Cassandra's Sister (22 page)

Martha did not let go of her hand. She looked at Jane with an expression of intense feeling. “If only we could, Jane,” she said. “If only we could.”

“W
e are moving to
Bath
?”

Jane echoed her mother's words, her voice full of dismay.

“Yes, it is quite settled!” trilled Mama. “Now, let Kitty take that wet bonnet. What dreadful weather we are having this year! I would rather have snow than rain, and I am persuaded you feel the same.” She began to untie Jane's bonnet and take off her gloves, as if Jane were a child no older than Anna. “You see, Papa has decided to retire to somewhere more lively than Steventon. He is to give up the living here and pass it to James, so the old house will still be in the family, and kept by our dear Mary better than it ever was by your Mama.”

Jane said nothing. Her mother looked at her sharply. “Did you hear me?”

“Yes, I heard you,” said Jane in a small voice. She felt as if every drop of blood in her body had rushed to her head. “When are we to leave?”

“In May.”

Christmas was three days away. Jane had just alighted from the carriage on her return from Ibthorpe, where she had passed the happiest week she could remember for a long time. But in a mere five months from this moment, everything she had known and loved for her entire life would change.

“In May!” she cried. “Mama, why did you not tell me before?”

“Papa and I have not told any of you until now. Except James, of course.”

Kitty appeared. “Bring tea for Miss Jane,” Mama instructed her, handing her Jane's outdoor clothes. “Is this not exciting, my dear?” she asked Jane when Kitty had gone. “Are you not pleased at the prospect of living in a new place, and meeting new people? How busy we shall be! And everything on the doorstep, instead of a carriage-ride away. Most convenient for older people like Papa and me.”

Mama chattered on as they sat down by the fire, but Jane only half heard her words. So Mary and James had known they were to inherit the living at Steventon, and the house that went with it, during Martha's visit only a few weeks ago. And Mary had said nothing. Jane could not suppress uncharitable feelings towards her. If such close relatives were prepared to act parts in order to keep important secrets, what hope was there for trust and honour between anyone?

“So we must pack up our belongings,” Mama was saying. “We must begin as soon as Papa's thanksgiving has passed.”

Jane began to listen more carefully. “Pack up our belongings?”

“Why, yes. James and Mary already have two children, and may have more. We cannot expect them to make room for things which are not theirs. When we visit, as I am sure we shall, it will be as their guests.”

“Their guests? But Steventon is
our
home!” Jane's fingernails dug into her palms. She was trying hard to be calm, but each announcement by Mama made this more difficult.

“Only until May, my dear,” said Mama steadily. “You have always known that a clergyman's house belongs to his church, and he may only live in it until the next incumbent of the parish relieves him at his post.”

Yes, Jane had always known it. But she had hoped to be mistress of her own house before this inevitable move took place. Leaving her childhood home would have been a wrench even upon her marriage, but to have to leave it in the company of Cassandra, Mama and Papa! Other daughters of clergymen faced the same disruption daily, but to leave
her
Steventon,
her
Rectory,
her
kitchen garden, and the upstairs sitting-room, and the inglenook by the fire! She glanced at the inglenook now, as she and her mother awaited tea. The firelight blurred.

“Mama,” she said, blinking away her tears, “I cannot pretend that Bath is as attractive to me as it is to you and Papa. But Cass, who will be surprised as I am when she hears the plan, will acquiesce immediately. That is her way. And if Cass can tolerate this sudden change, then so must I. I only wish you and Papa had not kept it secret. It is more than a surprise – it is a shock.”

Kitty entered, set down the tray, bobbed a curtsey and was gone. “A pleasant shock, though, surely?” said Mama, busying herself among the cups. “We have been plotting it for weeks and weeks, you know. I confess I am very excited!”

Jane had not seen her mother so pleased since James and Mary's wedding. Her smile was irrepressible. She loved society and shopping, music and gossip. Now, after forty years as a country vicar's wife she had a chance to return to the more sophisticated life she had enjoyed as a girl. Could Jane could be so churlish as to deny her?

“Am I the first one to know?” she asked. “Apart from James and Mary?”

