Page 68

Bastow Parsonage

Derbyshire

September, 1814

Mrs. Charlotte Collins gazed down lovingly at her son, little Tobias Collins, age fourteen months.

The little one had recently mastered the art of walking and was currently toddling back and forth across the sitting room with many a proud glance at his adoring mother.

Charlotte felt a happy tear slip from her eye before she quickly wiped it away. Tobias, for all his youth, was alert to her emotions and would no doubt be distressed if he saw his mother crying.

She smiled broadly instead. To think that only three years ago, she had been a spinster in her father’s home in Meryton, Hertfordshire, facing a life of loneliness, of being a burden to her father’s family.

And then, Elizabeth Bennet had approached her with a most remarkable invitation. Mr. William Collins, clergyman and heir to the Bennet estate of Longbourn, was the guest of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley in Derbyshire, and was seeking a wife. Charlotte, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s sister Mary traveled north to Pemberley and within a few days, Charlotte was engaged to the clergyman. A short time later, she had married her dear William in a double ceremony along with Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. In short order, she was pregnant with her son and had birthed him the same day that Elizabeth’s sister, Mary, married the steward of Bastow, Mr. Edward Martyn.

For the last two years, Mr. Collins had served as a clergyman with Mr. Darcy as his patron. The Bastow living was not quite as lucrative as the one at Hunsford in Kent where Mr. Collins had served before his marriage. Charlotte could not repine the decrease in income since she knew both she and William were very happy here, close to the Darcys and the Martyns and away from the autocratic and irritable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who held the Hunsford living.

The door to the sitting room opened carefully and her husband entered, cautious of the location of his baby son.

“Da!” squealed Tobias, lurching toward his beloved father. Mr. Collins leaned over and picked the boy up, nuzzling his little neck to produce a cacophony of hysterical laughter.

Charlotte stood and moved forward to give her husband a loving kiss on the cheek. Their marriage had started out as a practical one, but the last two years had seen man and wife grow to love one another. It was not, the lady reflected, a scintillating, passionate love, but one of genuine respect and fondness.

“My dear,” Mr. Collins said, setting his son down carefully, “I fear I have bad news. Blossom knocked over the railing between her pen and Petunia’s, and Petunia has three significant gashes in her back.”

Charlotte’s delight shifted to distress, “Oh no! How are Petunia’s piglets?”

“They are not injured. The railing fell on their mother’s great back, so she protected them. I am going out to the barn now to sew the injuries.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

He left precipitously, causing Tobias to wail in disappointment. Charlotte picked the boy up and carried him to the window so that they could watch husband and father march toward the barn, which was some five hundred yards from the parsonage.

She felt tears gathering in her eyes again and firmly blinked them back. She knew, because she had been told, that three years ago Mr. William Collins had been a groveling, sycophantic fool of a clergyman, obsequious to his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and uniformly irritating to everyone else. But then had come the ball at Netherfield Hall near Meryton, where Mr. Collins tripped and fell while dancing and was knocked unconscious.

He had awoken the next day, changed . Gone was the cringing fool, replaced by a blunt, brilliant man with a genius that she imagined was encountered only a few times in a generation.

Charlotte was glad she had never met Mr. Collins’s father as she would have been tempted to hit him! He had bullied and abused his brilliant son until the younger Collins had submerged his talents to avoid beatings and verbal cruelty. It had taken a hard knock on the head to suppress the former persona in favor of the current man, who was a polymath of the highest order.

“Mrs. Darcy, Miss Lydia Bennet,” a maid announced from the door, causing Charlotte to turn in surprise and delight.

“Elizabeth, Lydia! What a pleasant surprise” she exclaimed as she carefully lowered Tobias to the floor. “Lydia, Elizabeth wrote me that you were visiting Pemberley for several months. How delightful to see you! What brings you to Bastow today?”

Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy was carrying her own small daughter in her arms with Lydia, her youngest sister, trailing in her wake. The latter was carrying a well filled bag, which Charlotte assumed held various garments and diapers for Baby Rosemary. She well knew that it was dangerous to leave home without plenty of changes in clothing. Babies were invariably messy.

“Good morning, Charlotte,” Elizabeth responded happily, carefully setting Rosemary on the floor. The baby looked about with wide eyed interest before focusing on Tobias, who was clinging to his mother’s skirts with a mixture of curiosity and concern.

“Gertrude, can you please bring tea?” Charlotte asked of her maid, who nodded obediently and departed.

“We are going to visit Mary in a few hours,” Lydia explained, answering Charlotte’s initial question. “Our sister is only a few weeks away from the birth of her baby and not willing to travel even so short a distance as the journey to Pemberley. We thought we would stop by and see you before we continued on to see her.”

