Jane Austen Mysteries 10 Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron (4 page)

I
F MY THOUGHT WAS TO PROVIDE
M
ANON WITH SUCCOR IN
her time of grief, my impulse was misplaced, however well-intentioned. It is virtually impossible for a woman of middle years, who has served others nearly all her life, to leave off doing so, be she ever so eager to attempt the exercise. No sooner was Manon settled in a chair, with a bit of needlework to pass the time, than she must be jumping up and shifting the pillows for my mother's back; or helping Mademoiselle Cassandra with the gathering of the new peas; or busying herself in the kitchen about the boiling of the tea. I spent our first Chawton morning following her anxiously about, and urging her to leave such cares to others, that she might take a refreshing turn in the garden, where the syringa is in bloom--but she would have none of it. I therefore set her to fashioning my mourning gowns--for I would not appear a dowd in respect of Eliza's loss. Of all the women I have known, my late sister's passion for dress was insatiable. The task suited Manon's needle so admirably, and animated her instincts as a Frenchwoman so well, that nothing would serve but that I must carry her into Alton for the purchase of such trimmings and lengths of muslin and silk as a country village might provide. We were not many hours returned from our shopping, with the packages sent round by dogcart, before I was summoned to stand before the tiny looking glass that serves Cassandra and me for doing up our hair of a morning, while Manon pinned and trimmed to her heart's content.

I was arrayed in a sober dark grey, with rosettes of black silk cord about the bodice, the following morning--Manon having sat up with work candles the better part of the night so that the gown might be finished. Overcome by this evidence of her devotion to her mistress, I apprehended--amidst my profuse thanks--that the unfortunate creature could not get a wink of sleep in any case, for the utter silence of the country, and was desperately in want of her beloved London's racket. Her exhaustion failed utterly to diminish her energy, however--the maid
would
look mumchance at the prospect of taking up a book in the chair nearest the fire--and so my mother set her to baking bread, and later despatched her to Alton's butcher and poulterer--which errand occupied so many hours, and gave her such a sense of importance, as a Londoner and a Foreigner in a country town, that I am sure her grief for Eliza was momentarily forgot.

As day followed day, however, I found myself seeking comfort alone in the out-of-doors, where I might walk towards the Great House in the hope of seeing Fanny or another of my nieces; I made no progress at all in the thorny question of Mr. Henry Crawford, and his possible salvation through the love of a pure heart. It was impossible to write at my little table in the front parlour, with Manon endlessly sweeping the floors.

It was with a measure of thankfulness, therefore, that I saw a travelling chaise draw up before the Cottage door this Wednesday evening, and my brother Henry alight from it. There is no doubt that Manon is eminently useful about the place--but we are all of us fatigued beyond what may be borne, in finding out tasks for her.

"Jane," Henry said as he took my hand, "you look entirely recovered from your recent exertions."

"From the exertion, perhaps--but not the loss."

He inclined his head; we neither of us said anything further; we should not be reviving Eliza, after all, in talking over her end. But I could not like the cast of Henry's countenance--whatever repose I had found, in regaining the country, he had failed to secure in Sloane Street.

When he had paid off the coachman and directed the man to the Crown at Alton, where he might find stabling for his team, I slipped my hand through Henry's arm. He had exchanged his usual bright waistcoat for apparel of a sombre hue; the picture he made being so unlike our Henry that I suffered a pang, as though my brother, too, had gone into the grave with Eliza.

"Come inside. We keep shockingly
country
hours, as you know, but you are only a little late for dinner--Mme. Perigord will certainly warm something for you."

"How is she?"

"Pining for Town, I'm afraid. She holds our ways very cheap, in Hampshire. Other than the quality of our peas, she can find nothing to admire." I leaned towards him conspiratorially. "I confess I shall be heartily glad to have her off my hands, Henry! So much for benevolent impulse!"

"Yes--one tires of nothing so quickly as benevolence; and it is never valued as highly by the object as the giver!" The smile he flashed was
almost
the Henry of old. "Very well; I shall carry off my good French maid tomorrow, as soon as she has cooked us breakfast. She is sorely wanted at home. For you must know, Jane, that I have in mind a scheme of removal--I have set old Bigeon about it already. I intend to give up Sloane Street--"

"So soon!" I interjected.

"--and live quite neatly and comfortably above my offices. Only think what a saving in the lease!"

"Indeed," I managed, having a sudden, sharp vision of the neighbourhood round No. 10, Henrietta Street--the building that houses Henry's bank. Covent Garden, in all its noise and bustle, its theatre linkmen, its throng of carriages and torch-lit entryways; its gentlemen swaggering among the Impures who ply their trade in the shadow of opening nights--is hardly the locale for an Interval of Reflection, so appropriate to one But Lately Bereaved. No, for a Henry stricken in grief, something wilder and more severe was required; something like the fall of the rocky coast at Lyme, or the noble crags of Derbyshire! What a pity it was not November! There is no nursing a grief in May....

"Henry," I said as he pulled open the Cottage door, "I have had a capital notion. Should you not like to repair to the seaside for a period, in order to take the air, and recruit your strength?"

"The seaside, Jane?" He frowned at me. "I thought you were wishing Mme. Perigord at Bedlam!"

"Indeed," I assured him. "You might seek the seaside
after
you have restored Manon to her mother. While the good Frenchwomen effect the removal of your things to No. 10, you might be taking restorative walks along the Cobb."

"The Cobb?" he repeated, bewildered.

