“What has Mr. Hawkins to do with it?” Mamma’s looks suggested apoplexy. “Mark my words, Miss Jane, you shall come to no good end! To follow the whims of a stranger — to board an unknown ship — is what I cannot like! You might have suffered all manner of abuse — been carried off without a word of warning — and ended a captive in a sultan’s harem! You are far too trusting and too independent of convention for your own good. People will talk. At your age, and with your unfortunate history, you cannot be too nice in your habits.”
My history, as my mother would term it, has been characterised by a penchant for stumbling over corpses that even I have begun to regard as a morbid hoax of Fate. It is true that my study of murder commenced with the refusal of the most respectable offer of marriage I had ever received — in December of 1802—and my mother might be forgiven for drawing the obvious conclusion: that my taste for Scandal has driven away all my suitors. Several years had lately intervened without the presentation of a body, however; and I dared hope that I was quite free of the blight.
“Captain Strong was anxious that news of Frank should be conveyed to poor Mary,” I observed mildly, “and his First Lieutenant, Mr. Smythe, was most pressing in his invitation to come aboard. Perhaps I ought not to have accepted the invitation—”
“No lady of delicacy should have done so.”
“—but I understood that the Captain must sail with the tide. Imagine my suspense! I was every moment believing that Fly had been wounded — or taken ill — or even, God forbid...”
“But as your brother is merely three days out from Portsmouth, Captain Strong excited your worst fears to no purpose,” my mother rejoined crossly.
“You have lost your heart to that Lieutenant, I’ll be bound. What is his name?”
“Smythe. He is perfectly respectable, Mamma, and by this hour, is safely at sea.”
“You were always a girl to set your cap at the most disreputable sort of person — first Tom Lefroy, an Irishman, by my lights; and then that abominable smuggler who went by the name of Sidmouth—”
“How I detest that phrase, Mamma! Setting one’s cap. It is so decidedly vulgar.”
“Not to mention the gentleman whose name I vowed should never more be suffered to pass my lips.”
She referred, of course, to Lord Harold Trowbridge — whose attentions she had long misapprehended as a seducer’s. My mother’s hopes warred with her disapproval of Lord Harold in this; for like any sensible widow left with two spinsters on her hands, she longed to see the family’s fortunes made through a brilliant and unexpected alliance. However dreadful his reputation, Lord Harold was yet a duke’s son.
How shall I learn anything of Mrs. Challoner? I had asked him as he stood by the brig’s rail, preparing to bid me farewell.
She lives in a place called Netley Lodge, he replied. A grand old manor near the Abbey ruins. You must have observed it...
I had, indeed — but a few hours before. And wondered at the smoke curling from the disused chimneys. Martha reached now for my untouched tea and replaced it with a glass of Port. “For medicinal purposes, Jane. I should not like you to catch cold. Your spencer is wringing with wet, my dear.”
“As are your nephews’ heads!” my mother snapped.
“I shall undertake to write a letter to the Master of Winchester” — I sighed — “informing him that Edward and George may prove a trifle delicate in coming days. Dr. Mayhew must be aware of Elizabeth’s passing, and his sympathies will be already excited on the boys’ behalf. They may be spared the worst of Winchester for at least a week.”
Martha snorted. “I should judge them hearty enough. They were spraying the scullery with hot bathwater when I left them, exuberant as two whales.”
Late this evening, alone at last in my own bedchamber, I built up the fire to a good blaze, drew off my stained gown, and laid my damp spencer by the hearth to dry. It was impossible not to think of him: at Gravesend, perhaps, or sailing past Greenwich. If the brig had made good time, he might even now be arrived at Wilborough House. The great limestone façade would be draped in black, the lanthorns shuttered.
“My mother is to be interred on the morrow,” he had said, “and by Thursday or Friday at the latest I shall be returned to Southampton. Orlando stays behind — I shall put him off with Mr. Hawkins this very hour. He is to engage a suite of rooms at the Dolphin Inn against my return.”
“Why cannot Orlando watch Mrs. Challoner in my stead?”
“Because he is known to her as my manservant,”
Lord Harold said quietly. “I do not want her to apprehend, at present, that she moves under my eye. Do you dabble in watercolours, Jane? Or sketch a little, perhaps?”
“A very little — but I am no proficient, sir. It is my sister who possesses that art.”
“Then you might borrow her paintbox and easel, and set up in the ruins. Be seized by a fine passion for ancient habitation and lost sacerdotal faith. Spend hours — fortified by a suitable nuncheon — in the environs of Netley Abbey. Contrive to keep a weather eye on all activity at that house.”
“So that I might learn... what, my lord?”
“How Sophia Challoner intends to despatch her intelligence to France.”
“And if it rains?” I enquired with asperity. He threw back his head and laughed. “You might beg shelter from the dragon. She will entertain you charmingly, I am sure.”
I had written only the previous day to my sister Cassandra at Godmersham, but the habit of communication is strong, and I could not douse my candle without conveying a little of the boys’ adventures at the Abbey. No word should pass my lips, however, of my encounter with Lord Harold; Cassandra required diversion amidst her painful duties, not a further increase of anxiety. She never heard news of the Gentleman Rogue with equanimity.
... the scheme met with such success that I fear young George might run off to sea, if his taste for Winchester does not increase. Mr. Hawkins allowed them to take the oars on the voyage home, and both are now possessed of sizeable blisters on their palms. Our nephews should not part with them for the world, and shall probably earn the esteem of their fellows, when once they are returned to school. . A boy cried out in his sleep, tortured by nightmares. I raised my head from my letter and felt the stillness of the house. It must be George. Did he dream of his mother? And did she walk tonight among the ruins of an abbey?
“Aunt Jane!”
The voice was deep and fluting by turns, the voice of a boy on the verge of manhood. I turned towards the doorway, and discovered Edward standing there — his taper, lit from the lamp left burning in the hall, trembling in the draughts. He looked ghostly and forlorn in his long striped nightshirt, his grey eyes shadowed. Edward, whom I had considered too stoic for nightmares.
“What is it, my love? You should not be awake.”
“Might I have a drink of water? The pitcher in our room is bone dry.”
I laid down my pen and reached for the earthen jug that sat on the dressing table. “Then pray avail yourself of mine. You do not suffer from fever, I hope, as a result of your drenching at the Abbey?”
He shook his head, and took the proffered cup.
“Was that you I heard, calling out in your sleep?”
“The wind howls so — it woke me, Aunt. I hear voices crying.”
I searched his countenance. He was not a youth to bare his soul. Even when his father’s letter from Godmersham arrived, with an account of his mother’s funeral service, Edward had read over the whole without flinching. It was George who had sobbed aloud.
“There are voices in the wind, I tell you.” The grey eyes slid up to my own. “I heard a woman cry. And the wail of a baby. Aunt Jane — is my brother well? My youngest brother?”