“So you see — it is possible the chest has not been destroyed after all,” Henry concluded. “Nor may it be so very far away. It is something, is it not, to consider our genteel neighbours in the light of thieves?”
I confess I did not sleep at all well last night. I left Cassandra to unpack her things in peace this morning, and descended to the sitting room, where my brother Edward was arranged in a chair with his elegant hat balanced upon one beautifully-tailored knee. He looked every inch the Squire of Chawton, and an established man of property — save for the expression of deadness in his eyes I understood too well.
“My dear Neddie,” I said as he rose to greet me, “how very good of you to bring my sister all this way from Kent!”
“I could wish that I had come sooner,” he observed, “when I hear what has been happening in my absence. The corpse in the cellar and the invasion of the cottage are bad enough — but Mamma would have me to understand that you have been greeted with a degree of coldness from the local people that I must find offensive, Jane!”
“Mamma refines too much upon a trifle,” I replied easily.
“The Prowtings and the Middletons have been kindness itself.”
“Jack and Jane Hinton are hardly trifles,” my brother retorted. “They are mushrooms of the very worst order, for all that their father was a clergyman. Shall I remove your party to the George until these distressing matters are settled?”
“And what then? Are we to live in an inn all our lives? Or quit Hampshire in defeat, and know ourselves to be the laughingstock of the entire county? No, no, Neddie — allow us to fight our battles on our own ground, if you please. You must consider your dignity as Squire. Your claim to Chawton and all its goods is under the most subtle of attack in the court of publick opinion. It will not do for your tenants to believe you shaken.”
He studied my countenance an instant before his own gaze dropped to the floor. “I have been idle too long. My cares and my grief — my privileged misery — have occasioned neglect.”
“I fear that is true — however much my knowledge of your excellent propensities would excuse it. Your tenants, Neddie, hesitate to give you a good name. There is much resentment among the common folk: over the eviction of Mrs. Seward, who must leave her home of many years and give way to us; and a dozen other paltry matters that loom unfortunately large in Chawton minds. You would do well not to leave the neighbourhood without a thorough audience with all the outraged parties. You could do much to win back good will, Neddie, did you only exert yourself.”
His eyes came up to my own. “And the happiness of those I leave behind me, you would suggest, depends upon that exertion?”
“It does. We can endure all manner of slight and injury at present, provided we have reason to believe in future good. We have this consolation at least: our standing in the village can only rise.”
“I believe,” Edward said with careful consideration, “that I shall make it known among the tenants that I will hold Quarter Day at the George tomorrow. And I shall make every effort, Jane, to hear their grievances to the last detail. Even if I must remain a fortnight to do it.”
“That is excellent news. We should dearly love to keep you in Hampshire so long.”
“But first, I must pay my respects to Mr. Middleton. Do I ask too much — or will you walk with me to the Great House?”
We encountered all the Stonings party as we achieved the entrance to the sweep: Julian Thrace and Charles Spence astride a pair of high-blooded horses, walking mettlesomely at either side of Lady Imogen’s carriage. The gentlemen reined in, while the lady put down her window and extended her gloved hand to me and my brother. He stared at her an instant too long, as tho’ entranced and horrified at one and the same moment — and too late, I saw the danger. Lady Imogen, in all the freshness of two-and-twenty, could boast a dark beauty reminiscent of his dead Lizzy’s own.
“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.