Charlotte walked cautiously over to a nearby chair, with her baby still clinging to her skirts, and sat down, “I am absolutely delighted that you broke your journey to visit. How are you doing?”

“We are very well,” Elizabeth responded, and Charlotte could tell from the glow on her friend’s face that she spoke nothing but the truth. Elizabeth Bennet had been a beauty when unwed, but her marriage to a thoroughly compatible man made her even more lovely.

“I am glad,” Charlotte returned just as Rosemary looked up at her mother and opened her mouth in a giant wail of distress.

“The poor angel is working on her teeth,” Elizabeth Darcy explained, picking the girl up and rubbing her back. “She sometimes cries from the pain, but I think her two teeth have nearly broken through.”

“Precious dear,” Charlotte responded with quick compassion. “Our Tobias has eight teeth now, do you not, my darling?”

Her baby son looked up with a smile and then fixed his brown eyes on Mr. Collins’s white cat, which had followed the guests into the room and settled on a couch near Charlotte.

“Kit!” Tobias squealed, toddling eagerly towards the feline. The animal took one horrified look at the approaching youngster and fled in terror, causing baby Rosemary Darcy to squawk in delight and Tobias to begin crying.

Lydia Bennet suppressed a strong desire to clap her hands over her ears at the noise. Really, how did mothers survive the noisiness of their offspring? Her own mother, she knew, had handed her children off to nurses until they were old enough to be quiet in company, but Charlotte and Elizabeth were far more engaged mothers with their own tiresomely loud progeny.

“I am going outside for some air,” she told Elizabeth. Her older sister nodded with understanding, and Lydia departed quickly. She hurried out the back passageway and into the glebe behind the house. When the door shut behind her with a bang, the last sounds of screaming babies faded away and Lydia relaxed.

She glanced around and then made her way over to a simple wooden bench which had been placed under a tall and elegant oak tree. The early September sun was blazing, and she would begin sweating in her gown if she did not take cover.

Once Lydia had settled onto her seat, she looked around with interest. She had visited Derbyshire a year ago when her sister Mary wed Mr. Martyn in the nearby church, but Lydia had not visited the parsonage. Today she and Elizabeth had traveled the fifteen miles from Pemberley to Bastow and Lydia had seen the inside of her friend’s home for the first time.

Lydia’s first impressions were not particularly positive. Charlotte’s home was far smaller than Longbourn, the Bennet house back in Hertfordshire, and poor Charlotte was making do with only six full time servants, which was completely absurd. How could any gentlewoman survive with so little help, especially with a needy baby boy?

The furnishings, too, were very simple compared to those at Longbourn. Mrs. Bennet, Lydia’s mother, adored pretty trinkets; every flat surface at Longbourn was decorated with figurines or potted plants. Charlotte had very little in the way of ornaments though perhaps that was due to the baby. Elizabeth had explained that at Pemberley, the vast estate of the Darcys, anything within reach of a child had to be carefully tucked away now that her daughter Rosemary was crawling.

The fifth Bennet daughter leaned back and slowly blew out her breath. Only two years ago, she had been extremely eager to get married; indeed, she thought that if she could be married first of all her sisters, it would be the most glorious triumph of her life.

Now that her three eldest sisters were married, Lydia was far more aware of the challenges of wedded living. She would marry eventually no doubt, but for now, she was happy to be single and carefree and healthy. All three of her older sisters had been quite ill the first few months of their pregnancies, and now Jane and Elizabeth were tied down by demanding, if thoroughly adorable, babies.

“ Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound ...”

Lydia looked around in bewilderment. She was familiar with the hymn but the person singing it, obviously a male based on the low notes, did not have a good voice.

“ That saved a wretch like me!”

The girl rose from her feet and walked swiftly toward the singing, which was in the direction of the new barn. Lydia knew the structure had only recently been erected for the Collins’ livestock.

“ I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

Her nose wrinkled as she approached the barn from a most obnoxious smell, which added to the unpleasantness of the poor singing, but her curiosity drove her on. She turned the corner and found herself staring into an outdoor pen which was shaded by a spreading elm tree. Inside the pen was a colossal pink sow, and attached to the sow were ten piglets, all drinking milk raptly from the teats of their enormous mother.

Mr. Collins, Charlotte’s husband, was standing in a corner of the odiferous pen, singing badly, but he stopped when he observed Lydia.

“Ah, Miss Lydia! Do you sing?”

Her mouth dropped open briefly before she managed to sputter out a reply, “Er, yes, a little? Not as well as Lizzy ...”

“Far better than me, I am certain. Please do sing, Miss Lydia. Petunia likes it when we sing to her, and I must focus on closing her wounds. The beast was injured when a barrier inside fell over and cut her.”

