The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen (2 page)

At the end of the first week of her holiday I was sent to seek Jane out. She had promised to take Fanny on a gypsy picnic but had apparently forgotten all about it. As I searched the downstairs rooms I felt a little knot of anger tighten in my stomach. Fanny was a loving, trusting child and this was her favorite aunt. How could Jane display such casual disregard for her feelings? Did she not understand how disappointed Fanny would be?

I found her all alone in the library with a pen in her hand. Writing letters, I supposed. At the sound of my coming she seemed to jump, her ink-stained fingers flying to the paper. Seeing my face she bit her lip and glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.

“Goodness! Is it that time already? I’m so sorry—Fanny must be wondering where on earth I’ve got to.” If a horse had trampled on her best hat she couldn’t have looked more aggrieved
. You were quite wrong about her, weren’t you?
I thought.
She
loves
her
niece
just
as
much
as
Henry
does
. She shot out of her chair, her elbow catching a book that had lain open on the table beside her. It slid across the polished wood and fell to the floor with a thud at my feet. As I bent to pick it up I recognized the title on the spine. It was a volume of one of Frances Burney’s novels.

“Do… do you like
Camilla
?” I think I sounded as flustered as she looked.

“Have you read it?” The shoulders lifted, the chin tilted. I saw a spark of interest in those hazel eyes.

I nodded. “It was the first book I took from the library.”

“And have you read
Evelina
?”

“Yes,” I said. “I have all three volumes, though they’re falling apart from having been read so many times.”
Evelina
was one of the books I had concealed when everything else was seized. It was my comforter in the days after my father’s death and no matter what else I happened to be reading at Godmersham, it was always on my bedside table. Like me, its heroine yearned for the family she had lost. I didn’t tell Jane this, of course, but her face spoke her approval. She asked what other books I liked and we became so lost in our chatter that by the time we reached the schoolroom I had quite forgotten the reason for taking her there. Then Jane asked me if I would accompany her on the picnic. I hesitated a moment before replying, afraid of being relegated to second fiddle.

“Oh, please come!” Fanny grabbed my arm and squeezed it. The worm of jealousy went back into its hole.

The weather had turned hot and fine. Fanny’s cousin Anna had come to join the family party at Godmersham and the girls had planned this outing together. We took the path that ran past the ice house and alongside the orchard, where apples hung small and green from the branches that overhung the wall. We crossed the low stone bridge over the river and skirted the Greek temple, where Fanny and Anna darted off to chase each other around the columns and shout inside the cool, dark walls to hear the echo.

“I come here in the mornings sometimes.” Jane followed the girls with her eyes. “It’s hard to concentrate, sometimes, isn’t it, in a house of that size? Always something going on, people coming in and out.”

I nodded, wondering if
Camilla
had been her companion on these early morning pilgrimages. I never imagined that someone might come to a place like this to write.

“It’s strange, hearing their voices,” she went on. “Usually I have only blackbirds and thrushes for company.”

A squeal of laughter from Fanny drowned out Jane’s next few words. The girls were at that strange age when they behaved like children one minute and young women the next. Anna was just a few months younger than her cousin. She was the daughter of the eldest Austen brother, James, but had come without the rest of her family. She was a pretty little thing and had won me over the day she arrived by asking if she could borrow one of my best-loved children’s books,
The
Governess
. After a few minutes of running about, the echoes of the girls’ voices faded and died. All was silent within the temple.

“I suppose they’re hiding.” Jane rolled her eyes. “I’d better go and smoke them out.” As she disappeared into the gloom I wandered around the side of the temple where a thicket of brambles snagged the carved stones like clawed fingers.

“Do you really hate her?” It was Fanny’s voice. They were hiding behind one of the columns.

“I wish she was dead!” Anna hissed back.

“Well, she might die,” Fanny whispered. “It might kill her.”

“Oh, there you are!” Jane emerged from the shadows, her hands behind her back. “What are you plotting?”

