The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen (28 page)

Will you help me with my gown?” Anna’s voice summoned me from upstairs, joined in quick succession by Martha who was begging for assistance from Cass.

I laced the back of Anna’s spotted silk gown and stood back as she admired herself in the mirror. “Could you pass me my brooch?” she asked. “It’s on the night table.”

I went to fetch it, biting my lip when I saw what it contained. “Is that Jane’s hair?” I passed her the silver disc with its mount of tiny plaits fashioned into the shape of a flower.

“It’s my father’s,” she replied. “I have a ring for Aunt Jane, though I don’t wear it very often.” She gave me a wry glance as she pinned the brooch to her bodice. “I’m afraid of spoiling it with all the things I handle in a day.”

I nodded, stroking the ring on my own finger.
Stay
with
me, Jane
, I whispered to myself.
Come
with
me
to
Winchester, won’t you?

***

Cass, Anna, and I traveled to the wedding together. Our carriage was lined up in the procession of vehicles provided by the Great House, which consisted of a barouche for the bride, a curricle for the groom and best man, a chaise for the groom’s children, and a coach and six for Edward and his family. Henry’s rather humble gig brought up the rear.

“Doesn’t Martha look lovely?” Cass, whose only concession to the occasion was to swap her customary bombazine for black satin, gave me a tight-lipped smile. I wasn’t sure if she was overcome with emotion at the sight of her friend in a bridal gown or just self-conscious about her teeth. “She says she doesn’t like dressing up, but that pearl gray silk really suits her.”

“And here comes Uncle Frank.” Anna grinned. “
He
looks rather splendid, doesn’t he?”

“There’s nothing quite like a man in uniform.” Cass’s face turned wistful. I wondered how many years it was since she had gone to Portsmouth with her trousseau, only to find that her fiancé was dead. I felt I should say something, try to lift her spirits with some lighthearted banter about the day ahead. But my stomach was tied in knots at the prospect of seeing Mary Austen. I wasn’t sure how I was going to control myself in the cathedral when I caught sight of her.

Thankfully, Anna filled in the silences with her chatter and after an hour or so we were on the outskirts of the city. We stepped out into dazzling sunshine. Cathedral Close was a hive of activity: a group of schoolboys marching in a line across the green, and hawkers parading up and down, shouting their wares at every passerby. Shading my eyes, I searched for Mary’s face in the throng. But there was no sign of her. Neither had she appeared by the time we all trooped into the porch.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the shadowy world within. Here and there pools of jeweled light fell on the stones. I breathed in the ancient, unchanging scent of incense and candle wax and aged wood. My heart shifted against my ribs.
I’m here, Jane
, I said silently.

“We’ll sit at the back, shall we?” Anna took my arm. “Aunt Cass is going in the second pew with Uncle Edward and Uncle Henry.” As she spoke Henry walked past us, carrying the sweet-faced Eleanor, who was beautifully attired in a gown of fine apricot muslin trimmed with ivory rosebuds.
He
has
so
much
to
answer
for
, I thought,
so
much
to
reveal
. But how could I interrogate him in these circumstances? And how would he react if, as I suspected, he was wholly ignorant of Mary’s crimes? I had lost my dearest friend, but he had lost a sister, a brother, and a lover. A man of the cloth he may be, but he would have to exert superhuman self-control on discovering such a thing. And whatever he did would impact on Eleanor. How could I contemplate threatening the well-being of a woman who so needed and deserved his support?

“Come on.” Anna steered me toward the side chapel where the service was to be performed. To reach it we had to pass the very spot where Jane lay. “Good morning, Aunt Jane—we’ve come to see Martha Lloyd marry Uncle Frank,” she whispered. “But I suppose you know that already, don’t you?” She kissed her gloved fingers and bobbed down to touch the stone. “I know I said I don’t believe in ghosts, but I bet she’s looking down on us; she wouldn’t have missed it for the world, would she?”

