The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen Read online

  I had a vision of the two of them sitting by the fire on a cold winter’s night in their lodgings in Bath. Mrs Austen would be stitching patchwork while holding forth on some well-worn topic, such as the dearth of eligible young men at last season’s balls, or the shocking display of naked bosoms occasioned by the latest London fashion. Jane would slyly reach for the poetry book and ask her mother if she cared to be read to while she sewed. Gray’s wheeling beetles and drowsy tinklings would act upon Mrs A. like a dose of laudanum, sending the patchwork slipping from her lap as she drifted into sonorous slumber.

  ‘Come on,’ Jane said, hooking her free arm through mine, ‘let’s get him home before he wakes.’

  I took to my room while she cooked the lobster – something she insisted on doing herself, despite protests from the cook – and though I cringed at the idea of eating the trembling, whiskery thing, the smell came wafting up the stairs to tempt me. It was every bit as delicious as she had predicted.

  ‘Now,’ she said, as we wiped our fingers, ‘you are my partner in crime. I have committed murder and you have helped me eat the evidence. How do you plead?’

  ‘Guilty,’ I said, returning her wry smile.

  ‘For which the appropriate sentence must be imposed.’ She reached for a clean napkin and set it upon her head. ‘It must be death, of course. Though there are some would say that hanging is too good for you; that you should be dispatched in the same manner as the hapless victim. What say you to that?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘I would do as you do – that is, I would resort to poetry in my hour of need. Not Mr Gray’s verses, I think, but Mr Donne’s:

  “Death be not proud, tho’ some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,

  For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,

  Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”’

  ‘Bravo!’ Jane cast off her judge’s cap with a flourish, catching sight as she did so of a familiar face through the window. ‘My sister returns.’ Her face clouded. ‘You won’t repeat any of the conversation we had this morning, will you? Please, promise me that you will not speak of it.’ She took my hand in both of hers and clasped it to her. I felt that strange, warm liquefying of my insides again. It startled me. I withdrew my hand, nodding as I did so.

  ‘It would destroy Cass if she knew,’ Jane hissed. ‘She has attended the birth of seven of those—’ she broke off at the clanging of the doorbell.

  ‘Of course I won’t speak of it,’ I whispered back. ‘She will never hear it from me.’

  Cassandra stepped into the room, her face rosy from the steaming heat of the warm baths. Jane’s mask was on in a trice. She demanded a description of the bodies on display at the baths and Cassandra laughingly obliged with details of the fattest and the ugliest.

  As I watched them I wondered how long the awful secret could be kept from the rest of the family. I was thinking of Fanny, growing older and more knowing with every passing day. By this time tomorrow, I thought, she will be back at Godmersham; she will wave her father goodbye and see her mother’s smiles as Henry rides into the courtyard a few hours later. How long will it be before she works out what is really going on? That it is not just her father’s guns he is keeping warm when he comes for a week’s shooting?

  A few days later a letter came for me from Fanny. It was mostly about her pets and the fact that baby Louisa had just taken her first steps. But a couple of paragraphs gave me cause for concern:

  The weather was vile yesterday and I was so very dull without you. Uncle Henry came today, though, and he cheered me up by sending me off to Canterbury with money for a new dress. Sayce was going anyway to collect a length of jaconet for Mama, so I went with her in the carriage. The shops were very gay and it took me a long time to decide what to buy. In the end I chose a figured dimity cloth in a shade called wild rose.

  It was nearly dark when we got back and it took me ages to find Uncle Henry to show him what I’d bought. It turned out he was fast asleep in his chamber. My knocking woke him up and when he opened the door his face was all sweaty, like someone with a fever. I asked him if he was ill and he replied that he had taken to his bed feeling rather unwell. Mama was looking after him, though. She brought a jug of water and some towels from his dressing room and bathed his forehead. He was quite all right by dinnertime.

  I didn’t show the letter to Jane. Fanny wrote a joint letter to her aunts a few days later but there was no reference to the visit from Henry. This I knew because Cass read the letter aloud to Jane at breakfast. Why had Fanny told me about her uncle’s visit but kept her aunts in ignorance about it? Was this a veiled appeal for help? Had she already guessed what was going on? It dawned on me that to her, I was the only person who could help; the only person she trusted who was not a member of the family. Of course, she couldn’t know what the consequences of my intervention were likely to be.

  I wrestled with my conscience for a long time. What was more important: to lose my post or protect Fanny? Either way the child was likely to suffer. And what of my own sufferings if I was cast out of Godmersham? I had nowhere to go and no more than a few shillings to my name.

  After a few days something like a plan began to form in my mind. I reasoned that Henry loved his niece and would be horrified by any suggestion that he was hurting her. If I could somehow get him alone, appeal to that kinder, softer side I knew he possessed, perhaps I could make him see what damage he was doing. I would be taking a huge risk in confronting him with what I suspected but I clung to the belief that he was, at heart, an honourable man who, if he could not stop what he was doing, would at least see the wisdom in behaving more discreetly.

