Longbourn by Jo Baker Page B

sofa and tilted his head back, mouth open, as if utterly exhausted by the small journey to and from the door.
    The room was frowsty and cold, and smelt of medicaments and camphor wood and urine but also something faintly sweet; a card-tablewas set out with a clutter of mismatched tea things, and there was a tumbled daybed in the corner, on which lay what she first took to be a bundle of mending, but which moved and then turned, and then smiled at the child; such teeth as the old lady still possessed were black.
    “Would you like a piece of cake, little girl?”
    Sarah shook her head, set down the ham, and walked backwards for the door. She spun round and sprinted the length of the haunted corridor, and heaved open the huge front door herself. Then she ran, stumbling, the first mile back to Longbourn, and when she couldn’t run any more she walked as fast as she could, glancing over her shoulder. The smell of the place—the sweetness that was decay—had seemed to linger about her for days.
    Today, all grown up, she approached Netherfield again. This time, instead of a heavy cold ham, she was carrying an elegantly phrased invitation for Mr. Bingley, requesting his company at a Family Dinner.
    Crunching up the gravel drive, which had been raked and hoed and cleared of weeds, she gazed up at the stately scrubbed-clean colonnade: this was clearly no longer the kind of establishment where a neighbour’s housemaid could be received at the front door. She took a path round the side of the house, looking for the servants’ entrance. The sashes were lifted to let the fresh air in to sweeten the rooms—all inside was newly painted; she could smell it. She glimpsed pure-white ceilings, dust sheets, a watery mirror.
    The young ladies and Mrs. B. were all of a twitter about him, this Mr. Bingley. There had already been a bit of to-and-fro, but the servants had had little to do with it. When Mr. Bingley called at Longbourn, the gentlemen had sipped Canary wine in the library in a remarkably self-sufficient manner. James had seemed to think the care of the Bingley horse—an impressive black gelding—to be a pleasure rather than an imposition.
    But now there was this, the invitation to a Family Dinner, and Mrs. B. was already in a fluster about fish and soup, because a Family Dinner was of course more difficult to get right than a formal one. You had to impress, but at the same time you had to look like you were not trying to impress at all. It had to be excellent, and it also had to seem as though it was how they were all used to dining every day.
    Mrs. B. had been very particular about the note, had shaped thewords carefully on the best paper in the house, tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth. Mrs. Hill had been very particular about it too: when James came down from the breakfast room with the missive, she had tweaked it off the salver, squinted at it a long moment, then handed it straight to Sarah.
    “Quick as you can; no dawdling, please. I need you back here to help with the pies.”
    The door was small and plain and must be a servants’ entrance. No one answered her knock, so she just slipped in, and followed the noise towards the kitchen. This seemed a likely place to find someone to convey a note on its onward journey to an upstairs apartment. Sarah already felt anxious, and she had not even been obliged to speak to anybody yet: it would surely look odd that she, a housemaid, had come with an invitation, instead of a footman. What was Mrs. Hill thinking? What was Mr. Smith for , if not to dash about the countryside on the family’s behalf?
    Sarah sidled through a swing door, and into the vast kitchen. No one even noticed her. The place was cavernous, echoing, and bustling with activity. She saw a male cook in a blue jacket, pacing and peering into pots; three kitchen maids chopped onions and leeks; menservants swept in and out. The scents were overwhelming: beef and wine and stewing fruits. Then a footman—tall,