“She wouldn’t.” I swallowed hard. It was almost unbearable to think of Mary walking past her grave, as she surely would any moment now. I glanced over my shoulder. Edward was coming through the door with Charlotte on one arm and Louisa on the other. No change there then, I thought. Fanny was behind him, accompanied by a gaggle of young people who ranged in age from late teens to late twenties. Anna told me that some of these were Frank’s children and some were Edward’s, but the only one I recognized was Brook-John, because, like James-Edward, he was the spitting image of Henry.

We took our places at the back of the chapel and watched the other guests arrange themselves according to their relationship to the bride or groom. I watched Edward give a little bow to Charlotte and Louisa before walking back down the aisle toward the porch. With Martha’s father long since dead, he was to be the one to give her away.

“Where is your stepmother?” I asked Anna. “Shouldn’t she be at the front?”

“I don’t know,” Anna hissed back. “I think she must be late—I don’t know why though. James-Edward is here and he was supposed to be traveling in the same carriage.” She pointed out her half brother, who was standing behind the bridegroom and best man. There was a young woman standing next to him. “That’s his fiancée, Emma Smith. She’s going with them to Lyme.”

At that moment the organ struck up a loud and throbbing chord, startling us into silence. Anna glanced over her shoulder. “Here she comes!” I twisted my head around, expecting to see Martha coming down the aisle, but it was Mary. Caroline followed in her wake, both of them scurrying as fast as their gowns would permit. They dodged into the pew across from ours. I clenched my fingers around the prayer book I held and took a slow, hard breath. Mary was now standing just three feet away from me. Her face was obscured by a white gauze veil draped over the front of a blue satin bonnet.
No
widow’s weeds for you, then.
I dug my thumbnails into the cover of the prayer book.
How
can
you
enter
this
place? How can you kneel and pray while she lies not fifty paces distant?

I have a vague memory of Martha and Edward coming into my field of vision as a blur of blue and gray, but I have no lasting impression of the ceremony itself. My mind was seething with recriminations. I had a mighty urge to drag Mary from her seat with that veil pulled tight across her throat. I don’t recall what hymns I mouthed or catechisms I mumbled as I struggled with this instinct; I can remember Anna remarking on the fact that Frank and Martha were kissing each other and the next thing I was aware of was Caroline squeezing out of the pew past her mother to get to Anna, who gave her a big hug. I saw Mary slip out of her place then. She was walking fast, out of the little chapel and back up the north aisle. I followed her.

She was heading straight for Jane’s memorial stone, and, to my horror, she walked not around it but right over it. I quickened my step.
She
won’t get away!
I whispered it aloud as I skirted the black marble tablet. Mary disappeared through the doors of the cathedral. I lifted my skirts and ran, almost knocking into a surpliced old gentleman carrying a pile of hymn books. He spluttered some admonishment, but I didn’t stop. A moment later I was outside, blinking as the sunshine stung my eyes.
Where
is
she?
With my hand pressed to my forehead, I scanned the grassy expanse of cathedral close. A flash of blue satin disappeared behind the yew hedge.

“Mrs. Austen!” I yelled it as loud as I could. A man selling wooden crosses looked askance as I ran past him. Mary looked back, startled. I don’t think she knew who I was. “Mrs. Austen, wait, please!” I was panting as I drew level with her. “Do you remember me? I am Miss Sharp, Jane’s friend.” I spoke the words in a matter-of-fact tone, with no hint of the rage boiling inside me. Now I had her, I wanted to catch her by surprise.

“Miss Sharp?” She lifted the veil and tucked it over the brim of her bonnet. “Were you at the wedding? I didn’t see you.”

“But I saw you.” I took a step closer. “Why were you so late?”

“Oh… I…” She looked away and the sun caught the scars on her face. “Why do you ask?” She turned back to me with a determined frown.

“Because I think you were wrestling with your conscience, madam,” I replied. “You still have a vestige of it left, I assume? Tell me, why did you want to destroy Henry?”

She blinked once, twice. “What on earth do you mean?”

