him. “What is it?”
“Go back. Please. Go back to your bed.”
She was so close that her hip bone pressed against his. Linen, wool, velvet, linen. Either side, the warm pulse of their separate flesh. He got up, and moved away, putting space between them.
“I can’t—” he began.
“I thought,” she spoke over him, “that we got off to a bad start. So I thought, ‘Start again.’ So. Here I am, starting again. Good morning.”
“Sarah.”
“Yes.”
She still sat there, on his bed, looking up at him.
“Sarah, I don’t know what you expect. From me. But this”—he gestured at the little room, the one candle, the borrowed map—“this is not just everything I have. It’s all I’m ever likely to have. It’s the best that I can do.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I’ve nothing to offer you.”
“Why would you offer me something?”
“Sarah, please—” He turned away to the window, and peeled back the curtain, so as not to look at her; he blinked out into the dark beyond the frosted pane. There was a whole world out there, and so many people. Englishmen and Frenchmen and Turks and Indians and Americans. Millions and millions of men, and Sarah, she had met only the tiniest handful of them. He could not let her settle, not for him, not for this.
“Go back,” he said again, not looking round.
For a moment there was silence. Then he heard the thunk of dropped boots, and the pad of bare feet on the boards. Her hand, when she took his, was small and cold.
“Come away from the window,” she said.
The curtain fell back. He let her turn him away from the night.
She stood on tiptoe and touched her lips against his lips. And for a moment he just held her by the upper arms—so slight in his hands—keeping her still at this little distance. But it was too much to resist: he drew her to him, and let her body lean into his, the length of it, the bones and softnesses of her, and the warmth.
She felt the haze of his stubble against her skin, the curve of the back of his head in her hand, the snag of a broken tooth against her lip. She knew what the birds did, and the bees, and the cats and sheep and cattle, and no one blamed them for it. Girls like her, and men like him—nobody looked askance at a big belly at the altar, nobody cared so long as it was under plain calico or stuff, and not silk.
James pushed her away, but he did not quite let go of her.
“Sarah, you must not.”
She plucked open the top button of his shirt. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
“It is impossible, Sarah. You have to understand that it is impossible.”
She eased his coat off his shoulders, undid his tiny shirt buttons one by one, frowning and intent. He must stop her; he should take her by the wrists and stop her. But then she dipped forward, and her lips were on his collarbone, and her warm breath and her small icy hands were on his skin. He touched her hair, his lips parting to speak; now, while there was still time. But then her fingertips brushed across a scar—he caught his breath; that blank feeling where the nerve was gone—and it was all too late. Her hand stopped, and slipped over the scar again, and followed the line of it over the cusp of his shoulder, and a little way down onto his back. She went still. Her palm lay softly on the real, terrible mess of his scars.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. He swallowed. “It was another country.”
She pulled away, looking up at him, her forehead creased. Her expression, any moment now, would collapse into disgust. He would beg for her silence; she would be kind, no doubt, and she would leave. And he would have to see her every day. He would live on pins and broken glass. But her expression didn’t change, and she didn’t say a word. She just pushed his shirt back, so that it slid off his shoulders. He stood there in the candlelight, half naked, still, almost unable to breathe. Then, her hand running over his shoulder, she moved round him, till she was standing behind him, her touch never leaving him, her hand resting now where the skin had been unmade and had made itself again.
For him, it was a firing-off of sensation here, and there, a pause and blankness where the feeling was gone. It was a choked throat, and hobbled words.
He had to explain. About how he had come by it. He had to apologize; he had to beg to be forgiven. And then accept the silence, and the broken glass.
But her arms twined around him, slipping around his belly and his chest, and then she rested her hot cheek against his damaged back, and held him.
She was then but fifteen, which must be her excuse …
There is a certain kind of knowledge that has no words. A physical understanding can emerge out of propinquity, out of intimacy sometimes, and also out of the uncountable repetitions of work and play. One body can come to know another body, to anticipate its needs and actions, without any recourse to conscious thought. For Sarah, though, it was not formed through gradual accretion: she was whisked up in this new understanding, released from herself, her body so suddenly in sympathy with James’s; it had the overwhelming certainty of a revelation.
Words had become overnight just little coins, insignificant and unfreighted, to be exchanged for ribbons, buttons, for an apple or an egg.
And over the weeks and months that followed—when she eased out of her bed, leaving Polly asleep, flung starfish-like across the extra space, and crept chilly and barefooted across the yard to his room; or when she found him in the kitchen garden and surprised him with a kiss; or when she simply glimpsed him at a distance, crossing the fields with fallen timber to split for kindling—this understanding seemed entirely and stunningly sufficient. She knew now, without any conscious thought at all, what it meant to be alive in the world, and why their continuance in this sequestered place was entirely worth the while.
The turn of the year towards spring, with its lengthening of the days, the appearance of the first green points of snowdrops, and then their white heads lolling in the February wind, and then lambs staggering in the meadow: she knew all this too, had slipped into sympathy with the changing world, with what spring was for. Her body had hitherto been a carthorse, dragging her through the days: now she lived in it differently. It had become a thing of luxury and delight.
