Longbourn by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

squeezed her arms the tighter. “What are you doing here?”
    He paused in his work. “What?”
    “I mean, why here? I mean, if I were you, I wouldn’t have settled for this. Hidden away like a pike in a backwater. Hardly knowing you’re alive.”
    He shifted the currycomb in his palm, straightening the strap across the back of his hand. He didn’t look up.
    “I saw you walking down the lane the other day. It was you, wasn’t it?”
    He stiffened, and turned to look at her. She was struck again by those light hazel eyes, the darkness of his weather-tanned skin.
    “Where did you come from?” Her voice dropped. “You must have travelled. Have you ever been to London?”
    “London’s only twenty miles or so from here, you know.”
    She flushed, kicking one boot heel with a hard-capped toe. He went back to his work.
    “I don’t know what to make of you at all,” she said.
    “Please don’t trouble yourself to try.”
    She spun away, and clumped off back to the kitchen. He was such a frustrating mixture of helpfulness, courtesy and incivility that she could indeed form no clear notion of him. Of one thing, though, she was certain: he was lying. He was not what he pretended to be. He might have fooled everybody else at Longbourn, but he did not fool her. Not for a minute.

The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news .
    Mrs. Bennet’s dressing room: her inner sanctum , her retreat from the pressing demands of family life; a place of bulging upholstery and swags and cushions and drapes and Turkey-rugs; a place heaped with worn-once gowns, abandoned shawls, spencers, pelisses and bonnets; a place of rose-petal mustiness, of striped and flowered wallpaper, of surfaces trinked out with all the porcelain her pin money could supply, and all the paper flowers and shellwork and scrollwork and embroidered panels and painted china her daughters’ nimble fingers could furnish, and all of it decomposing now and peeling and gathering dust, and driving Mrs. Hill’s ordered, governable heart to distraction.
    Mrs. Hill had been summoned to discuss the menus for the week, and having committed the requests for partridge and timbales and ragouts, as she always did, to memory, she should now be off and away to knead the bread dough, which she’d left to rise in the kitchen. But instead she was kept in the dressing room to hear Mrs. B.’s complaints, which concerned—as they often did—Mr. B.’s failure to understand the necessity of something that was violently important to his wife. And since he seemed barely capable of hearing her voice, let alone the import of her speech, Mrs. B. was resolved not to pursue the matter with him any further. Instead, she complained of it to Mrs. Hill.
    It was not in Mrs. Hill’s nature to make sympathetic noises and be idle, even though she knew from long experience that all attempts at putting this room in order were entirely futile. She dusted a japanned box with a corner of her apron, and then wiped the dust off the cabinetshelf that it stood on. She lifted a rumpled egg-yolk evening-gown from a chair, and shook out its folds.
    “Oh, just leave it, Hill.”
    “I’ll hang it up—”
    “Hang it up? Hang it all! Don’t bother yourself with it! That ragged old thing!”
    Mrs. Hill looked the dress over: had the girls missed something? The silky yellow folds slipped through her hands. No marks that she could see, no fallen hems or pulled seams; no obvious tears. It seemed entirely as it had been when returned to Mrs. Bennet’s wardrobe after its last laundering; there had been a particularly soupy supper at the Gouldings’. How the girls had tutted over the gown; how they’d steeped and soaped and teased the spots out of the silk. She had been proud of them, capable little laundresses that they were. And she had felt that they were pleased with themselves, too, when it had at last come up clean, and that was gratifying: they were beginning