“It was you, wasn’t it, who turned Warren Hastings against him?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think you do. I knew him, you see. Don’t you remember the ball in Bath? You were sitting right beside me when he asked me to dance.” I watched the memory of it dawn in her eyes. Now for the gamble: “I used to visit the gentleman and his wife at Daylesford. I was there the year Jane died. He told me all about the business with Henry.”

“You’re mad,” she hissed. “Henry always said you had an overactive imagination.”

“Jane warned him off you, you know; she got a message to him before she died. She knew, didn’t she, because you told her when you thought she was too ill to do anything about it; you told her what you’d done to Henry
and
what you were doing to her.”

She stood motionless, the wind whipping loose strands of gray hair from under her bonnet. From the look on her face my lies had found their mark.

“You thought you’d silenced her, didn’t you? What did you do? Pretend you’d cooled things with Henry while you poisoned her? Waited for her to die so you could murder your husband and marry him? Well, she outwitted you, didn’t she? She ruined all your plans!”

She opened her mouth but said nothing. I saw her teeth, small and sharp, just as they had been in my nightmare.

“You killed Elizabeth too, didn’t you? It took me a while to work that one out, but I know how you did it: Cass and Martha will kill you themselves when they find out how you used them.” I clenched my jaw, for my lips had begun to tremble. “And what about Anna’s mother? Was she your first? You’ve been doing this for years, haven’t you? What a miracle for Henry and his wife that they don’t need Martha’s potions. Eleanor, I suppose, is beyond the help of anything medicine could achieve; you’d have poisoned them too, wouldn’t you, if you’d had the chance.”

She looked at me coldly. “That’s laughable.
You
are laughable.”

“Is that all you have to say?” I clasped my arms tight about my waist. “Not a very spirited defense, if I may say so.”

“We all joked about you behind your back,” she said slowly. “The way you looked at Jane, the way you followed her around. Cass only tolerates you for her sake, you know. You’re unnatural, a freak.”

“Call me whatever you like.” My voice threatened to betray the pain her words had inflicted. “You can’t hurt me, and you can’t stop me!”

Her lip curled as she looked me up and down. “You wouldn’t dare tell anyone what you’ve just said to me because it’s all in your warped little mind! You have no proof, do you, of what you’re saying? So do what you want; no one will ever believe you!”

“All the proof
I
require is there in your eyes,” I growled back. “But I won’t rest until I
can
prove it, in a court of law. I don’t care how long it takes. So think about that as you go about your daily business; there’ll be nothing
natural
in the way you end your days, Mrs. Austen: the hangman will see to that!”

My legs were shaking as I turned my back on her and strode across the grass. I felt weak and proud and stupid and a dozen other things besides. What was I thinking of, coming out with all that? How in God’s name was I ever going to prove anything? The coded message from the poem was the strongest piece of evidence I possessed and what lawyer was going to take that seriously?

Ridiculous as it sounds, the overwhelming emotion as I stepped out of her sight into the shadows of the cathedral was a thrilling sense of vengeance: I might never have the evidence I sought but at least I’d had the satisfaction of rattling her, of planting a creeping dread of what might lie ahead.

***

In the carriage back to Chawton I was barely able to string two words together. I told Anna and Cass I felt unwell and when we reached the village I asked to be put down at the cottage, saying I would follow them up to the Great House when I had rested a while. The truth was I couldn’t bear to spend another minute in their company, not after what Mary had said.

It’s not true
, Jane whispered in my ear.
She
only
said
it
to
hurt
you
.

Rationalizing it made no difference; I had to get away. I left a note on the kitchen table and boarded the next mail coach to London. I fixed my gaze on the parlor window as the horses pulled away, knowing in my heart that I would never see Chawton again.

I have kept up my correspondence with Cass and Anna, although the letters we exchange become fewer as the years go by. They no longer express the hope of a visit from me; I think that the excuses I have made about the school or the state of my health make them believe that I no longer wish to see them. It is not true, of course. But it could never be as it once was. All the pleasure would be soured by those wounding words of Mary Austen’s.

Anna became a widow not long after Martha’s wedding. With seven young children to care for, she was in a perilous position, and I sent her money whenever I could.

