The transformation continued that night as I was going downstairs to retrieve a cup of warm milk for Charlotte. I found Sarah asleep at the kitchen table.
“Sarah,” I whispered.
Catlike, she stirred, opened a pair of green eyes, and stretched her freckled arms, curling her sooty fingers as though they were claws flexing.
“What is it, miss?” she yawned. “I’ve just had such a strange dream.”
“Mrs. Collins wants her cup of milk. She can’t sleep without it.”
“I’m glad you woke me when you did,” Sarah continued, stumbling to the stove. “Can you believe what I dreamed just now? I dreamed I was mistress of this house! Me! Mistress of Longbourn! It’s laughable, isn’t it? And everyone around me was calling me ‘Charlotte’ or ‘Mrs. Collins,’ including you, miss, and I could hardly move for being so fat. Someone had to push me down the hall and up the stairs ’cause I couldn’t walk on my own two legs.”
“Sarah, you’ll want to be careful how you talk about Mrs. Collins, even behind her back,” I warned, more for her sake than that of the impatient woman upstairs.
“The devil with Mrs. Collins!” Sarah cursed, becoming, for all of five seconds, less greasy-smocked human than auburn-haired goddess. We laughed together, for since Mama and Kitty had left, we’d become good friends, and I returned upstairs with “the mistress’s” milk. After this duty had been dispensed with and the cup washed and dried and replaced in the cabinet belowstairs, I was permitted to retire for the rest of the evening. In my room, I slipped out a single sheet of paper. I prepared a pen and a bottle of ink, and I began to write the story of innocent Sarah Ellis, a maid-of-all-work in a small but understaffed household who is regularly thrashed within an inch of her life by her overfed and frugal mistress. The mistress’s husband I described as a slender and snobbishly erudite young man two years her junior with a secret proclivity for wearing women’s bonnets and shawls. Sarah Ellis wakes up one morning to find herself in the bed of Mrs. Caroline Collingwood, and Mrs. Caroline Collingwood wakes up several hours later in a “small, confined room” belowstairs. I wrote until I had depleted all the candles, paper, and quill pens in my room, and the only survivor of my creative tempest remained a bottle of ink which could perhaps eke out another two sentences or three before outliving its usefulness.
When at last I laid down my pen, I read over what I’d written.
The twenty-first of October held special meaning for Mrs. Caroline Collingwood, mistress of the ancient house of Middlebourne in Bedfordshire County. For one, it was her birthday, and she had arranged several weeks earlier that it should be nothing less than a grand occasion with many people present in order to congratulate her on her accomplishment. This accomplishment, the aging of precisely one year since the previous twenty-first of October, also marked the anniversary of another singular event: her marriage to Mr. Aloysius Collingwood, a religious scholar whose article elucidating the four cardinal virtues of Saint Thomas Aquinas had received praise from sources as high as the bishop. He was a gentleman of truly delicate constitution, slender, with hands as soft as lambskin and veins of faintest blue, as though the blood in his body had been diluted in equal parts with icy water. To their neighbors, they could not have been a more unlikely couple. She was prone to being loud, and he so accustomed to whispering all his “good evening”s and “farewell”s that their closest friends instinctively bent their heads and craned their necks to hear him. Mr. Collingwood had come from a good family, and throughout his life a rumor persisted, never disproved or affirmed, that he had for an ancestor a duke who’d ridden into Agincourt beside the king. The superiority of Mr. Collingwood’s relations and the bestowment of a comfortable income from his late father had a very different effect on his wife than it did on his own diminutive person. For Mr. Collingwood, the security of wealth necessitated that he should turn his mind to greater, immaterial things, and thus he passed most of his evenings after supper with the composition of fine religious sonnets by candlelight. For Mrs. Collingwood, the possession of an immodest income meant that she counted among her dearest friends nearly all of the shopkeepers of her industrious little town.
The evening of the twentieth of October boasted no remarkable events for either of them. Mrs. Collingwood enjoyed her dinner of boiled chicken, sweetbreads, tongue, and venison, and Mr. Collingwood washed down the meat of two small prawns with a spoonful of cabbage soup. Waiting on both of them was an emaciated girl of yellow complexion and ginger hair whose name was Sarah Ellis, the only maid employed by the Collingwoods and responsible for a good many things that in any other house would have been divided between two or even three fit young women.
Dinner was nearly over, and all had gone smoothly and well until Sarah Ellis spilled gravy into the lap of her mistress. This was not, as Mrs. Collingwood instantly assumed, a malicious insurrection on the part of her maid. It was only a mistake caused by the many sleepless nights in which Sarah Ellis was obliged to sit belowstairs and polish the silver or finish the washing. But Mrs. Collingwood did not know this, and even if she had, she mightn’t have cared. So she called for Mr. Haines, who knew to bring Mrs. Collingwood her riding crop, and Mrs. Collingwood thrashed Sarah within an inch of her life using this monstrous instrument, until her own arms grew too tired and sore from the constant whipping of the poor girl’s back.
“That fool has no mind for work,” Mrs. Collingwood despaired to her indifferent husband once her victim had been dismissed. “And she despises me. She’d murder me in my sleep if she had the chance. Have you seen the way she looks at me?”
“Tut, tut, my dear,” Mr. Collingwood whispered and, taking another spoonful of soup, excused himself from the dinner table.
That night, Mrs. Collingwood retired in high spirits. She fell asleep with the taste of chicken in her mouth, and her thick fingers gripped the sheets of her bed as though they each held a large slice of cake. Sarah Ellis, too, fell asleep for the first time in many days, while in an undusted corner of the house that remained forgotten to all but one, Mr. Collingwood paired a new bonnet with a pretty shawl his wife had given up for lost.
The next morning, the house awoke to screams, no sooner in one quarter of the house than they began with equal fire and liveliness in another.
“Mr. Collingwood!” Mrs.-Collingwood-who-was-really-Sarah-Ellis screamed.
“Mrs. Collingwood?” Mr. Collingwood whispered doubtfully.
“Aloysius!” Sarah-Ellis-who-was-really-Mrs.-Collingwood bellowed, coming up the stairs from the small, confined room she had slept in all night. “What on earth is happening here?”
That was when she set eyes on herself and screamed. To the Cook and the Gamekeeper, to the Butler and the Valet and the Footman, all of whom had run upstairs to see what was the matter, Mrs. Collingwood could be no other person than who she appeared to be. Little surprise then that when she fainted, no one in the whole group of able-bodied men ventured even halfheartedly to catch her.
THE NEXT MORNING, I awoke at my desk with a sore head and a throbbing hand. I heard a rash of hurried footsteps outside; then a fist rapped like an angry woodpecker on my door before the real-life inspiration for Mrs. Caroline Collingwood entered. From the looks of it, she was most upset about something.
And yet she smiled, too.
“Mary, do you not know what time it is? It is nearly a quarter to ten. And you aren’t even dressed, by God!”
I began to offer apologies for my remiss behavior, but she batted these skillfully away.
“Never mind all that, Mary,” Charlotte scolded. “We have a visitor, and you must come immediately and not keep our guest waiting any longer!”
I smoothed the front of my dress, feeling a flash of excitement. “Has one of my sisters come? Is it Jane? Or perhaps Lizzy and Kitty traveled together from Pemberley to see me?”
“No, no, and no!” Charlotte repeated, flustered. “It’s Mr. Darcy!”