Restitution #2
Mr Heaver started, and even Mrs Kerridge could confess to some alarm. She gestured sharply to the door while Heaver dithered with the clutter on his desk.
“Ah… come in!” he called.
It was Sarah, with that great looming footman, Robson, for some reason.
“Beg your pardon, Mrs Kerridge,” Sarah said, holding up a rumpled bed sheet. “Only the mistress’s bed sheet’s torn.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mrs Kerridge snapped. “That’s the third this month! What on earth are they—?” She bit off the question, recalling that Sarah was yet unmarried. The girl showed the tear. It was beyond repair.
“I went to the closet for a new one, and there were none left, though the paper said there ought to be two new with the last packet from Wreathe’s.”
“Of course there are none left. Whoever would imagine a respectable house would get through four sheets in a—” Mrs Kerridge paused. “What do you mean, ‘the paper’? What is this paper?”
“Oh,” said Sarah. “It’s an idea of the mistress’s, something her mother used to do.
She’s pinned up the receipt in the airing cupboard so that we can see what we have and mark off anything we use.
She’s done it on the larder door and the board by the cellar stairs.
Cook likes it. But anyway, there were supposed to be eight sheets total, three gone through, and this the fourth.
Which should leave four more, only there are none in the cupboard. ”
Resolutely not looking at Mr Heaver, Mrs Kerridge managed to keep her face blank and her voice no more irritable than usual.
“It shall be looked into,” she said. “In the meantime, you, Robson, since you clearly have nothing better to do, can dash off into town to pick up a new one from Wreathe’s. Camberley, I have no doubt you can find something with which to occupy yourself.”
Still without looking at Mr Heaver, Mrs Kerridge followed the two out into the passage and watched them until they were out of sight. Then she went to the cellar, the larder, and the linen store, tore the papers from the pins that affixed them, and folded them into an inner pocket.
The morning room was filled with sunlight, pouring in past the pale blue curtains.
Charles Bingley sat at the escritoire, an account book in front of him.
Jane, having abandoned her reading, was now sketching him, her board propped on her knees where she reclined on the chaise longue.
She smiled to herself as she noted how he seemed to feel her scrutiny.
It was as though by the force of her gaze alone she could touch this part of him or that—the soft skin below his ear, the strong cords that ran from jaw to clavicle, the little, curling tuft of hair that just brushed the back of his collar—simply by willing it.
For much of her life, her beauty had seemed something of a burden.
It had always meant a great deal of work on the part of all around her to maintain and protect, and yet they seemed pleased, even proud, to exert themselves, which had always made her feel obscurely guilty.
Guilty, too, when it was said that she had bewitched one gentleman or another, apparently by doing no more than standing quietly in a room with her head down, having been forbidden to remain at home.
With her marriage, however, all had changed.
What had seemed a curse before appeared now a gift, a kind of magic power.
The ultimate consequence of a look, a chance touch, even a smile alone was no longer something to be apprehended, to be retreated from, avoided at all costs.
She could be careless around Charles—reckless, generous, demanding.
Inviting. And she could distract him. With a look, an outward breath, a motion of her hand.
Even simply existing near him set her far above any other concern of his.
Never before had she been anyone’s absolute priority in quite the same way.
Charles put down his pen and looked up. They smiled at one another. He snapped the book shut and came to join her, settling her legs on his lap. He peered at her sketch. It was not very accomplished. They shared another look and laughed.
“Charles,” she said, a memory coming to her.
“Yes, my dear?”
“What was that word Caroline said at breakfast the other day? It upset you, and I could not see why.”
Charles laughed again, but this time it was the laugh that he kept as a defence, like a fencing foil with which to parry. It was almost, but not entirely, indistinguishable from the real thing.
“Oh, it’s only childish nonsense! Il Miraggio.
” Charles shook his head. “At the time, he was quite fashionable, a conjurer, a magician, I suppose. I was eight and asked my father if he might visit us, if conjurers went as far north as Yorkshire. He said, of course they did, and that he would engage him for my ninth birthday. I, of course, told everyone at my prep school that he would be there. But, unfortunately for me, he… ah… was not.”
He gave the not-quite-laugh again.
