Longbourn by Jo Baker

Author:Jo Baker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-07T21:00:00+00:00

Miss Lucas was married on the Thursday, and the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door. Mrs. Hill and Sarah and Polly stood in the road, just outside the lich-gate, to wave them off.

“Mrs. Collins does look lovely,” Sarah said, when the couple had climbed into the chaise.

“All brides are beautiful,” said Mrs. Hill. “It is the one day when any woman is allowed to be so.”

“What was your wedding day like, Mrs. Hill?”

“It was a cold day too,” she said. “It was a long time ago.”

They were joined, when the well-wishers had cleared from the churchyard, by the Bennet family, and they all walked together back up to Longbourn House. All the way, Mrs. Bennet kept saying that she wished they might be happy, though her tone made it clear to Mrs. Hill that her thoughts were occupied with her own girls, and not really Mrs. Collins, and that she was not at all sanguine in her hopes.

Mrs. Hill, however, was warm enough in hers. Mrs. Collins had held her new dove-grey reticule on her lap, in the hack-chaise: this augured well. The marriage of Mr. Collins and Miss Lucas was not the worst possible outcome for the servantry, not by a long chalk. Though Mary, poor Mary, walked a little ahead of the others, and went straight upstairs to her piano, and played melancholy airs all afternoon.

“She is a good girl,” Mrs. Hill said, nodding over her needlework later on. “I always liked Miss Lucas, and I think we are a little more secure, because of this.”

But the whole thing left Sarah feeling very ill at ease. It was all as arbitrary and as far beyond their control as the weather. To live so entirely at the mercy of other people’s whims and fancies was, she thought, no way to live at all.

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