A Walk with Jane Austen (20 page)

Chilham is the smallest train station I have seen yet. There were no cabs, not even a shack, no phone numbers posted on a sign anywhere. Everyone who got off the train with me disappeared. I started to walk in what seemed like the direction of town. I passed a tea shop and thought perhaps I should stop there to call a cab, but just beyond it was a signpost that said Godmersham. I remembered that Chilham was mentioned in my walking guidebook, so I looked it up there at the side of the road and found it was only two or three miles, but the writer recommended a back way through fields, and I couldn't figure that out. Better to stick to the road. It had stopped raining, although it was spitting a little. There was even a marked walking path beside the road, so I set out. What's two or three miles on a walking path by a country road in spitting rain to reach a village no one has ever heard of? I could hear Marianne from the pages of
Sense and Sensibility
saying, “It's not going to rain.” And anyway, it's nothing I mind at all.

The walking trail quickly veered off to the left, and I decided to follow the road instead. It started to rain again, harder, until it was raining so hard it seemed to be coming straight through my Gore-Tex jacket, under which I was sweating from the exertion. I tried to keep my hood up to keep my head dry, but it cut off my vision and eventually just annoyed me, so I took it down and let my head get soaked. The shoulder was gradually disappearing.

Fifteen minutes in, I knew it was a mistake. But I thought,
How much farther can it be?
Fifteen more minutes and the shoulder was completely gone, so I was walking in the road and jumping up on the bank between trees when I heard cars coming. Every car that went by—and they were going very fast—splashed me with water. The road curved so much that I thought how easy it would be for a car to whip around a corner and hit me dead-on. I was officially terrified. But now I was thirty minutes into the walk, and I know I can easily walk a mile in fifteen minutes, so I thought it really couldn't be that much farther.

I slipped on the wet grass and landed on nettles of some kind. All I could think was,
What if I had slipped into the road?
I passed a simple, expensive-looking house with handcrafted bronze gates. Feeling incredibly foolish, I rang the intercom, but the phone on the other end just rang and rang and no one picked up.

So I made it to a little clearing and stuck out my thumb and prayed very, very hard. A cabby went by without stopping. Loads of people alone or with families, completely immune to my crazy, drenched, desperate hand waving. And then the best cabby, William, went by in one direction, saw my pitiful thumb, turned around, and came back. Cue the trumpet voluntary. God saved me from my own stupidity.

“You're awfully wet,” William said. He drove me to Godmersham, first to the church and then to the big house, turned off his meter and sat and waited for me for twenty minutes while I walked through the fields to see the house. He wasn't creepy at all, which a girl might worry about in this situation. He had short dark hair, bright blue eyes, and a solid build. Nothing about him was messy.

Godmersham was glorious. It had stopped raining, and I walked into the fields under a heavy gray sky. You can't get into the house (at
least I couldn't find contact information for anyone), which is now a professional school of some kind. So I took the walking path through the sheep pasture, next to the cows, and up a hill into a cornfield to look down on everything. Its simple and grand, gorgeous red brick, classical lines with two rows of windows and two wings on either end and maybe more in the back. The house sits in the valley of the Stour, broad hills rising behind and in front of it. When Jane came to visit, they made a point of hiking (or walking as they called it) in the afternoons. I wish I had hours to explore.

Jane and Cassandra spent a great deal of time here, often separately, helping with household duties around the birth of the latest child. There were eleven children before Elizabeth died at thirty-five.
¹
Cassandra seems to have been Elizabeth's favorite. No doubt Cassandra was more compliant, Jane's wit more disconcerting. Jane's niece Anna said, “A little talent went a long way with the Goodneston Bridgeses [Elizabeth's family] of that period; &
much
must have gone a long way too far.”
²
And Jane, who loved to laugh at everyone, herself included, no doubt found material enough at Godmersham.

I got back in the cab and William said, “You're still awfully wet,” and drove me all the way back to Canterbury. We had a little bond going, William and I. When he found out about the Austen connection, he wanted to take me out to Goodnestone as well (which was the Bridges’ home, Edward's in-laws), but I couldn't afford another adventure. It felt wrong somehow though to just say good-bye to him there in the tourist district of Canterbury, feeling like he had saved my life.

At 5:09 p.m. in Faversham, on the train back, the sun came out. My feet were still soaked.

Margaret has made me promise never to hitchhike again. She laughed at me, of course (which I have no problem with because I am laughing at myself anyway), and has refused my help with dinner, sitting me on the couch with tea and biscuits while she makes quiche. I will miss her tomorrow when I leave. The view of Godmersham from the fields was worth everything. And I am full of quick-hearted joy, with a much more palpable sense of the hand of God in my life, which perhaps sounds ridiculous in light of the days events, but I'm thankful most of all that my own stupidity does not negate his goodness.

