Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (25 page)

Selling his brother’s political secrets to the highest bidder, perhaps?

Entanglement with Birds and their inevitable expence laid even the most discreet gentlemen open to blackmail; and Thomas-Vere was never discreet. If Edward Gambier had chosen to broach the subject before a Winchester schoolboy, he must assume the Bird of Paradise was common knowledge.

Or that Thomas-Vere, suitably warned, might pay well for silence.

I mounted the stairs to my room and sat down with this journal and pen. There is nothing like a bit of ink to bring reason to the most disordered mind.

SUSPECTS

I looked up from the page. The movements of our party were variable at the time of John Gage’s death. But anyone might have administered laudanum to Mary Gambier’s food or drink. The only person entirely cleared of her murder was Benedict L’Anglois. He had returned to The Vyne less than an hour before her lifeless body was discovered, and no doubt the stable lads could attest to his horse’s arrival. That interval was insufficient to effect murder; when found, Miss Gambier had been dead some hours.
She is so cold
, Edward Gambier had cried.
Will no one help me?

Did innocence in one death clear L’Anglois of the other? Quite probably. There could not be two guests at The Vyne determined upon violence.

Mary, Cassandra, and I had been fixed with Eliza in the morning room at the moment Lieutenant Gage’s neck was broken, our movements known. Of the remaining ladies, only Lousia Gambier—unattended in her bedchamber—and Mamma, at her needlework in the library, had gone unobserved. The breaking of a strong young man’s neck, however, suggested the killer to be male. Edward Gambier or Thomas-Vere might have done it. So might my brother James.

Or Raphael West.

I knew where the first two gentlemen claimed to have been at the moment of the Lieutenant’s death. I should probably discover that my brother was lost in slumber upon a settee in the Saloon at the time. Gambier claimed to have glimpsed Raphael West in the Chapel that morning—but at what hour, exactly? Mary Gambier could have told me—could have supported or denied Mr. West’s search for a secret passage. To the ice house. Where Lieutenant Gage’s murderer had lain in wait for a trap to be sprung.

But Mary Gambier, most inconveniently, was dead. Or was her loss a convenience, in fact, to Raphael West?

M
ARY BEING INDISPOSED ON
her sopha this morning, and James closeted in his study about his sermon for the morrow, the Austen ladies were free to command the parsonage staff. I ordered brisk fires in the principal rooms, and dressed the mantel with evergreen boughs. Mamma sailed into the kitchen and gave her orders for dinner, which chiefly concerned the freshly killed chickens just procured. Cassandra commenced the baking of mince-pies. The housemaid and cook, being newly returned from a protracted interval of leisure, proved cheerful and ready enough to do our bidding. Cook broke into a lusty performance of “Greensleeves” as she plucked the chickens, and Sarah the maid set James’s man—I cannot call him a footman even in pretence, as he was rather a factotum of labour—to chopping more wood. All was light and happiness within; it was quite the parsonage of old. Without, snowflakes began to fall as the candles were lighted.

“Jane,” my mother said conspiratorially as we eyed the mahogany table in the dining parlour, “I do not think we can contrive a castle carved out of a block of sugar, but could we not arrange some greens for the centre? And do you think we ought to declare our intention of departing for Chawton on the morrow—as with all the bloodletting at the Chutes, my heart has quite gone out of remaining for Twelfth Night?”

I bent to the sheaf of boughs that James’s man had cut for us and carried it into the house. “Tomorrow is Sunday, Mamma. You never travel on the Sabbath.”

“Monday, then. Surely that will be long enough for propriety’s sake?”

I did not wish to return home yet—I should be disappointed of
any chance at solving the puzzle of Mary Gambier and Lieutenant Gage—but I apprehended that my mother was finding her son and daughter-in-law’s establishment hard to bear. “Only consider that the children shall be made unhappy. We promised them a fortnight’s visit. And you have not yet met with half your old acquaintance in the neighbourhood!”

“It is true that nobody has seen my reticule,” she said regretfully.

“Only think how sad for them.”

“I do not count Eliza Chute, for she has many fine things, and is accustomed to town bronze.”

“Even she admired it, however. But if Mrs. Digweed of Dummer were to espy it, or one of the Miss Terrys, you must be satisfied.”

As tho’ I had conjured it, a loud rapping was heard at the front door. We waited for the result, the greens for the table suspended in my hands. Presently the housemaid appeared with a parcel, wrapt in butcher’s paper and twine.

“Christmas pudding, ma’am,” she said briefly, “with Mr. Portal’s compliments, and would all the Austens please join them at Ashe Park for dinner tomorrow. Five o’clock. They keeps country hours at Ashe,” she added, of her own volition.

“Dinner!” My mother looked to me in doubt. “I do not know what James will say. He does not believe in Sunday travel any more than I do.”
¹⁰

“The Portals live but two miles away, Mamma,” I said reasonably. “Mr. Portal will send his carriage—he knows that my brother keeps only a gig. And it is New Year’s Day. Surely that takes precedence over stricter principles?”

“Do not be telling James so.” She fidgeted a little with a candlestick and a beeswax taper. “I am sure Mrs. Portal would wish to see my reticule.”

