Mr. Prowting was a man of some means — one of Chawton’s dignitaries, in the commission of the peace of the county as well as its Deputy Lieutenant.[2] He was a grey-haired, portly, and rather carelessly-dressed gentleman of middle age, beaming all his benevolence.
I dropped a curtsey and said, “I have heard much of you, Mr. Prowting, from my brother Mr. Austen. You are our nearest neighbour, I collect.”
“Indeed, indeed — our home is but a stone’s toss from your doorstep, my dear Miss Austen, and easily accessible by a stile in the adjoining meadow.”
I could not have avoided a glimpse of Prowtings, as the house was called, had I wished it; the place was a fine, modern building of substantial size on the same side of the Gosport road as our own, but happier in its situation, being set back a good distance from the carriage-way. Their beds should not be shaken in the dead of night by the passage of the London coach-and-six, as I imagined our own should be.
“Mrs. Prowting and my daughters, Catherine-Ann and AnnMary, would, I am sure, have joined me in this brief visit of welcome,” he said, “but that the latter is practising upon the pianoforte, and the former is lying down with the head-ache. The heat of July, you know, is quite a trial to young ladies prone to the head-ache.”
“So I understand. Tho’ increasing age, I might add, is no preservative against the malady.” I was too well acquainted with my mother’s imagined sufferings whenever heat, or cold, or too much of both, should disoblige her expectations and send her reeling to her bed.
“Mrs. Prowting wished me to convey her compliments,” he said with a bow, “and desires me to press you most earnestly to join us for dinner this evening at Prowtings. You need not make yourselves anxious on the subject of dress; we are all easy in Chawton, Mrs. Austen, with no unbecoming formality.”
“Thank you most kindly,” my mother replied. “We should be very happy to accept your invitation.”
I was about to add my thanks to hers when the sound of an equipage drawing up in the street outside our door claimed all our notice. Mr. Prowting turned, as though in expectation of espying a neighbour come upon a similar errand of civility; but I understood instantly from his expression that the person now alighting from the chaise-and-four was a stranger even to him. A spare, stooped, ancient man, dressed all in black and grim of expression, hobbled forward as though a martyr to dyspepsia. The newcomer wore a tricorn hat and supported his infirmities with a beautifully-carved walking-stick of ebony and gold, which stabbed at the pavings of our walkway with such vehemence that I almost expected sparks to fly from its tip.
He was followed by two lackeys in a livery of primrose and black, bearing between them a massive wooden chest bound with silver hasps. The chest’s aspect was arresting: it was carved and painted with curious figures that were hardly native to England. It was clear that the party’s object was our cottage, but what their purpose might be in seeking it, I had not the least idea.
“Good day to you, sir,” Mr. Prowting said in the peremptory tone of one who has served as magistrate.
The gentleman in the tricorn lifted up his gaze, a withering look of contempt on his countenance. He did not deign to return Mr. Prowting’s salutation, nor did he waste another instant in surveying his figure. He merely turned his eyes upon my mother and myself, came to a halt at our doorstep, and lifted his hat with extreme care from the exquisitely-powdered wig that adorned his head.
“Have I the honour of addressing the Austen household?”
“You do, sir,” said my mother doubtfully. “I am Mrs. George Austen.”
“My compliments, ma’am,” he replied, “but I need not disturb you further. It is Miss Jane Austen I seek. Is she at leisure to receive me?”
Chapter 3
A Contested Provision
4 July 1809, cont.
“I am Miss Austen,” I answered, in some bewilderment.
“Bartholomew Chizzlewit, of Lincoln’s Inn, at your service, ma’am.”[3] The elderly gentleman bowed low. “I must beg the indulgence of perhaps half an hour of your time, on a pressing matter of business that has already been delayed some months.”
“A matter of business, sir?” I repeated. I could claim no business in the world, save the arrangement of domestic affairs too inconsequential to be of concern to such a man.
“Indeed. A matter of so delicate a nature, ma’am, that I must demand complete and uninterrupted privacy” — at this, his gaze shifted narrowly to my mother’s countenance — “for the discharging of my trust.”
An instant of silence followed this declaration, as my mother attempted to make sense of it and I considered the disorder of unpacking that was everywhere evident within the cottage. How was I to even attempt a tête-à-tête?
“I am putting up at the Swan in Alton,” the attorney added firmly, consulting a pocket watch, “and have ordered my dinner for precisely six o’clock. If you find you are unable to accommodate me today, Miss Austen, I must beg you to wait upon me in Alton tomorrow morning, well in advance of my intended departure for London, which I anticipate occurring at ten o’clock. I may add that I am unaccustomed to brooking delay.”
“Extraordinary behaviour!” Mr. Prowting exclaimed. “You can have not the slightest pretension to these ladies’ consideration, sirrah, much less the freedom to demand the terms of your admittance to their household.”
“Sir,” Chizzlewit declared in a voice rich with contempt, “I neither know nor care whom you might be, but I must emphatically state that a man of your obviously rustic experience and modest station can claim no influence with the representative of the noble and most puissant house of His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, whose forebears and heirs I have had the honour to serve as solicitor these sixty years and more.”
“Wilborough?” my mother cried in startled accents. “Good Lord, Jane — has the Rogue left you something after all? I should not have believed it possible! That a gentleman — even one of Lord Harold’s unsavoury reputation — should offer the insult of monetary consideration to one whose reputation he has already sullied beyond repair—”
“Mamma,” I said firmly, “I believe I should receive Mr. Chizzlewit and learn the burden of his news. I shall require the use of the dining parlour for an interval. You might walk in the direction of the Great House before dinner — and observe whether the tenant, Mr. Middleton, is entirely worthy of my brother’s trust.”
“But my dear Miss Austen—” Mr. Prowting protested. “A young lady of your sensibility—”
“I am nearly four-and-thirty years of age, good sir, and feel not the slightest anxiety at receiving so respectable a person as Mr. Chizzlewit. Would you be very good — and attend my mother on her walk?”
If the servant of the noble and most puissant house of Wilborough was dismayed by the surroundings in which he presently found himself, he did not betray his discomfiture. I seated myself on one of my mother’s straight-backed chairs and waited while Mr. Chizzlewit disposed himself in another. With a wordless gesture of his right hand, he had ordered his minions to follow him; they set the curiously-carved chest on the dining-parlour floor and then retreated impassively to await their master’s pleasure.
“I have it on the very best authority, Miss Austen, that your understanding is excellent,” he began, “and therefore I shall not sport with your patience. Under the terms of the late Lord Harold Trowbridge’s Last Will and Testament, written by his lordship on the third of November last and witnessed by one Jeb Hawkins, Able Seaman, and one Josiah Fortescue, publican” — Chizzlewit’s distaste for such witnesses was evident — “you have been named as the legatee of a rather extraordinary bequest.”
2
To be in the commission of the peace for the county, as Jane phrases it, was to be appointed a justice of the peace, or magistrate. Deputy lieutenant was a post appointed at the pleasure of the lord lieutenant of the county, usually the county’s ranking peer, and carried with it certain administrative duties.
3
Lincoln’s Inn is one of the four Inns of Court, formed in the Middle Ages to provide lodgings for young men studying law. It sits roughly half a mile from Covent Garden in the center of London, and in Jane Austen’s day was a common locus of solicitors’ and barristers’ chambers, as it remains today.