She did not ask about the scars. They belonged to this realm of congruence, of ineffable bodily logic: they were not to do with words. The soldier flogged to bloody submission in the rain, the wounded man warm in her arms: each explained and justified the other. They never spoke of this, either, but she knew that he was taking care not to burden her with pregnancy; she understood, and was grateful for it, and for the pleasure that he nonetheless afforded her.
But there must come a time when the insufficiency of this understanding is made all too obvious, when circumstances reveal the gulf between two people, the impossibility of its distance.
Sarah, having come lately to her knowledge, did not suspect any of this yet. She was dreamy with her new understanding, lulled with contentment, not thinking beyond the pads of her own fingers, the tip of her tongue.
James, though, knew better. His arms around her, her head on his chest, he felt the sleek length of her body against his, and the rise and fall of her breath, and the saltwater trickle down his temples, and raised a hand to wipe the wet away. She stirred. He smoothed her hair, kissed her forehead. This was a beautiful disaster, and it could not be undone.
And Polly, mumbling in the darkness, and surfacing to find the bed cold and empty beside her, sat up, blinking, and knew—through an immediate, physical understanding—exactly where Sarah had gone.
The days, the work: they were as they always had been. Mrs. B. still nagged and fretted, and Mrs. Hill still lost her temper, and Sarah still did the weekly wash with Polly’s sc
ant assistance, and steeped the monthly napkins, and Mr. Hill still spat upon the forks to clean them, and across the yard the horses stamped and whinnied as James prepared them for the plough or, more usually, for the carriage to take the ladies out on morning calls or to drink tea in the afternoon. But it was good now. In substance it was changed not at all, but for Sarah it was nonetheless transformed.
Sarah took Elizabeth’s letters to the post office at Meryton, addressed to Jane and Mrs. Gardiner in London, and to Mrs. Collins in Kent, with coins in her pocket to pay for any letters that were to be fetched back with her. These plump little packages folded tightly in upon their secrets: Sarah studied their covers as she walked back home through the new grass; she turned them over in her hands, lifting them to smell them, tracing the seals with a rough fingertip. They flitted wherever they liked, these letters. They darted back and forth across the countryside like birds.
“Do you ever feel,” Elizabeth asked Sarah, who was lacing up her short-stays for her one morning, “that the days go by just like that”—she snapped her fingers—“even though nothing ever really happens at all?”
Sarah smiled.
“It was Christmas only a moment ago, it seems, and now it’s February, and before you know it, it’ll be March, and where did January even go?”
What could she say? For Elizabeth the days had scudded by, but for Sarah they had expanded and swelled and grown beyond all possibility, so that every crease and dimple in them, the scent and silk and warmth of her hours, now absorbed her senses so completely that she was dazed by the world, soaked in it, more alive than she had ever been before.
“I shall be off to Kent in March,” Lizzy said.
Sarah nodded, teasing the laces straight; she gave a quick final tug, and tied a long loose bow. Then she lifted Elizabeth’s petticoat and dropped it down over her head. The young lady’s voice came muffled as she fumbled her way through the folds.
“Truth be told, Sarah, dear, I am not so certain about it.”
Sarah fastened the petticoat hooks-and-eyes, then took up the periwinkle morning-gown from the bed, and lifted it so that Elizabeth could slip her head and arms through; Sarah settled the neckline and shoulder seams while Elizabeth tugged the sleeves straight. When she was done here, Sarah might see James in the kitchen, or pass him in the hallway, as he took the family’s breakfast up to them.
Elizabeth fastened the cuffs herself while Sarah did the bone buttons at the back.
“And of course it will be lovely to see Jane. But six weeks in Kent, with the Collinses—”
She glanced back at Sarah—Sarah nodded, she had finished; Elizabeth moved away, towards the window, leaving her nightgown in a heap upon the floor.
“I fear there cannot be much pleasure in that.”
Sarah retrieved the nightgown, then shook it out and folded it. She slipped it under the pillow. “Is there anything else you need from me now?”
“Oh, thank you, Sarah, no,” Elizabeth said. “That will be all for now.”
Sarah bobbed a curtsey, and left. The bedchamber door closed, she crossed the landing at a smart step, then slipped through the door into the servants’ stairs. Then she thundered down the steps and out into the hallway, to see if she might find James.
It was a chill day when Mr. Wickham actually ventured into the kitchen, bringing with him a sharp draught and the whiff of tobacco smoke. Hitherto he had lurked on thresholds; now he broke entirely through the caul between one world and the other, as if for him it simply did not matter.
“Ah, so here we are. The kitchen!”
Polly gaped, her whisk falling still in her drift of eggwhite. Mrs. Hill turned from the range. Sarah straightened from her work, saw him, and her hands stilled too. It was as though a peacock had flapped down to join the plain old gallinies, and started sauntering around the yard with them, pecking at their scraps.
“This is more like it. What are you making? Macaroons? How splendid.”
“I think you are lost, sir,” Sarah said.
He rubbed at his cropped head with a boyish air and grinned. Sarah thought, He knows exactly what he is doing; he knows exactly how to seem most charming. He turned from her, and addressed himself to Mrs. Hill.