“Nothing, Aunt Jane!” Fanny stepped out into the sunlight, Anna behind her.

“Really?” She searched their faces. “Do you know what the gypsies do to bad children?” They shook their heads. She whipped out two clenched fists. “They put toads down their necks!” The girls screamed as she chased them, all three landing in a helpless heap at the bottom of the steps. They couldn’t see me watching them, for the brambles were between us. Jane had not caught the sinister nature of the girls’ conversation; of that I was certain. I wondered who it was that Anna hated so much.

When they had picked themselves up, we headed for a wilderness on the other side of the hill. Baskets of bread and cheese and elderflower water had been packed up for the girls, who were happy to be left to set up their gypsy camp while Jane and I sat a little way off in the cool green dome of a weeping willow.

“Anna looks happier than I’ve seen her for a long time,” Jane said, pulling her gown out from under her knees and spreading it over the blanket. “I think Godmersham is doing her good. But tell me, Miss Sharp, do
you
like it here?”

She must have seen the confusion her question caused me. How could I answer honestly? She was my employer’s sister. I couldn’t tell her how I felt, caught between the servants and the family like a sea creature stranded by the tide. I had food and a bed and the company of children and yes, of course, I was grateful; how could I forget what it felt like to stare destitution in the face? But there was a creeping sense of emptiness every night when I shut my door. I ached for something more, something I couldn’t even name. To allow such a thought felt disloyal and peevish. To speak it aloud was out of the question.

“I’m sorry; it was impertinent of me to ask.” She took a bowl of strawberries from her basket and offered it to me. “It’s just that Fanny hasn’t been very lucky with her governesses; the last one was dismissed after a month because she had not a word of French, and the one before that ran away with the head horseman.”

“Well, I don’t think that I shall fail her for either of those reasons.” I smiled.

“She likes you very well, so I hope you’ll stay.” She bit into a strawberry and scrutinized the heart-shaped half left in her grasp as if she was inspecting it for grubs. “What are you reading at the moment?” she asked without looking up.

“Charlotte Lennox,” I replied. “
The
Female
Quixote
.”

She smiled at the strawberry. “That is one of my favorites. What do you think of Arabella?”

I hesitated for a moment. I had already formed an opinion of the heroine, but I was afraid it might offend. “I find her fascinating; complex, I suppose. Some would regard her as a silly girl who is overly influenced by French romances. But I see her as someone in search of an identity, a young woman with an artistic nature trying to express herself in a world governed by men.”

She swallowed the morsel of fruit, licking her thumb where the juice had run down it. “What was the book you read last? Before Lennox, I mean.”

I felt my color rising and I looked away.

“Was it Madame de Staël? Or Fielding, perhaps?”

I stared at the ground. If I told her she might think me immodest and unworthy of her company.

“I do hope that you have read
Tom
Jones
,” she said, “for I think it is absolutely necessary to read books in which the world is promiscuously described in order to appreciate what is truly better. If I were Edward, I would not wish to entrust Fanny to a governess whose knowledge of humanity was restricted to Fordyce’s Sermons.”

I glanced up at arched brows and lips pressed tight with mirth.
Oh
, I thought,
he
lectures
his
sisters
as
he
has
lectured
me
. I shot her a look of happy gratitude. We were coconspirators.

She leaned forward and pulled something out from beneath the cloth that had covered the strawberries. It was a handwritten copy of Hannah Cowley’s play
Which
Is
the
Man?
She asked me if I had ever seen it performed. I had, but some years earlier, when my parents were still living. She asked me how I had liked it. “Oh,” I said, shaking my head, “I liked it so well that I tried to write something of the same kind. I gave it up pretty soon, of course, as it was too terrible to merit any sort of ending.”

She looked at me then with an expression so strange I pulled back a little. It was an intense face, but smiling, like a child who has just worked out the answer to a most perplexing puzzle. “May I read it?” she asked.

“Read it?” I laughed. “The only thing it was fit for was lighting the fire.”

