Free Longbourn by Jo Baker Page B

sufficient care? How could he ever repay the trust that that good man had placed in him? Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind. He would do nothing to risk the loss of this. He would keep his head down, draw no attention to himself. He would not even look at Sarah, for all she was so very good to look at.
    They descended through woods, into the nutty scent of beech-mast and the peaty smell of this year’s first fallen leaves.
    After the quiet of the road, Meryton was a bombardment. Iron-shod hooves and iron wheel-rims on cobbles; shouts, catcalls, laughter. The streets were choked. Ostlers and footmen yelled, horses whinnied; passers-by rapped on carriage windows, passengers waved frantically at acquaintances spied across the street.
    The stream of gigs and chaises and cabriolets thickened and slowed at the Assembly Rooms, where they discharged their cargoes. People pushed eagerly up towards the doorway, the young and light andkeen weaving briskly around the grey, heavy older folk. Through the windows, James glimpsed the already teeming interior. He pulled up at the curved stone steps.
    It was one of those strange handicaps that afflicted gentlefolk, that they could not open a door for themselves, nor get in or out of a coach without someone to assist them. An old man with a heron’s stoop and full livery stepped forward and opened the door, so that James did not have to get down and do it himself.
    The young ladies streamed out like chicks from a hencoop, rustling gowns, each of them clasping the unknown servant’s hand for just a moment—a strange intimacy to allow him, it seemed to James—their faces radiant with the evening. And then Mrs. Bennet, splendid in mauve, clambered out, and sailed away, her daughters tucking themselves in around her, talking and laughing and waving to other new arrivals. Then they disappeared into the crush, where it already seemed too full to accommodate another soul.
    “God’s sake, man! Get a move on! Get that old hulk out of the way!”
    Someone slapped the back of the carriage. James clicked his tongue, told the horses to walk on.
    Along the side wall of the Assembly Rooms a row of carriages waited, the overflow of the inn yard and the livery stables. The coachmen gathered there too, passing a bottle, calling out to him to join them for a sup, and he nodded them a good evening, but instead unhitched the horses and brought them back to a trough in the Market Square. When they had drunk, breaking the moon into shards and ripples, he led them back to the coach, to wait.
    There was a hum of voices from inside the Assembly Rooms. Peals of laughter, and not words themselves but the shapes of talk in the air, the burr of it. Then the music started; voices fell away, and there was a thundering of feet on the wooden floor.
    He buckled the horses up in blankets. Across the street, the coachmen sung out dirty words to the pretty tune. A pair of them performed a clumsy jig.
    The mare clopped a hoof down on the cobbles. He patted her neck.
    What was astonishing was the peace of this place. Like a pebbledropped into a stream, his arrival had made a ripple in the surface of things. He’d felt that; he’d seen it in the way they looked at him, Sarah and Mrs. Hill and the little girl. But the ripples were getting fainter as they spread, and he himself was by now sunk deep and settled here; time would flow by and over him, and wedge him firmer, and he would take on the local colour of things.
    But Sarah. Those clear grey eyes of hers; you could see she was always thinking. She peered at him like he was a slipped stitch: unforeseen, infuriating, just asking to be unpicked.
    A yell startled him back to himself. One of the coachmen took a swing at another, and missed, staggering. There were shouted insults, laughter. James breathed on his hands, looked away.
    There had been times, in the past years, when he had felt more acutely