The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen (25 page)

But a letter I received from Fanny in April that same year put paid to any such possibility. “You will never guess what,” she wrote in her usual breathless style. “Uncle Henry has surprised and shocked us all by taking a new wife. Her name is Eleanor Jackson and she is only six months older than me. She is the niece of the Reverend Papillon. Do you remember him? He lives at the rectory in Chawton, right opposite the Great House.”

Fanny went on to describe the visit she had made to the newlyweds while staying at the Great House with her father: “Miss Jackson has a good pair of eyes,” she wrote, “but I fear she is not strong. She cannot go for walks by herself; Uncle Henry pushes her about the village in a wheelchair, which seems rather strange when one considers that he is close to fifty and she twenty-eight.”

The rest of the letter was taken up with Fanny’s own wedding plans. She was to marry the man in the miniature, Sir Edward Knatchbull, who, she told me, had six children under ten years old. Poor little Fanny, I thought. Perhaps she believes he will not be interested in fathering any more.

As I folded the letter and put it away I could not help thinking of Mary, kicking her heels in Bath. If my instincts about her were right she must be incandescent with rage: not only had Henry passed her over, he had chosen someone young enough to be her daughter. Perhaps now that Mary was available she was no longer desirable. I wondered if what Henry really wanted was a child: a
legitimate
child. If so, Mary was unlikely to be able to provide him with one at forty-two years old. Was that the reason for him choosing young Miss Jackson? If Fanny’s description of her was anything to go by, she did not sound an ideal candidate for motherhood. Perhaps there was another attraction then: did this new bride come with money, or the promise of it?

I took a little cloth from my desk to polish the ring on my finger. “Well, Jane,” I whispered. “What do
you
make of it?”

Jane shared my new home in Liverpool in a way that would never have been possible in life. I spoke to her every day, out loud when I was in private or in my head when there were other people about. Sometimes I would consult her about the running of the school or my concern for one of the pupils; another day I might tell her how the Mersey looked as it flowed past my window to the sea. She became a constant presence in my life and although my evenings were often spent alone I never felt lonely, for I had her books and her letters all about me.

It wasn’t long before I had her face to look upon as well. True to her word, Cass copied the pastel drawing and sent it to me, along with first editions of
Northanger
Abbey
and
Persuasion
. In the days that followed it was as if Jane was sitting beside me, reading the words herself. I have to confess that of all her books,
Persuasion
is my favorite, because its voice is the voice of the Jane I got to know at Godmersham, the Jane who knew what it felt like to suffer for love but could summon delight from the most hopeless of circumstances.
Persuasion
felt like her gift to me—a promise of fulfillment at last, made all the more precious by a heroine named Anne.

I was invited to stay at Chawton many times over the next few years. Being with Cassandra and Mrs. Austen fed the flame in my heart. And I would catch glimpses of Jane in the faces of Anna’s children. Julia had her eyes, Jemima had her sharp tongue, and little George once told me very solemnly that he could not decide what he loved best: reading or dancing.

In all those years it never occurred to me that Jane’s death had been anything other than the tragic result of some unidentifiable illness. It was not until 1827—a few months before the tenth anniversary of her passing—that I came across something that led me to question that assumption.

In the last week of January I received the sad news that Mrs. Austen had breathed her last on the eighteenth day of that month, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven. Like many of those who claim a weak constitution, Jane’s mother had outlived most of her contemporaries and several of her younger relatives. One of the last things she ever said to me, as I bid her farewell the previous summer, was: “I think God has forgotten me.”

It was Anna who wrote to tell me of her passing. “The vigor of her constitution even at her great age made the battle between life and death severe,” she wrote, “but the last hours were tranquil and free from pain, and when it was over the very wrinkles seemed smoothed out of her face and the beauty of youth restored to it—her nurses were Aunt Cassandra, Martha Lloyd, and the two maids, who took their full share and proved themselves most faithful and kind.”

Two days after Anna’s letter arrived there was a notice in the
Times
. It was short and to the point, noting that she was the mother of the late novelist, Miss Jane Austen, and had been buried in the graveyard of St. Nicholas in the village where she had spent the latter years of her life. As I turned the page I was talking to Jane, asking her how she felt about her mother’s grave being so far away from her own. I was staring at the newspaper without seeing the print, but as my eyes came back into focus, they alighted on an extraordinary headline:

Woman poisons husband and two children.

