Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (2 page)

“James may lament the loss of his coin when he has sense enough to hire a closed carriage,” I retorted crossly. “His parsimony has long been cause for ridicule, but I refuse to allow it to finish us. Jem! Jem!”

Our driver turned his head.

“Pray pull up your horse. We—”

I broke off, mouth agape in dread, my eyes fixed upon the luminous spheres wavering over Jem’s shoulder. Carriage lanterns! At the same instant I caught the muffled beat of hooves, deadened by snow.
The oncoming coachman could not perceive us for the whirl of flakes; our paltry conveyance was unlit, and moreover, should afford not the slightest protection from the impact of a coach and four. I rose from my seat, waving my arms in panic. Jem turned, espied the danger, and attempted too late to haul his nag into the hedge at the side of the road. He achieved only the most awkward of situations, his front wheels canted into the ditch, and the rear ones rising at an angle from the roadbed.

“Jane!” Cassandra cried. Her right arm clasped our mother to her bosom, her left braced them both against the mad tilt of the cart. Placed as we were, full against the hedge, it must be impossible to escape. We should all be killed

The crash, when it came, threw me violently on top of my relations and brought my face into abrupt contact with the hedgerow. The nag was screaming in alarm and the neighs of other horses were strident in my ears; a gout of snow had fallen from the hedge full on my bonnet. There was snow in the neck of my pelisse. But my throat was open in protest, which suggested I was not quite dead—nor did I appear to have suffered any broken bones. I struggled to right myself against the yielding stuff that was Cassandra, and found purchase on my knees in the body of the cart.

The coach had come to a swaying halt some twenty yards further down the road. I could hear the coachman’s curses as he struggled to control his team; he must be driving four in hand, a remarkable feat in such weather. That augured a private conveyance. I glanced about—saw Cassandra drawing breath, her eyes wide with shock, and my mother’s eyes tightly closed, her lips moving in prayer.

“Are you hurt, ma’am?”

The hoarse enquiry was Jem’s. He had jumped down from the box and gone to his horse’s head; the beast was shuddering, but no longer
attempting to throw over the traces.

“I shall do.” I gathered myself in a huddle on the canted seat beside my mother and observed that the rear corner of the cart had carried away, leaving only a splintered gap. The wheel, too, was a bent misery of iron on that side. We should go no further this e’en.

“Halloo-o there! Are you injured? Is your equipage damaged?”

A deep voice, crackling with annoyance and leashed anger—but the voice of a gentleman, all the same. Its owner remained obscured by the storm.

“Nag’s all right,” Jem called, “but the cart’s done for. You’m torn the wheel right off.”

“Blast. What in the hell were you thinking, pulled up in the road without a spark of light?” The voice was approaching; I heard the quick sound of booted feet, careless of the slippery roadbed beneath them. “I’d have been damned well within my rights if I’d killed you.”

“Sir!” my mother cried in outrage. I doubt she had heard so many oaths uttered in a single sentence before. “Pray consider where you are!”

There was a groan, half exasperation, half amusement. “I fear I am in the middle of a frozen wilderness, madam, with a party of Amazons I have vastly incommoded.” A shape loomed out of the whirling snow: a tall beaver and a greatcoat sporting numerous capes. A gloved hand swept his hat from his head, and the tall figure bowed low. “Mr. West at your service. May I implore you to seek shelter in the far warmer interior of my carriage?”

I
SUSPECT THAT IT
shall be long, indeed, before I cease to think of the exquisite relief of that carriage—how opulent the dark blue velvet squabs and cushions appeared, after the careworn benches of Jem’s cart, and how loath my sister and I were to spoil its beauty with our dripping pelisses. Once the coach doors were closed, the warmth
of several hot bricks was palpable at our feet; my mother uttered a deep sigh of relief.

“I have no notion whom that fellow may be, Jane—he is most vulgar in his expressions, to be sure, and where the tongue goes, the mind undoubtedly follows—but I cannot think death preferable to this brush with iniquity; and I confess I felt myself to be within mere moments of expiring, so frozen as my limbs were become. I could not bear to think of my dear girls cast alone into—what did he call it? A frozen wilderness?—and thus if your brother James showers us with reproaches when he learns all, I shall take the burden of blame upon myself, as a mother and a Christian.”