“I made rather a spectacle of myself, I’m afraid. And Caroline never fails to mention it whenever she wants to discomfit me.”
Jane regarded him for some moments more, then cast her drawing board to the floor with a clatter and pulled him into a kiss. He lay beside her on the couch, sliding his arm around her shoulders and squeezing her tightly.
“It’s quite absurd, my getting upset about anything, then or now,” he murmured into the fragrant cloud of her hair. “I, who have so much. My life has always been charmed. I’ve always been lucky.”
Jane watched a few motes of dust swirl in the sunlight. She felt the same way; she had never allowed herself to have had the right to repine. That, sadly, had not always meant that she was unable to do so.
“Well,” she said at length, “I think it’s beastly that she made you move your birthday. We shall hold a party for you here, on the day itself, and Elizabeth and Darcy will certainly choose us over Hardwick. I shall organise it, my dear. You just leave it to me.”
She kissed him again in a business-like manner and made to rise, but he held onto her.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said, pressing his forehead to hers. Then he grinned, properly this time. “I am all anticipation!”
That evening, Sarah passed the brush through her mistress’s golden hair.
Immaculate, she thought, with professional satisfaction; fond, but detached.
Sarah had been hired as a maid in London upon Jane’s marriage and had arrived new to Bartestone when they moved.
When, after a month or two, she had been elevated to lady’s maid, most of the servants at the house had been friendly enough, Robson in particular.
Mrs Kerridge was unpleasant, and Mr Heaver weak and incompetent.
It made life below stairs something of a trial, but that was eclipsed by the pleasure of serving such a nonpareil in temperament and beauty both.
It had intimidated her at first, but she had quickly found that Mrs Bingley could hardly help but look her best, and only the most rudimentary of Sarah’s skills were required.
“Sarah?” Mrs Bingley asked. “Were you in service long in London?”
“Three years, ma’am.”
“Hmm. Likely too recent,” her mistress murmured. “Do you recall any talk of an entertainer—there was apparently a fashion for him some ten years back—called Il Miraggio?”
Sarah frowned. “No, ma’am, I cannot say I do. Would he have been a foreign gentleman?”
“Well, I suppose so… the name is Italian, though I was never so attentive to those lessons as I should have been. It may just be a stage name, when his real name is… oh, I do not know…”
“Jim?” Sarah ventured, “Jimmy Cooper?”
Mrs Bingley laughed.
“You might ask Mr Robson, ma’am,” Sarah went on, laying the brush down and starting a loose plait. “He knows a great deal about all sorts of things.”
“But has he not lived here all his life?”
“For the last six years, but before that he was in Nottingham, and before that London. His uncle has an inn near Aldgate.”
“I shall ask him, then. Thank you, Sarah.”
“Not at all.” Sarah tied the ribbon and stepped back. “Madam… I wanted to say… the receipts in the linen cupboard…”
Mrs Bingley turned to her, and her nervousness increased.
“It’s just that, the receipts had said there ought to have been—”
Mrs Bingley’s eyes darted to the door, and she said, “Ah, Mrs Kerridge.”
Sarah’s head snapped around. The housekeeper stood in the doorway like a dark apparition, face pinched, eyes glinting.
“Finished, have you, Miss Camberley?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs Kerridge,” Sarah mumbled, curtseying and stepping back.
“On your way, then. The mistress doesn’t pay you to stand about.”
Sarah bobbed another curtsy to Mrs Bingley, who smiled, and then left the room. Mrs Kerridge closed the door behind her.
“I would ask you not to speak so to my maid, Mrs Kerridge,” Jane said, turning to the mirror and regarding the housekeeper only indirectly. “I appreciate that you run a tight ship, but Mr Bingley and I would prefer to employ fellow human creatures, rather than automata.”
“Certainly, ma’am,” said Mrs Kerridge, not chastened in the least, busying herself around the room with the kind of unnecessary tidying that aims to reproach.
When she had finished, she returned to stand by the door.
“You are entitled to order things as you wish, madam, but, with thirty years of honourable service to my name, I would venture to offer two pieces of advice, if you would hear them?”
Mrs Bingley nodded. “Certainly, Mrs Kerridge, I very much appreciate your experience. You have long managed this estate, and I am quite new to it.”