Page 5 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)

CHAPTER FOUR

L ambton, like so many villages in England, was built up on both sides of a long road.

The village high street had once been a mere track from coal beds to the market town of Chesterfield.

The mines, long since stripped of coal, lime, and lead ore, had been abandoned.

But the settlement continued, having survived by means of the quarrying of limestone and the production of milk and cheese, as well as the occupations of commerce required wherever people settled.

Naturally, anywhere prosperity was sufficient, a church was built—in Lambton’s case, the All Saints Church—and where there was a church, houses sprung up around it like mushrooms surrounding a stump.

Unfortunately for me, Mrs Jennings’s house was situated on the main road at the tail end of the village itself, north of the church, the shops, and the market.

This made for a long walk no matter where I went, and since the widow did not keep a carriage or even a donkey cart, I went everywhere on foot.

Perhaps I should have sent Smith. I am certain Mrs Burke did so. However, after sending him to the post office and seeing him return three hours later with one letter from Mrs Gardiner for Mrs Jennings, but having forgotten to enquire for my own, I chose to go myself.

I was, after all, a habitual walker, and daily errands offered me an escape from my confining circumstances.

Lambton, however, was fast curing me of my love of this particular form of exercise.

For one thing, it was December. By the eighth day after my arrival, it had rained for eight days running.

The dreary wet days and frigid nights, compounded by a perpetually damp coat, hems, boots, and bonnet, were more miserable than they would have been had I been exploring the wooded hills that overlooked the town.

My arms, used to carrying little more than a sprig of juniper or a clump of wildflowers, often ached from the weight of baskets and parcels as I lumbered from the shops to the last house in the village where Mrs Jennings lived.

For whatever reason, the town had grown in all other directions save the one I so often went, which left us with only one neighbour on the south side and no one across the road.

It was perhaps just my poor luck that our only neighbour was Mrs Edmonton, who sat at the window in her parlour all day to make note of my comings and goings.

I passed her with a basket of baked goods in a drizzle on Friday afternoon and wished I could stick my tongue out at her as would my youngest sister.

Burdened by cabbages and eggs, I passed her again in a rare lull between cloudbursts after the Saturday morning market.

Inevitably, our neighbour arrived at Mrs Jennings’s door within ten minutes of seeing me walk past in order to remonstrate with me on the quality of bread I chose or to wonder aloud why I did not send Smith to the market with the barrow.

I made that error once and had a root cellar full of sad carrots, spongy potatoes, and a wheel of cheese caked in mould as a result.

But Mrs Edmonton never gave me the opportunity to explain even that much, for she talked continuously.

That was bad enough, but the woman also had the poor manners to enquire as to the smell of the house when she visited.

I coolly blamed the candles, which led to a quarter of an hour of being told she had predicted our troubles in that regard, but in truth, sheep’s fat was not the cause of the smell in the house.

I had early on opted to send us all to bed at dusk, rather than burn tallow.

I had a very modest purse of coins at that time, counterbalanced by a rather hefty degree of pride, both of which deterred me from the degradation of returning to the chandler to be laughed at as a fool and charged a premium for wax.

Besides, I was in a constant state of physical exhaustion, and poor Mrs Jennings became truly pitiful once night set in, for she did not really know where she was or who had the care of her.

Thus, we lived in a state that bordered on perpetual darkness.

But with regard to the true cause of the lingering odour Mrs Edmonton found so objectionable and that still clung to the rugs, curtains, and carpets, I was too mortified to confess to our neighbour that I had tried my hand at making pork jelly.

Only the stench coming from the chandler’s rivalled that of the vile concoction over which I had perspired for five full hours.

In the end, I did not have sufficient cruelty to make Penny scrub the pot and sacrificed both pot and its contents to the sustenance of the ancient mastiff that lurked behind Mrs Edmonton’s house.

This unfortunate decision resulted in a declaration of war on the part of the cook. And though I went to Stevenson’s on Monday morning and brought home a replacement pot, paid for out of my own meagre purse, nothing the cook prepared would ever taste the same again.

“A new pot canna just get bought and boil up anything fit to eat in under five years!” Mrs Smith had bellowed .

You would have thought I had murdered her firstborn child. And as if to prove her point, while she had only ever produced passably edible food, she then began to set before us nearly inedible and unrecognisable fare.

While the tension in the kitchen grew thick, I had other concerns—most notably the regularity with which Mrs Jennings became frightened in the late evenings.

The dark seemed to conjure every feeling of abandonment, of threat, and of overwhelming grief.

This was terribly distressing to me because I could see the loss of her memory left the lady susceptible to the very possibilities that flashed into her uncertain mind as though they were real.

