“I trust your cottage was not too much disturbed by that miscreant last evening,” she said with solicitude as Edward released her hand. “My poor Miss Austen! What shocking ill-treatment you have received, I declare, since your arrival in Hampshire! You must believe us a pack of brigands!”

I should have liked to order her out of the carriage and search the baggage strapped within and behind, but such a course must be impossible; and so I murmured a polite nothing, and allowed the gentlemen to bid me adieux.

“It is a pleasure to meet at last the owner of the Great House,” Major Spence said in his quiet, well-bred way. “We have heard much of you, Mr. Austen — and all of it praise.”

“I thank you, sir. It is good news indeed to learn that Stonings is under repair. We have need of steady families in the neighbourhood — tho’ I say it as should not, who persist in living such a great way off.”

“You must all come to Stonings tomorrow,” Mr. Thrace remarked gaily, “for we mean to have a sort of picnic on the grounds, and show our Chawton friends over the house. The weather could not be finer for such a scheme; and tho’ the strawberries are done, the peaches are sure to be ripe. Middleton is charged with seconding my invitation — he intends to bring all the children, and Miss Beckford, and Miss Benn as well, in every open conveyance he can borrow or steal; and shall call upon you at the cottage directly to explain the whole!”

Major Spence looked as tho’ he should have liked to curb his friend’s speech, of the word steal at the very least; but he added his pressing assurance of our welcome to Mr. Thrace’s, and closed with the words, “Pray bring all your family, Miss Austen — your other brother not excepted. I should like his advice on the best way to go about the Vyne hunt, well before next season.”

And so we parted with satisfaction, and some little interest, on all sides.

Excerpt from the diary of Lord Harold Trowbridge, dated Paris, 3 January 1792.

. My memory of these past few weeks is of one long and barely endurable privation, first on the passage between Marseille and the Spanish coast, where the jagged reefs and the monumental seas at our point of landing would have driven us on the rocks, and we were forced to wear and wear back out to sea, almost to the point of achieving the Dorset coast, and might have put in there but for the Comte’s protests. The women, all sick belowdecks and too weak even to tend to their children, one of whom was nearly lost overboard when the ship was swamped under a wall of water; and all the while, Geoffrey Sidmouth shouting like a madman, half in French, half in English. I like Sidmouth’s looks, and love his courage; I shall want a good deal of both if Grey’s plans for the French are to achieve fruition. And then the return to Aix, and the intelligence that Hélène was not to be found — the party lost in the Pyrénées having emerged from the snows of the pass at last, and without her. Freddy Vansittart, his noble reputation forgot, tearing at my sleeve in frantic supplication. Promising me money, promising me support, promising me a lifetime of servitude if only I will undertake this journey— Too afraid to venture himself, but too overwrought to sit in idleness, never knowing — and so I am gone again on horseback, working my way north by slow degrees and worse roads, the people everywhere about in the most wretched condition, and blood running in the streets. I fear she has remained in Paris when all counsel would have had her flee to the south. Perhaps it was the child — a sudden chill or fever, and the desire to remain where food and shelter were at least certain. But for how long? How long before the tumbrel arrives for the Comte’s fair daughter? I must find out where she is hidden. I must see Hélène safe, and the boy with her. Not for Freddy or the Comte or the discomfiture of St. Eustace — but for Horatia, my poor lost girl lying cold in the Viscount’s tomb. I must save Hélène and her boy for the sake of those whom long ago I sent to their ruin.

Chapter 14

Catherine’s Confession

7 July 1809, cont.

Neddie thought it only proper to continue on to the Great House, and pay his respects to his tenant Mr. Middleton, and listen with becoming gravity to all the discussion of roof-slates, stable accommodation, and patches of damp, while I made my thanks to Miss Beckford for the previous evening’s entertainment.

“My brother tells me that you have suffered a loss, Miss Austen, as well as a second violation of your privacy,” she said soberly. “A very valuable chest, I believe, that had only lately come into your possession.”

“That is true. And the man Mr. Prowting has detained cannot tell us what has happened to it.”

“Bertie Philmore,” she said succinctly. “The Philmores are an odious lot. Bertie’s uncle, Old Philmore, is the owner of that group of hovels known as Thatch Cottages, where poor Miss Benn resides. Old Philmore drives a very hard bargain in rents, I believe, and does absolutely nothing towards the maintenance of his property. We really must endeavour to find Miss Benn more adequate accommodation before the winter; for the place is barely fit for stabling cattle, when the storms of January set in.”

“Miss Benn is awkwardly left, I take it?”

“Very sadly so. Her father was once rector of Chawton, before old Mr. Hinton’s time; and her brother, while possessing a fair living in Farringdon, is so beset with children himself that he cannot provide much towards his sister’s support. For a gentlewoman of good breeding and nice habits to be reduced to Miss Benn’s present degree of poverty is lowering in the extreme. We do what we can for her, of course, by including her in some of our amusements; and she is very grateful, poor soul, for any attention.”

But for the generosity of my brother Neddie, and the steady contributions of my other brothers towards the maintenance of our household, Cassandra and I might have been left in similar poverty at the demise of our clergyman father. I had viewed Miss Benn with easy contempt for her silly manners and vague understanding, for the spinster effusions to which she was too much given; but my conscience smote me at Miss Beckford’s communication. My contempt for Miss Benn was too much like self-hatred at the aging woman I was myself become. Miss Beckford led me to the wilderness that comprised the back garden, and here, for the first time in my acquaintance with the household, I observed no less than five children — four well-grown girls and a little boy of perhaps six — at play in the grass under the watchful eye of a maidservant.

“What fine, stout creatures they are,” I observed with a smile. “And how lovely to think of this house populated with young people! My brother, I am sure, is happy to find it so!”

“The eldest, John, has been at sea from the age of ten,” Miss Beckford told me, “and at fifteen, is now become a Midshipman. I wish that my sister could have known of his success; she died the year before he went away, in 1803—after little Frederick was born.”

The small boy was laughing as he tumbled down the gentle slope behind the Great House, and I thought of dear Elizabeth, and the babe she had left behind, with a pang. Someday her eleventh child would play even so with his sisters, forever ignorant of the lovely woman who had given him birth and marred his father’s life with her passing. The impermanence of existence — the cruel lot of women in childbed — impressed me with a weight of sadness that was become too familiar. As the years advance, we find more cause for sorrow, and less occasion for laughing in the grass.

“Mr. Middleton has had much to do with so many children to rear,” I observed. “He is indeed fortunate in possessing an aide as admirable as yourself, Miss Beckford.”