Jane Austen Stole My Boyfriend (6 page)

‘There, Sir Anthony, there sits the deliberate simpleton who wants to disgrace her family, and lavish herself on a fellow not worth a shilling.’

I felt Tom Fowle, Cassandra’s penniless fiancé, shake with silent laughter at my side as we waited in the wings, but I was too fascinated by Eliza’s gown to take much notice
of him.

I could well imagine her dancing in front of the King and Queen of France in this magnificent outfit. Her gown, like my own, had panniers, but poor Mrs Austen had never possessed anything like
this creation of a bodice and petticoat of pale green lutestring (I think it is called that – a sort of glossy silk fabric anyway), all covered with a transparent gown of silver gauze –
and the petticoat and sleeves were puckered up and tied with silk ribbons and small silk violets. Her dark hair was heavily powdered to a silver colour and rose so high on her head that I suspected
that she had a small cushion embedded in it.

A huge burst of clapping rang out after she had said her first words. The audience of the neighbouring families – the Digweeds, the Terrys, the Chutes and the Lefroys – all obviously
knew Eliza and were expecting fun from her.

I had never seen her act so well.
‘You thought, miss!
‘ she shrieked at Cassandra. ‘
I don’t know any business you have to think at all – thought does not
become a young woman!
‘

And then, advising Cassandrato’
illiterate
‘thethought of her beloved from her mind, she had everyone on stage roaring with laughter. Whenever she pronounced the wrong word,
like substituting ‘
illiterate
‘ for ‘
obliterate
‘, she put such emphasis on it that even the dullest and sleepiest audience could not fail to get the joke.

James was splendid as Sir Anthony, and Mr Austen almost fell off his chair from laughing when he thundered magnificently:

‘
Objection! – Let the boy object if he dare! – No, no, Mrs Malaprop, Jack knows that the least demur from any son of mine puts me in a frenzy directly. My process was always
very simple – in their younger days, ‘twas “Jack, do this”; – if he demurred, I knocked him down – and if he grumbled at that, I just knocked him down
again.
‘

When Eliza said in her best Mrs Malaprop fashion: ‘
Nothing is so conciliating to young people as severity . . .
‘ she gave a lovely artistic pause at the wrong word
‘
conciliating
‘ and at that very second Jane, with a quick flash of a grin, jumped forward and tickled Pug, who gave a loud shrill bark.

I was standing beside Harry Digweed (who had the task of opening and closing the curtains) when she did that, and he was laughing so much that I thought the audience would hear him. But there
was little danger of that. The audience, also, was roaring with laughter, and William Chute gave a loud ‘
toot, toot
‘ in imitation of a hunting horn, and that made Pug bark even
more hysterically.

I wished that Thomas could have been present to see me act as Julia, the girl who stays faithful to her lover, despite any objections.

I didn’t really have to act – I just pretended that Henry, who played the part of Faulkland, was really Thomas and when I said lines like: ‘
I never can be happy in your
absence
‘ I was saying the words to him. Afterwards Jane said that she could hear them ring with such sincerity she thought I was quite good enough to act in Covent Garden, or in the
Theatre Royal in Bath (Jane will always exaggerate!), and when I spoke the last lines of the play and talked about ‘
. . . hearts that deserve happiness being united at last
‘ the
thunder of applause was so loud that a barn owl, who had slept through all the many practices and throughout the whole play, suddenly woke up, swooped down over the heads of the actors and the
audience, and flew blinking into the sunlight.

‘Bravo, bravo!’ called Mrs Austen. And then everyone was on their feet, clapping and stamping and shouting congratulations.

Harry and Charles pulled the curtains open and closed so many times that we all began to feel dizzy as we bowed and waved and smiled – again and again and again.

And then it was all over. The actors were all kissing and hugging each other in delight with themselves and with each other. Everybody admired Eliza’s wonderful gown, and James
didn’t say a word about her arriving so late that she almost spoiled his play. In fact, he was the first to kiss her!

And then, just as everyone was streaming out into the sunshine, laughing and talking, echoing lines from the play, I saw Jane slip back on to the stage. I couldn’t hear what she said, but
I saw her hug Harry and I think I saw her kiss him on the cheek.

