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

CHAPTER FIVE

D irectly after breakfast the following morning, I stood Doreen and Penny together in the kitchen, announced I would be gone for several hours, and sternly suggested they attend to their mistress in my absence, lest they suffer the consequences of my displeasure.

The cook dared to make a small noise of disgust, prompting me to speak to her perhaps too candidly.

“And I hope that soup is edible, Mrs Smith. Your mistress seems weak today, and if she becomes too ill to sit at the table, she will only need broth, which Penny can make, and you can find employment at the house next door.”

With that stern admonishment, I walked to Pemberley.

I took a gravel track just behind Mrs Jennings’s house that went through a fallow plot of ground and intersected with the church road heading east of Lambton through a cut in the hills.

I had worn one of my better dresses, hitched up to keep the hems dry.

Bundled up to my chin to protect my coat collar from the wet, sporting a velvet calash and matching reticule, and wielding a large umbrella, I was armed for my errand .

For once it was not raining, which was not to say it would not do so at any minute, but for the moment, I was thankful for the reprieve and took in the scenery I passed.

I imagined what the village might look like in summer when the scrub forest that dotted the hills turned green.

In sunlight, perhaps the limestone of the buildings would not seem so dingy, even less so if the flower boxes were kept full of pansies and violets.

In all likelihood, Lambton was a pretty place to visit if one arrived here in spring and was noticed as a visiting gentleman’s daughter.

I had expected such treatment. I had felt entitled to the respect and interest, in fact.

And if Mrs Jennings had been in her right mind, if she enjoyed visitors and went to church on Sundays, as I had assumed, she would have introduced me properly. My station in life would have been quickly known by everyone, and I would have been treated accordingly.

Even my aunt and uncle did not anticipate—they could not have imagined—that Mrs Jennings had no friends or visitors, and she would not remember them if they came.

Her forgetfulness left her isolated and ignored in the house farthest up the road, and in consequence, I was classed as the nobody come to take Mrs Burke’s place.

I could hardly go around claiming to be a gentleman’s daughter from an estate in Hertfordshire.

This sort of self-promotion had the exact opposite effect it intended and earned heaps of disgust by persons of every walk of life.

And while I had not gone to that extreme, I had comported myself as I always did at home, thus earning the general dislike of the entire neighbourhood for the sin of putting on airs.

That, compounded with my youth and inexperience, made me the butt of everyone’s joke in the village. And while I would customarily have done something to rectify my standing, I hardly had time even to consider it. From the first moment of my arrival, I had been overwhelmed.

Every step I took towards a rich man’s estate reminded me of the facts of my life, and I pondered my situation.

I may have been a gentleman’s daughter, but our family clung to the very last rung on the ladder of respectability.

Our relations were uninteresting. Mr Collins, Mr and Mrs Philips, and even, unfortunately, Mr Gardiner’s profession dragged at our feet as we dangled precariously over a fall into a different class altogether.

My association with Mrs Jennings had shown me this in dramatic fashion, for if my aunt and uncle had been landed relations, things would have been vastly different for Mrs Gardiner’s widowed aunt.

Unconsciously perhaps, I had considered all this before.

I flaunted rules and restrictions as a way of despising the system of power which threatened to undo us.

After all, we could not be hurt by a classification of status if we refused to bow and laughed at it instead.

I claimed to care nothing at all about who was who, even rubbing the nose of the likes of Mr Darcy in his own snobbery.

Yet Lambton had educated me a little on why Caroline Bingley spent every waking moment grasping at whatever shreds of superiority she could invent.

This life, the one in which I had been unceremoniously dunked, was but a foretaste of the spinsterhood my mother so dreaded for us.

Perhaps the reality of our precarious future had also caused my father to resort to caustic humour as a means of denial and self-protection.

I reached the church road and walked the hump between muddy ruts, searching the side of the lane for anything beautiful to look at and finding nothing save dead grasses, bent and crushed into mud, and the bare, thorny branches of nearby brambles.

I looked up and searched the grey December clouds for some brightness, some happy thought at the end of my sombre contemplations.

All that came to me was a sort of resolution.