Fanny stopped writing to me at about the same time. She was safely delivered of her child—a boy, as Anna had predicted—but she seemed to want to cast off her old life and connections with the onset of motherhood. Anna, who remains very angry with her, tells me that she thinks herself too fine for the rest of the family now and seeks to cover up her Austen connections. She becomes embarrassed, apparently, when people ask if she is indeed the niece of the famous author. It grieves me to hear it.

Cass continues to live at the cottage on her own and when she is not tending the garden she spends her time sewing for the poor, teaching the village children to read, and entertaining her great-nephews and nieces—the sons and daughters of Edward’s eldest son, who is now in permanent residence at the Great House. Edward himself continues to live at Godmersham with Charlotte and Louisa, the two women who have become indispensable to him.

James-Edward married the girl I saw in Winchester cathedral and three years ago, when Aunt Leigh-Perrot left this world at the grand old age of ninety-one, he inherited the Scarlets estate. Anna requires no more help from me now: her young half brother has become her benefactor and protector. Her first children’s story,
Little
Bertram’s Dream
, is to be published next year.

Cass makes occasional mention of Henry in her letters. “He and Eleanor have retired to Tunbridge Wells,” she wrote to me this summer. “Despite her frail constitution, she shows no sign of making him a widower for a second time. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she outlived him.”

And
what
of
Mary?
“My stepmother continues as stout as ever,” Anna reported with thinly veiled sarcasm in her last letter. “She is moving to another rented house in a hamlet called Speen near Newbury. Caroline is with her, of course. I think there is no prospect of my sister ever marrying now, as she is almost six-and-thirty. She reminds me in many ways of dear Aunt Jane. I never realized, when I was young, what life was like for her. Now I see, through Caroline’s eyes, what it is to have the care of a parent when one might have hoped for children to nurture. Aunt Jane did at least have the solace of a sister to share that burden—and a burden it must indeed be in my stepmother’s case.”

***

I have stored every scrap of intelligence I can gather about Mary Austen in a special notebook reserved for the purpose. It has been very hard, knowing that she still lives a comfortable life while Jane lies in eternal slumber beneath the cold stones of Winchester cathedral. The certainty of her guilt is a heavy burden to carry. It has eaten away at me over the years. But I have never stopped searching for a way to prove my suspicions. What drives me on is my love for Jane and the thought of what she might have achieved had she lived to a ripe old age. The six novels might have become sixteen; the royal patronage she had begun to attract would have elevated her to the highest heights of literary fame—something she should have been able to enjoy to the full in her lifetime but was granted a mere taste of.

It is almost unbearable that this crime should go unpunished and unnoticed. With every passing year, the sense of despair deepens. Can I accept that it may never be resolved? Must I, like Jane and the others, take the hand that fate has dealt me? No, I cannot. I will not. I will go on searching for the proof to my dying breath.

Anne
Sharp
December
1840

July 9, 1843

Reading my own words again has shaken my resolve. When I brushed the dust off the binding, I had all but convinced myself to parcel it up, climb into a carriage, and deliver it in person to Dr. Sillar. But those last few pages hold such bitter passion. I find that I am shocked by the intensity of my longing for vengeance. It eclipses everything: all the joy, the wonder, and the tenderness of the years I had with Jane.

Looking up from my desk, I see her face before me. Sometimes it takes a while to hear what she has to say, but this time, the message is instant. She does not crow with triumph at the prospect of justice. No, she begs me to pause, to reckon what there is to be gained from chasing an old woman to the gallows.

“But, Jane,” I whisper back, “I was going to write to Anna; I was going to ask for a sample of her father’s hair from the brooch she wears to give to Dr. Sillar.”

“To what purpose?” she replies. “Will it bring James back? And think what harm it might do: Anna could hardly hate Mary more than she does already, but what would become of Caroline if the case came to court? Would you set sister against sister?”