“You are,” said Mama, handing her an over-full cup with too much milk in it. In forty years, she had never learnt to pour tea correctly. “Papa and I only heard this morning that the money for the rent in Bath is guaranteed, and since you were coming home today, I could not keep the news to myself any longer.”

“When shall you tell the others?” asked Jane, sipping carefully.

“Oh, as and when,” said her mother airily.

“Cass must be told soon, surely,” said Jane, “as she and I are to be most affected. The others may be losing Steventon, but they are not moving from it.”

“That is because they have moved from it already, my dear,” declared Mama impatiently.

“Frank and Charles have not,” retorted Jane. “Where shall they live, when they leave the navy?”

“They shall take wives, I imagine, and set up house with them,” said Mama. She was no longer smiling. “Really, Jane, you must not take this so tragically. The house will be in James's hands, and that is that. You are a very lucky girl, to be taken to live in Bath, so near your uncle and aunt, with all their acquaintance.”

There was nothing more to say. Jane drank her tea, told her mother she would write immediately to Cassandra, and walked slowly up to her sitting-room, conscious of every one of her footsteps on every one of the stairs, thinking, thinking…

The house in Bath would not be a house at all. It would be an apartment, with no more than four rooms. She and Cass would not have their own sitting-room with a fireplace and a window seat. Their bedroom would not overlook a much-loved garden but wet cobbles, passers-by and endless traffic. Opposite their window, instead of farm fields changing with the seasons, they would see someone else's apartment window. They would have to draw down their blind to avoid being observed by strangers. And it would be so not merely for the duration of a visit, but for the rest of their days.

Jane's head ached. Her limbs felt awkward; she could not move with her famous grace. She pulled out the carved chair. Was this treasured thing, so meaningful to Jane, so trivial to everyone else, to be left for
James and Mary
?

She sat down unsteadily at the writing desk where Catherine Morland had followed Elizabeth Bennet and the Dashwood sisters into the corners of her heart. She took a piece of paper and smoothed it with shaking fingers. But when she reached for a pen, her feelings overcame her. She could not write to Cass until she had collected herself.

But she could not collect herself. She sat for a long time, her feet in their outdoor boots crossed beneath the chair, her elbows on the desk, her head in her hands. Desperation rose up, and brought tears, but she went on sitting there. Hating herself for even considering the word, she told herself that this was a betrayal. And it had been committed by the very people who were supposed to love her.

Mama's enthusiasm she could comprehend, but Papa's was unfathomable. Why should he be ready to leave his parish at such short notice, and go so far away? He of all people – the champion of Jane's literary efforts, the defender of her observations, the wise circumnavigator of conflict with Mama. Why had he deserted his post when he was needed most?

Perhaps she was still seeing her father with a child's trust. But for whatever reason, he concurred with Mama's conviction that he had lived quietly for long enough, and that since he was no longer to serve the parish, there was no reason to live in it.

But
Bath
! Jane fetched a handkerchief and cried noisily into it. Unchristian though it might be, she could not help but pity herself and her sister. The helplessness of their situation was not merely unfair. It was demeaning.

She had never before been so strongly convinced of this. She and Cass had discussed Miss Wollstonecraft's
Vindication of the Rights of Women
when they had first read it, years ago. Cass had marvelled at the audacity of the suggestion that women should be educated to a high level and granted the opportunity to enter the professions, though to Jane this hypothesis had always seemed entirely correct. They had both laughed, however, when they had tried to picture a woman lawyer, in a wig and gown, or a woman Member of Parliament trying to make herself heard above the robust shouting in the House. Now, Jane's frustration at being moved to Bath as if she were a piece of furniture, with no possible alternative simply because she was an unmarried woman, overcame her so violently that she cast herself down upon the bed.

She wept for a long time. If only her sister were at home! Jane knew her sister-in-law needed Cassandra more than she did at present, but how she missed her! On this dreary winter evening, with the rain dribbling down the window-panes and the larches behind the house groaning in sympathy with her mood, Jane wished and wished for her sister to appear.