“Well, in that case, Miss Sharp,” she said, wagging her finger, “you must help me to write another.”

***

In the days that followed I discovered that Jane had a mischievous spirit from which no one—be they pauper, parson, or prince—was spared. She had a stock of characters in her head whose words and manners she had memorized so perfectly that she could trot them out at will. When pressed, she would admit to having met these people at a ball or some other social gathering. “Oh, the Miss Ds?” she would nod, tapping the side of her nose. “Yes, I was introduced to them at the Assembly Rooms in Bath.” A pause would be followed by a wink. “I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow.” And then: “You wish to know about Mrs. B? Well, she appeared at a dance in November exactly as she had done the previous September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband, and fat neck…”

Working with her on the script it was impossible not to envy the way she conjured humor from ordinary, everyday things. It made me cringe anew at the thought of my own abandoned manuscript. I had lied about burning it. It lay in the bottom of my trunk like a broken necklace. I could not bring myself to throw it away, but neither could I face trying to repair it. It was different, writing with Jane; somehow lines came to me when she was there. What started out as envy turned into admiration and inspiration. I knew that my pen was guided by her brain, but somehow it ceased to matter. I reveled in the pure pleasure of creating something others would admire.

Before we had even finished the writing of
Pride
Punished
or
Innocence
Rewarded
, Jane had Fanny, Anna, her mother, and Cassandra learning the lines. Elizabeth declined the invitation to take part. I was not told the reason why. I wondered if she disapproved of my involvement, of this blurring of the boundaries between staff and family.

If that was her opinion, other members of the family did not appear to share it. One day, when Mrs. Austen was reading a page of the script that I had given her, she looked me up and down and said: “Well, Miss Sharp, I knew from the minute I saw you that you had a good brain, and I declare that I was not mistaken.” When I begged to know what had led her to this swift assessment of my mental powers, she replied: “Why, your nose, of course! It is fine and large, and as I always say, ‘The bigger the nose, the quicker the brain!’” I was not quite sure how to take this strange compliment, but I took comfort from the observation that she herself had a very prominent, rather aristocratic nose. “Now Elizabeth, you see, has no nose at all,” she went on, “but of course, she has many other fine qualities. She is a prodigious breeder, which is vastly pleasing for my son.” I began to see where Jane’s keen eye for the character and the foibles of others came from.

“Really, Mama!” Cassandra, who was standing nearby, had overheard this last remark. “You make her sound no better than a prize sow, when you know quite well that she is as quick and clever as anyone!”

“Who is a prize sow?” Fanny came running up to her aunt, demanding to know what they were talking about.

“Nobody, dear,” Cassandra replied with a fierce look at her mother. “We were just talking about one of the characters in the play, weren’t we, Mama?” Unlike her mother and younger sister, Cassandra had learned to suppress her forthright views when in company.

Sometime during those rehearsals Jane and I ceased to be guest and governess and started to become friends. She insisted that I call her by her Christian name. At the time, I had no idea why she had decided to befriend me. She and Cassandra were so close that I wondered why she took the trouble to cultivate anybody else. Looking back, I think she must have felt the need of someone outside the family to confide in, although, at first, she could not admit that need even to herself. She held her quick wit before her like a shield, but I thought I sensed a sadness about her that went beyond the sorrow for her father. During the long, hot weeks of that summer she began to give me glimpses of what it was that disturbed her.

It was the play that started it. One morning we were watching the girls rehearsing a scene. Looking at Anna’s angelic little face it was hard to believe the words that had come out of her mouth a couple weeks earlier in the Greek temple. How could a child apparently so sweet-natured hate anyone so much as to wish them dead? So intent was I on watching Anna that I dropped a page of the script. As I bent to retrieve it, I saw that Jane’s eyes were not on the actors but on the ceiling, locked in an unblinking gaze, as if her soul had taken leave of her body.

“Are you all right?” I whispered.

