My application to Catherine Prowting — without the necessity of informing her father or betraying the folly into which his daughter had plunged — had wrested the young man’s location from her terrified lips. The Earl himself rode out to find Julian, and no one else was privileged to witness their reconciliation, or to know what was then said. My brother Edward, however, was able to satisfy Mr. Prowting that Charles Spence was entirely responsible for the murders of Shafto French and Lady Imogen; and in the conversation of the two magistrates, Justice was allowed to have been served.
Catherine Prowting received a very pretty round of thanks from Mr. Thrace for her care of him in distress, but no offer of marriage; and as that gentleman is now gone a fortnight from Hampshire, and no one knows whether he is ever likely to return, the unfortunate Catherine appears certain to fall into a decline.
To supplement the loss of such compelling society, however, I have had my Bengal chest: returned with a forced lock and a splintered face, but with the contents mostly intact. Great disorder reigned among Lord Harold’s papers, as Charles Spence had obviously gone through them in immense haste, and failed to discover the proofs he so desperately sought; but there is a satisfaction in bringing order from chaos, against which even I am no proof. I have spent many consuming mornings closeted in my bedchamber, with packets of letters and journals spread out all around me, and am in a mood to welcome any shower of rain, as discouraging all other activity but that of reading. Cassandra, observing me, sniffed with disdain that I was as much Lord Harold’s inamorata in death as in life — and I did not trouble to argue the point. Entire worlds of experience have been opened to me through his lordship’s letters; and I feel now as tho’ I hardly knew him, when he stood in my parlour with one booted foot on the fender, and his hooded grey eyes fixed on my countenance. There is much to trouble, and much to shock, among these papers; much also to admire and love. But what a burden he has placed in my safekeeping! I no longer trust to the security of a cottage.
I have written to Mr. Bartholomew Chizzlewit of Lincoln’s Inn, and desired him to despatch a special courier to Chawton, so that Lord Harold’s bequest might be returned to the solicitor’s offices. There, from time to time, I might visit his lordship’s ghost — and determine how best to fulfill the heavy charge he has placed upon me. The writing up and publication of the Rogue’s memoirs will prove no easy task — but if it is to be a lifework, it is one I feel myself equal to undertake. The effect of the Memoirs of a Gentleman Rogue should be as a bombshell bursting upon the Polite World; and nothing would deprive me of the privilege of unleashing so cataclysmic a force. I have not yet learned to ignore Lord Harold’s loss. Here, in the simple beauty of this country garden, with the prospect of my family’s society always around me, I must know myself even still for a woman set apart. Great love denied has been my burden; and its bastards are silence and loneliness. It is my very singularity I must struggle with now — as perhaps I have always done. It was Lord Harold alone who understood this; and honoured me with his esteem despite the ways in which I shall never be quite like other women.
Or perhaps— as he told me once —because of them.
Letter from Lord Harold Trowbridge to Miss Jane Austen, dated 3 November 1808; one leaf quarto, laid; watermark Fitzhugh and Gilroy; sealed with black wax over signature.
(British Museum, Wilborough Papers, Austen bequest)
My dearest Jane—
If I survive the morning’s work — as no doubt I shall — this letter will never reach you; but if I am fated by some mischance to fall under Ord’s hand, I cannot go in silence upon one subject, at least.
I am no sentimentalist. I will tell you that you are hardly the most beautiful woman I have ever known, Jane, nor the most enchanting. Your witchery is of a different order than others’—
and springs, I believe, from the extraordinary self-possession you command. It is unique in my experience of women. You have my unqualified esteem and respect; you have my trust and my heart; and if I love you, my dear, it is as one loves the familiar room to which one returns after desperate wandering. In this room I might draw the shades upon the world and live in comfort forever.
Do not cry for me, Jane — but carry me always in your heart, as one who loved you for that courage to be yourself, and not what convention would have you be.
Your Rogue
Editor’s Afterword
There are many who make it their lifework to study Jane Austen and her novels, and to them I owe a considerable debt. There are others, however, who are content to simply enjoy her words and live for a while in the world she created; and to many of these devoted readers, the town of Chawton — and the cottage in which Austen lived the final eight years of her life — have become a shrine to a lost time and place. They will probably object to my portrait of the village as hostile to the Austens’ arrival in 1809, but there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the four women who took up residence in Widow Seward’s cottage were not immediately beloved. The claims of the Hinton family, and their relations the Baverstocks and Dusautoys, against Edward Austen are well documented, and resulted in a lawsuit in 1814 demanding the reversion of the Chawton estates to the direct heirs of the Knights of Chawton. Edward was forced to settle the claim with a payment of fifteen thousand pounds to Jack Hinton, which he raised by the sale of timber from the Chawton woods. In that same year, Edward also prosecuted one of the Baigent boys for assault; but history does not tell us whether it was Toby or in what manner he attacked the Squire.
Ann Prowting submitted to fate and married Benjamin Clement of the Royal Navy. After the end of the Napoleonic wars turned him on shore, the young couple took up residence in Chawton and remained there until their deaths. Catherine Prowting never married.
Edward Austen and his children took the surname of Knight in 1812, when his patroness Catherine Knight died. He stayed briefly in the Great House in 1813 and again in 1814, but remained until his death a resident of Kent. The Middleton family gave up the lease of the Chawton estate in 1812, and in the years before Edward’s eldest son, Edward (1794–1879), moved into the Great House in 1826, the place was at the disposal of Jane’s naval brothers, Frank and Charles. Frank’s fourth son, Herbert, was born there in 1815.
For those who wish to know more of Jane Austen’s neighborhood in Hampshire, I must recommend Rupert Willoughby’s slim volume, Chawton: Jane Austen’s Village, The Old Rectory, Sherborne St. John, 1998; Jane Austen and Alton, by Jane Hurst, copyright Jane Hurst, 2001; Nigel Nicolson’s The World of Jane Austen, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1991; Jane Austen, A Family Record, by W. Austen-Leigh, R. A. Austen-Leigh, and Deirdre Le Faye, The British Library, 1989; and Jane Austen’s Let- ters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, Oxford University Press, 1995. Chawton Great House was sold in 1993 to Ms. Sandy Lerner, an American, who has completely refurbished the house and grounds as a Center for the Study of Early English Women’s Writing — a use Jane Austen might have approved, although she would certainly have lamented its inevitable passage from family hands. Chawton Cottage is in the care of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, and can be toured most days of the year.
Stephanie Barron
Golden, Colorado
January 2004