The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen (7 page)

We arrived in Worthing on a warm September afternoon, having traveled for two days. I had not seen Jane to speak to, for she had come back from her visit to Lady Bridges very late the night before our departure. The next morning we had been put in separate conveyances, she in a barouche with her sister and mother, and I in a carriage with Fanny and her parents. We had spent the night at Horsebridge near Battle and while Jane and her family went to see the Abbey I stayed with Fanny, supervising her meal and putting her to bed because Sackree was left behind at Godmersham with the younger children.

By the time we reached the seaside Fanny could barely contain herself, begging to be released from the carriage to go onto the beach. Her father seemed inclined to indulge her and said that we could all take a walk while the servants were making our rooms ready.

We came to a halt beside a white stucco house about the size of Henry’s home in Brompton. As I stepped down from the carriage and breathed in the salty air, I saw my parents, as clear as if they were standing before me. I reached out for the blue-painted railings that ran along the front of the house, for the ground beneath my feet seemed to buckle. I remember tensing the muscles of my eyelids in a vain attempt to keep the image from fading away. I saw them walking across the sand, Mama in what she called her seaside bonnet—the straw dyed blue and trimmed with white ribbon—and the cashmere shawl with the pine cone weave about her neck. The wind was taking the tails of the shawl and whipping them across Papa’s face, knocking off his hat, which he chased across the beach, both of them laughing as he raced it to the water’s edge.

My fondest memories of my parents were of such days by the sea. Ramsgate was the favorite haunt of my father’s, the place where we had spent our last carefree week together along with my cousins Catherine and Constance and my Aunt Edith. A fortnight after our return my mother was dead of the typhus fever that swept through London in the autumn of 1803. Catherine, Constance, and their mother died a week later. My father, who had never been the cleverest of men with his money, sank even further without Mama’s guiding hand. Within six months he had gone to join her and his creditors made sure that I was the only tangible reminder that he had ever walked this earth. It was his wine merchant—the one to whom he owed more than all the rest—who took pity on me. One of his other clients was Edward Austen, who happened to be in urgent need of a governess at the time. Some sort of bargain was made between them, the details of which I was never privy to. But it was a full year before I received anything for my labors beyond my bed and board.

Fanny was pulling at my skirts, chiding me for being so slow. “Come on,” she said, “I want to go collecting shells! Aunt Jane will help us, won’t she?” The others followed us across the road to the steps that led to the beach. The tang of the sea was mixed with other scents now: of oysters, whelks, and vinegar on the carts along the promenade; of rotting seaweed washed up by the tide; of donkeys, dogs, and people gently baking in the heat.

Seagulls tumbled above us as our feet became acquainted with the strange sensation of walking upon shingle. Fanny raced along, stopping every few seconds to crouch over some treasure that was scooped up into a little tin bucket she had carried with her all the way from home. Edward and Elizabeth walked behind her, with Cassandra and her mother following at a little distance. Jane and I fell into step behind them.

“Your company was sorely missed at Ashford.” Jane slipped her arm through mine. Her words set off a ripple of pleasure which I struggled to conceal.

“Oh?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Was Lady Bridges out of sorts?” I had observed Elizabeth’s mother many times and found her a most unpleasant, meddling sort of woman who used her title to intimidate all around her.

“Where should I begin?” she grimaced. “First of all she was cross with the Duke of Gloucester for dropping dead last Friday, which meant the ball at Deal was canceled. Then she was hatching a scheme to marry poor Harriot off to a grumpy old parson with hairy ears. When Harriot returned from London to find him waiting in the parlor, she turned and ran from the house. They say he is so much hated by his flock that when he married his first wife they sang the funeral hymn instead of the nuptial psalm.”

“Seriously?” I saw her lips were twitching mischievously. I wondered if this was another one of her tall stories.

“Absolutely true.” She grinned, crossing her finger over her heart. “And now I want to hear all about your trip to London. I hope you were not too fagged by the journey? Henry will talk people half to death when he has a captive audience.” She was smiling still, but there was an edge to her voice. If she was fishing, I was not going to take the bait.