For a moment I thought she didn’t recognize me. “Sorry!” She gave me a puzzled smile. “I was somewhere else.”

“Was it somewhere nice?” I asked when the girls went off for their lunch.

She gave me a blank look. “Oh, in the rehearsal, you mean?” She closed her eyes and gave a little shake of her head. “I was back at Steventon, at the rectory. Fanny reminds me of myself, I suppose. I was exactly her age when we put on a play in the barn one Christmas. It was the one I showed you:
Which
Is
the
Man?
My brother Henry was in it. And my cousin Eliza.” Jane gave an almost imperceptible nod to the chandelier above our heads. “We hadn’t met her before and she fascinated us. She had the most exquisite gowns, all made in Paris, and she used to swear at us in French. Henry was only fifteen, but he—” Her eyes snapped back into focus and she bit her lip. “Listen to me, droning on about the past! You must promise to pinch me if I drift off again.”

“Are you sure?” I turned up my palms and spread my fingers. “Have you seen the size of my hands?”

She grasped my wrists with a peal of laughter. “Oh, I didn’t mean to find you so agreeable! It would have saved me the trouble of liking you!”

The door opened then and Mr. Priddle, the butler, stepped into the room. “Madam asks if you are coming to luncheon, Miss Jane.” His eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch, just enough to convey the annoyance Elizabeth had no doubt expressed at Jane’s absence. Turning to me he said: “Your tray is in the morning room, Miss Sharp.”

The morning room was where I took all my meals. I ate alone, for it was not deemed suitable for me to eat belowstairs. I would not have chosen to be singled out in this way; it underlined the sense of isolation I felt. Sometimes Fanny would stray in, but I felt bound to discourage this because it got her into trouble with the children’s nursemaid.

“Thank you, Priddle.” Jane stepped between me and the door. “Could you give my sister-in-law my apologies? There’s something I have to attend to. Perhaps you could bring a little extra luncheon to the morning room?”

I didn’t see the butler’s reaction to this, for she was standing in front of him. I could imagine it well enough, though. He was not accustomed to having the rigid order of things rearranged. No doubt he would report Jane’s instructions verbatim to his mistress. I wondered how that would go down.

“Elizabeth won’t miss me,” Jane said as we sat down to eat. “She likes my sister, but she barely tolerates me. Cass is so good-hearted that no one could possibly dislike her. But I don’t know what I’ve done to cause offense, other than reminding her of her husband’s humble origins.”

I had pieced together enough of my employer’s background to know what she meant. Fanny’s stories about Grandpapa Austen and fragments of gossip I had picked up from the servants suggested that, by nothing other than sheer good luck, Edward had been adopted by childless relatives seeking a boy they could groom as heir to Godmersham.

Jane helped herself to a slice of the cold meat that the butler had left on the tray. “Elizabeth likes my brother Henry very well.” She paused, a forkful of ham halfway between the plate and her lips. “He is rich, of course, which makes all the difference.”

There was something about the way she said it, the way she emphasized the word “all”; it brought back banished images, things I told myself I should not be thinking about. Intrigued, I prompted her: “Fanny sometimes speaks of an Aunt Eliza. Is she the cousin you were telling me about? The one with the Parisian gowns?”

She stared at her fork as if she had suddenly discovered it was dirty. “What does Fanny say about her?”

“Oh, nothing of any consequence.” Clearly this was dangerous ground. Her eyes moved from the fork to my face. She wouldn’t be fobbed off with such an answer. “She only mentioned something about her aunt being too old to have children.”

“She
is
older than Henry.” Jane’s features seemed to relax a little then. “She was married with a baby son when she came to us that Christmas.” She cut a piece of cheese, held it up to her nose, and made a face. Reaching for a plum instead, she said: “Her husband was a French count. He went to the guillotine, poor man.” She gave a little upward roll of her eyes as she extricated the plum stone.

“I should think that Henry made a fine stepfather for her son,” I said. “He’s always so warm-hearted to the children.”

