Mr. Philips spent his days between the Gardiner warehouses, the counting-house, and various legal offices, trying to discover the true state of her uncle’s affairs. Elizabeth remained at Gracechurch Street, working side by side with the few servants who had not fled. There was John, the young footman, who possessed a strong back and very little confidence; Bess, the upstairs maid, who had wept over nearly every room the first two days but worked steadily through the tears; Cook, who ruled the kitchen as though grief were an impertinent caller to be shown out; and Mrs. Thompson, the young housekeeper, who seemed to have survived the past fortnight through nothing but resolve and tea.
“You know,” Mrs. Thompson said as she and Elizabeth knelt together before a large cedar chest in the bedchamber that had belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, “there are not many gentlewomen who would get their hands so dirty, even with so few servants.”
Elizabeth looked down at her hands, which were indeed smudged with dust and lavender from the sachets tucked into the chest. “Are there not? And how many gentlewomen have you known in all your aged years, Mrs. Thompson ?”
The housekeeper gave her a startled look, then laughed.
It was the first true laugh Elizabeth had heard from her.
“I shall have you know I am four-and-twenty, Miss Elizabeth, which is ancient enough when one has been made housekeeper two months before the whole household falls to pieces.”
“Four-and-twenty? I beg your pardon. I thought you were at least five-and-twenty.”
Mrs. Thompson shook her head, still smiling as she folded a tablecloth and placed it with the small pile of linens Elizabeth had decided must be preserved for the children. “If we are to be on our knees in dust together, I think you may call me Susie when no one else is by to be scandalized.”
“Very well, Susie. Though if you continue to call me Miss Bennet whilst we are both covered in cobwebs, I shall consider it a grave inequality.”
“Miss Lizzy, then,” Susie said, testing the name with a faint smile. “Your aunt called you that when she spoke of you, as do the children.”
Elizabeth’s hands stilled briefly upon the folded linen. There were still moments when grief struck without warning, sharp and breathless. A passing phrase. A familiar chair. The scent of her aunt’s lavender soap lingering in a drawer.
She swallowed and resumed her work. “She was very dear to me.”
“I know.” Susie’s voice gentled. “She spoke often of Longbourn. Of all of you, but especially you and Miss Jane.”
Elizabeth attempted a smile and turned to the next item in the chest: a christening gown, yellowed with age, folded in tissue. That, too, was set aside for the children. Almost everything else in the room had to be sorted by necessity — what must go to Longbourn, what ought to be kept in trust, what could be sold, what was too far gone to save. It felt a brutal sort of intimacy, sorting through the possessions of the dead and putting a price on what had once been no more than the ordinary furniture of a life.
“You said you had not been housekeeper here long?” Elizabeth asked, more to steady herself than from any true need to know.
“No. Mrs. Gardiner hired me just before Christmas. I had been upper housemaid in another household before that.” Susie tied one bundle of linen and reached for the next. “I came from Derbyshire originally. Mrs. Gardiner’s family knew mine a little. Not grandly, of course, but enough that when she heard I was looking for a better position, she sent word.”
“Derbyshire?” Elizabeth asked. “I have never been so far north.”
“It is a beautiful county. Hills everywhere, and great houses tucked among them as though the land itself chose where they ought to stand. My aunt, Mrs. Reynolds, is housekeeper at Pemberley. She gave me a place there as housemaid.”
Elizabeth glanced up. “Pemberley. I have heard the name, I think.”
“Most have. It used to be one of the grandest estates in England.” Susie lowered her voice slightly, though there was no one but Elizabeth to hear. “The old master was wild, though. Spent money as though coin grew upon hedges and never thought of what came after. My aunt secured a position for me in London when economies began to be necessary. But his son is a different sort entirely.”
Elizabeth returned to folding, though she listened with half her attention. It was oddly soothing to hear of strangers and distant places instead of death, flood, and legal complications.
“He serves in the militia now,” Susie continued. “Could have paid someone to go in his place, being who he is, but he would not. My aunt wrote that everyone in Lambton speaks very well of him for it. And before he went, he sold what he could and put the money back into the estate. Repairs for tenants, wages made good, that sort of thing. Imagine that—a gentleman selling his own luxuries to mend cottages.”
Elizabeth’s mouth curved faintly. “That does sound remarkable.”
“My aunt says he is proud, but not in the common way. More like… stiff because if he bends, something inside him may break.”
Elizabeth looked at her then, struck by the observation.
Susie flushed. “That was my aunt’s phrasing, not mine. She has known him since he was a boy. I daresay housekeepers know more of their masters than anyone realizes.”
“I do not doubt it.” Elizabeth set another bundle aside, thinking privately that Mrs. Hill knew enough of the Bennets to ruin them all if ever she chose to speak freely.
For a moment, the two women worked in companionable silence, the scrape of folded linen and the faint crackle of the fire the only sounds in the room. Elizabeth had not expected to find comfort in Gracechurch Street after all that had happened, and certainly not in the company of a young housekeeper from Derbyshire. Yet as Susie tied another bundle and began speaking of which linens might fetch a better price, Elizabeth felt, for the first time since the express arrived, that grief had not swallowed the whole world.
There was still work to do.
And work, at least, was something Elizabeth understood.