I do not know what was contained in the sleeping draught I gave her every night, but I was grateful that once she fell asleep, this potion helped her to stay soundly oblivious and thereby escape her terrors.

Thankfully, the old lady recovered her sweet optimism most mornings, and I believe a naturally happy disposition aided her in this regard.

After Doreen finished helping Mrs Jennings to wash, I dressed her in her silk robe and slippers, pinned her thin white braid into a neat bun under a warm flannel cap, tucked the blue shawl over her lap and the ivory one over her tiny shoulders, and we sat down to breakfast. Directly after I introduced myself as Elizabeth-Bennet-from-Hertfordshire-niece-to-Mrs-Gardiner-in-London, she invariably asked me the same question day upon day.

“Is there any pork jelly, Madeline?”

“No, Auntie, not today.”

I had surrendered perhaps too easily, but Mrs Jennings found it easier to think of me as her own familiar relation than a more complicated—and unknown—great-niece.

She could sometimes, for nearly three quarters of the day, remember who I was when she believed me to be fourteen-year-old Madeline Frye, my own Aunt Gardiner .

Out of compassion, I allowed her this small error, for I had become increasingly protective of her, given the severity of her debility of retention.

And while I congratulated myself on how well I cared for my elderly ‘Auntie’—how I held her hand at night until I was certain she was soundly asleep, and how I entertained her by singing songs heard in nurseries everywhere as we sat over our needlework—I could not claim success so long as she pined for pork jelly.

Short of begging Mrs Edmonton for some of hers, which I would never do, I came to no solution.

Even a visit to the local apothecary, Mr Kelly, the man Mrs Burke had warned me against, had been fruitless.

I had gone into his tiny shop as a last resort, and once my eyes had adjusted to the dimness of the room, I had asked him if by chance he sold pork jelly.

A man with an apparently gloomy disposition to match his establishment, he grudgingly pulled a jar off the shelf, blew a half an inch of dust off the lid, and thrust it forwards for my examination.

“How much is it?” I asked tentatively, striving not to sneeze and regretting my enquiry in the first place. He named a price, I declined on the grounds of thrift, and left his shop, thus extricating myself as politely as I could.

I then went to the small bookseller’s to search out any reference I might find that would inform me about jellies and any other housekeeping matters.

Other than a pamphlet on a formulation for the elimination of black beetles in a kitchen and another on the multiple uses of carbolic, both of which I purchased for a penny apiece, I left as ignorant as I went in.

My last errand of the day was at Stevenson’s, the sundries shop.

I did not go for the purpose of finding pork jelly—they did not sell that sort of thing—but because Mrs Jennings was in need of yarn for her knitting.

The dear was prolific with her needles and had worked a shawl large enough to comfort an elephant before coming to the end of her skein.

Doreen had whispered that Mrs Burke pulled out half the mistress’s stitches and wound the yarn up again every night since the poor lady never could tie a knot.

But I did not have the will or the resolution to execute such a drastic economy.

Besides, I thought it the basest form of trickery to deceive a person so crippled of memory.

Thus, I stood before the yarn and was on the verge of selecting a ball of ordinary cream wool when I began to listen to the lady at the counter who was transacting her business with the primary shopkeeper.

“I will have two pints of carbolic, the pine wax, and three lengths of the ticking—not that one, the other—yes.”

I had been caught by the reference to carbolic, so lately on my mind, and I surreptitiously eyed her as she went through her transaction.

She was dressed plainly, almost severely, but in a coat of such obvious quality and warmth that I envied her.

But it was her carriage of authority I truly envied.

I could not help but notice she was treated with twice the respect I had ever received anywhere in Lambton.

I dawdled by the yarn until the woman finished her purchases and left, before I went to the counter.

“Who was that lady?” I asked of the junior clerk sent to manage my inconsequential purchase.

“Mrs Reynolds. She is housekeeper at the great house.”

“The squire’s housekeeper?”

“No, miss. She keeps Pemberley.”

I stood in arrested silence for a few seconds too long.

“Miss?”

“Thank you,” I said, taking my parcel. “Pemberley is near Lambton, then?”

“Just down the church road.”

“Is that so? Do you happen to know if Mr Darcy is at his estate for the festive season? ”

He openly smirked at whatever far-fetched social aspirations I might be harbouring, and said, “He brings his sister from London any time now, so’s we hear.”

My walk home in a determined pelting of rain was pensive enough that I barely noticed my drenching.

I knew Mr Darcy hailed from Pemberley in Derbyshire, for Miss Bingley had mentioned it often enough.

Yet, Derbyshire was an entire county, and it had never occurred to me that his house would be anywhere near Lambton.

I could only shake my head in perplexity at a proximity I had not suspected.