“Mr. Sidmouth,” I cried.

“Yes, Miss Austen?” He halted in the. very act of exiting, and offered a lifted eyebrow.

“This is a very singular household indeed,” I burst out.

“’Singular’ does not even begin to describe it,” Mr. Sidmouth replied, and left me to myself.

I HAD NOT LONG TO AWAIT THE RETURN OF THE GRANGE'S CARRIAGE, and my anxious feet had sped me to the courtyard well before the horses were pulled up, and the coach door flung open, and my dear Cassandra laid on a settee before the fire. She was as colourless as a ghost, and I might even have believed her to have expired, but from the composure of my father in attending her.

Sidmouth materialised in the drive with a sturdy farm woman behind, the very Mary whose slovenliness I had conjectured; she bore a steaming basin and a quantity of torn cloth, for the preparation of bandages, and I was soon relieved to find her possessed of a quiet efficiency. When she had bathed Cassandra's wound, Sidmouth himself bent over my sister with an air of command that would not be gainsaid. His fingers probed the bones of her skull, and passed with delicate knowledge along her temple, so that she winced in her delirium, but showed no other sign of discomfort. My poor Cassandra! So lovely still, despite her suffering, that even Sidmouth could not fail to be moved!

“Mary,” he said, extending a hand for a cloth and wringing it over the basin, “she will need some brandy first and then some hot broth. Beef, 1 think. Fetch those and your smelling salts directly.”

The woman silently departed, and the master of High Down proceeded to test the waist of my sister's dress, so that my mother made a small movement of distress, and my father laid his hand upon hers. “The gendeman knows what he is about, my dear,” my father said quietly. Then, to Mr. Sidmouth himself, “You have experience in such matters, I believe?”

“I do.”

“You were in His Majesty's service at one time?”

I saw the direction my father's thoughts were taking; and applauded his perspicacity. Sidmouth's actions looked for all the world like those of a camp doctor, accustomed to crisis in the field. But the gentleman himself did not reply directly.

“Her ribs are intact, for which you may be thankful,” he said briskly, and reached for a length of calico to dress Cassandra's temple. “She is not out of danger — we must await the outcome of the night to proclaim her truly safe — but I think it likely she shall only want strength for some weeks, and suffer from the headache. I venture to predict, that barring a relapse in the next few hours, she may recover entirely.”

My mother gave a faint cry, and staggered backwards; my own relief was not to be described; and my father silently joined his hands in an attitude of prayer. To all of this, Sidmouth made sardonic witness, a faint smile about his lips. At Mary's reappearance, brandy was administered, and smelling salts applied; Cassandra's consciousness returned, and with it a bewilderment that brought tears to her eyes — and so we were borne away to bed.

HOW EXTRAORDINARY IS THE HAND OF FATE ITS ACCIDENTAL miseries, its directed salvations. My father bears Cassandra's trouble well, and is even now gone peacefully to his bed; he has seen much that is worrisome in three-and-seventy years, and trusts to the goodness of Providence. My mother is less sanguine. She starts, and weeps upon our bedroom stoop, and wrings her hands for lack of anything better; and permits the grossest fancies to unnerve her sense.

“But do you think her quite at ease, my dear?” she enquired thrice this last half-hour, her ravaged countenance peering about the door-frame.

“She shall be, madam, as soon as she achieves some quiet”

“Perhaps my wool wrap, placed over the coverlet? For cold is ever a danger in such cases, as you will remember. Miss Tate was carried off in a matter of hours, for want of extra bedclothes, and Miss Campbell in but a week, for having got wet through in a sudden rain; and how her mother survived such a cruel mistake, I shall never comprehend.”

“I assure you, madam, that everything will be done to sustain Cassandra's comfort,” I replied, stemming my impatience with difficulty. Having heard of the untimely ends of a score of young ladies among the Austen acquaintance, my tolerance for my mother was at its close. “Do you seek the chamber Mr. Sidmouth has provided for you, and rest easy in the knowledge that should we require you, you shall be summoned directly.”

Though all benevolence in her distress, my mother is overcome by such tender emotions in gazing at her dearest daughter, that I fear she should prove of little aid to Cassandra, in any hour of extremity. Better that I should sit watch by my sister alone, and my mother find some comfort in sleep's oblivion. But it required a full quarter-hour, and the recollection of the fates of both young Master and Miss Holder, who met their ends some three years past, before she would at last seek her bed.

Cassandra is stirring now, and calls my name; I set aside my pen and journal and reach for her hand. A touch alone suffices; we two are so familiar to each other, from the happy intimacy of our minds and hearts, that at the pressure of my fingertips upon her brow, her troubled mind relaxes. A moment more, and she slumbers deep, the pain of injury forgotten. I regain my seat, and take up my pen and modest book — formed, according to my habit, from a sheaf of paper sewn quite through and trimmed to manageable size. A stout book, for the stoutest of thoughts; and of considerable comfort, in serving as confidante when no living mind may answer.

All around us the eaves of the old farmhouse creak with the violence of the wind, but the intimates of High Down Grange are lost in storm-filled slumber — no sound emanates from the shuttered rooms, so that I might be the last soul alive, left here at the edge of the world. Beyond is darkness, and cliffs, and the depthless sea; England is to my back as 1 sit by Cassandra's bed. And so I cross the room to peer out at the unknown, stretching before me like all the days I have yet to live; and can discern nothing beyond my own wavering reflection in the window's glass. A shiver — of foreboding, perhaps — at the hidden landscape, and I would turn away to find comfort in candlelight. But a sudden flare in the darkness below seizes my gaze; I peer more closely, my eyes narrowing, and discern the bob of a lanthorn. A lanthorn just come up over the cliffs edge in the distance, and toiling even now towards the Grange itself. A curiously-shaped lanthorn, perhaps, with a protuberant spout, of a utility unknown to me? Clutched in an angel's ethereal hand, while the other flutters at the nape of a flowing red cloak?

Chapter 2

The Understanding of Eliza

5 September 1804

Lyme

AND SO WE ARE AT LAST COME TO LYME, AND TO OUR VERY OWN Wings cottage — a smallish affair of a house tucked into a hillside, with two ground floors-one in its proper place, and the other at the top of the house containing the bedrooms and a back door opening onto a greensward behind. The house fronts upon a busy block of Broad Street, a location not entirely as our imaginings had made it; for where we had looked to gaze upon the sea, and throw open our casements to its gentle roar, we are instead meant to be happy with a partial view of the Cobb, and that only from the garden at the house's top. But the sitting-room is pretty; and the bustle of traffic at the foot of town, and the eternal cries of muffin men and milk carters climbing its precipitously steep main road, little more than we should have heard at home. More to the point, we are free at last of High Down Grange.