Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (3 page)

Impossible that she should grasp the severity of our ordeal; it should be left to Cassandra or me to chivy the housemaid into preparing hot coals for the warming pans and hot bricks to the feet, when once we made our cheerless way to bed. Not for the first time did I wish myself wedged back into the publick stage with Martha, still swaying towards Bath!

My mother had disappeared into the dining parlour in search of sustenance; she had long known what Mary was. Cassandra, being more selfless than Mamma and more charitable than I, attempted once more to move the poor sufferer before us.

“You know we always make you better once we are come.” She crossed the room and perched herself upon the sopha’s creaking arm. A few drops of melting snow fell from her bonnet to Mary’s faded hair, drawn back in a makeshift knot at her nape. But Mary persisted in staring bleakly at the leaded casement, like a child in a fit of the sullens.

“Such gaieties as we shall have,” Cassandra attempted, hastening to remove her gloves, the better to wrestle with her bonnet, “now that Christmas is upon us.”

“Twelve days entire of rank frivolity,” I agreed sardonically.

“We shall call upon the Terrys, and the Harwoods, and the Bramstons at Oakley Hall,” Cassandra enumerated, more for the benefit of ourselves than the listless Mary. “And we may claim a new acquaintance at The Vyne! A Mr.—West, was it not, Jane? Our deliverer from the snowbank. I have not seen Mr. and Mrs. Chute this age. What a delight it shall be to meet once more!”

“Then you are more easily pleased than I,” Mary retorted spitefully. But her attention was reclaimed, and she forced herself upright against the sopha cushions. Her form emerged from the shawls; a drift of Paisley slid down her shoulders. “Mrs. Chute is an excessively
vulgar woman, I believe, who presumes to comment upon those above her station. Only think, Cassandra—she deigned to give me what she termed a ha’porth of advice. Utterly unsolicited, I assure you. ‘If Mrs. James Austen were only to undertake some useful employment’—careening about the country on horseback with that wretched Vyne Hunt, no doubt—‘she should be much improved for it, and throw off these airs and megrims.’ Mrs. Chute shall think better of her insolence, I suppose, when she sees me in my grave.”

“Now, Mary,” my mother interjected as she reentered the parlour bearing a platter in both hands, “here is a fine bit of ham and a round of Stilton. I declare I have not seen such a Stilton in many a year!”

“A gift to James from the parish, I suppose,” his wife noted indifferently.

“Should you like a morsel?”

“Of so strong a cheese! No, indeed. I should fall ill directly.”

We had risen at cock-crow to prepare for the long journey from Chawton Cottage to my brother’s house—all of seventeen miles—and even without the chaos of recent hours, should have dearly loved a little consideration. But it was ever thus, in James’s household: the invited guests must immediately minister to the desperate heroine who commanded the scene, and no concerns but hers were broached. I might happily have strangled Mary many years since, so poor a patience do I possess for nerves; and therefore cannot trust myself to cross her doorstep unattended.

She hunched one shoulder at Mamma and returned her gaze to the blank windowpane; my mother sank down into a chair and threw up her hands.

I seized a knife and cut into the ham with heartless industry.

Pray apprehend: Mary is not ill, exactly; she merely fancies herself so. She quacks and physicks herself, and announces portentously that
the End is Near; she lies upon the sopha the better part of the day and laments the coldness of a world indifferent to her dying. She refers to her grave with all the consideration of an old friend; but where it may lie, and what may drive her into it, remains a subject of conjecture among her intimates. Tho’ a trifle thin, Mary possesses as sound a body as the rest of us. It is her mind that is ill. A want of energy and interest are the chief evils—although I suspect that Mary secretly revels in the distinction her humours give her. Her portion in life is meagre, her social ambitions constrained; but as an invalid, her stile is equal to the greatest duchess’s in the Kingdom.

