Free Longbourn by Jo Baker

an old evening-gown, in oyster-coloured satin, and laid it on the bed. Low-necked, short-sleeved. Elizabeth went to join her, shook her head.
    “Or there’s this …”
    An oak-leaf-print pelisse, in twilled silk, to wear indoors on cool evenings.
    “She’s better with something less …” Elizabeth turned towards the closet, frowning. “A day-dress perhaps, simpler, I think, for village dances on the green.”
    She lifted out a sprigged poplin day-dress, with long sleeves and a high neckline. The pattern was a repeat of green stems and tiny claret rosebuds on a cream background. Sarah had cut and stitched the stuff two summers ago, it was lovely then, and was pretty still; through every washing, every mangling and ironing, she had adored it. Then Elizabeth laid a sage-green tea-gown beside the poplin; it was trimmedwith white velvet ribbon; you had to unpick the ribbon every time you washed it, to keep the dye from bleeding into the velvet.
    “Here,” Elizabeth said, “whichever you prefer.”
    “Really?”
    “But just the one, or we shall have Polly in a sulk,” Jane said. “And none of ours will fit her yet.”
    “She’d have to persuade Kitty or Lydia to give up a frock.”
    Jane smiled. “Lydia would.”
    “Lyddie would give anyone anything, just for the asking.”
    From Mary’s room came the sound of the pianoforte, a rill of scales and arpeggios, and the muffled laughter of the youngest girls in their room across the landing. Quietly, Sarah lifted the sprigged poplin and laid it over her arm, and bobbed a curtsey, and said thank you, before anyone could change their mind. The pleasure of its acquisition made her breathless.
    Elizabeth nodded to a book on the dresser. “And you might like to borrow that.”
    Sarah tilted her head to look at the spine. Pamela , she read.
    Then, dressed and coiffed and beautiful, Elizabeth and Jane wished her a good evening. They wafted out of the room and clipped softly down the stairs. Sarah laid her new gown reverentially down on the bed; she tidied away the brushes and combs, the spilt pins and ribbons. She smoothed the rumpled counterpane. The room was dull now, and meaningless, with the young ladies gone from it. They were both lovely, almost luminous. And Sarah was, she knew, as she slipped along the servants’ corridor, and then up the stairs to the attic to hang her new dress on the rail, just one of the many shadows that ebbed and tugged at the edges of the light.
    In the kitchen, Mr. Smith leaned by the fire and chewed an apple, looking stiff in his livery. He caught Sarah’s eye, and looked away, and crunched again.
    “Where’s missus?” she asked.
    He swallowed, spoke: “Upstairs with madam.”
    So Sarah went straight through the kitchen and down into the dim blue scullery, where Polly was sitting on the duckboard, legs stretchedout in front of her, boots at odd angles, back against the wall. Sarah slid down and sat beside her. It was their mutual secret: this spot was unfrequented at certain busy times, and so here they could snatch moments of respite.
    “Do you ever think,” Sarah asked, “that it would be good if there was somewhere else you could go?”
    Polly raised her eyebrows, lifted a finger to her lips: from the kitchen they heard Mrs. Hill’s voice, Mr. Smith’s reply; she had come back, and was asking where the girls were.
    Sarah dropped her voice, whispered, “That’s what I mean: somewhere you could just be , and not always be obliged to do . Somewhere where you could be alone, and nobody wants or expects anything of you, just for a while, at least.”
    Polly wriggled her narrow shoulders against the bare brick; it was the chimney wall—on the other side the kitchen range flared and sparked—and so was dry and warm.
    “Stop moaning and shut up,” she said. “Someone will hear you.”
    Polly had herself come through a frozen January night in a basket on a farmer’s doorstep, then the precarious neglect of a parish wet-nurse,