Lydia stared at the man in bewilderment before dropping her gaze to the sow. The large animal had three gaping cuts along her back. How dreadful!

Hesitatingly at first, and then with increased enthusiasm, she began singing ‘Greensleeves’ to the pig.

Mr. Collins stepped inside the barn and quickly reappeared with a needle and thread. He pulled over a convenient stool, sat down, and began carefully stitching one of the wounds. Lydia ran out of verses to ‘Greensleeves’ before he was finished so she switched to another popular ballad while Mr. Collins darted in and out of the barn with two more sets of needle and thread, which he used to sew the other wounds shut.

“Thank you very much,” the man finally said, beaming. “You have been enormously helpful. Petunia obviously appreciated her songstress given how quietly she submitted to my medical care. Give me a moment, and I will join you.”

Lydia nodded, still shocked by the scene, and waited until her friend’s husband joined her. She almost immediately regretted that decision as Mr. Collins was exceedingly smelly.

“I am going to go jump in the stream, Miss Lydia,” the man said cheerfully, striding away from the barn.

“Jump into the stream?’

“Yes, I have a great deal of pig excrement on my person and would like to wash it away.”

“Cannot the servants clean your clothing?”

The stream was located very near the barn and as Lydia watched, the parson waded directly into the brook and sat down so that the water came up to his neck.

“It makes far less work for the servants if I wash myself off first in this manner,” the clergyman explained. “They have enough work without dealing with my thoroughly filthy clothing.

Lydia considered this with wonder. She had never even considered how her own dirty clothing would affect the servants. Why should it matter? They were there to serve, were they not?

Mr. Collins clambered out, water streaming off his loose clothing and walked toward the bench under the oak tree.

“I am going to sit outside in the sun to dry off a bit before entering the parsonage,” he declared. “It will reduce the drips on the floor. Do not feel you must wait outside with me, Miss Lydia.

The girl hesitated for a moment but then sat down at the extreme end of the bench where she would not be in danger of getting wet. She was not ready to go indoors and be subjected to yelling babies.

“How did you learn to stitch close wounds?” she inquired. “It seems quite extraordinary for a clergyman!”

“A very good question,” Mr. Collins replied in a judicious tone. “The truth is that animal husbandry inevitably requires some attention to the illness and injuries of the beasts in our care. I have taken the time to read books and learn from other local men who work with animals on a regular basis. I am also conducting a scientific experiment.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“I am studying the use of different kinds of materials to stitch up wounds. Did you notice that the strands were not all the same color?”

Lydia frowned at this, thinking back, “Oh yes! One was black and the other two were yellow.”

“Precisely,” Mr. Collins replied enthusiastically. “The black thread is actually horse hair, from the tail of a horse.”

“How strange! Why would you use something so odd when you can use normal thread, Mr. Collins?”

“Again, a most excellent question! First, cotton thread does not work in stitching wounds; it breaks down too quickly. Most doctors use silk thread if it is available. However, there have been reports in scientific literature that horsehair usually results in less infection than silk thread.”

The girl tilted her head in surprise, “Why would the type of thread be important?”

“I wondered that too. The fibers themselves are different, of course; horsehair is grown from a horse and silk from silkworms, but it occurred to me to wonder if the processing is important.”

“Processing?”

“Yes. The horsehair is boiled to make it more pliable. It is possible that perhaps it is the boiling process which is helping in some way.”

“I do not understand how merely boiling thread would ... would make a pig heal better!”

“That is why I am doing the experiment! The horsehair was boiled because it must be to make it pliable. One silk thread has been boiled and the other has not. I will study the wounds to see if they heal similarly. Of course, it is not a perfect experiment; the wounds are not identical. However, the alternative is to deliberately cut the animal to create wounds, and that would not be right.”

“No indeed,” Lydia agreed, shuddering slightly.

“So we will see,” the clergyman finished brightly.

Lydia mulled this over thoughtfully, “The thread is not hot when you use it, correct?”

“No, I let it cool down to normal temperatures.”

“It should not affect the healing of the wounds then,” Lydia declared in frustration. “How could it?”

“Many things are altered by being heated, are they not?” her companion inquired reasonably. “Bread dough becomes bread, for example. Raw meat changes into a far more palatable form for eating, even after it cools, and so on.”

“That is true. I admit I had not really thought about it before.”

“The world is full of amazing things, Miss Lydia,” the brilliant rector commented, gazing around in wonder. “It is a privilege when we are able to understand some small part of it better. And now I believe I have dried enough to enter the house, and I am quite ready for tea.”

Lydia rose to her feet and followed the man into the parsonage, her mind whirling busily. How odd to think about heat and its effect on food and horsehair and silk ...