Longbourn by Jo Baker

anything that might disturb the household’s tranquillity. Which is why he’d sat on with the women when he could have been quietly reading in his room. And there was, he had to admit it, such a pleasure in her proximity. To feel her breathe, to hear the rustle of her skirts, a sweet word or two spoken to little Polly. It was good.
    The footman returned the following morning. He was mucked up to the knees, his greatcoat heavy and wet, and his wig limp, its powder running down his coat in milky streams. Sarah had an armful of eggy plates from breakfast, and cast desperately around for some way to be rid of them. Still on the threshold, he took off his hat and shook the water off it. He reached inside his coat, and produced a rather damp-looking letter.
    “For Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”
    James looked from Sarah to the footman and back again. Mr. and Mrs. Hill being occupied elsewhere, the three of them stood alone in the kitchen. It was clearly James’s duty to take the missive up, but then that would leave Sarah alone with the footman.
    “Will you take it?” he asked her.
    “It’s for you to do, isn’t it?”
    James bowed stiffly, took the note and strode off upstairs to the breakfast room, where Mrs. Hill was serving the family their coffee. He waited, fidgeting all the time that it was being read and exclaimed over.
    Down in the kitchen, alone with the Netherfield footman now, Sarah said, “Terrible wet, this weather …” and then quailed at her own dullness. Thankfully he did not seem to notice it: he flumped down in the fireside chair, and stretched out his arms and booted feet, to show her the state that he was in.
    “This Hertfordshire mud has a will of its own, I’d swear to it. It latches on and climbs. In London,” he said, “with the paving and thearcades, you can go about whatever the weather, it can rain stair-rods and you won’t even get your feet wet.”
    “You’re from London, then?”
    She handed him a cup of tea. He seemed mildly surprised by it, and glanced around the kitchen, but observing nothing more to his taste, he took the cup.
    “I lived there for a time. With the old master, and then the new.”
    She sat down opposite, and drew her chair a little closer.
    “Tell me; what’s it like?”
    He told her about Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, where they performed feats of horsemanship, and juggling and acrobatics. And then about the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, where there was music and dancing. He told her about a beggar that he knew, an acquaintance of his, quite a gentleman, who sang sea shanties and wore a model ship on his head, so that when he danced it was tossed around as though it rode upon a stormy sea.
    “And there are fireworks at night, so splendid and noisy that even the old soldiers say they never saw anything like it.”
    James returned more swiftly than Sarah could have anticipated.
    “Do you wait for a reply?”
    “If there is one.”
    “Well, there isn’t.”
    Buttoning up his greatcoat, the footman was gone with a wink, trudging off out into the grizzling morning. Sarah went to the window to watch him go. It was such a glorious thing, to know that he was around now, that he might wander in at any time, and want to have a cup of tea with her, and tell her about London.
    “Miss Jane is ill.”
    James said this with more emphasis than it really merited; after all, the young lady had only caught a chill.
    He was rewarded with the barest glance.
    “She got caught out in the rain like we thought she would, and now has a chill, and is laid up at Netherfield.”
    “Oh,” said Sarah.
    “So Miss Elizabeth is going to her.”
    This was, as far as Sarah was concerned, not the worst news she could have heard. If Jane must be ill, then it was better that she be illat the Bingleys’ house than at home: they had an army there to care for her, but at Longbourn sickness meant so much extra work to be shared between so few; the sickroom linen, the handkerchiefs, the special