“Jane? Jane!”

My fingers clutched around the copybook, I gazed quickly through the henhouse door.

“Henry!” I cried. “Good God — where did you spring from?”

“Alton,” my brother replied carelessly. “I keep a bank there, you know. What do you mean by sitting in the middle of a poultry yard in your dressing gown at eight o’clock in the morning?”

Chapter 6

Coincidence, or Pattern?

5 July 1809, cont.

It is impossible to describe my astonishment at this sudden apparition of my brother, in a place that — although not wholly alien to him — was nonetheless the very last in which I expected to find him. I had understood our Henry to be fixed with his wife, the aforementioned Eliza de Feuillide, at Godmersham with all our Kentish party; and failing Kent, I should have expected to learn that he and Eliza were returned to London, where they intended a removal to a new home in Sloane Street. Henry’s banking concerns had fared so well of late, and his affluence was so obvious, that the affairs of the Alton branch of Austen, Gray & Vincent might suitably have been left in the hands of his partners for the duration of the summer months; and yet, here was Henry: large as life and impatient for his breakfast.

As I rose from the henhouse floor, he sauntered towards the chest. “Good Lord! Is this the Rogue’s Treasure?”

“What do you know of it?” I demanded indignantly.

“Half of Alton is talking about this article, my dear; besides, Mamma told me the whole the moment I walked in the door.”

“She is already awake?” I peered out at the sun. “I had no notion the morning was so advanced.”

“The cask is undoubtedly from the Subcontinent, and must have been carved a hundred years ago at a pasha’s orders,”

Henry murmured, ignoring me entirely. “Observe the figures cut into the teak!”

“They are most indecent,” I said primly, “and I beg you will not draw them to Mamma’s notice.”

“I suppose his lordship must once have visited Bengal.”

“I believe, Henry, that he lived there some years — and was in a position of some trust to your wife’s benefactor, Mr. Hastings.”

“Lord Harold knew old Warren?” Henry’s startled expression was comical, as tho’ Mr. Hastings was the preserve of the Austens alone, instead of a man who had encountered half the world and commanded the rest. “I shall have to tax him with the acquaintance when next we meet. He is getting on in years, Jane — must be five-and-seventy if he is a day — but he would remember such a figure as the Rogue. Should you like me to lock this in the Alton bank?”

“Certainly not! The chest shall ascend to my bedroom, if you please. You may carry it there immediately, like the good brother you are.”

“Be so good as to hold my coat.” He drew off the elegant article and bent to lift the chest.

“Heavy enough to be filled with gold,” he gasped. “Is that what he left you?”

“No questions, Henry.”

“Very well. But you might reward me for my labour.”

“Only when you explain your presence in Hampshire!”

“I left Eliza with young Fanny,” he managed as I led him, staggering with the chest’s weight, into the cottage, “and set out with Neddie and Cass from Kent two days ago. Neddie’s chaise broke an axle not far from Brompton, and he has put up at the Bell until the equipage is repaired. I rode on with the intention of making your minds easy. I reached the George late last night — and learned you were already established in Chawton.”

“My sister was not hurt, I hope, by the accident to the chaise?”

Cassandra had suffered greatly during an unfortunate overturning we experienced near Lyme, some years before, and I did not like to think of her cast down with the head-ache in a strange inn.

“Not a whit — so do not be exciting Mamma with your talk of injury,” Henry admonished me. “This seems a comfortable little place,” he added doubtfully, as he set down the chest on the kitchen floor and peered through the doorway to the sparsely furnished rooms. “Could do with a bit of paint. Something bright and cheerful, in the yellow line.”

“Thank you,” I returned with heavy sarcasm. “Perhaps you could find us a painter among your Alton acquaintance? And a manservant? Or possibly a cook?”

“I cannot spare above a few days in the neighbourhood, Jane,” he assured me hastily. “I suggest you consult Mr. Prowting. He dearly loves to dispose of other people’s lives. Have you any coffee?”

“You shall have to be content with tea.” I glanced at the kettle; my supply of water had entirely boiled away while I sat in the henhouse. “The well is in the yard. After you have seen Lord Harold’s legacy safely beneath my bed, you may employ your talents with bucket and pump while I repair upstairs to dress.”

“It is the oddest thing,” Henry observed an hour later as we walked out into the Street — as the London to Gosport road is termed where it winds through Chawton village. We were gone on the errand of discovering the local bread baker — my mother had sorely missed her customary toast. “You enter the cottage for the first time, only to discover a dead man; while I am greeted at my Alton branch with news of a mysterious burglary. I must consider my decision to descend into Hampshire this week as a matter of Providence.”

“Burglary,” I repeated in a lowered tone, and glanced about me at the sparse population of local folk: two children and their mother, a market basket over her arm, who drove a flock of geese before them in the direction of Alton; and a labourer engaged in shifting a quantity of grain from his dray into his cottage yard. None of these persons so much as offered us a good morning, or pulled a forelock; the children, at least, stared openly at the strange lady who had found a corpse in her cellar.

“I was met with the tale upon my arrival at the George,”

Henry continued. “The publican — Burbridge? Berlin?”

“Barlow,” I supplied.

“—thought that I had been summoned to the place. ‘Ah, Mr. Austen,’ he said, with obvious relief. ‘You’ve come, then, about the bank.’ ”

“What about the bank?” I demanded, frowning.

“Naturally I enquired. It seems that poor Gray”—by this he meant Mr. Edward-William Gray, his partner in Alton—“had been suffering every kind of anxiety that morning. The windows of Number Ten High Street were forced, if you will credit it — glass lying about the carpet, chairs overturned, and all our papers in a considerable disorder. Gray had spent much of yesterday attempting to determine what, if anything, had been stolen.”

“And?”

“He cannot make head or tail of the business. Neither our post bills nor our banknotes were touched.”[5]

My brother Henry has made a considerable fortune in recent years as a payroll agent for several valuable regiments around the country, including some in Hampshire, Kent, and Derbyshire. He serves, in essence, as go-between for the disbursement of salaries to officers and enlisted men, which sums are sent out by the Paymaster General in London to regimental representatives such as Henry. The role of agent is a coveted one, held in the gift of each regiment’s Colonel; and that Henry has secured so valuable a living, may be attributed to his polished manners, his knack for cultivating The Great, his former commission in the Oxfordshire Militia, and the connexions of his wife — who is everywhere received in Society, and does not hesitate to turn her acquaintance to advantage. Henry’s prosperity has induced my brother Frank to become another partner of the London concern, bringing naval patronage within Henry’s orbit; and if I suspected that Henry occasionally turned a profit on the negotiated sale of commissions in prized regiments, which we are taught to consider beyond the pale of the law, I have never taxed him with the subject.