“I daresay you wish to know how we left Martha.” Cassandra had succeeded in removing her bonnet and was smoothing her disarranged hair. Our dearest Martha may be Mary’s sister, but there cannot be two more dissimilar women in the Kingdom; where one is indolent, the other is active; one self-absorbed, the other benevolently inclined towards all the world. I carried my plate of ham as close as possible to the fire, too chilled to remove my pelisse, and took up the tongs. Once stirred, the embers glowed with faint life; I tossed some kindling upon them and was rewarded with a flame.

“Pray do not trouble, Jane,” Mary said sharply. “For what do we possess a parlour maid?”

“Merest show, apparently.” I grasped a log in my gloved hands. “Draw your chair nearer to the hearth, Mamma, and allow me to take your wrap.”

“Martha,” Cassandra persisted a shade more loudly, “was excessively well. We saw her safely onto the stage at Basingstoke, and have every expectation she will reach her friends in Bath by nightfall. She begged that I wish you all the joy of the season.”

“Martha does not know what it is to be ill,” Mary said fretfully. “She has no compassion for those who suffer.”

Thus she despatched her sister, whilst I despatched the ham.

It is a pity, indeed, that James’s choice did not light upon Martha when he went looking for a wife among the Lloyds of Ibthorpe. It is many years since I ceased to regard Martha as an acquaintance, and embraced her wholeheartedly as a relation. A friend of the bosom in my distant girlhood—a companion in wet country walks and overheated Assembly-Room balls—she is become as much a sister to me as Cassandra. Since her mother’s death, indeed, she has made her home with us at Chawton. Martha should never have met us with gloom, or served my mother’s parsonage with neglect. But it is probable the high spirits and excellent sense of my dearest friend should have been entirely thrown away upon my eldest brother. The loss of his Anne, a mere eighteen months after the birth of their only child, seems to have turned his heart queerly—tho’ I do say it of a clergyman, whose solace ought to be in the prospect of Better Things.

Certainly James did not attempt to supply Anne’s gentle place in his second attachment; his union with Mary might best be regarded as a marriage of convenience, undertaken by a gentleman perplexed with the care of managing a parish and raising a female child entirely alone. If there was an initial liking in James’s choice—if indeed there was even love—it has long since gone off, like a beauty’s brief and early bloom. Such an unhappy situation cannot be without its ill effects upon every member of the household.

Mary consented to raise little Anna, James’s child; but what maternal love she claims is reserved, in rare moments, for her own progeny: James-Edward, a youth of sixteen who spends the better part of his year at Winchester School, and Caroline, a young miss of nine years who wanders the hedgerows in summer and hides in the garrets with stolen books during the long winter months. It was the “teazing”
of these two that had set our Mary’s head to aching; but as I had heard not a peep from the adjoining rooms in the interval following our arrival, I concluded both children were gone out—Caroline to visit her pony in the stables, perhaps, and James-Edward to one of the happier households of Dummer or Sherborne St. John. After the bustle of Winchester, I should imagine the poor boy was desperate for any amusement that might offer, for certainly none was to be found within the parsonage.

As for Anna—she is now grown and married a month to her improvident curate, Ben Lefroy, the youngest son of my own dear departed friend, Madam Lefroy. Ben is indolent and barely inclined to shift for himself, much less a wife; to unite their fortunes must be regarded as one of the worst decisions either party ever made; but as a certain release from the household at Steventon, Anna’s match may be credited a success.

I was summoned from my ruminations—and my enjoyment of the ham—by all the noise of arrival emanating from the rear of the house.

“James!” Mary said with a curious air of satisfaction. She drew her draperies once more to her chin, cast her head languidly on the sopha pillow, and stared fixedly into the blank windowpane—the very image of one sunk in suffering.

The heavy tread of booted feet sounded in the passage. There was a flicker as James paused to light a wall sconce with his taper, the only light in the parsonage save the glow from the hearth.

“Pray secure an oil lamp, dearest, whilst you are about it,” my mother called out. “Else you are likely to trample us in all this gloom.”

“Mama!” James hastened through the parlour doorway, his hands outstretched in welcome; one of them still clutched the burning taper. I slipped it from his fingers as he embraced our parent, and tossed it into the fire.