She looked directly into my eyes, slightly startled. I wondered if she knew how often Henry came to Godmersham, if she even knew that I had met him. “Yes, he did…” She trailed off, her gaze moving away and over my shoulder. She looked as if she were remembering something that pained her to the point of tears.

“I think I heard the girls calling,” I said, afraid that I might have upset her and threatened this fragile beginning of friendship. “Shall we go and find them?”

She nodded quickly. As we rose from the table she took my arm.

***

I was surprised that there were no repercussions from Jane’s decision to take her lunch with me. Elizabeth came to watch the rehearsal in the afternoon but made no mention of it. I began to wonder if she might actually be pleased that Jane and I had become friends; it would, after all, save her the effort of toleration if Jane’s assessment were correct.

Edward was not at home that day, but he arrived in time to see the play performed. He came back quite unexpectedly, in the middle of the night, from a trip to a property he owned in Hampshire. Fanny told me about it when I caught her yawning halfway through the morning.

“It’s all Papa’s fault,” she said. “He came home before dawn and turned me out of bed!”

“Turned you out of bed?” I frowned. “Why ever would he do that?”

“I was in Mama’s bed,” she sighed. “She’s been having trouble sleeping and she asked me to keep her company. She didn’t know Papa would be coming back so soon.”

I said nothing in response, of course, but I thought how selfish Edward was to do such a thing—not just to Fanny, but to his wife also. Was he so unable to control himself? Could he not have found a bed elsewhere in the house and waited just a few more hours?

Watching Edward that afternoon, as he sat beside Elizabeth, smiling and applauding his daughter’s performance, it was hard to imagine the scene Fanny had described. He was being so affable, so attentive. Then I reminded myself of the side I had seen during the first week of my employment, when he had challenged me about the ideas Fanny should be exposed to. He had not shouted or even raised his voice, but his manner had carried all the menace of a dog about to bite. Clearly he was a man who expected to have his own way in everything.

To my surprise Jane laughed when Fanny repeated the story to her. I was not sure whether it was out of spite for Elizabeth or a vicarious sense of triumph for Edward. Can a sister feel that way about her brother’s conjugal behavior? As an only child, I can never know. But I thought it a strange reaction.

A few days after the performance of the play Fanny came into the schoolroom with a tiny lace-trimmed cap in her hand. “It’s for Anna’s new baby sister,” she said. “Her name is Caroline and she was born yesterday morning at five-and-twenty to six. Mama wants me to embroider a
C
and an
A
on the front so it looks as if we made it especially. I don’t want to do it, but she says I must.”

When I asked her why not, she said: “Because Anna must take it back with her and I don’t want her to go.”

This I could understand. The girls had become very thick in the weeks since Anna’s arrival and there would be no one of Fanny’s own age for her to play with when her cousin left.

“She hates going home,” Fanny went on. “She doesn’t like Aunt Mary. And I don’t blame her. I feel sorry for her, not having a real mother.”

No one had mentioned the fact that Anna had a stepmother. I considered this intelligence in the light of the conversation I had overheard at the temple. I wondered if this was the person the child hated so much; it was often the way.
It
might
kill
her
, Fanny had whispered in response to the death wish uttered by her cousin.
Yes
, I thought,
a
baby
might
kill
its
mother
.

Elizabeth, I well knew, prepared herself for this eventuality every time she was confined. A few days before the birth of her youngest son, Charles, she had given me a letter, all sealed up and addressed to Fanny. “I want you to keep this safe, Sharp,” she’d said. “I would give it to my husband, but it wouldn’t be fair to expect him to deliver it in the event of…” The unspoken words hung in the space between us until she glanced down at her swollen belly and I apprehended just what it was she was asking me to do. It was a death letter, a good-bye. My mother told me she had written something similar to my father the week before I was born. When I asked what had happened to it, she said she threw it on the fire when I was a month old. I did not throw Elizabeth’s letter on the fire. It was tucked away in the far corner of a drawer inside an odd glove whose partner was lost somewhere in the park, and by the time I remembered it was there she was well into her next pregnancy. I wondered if Anna’s mother had written a letter like that to her, and how old a child should be before being shown such a thing.

