“May I be of assistance, ma’am?” Henry cried, approaching the distracted lady with a satiric light in his eye I knew too well.

“Perhaps you set down your key when you took up your flowers.”

“My flowers?” she enquired, blinking about her doubtfully.

“So very kind. but I do not think we are acquainted. or perhaps I am being foolish again. is it Mr. Thrace?”

“Mr. Henry Austen at your service.” He raised his hat obligingly.

“Austen?” she repeated, and peered from Henry to me.

“Did you say Austen?”

“I did, ma’am. And you are.?”

“Miss Benn.” Her faded blue eyes travelled the length of my brother’s form with that same expression of doubt.[6]

“May I beg leave to present my sister?” Henry’s glance was eloquent of mischief. “Miss Jane Austen, lately arrived at the former bailiff’s cottage.”

“Bailiff’s cottage?” Miss Benn echoed vaguely. “I do not think. ” Comprehension broke upon the lady’s countenance.

“The corpse! So very silly of me, and the whole village talking of nothing else. Then you will be the Squire’s family! The ones who have come into a quantity of jewels! I had heard something to the effect that you would be arriving this summer — I am not sure — from Mrs. Prowting, perhaps, or Mr. Baigent? — ”

“Shall I hold your flowers while you search for that key?”

Henry enquired.

“My flowers? I only intended to step across to the church — dear St. Nicholas’s, but of course you will know that is the church’s name, if you are indeed a member of the Austen family — I often do the flowers of a morning, I think it makes such a difference to the air of a church, do not you? — My brother, Mr. John Benn, Rector of Farringdon, has often wished he could summon my posies to his vestry — so of course I don’t really require the door to be locked, as I am sure Mrs. Cuttle will kindly keep an eye on the cottage for me; tho’ Old Philmore is terribly particular, quite the ogre, Mr. Austen, if you understand my meaning, and much given to threats if he believes his property is liable to come to harm — tho’ how such a disreputable and sad little place could possibly deteriorate further, is quite difficult to say. ”

She plucked at her shawl as she spoke, as though conscious of a draught despite the July heat, her nearsighted gaze roaming distractedly from myself to the half-open door to the basket of loaves before Mrs. Cuttle’s door; and of a sudden, I pitied her.

“We are walking that way ourselves,” I said, “and should be glad to accompany you into the church.”

“That is excessively kind of you, Miss Austen! Let me just leave the door off the latch — and if perhaps Libby would not mind casting her eye over the place now and again while I am away — and perhaps fibbing on my behalf if Old Philmore should materialise. ”

The steady clip-clop of a pair of horses put paid to this speech, and a beatific smile suffused Miss Benn’s withered features. “And there is Mr. Middleton! Such an excellent man,” she informed us, “and so exceptionally considerate, despite the nu- merous cares of the children. The Squire is indeed fortunate in the character of his tenant.”

Two gentlemen were approaching from the direction of the Great House, their horses — a young chestnut, and a strengthy grey — progressing at a walk. One I judged to be in his middle fifties: stout, ruddy of feature, and a model of deportment in the saddle. The other was a gentleman of perhaps half his companion’s age. Beautifully arrayed in the best Bond Street fashion, he possessed the easy seat and careless grace of a punishing rider to hounds. This must be Mr. Middleton and his son; I had understood from Neddie that there were several children, left motherless some years before.

Beside me, Henry let slip a low and speculative whistle.

“Devil take it!” he muttered. “What has Julian Thrace to do in Chawton, of all places?”

Letter from Lord Harold Trowbridge to Eugenie, Duchess of Wilborough, dated Eton College, 23 January 1767; three leaves quarto, wove; no watermark.

(British Museum, Wilborough Papers, Austen bequest)

My dear Mamma—

Benning will say that I ott not to adress you in so Informal a Way, you being amung the Grate of the Land; but he is a Prig and a Swot and I do not care for his vews on what is owd to a Duchess, tho I must serve him as Fag. I shall give one of the soverains you left me to Wilkins at the Gate, and he will post this letter without Benning having to know. I miss you eckseedingly, after all the happy times of the holydays, and I cannot help crying at night in my cot when the others have gone to sleep. I recall the noise of the streets around home, and the fires in the Park, and the smell of rosting chestnuts, and the good steemy smell of Poll my pony when we have had a run in Rotten Row, and I feel such a desire to leave this place and be back with you and Nanny that I have three times tryed to run away. My efferts have not been graced with success. After the last, I could not sit down for two days, Mr. Pilfer being librul with his switch and Benning having topped the whole with a slipper aplyed to my backside. I hate Benning but my brother says he is a Great Gun and I must do as he says. I hope he gets the Pox as some of the older boys have got it and two have died. Perhaps if you are fearful of the Pox you will send for me? Pilfer says he shall write to Papa if I run away a forth time, so I shall not. It seems an age until the end of term. You will not forget me?

When I am grown I shall take you back to live in Paris and you will never cry in the evenings when Papa is away again, and I shall never cry for missing you.

Your loving son,

Harry

Chapter 7

The Bond Street Beau

5 July 1809, cont.

Mr. Julian Thrace, as Henry later informed me, is the latest sensation of the ton: a gentleman who appears to have sprung from exactly nowhere as recently as January, breaking upon Fashionable London with all the force of a thunderclap: his looks, his air, his manners, and his social graces being of the finest. For a young man of two-and-twenty, who possesses neither title nor fortune, to gain the kind of introductions Mr. Thrace everywhere obtained, was no less extraordinary than it was wondered at; he was carried into Carlton House on the arm of the Earl of Holbrook; was proposed for membership at White’s by as many as half a dozen of its standing members; was admitted to the most exclusive assemblies without hesitation; and was no more suspected of seduction by the careful mammas parading their daughters in the Green Park of an afternoon, than was the local man of the cloth.

“But who is he, Henry?” I demanded, as my brother regaled me with the tale during our return to the cottage.

“An orphan, reared for some years abroad,” my brother replied. “His history is a delicate one — and thus discourages the impertinent from delving too far into Mr. Thrace’s business. It is said that he is the illegitimate son of a peer, and will shortly be proclaimed that gentleman’s heir, as the nobleman in question has no legitimate male issue; and on the basis of rumour and his expectations alone, Thrace has been living on tick for the past six months.[7] I admire the fellow’s audacity; but I wonder at his prospects. Those of us in the banking profession — and any number have been applied to, Jane, for the support of Mr. Thrace’s debts — have taken to calling him the South Sea Bubble, from a belief that he is just such an object of speculation, and likely to leave any number of his current backers awash in future.”