Page 11 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)

CHAPTER TEN

T he pease soup was the best I had ever tasted.

Never mind that I had rarely had such homely fare at Longbourn.

My mother would never in all her life serve a soup that was not at least half made up of cream, much less something served to sailors on blue-water passages to Java.

My success was slightly overshadowed, however, by the gift of edibles brought by Mr and Miss Darcy.

Ah well. I could hardly begrudge Auntie the relish with which she nibbled at a slice of Dutch-style cheese or the smoked trout that seemed to melt in her mouth, or later, the dried apricots dusted with sugar and stuffed with almonds.

These garnishes to our pauper’s fare threw me into thinking of meals I had enjoyed at home or in London, and I began to pine for my family.

This longing for home became acute on Christmas Day.

I pushed it away by once again doing battle with the cookstove and, in a new endeavour, the spit in the hearth.

Before Mrs Smith had left, I had bespoken not one, but two geese.

The first she prepared and set to roasting so that we could see how the thing was done.

The second was delivered to me by the butcher’s boy for a pretty penny the day before Christmas.

Between Doreen, Penny, and me, we eventually had our goose roughly trussed up.

“I do hope you removed all the pin feathers,” I fretted at Penny, as I took my turn spinning the slightly mangled bird over the coals. Meanwhile, armed with my apron and brown wool once again, I tackled the awesome enterprise of a suet pudding.

I did not have Mrs Reynolds’s endorsement to take it on. Rather, I been stupidly emboldened after achieving a mere soup. And having read the instructions from Mrs Kettleby’s Collection of Receipts in Cookery , I felt ready to conquer a truer challenge than the reconstitution of dried peas.

Thankfully, we did not have to rely on my pudding for dinner. It was a stodgy clump fit to be hurled at someone’s head in one of those crude comedies at Cheltenham. Penny, however, said she had never tasted anything more delicious, and I gave her leave to stuff herself.

We had been spared my pudding because that morning we had received a delivery from Pemberley.

This was a box containing a beautiful Christmas pudding, lined with glistening plums shining with an apricot glaze and decorated with delicate sprigs of sugared mint leaves.

I was no stranger to lovely puddings, but this particular one was light, heavenly and warmly spiced.

I sighed to taste what I would never be able to produce.

The goose was marginally better than my pudding, though a little dry, but I did surprise myself with the tastiness of the pickle I had put up three days earlier.

I rounded out our little feast with more delectables from Miss Darcy’s hamper, and when we could not eat another bite, I gave Mrs Jennings a new lace cap and a pair of flannel mittens to wear at night.

On behalf of Mrs Jennings, I gave Doreen the elephantine shawl.

For Penny, I had bought a more suitably sized Sunday dress from the local rag seller.

She wept over this second-hand garment as though it were made of silk, threatening to dampen my already lowered spirits with such overwhelming gratitude.

Thus, I made the hasty decision to make myself merrier by doing more for the maids and announced I would send them both home to their families for the night.

I gave Doreen the coins she would need to secure their passage on a dairy cart that passed that way, and sent them off with baskets filled with potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and onions, along with the remains of the goose and my stodgy pudding.

In a flash of inspiration, I had also packed up a half a dozen each of the tallow candles stored in the still room and a cake of soap cut in two pieces to share, as I was perpetually coaxing the girls to bathe more often and hoped they would take the hint.

My gift to Smith, who agreed to sleep in the kitchen meanwhile so we would not be left completely alone, was a small and impersonal sum of money. I felt mildly guilty at this slight, but his face brightened into a toothless smile, and with that, I closed the book on Christmas in Lambton.

Letters and packages had come from Hertfordshire and London, though I was slighted by my mother in a significant way.

I managed to brush off this setback with news from Mrs Gardiner that Jane’s spirits were rising, the children had all grown plump, and Mr Gardiner had given her a necklace of gold as a gift.

Jane sent me a silk scarf and a tearful letter full of love.

Mary wrote me out a fairly complete description of the vicar’s Christmas homily and included an embroidered bookmark with her letter, Kitty sent me a long list of grievances against Lydia and a ribbon, and Lydia wrote me a short letter about how great a favourite she was with all the officers in the militia and a promise that she would give me one of her ribbons when next she saw me.

