Jane and the Man of the Cloth (4 page)

“There you are at last,” Sidmouth said, with a touch of impatience.

The angel made no reply, but awaited his command.

‘This is Miss Jane Austen.”

Her gaze turned my way, as cold as the breath of a sepulchre. Then she looked her enquiry to Sidmouth. To my surprise, he broke into a torrent of French, a language with which I am somewhat familiar; but the rapidity of his speech left me quickly behind. A few words only I caught—
dogs,
and
the bay,
and perhaps
the men;
and then Seraphine was gesturing towards me, her lovely face overcome with suspicion, and Sidmouth abrupdy silencing her with a word. That it was an incomprehensible one to me—
lascargon
—made no difference to the angel. She turned on her heel in a swirl of red wool, and was as swiftly gone; and I drew a deep breath, and looked for an explanation to Sidmouth—who clearly intended to offer me none. His face was once more to the fire, and his hands clasped behind. As if sensible of my gaze, he roused himself, and met my eyes with a single long look; then he bowed, and made for the door.

“Mr. Sidmouthr I cried.

“Yes, Miss Austen?” He halted in the. very act of exiting, and offered a lifted eyebrow.

“This is a very singular household indeed,” I burst out.

“’Singular’ does not even begin to describe it,” Mr. Sid mouth replied, and left me to myself.

I HAD NOT LONG TO AWAIT THE RETURN OF THE GRANGE'S CARRIAGE, and my anxious feet had sped me to the courtyard well before the horses were pulled up, and the coach door flung open, and my dear Cassandra laid gcndy on a settee before the fire. She was as colourless as a ghost, and I might even have believed her to have expired, but from the composure of my father in attending her.

Sidmouth materialised in the drive with a sturdy farm woman behind, the very Mary whose slovenliness I had conjectured; she bore a steaming basin and a quantity of torn cloth, for the preparation of bandages, and I was soon relieved to find her possessed of a quiet efficiency. When she had bathed Cassandra's wound, Sidmouth himself bent over my sister with an air of command that would not be gainsaid. His fingers probed the bones of her skull, and passed with delicate knowledge along her temple, so that she winced in her delirium, but showed no other sign of discomfort. My poor Cassandra! So lovely still, despite her suffering, that even Sidmouth could not fail to be moved!

“Mary,” he said, extending a hand for a cloth and wringing it over the basin, “she will need some brandy first and then some hot broth. Beef, 1 think. Fetch those and your smelling salts directly.”

The woman silently departed, and the master of High Down proceeded to test the waist of my sister's dress, so that my mother made a small movement of distress, and my father laid his hand upon hers. “The gendeman knows what he is about, my dear,” my father said quietiy. Then, to Mr. Sidmouth himself, “You have experience in such matters, I believe?”

“I do.”

“You were in His Majesty's service at one time?”

I saw the direction my father's thoughts were taking; and applauded his perspicacity. Sidmouth's actions looked for all the world like those of a camp doctor, accustomed to crisis in the field. But the gendeman himself did not reply direcdy.

“Her ribs are intact, for which you may be thankful,” he said briskly, and reached for a length of calico to dress Cassandra's temple. “She is not out of danger—we must await the outcome of the night to proclaim her truly safe—but I think it likely she shall only want strength for some weeks, and suffer from the headache. I venture to predict, that barring a relapse in the next few hours, she may recover entirely.”

My mother gave a faint cry, and staggered backwards; my own relief was not to be described; and my father silendy joined his hands in an attitude of prayer. To all of this, Sidmouth made sardonic witness, a faint smile about his lips. At Mary's reappearance, brandy was administered, and smelling salts applied; Cassandra's consciousness returned, and with it a bewilderment that brought tears to her eyes—and so we were borne away to bed.

HOW EXTRAORDINARY IS THE HAND OF FATE ITS ACCIDENTALmiseries, its directed salvations. My father bears Cassandra's trouble well, and is even now gone peacefully to his bed; he has seen much that is worrisome in three-and-seventy years, and trusts to the goodness of Providence. My mother is less sanguine. She starts, and weeps upon our bedroom stoop, and wrings her hands for lack of anything better; and permits the grossest fancies to unnerve her sense.

“But do you think her quite
at ease,
my dear?” she enquired thrice this last half-hour, her ravaged countenance peering about the doorframe.

“She
shall
be, madam, as soon as she achieves some quiet”

“Perhaps my wool wrap, placed over the coverlet? For cold is ever a danger in such cases, as you will remember. Miss Tate was carried off in a matter of hours, for want of extra bedclothes, and Miss Campbell in but a week, for having got wet through in a sudden rain; and how her mother survived such a cruel mistake, I shall never comprehend.”

“I assure you, madam, that everything will be done to sustain Cassandra's comfort,” I replied, stemming my impatience with difficulty. Having heard of the untimely ends of a score of young ladies among the Austen acquaintance, my tolerance for my mother was at its close. “Do you seek the chamber Mr. Sidmouth has provided for you, and rest easy in the knowledge that should we require you, you shall be summoned direcdy.”

Though all benevolence in her distress, my mother is overcome by such tender emotions in gazing at her dearest daughter, that I fear she should prove of little aid to Cassandra, in any hour of extremity. Better that I should sit watch by my sister alone, and my mother find some comfort in sleep's oblivion. But it required a full quarter-hour, and the recollection of the fates of both young Master and Miss Holder, who met their ends some three years past, before she would at last seek her bed.