Jane came to Winchester to die. I think she knew that. She drew up her will in late April 1817 without telling any of her family. By the end of May, she and Cassandra were here in a house at 8 College Street behind some windy roads from the cathedral so Jane could be treated by the surgeon Mr. Lyford.
¹
He told Jane that he would cure her but soon privately told family members that there was no hope. In June everyone thought she was dying, but she rallied again and lasted until mid-July. Her sister, Cassandra, was there, and her sister-in-law Mary. Her brothers had been visiting, all but Frank, whose seventh child was just three months old and who may have agreed to stay home to keep their mother company.
²
At the end, Cassandra asked if Jane wanted anything, and she told her “she wanted nothing but death” and said, “God grant me patience, Pray for me Oh Pray for me.”
³

Early the next morning, she was gone.

Nearly everyone in Jane's family lived into their seventies or eighties. Her mother, who regularly suffered from all kinds of illnesses, like a “gouty swelling & sensation,” bile, “heat in her throat,” “an Asthma, a Dropsy, Water in her Chest
&C
a Liver Disorder”
⁴
would outlive her by ten years, her sister by nearly thirty. James died shortly after Jane, but Frank and Charles were both commanding ships in their seventies. Charles died at seventy-three of cholera in Burma, serving as rear admiral.
⁵
Frank lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one.
⁶
Edward lived to be eighty-five, and dear Henry almost as long.
⁷
In a world where sickness and death were so much more readily expected, the Austens were remarkably healthy. Jane was just forty-one.

She had been sick for a year and a half.
⁸
It was a strange illness no one understood at the time. It made her tired so that she often had to lie down. Her back hurt sometimes, and her skin went blotchy—black and white. She had fevers and difficulty sleeping and enough gastrointestinal problems to make her believe that bile—that general nineteenth-century malady supposed to be responsible for so much illness—was the cause of the whole thing. At the end, she would be stuck on a sofa during the days and brag of being able to get up from time to time and move from room to room. Some suggest this was cancer, but most now believe it was Addison's disease, which had yet to be named. With Addison's, the adrenal glands go askew, and the body's fine balance is disturbed.

Jane was always hopeful that it was going away. There were periods when she couldn't take her regular walks so she used a donkey cart to get out or even rode the donkey itself, which she sometimes found easier. She was always trying to get better, always expecting that she was
getting better. She wrote to her niece Caroline, “/ feel myself getting stronger than I was half a year ago, & can so perfectly well walk to Alton,
or
back again, without the slightest fatigue that I hope to be able to do both when Summer comes.”
⁹
And to Fanny, “Sickness is a dangerous Indulgence at my time of Life.”
¹⁰
Some days she rested on a group of three chairs in a row, never taking the couch for fear that her mom might need to lie down there and would never use it if she thought Jane might need it.

She finished writing
Persuasion
as the fog was setting in (not that there is any symptom of this fog in her writing), then started
Sanditon
and had to put it aside fairly quickly.

Her illness got worse with stress, and there was stress during this period in the Austen family. Edward had been dealing with a lawsuit that threatened all of his Hampshire properties, including Chawton and Steventon.
¹¹
Charles, whose wife and new baby had died a couple of years earlier, ran the naval ship he was commanding aground along the Turkish coast.
¹²
It was all proved not to be his fault, but he would have had to go through a court-martial, and it was a black mark against his name. Henrys banking business failed, which cost the family dearly.
¹³
Then Uncle Leigh-Perrot, Mrs. Austen's wealthy brother, died and left them nothing immediately, instead giving everything to his wife. The Austens had reason to hope for something from his will and were greatly disheartened—and if that sounds moneygrubbing, at that period of time, families were largely dependent on one another, and Leigh-Perrot was immensely wealthy compared to the Austens.
¹⁴
So Jane would get worse, and then she would recover and believe she was getting better, but it would never actually go away—only return again and again with a stealthy ferocity.

I think Jane had always been preparing for this moment. Reading her letters, there is an awareness and remembrance of what would be next. She was conscious of that other world that is a focus of Christianity. This life, however good or bad, was thought of as preparation for the next. In one of her letters to her brother Frank—Frank who was known as the devout sailor, the one “who knelt in church”
¹⁵
—she wrote of her growing fame, “what a trifle it is in all its Bearings, to the really important points of ones existence even in this World!”
¹⁶
(Actually, what Jane was concerned about was Henry's letting out her secret career as a writer.)

Jane, with humility that prevailed in spite of her sharp wit and sometimes sharp tongue, was not sure she was entirely prepared for death. In one of her last letters, sent when Jane still believed she was recovering, she tells her friend Anne Sharp, “the Providence of God has restored me—& may I be more fit to appear before him when I
am
summoned, than I should have been now!”
¹⁷
I can only imagine what she felt, to be so sick so young, to have hope because of the grace of God and yet feel like more could have been done, more years were wanted.

The Austens—particularly Cassandra—seem to have stifled their grief a bit in light of their great Christian hope of another world, of Jane being acceptable to God, and even of someday being together again. They were both devastated and stalwart, with tangible hope.