"In Lyme," I persisted. "You will recall that poor Father was forever taking Cassandra and me there, and at the very end of the Season, too, when the town was dreadfully thin of company and the Assemblies almost run. Or perhaps Worthing--"

"
Worthing
?" His tone of revulsion was not propitious. "Jane, only such relicts of the country gentry as are tottering on the edge of their graves, seek to be known in
Worthing.
"

"Very well. Ramsgate."

He took me firmly by the arm and propelled me within the Cottage. The most delicious odour of roasted fowl still hung upon the air, but I am afraid the better part of the bird had long since been consumed, and the excellent Manon would already be thrusting the carcass into a soup pot; it was her decided passion, this affair of bones and broth.

"Henry!" my mother cried, and rose from her chair--not without effort, but with at least the suggestion of alacrity; for, after all, she is four-and-seventy. "My dear boy! We have all been so grieved--so
shattered
, indeed, by the passing of Eliza! How such a hearty soul can be taken, when I linger here, a burden to you all--"

He kissed her cheek, and she smoothed his hair, and for a moment as I watched them we might all of us have been thirty years younger--and Henry a boy of fifteen, returned from school.

"There will never be another like her, Mamma," he said softly, "as Heaven is daily learning--to its chagrin!"

"Come and sit by the fire," she said fondly, "while that busy French scold warms your dinner. You look fagged to death!"

"It has been a long, weary, and mournful winter," he admitted with a sigh, "but that is all to be mended."

"Indeed?" Cassandra murmured, with an anxious glance for me; it has long been her assertion that Henry is incapable of living alone, and will throw himself at the first well-endowed widow who offers. "Mended, you say? And so soon?"

My brother smiled. "Our sister Jane has a decided inclination to visit the sea. She believes that a period of exposure to salt air is as essential as balm to a wounded heart. You know her devotion to Eliza; they were sisters as much as cousins; and I think, after all her signal exertion during the past few weeks--her devotion to my wife in her final hours--that it behooves me to offer this small gesture of thanks. I have consented to bear her company on an expedition to the seaside."

"Jane?" my mother repeated, aghast. "But she is only just returned from London! Who is to put up the strawberries, if not Jane? And there will be no dealing with the butcher if Jane is gone off again!"

It is painful, in such moments, to learn exactly
how
one is valued by one's parents. But I was too diverted by the expression of mischief in Henry's visage to pay my mother much heed.

Her face darkened. "Do not be thinking to leave that Perigord woman on our hands, Henry! We should none of us survive it! An excellent creature in her way, I am sure--but so dreadfully
active.
"

"She is to be gone on the morrow, Mamma. Jane's plan--"

I could not suppress a gasp at this; but Henry was always adept at effrontery.

"--is that once we have seen Manon safely restored to Sloane Street, she and I shall pursue our interval of reflection. A period of long walks about the cliffs--the refreshment of our jaded spirits--deep draughts of restorative salt air." He surveyed the room with a satiric eye. "We are bound, you see, for the wilds of Brighton."

B
RIGHTON
.

The most glittering resort of the present age, the summer haunt of expensive Fashionables, the exile-of-choice for every member of the London
ton
possessed of the careless means of securing a lodging--Brighton, where the betting is high on the horses raced with spontaneous abandon over the hard-packed Downs; where the Assemblies at the Old Ship are a crush of the highborn and the low; where the Prince Regent and his cronies hold indecent revels beneath the Chinese lanterns of the Marine Pavilion.

I could not conceive of a less reclusive spot for Henry to chuse, but before I opened my lips in a torrent of protest, a single thought arrested me.

How Eliza would have loved it
.

They were a different sort of animal, Henry and Eliza, from the general run of retiring Austens. Not for them the solitude of Nature, the steadying influence of contemplation or prayer. Henry would never survive his grief by embracing melancholy; he was not an one to drape himself in crape, and sigh over the grave of his beloved. Henry seized at Life, and it is probable that his final vigil by Eliza's bed--the sleeplessness and darkness, the nightmares of laudanum--were the closest he should ever come to Death's abyss. He had leapt over it now, and the brightness of pleasure called to him. Brighton, in all its strumpet glory, was
exactly
what he required.

"Brighton?" Cassandra repeated, in a tone of bewilderment. "But is it not a very
vulgar
place, Henry, of decided dissipation? Recollect that it was in Brighton that poor Lydia Bennet made her fatal choice to elope with Wickham, in dear Jane's diverting novel. I am sure
I
should never care to go there."

"And due to your goodness, our mother shall not be entirely abandoned! You have my gratitude, Cass, for the sacrifice." Henry placed his hand over his heart, and bowed. "But as to your scruples--I have it on good authority that the 10th Hussars are grown so respectable now Napoleon has immolated himself among the Tatars, that you need not be in a fret regarding dear Jane's virtue. She shall not run off with a red coat, while she is under my protection."

"Unfortunate," my mother sighed, "but we cannot be having everything. It is enough, perhaps, that she has the opportunity to be
seen
. One may meet with so many Eligibles in Brighton, I am sure--and though Jane is long since on the shelf, you cannot deny that her complexion improves with exposure to salt air!"

On this happy thought, my mother retired to her bedchamber, while I thanked Henry prettily, if somewhat archly, for the treat he meant to bestow.

"Save your breath for Manon," he advised. "If that woman is to be credited, there is only one right manner of folding and packing gowns--and she will be busy with your trunk and silver paper the better part of the night."

I left him to recruit his strength with the remains of a pie, while I hurried above-stairs, certain that nothing like silver paper was to be found in Chawton Cottage--to discover my bedchamber strewn with the stuff, and Manon up to her elbows in my meagre wardrobe.

CHAPTER THREE
An Incident on the Road