“How I wish that we might have time to walk around the garden,” I said wistfully.
“You shall have walking enough at The Larches,” Neddie reminded me. “There is not a finer showplace in Kent.”
“Particularly now that Mr. Sothey has had his way with it,” I observed.
We proceeded then in silence, for Lizzy was not of a disposition for idle chatter, and my brothers were too weary to keep their eyes from closing. Tho' I would have given much for their opinion of my morning's discoveries — the curious fact of Mr. Sothey's handwriting, on letters destroyed by the governess — I could not feel it wise to canvass the matter so soon. My own part in disturbing the ashes was suspect enough, and open to censure; but I hesitated to expose Anne Sharpe to the contempt of her employers. Lizzy should be unlikely to look with favour on a governess familiar with intrigue; she would not scruple to dismiss a woman whom she considered unsuitable for the instruction of her daughters; and that I might be the agent of Anne Sharpe's ruin, was more than I could bear.
I could conceive a perfectly innocent explanation for the entire matter. Anne Sharpe had been taken much into Society during her years with the Porter-mans, and it was not incredible that she should have met Sothey somewhere, and formed an attachment. Fortune being scant on either side, the two might have considered it imprudent to marry, and determined to separate. Miss Sharpe came to my sister, in the regrettable role of governess, while Mr. Sothey was left to barter his talent for the arrangement of landscape. The gentleman might quickly have thrown himself into new things, new acquaintance — including his affaire with Francoise Grey. Miss Sharpe's heart, however, may have proved unequal to her sense of duty.
She had borne with her disappointment tolerably well, until the morning of the Canterbury race-meeting. There she must have witnessed, in company with myself, Mrs. Grey's stinging rebuke of her cicisbeo. The outrage! The betrayal! The mortification! And then, in the privacy of her own room, the desolation of loss. It should be enough to pique the sensibility of any well-bred young woman.
That Mr. Sothey had discerned his Anne in the Austen carriage, I little doubted — his marked interest in the Godmersham nursery, so evident during our conversation at Eastwell, was now explained. The mysterious letter that Fanny perceived on Wednesday would have been his communication; and no answer to it arriving— no Anne Sharpe appearing at the Eastwell dinner on Friday — he would necessarily have been at a high pitch of nerves. Whatever Sothey wrote to the governess, it had precipitated a different reply than he had expected, for she had ordered a fire as early as Thursday and destroyed the entirety of his correspondence.
But would a young lady, bred to the most delicate sense of duty, have consented to correspond with such a man, absent some private understanding of marriage? Had Anne Sharpe, in fact, been secretly engaged to Mr. Sothey?
Then his attentions to Francoise Grey — and the subsequent public rupture at the Canterbury race-meeting— were despicable, indeed. What if Anne Sharpe had somehow precipitated Mrs. Grey's anger? And incited Julian Sothey to murder?
Fantastic as the notion might seem — the merest flight of fancy — one consideration must lend it weight: Mr. Brett's disturbing glimpse of a woman with raven hair emerging from The Larches' stables. If that lady had been Anne Sharpe—
“Here we are at last, Jane — tho' well before I expected,” Lizzy murmured. “No one but Pratt may manage a team so nobly through the mud, to be sure! And how fortunate that the rain is ended — you shall have a delightful prospect of the valley as we approach.”
I thrust aside Mr. Sothey and his amours — consigned Anne Sharpe and her secrets to a safe compartment in my mind — and prepared for delight.
NOTHING MY BROTHER HENRY HAD TOLD ME OF Valentine Grey's consequence had urged me to believe The Larches a modest little place. My brief impression of the late Mrs. Grey — bold, dashing, and devil-may-care — had done nothing to dampen expectation. A woman may only flout convention when she commands sufficient power, either of rank or fortune; Francoise Grey had commanded both. I knew that her home would be in the first style of luxury. To this I was indifferent — one great house richly furnished may be very much like another. It was the grounds of The Larches alone that utterly deprived me of speech.
One approaches the place by a winding drive, that runs for some time through rolling Kentish downs; clumps of trees, in the style of Capability Brown, dot the greenest meadows, and an arched bridge surmounts the river perhaps a mile before the house. In this, there is nothing to astonish — Stourhead or The Vyne[48] might boast as much — and even the prospect of The Larches itself, first perceived around a turning of the drive, is only as noble as any other modern villa of its type. I could cry out in delight, and admire it as I have done any number of places, without feeling moved by a deeper beauty; it required a walk around the remarkable park, before I was completely overcome.
One enters the grounds from a terrace running perpendicular to one side of the house; a series of steps leads to a gravel path, that descends through a wood; and after a period of winding among larch tree, and beech, under-planted with the rarest specimens of rhododendron and azalea, the wood opens out to reveal a plunge of valley, its sides steeply planted with every variety of growing thing, massed in the most pleasing arrangement of colour and form. Below lies the river, now swelled to something greater — a lake, in fact, that is spanned at its narrowest points by first a bridge, and then a ferry. Emerging from the trees, on promontories of their own, and offering rival views of the valley's charms, are three temples — dedicated to Philosophy, Science, and Art.
I rested several moments under the portico of the last, surveying the fall of ground before me, and the ferry boat plying its oars between the near shore and my own; and rather wondered that Mr. Grey had neglected to raise an altar to the god of Mammon — his consequence and his garden both being dependent upon it. But these thoughts seemed ungenerous in the face of such beauty; and besides, the gentleman in question stood silently near me. It would never do to excite his contempt when we had progressed so admirably towards a better knowledge of one another.
But I forget myself, and proceed apace to Mr. Valentine Grey, when I had better have begun with his housekeeper.
Our excellent Pratt pulled up before the house in due course, and we found one Mrs. Bastable standing in the open doorway, as tho' in expectation of our visit. She was quite magnificent in an old-fashioned gown of black lawn, a starched white apron, and a ribboned cap; and she bobbed a cold curtsey as Neddie handed my sister from the carriage.
“Good morning, madam,” she said, in a colourless voice, “it is very good to see you at The Larches again, and after so long a period. You have been well, I trust?”
“Perfectly, Bastable, I assure you,” Lizzy said in a tone of faint amusement. The woman's implication was hardly lost upon her; she had been rebuked for neglect of the dead mistress, and for descending like a vulture upon the funeral-baked meats. “You do not know my sister, Miss Austen, I believe.”
48
Stourhead was the ancestral home of the Hoares, a wealthy and ennobled family of bankers whose chief passion was the creation of a classical pleasure-ground running to over a thousand acres. There is no record of Austen ever visiting Stourhead, but as it sits a short distance from Bath, she may have done so. The Vyne, in Hampshire, was the ancestral home of the Chutes, and best known for its hunt; Reverend James Austen, Jane's eldest brother, was an intimate friend of the Chute family. —