“Jane! And Cass! Welcome, welcome! I trust you arrived safely before the snowfall?”

“We arrived safely,” Cassandra replied, with a hint of unaccustomed irritation. “Happy Christmas, James. You look very well.”

And naturally she was correct—I have never had a glimpse of my eldest brother when he is not beaming with the most sanguine self-satisfaction. It need not concern us that his pate has suffered a diminution in its luxurious hair, or that his figure has increased beyond what is strictly acceptable in a man of Fashion, or that he is buried in the country with only four-and-twenty families to admire his sermons of a Sunday morning. James is above such worldly concerns. He inhabits the realm of the Spirit; and those of us required to ascend to its heights in his train, may only congratulate ourselves.

If we did not, we might be tempted to seek our beds with as much lassitude as the unfortunate Mary.

“My dear,” he said sternly to his wife the instant my thoughts chanced to light upon her, “do not alarm me with this attitude of dejection. Say not that you have suffered a relapse of your habitual complaint!”

Mary merely sighed, her shoulders drooping. Being lost in contemplation of the grave, she could not lift her head.

James knelt by the sopha and secured her hand. “You must endeavour to overcome your worse self, my dear. You must pray to our Lord to arm you against the Devil—who comes in the form of an oppression of spirits, and wrestles for your soul!”

My eyes met Cassandra’s over our brother’s bowed head. He was murmuring words of scripture into Mary’s palm. It was as I had foreseen: our lighthearted Christmas season was at an end before it had begun.

My mother quitted her chair and gathered us up, linking an arm through each of ours. “I should enjoy spirits of an entirely different order, girls. I am sure that sherry will accompany this Stilton delightfully—and I know exactly where James hides it!”

THE FIRST DAY

The snow ceased to fall during the night, and it was a sparkling world that greeted us this Christmas morning. The verger had swept the churchyard pavings, despite James’s prohibition against any form of labour on so sacred a day, and thus we were able to walk in a sedate file from the parsonage to St. Nicholas’s. Cassandra’s bonnet feathers were past repair, but Mamma exhibited her reticule with modest pride.

Mary was markedly pale, the consequence of having refused all sustenance in the past four-and-twenty hours. How interesting we may make ourselves, through the conscious mortification of the flesh!

The local farmwives had festooned the stone interior of the old Norman church with green boughs of fir and holly, a ritual dear enough to the villagers that James must have submitted to the practise with grudging grace. I know him to regard such decoration as thoroughly pagan—as he does most of the gaieties of the Christmas season—and would never allow it to be attempted at home. And indeed, as he mounted the rostrum to deliver his Nativity sermon, my brother’s brow was lowering and his aspect melancholic. How strange
this seems! Our dear father was joyous in his offerings of mistletoe to every lady of his acquaintance, however seriously he regarded his duties as a clergyman. James’s repugnance for worldly happiness must be viewed, then, as the determined rebellion of a disaffected son. We Austens were not reared to be cheerless and disdainful; on James’s part, this is a conscious choice. I must assume, therefore, that having been treated to a childhood of strictest sobriety, young James-Edward shall take the shortest road to ruin—through a gaming hell and a brothel—and that little Caroline will be a heedless madcap, wanton in every material display, when once she attains her freedom.

Caroline is approaching her tenth year, a slip of a girl with waves of chestnut hair pulled painfully into a knot at her neck. Clear grey eyes—Austen eyes—and a rose complexion bode well for her looks; she requires only time and care to bloom. I should like to carry her off to Godmersham, my brother Edward’s estate in Kent, where young ladies are allowed to be foolish and silly, and to dance in the nursery wing long before they are permitted to waltz in publick. But lacking all authority, I must content myself with the early presentation of Caroline’s Christmas gift—which by rights should wait for Twelfth Night, when all our presents, trivial though they may be, are exchanged. I believe I shall steal into Caroline’s room and leave my token on her pillow without a word, as tho’ some good faerie had bestowed it. Caroline will delight in the game of discovering her benefactress, which will increase the gift’s value threefold.