“How could she not? You know that Papa, were he here, should never hesitate.”

And so it was settled. We added the Portals’ excellent pudding to our store of delicacies intended for this evening, and set Cassandra to wheedling brandy out of James. It is not quite a Christmas pudding if one cannot set fire to it.

Even Mary found the strength to rise from her sick-bed, on the promise of a gaiety tomorrow.

W
HEN MY FATHER WAS
alive, New Year’s Eve was a time of singing and dancing at the parsonage. The Rector led the festivities, inviting all his acquaintance into these small rooms, and bestowing his sprigs of mistletoe on the young ladies. There was wassail, and roaring fires, and tables creaking under the weight of good things; for no matter how many mouths George Austen had to feed, his benevolent heart was open to every chance friend. I remember theatricals, as well—I wrote some of them myself as a girl of thirteen or fourteen—and one splendid Christmas when all my brothers were at home, they consented to play in a grand production with my beloved French cousin, Eliza de Feuillide. My brothers are scattered and Eliza is in her grave; but I wish that Caroline and James-Edward were treated to similar amusements. If one is forbidden to indulge every sort of silliness as a child, one is bound to do so when grown.

And so this evening I performed a ritual from my vanished girlhood. As the parlour clock began to strike twelve, I opened the kitchen door to let the Old Year out. Then I hurried along the passage
to the parsonage hall, and on the stroke of twelve, threw wide the front door to let the New Year in.

Huddled in her shawl, Cassandra came to stand by me. Snow was falling, and the world looked white and clean.

“There should be a dark-haired gentleman waiting to enter,” she said. “For good luck.”

I pushed away the thought of Raphael West, and embraced Cassandra. “Never mind, my dear. We have done without him all these years, well enough.”

THE EIGHTH DAY

It was I who crept into Caroline’s room this morning, with a neat walking dress of bronze-green French twill and a nut-brown wool spencer, trimmed in the same bronze-green. Bonnets being difficult to fashion for a head so small as Jemima’s, I had settled for a brown velvet turban dressed with a bronze-green feather, trimmed down from one I had purchased at Burlington House while in London last month. Caroline was already awake, and stared at me soberly from beneath the bedclothes.

“It is a splendid costume, Aunt,” she said. “But I do not know when she will find a use for it.”

“She should wear it while taking the air in Hyde Park.”

Caroline’s grey eyes fixed upon mine. “We never go to London. We never go anywhere. The most interesting place I have been in all my life is The Vyne.”

“You have been to Chawton,” I attempted.

She lifted her shoulders. “Jemima cannot wear her ball gown there.”

“You might pretend to be in Hyde Park. Or at the Coming-Out
of an Earl’s daughter. With your wit, Caroline, you might travel anywhere—and carry Jemima with you. For what do we possess minds, if not to broaden our experience?”

“It is not experience if it is only in your mind,” she pointed out.

Discomfiting child.

“Perhaps when I next visit Uncle Henry in Town,” I said recklessly, “I might take you with me.”

“Truly, Aunt?” She sat upright, her countenance all eagerness. “May we visit Astley’s Amphitheatre?”

“How could we not?”

“And attend a pantomime at Covent Garden?”

“Uncle Henry’s new lodgings are directly opposite Drury Lane.”

Caroline threw her arms around me. “I do love you, Aunt Jane. You never make one feel sinful, in longing for pleasure. Or hopeless of ever attaining it.”

My heart suffered a queer ache. I might write about love and marriage in my novels; my wit, like Caroline’s, could transport me anywhere. But she was right—pretend is not the same as experience.

“Dress yourself warmly for church,” I advised. “If you contrive to appear the ideal Rector’s daughter, you may win Papa’s permission for a London visit sooner than you think.”

T
HE SNOW WAS DONE
by the time we exited St. Nicholas’s several hours later, but we were chilled to the core. I downed several cups of scalding tea upon my return to the parsonage, before ever breakfast had been laid in the parlour. But the sky began to clear as we finished our repast, and a faint sun shone; everywhere about the eaves of the house came the sound of dripping water.

By four o’clock, when we had changed into evening dress and were assembled in the front hall awaiting the arrival of Mr. Portal’s
carriage, the coverlet of white was gone and the main road returned to churned mud.

It was a heavy two miles behind Portal’s excellent horses to Ashe Park. My brother James rode beside us on his hunter, to afford the ladies more room; and inside the carriage most of us were serene.

“How good it is, to be sure,” my mother exclaimed, “to renew old acquaintance!”

Mary sniffed. “And how tedious to be forced to rely on their equipages, for one’s social engagements! I wonder that James is not mortified to be indebted to John Portal in this way. A mill owner, to be conveying a clergyman! When James was so superior to John Portal, too, at Oxford.”

I exchanged a look with Cassandra. It is true that the Portal family has for many years owned the mills in Laverstoke that produce the paper for Bank of England notes; but I wonder if John Portal has ever entered them. His elder brother lives in Laverstoke, tho’ he also owns Ashe Park; and so handsome is the family fortune that John might chuse to reside at Ashe merely for the asking. Mary’s petty snobberies are her sole armour against those who possess what she cannot hope to attain; that, and a general sense of ill-usage.