Stephanie Barron

Jane and His Lordship's Legacy

Being the Eighth Jane Austen Mystery

Map of Present-Day Chawton Village

Chapter 1

All We Have

Tuesday, 4 July 1809

Chawton, Hampshire

I came into my kingdom today at half-past two — or so much of one as shall ever be granted me on this earth. Four square brick walls, half a dozen chimneys, a simple doorway fronting on the London to Gosport road, and a clutch of outbuildings behind: such is our cottage in Chawton.

“Lord, Jane,” my mother breathed as she surveyed the unadorned façade of her future abode from the vantage of our hired pony trap, “I should not call it charming, to be sure — but beggars cannot be choosers, you know, and we must admit ourselves infinitely obliged to your excellent brother. Observe, a new cesspit has been dug, and the privy painted! I declare, is nothing forgot that might contribute to our comfort?”

I did not reply, for tho’ the raw mud near the new plumbing works looked dismal enough, my mother could not hesitate to approve the generosity Edward has shown. A man of considerable property, as the heir of our distant cousins the Knights, my brother chuses to reside at his principal estate of Godmersham, in Kent — but has given us the use of his late bailiff’s cottage here in Hampshire. If a former alehouse, fronting the juncture of two highways overrun by coaching traffic, with rough-hewn beams, low-ceilinged rooms, and cramped stairs, may be considered a luxury, then we are bound to be grateful to Edward; he has saved four women the expence of lodgings, and for a household of strict economy and perpetual dependence, that cost must be a saving indeed.

There are some among our acquaintance who would hint that, in possessing the freehold of every house in Chawton village, my brother might have done more for his widowed mother, and done it years since; but I will not join my strictures to theirs.[1] My heart rises to smell the good earth again, and rejoices to think that my mornings will never more be shattered by the bustle of a town, and all the noise of commerce crying at the gate! There is nothing, when one is broken-hearted, like the healing balm of the country!

“I shall plant potatoes,” my mother declared briskly, “and if we are fortunate, we shall gather them by late September. The cottage’s aspect might be softened, Jane. It requires only a flowering vine, I think, to grow romantickly across the door.”

 “—And to complete the picturesque, it ought to be sagging in its casements. It is too much to hope for a shattered roof or a tower crumbling into ruin; we must contrive to be satisfied with a building that is only ample, sturdy, and in good repair, Mamma.”

The house’s position at the fork of Chawton’s two principal roads must be adjudged an evil — but outweighing this are the broad meadows to north and east, the stout wood fence and hornbeam hedge enclosing the grounds, and the delightful promise of birdsong from the thriving fields. Mr. Seward, the late bailiff, maintained a shrubbery and an orchard, but Mrs. Seward cannot have loved her flowers; the borders must and shall be worked. Syringas, and peonies, and the simpler blooms of mignonette — all these we shall have, and Sweet William too. While the carter jumped down to secure his horse, I studied the distant view of the privy and banished the idea of a water closet, soon to be installed in brother Henry’s London house; such ostentation has no place in a country village. It is not for Jane to repine. I had found no love or joy in the habitation of cities — I had rather witnessed, in first Bath and then Southampton, the gradual erosion of nearly every cherished dream I held in life. It was time I made a trial of rural delights; it was they that had formed my earliest vision of happiness.

“The man will want something for his pains,” my mother urged in an audible hiss as the driver helped her to descend.

“See that he shifts the baggage before he deserts us entirely. And do not go spoiling him with Edward’s coin! I am gone to inspect the privy.”

She moved with determination in the direction of my brother’s improvements, her gait marked by the stiffness of rheumatism. I stepped down to the rutted surface of the road and prepared to be — if not happy, then content.

• • •

We had set out from Castle Square in late April, bidding farewell forever to the glare and stink of a town. We made for Godmersham, where we tarried six weeks in the pleasant Kentish spring, tho’ the place and all who live in it are remarkably changed from what they once were. My brother Edward’s wife Elizabeth is dead now nearly a year and my sister Cassandra resident in the household, supplying the want of a mother; she is careworn but steady in her attachment to the little children, and a prop to Fanny, who at sixteen must now fill Elizabeth’s place. Tho’ the chuckling of the Stour was as sweet as I remembered, and the temple on the hill beckoned with serenity, I could not stomach the climb to its heights, nor rest an interval between its columns. In happier times I had sat in that very place with Elizabeth beside me — and once, looked up from my pen to find the tall figure of a silver-haired man climbing the grassy slope—

Edward has not yet learned to endure his Lizzy’s passing. Indeed, he has come to see in it a deliberate blow of Divine Judgement: that having loved his wife too well, and delighting in the gift of every luxury and indulgence her fair form desired, he incurred the wrath of Providence — Who despised Edward’s attachment to things of this world so much, that He tore from my brother’s bosom the one creature he cherished most.

“Were it not for the children,” Neddie observed bitterly as we sat together before the bare grate in the stillness of Elizabeth’s drawing-room, “I should have gone into the grave with her, Jane. I should not have hesitated at self-murder.”

“—Tho’ the very act should damn you to Hell?”

“It is Hell I endure at present.”

I could not assure my brother that I understood too well his sentiments; could not add my misery to his own, as he sat glaring at the waste of all that constituted his happiness. Edward knew nothing of the Gentleman Rogue, beyond a passing acquaintance with one who had called briefly at Godmersham several years before, and had long since been forgot. I could not explain that I, too, must submit to all the agony of bereavement — with the added burden of suffering in silence. Never having been Lord Harold Trowbridge’s acknowledged love, I must be mute in misery before the world he deserted so abruptly last November.

As I studied my brother’s countenance — grave, where it had once been gay; worn, where it had formerly appeared the portrait of inveterate youth — I concluded that there was at least this relief in publick grief: one was not forced to shield the feelings of others. The Bereaved might be all that is selfish in their parade of unhappiness. Whereas I was continually chafing under the daily proofs of inconsideration, imperviousness, high animal spirits, and insensibility that surrounded me, when every hope of happiness for myself was at an end. When the Rogue expired of a knife wound on the fifth of November, some ten months ago, it was as though a black pit yawned at my feet and I trembled on the brink of it for days together without being conscious of what I said or did. I know from others that his body was fetched back to London in the Duke of Wilborough’s carriage; that Wilborough House, so lately draped in black for the passing of the Rogue’s mother, remained in crepe for this second son; that nearly five hundred men followed the cortège first to the Abbey church at Westminster and then, on horseback, to the interment in the Wilborough tomb. It was said that no less than seven ladies of Fashion fainted dead away at the awful news of his demise, and three fell into a decline. All this my mother read aloud from the London papers, offering comment and opinion of her own.