“The journey passed quite quickly,” I replied, “and Henry had business to attend to so I saw little of him after we arrived.” I launched into a description of my visit to Signor Molteni, telling Jane of the spectacles and the enforced idleness I must now endure.

“Oh! I am sorry for your eyes,” she said, “but I will read to you every night, if you will let me!”

I replied that she was very kind, but I must not interfere with the entertainment of the family on their holiday. “Nonsense!” she cried. “I don’t expect we shall see much of Edward and Elizabeth in the evenings—they will be dining out with their friends—and by the end of the week they will be gone back to Godmersham, my mother with them. We shall be left a very snug three, and we will spend our days exactly as we please. Now,” she went on, hardly pausing for breath, “tell me more about London. It seems an age since I was there. How was Madame Bigeon? Did you meet Marie Marguerite?”

I began to describe the glimpse I had had of the life of the household in Brompton. I had not intended to mention Warren Hastings, but I found myself recounting the conversation about Eliza’s musical evening, at which point Jane interrupted me.

“Oh yes, I well remember it! I was seized upon by an insufferable woman—the wife of Eliza’s godfather, Mr. Hastings. She spent the whole evening criticizing the pianists with her mouth full of sweetmeats and macaroons—she left the servants black and blue, pinching them by the arm every time they strayed near her with a tray—and then she had the nerve to suggest that she could offer me something far superior by way of entertainment.” Here she paused and rolled her eyes. “Had she been anything
resembling
a civilized human being I would have been thrilled by her invitation to the opera; I had to accept, of course, for fear of offending Mr. Hastings. How a woman like that ensnared such a man as he I cannot fathom; he is as refined as she is coarse, as courteous as she is rude. I suppose I should not blame her; after all, nobody minds having what is too good for them.”

I laughed heartily at that, picturing a grizzled old dame with bulging cheeks hanging on to the arm of a silver-haired gentleman with fine bearing and a benevolent smile. “Madame Bigeon told me that Eliza’s parents met Mr. Hastings in India.” I could not resist the urge to probe deeper, now that she had provided the opportunity.

She nodded, kicking up a little shower of broken shells as her foot slid sideways on the lumpy surface of the beach. “My Aunt Philadelphia decided there were no good husbands to be found in England so she set out for India to find one. Mr. Hastings was on the same boat, but they did not meet properly until sometime after they arrived in Calcutta. She was married within weeks to a man called Mr. Hancock, who then, a few years later, went into business with Mr. Hastings.”

“And the horrible wife? Was she in Calcutta too?”

“Not at that time,” she replied. “She was married to someone else then—a German, I think. Mr. Hastings had been married too, but he was a widower when he got to know my aunt and uncle. He had a little girl who died and Eliza was named after her. My aunt was lucky to have a child herself: she was married for eight years before Eliza came along.”

A flock of tiny birds alighted suddenly on the stretch of wet sand between the shingle bank and the sea. Fanny ran at them, calling out, and they scattered like a shower of stones flung across the waves. As I watched them disappear I said: “I suppose Mr. Hastings treasures Eliza, having no living child of his own?”

“Yes, he does, and he has been her salvation. He put ten thousand pounds in trust for her when she was still a child—little did she know how much she would need it.”

Somewhere behind us a donkey began to bray and Fanny ran between us, catching our hands and pulling us around to see the beast, which had plucked off an elderly woman’s bonnet and was trying to eat the artificial strawberries that adorned it. I stared but did not take it in. I was thinking of the ten thousand pounds, calculating that if I worked for fifty years and saved every penny of my salary, it would not make a quarter of that sum.

“You cannot blame the donkey, can you?” Jane was saying. “The old dame should have chosen paper violets or silk roses; I cannot help thinking it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.”

The others had turned back at the sound of the hubbub on the beach. By the time the fuss was over we were halfway up the steps to the road. Edward waved us onward, standing guard as his gaggle of females made their way across to the house. Once inside, the business of allocating rooms got underway. Edward and Elizabeth were to have the largest one at the front of the house, which had French windows and a little balcony overlooking the sea. Mrs. Austen was given the chamber next door to them. At the back of the house were two more bedrooms, one of which Jane and her sister were to share and the other to be tenanted by Fanny and myself.