I would always and forever despise a system of hierarchy that would relegate a sweet, old lady such as Mrs Jennings to a life of solitary neglect, that would bring out the inherent meanness in chandlers, butchers, and shopkeepers, and would sanction the small cuts that even the lowliest kitchen maid must perpetually suffer from her so-called betters.

I had been treated to all these slights in Lambton, and as such, I would never in future, out of pride and perversity, resort to any version of this behaviour if I could help it.

Pemberley was not precisely ‘just up the church road’ as I had been told at Stevenson’s sundries shop.

I arrived at last, and from the aching of my feet, gauged the distance to be farther than Netherfield Park was from Longbourn. Nevertheless, I persevered, for I had nothing better to do than to sit in Mrs Jennings’ smelly house and read about the wonders of carbolic.

The estate, which stood majestically in a vast, exquisite park, was visible for nearly half a mile as I walked down the long hill, past the lake and over a bridged fall of water.

I admit to being startled by its grandeur and shocked at the apparent wealth of its owner.

And while I was slightly overborne by the place, I strove for dignity as I went to the front door.

Before I could sound the knocker, the great doors opened, and I was greeted by an underbutler, I surmised, since the man was fairly young.

The expression on his face was a perfectly schooled combination of welcome and dismissal.

He was prepared to do either, depending upon the terms of my application.

“I would like to see Mrs Reynolds if she is available,” I said.

“Very good, Miss…”

I handed him my card. “Miss Elizabeth Bennet.”

Thankfully, I was not asked to wait outside on the grand portico, but I was hardly brought fully into the house either.

I was directed to a bench, set off to the side against the wall by the entrance—no doubt a place where every unknown was sent to await his or her fate upon entering such a house.

The underbutler, Mr Brown as I overheard him addressed, spoke to a footman who went down the hall.

At no time was I to be left alone, it seemed.

Some minutes of waiting ensued, but I was eventually escorted to Mrs Reynolds’s office.

I curtseyed and said, “Forgive this intrusion, Mrs Reynolds, but I have no other sources, and I have come to ask for your advice.”

“Yes, Miss Bennet?” she said, glancing over my person and taking my measure, no doubt.

“I am visiting Lambton from Hertfordshire, come to assist Mrs Jennings.”

“I do not believe I know Mrs Jennings.”

“She is a widow who inherited the Frye house. Her housekeeper, Mrs Burke, upon whom she relies for all manner of assistance and support, was called away. My aunt, who lives in London is Mrs Jennings’s niece, and she herself could not come. She has four young children and a busy life there.”

“Oh, I see. I believe I have seen the lady at church some years ago, though we have not been introduced. How may I help you?”

I must have passed the minimum requirements for being noticed by a woman of Mrs Reynolds’s position, for she motioned me to a chair .

I gratefully took my seat and said, “You must think it passing strange that I have applied to you for help, but Mrs Jennings has no friends to speak of, and I am a stranger here, treated with reserve wherever I go.” I then smiled a little sheepishly and said, “Mrs Reynolds, I wonder if you would tell me how to make pork jelly?”

The housekeeper looked surprised, but even so, she seemed to relax just a little. “Certainly,” she said, looking at me with outright curiosity.

“I suppose I should explain such a silly request, but it would take an hour of your time. Suffice it to say, Mrs Jennings asks for it every morning, and I would very much like to give her what she wants. She is very poorly, you understand.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” Mrs Reynolds said, taking a sheet of paper from her desk. We sat in silence as she dipped her quill in and out of the ink pot, scribbled for a few moments, and sanded her paper.

When she handed me a list of instructions for pork jelly, I skimmed over it eagerly and said, “Oh! I see my mistake.” I looked up with a smile of chagrin.

“From beginning to end, I did everything wrong, but perhaps the worst was I did not skim the impurities. Nor did I even think to season it with lemon and bay leaf. You can imagine the result.”

Mrs Reynolds unbent enough almost to smile. “Boiled offal can be quite offensive,” she conceded.

“And the smell seems to have taken up permanent residence in the house,” I said, standing.

“If you steam a kettle with cloves and rosemary in the rooms affected, you might enjoy fresher air after a few days,” she said, also standing. “If there is ever anything else you need, Miss Bennet, you may apply to me.”

I apologised again for my intrusion, thanked her sincerely for this unasked for boon, and walked the long road back to Mrs Jennings’s house with an entirely new perspective.