My father sent me a note and a book of essays, which would have thrown me over the moon if I were not forced to sit in gloom with nothing but firelight every evening.

My mother sent me nothing at all, but Mrs Hill sent a handkerchief embroidered with my favourite bluebells.

In the days following Christmas, Mrs Jennings and I continued to forage for our sustenance from the depths of the large hamper in the kitchen.

The old lady delighted in every new discovery, such as a tin of cinnamon-flavoured biscuits, which I doled out to her with unbecoming stinginess, before hiding them along with a tin of Indian tea leaves.

These I hoarded against the unlikely necessity of having visitors and the wish to serve them something of unexpected quality, thereby perhaps earning Mrs Jennings a particle of respect.

I had puzzled over why the widow was so thoroughly neglected by the neighbourhood but gradually came to understand, through the generosity of Mrs Edmonton’s tongue, that Mrs Burke had guarded her too well.

She had apparently refused almost everyone who called, and eventually, the message was effectively related that Mrs Jennings did not like company.

This saddened me, but I could not blame Mrs Burke.

I understood her only too well. She seemed to care for my great-aunt and would rather see her lonely than laughed at for her failing wits.

The housekeeper’s strategy of treatment for this malady might have also been to blame.

Auntie would have been forced to a constant recitation of who was who and what was what, and though willing to repeat what she was told, she must have been exhausted by the effort.

I was not convinced that memorisation would solve a loss of memory. The approach I preferred was that of letting the lady enjoy whatever memories remained, and if she called me Hannah or Madeline, or even, upon occasion, Mrs Darcy, I did not correct her.

Well, perhaps I did not prefer the references to that name.

Mr Darcy had impressed me from the very beginning as a proud, unhappy man.

More damning than his disposition was the likelihood he had ruined Jane’s chances with Mr Bingley.

The gentleman had certainly ruined Mr Wickham’s chances of a living with the church, he sneered down his nose at my family in particular, and he apparently enjoyed Miss Bingley’s cutting remarks.

Unfortunately, the illustriousness of the Darcys’ notice back in the dark days of her husband’s illness had left a deep impression on the otherwise blank slate of Mrs Jennings’s brain.

This impression had been brought back to life by the arrival of the son and daughter, whose physical appearances were similar to the parents.

And the memory was further prevented from sinking back into the fog of the past by the constant reminders of the name of Darcy.

Mrs Edmonton questioned me unrelentingly as to why the Darcy coach had come to our house.

Thankfully, she did not pause for breath so as to force me to answer her.

Instead, she formulated various conclusions of her own—most notably, that they had discovered that Widow Jennings was very old and wished only to see the inside of the house in case Mr Darcy wished to buy it.

“Buy it?” I interrupted her. “Have you ever seen Pemberley, Mrs Edmonton?”

Seen Pemberley! She had practically been born there!

The woman did not like my insinuation at all and went on at length, vehemently claiming that Mr Darcy owned all manner of properties in Lambton, that he was well on his way to buying the entire village for annexation to his estate, and that she had heard he was interested in her own house, which was exceptionally well-built and fitted out with every modern convenience.

After many such visits, I finally unravelled the mystery of Mrs Edmonton’s persistence in pursuing our acquaintance, though she often left our house in a lather of frustration.

Mrs Edmonton was herself also cast out, per se.

She had a little money and a house—the second-to-last house in Lambton, as it so happened—but these were acquired from suspicious sources, or so claimed Doreen in a low voice of intrigue.

No one believed she had ever been married, and some thought she had had a career in an illegal trade of one kind or another.

The maid had then bestowed upon me a look of squinty-eyed insinuation, which I chose to ignore.

Honestly, I would rather not know what business Mrs Edmonton had engaged in, for I had made the mistake of admitting her into Mrs Jennings’s house.

I attempted to comfort myself with reminders that gossips were prone to concocting the worst, most salacious stories.

The woman most likely had her money from smuggled French perfume or some such, and I put her from my mind.