Page 7 of The Last House in Lambton (Pride and Prejudice Variations #6)
CHAPTER SIX
I never expected to intrude upon Mrs Reynolds again.
Armed with her offer of support should I have need, I felt sufficiently bolstered to stand on my own two feet thereafter, and set out on a course to end my visit to Lambton better than I had begun.
And indeed, over the next several days, I enjoyed a few modest successes.
My first order of business was to procure a pork snout, rind, ears, and trotters, in addition to the bones. I also bought an iron pot suitable for the job I intended to undertake, thinking that if I ruined this one, at least I would not further enrage Mrs Smith.
In the three hours of the afternoon in which I boiled my concoction over a low fire, I also steamed cloves and rosemary in a kettle hung on a hook in the main fireplace. Immediately, the scented air gave me a sense of relief or perhaps simply the courage to persevere.
As it turned out, the pork jelly was a triumph. That is not to say it was better than any ever made, only that it was fit to eat. Mrs Jennings beamed at me in the morning when I presented it to her on a little porcelain plate .
She promptly spread a bit of it on her toast and said, “Dear Hannah, you must try some of this.”
When she mistook me for her sister, now long departed, Mrs Jennings was generally cast back into memories of her youth.
This seemed a happy time for her, and I prolonged her comfort by asking what she would wear to church or some other improvisation which led her to remember various details of her life.
After breakfast, I settled the lady in a chair by the window where she knitted in the dim light of winter.
I then ran Doreen to ground and nagged her into polishing the furniture with linseed oil—we could not get wax candles much less wax for polishing—and then we dusted the house from top to bottom.
While we worked, I made an effort with the mulish girl and learnt that she had started into service at the age of ten.
She came from a family of six children, and her father, who mined lime and then limestone, had died of a lung ailment.
Doreen was apparently the sole support for her mother and two siblings who remained at home.
She walked the seven miles home to the cottages near the lime pits every Sunday and returned by noon on Monday, a concession for which she was grateful to Mrs Burke, since most servants were only given half a day of leisure in a week.
Christmas was fast approaching, and I wondered what I should do for the servants.
My ineptitude at housekeeping had cost too much of Mrs Jennings’s pension already, and my own purse also suffered, yet something must be done for them.
It just so happened that the day following the furniture polishing was Sunday, and after Doreen had gone, I went up to her attic room.
I justified my curiosity on account of wanting to know how she lived.
I found a tiny room, cold as a tomb. She had a box containing the few items of clothing she possessed, and there on the cot, the copy of La Belle Assemblie I had brought with me and could not find.
She had also absconded with one of the forbidden tallow candles in order to peruse this contraband journal.
I should have done something about this theft, but she lived such a hopeless life of servitude, I rather admired that she had some source of interest at all.
On Monday, I spent time discovering what I could of the young kitchen maid, Penny.
She was also a child of a miner and had come from the same hamlet as Doreen, but she did not go home every week because her mother could not afford to feed her if she did.
Penny slept in the kitchen, which was at least warmer than the attic, but she had nothing of her own other than a bedroll and a Sunday dress, which might have fit her when she was nine years old.
Smith was a bit of an unknown. Since Mrs Jennings’s house was so modestly sized, and Mrs Burke had monopolised the space that served as servant’s quarters, there was no room left for a male servant.
As such, he reportedly lodged with the cook as a boarder, but as the days went by and I witnessed her general treatment of the man with slaps on the back of the head on the one hand and admonishments to tuck the scarf around his ears on the other, I began to suspect their adamant claims to be unrelated were specious, and they were likely married.
If my theory was true, I attributed their caution to fear of Mrs Burke’s old-fashioned management or perhaps a generally suspicious nature.
Whatever the reason, Mrs Smith continued to regard me with distrust. Clearly, she also regarded me with dark feelings of resentment ever since I threw away her favourite pot and then later, had the gall to suggest she could seek work elsewhere if she could not decently feed Mrs Jennings.
And it was on account of Mrs Smith’s smouldering resentment that I found myself once again trudging up the church road to Pemberley.
I walked in a constant drizzle of cold rain that day, and on this occasion, rather than pondering the frustrating whims of society, I thought wistfully of my family.
I was too busy in the daytime to think much of anything, but at night, as I sat in the dark, holding Mrs Jennings’s hand until she fell asleep, I had no choice but to cogitate on my life.
To my great surprise, it was my mother who came most often to mind.
Perhaps my rude introduction to housekeeping or my naiveté in thinking I could step into that role as if it were a mere sinecure caused me to ponder her decision to shield us from learning the age-old art of managing a house.
She had nearly bitten Mr Collins’s head off when he dared to compliment one or the other of her daughters for the potatoes he enjoyed at Longbourn, and I smiled to recall his look of consternation, as though he wished to blurt out in dismay, Do they not cook at all?
I had always classed Mama as too flighty to have set plans with regard to anything, but perhaps consciously or out of instinct alone, she educated her daughters strictly according to her aspirations for us.
We were never to dirty our hands over pork jelly, meet the sandman at the back door, haggle at a market, face down a debt collector, or outwit a sly shopkeeper.
We were to sew trifles and look pretty, manage a tea tray, dance all the steps of popular dances, and provide our company with lively conversation or musical entertainment.
It seemed this failure of initiation constituted her last line of defence for her brood, as though preventing us from becoming skilled at lower occupations would spare us the need to resort to them.
We knew precious little about what went on below stairs, nor were we sufficiently educated to be governesses.
And apart from being a housekeeper or a governess, the only marginally acceptable occupation for the unmarried and impoverished daughter of a gentleman was that of wife.
My sisters and I had been educated sufficiently for one, and only one purpose—that of marrying a gentleman of means.
Had she done us a disservice? Or had my mother in fact put a stake in the ground and made a declaration to the world that over her dead body would Mrs Bennet’s daughters be relegated to the meanness of work.
I would never know, for she acted on instinct alone and would fail to understand me if I questioned her philosophy.
I will own the dreariness of the landscape caused my reflections to tend towards the overly dramatic, or maybe I was more my mother’s daughter than I thought.
Either way, we were perhaps luckier than some in that we had the cushion of her brother and sister, upon whom she had no qualms of relying should we be orphaned.
But fate is unpredictable and anyone can suffer misfortune.
Our protection was thin indeed if we were to batten ourselves on the generosity of our uncles as our last resort.
Mr Philips earned a mere competence sufficient for his station in life.
And though Mr Gardiner was prosperous, I had to wonder if he would always be.
Trade was notoriously fickle, and he had children of his own to provide for.
But meanwhile, I was grateful for his generosity, having just last week received a little money from London after I wrote to my aunt that I had been forced to spend more than I should on account of a few ‘trifling misunderstandings’ at the shops.
Other than that one small confession, my letters to London had been composed of happy news.
Never in life would I admit to Mrs Gardiner a tenth of what I encountered in a village she thought of as ideal.
Nor would I tell her of Mrs Jennings’s mental deterioration, for if I had stated the case plainly, she would have come to Lambton and for such a duration and at such a time of year as to be pure folly.
No, I would prove to myself that I was indeed, to use my father’s words, ‘made of sterner stuff’. I would see the thing through without crying for help.