But it was the wish of a child. Jane's powers of reasoning told her that Cass could not return until Elizabeth could spare her, and that she had the advantage over her sister anyway. Unlike poor Cass, Jane did not have to spend their final weeks away from Steventon. While it was still their home, Jane could at least live in it.

“Where are you, Jane?”

It was Papa's voice. Jane wiped her face and went out onto the landing. “Here, Papa.”

He was at the bottom of the stairs, smiling, with his whiskers brushed and his spectacles gleaming. Jane's heart swelled at the sight; he was as excited as a schoolboy. “What is it, Papa?”

“Mary and James are here.”

Jane had no wish to see her brother or his wife. “Is Anna with them?”

“She is.”

“Please may I have her up here?”

“I do not see why not.” He disappeared, then reappeared holding his granddaughter by the hand. “Go up to your Aunt Jane, my child.”

Still in her cape and bonnet, Anna trotted up the stairs. Jane sank to her knees and clasped the little girl tightly to her breast. More tears came, but she did not care; children understood tears. Anna would understand what had caused these, and disperse them as only children could.

“Aunt Jane, I cannot breathe.”

Jane released the child. She took hold of both her hands and looked into the small face of the niece she loved best. “Anna dearest, come and help me write a letter to Aunt Cassandra. I confess I know not where to start, but you always have the cleverest ideas.”

“Why are you crying?” asked Anna, with troubled eyes.

Having been kept in ignorance herself, Jane was wary in case Anna had been too. “Have your Mama and Papa told you any news lately?”

“They told me something this morning.”

“Yes, dearest? What did they say?”

“That Grandpapa is not going to be the vicar of Steventon any more, and we are to move from Deane and come to live here at the Rectory.”

“That is quite true,” said Jane, “and I must write and tell Aunt Cass. But I have a headache. Will you be a good girl and sit at the desk with me?”

“I shall be glad to,” said Anna in her serious way. “Would you take off my gloves, please, Aunt? I cannot undo the buttons.”

Jane obliged, sniffing back tears. And when the slender eight-year-old fingers were free, aunt and niece went hand-in-hand into the sitting-room. Together they composed a letter containing the most heart-breaking news Jane had ever had to impart to her sister, leavened only by the brightness of Anna's astonishment when Jane speculated that one day, perhaps, this very sitting-room and everything in it would be Anna's own.

“Why, Aunt Jane!” she exclaimed, her eyes and mouth equally wide open. “If I truly may sit on
your
chair, at
your
desk, one day … might I be an author, like you?”

The desk and chair remained at Steventon. But by the day of moving, Jane had no heart for regret at leaving them behind. She was not sure her heart was even in the same place as it had always been, or that she had any true feelings at all. Months of agreeing when inwardly she objected, smiling when she had no desire for merriment, tirelessly dusting and wrapping and packing when she longed for all the things to be left exactly where they were, had hardened her.

She resolved that she would not weep, or allow her parents to suspect the depth of her unhappiness. Leave she must, so leave she would, without demur.

“We must make of Bath what we can,” Cassandra had said upon her return from Godmersham. “I cannot pretend to like the notion of James and Mary living in our house any more than you do, but since there is nothing we can do about it, we must do as the Bible commands.
Blessed are the meek
.”

Jane did not want to be meek, but she could no longer summon the rage of that first tearful hour. “Very well, Cass,” she had agreed. “When required, I can be as meek as anyone else. But I am sure that meekness will not make me inherit the earth. I would rather inherit the Rectory anyway, which I cannot do because Papa does not own it, and even if he did, it would go to exactly the same person who is having it anyway. James!”

“Oh, Jane, do not dwell on the ways of the world,” Cassandra had wisely advised. “It was ever a pointless exercise, and only makes for misery.”

Mama and Papa had at least taken note of James's suggestion that they take a
house
in Bath, rather than an upstairs apartment. Jane did not know how to express her gratitude to her brother for this intervention. When she tried, he patted her hand and said, “I love Steventon in equal measure with all my sisters and brothers. When the time comes for me to leave it, if I do not live somewhere with room to move, and some greenery to look at, I shall die.”