“Blast James,” I said crossly. “He is a damned fool. You see, Mamma? I have profited by my brief association with Mr. West, in the enlargement of my vocabulary.”

“You have been acquainted with such words this age, Jane,” my parent retorted sharply, “so do not attempt to bamboozle me. What are those men about, with all this to-ing and fro-ing? It grows excessively late, and I want my dinner.”

The brawn.

I surveyed the interior of the carriage, but no hamper betrayed its existence. The air was markedly devoid of odour, as well. The basket and its contents were vanished into a snowdrift.

“I believe,” Cassandra said hastily, “the men are determining what is to be done with the damaged cart.”

“Drive it entirely through the hedge,” I suggested, “so that it may do no harm to any unsuspecting person on Christmas Eve. The villagers might make merry with it, in the form of kindling.”

At that moment, the door nearest me was wrenched open and a dark head was thrust inside.

“Madam,” he said.

I found myself confronting Mr. West. His eyes were dark brown and capable of great expression—amusement, exasperation, and weariness evident in their depths. His countenance was hardly youthful—he might claim roughly my own years, indeed—but his features were fine-boned and beautifully proportioned. Something else I detected, however, as my cheeks warmed—the gentleman seemed accustomed to study the human form, and quite intently, as though it were in his charge to record every visible detail of those he surveyed. Mr. West appraised me with an attitude both intimate and detached. He anatomised me at a glance.

“Mr. West?” I said faintly.

His gaze broke from mine and travelled over my companions.

“I understand I have the pleasure of addressing a family party, by the name of Austen, and that you are bound for the parsonage in a village called Steventon.”

“Yes, indeed. My brother, Mr. James Austen, is rector of St. Nicholas church there.”

“How appropriate.”

I must have looked my confusion.

“It is, after all, the season of St. Nicholas. My own road, unfortunately, lies elsewhere—as you must have divined, at perceiving my approach from the opposite direction to your own. I have come, indeed, from Bath …”

His position in the open doorway must be growing excessively uncomfortable, as the snow was driving harder than ever; certainly the draughts were no pleasure to those within.

“… and I am expected this evening at The Vyne.”

“The Vyne!” Cassandra exclaimed. “Are you acquainted, then, with Mr. and Mrs. William Chute?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He inclined his head to her. “We have
maintained a voluminous correspondence, but have yet to meet in the flesh. If I hope to do so before another twenty-four hours have passed, I must conclude our conversation and send you on your way.”

“You do not accompany us?” I said hurriedly.

A flicker of interest from those brown depths; and then their light was shrouded by half-closed lids. “I entrust you, rather, to my coachman. Tower is, as his name suggests, the epitome of strength. He has obtained the parsonage’s direction from your carter and has unharnessed two of my team. I shall take one horse and ride onwards to The Vyne; your carter shall take the other, and lead his poor nag home. She has gone lame in her off rear.”

“But what of your baggage, sir?” my mother demanded. “What of your safety? We cannot possibly exile you from your own equipage, and in such weather! That is to be doing too much!”

“Not at all, ma’am. I shall regard it as a trifle.”

If I detected further amusement in his countenance, I did not betray him. I could well imagine that any man should prefer a brisk trot towards dinner and a fire, to a tedious seven-mile journey through snow seated on the box next to his own coachman. That Mr. West did not wish to embarrass us with his presence inside the carriage, I ascribed to an unexpected delicacy.

“Tower shall join me once he has set you safely down at Steventon parsonage, madam,” he informed Mamma. “It is only a matter of three miles, and the road to The Vyne not much longer again than that. The horses were changed at Reading, and may easily stand the distance.”

“You are very good, sir.”

He smiled wryly. “Having been nearly the death of you, I cannot be too solicitous of your security.” A last quicksilver glance at me, the ghost of a nod, and his head was withdrawn from the body of the
coach. The door slammed to, and we heard the rap of his knuckles without; the wheels began to turn.

“Happy Christmas!” he shouted.