Luckily Mrs Austen had already hurried off to see to supper. She would have died of horror to see Jane do something like that. I thought it was nice of her though. Otherwise, Harry might have
felt a bit left out.

Saturday, 16 April 1791

I know it is far too early to hear from Thomas, but I still persuaded Jane to go for a walk by the churchyard, and I glanced, just casually, into the darkness of the hollow yew
tree, but of course it was empty so we went back to the house. The pupils begin their holidays today and they have been thundering up and down the wooden stairs all the morning hauling down their
trunks and their leather travelling bags.

This is what Mr Austen’s farm cart, piled high with their luggage, looked like:

After dinner we all walked up to Deane Gate Inn to see them off. As they were all clambering on to the stagecoach, Mrs Austen warned Gilbert East not to be late back after Easter –
apparently at the beginning of last term he stayed at home after term began because there were some balls in his neighbourhood – and Gilbert pulled out of his pocket the poem she had written
to him then and he read it aloud. Everyone laughed, and Mrs Austen blew them all a kiss and only laughed also when Jane did the same.

When we went back to the house I asked Mrs Austen about the poem she wrote to summon Gilbert back, and she produced a rough copy. Here are a few lines from it:

I had not realized that Mrs Austen was a writer of poetry. Jane must have inherited her gift from her mother.

Sunday, 17 April 1791

Today was a quiet day. Eliza didn’t come down at all. After church in the morning, the boys all disappeared to the houses of various friends and neighbours, and
Cassandra, Jane and myself went for a walk. Cassandra did most of the talking – we heard a lot about her beloved Tom Fowle and how, when we come back from Bath, Cassandra is going to stay for
a week with his family in Berkshire. Cassandra, like me, can think only of when she will be able to be married – when Tom gets a parish from his rich relation, Lord Craven. That will not be
for years and years, but it doesn’t stop Cassandra, who is very domesticated, from planning her bridal meal.

Tonight, while I am wondering what else to put into my journal from this dull day, I was thinking about Cassandra. I feel sorry for her. After all, I am not as badly off as she is. At the worst
I only have to wait another four years till I am twenty-one and can be married. Tom Fowle won’t be able to support Cassandra for another five or six years at least.

Monday, 18 April 1791

And now it is all settled. As Eliza had guessed, Mrs Austen was not keen to let us go to Bath under her niece’s care. However, she decided that she would have a short
rest from all the housekeeping and dairy making and spend a couple of weeks with her brother, James Leigh-Perrot, and his wife at Bath. And that she would take us with her. Poor Cassandra is going
to stay to look after the household affairs. Now we are busy washing and ironing and getting everything ready for a three-week stay in Bath, and we are leaving in two days’ time!

I asked Jane what was going to happen about my letters from Thomas, and she said that we would ask Harry to send them to Eliza at her Bath address.

I wish I could see Thomas before he sets out for the East Indies. It seems very unfair that I should not be able to.

I asked Jane, jokingly of course, whether she thought I could ride as far as Southampton on my donkey and Jane was full of wild ideas.

‘Let us borrow the fare from Bath to Bristol from Eliza,’ she said in her usual dramatic way. ‘When we get to Bristol we will hide until Augusta goes out and then steal into
the house and take some banknotes from her desk drawer. You could use these to buy a seat on the stagecoach to Southampton. If you took plenty of banknotes, you could put up in a respectable
inn.’

I asked her what we would do if Augusta returned and discovered us, and Jane had a prompt answer for that. She quickly produced her novel
Love and Freindship
(Jane never could spell
‘friend’) and read aloud from it and then gave me the rough copy to stick in my journal as an example of how I could behave in Edward-John and Augusta’s house in Bristol.

This cheered me up a little, and I thought about what Eliza had said of speaking to the lawyer (who was so in love with her) at Bath.

We went to find Eliza, who was out in the garden. James had brought out so many cushions that he had almost made a bed for her and she was reclining on them, propped up against an elm tree, her
little pug on her lap, as James read aloud from the magazine called
The Loiterer
which he and Henry edited and tried to sell to the students at Oxford.