The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen (19 page)

Henry was ushered toward the fireplace. I overhead him telling Edward that some unexpected business with the Alton branch of his bank had brought him to Hampshire on horseback. He had called at the cottage to find no one but the cook, Hannah Pegg, at home. It was she, he said, who had told him of the gathering at the Great House.

“Trust you to arrive just in time for dinner!” Edward was smiling broadly. “We shall have some sport tomorrow, if you can keep away from the counting house for a few hours. I took a brace of pheasants from Knickernocker Copse this morning.”

They fell to an earnest discussion of the relative merits of the shooting to be had at Chawton and Godmersham, upon which I eavesdropped with some amazement. There seemed to be no edge to the conversation, nothing to suggest that they were anything other than the best of friends. Apparently Edward had no suspicion that Henry had been anything other than a favorite brother-in-law to his late wife.

Their conversation was brought to an abrupt halt by the summons to the dining room. As we were eleven females and just three men, Henry and Edward were required to sit at opposite ends of the huge table. Ben Lefroy was seated in the middle, opposite Anna, who could barely get her chair close enough to eat in comfort, and the rest of us were arranged around them. Louisa Bridges was seated at Edward’s right hand and Fanny on his left. Charlotte Bridges was on Henry’s right and Mary Austen sat to his left. Jane and Mrs. Austen were either side of Anna with their backs to the fire, and Martha and I were opposite with Ben in between us. Caroline squeezed in between Martha and her mother, and Cass took a seat beside Jane.

Sitting in that room was like being transported into the imaginary world of
Sense
and
Sensibility
, for the house reminded me very much of Colonel Brandon’s Delaford:
a
nice
old
fashioned
place, full of comforts and conveniences
. The gilded frames of portraits of Edward’s adopted ancestors reflected the warm glow of the fire; the polished mahogany table glimmered beneath the light cast by three towering candelabra. Nine steaming silver platters were arranged in a diamond formation, the largest one in the center. The combined smells of buttered crab, stewed hare, roast goose, and boiled oysters wafted around the room as the pot-bellied covers came off.

Anna announced that she was starving and her plate was soon piled high with crab and pickles, for which she said she had a particular craving. As she went to spear another morsel of claw meat she knocked her butter knife off the table. It landed with a clatter somewhere between her chair and Mrs. Austen’s. She bent to retrieve it, but her figure prevented it. Mrs. Austen reached down, but Henry got there before her. He bowed low to pick up the knife and from my vantage point directly opposite, I saw his eyes glide over Anna’s body as he straightened up.

“We can’t have you and Mama cracking heads.” He grinned. “Where have all the servants gone, Edward? Have you given them the evening off?”

During the genial banter that followed I glanced around the table, wondering if anyone else had caught what I had seen. Ben seemed unperturbed and was well on the way to clearing his plate of the great mound of stewed hare heaped upon it. Jane was the wrong side of Anna to have noticed anything and so was Cassandra. Fanny was fiddling with her napkin and her eyes were downcast. Mary Austen was picking at the oysters on her plate, but every so often, she would steal a furtive glance at Anna. Was that resentment or concern in her eyes? I could not tell.

Henry was regaling Charlotte Bridges with some incident that had befallen him on the ride from London. Leaning back in her chair and fanning herself, she looked like a delicate flower that might wilt under the power of his beaming smile. At the opposite end of the table Edward was deep in conversation with Jane and Louisa about a review he had read of
Mansfield
Park
. Louisa wanted to know when the next book was coming out and what its title would be. “Will there be a character with my name in it?” she asked. “I should so love it if there was!” Jane arched her eyebrows and said that she would just have to wait and see.

“Beware of what you ask for,” Edward said, wagging a finger at Louisa and cocking his head toward his daughter. “She might make you someone impossibly good, like Fanny Price.”

Fanny’s eyes narrowed at this. “Better to be impossibly good than truly vile, like Henry Crawford!” Her head shifted just a fraction of an inch toward the other end of the table and her father roared with laughter.

“Oh yes! Poor Henry! I had quite forgotten about him.”