“It is a shame that Henry isn’t with us,” Mrs. Austen declared as we sat down to tea, “but where he would have slept, I do not know. I suppose the servants have taken all the attic rooms?”

“Yes, Mama.” Edward’s eyes darted to his wife as he turned his head toward his mother. I saw Jane shift slightly in her seat. “There are three rooms in the attic,” he went on. “Sayce has one, Roberts and the footman another, and the cook shares the third with the housemaids.”

“Didn’t Henry say that he might come later in the week, though?” Mrs. Austen persisted.

“I think not,” her son replied. “His business calls him back to Hampshire.”

“Oh?” his mother said. “He will be staying with James and Mary then, I suppose. Will you see him there, when you visit your estate at Chawton?”

“I don’t know, Mama.” Edward drew in a breath, lips pursed, as if he was tired of her questions. “You know as well as I do that Henry is a law unto himself. How long he will stay and whither he will fetch up next are a mystery to us all, I’m sure.” I could not see Elizabeth’s face at this point, for she had raised her tea cup to her lips. “Now, Fanny”—Edward turned to his daughter, wishing, so it seemed, to change the subject—“what do you say to a dip in the sea before dinner?” This produced predictable squeals of delight. “Will you escort her, Sharp? He put his hand in his pocket and pushed a sixpence across the table. “You must go directly, before the sun loses its strength.”

As I rose to my feet I saw that Jane had risen too. “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I do love to bathe in the sea.”

“Oh no, Jane!” her mother cut in. “You and Cassandra must help me to unpack! You can’t imagine how fagged I am with all this traveling! There will be plenty of time for bathing later on!”

I caught Jane’s eye across the table. I could guess just what she was thinking
: I am nine-and-twenty and still she tells me what I may and may not do! Would you be me?
What I would have said, could I have answered, I am not certain. I saw that, like me, she was a species of prisoner. Although she did not have to work for a living and had no husband to answer to, there were other constraints on the manner in which her life was conducted. Was it better to be told what to do by a domineering mother or an employer? In the latter case there was some financial reward, however small.

My mother had never tried to control me, despite the disappointment I caused her by refusing to enter the marriage market. I wondered if Jane had chosen spinsterhood or merely settled for it, as Cassandra had; and if it
was
her choice, was there a chance she had made it for the same reason I had? The next few days passed in a whirl of activity and my time was governed by Fanny, who woke up early every morning and threw open the curtains, eager to know what the weather would be. Mrs. Austen, who was herself an early riser, would usually take her down to the beach to buy fish, giving me a little peace before the merry-go-round began in earnest.

When they had gone, I would get back into my bed, listening to the squawking of the gulls outside the window. In the lulls in their banter I sometimes caught Jane’s voice through the wall, chatting away to Cassandra. How I envied them, those sisters. How I longed for that closeness, that intimacy, with a creature such as Jane. I was well aware that my time with her was limited, that once this holiday was over I knew not when I might see her again, and I found myself fighting a battle inside. I was wishing the days away, wishing Fanny and her parents to be gone so that I could make the most of those few precious weeks of Jane’s friendship, and yet I knew I would miss Fanny terribly: much more, I suspected, than she was likely to miss me.

On the Saturday evening Edward and Elizabeth went to dine with the Johnsons, a Kent couple who, like them, had rented a house in Worthing for the summer. Mrs. Austen was feeling unwell and had taken herself off to bed with a cup of tea. Cassandra had gone to visit a Miss Fielding, another native of Kent whom she had gotten to know on a previous visit to Godmersham. That left Jane and me to entertain Fanny until her bedtime.

It had begun to rain for the first time since we arrived, so a walk on the sands was not possible. Jane suggested charades, but Fanny said it would not be any fun with only three players and begged for a game of cards instead.

“I will fetch Mama’s pack,” she said, leaping out of her chair with her usual boundless energy. “I know where she keeps it.” She returned in less than a minute, clutching an exquisite little card case of tortoiseshell inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Look,” she said, turning it over and bringing it near to my eyes, “it has Mama’s name engraved on the back. It was her present when Louisa was born.”