“Oh, I see. I believe I used to glimpse the lady at church some years ago though we have not been introduced. How may I help you?”
I must have passed the minimum requirements for being noticed by a woman of Mrs. Reynolds’s position, for she motioned me to a chair.
I gratefully took my seat. “You must think it passing strange that I have applied to you for help, but Mrs. Jennings has no friends to speak of, and I am a stranger here, treated with reserve wherever I go.” I then smiled a little sheepishly and said, “Mrs. Reynolds, I wonder whether you would tell me how to make pork jelly?”
The housekeeper looked surprised, but even so, she seemed to relax just a little. “Certainly,” she said, looking at me with outright curiosity.
“I suppose I should explain such a silly request, but it would take an hour of your time. Suffice it to say, Mrs. Jennings asks for it every morning, and I would very much like to give her what she wants. She is very poorly, you understand.”
“I am sorry to hear it,” Mrs. Reynolds said, taking a piece of paper from her desk. We sat in silence as she dipped her quill in and out of the ink pot, scribbled for a few moments, and sanded her paper.
When she handed me a list of instructions for pork jelly, I skimmed over it eagerly and said, “Oh! I see my mistake.” I looked up with a smile of chagrin. “From beginning to end, I did everything wrong, but perhaps the worst was I did not skim the impurities. Nor did I even think to season it with lemon and bay leaf. You can imagine the result.”
Mrs. Reynolds unbent enough almost to smile. “Boiled offal can be quite offensive,” she conceded.
“And the smell seems to have taken up permanent residence in the house,” I said, standing.
“If you steam a kettle with cloves and rosemary in the rooms affected, you might enjoy fresher air after a few days,” she said, also standing. “If there is ever anything else you need, Miss Bennet, you may apply to me.”
I apologized again for my intrusion, thanked her sincerely for this unasked for boon, and walked the long road back to Mrs. Jennings’s house with an entirely new perspective.
Chapter Six
I never expected to intrude upon Mrs. Reynolds again. Armed with her offer of support should I have need, I felt sufficiently bolstered to stand on my own two feet thereafter, and set out on a course to end my visit to Lambton better than I had begun. And indeed, over the next several days, I enjoyed a few modest successes.
My first order of business was to procure a pork snout, rind, ears, and trotters, in addition to the bones. I also bought an iron pot suitable for the job I intended to undertake, thinking that if I ruined this one, at least I would not further enrage Mrs. Smith.
In the three hours of the afternoon in which I boiled my concoction over a low fire, I also steamed cloves and rosemary in a kettle hung on a hook in the main fireplace. Immediately, the scented air gave me a sense of relief or perhaps simply the courage to persevere.
As it turned out, the pork jelly was a triumph. That is not to say it was better than any ever made, only that it was fit to eat. Mrs. Jennings beamed at me in the morning when I presented it to her on a little porcelain plate.
She promptly spread a bit of it on her toast and said, “Dear Hannah, you must try some of this.”
When she mistook me for her sister, now long departed, Mrs. Jennings was generally cast back into memories of her youth. This seemed a happy time for her, and I prolonged her comfort by asking what she would wear to church or some other improvisation that led her to remember various details of her life. After breakfast, I settled the lady in a chair by the window where she knitted in the dim light of winter.
I then ran Doreen to ground and nagged her into polishing the furniture with linseed oil—we could not get wax candles much less wax for polishing—and then we dusted the house from top to bottom. While we worked, I made an effort with the mulish girl and learned that she had started into service at the age of ten. She came from a family of six children, and her father, who mined lime and then limestone, had died of a lung ailment. Doreen was apparently the sole support for her mother and two siblings who remained at home. She walked the seven miles home to the cottages near the lime pits every Sunday and returned by noon on Monday, a concession for which she was grateful to Mrs. Burke since most servants were only given half a day of leisure in a week.
Christmas was fast approaching, and I wondered what I would do for the servants. My ineptitude at housekeeping had cost too much of Mrs. Jennings’s pension already, and my own purse also suffered, yet something must be done for them. It just so happened that the day following the furniture polishing was Sunday, and after Doreen had gone, I went up to her attic room. I justified my curiosity on account of wanting to know how she lived. I found a tiny room, cold as a tomb. She had a box containing the few items of clothing she possessed, and there on the cot, the copy ofLa Belle AssemblieI had brought with me and could not find. She had also absconded with one of the forbidden tallow candles in order to peruse this contraband journal.
I should have done something about this theft, but she lived such a hopeless life of servitude, I rather admired that she had some source of interest at all.
On Monday, I spent time discovering what I could of the young kitchen maid, Penny. She was also a miner’s child, coming from the same hamlet as Doreen, but she did not go home every week because her mother could not afford to feed her if she did. Penny slept in the kitchen, which was at least warmer than the attic, but she had nothing of her own other than a bedroll and a Sunday dress, which might have fit her when she was nine years old.
Smith was a bit of an unknown. Since Mrs. Jennings’s house was so modestly sized and Mrs. Burke had monopolized the space that served as servant’s quarters, there was no room left for a male servant. As such, he reportedly lodged with the cook as a boarder, but as the days went by and I witnessed her general treatment of the man with slaps on the back of the head on the one hand and admonishments to tuck the scarf around his ears on the other, I began to suspect their adamant claims to be unrelated were specious, and they were likely married.
If my theory was true, I attributed their caution to fear of Mrs. Burke’s old-fashioned management or perhaps a generally suspicious nature. Whatever the reason, Mrs. Smith continued to regard me with distrust. Clearly, she also regarded me with dark feelings of resentment after I threw away her favorite pot and then had the gall to suggest she could seek work elsewhere if she could not decently feed Mrs. Jennings.
And it was on account of Mrs. Smith’s smoldering resentment that I found myself once again trudging up the church road to Pemberley.
***
I walked in a constant drizzle of cold rain that day, and on this occasion, rather than pondering the frustrating whims of society, I thought wistfully of my family.
I was too busy in the daytime, but at night—as I sat in the dark, holding Mrs. Jennings’s hand until she fell asleep—I had no choice but to cogitate on my life. To my great surprise, it was my mother who came most often to mind. Perhaps my rude introduction to housekeeping or my naiveté in thinking I could step into that role as if it were a mere sinecure caused me to ponder her decision to shield us from learning the age-old art of managing a house.
She had nearly bitten off Mr. Collins’s head when he dared to compliment one or the other of her daughters for the potatoes he enjoyed at Longbourn, and I smiled to recall his look of consternation as though he wished to blurt out in dismay,“Do they not cook at all?”
I had always classed Mama as too flighty to have set plans with regard to anything, but perhaps consciously or out of instinct alone, she educated her daughters strictly according to her aspirations for us.