“I do so like a kitchen, you know,” he said. “And so I thought I would come and see yours. And you have a delightful example of the species here.”
“You’d be more at home in the parlour, sir,” Sarah said.
“Appearances will deceive, my dear girl.”
He leaned in against the table, beside Sarah. He raised his eyebrows at her, but when he spoke, he addressed himself again to Mrs. Hill.
“My father was a humble steward, you see, my dear madam, and I have been in and out of kitchens and offices and still rooms all my life. A kitchen is the one place where I can feel quite at my ease.”
Polly, recovering herself a little, took up her whisk and began to beat the eggwhite again, her eyes like inkwells. Sarah, glancing from her to him, caught the moment when he winked, and then turned and caught Polly’s delighted shy look in response. He must charm everybody, must this fellow—it seemed like a compulsion.
“You will be missed by the ladies,” Sarah said.
“Ah yes, the ladies.” He pursed his lips. “The ladies.”
Polly’s whisk kept up a slow and ineffectual clatter. He moved away from the table, and crossed to the fireside; he settled himself down in Mr. Hill’s empty chair, with the air of someone coming home.
“They are so exhausting, aren’t they, the ladies? All that chatter.”
Polly covered her mouth with a hand, and giggled.
He smiled at her, his mustachios lifting up at the corners. “I would so much rather be cosy down here with you lovely girls.”
“We are a working kitchen here, sir—” Sarah tried.
“Oh, that’s the charm of it, don’t you know. That’s what I love, that’s what I am used to.”
“Perhaps you would oblige us, then, sir, by joining in. If you are to be here, you may as well be useful.”
Mrs. Hill, who had thus far been struggling with a shock so profound—a guest in the house had actually trespassed into her kitchen, was even now sitting by her kitchen fire—that she had been entirely unable to speak, now cleared her throat.
“I’ll fetch them turnips. They’s muddy as anything, and need a good scrubbing before they’re peeled.”
He looked from Mrs. Hill to Sarah to Polly and back again. A slick smile at their little joke.
“But where are my manners? Thinking only of myself, and not of my hosts; they will wonder where I am.” He pushed himself up from the chair, turned to Polly. “Might I have a guide back to the company, Little Miss? You will spare me a moment’s favour, I hope.”
Sarah hesitated. But Mrs. Hill jerked her head to Polly, keen to be rid of him: the world must be restored to its proper order.
“If you please, Polly.”
Polly dropped her whisk, wiped off her hands and darted for the door. She did please: Mr. Wickham was, after all, an excellent tipper.
“It’s this way, sir, back to the company.”
James had seen Mr. Wickham cross the yard some moments earlier, his red coat almost glowing in the grey day. He obeyed his first impulse, and stepped back, into the stable doorway, to observe the officer unseen. From there, he watched as Wickham ground out his cigar against the wall, smoothed his moustache and his hair, tugged his scarlet coat straight, and then pushed open the kitchen door.
James swallowed back the sickness. It was as if there was something spoiling in his belly. Wickham was seeping in everywhere, slipping through the cracks and oozing across the floor, and starting to look as though he’d always be there, and would be got used to, like rising groundwater.
He slid out of his hiding place and skirted round the edges of the yard, keeping out of sight of the window till he came right up beside it. There was a haze of scarlet in the fireside chair. He saw the young officer ease himself t
o his feet. He saw Polly scamper across the kitchen and hold the hall door open for him, saw the officer breeze across the room, and pass her. He watched the girl, grinning, follow after him, and the door fall shut upon them.
James slammed in through the kitchen door, making Mrs. Hill start, making Sarah turn and smile. Then her smile faded and was gone.
“What is it?”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing—”
“What did he do?”
“Well, he came into my kitchen—” This from Mrs. Hill; but from Sarah, a half-shake of the head—nothing—but then a glance after Polly.
He took in the lay of the land; the women stalled in their work by his sudden entrance, staring at him blankly. But Polly—where was she? He crossed the room in three strides, leaned through the hall doorway, and looked out.
“What is it?” Sarah came over, wiping her hands, and peering out beside him.
They watched as Mr. Wickham, in his pristine scarlet coat, walked side by side with Polly down the hallway. Polly, half-skipping to keep up with his stride, kept glancing up at the impressive figure now in her charge. She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand.
Sarah and James watched together as Polly heaved open the door into the parlour; together they heard the peal of silver bells as the ladies exclaimed at Wickham’s shockingly long absence, and demanded he account for it; as though they were, in that moment, all Penelopes, and he Odysseus returned.
Struggling with the heavy door, Polly bobbed Wickham a little curtsey as he went past her. His hand rested a moment on her slender arm.
“Thank you, Little Miss.”
Then he was gone, and Polly clapped the door shut. Smirking, she flounced back down the hall towards the kitchen. James and Sarah parted to let her past. The door fell closed, cutting them off from the rest of the house.
Sarah saw that the blood had drained entirely from his face.
“What is it?” Sarah asked him. “What’s wrong?”
He watched Polly, who had picked up her whisk and was poking at the eggwhite with it, a dimple in her cheek.