Louisa was laughing too now, and Cassandra, who had been talking across the table to Ben Lefroy, wanted to know the cause of their merriment. I watched them all in fascination. Jane, for once, seemed lost for words and Fanny was sitting back, arms folded, with a rather supercilious look on her face.
How
can
Edward
laugh?
I thought to myself.
Is
he
blind? Did he not recognize his brother on the pages of Mansfield Park?

If Henry overheard the conversation at the top of the table he affected not to notice. He had drawn Mary, Anna, and Mrs. Austen into his conversation with Charlotte, having hit upon possibly the only thing the four women had in common, which was that all either were or had been married to men of the cloth.

The hubbub at Edward’s end soon died down and Jane, I thought, looked relieved when Louisa started talking about plays instead of books. After several unsuccessful attempts at engaging Ben in conversation, I finally found some common ground in the subject of the education of young people, whereupon he told me at great length of his plans for the instruction of the new baby, who, it seemed, was going to be read extracts from the Bible as soon as it drew breath. It was a relief to me when Edward got to his feet and drank a toast to the ladies, which was our cue to withdraw upstairs.

Mrs. Austen made a beeline for the fireplace, where she settled herself in an armchair and promptly fell asleep. The others gathered around the coffee tray—all except Fanny, who took herself off to a little alcove at the far end of the room. She stood at the window with her back to everyone, as if she was searching for something in the darkness.

“Not much to see out there tonight,” I said, setting a cup down for her on the window sill. There was no moon nor any stars in evidence, for the thick clouds had not dispersed. The drive was a ribbon of charcoal in a black landscape; even the tower of St. Nicholas’ church, just a hundred yards distant, was hard to distinguish. I heard Fanny draw in a slow, deep breath, but she said nothing. I remembered this little routine. It meant that something was bothering her, something she wanted to talk about but wouldn’t unless she was pressed.

“You don’t seem quite yourself this evening,” I began. Another heavy sigh. “Has someone done something to upset you?” Silence. I tried another tack. “It must be hard for you, being the eldest, having always to set an example to the little ones.” I paused a moment, then said: “It must seem very unfair: Anna has had none of your responsibilities; if I were you, I’m sure I would resent her.”

“It is not
Anna’s
fault!” Fanny’s voice was a hissed whisper. Ah, I thought, now we are getting somewhere. I fixed my eyes on the windowpane, waiting for her to spill it out. “Didn’t you notice him? He was all over her! He can’t help himself, you know.” There were only two men she could be talking about and I was pretty certain it wasn’t Ben Lefroy. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see it,” she went on. “His eyes were out on stalks! There’s something about women when they’re with child: he was always hanging around my mother, you know—and Anna tells me he was just the same with Aunt Mary when she was expecting Caroline.”

“Yes, I did see it,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. Her words had sent a chill through my heart. I turned my face toward her but avoided her eyes.

“Why do you think he does it?” I saw her jaw flex as she clenched her teeth. “I’ve tried to make allowances because he’s my uncle and I’m meant to love him. I say to myself: He has no children of his own—and that
could
be the reason, I suppose, but I just find it so…
revolting
.”

I glanced over my shoulder before reaching out to squeeze her hand. The others were all looking at something Louisa was passing around. It looked like a miniature or a silhouette: from that distance I couldn’t tell. “I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it,” I whispered. “I’m sure you’re right about the reason; it’s a shame that he and your Aunt Eliza were never able to have children—he would have loved to be a father, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he would,” she sighed. “Why doesn’t he just marry someone else, though? Somebody younger than Aunt Eliza who could give him a child?”

There she had me. I murmured some platitude about grief taking a long time to heal, which, in Henry’s case, I did not truly believe. She had presented me with an entirely new reading of her uncle that disturbed me greatly. If her observations were correct, Henry was either a vile pervert whose obsession extended to his own niece, or a man of deep feeling whose own sense of loss made him overly attentive. I had to question every assumption I had made about him. Could I have mistaken what I saw that night at Godmersham for brotherly affection? Elizabeth had not looked as if she was with child at the time, but she might have been; for all I knew she could have suffered a miscarriage before it was generally known that she was expecting. Could Jane have mistaken the look that had passed between them that same night? Had Elizabeth been telling him of her condition as he helped her into the carriage? If a man wanted a child so badly, might his face display that kind of intensity, that kind of longing, when told of such a thing?