  Jane never knew of this plan. I decided I had more chance of success with Henry if I could assure him that no one else was party to it. Perhaps that was naive; perhaps I should have realised that secrets of such magnitude cannot be boxed up and forgotten. Perhaps we should have gone together to confront him. Would it have made a difference to the awful events that followed? That is something I try not to contemplate, for I can never know the answer.

  Chapter Twelve

  Those next few weeks passed too quickly for me. Jane never once alluded to what we had discussed beneath the boat. What I had failed to grasp thus far was that a person whose tongue could be so sharp could inhabit a skin so thin. I didn’t fully understand this until she sent me, some nine years later, the first edition of Mansfield Park. ‘Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,’ she wrote in the final chapter, ‘I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can…’ It was the chapter that reported the adultery of a married woman with a man named Henry. What her family made of that I cannot know, but I believe the book was a way of releasing the pent up rage she felt at what she believed her brother had done. I do not think that rage is too strong a word, although no one would have guessed it that autumn at Worthing.

  In the middle of October, when the mornings misted up my bedroom window, Martha Lloyd, maker of potions, came to join us for the last fortnight of our holiday. Jane told me that Martha’s mother had died earlier in the year, an event which had left her homeless as well as bereaved. It had been decided that Martha would join Jane, Cassandra and their mother as a fourth member of their household in Bath, bringing a small income which would help pay the rent.

  In looks and character Martha reminded me very much of Madame Bigeon. She was small and round and very solicitous; a person whose sole concern seemed to be the comfort of others. She was ten years older than Jane but this made no difference to their affinity for one another. I might have been jealous but it was impossible to bear such a woman any malice.

  ‘Her sister is closer to me in age,’ Jane told me while Martha was unpacking her trunk, ‘But I like Martha much better. She is like us: she loves books. Mary thinks reading is a waste of time: she would far rather count James’ money than look at his sermons.’

  Although I was a stranger, Martha treated me with as much
regard as her two friends. When I told her that Jane had made me a wash for my eyes from her book of remedies, she took my face in her hands and studied it closely. ‘Your eyes look much recovered but your lips are a little cracked. Are they sore?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘the sea air has not been kind to them.’

  ‘I will make you a salve, if you like,’ she said. ‘Is there an apothecary in Worthing? I need alkanet root; the other ingredients I think I will find in the kitchen.’

  I watched her later as she busied herself in the kitchen, gathering butter, beeswax and claret to boil over the fire. As she reached for the pestle and mortar she turned to me and said: ‘Is Jane happy, do you think?’

  ‘Well, I think so…’ I hesitated, wondering what had prompted this. ‘Certainly she has been enjoying the holiday in Worthing.’ I paused for a moment, watching her deft movements as she peeled the alkanet root. ‘Do you have reason to think she may be unhappy?’ I ventured. ‘Apart from the loss of her father, I mean?’

  ‘I know that she hates living in Bath,’ Martha replied without looking up, ‘and that she dreads returning. She has never really settled since she left Steventon, you know, and that was five years ago.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, ‘She never told me that she hated it; I would have thought it a most enlivening place to live, judging from the tales she tells about the balls and the card parties and the gatherings in the Pump Room.’

  ‘I think that is her way of making it bearable.’ Martha sliced up the root and dropped the pieces into the mortar. ‘She despises most of the people she meets there. She would go back to Hampshire in a moment if she was able.’

  ‘She always talks of her old home with great affection,’ I said. ‘Why did they leave it?’

  ‘Her father decided it was time that he retired. Her mother has relatives in Bath and it is thought to be a good place for husband-hunting.’ She glanced at me, eyebrows raised. I wondered if this was the real reason for Jane’s dislike of the place. Perhaps she had fallen in with her parents’ plans only to be disappointed in her expectation of a marriage proposal. ‘I was with her when her parents gave her the news,’ Martha went on. ‘She had been staying with me and we returned to the rectory just before Christmas. No sooner had we crossed the threshold than her mother said: “Well, girls, it is all settled: we have decided to leave Steventon and go to Bath.” Jane was so shocked she actually fainted on the spot.’

  I would never have imagined Jane to be a person prone to fainting fits; she seemed far too robust a character for that. But, as I have said, I was still getting to know her. There was no doubt that I underestimated her sensibility.

  Martha pounded the alkanet until it bled white juice. ‘What made it all much worse was that my sister and her husband moved into the rectory,’ she said. ‘James was the curate at Deane but as soon as his father retired he was entitled to the living at Steventon. Jane’s parents insisted on selling nearly everything in the house and what didn’t sell was given to James and Mary.’ She shook the contents of the mortar into the pan. ‘Jane thought this terribly unfair,’ she went on, spooning in the beeswax and the butter. ‘Although Mary is my own sister I couldn’t help but agree. I remember the week we spent sorting through all the books in her father’s library: there were close on five hundred volumes and James got most of them for a pittance. Jane was absolutely furious.’ She poured a pint of claret into the pan and stirred it over the heat. ‘That same month was James and Mary’s wedding anniversary. They invited Jane to join the celebration but she refused to go.’

