Catherine Prowting, who overlistened the whole, gave an audible gasp.
“Many are the hours I have spent in enlarging upon the subject,” my mother continued, “but Jane will not see that no respectable man will take up with a lady who is so mad for blood. It is unnatural in a woman. But she will not understand me. She will not listen to reason. I am sure, Mr. Prowting, that you suffer similar trials yourself — being the father of daughters.”
“An inquest cannot be the proper place for a lady,” Mr. Prowting said doubtfully.
“In the present case, sir,” I replied with dignity, “I believe attendance to be my duty. The man was found in this house; and surely we must learn the truth, at all costs, of how he came here.”
The magistrate looked for aid to his daughter; but such a recourse must be useless. Catherine Prowting was pale as death, her hand gripping the back of my mother’s chair; and in an instant she had slipped to the floor insensible. We prevailed upon Mr. Prowting to leave his daughter a little while in our care, and Catherine appeared — when consciousness was regained — not averse to the suggestion. We laid her upon the sopha in the sitting room, and my mother went in search of vinegar-water, while the magistrate patted her hand in loving awkwardness.
“You will never be as strong as your sisters,” he told her fondly. “It is the head-ache, I suppose?”
“Yes, Papa,” she said tearfully.
“Well, well — rest a little in Miss Austen’s care, and then return to your mother. But do not be alarming her with talk of an indisposition. You know what her nerves are.”
“Yes, Papa.”
I saw the magistrate to the door and closed it quietly, so as not to disturb my suffering neighbour; and indeed, tho’ returned to her senses, Catherine looked very ill. Had it been the talk of blood and corpses that had unnerved her so?
“I understand you will be dining at the Great House tomorrow,” she managed as I dipped a cloth into the vinegar-water my mother had provided, and prepared to bathe her temples. “We are all to go as well, and my sister is devoting the better part of the morning to new-dressing her hair.”
“At your sister’s age — a period of high spirits, charm, and natural bloom — one’s appearance is of consuming interest,” I observed.
“Perhaps. There are four years’ difference in age between myself and Ann — she is but two-and-twenty; but I confess I have never wasted a tenth part of the hours that Ann believes necessary to the perfection of her toilette. Of course, I have not her beauty; but is it not remarkable, Miss Austen, that the more beauty one possesses, the more one is required to nurture and support it?”
“A tedious business,” I agreed with a laugh, “that must make the disappearance of all bloom a blessing rather than a pity! — As I have reason to know.”
“But you are charming,” Catherine protested.
“I am in my thirty-fourth year, my dear, and must put charm aside at last.”
“I have lived the better part of my life with Ann’s beauty and foibles as though they were quite another member of the family. There is more than enough of them to supply two women, I assure you — and when such a prospect as dinner at the Great House is in view, and in the company of a Bond Street Beau, there is hardly room for us both at Prowtings!”
This was bitterness, indeed, let slip so readily to a virtual stranger; but not all sisters are happy in possessing that perfect understanding and cordiality that have always obtained between Cassandra and me. I gazed at Catherine — at the sweetness of expression in her mild dark eyes, and the nut-brown indifference of her hair; and understood that a lifetime of denial and self-effacement had been hers: supported almost unconsciously by the fond indulgence of parents whose collusion in their youngest daughter’s vanity, though perhaps at first unwitting, was now become the sole method of managing her.
“That is enough vinegar,” Catherine said abruptly. “I am very well now, I thank you — indeed, I cannot understand how I should have come to be overpowered in the first place. It is so very silly—”
“We were too frank in our conversation. We should have considered that you were not equal to it.”
“I ought to have been, Miss Austen. I ought to be equal to many things.” She turned towards the window and stretched out her arms, as though she would fly from its casement to a wider world. I had been that way myself, once, in a small vicarage in Hampshire; I had dreamt of crossing the seas — of being an Irishman’s wife — had exulted in hope of adventure and limitless skies, and chafed against the boundaries of glebe and turnpike. A surge of fellow-feeling from my breast to Catherine’s, then; a recognition of hopes blighted and dreams put away.
“Is Ann your only sister?” I enquired.
“Elizabeth, my elder, is long since married,” Catherine replied. “We were all so unfortunate as to lose my two brothers to illness and accident; William being carried off while at school in Winchester; and John but a year later at home.”
I had carelessly used the very same names in my request for a manservant; how Mr. Prowting must have felt it, and misunderstood my levity’s cause! I felt a surge of colour to my cheeks.
“You have all my sympathy. Were they very young?”
“William was fifteen, and John but nine.”
“How dreadful!” I thought of Mrs. Prowting — of the blackedged handkerchief that appeared to be wedded to her palm — with a deeper comprehension. Despair and grief may appear to greater advantage when writ on an elegant form; but Mrs. Prowting’s large, comfortable bulk, though better suited to laughter, held as much right to suffering as my own.[8]
I saw Catherine over the stile in the meadow, with profuse thanks for the gift of eggs and cheese; and as she walked slowly into her house — into that orgy of preparation and exhilarated transport in which she was expected to take no part — I went back to the cottage.
If I hurried, I might just have time to read another of Lord Harold’s papers before I journeyed to Alton, and met the coroner.
Excerpt from the diaries of Lord Harold Trowbridge, dated 12 December 1782, on board the Indiaman Delos, bound for Bombay.
...it is no bad thing to be a young man of two-and-twenty, with the Paradise of the Subcontinent looming off the bow, and all the riches of a sultan’s court waiting to be plucked. There are the women lodged in all the acceptable quarters — no longer young, or lacking in fortune and looks, and in short the very dross of English gentility, sent out as brides to men they have never met and a life in a climate likely to kill them before very long. They are desperate for sport and fun before the voyage should be over — knowing, from the most ignorant of presentiments, that marriage to a stranger cannot be very agreeable, and seduction from a shipmate must provide present excitement and the comfort of stories for telling hereafter. I have lifted five skirts to date in the languid forenoon of a becalmed passage, and Freddy Vansittart is no less lucky — with his dark looks and his roguish smile, he can win any number of hearts. Stella from Yorkshire will have him, and he does not take care.
We have sunk to betting on the women as we do at cards, the boredom of this voyage being almost insufferable; and on occasion, when I am feeling low, I am thankful to God for Freddy Vansittart — his wild laughter and neck-or-nothing heart are all that stand between me and a pistol ball in the head. Like me, Freddy is a scoundrel and a second son; and if we do not hang together we shall most assuredly hang separately. I believe I have borrowed that last sentiment from another, but cannot recollect whom.
I am not often so low. In truth, I cannot regret the chain of events that have sent me here — the violence of that meeting at dawn; the cut on Benning’s face that will scar it like my signature forever after; the loss of my father’s good opinion or the anger I met on every side; my mother’s tears or the sober interview with the solicitors. It is not as tho’ Benning died; but his father believed he would, the fever from the wounds having put him on a kind of death-bed; and when one report of the heir’s passing was put out, damnably unproved, the Viscount St. Eustace suffered a fit. In short, the old man was carried off in a matter of hours — and Benning is now Viscount, and must be called by his title, the prospect of which he used to dangle sneeringly before me, all those years ago in school, when he called me a commoner and a spy who should end in the gutter. I hated him then and I hated him that morning when we met in the duelling ground at Hampstead Heath. I wish that I had killed him; his brother is a better man, and like all second sons, I wish him greater justice.
8
Jane makes a similar observation of her character Mrs. Musgrove, in