Cassandra is stirring now, and calls my name; I set aside my pen and journal and reach for her hand. A touch alone suffices; we two are so familiar to each other, from the happy intimacy of our minds and hearts, that at the pressure of my fingertips upon her brow, her troubled mind relaxes. A moment more, and she slumbers deep, the pain of injury forgotten. I regain my seat, and take up my pen and modest book—formed, according to my habit, from a sheaf of paper sewn quite through and trimmed to manageable size. A stout book, for the stoutest of thoughts; and of considerable comfort, in serving as confidante when no living mind may answer.

All around us the eaves of the old farmhouse creak with the violence of the wind, but the intimates of High Down Grange are lost in storm-filled slumber—no sound emanates from the shuttered rooms, so that I might be the last soul alive, left here at the edge of the world. Beyond is darkness, and cliffs, and the depthless sea; England is to my back as 1 sit by Cassandra's bed. And so I cross the room to peer out at the unknown, stretching before me like all the days I have yet to live; and can discern nothing beyond my own wavering reflection in the window's glass. A shiver—of foreboding, perhaps—at the hidden landscape, and I would turn away to find comfort in candlelight. But a sudden flare in the darkness below seizes my gaze; I peer more closely, my eyes narrowing, and discern the bob of a lanthorn. A lanthorn just come up over the cliffs edge in the distance, and toiling even now towards the Grange itself. A curiously-shaped lanthorn, perhaps, with a protuberant spout, of a utility unknown to me? Clutched in an angel's ethereal hand, while the other flutters at the nape of a flowing red cloak?

1
The Austens had visited Ramsgate during the spring or summer of 1803, prior to their first visit to Lyme that September. Jane disliked Ramsgate intensely; and when she wished to place a fictional charac ter in a compromising position, she often sent her to Ramsgate. Georgiana Darcy was nearly seduced by Wickham there, in
Pride and Prejudice,
while in
Mansfield Park,
Maria Bertram endured a loveless Ramsgate honeymoon before her adulterous affair with Henry Crawford. —
Editm's note.

2
Jane refers here to Lyme's Marine Parade, known in her day sim ply as The Walk; it ran along the beach fronting Lyme's harbor, and out along the ancient stone breakwater, both of which are called the Cobb. —
Editor's note.

3
Paterson's British Itinerary
was the road bible of the traveling gentry from 1785 to 1832. Written by Daniel Paterson and running to seventeen editions, it detailed stage and mail routes between major cities, as well as their tolls, bridges, landmarks, and notable country houses. —
Editor's note.

4
In Austen's rime, traveling on Sunday was considered disrespectful to the Sabbath.
—Editor's note.

5
We may presume Geoffrey Sidmouth to be referring, here, to Chaucer's
CarUerimry Tales,
in which the character of the Wife of Bath figures. Jane's mention of the town must have sparked the allusion. —
Editors note.

6
Austen's childhood home, the parsonage at Steventon where she lived until May 1801, would be regretted and missed for most of her life. —
Editor's note.

5
September 1804
Lyme

∼

A
ND SO WE ARE AT LAST COME TO
L
YME, AND TO OUR VERY OWN
Wings cottage—a smallish affair of a house tucked into a hillside, with
two
ground floors-—one in its proper place, and the other at the top of the house containing the bedrooms and a back door opening onto a greensward behind. The house fronts upon a busy block of Broad Street, a location
not
entirely as our imaginings had made it; for where we had looked to gaze upon the sea, and throw open our casements to its gende roar, we are instead meant to be happy with a partial view of the Cobb, and that only from the garden at the house's top. But the sitting-room is pretty; and the bustle of traffic at the foot of town, and the eternal cries of muffin men and milk carters climbing its precipitously steep main road, little more than we should have heard at home. More to the point, we are free at last of High Down Grange.

We were obliged to presume upon Geoffrey Sidmouth's taciturn hospitality for the sum of two nights and a day—my dear sister Cassandra's condition permitting of no removal to Lyme so early as yesterday morning. We saw little enough of the gentleman himself during our tedious sojourn, however—he being occupied with the concerns of his estate, and much out of doors in their pursuit. It was to Mary I applied for the necessities of the sickroom; and she provided them with alacrity and good sense. Of Seraphine I neither saw nor heard a word—in any language—though I found myself listening betimes for the whirling passage of a long, full cloak.

It was not until yesterday's dinner hour, in fact, that my own care for Cassandra allowed me to descend the stairs; and I was then to discover that the Austens partook of the meal alone, the master of High Down being yet abroad, and no one able to say when he should return. In a similar state of independence we claimed the drawing-room that evening, and finally retired; and it was well after midnight that a busde about the gates, and all the noise of a courtyard arrival, bespoke the end of Sidmouth's day.

We could not but be grateful this morning, however, in learning from the postboy Hibbs that some part of the master's activity was motivated by a concern for our affairs. A team and dray he had rousted, in the early hours, for the removal of the tree from the Lyme road; and our coach ordered repaired by a blacksmith fetched from town for that purpose. All this, before departing on some business of his own, of which we learned nothing.

We were to see him once more, however, as we assisted Cassandra somewhat shakily into the coach, and settled ourselves with bated breath in a conveyance we had little reason to trust. My mother was clutching at a handkerchief, in readiness for tears should the carriage disintegrate before her very eyes; and my father, who had seated himself beside Cassandra, was engaged in patting her hand in a comforting, if absent-minded, fashion; when I was startled by a voice at my elbow.

“Farewell, Miss Jane Austen of Bath, though 1 believe we shall meet again,” Mr. Sidmouth said. “Indeed, I shall be sustained by the hope of such a meeting's being not too long delayed. Your health, Miss Austen,” he continued, peering in the carriage window at my sister, who nodded faindy; “and to you both, sir and madam. Godspeed to Lyme.”