My eyes go to the ring on my finger, to the braided strands that are as familiar to me as my own face. So much of what I am is contained within it, but for the better part of two decades, I have felt nothing but a festering anger when I look upon it. I know that
I
have allowed this to happen: this tainting of the thing that was so dear to me. But if I was to abandon this relentless quest for justice, could I forget? Could I look upon her hair and
not
feel that all-consuming rage?

July 10, 1843

Last night I dreamed I boarded a train that took me all the way from Liverpool to Newbury without stopping. When I alighted, the whole station was thick with smoke and I blundered about with streaming eyes, searching for a way out. When at last I found the exit, I spied a fine chestnut mare tethered to a post. I straddled the horse as a man would, the lower half of my gown disappearing as I did so. I remember the sight of my legs, clad in breeches of yellow buckskin, gripping the horse’s belly as it galloped out of the town heading for open country.

We came to the hamlet of Speen, which was no more than a chapel and a few houses strung along the road like rosary beads. One of the houses looked familiar. It had a red door with a shiny lion’s head knocker. Dismounting the horse I walked up and peered through one of the windows. There was Mary Austen, sewing a patchwork. She was bidding good-bye to Caroline, who said she was off to a fair with the servants. I hid behind a bush as they all departed, then slipped into the house by the back door.

“You!” Mary’s cheeks blazed crimson against hair that was now snow white. “How dare you come into my house!”

Putting my hand into the pocket of my breeches, I pulled out the lock of hair I had sent to Dr. Sillar. It was black and brittle, as if it had been singed with hot irons. “Look at this,” I said to her. “It’s the proof I told you I would find. Here! Taste it!” I stuffed the hair into her gaping mouth. Her face contorted and she slumped sideways like a puppet on slack strings. I clapped her on the back and she spat out the hair. Then I took her by the shoulders and tossed her about, demanding a confession. Her mouth began to move, but no matter how violently I shook her, no words would come out.

I awoke with my hand across my face, Jane’s ring pressed against my lips. The room was still in darkness save for a thin beam of daylight piercing the curtains. I stared at the pool of color it cast on the ceiling. As I lay in that twilight state between waking and rising I saw myself with sudden clarity. The cause of the dream is, of course, blindingly obvious—but what drives this insatiable thirst for vengeance? Losing Jane so suddenly, not being able to say good-bye or even see her face in death—that has created an impotent fury within me. Someone must pay for this bitter loss, this theft of my heart. I see that my quest for justice is really a mask for something entirely selfish; it is not the crime of murder I wish Mary Austen to suffer for but the pain of my own unrequited love.

But
I
did
love
you
. Was that Jane’s voice or my own?

July 12, 1843

This morning, a letter arrived from Dr. Sillar. It is a polite reminder that I have not yet responded to what he communicated a week ago.

I am sure that Miss J. A. was very dear to you, otherwise you would not be in possession of a token so intimate. I fear that my remarks about the strength of the evidence might tempt you to a course of action that would be most inadvisable. I urge you, dear madam, not to confront any person, if indeed a suspect has come to mind. In itself, the Marsh Test will not bring a guilty party to book. Evidence of both opportunity and intent would be required in a court of law, as I am sure you are aware, and to act in haste in such a matter may result in a lawsuit for slander. Given the lapse of time it could be a difficult case to prove without an admission of guilt on the part of the poisoner.

Yes, of course. Even my sleeping self is aware of that insurmountable obstacle. What in this world would induce Mary Austen to confess? A gun held to the head of her son or daughter, perhaps? Nothing else comes to mind. Dr. Sillar asks for a meeting to discuss the case, but I am going to tell him that I have decided not to pursue it any further. What is done cannot be undone. I have tried to take a path the Bible tells us should only be taken by God Himself, and it has led me to an utterly desolate place.

But I do not regret sending the hair to be tested, precious as it was. The secret it held has opened the wound in my soul and cleansed it so that it no longer festers. This evening, I will ask Rebecca to light the fire in my study, even though the weather has been warm. The memoir can serve no further purpose, for I know now that I need no written record of what Jane meant to me: it is printed indelibly on my heart, wrapped in endpapers of crimson silk, and bound in the softest hide.