On the day that Anna left us, Jane and I took Fanny fishing in the river. But in the absence of her cousin, the child was in a tricky mood. She tried our patience by throwing little handfuls of earth into the water when she thought we weren’t looking.

“Fanny!” Jane cried. “You are turning the river into a mud bath! It is trout, not hippopotamus that we are after!”

Fanny dropped her head, sullen as a horse in a heat wave. “This is the wrong place for fish,” she muttered. “Uncle Henry knows the best spots. He took Mama and me the day after her birthday and we caught three whoppers.”

“Oh, Uncle Henry was here for Mama’s birthday, was he?” There was the slightest tremor of her eyelashes as she looked at me for confirmation.

“Yes, he was,” I replied. I remembered it clearly, for it had been a strange, unsettling sort of day. I had been left watching Fanny and the rods while Henry went with Elizabeth to inspect the walled garden. As they scrambled up the riverbank she must have dropped the key to the garden gate. I saw it glinting in the grass a few minutes afterward and ran to catch them up. But they were nowhere to be seen. Then I saw a flash of color, the bright yellow of Henry’s coat disappearing into the little bathing house on the next bend along the river.

Of course, there could have been any number of reasons for him going in there—a call of nature perhaps, or a sudden request from Elizabeth for a parasol to shield her from the sun. But it wasn’t the first time that this brother and sister-in-law had aroused my curiosity. I remember standing there, nonplussed, on the top of the bank. Fanny was calling out to me, telling me to come quick, that she had hooked a trout. My head twisted this way and that, like the hapless fish on the line, from the bathing house to the shouting child, from one river bend to the other, my mind a whirl of muddied images. I told myself that I was mistaken, that the sun had played tricks with my eyes, which have never been strong. Fanny landed her fish herself and before we knew it her uncle and mama were beside us, laughing as they slipped and slid the last few yards down the bank.

“The key, ma’am,” I said, when Fanny had dragged Henry across to the keep net to see her fish. “You must have dropped it.”

I watched her face. The limpid blue eyes were untroubled. The tendrils of blond hair quivered not an inch. “Oh, thank you, Sharp.” She almost managed a smile as she took it. “I wondered where it had gone! We had to ask old Baines to let us in, didn’t we, Henry?”

I don’t know if he heard what she said. His head was next to Fanny’s, peering at the thrashing silver creature in the net. He simply laughed and raised his hand in a wave, as if nothing anyone could say or do could spoil the magic of the moment.

That night, as I lay in bed, I turned it over and over in my mind. I had overheard enough conversations between my father and his customers to know that stories of men desiring a brother’s wife thrilled the drawing rooms of London. Could Henry really be guilty of such a thing? Was that why he came to Godmersham so often? Was his eager interest in the children just a ploy?

I thought about how he had been spending his days during this visit. When he was not with the children, he was often shooting or fishing with Edward. And yes, he did spend time with Elizabeth—probably more time with her than with anybody else. Unlike Edward, she did not have an estate to run. She had all the time in the world to entertain her brother-in-law. Too much time, perhaps.

There had been one incident, a couple months after I had taken up my post as governess, when he and Elizabeth had taken an afternoon walk. He had returned with a broken finger, saying that a buck had attacked them as they strolled toward Chilham Castle. Elizabeth was unhurt and praised Henry for his gallantry in fending off the beast. I thought at the time that it was unusual for deer to be aggressive in February, that autumn was the time for rutting.

Rutting
. The word lodged itself in my brain. Were they really in Chilham Park that day? Was he really attacked as he said? Or had he come by the injury some other way? The weather had been wild and windy. Had they been in the bathing house? Had the door blown shut on his hand when they tried to leave?