  A bittersweet aroma wafted from the pan. I pictured Jane, seething at the injustice of leaving her childhood home and all the old familiar things that were so dear to her. It reminded me of my own anguish when the bailiffs had arrived on the doorstep. I wondered how she had managed to remain on civil terms with her eldest brother and his wife. For the sake of her niece, perhaps, I thought. To Martha I said: ‘Little Anna is a lovely child; her aunt is very fond of her, I think.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she replied. ‘She and Cassandra were like mothers to her when she was small. It has been difficult for her, learning to love a new mama and sharing her father with a new brother and sister.’

  ‘And how does your sister and her baby? Both are well, I hope?’ I found it hard to visualise this sister of Martha’s: her disdain for books, her love of money, her bitter jealousy of Eliza and her coldness to Anna – these traits all warred with the sunny image of a new mother nursing her baby.

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ She took the pot off the stove and poured the steaming contents into a muslin bag set over a bowl. ‘She won’t be having any more children, though: she managed a space of seven years between James-Edward and Caroline and she says that two is quite enough.’

  I wondered how she could prevent it, short of turning her husband out of the marriage bed for good, for how else could she be so sure of avoiding the pains and perils of childbirth a third time? As I watched Martha squeezing the muslin bag to extract the last precious drops of her concoction another possibility occurred to me. I had heard of women taking all manner of things to prevent or terminate a pregnancy: was Martha the source of her sister’s confidence?

  ‘What’s this witches’ brew, Martha?’ It was Jane, peering round the door with her nose in the air, sniffing loudly. ‘Are you teaching Miss Sharp the black arts?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Martha smiled, setting the bowl to the window sill and lifting the latch. ‘I am making her a salve for her lips. Would you like some?’

  ‘Not if it contains hen’s dung or boar’s grease: I shouldn’t like either of those on my lips, thank you.’ Jane tugged at her friend’s apron strings as she turned round. Martha was transformed into a ship in full sail as the calico billowed out in the draught from the window. She took a swipe at Jane, who ducked away, grinning. ‘Gracious, what a colour!’ Jane was now bending over the dark, congealing liquid in the bowl. ‘I declare that you mean to turn my friend into a ruby-lipped temptress!’

  Martha gave a small sigh and smoothed down her apron. ‘It is not so red when it is rubbed in,’ she said. ‘If you don’t want any I shall pack up two pots for Miss Sharp to take back for Elizabeth and Fanny.’

  With a heavy heart I remembered that it was less than a week before I was due to return to Godmersham. The happy anticipation I would naturally have felt at being reunited with Fanny was muted by apprehension at the thought of confronting Henry. I wondered if he would be there when I returned. I hoped that he would not. I found myself willing something to happen, some event of such moment that it would end the affair without my intervention.

  I must have shuddered at the thought of what lay ahead, for Jane reached across to close the window. ‘I think it will set all right now,’ she said to Martha. ‘And I will have some, if you please. I’m sure Cass has need of a pot, too, so there won’t be any left to send to Godmersham, will there?’

  On the day that Jane and I were to part I woke up with a start. I’d been dreaming of the time we sat on the riverbank at Godmersham, cocooned in the branches of the weeping willow. She had the bowl of strawberries in her lap. I watched as she bit into one, swallowing half then reaching towards me, smearing my lips with what was left. Suddenly the willow leaves parted and Henry materialised, a knowing smile on his face. This is the ruby-lipped temptress, he hissed, stepping aside to let Elizabeth see my stained mouth.

  My eyes snapped open and I threw off the covers, my skin hot and sticky. I stared at the familiar objects on the dressing table. Everything looked grey. I suppose it was the wintry dawn light filtering through the blind that made them so. But it looked as though my body had put out tongues of flame as I slept, turning everything to ashes.

  I was ashamed of the dream, I suppose. It stirred up the same feelings of guilt and confusion I had experienced in the bathing machine. Jane and I had known each other only four months; less than half a year; and yet I dreaded the thought of being without her. I tried to pick my feelings apar
t. Was it the shared secret of Henry and Elizabeth that had brought us so close? No, my heart answered, you know it’s more than that. But I struggled to name what lay at the root of the strange kind of longing she provoked in me.

  Later that morning, when our trunks were packed in separate coaches, I hovered on the steps like an awkward child. ‘You will come and visit us in Bath, won’t you?’ She went to kiss me goodbye and I tensed as her lips brushed my cheek, half afraid to kiss her back. ‘I’m going to write to you as soon as I get home.’ This last was said with a determined nod and an inflection of the eyebrows. What was I to read into it? Was she trying to convey feelings similar to my own; feelings she couldn’t express in front of Martha and Cassandra? Or was it something more prosaic: that she was relying on me to act as her spy in the coming months?

  Martha was my travelling companion on the journey home. She was to accompany me as far as Rye, where she had arranged to stay for a few days with an old friend of her mother’s before travelling home to Bath. I was glad of her presence, for my heart felt like a lead weight as I clambered into the carriage.

  She did not mention Jane at all in the first hour or so of the journey and I wondered if she had guessed how downcast I felt and was trying to distract me from the cause of it. But suddenly she leaned across the space between us and touched my hand with hers.