“Oh? I had thought he had perhaps left town. My sister Jane called on Miss Bingley some weeks ago, and though they met again briefly, I do not believe they have seen one another since.”
My lord. Could I have selected a worse subject? I was now—compounded with feelings of mortification and harassment—strongly irritated with Mr. Darcy. However, the subject had been broached, and I boldly searched his face as I spoke, thinking I might catch some expression of guilt.
“Ahem,” he said, looking abstractedly at a framed watercolor on the wall. “I believe he intended to visit relatives in Scarborough.”
“Did he?” Miss Darcy asked in a tiny voice. “I saw Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst very lately, and they made no mention of leaving London.”
In grim triumph, I watched Mr. Darcy’s color change to the dusky shade of a shameless liar, fairly caught.
“Oh well,” I interjected, “I doubt such elegant ladies as Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst have much time for an acquaintance from Hertfordshire. Though they did claim to like Jane a great deal when they were at Netherfield Park, did they not, sir?
I turned to Miss Darcy. “My eldest sister fell ill while visiting Mr. Bingley’s sisters, and they insisted she stay to recover. Miss Bingley in particular expressed such relief when she was finally well enough to leave Netherfield and return home that I thought she might be sincerely attached to her.” I slanted a glance at Mr. Darcy to see how that dart struck before breezily returning my attention to his sister.
“Mr. Bingley even paid my sister the compliment—or so it seemed to the neighborhood—of delaying his ball until she was well enough to dance. He is a most amiable young man, is he not? All Meryton thought he was suited for country life. But perhaps we misread him, for he never did return to Hertfordshire after saying he would come back in a few days. He even promised to take dinner at Longbourn, but now there is talk he will close up the house and give up the lease.”
I smiled like a cat at Mr. Darcy as he shifted in his seat, and then I glibly continued. “But perhaps Jane will meet the Bingleys and Hursts at church—” I stopped abruptly and pinned him with a slightly accusatory look. “But at which church do they worship, Mr. Darcy?”
“Saint Bride’s, I believe.”
I had discomposed him to such a degree by hinting Jane would force herself on Mr. Bingley’s notice at church that he visibly jumped when the door knocker sounded again. And when we at last enjoyed a resounding silence at the end of a prolonged interruption of persistent knocking, he stood to take his sister away.
We saw our company to the door where Mrs. Jennings was sweetly affected by the farewell. She thanked her visitors for coming, sniffled and wiped her eyes in gratitude, and wondered at their goodness. I tucked her shawl around her tiny shoulders, clucked at her for being such a watering pot, and spoke my appreciation much more succinctly.
Mr. Darcy took Mrs. Jennings’s hand and then my own, which surprised me very much, for he was not a warm man. This inspired me to offer my hand to his sister, and she took it with shy goodwill. I have noticed that those we wish to be rid of are parted with great cordially indeed, and felt this to be the case since the end of their visit could not have been a happier occasion for me. I supposed they must also be rejoicing as they went down the road.
I dashed upstairs to put my brown dress back on, and I went back to nurse my soup, content that we would never see the Darcys at our door again.
Chapter Ten
The pease soup was the best I had ever tasted.
Never mind that I had rarely had such homely fare at Longbourn. My mother would never in all her life serve a soup that was not at least half made up of cream, much less something served to sailors on blue-water passages to Java. My success was slightly overshadowed, however, by the gift of edibles brought by Mr. and Miss Darcy.
Ah, well—I could hardly begrudge Auntie the relish with which she nibbled at a slice of Dutch-style cheese or the smoked trout that seemed to melt in her mouth, or later, the dried apricots dusted with sugar and stuffed with almonds. These garnishes to our pauper’s fare threw me into thinking of meals I had enjoyed at home or in London, and I began to pine for my family.
This longing for home became acute on Christmas Day. I pushed it away by once again doing battle with the cookstove and, in a new endeavor, the spit in the hearth. Before Mrs. Smith had left, I had bespoken not one, but two geese. The first she prepared and set to roasting so that we could see how the thing was done. The second was delivered to me by the butcher’s boy for a pretty penny the day before Christmas.
Between Doreen, Penny, and me, we eventually had our goose roughly trussed up.
“I do hope you removed all the pin feathers,” I fretted at Penny, as I took my turn spinning the slightly mangled bird over the coals. Meanwhile, armed with my apron and brown wool once again, I tackled the awesome enterprise of a suet pudding.
I did not have Mrs. Reynolds’s endorsement to take it on. Rather, I had been stupidly emboldened after achieving a mere soup. And having read the instructions fromMrs. Kettleby’s Collection of Receipts in Cookery, I felt ready to conquer a truer challenge than the reconstitution of dried peas.
Thankfully, we did not have to rely on my pudding for dinner. It was a stodgy clump fit to be hurled at someone’s head in one of those crude comedies at Cheltenham. Penny, however, said she had never tasted anything more delicious, and I gave her leave to stuff herself.
We had been spared my pudding because that morning we had received a delivery from Pemberley. This was a box containing a beautiful Christmas pudding lined with glistening plums shining with an apricot glaze and decorated with delicate sprigs of sugared mint leaves. I was no stranger to lovely puddings, but this particular one was light, heavenly, and warmly spiced. I sighed to taste what I would never be able to produce.
The goose was marginally better than my pudding, though a little dry, but I did surprise myself with the tastiness of the pickle I had put up three days earlier. I rounded out our little feast with more delectables from Miss Darcy’s hamper, and when we could not eat another bite, I gave Mrs. Jennings a new lace cap and a pair of flannel mittens to wear at night.
On behalf of Mrs. Jennings, I gave Doreen the elephantine shawl. For Penny, I had bought a more suitably sized Sunday dress from the local rag seller. She wept over this secondhand garment as though it were made of silk, threatening to dampen my already lowered spirits with such overwhelming gratitude.
Thus, I made the hasty decision to make myself merrier by doing more for the maids and announced I would send them both home to their families for the night. I gave Doreen the coins she would need to secure their passage on a dairy cart that passed that way, and sent them off with baskets full of potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and onions along with the remains of the goose and my stodgy pudding. In a flash of inspiration, I had also packed up a half a dozen each of the tallow candles stored in the stillroom and a cake of soap cut in two pieces to share; I was perpetually coaxing the girls to bathe more often, and I hoped they would take the hint.
My gift to Smith, who agreed to sleep in the kitchen meanwhile so we would not be left completely alone, was a small and impersonal sum of money. I felt mildly guilty at this slight, but his face brightened into a toothless smile, and with that, I closed the book on Christmas in Lambton.
***
Letters and packages had come from Hertfordshire and London, though I was slighted by my mother in a significant way. I managed to brush off this setback with news from Aunt Gardiner that Jane’s spirits were rising, the children had all grown plump, and Uncle Gardiner had given her a necklace of gold as a gift. Jane sent me a silk scarf and a tearful letter full of love. Mary wrote me out a fairly complete description of the vicar’s Christmas homily and included an embroidered bookmark with her letter, Kitty sent me a long list of grievances against Lydia and a ribbon, and Lydia wrote me a short letter about how great a favorite she was with all the officers in the militia and a promise that she would give me one of her ribbons when next she saw me. My father sent me a note and a book of essays, which would have thrown me over the moon if I were not forced to sit in gloom with nothing but firelight every evening. My mother sent me nothing at all, but Mrs. Hill sent a handkerchief embroidered with my favorite bluebells.