“I’m surprised he hasn’t proposed to Aunt Charlotte.” Fanny shook me out of the web of speculation I was spinning. “She’s only two years older than me, you know,” she muttered, glancing over her shoulder. “She has those ugly freckles, of course, but she has pretty hair, don’t you think?”

“Oh… er, yes,” I stuttered, struggling to take in this new, unexpected twist. “Do… do you think they like each other?”

Fanny shrugged. “She’s very shy and quiet and he always tries to make her laugh when he comes to stay, which is nice, I suppose. But he’s
nice
to everyone, isn’t he?
Prince
Charming
. That’s what Caky calls him.” There was more than a hint of resentment in her voice.

“Do
you
like Charlotte?” I asked.

“She is all right, I suppose.” Fanny stuck out her bottom lip in the way I remembered so well. For a moment she was a sulky twelve-year-old again, not a woman of two-and-twenty. “The children seem to like her, although Lizzy doesn’t. But Lizzy doesn’t like anybody very much at the moment: that is why Papa sent her away to school.”

I was not surprised at this. Lizzy was the sixth of Edward’s children—the next eldest daughter after Fanny. I calculated that she must be almost sixteen now. She had been a little tomboy when I was at Godmersham; it wasn’t difficult to imagine her kicking against any new woman brought into the household after her mother’s death.

“She’s at Mama’s old school in London,” Fanny went on. “Uncle Henry takes her out sometimes, to an exhibition or a play.” She gave me a sideways look and pursed her lips, as if to say: “Why can’t he find someone
outside
the family to go about with?”

“Fanny, dear, you must come and have a look at this!” Louisa was beside us. With a conspiratorial glance at me she took Fanny’s arm and tugged it. The girl followed her unwillingly across the room, where the others were waiting with smiles on their faces. I saw Cassandra hand the picture they had all been examining to Fanny. She frowned for a moment and passed it on to me. It was a miniature of a man with wide, rather vacant-looking eyes and a Roman nose. His brown hair was styled in the current fashion, but it was tinged gray at the temples.

“Who is he?” Fanny asked.

“Sir Edward Knatchbull,” Louisa replied. “He is the eldest son of a baronet and he is looking for a wife.”

“He looks very old.” Fanny wrinkled her nose. “He must be even uglier than he is painted if he has not managed to find a wife by now.”

“I would not call four-and-thirty old, would you, Jane?” Louisa was trying not to smile too broadly as she said this: she and Jane were almost the same age, which was half a decade more than this gentleman. “Anyway,” she went on, “he did have a wife, but she died last year.”

“Oh?” Fanny looked hardly more interested than before. “I suppose he has a gaggle of children, then?”

Louisa folded her arms across her chest. “I believe there are children, yes.” Her face told me that his wife had probably died giving birth to the youngest. She would not say so, of course, for fear of upsetting her niece.

Fanny let out a great sigh and turned to me and said: “You see what they are trying to do to me?” She looked about her. “How many are we in this room? Ten women altogether. And how many of us have husbands?” She glanced at Mrs. Austen, who was snoring gently in her armchair, then at Mary, who was staring into space. Her head moved slowly from left to right, taking us all in before she fixed her eyes on Anna. “Just two out of ten live in the married state. What do you say, Anna? If you could turn the clock back by one year, would you marry Ben again? Or would you choose a single life?”

Anna, who was already flushed from the food and the heat of the fire, turned a deeper shade of red. “How can you ask me such a thing?” she said, spreading her hands over her stomach. She looked about her for some word of support, but an uncomfortable silence had fallen over the room.

“I’m sorry, Anna.” Fanny swooped down and kissed her cousin rather roughly on the forehead. “I shouldn’t have. But I just can’t help feeling I’m being pushed out of this family by people who haven’t the courage to do the thing they are urging
me
to do!” With a glare at her aunts she stomped out of the room, slamming the door as she went.