I peered through the sidelight. But it was already fogged with moisture, and the darkness obscured every outline; he was an indistinct figure bracketed by horses, with a whirlwind descending.

Happy Christmas, Mr. West, I mentally returned; and wondered what might bring a stranger to so wild a place as The Vyne at such a frigid time of year.

“And so you are come at last.” Mary groaned as she lifted her head from the sopha cushions. “I declare I had quite given you up! The children have been asking for you since breakfast—and you know how their teazing makes my head ache. But you did not consider of me, I suppose, as you dawdled along the lanes. I am the very last creature alive, however, to complain of ill-usage at the hands of those I love.”

“You can have no idea what we endured,” my sister, Cassandra, protested indignantly. “The conveyance James elected to despatch—I cannot in conscience call it a carriage—”

“Poor Mary,” my mother broke in briskly. “Are you unwell? That will be very trying for James, with the Christmas service to manage.”

“James!” she retorted with deepest loathing. “He has not been near me all week! It does not suit the rector of Steventon to nurse the sick. He is far too busy hunting!”

We remained awkwardly in the parsonage’s central hall, our clothing sodden and our tempers frayed. Despite the coldness of our welcome, we were anything but strangers to this house—fully
half my life was lived within these walls, and I might find my way from kitchen to garret in pitch darkness without a single misstep. Judged by worldly eyes, Steventon parsonage is little more than a cottage—the front entry a latticed door, flanked by double windows to right and left. It was never an elegant abode, tho’ my father sheltered eight children and generations of pupils here. Ten bedchambers above-stairs, three of them in the garrets; two wings at the back of the house, where Cassandra and I shared a bedchamber and a small dressing room we dignified with the name of boudoir. Our father, I recollect, was so good as to purchase matching tented beds for his daughters, swathed in blue-and-white-check dimity, from Ring Brothers’ establishment, in Basingstoke; years later, my brother spent the giddy sum of two hundred pounds to new-furnish the parsonage for his bride—the sum being a wedding gift from Anne Mathew’s father, old General Sir Mathew. He cannot have spent a tenth of such riches since.
¹

But that is to be digging up matters better left buried. Anne was James’s first wife, a mild and sweet-faced creature who expired a few years after acquiring the pretty mahogany table and dozen matching chairs. They have grown worn and neglected under Mary’s authority.

There are other ghosts than Anne, however, in this dearest of childhood homes. I glanced around the low-ceilinged front hall with an aching heart, half-expecting my beloved father to emerge from his study, white head bent in amusement to the piping voice of a young scholar struggling with his Latin; but such fancies are in
vain. Papa died years ago in Bath, far from Steventon, and there he remains—solitary in the churchyard.

When my mother was mistress of the parsonage, it was filled with candlelight and warmth. We were buried in the north Hampshire country each winter, to be sure, the village boasting but a string of cottages and its twelfth-century church—but Mamma did not stop to consider of her dignity, nor pine for the brilliance of Society. She cultivated such acquaintance as she found, among Great and lowly alike, from Lord Bolton at Hackwood Park to the meanest villager in his hovel. I know for a certainty that funds were scarce, but we rarely wanted for much. The parsonage was inveterately cheerful. Curtains of cherry red hung from the windows, and the low beams echoed with myriad voices.

Mary had wrapt herself in shawls and was propped among her cushions by a churlish fire. She had not troubled herself to stir the coals, nor had she unwrapt a languid hand in welcome. Impatient with such die-away airs, I tore at my bonnet strings and discarded the offending object on the flagstone floor, unwilling to dampen the seat of a hallway chair.

“We were overturned, Mary,” I said as I strode into the room, “and but for the kind offices of a complete stranger, should be frozen stiff, somewhere between the Winchester and Andover roads. If Mamma has not caught her death, it will be the wonder of the season—and we are all sorely in want of our dinners. Happy Christmas.”

She shifted round slightly so as to face me, her wan face expressionless. “Your dinners? How extraordinary. I have no appetite at all. The slightest morsel is as ashes in my mouth. James has a little gruel, to be sure, when he comes in at this hour—you will observe how late it has grown whilst you idled in Basingstoke! But perhaps Cook has considered of you. A cold collation, left out on the sideboard.”