It was a report of the trial of a person from the north of England who had been accused of murdering her spouse and stepchildren for the insurance money their deaths would bring her. Her crimes had apparently gone undiscovered until she attempted the same method of disposing of her second husband, whose doctor spotted the telltale symptoms of poisoning. I stopped short when I read what the doctor had said in court: “The patient’s skin displayed a distinctive discoloration. It was blotched black and white, which is a clear indication of the ingestion of arsenic.”

Jane’s last letter leaped into my mind. “My face is black and white and every wrong color…” Those were her exact words. My heart lurched. Was Jane poisoned? I searched my memory for everything I knew about arsenic. Like most people, I have some in my own kitchen cupboard, used whenever rats are spotted rooting around in the alley at the side of the school. Had there been some accident? Had someone mistaken it for an ingredient that was mixed into something Jane ate?

I remembered the episode with the eye wash, described to me by Jane herself, when her mother had mistaken ground hen’s dung for pepper and put it in an oyster pie. But that had been a joke, hadn’t it? And besides, if arsenic had gotten into the food at Chawton cottage, other members of the family would have fallen ill too.

I cast about for another explanation. Arsenic was often prescribed by doctors. It was used to treat all manner of ailments. Had she been given too large a dose? The other possibility was too wild an idea to contemplate: that someone had deliberately poisoned her. I dismissed it immediately. “Who in the world,” I murmured, “would want to murder such a creature as you?”

I went back to the newspaper article, searching for any small detail that would dispel the thoughts taking shape in my mind. But what I saw only increased my disquiet. There was a paragraph about a former neighbor of the accused woman who had been called to give evidence. She reported that the stepchildren and first husband had all “gone a funny color in the face” in the weeks leading up to their demise. My heart thumped so hard I thought it would burst out of my ribs. Was it wrong to make a connection between this case and Jane’s death? Was I being as fanciful as Catherine Morland in
Northanger
Abbey
? I blinked at the words on the page before me.
No, you are not. There it is in black and white. Black and white!
Jane’s voice was as clear and strong as it had been in life.

***

Over the next few weeks I buried myself in medical books. First of all I wanted to know if anything else could have caused the facial discoloration. I found diseases that turned the skin yellow, red, or blue, but nothing that gave the patchy black and white effect she had described.

Then I read everything I could find about arsenic. The more I learned, the more I was convinced that Jane’s illness was not an illness at all, but the result of her system being poisoned. She had reported stomach problems, sickness, weakness in the limbs: all were typical of chronic exposure to arsenic. I read of people who had been accidentally poisoned by arsenic in the wallpaper of their homes, or by working in factories that manufactured paint and dyes for cloth, both of which processes involved handling the deadly compound. But every innocent, accidental explanation I sought brought me back to the fact that those who lived with her had not been similarly afflicted. Cassandra and Martha were still alive and well; so were the two servants, Jenny Butter and Hannah Pegg. Even Mrs. Austen had survived her daughter by nearly a decade and had, in Anna’s words, looked quite beautiful in death.

I read that there were two ways in which people could die from ingesting arsenic. If small amounts were taken over a long period of time, the victim would not die at once but would develop symptoms which mimic those of cancer of the stomach or the bowel. If the amount is then increased by even a little, the body, already so weak, will experience major organ failure, with death occurring quickly after. The second type of death results from ingesting a single large dose of the compound. In this instance, the person suffers a sudden, violent death.

By now my head was tumbling with questions. The chief of these was the matter of Jane’s medical treatment. Had she been given arsenic as a cure? If so, her symptoms could be attributed to accidental overdose or malpractice on the part of the doctor. This was not the sort of question that could be asked in a letter to Cassandra. It would have to be done with great subtlety on my next visit to Chawton. But when would that be? I could hardly invite myself, especially with Cassandra in mourning for her mother.

In a fever of uncertainty, I hit upon a plan. I wrote to Martha Lloyd with a request for advice, pretending that one of the girls in my charge was suffering from a condition that had so far defied diagnosis but reminded me of the symptoms Jane had described to me in her letters. I told Martha that the doctor was inclined to administer arsenic, but I was not sure that this was the right course of action. Did Martha know if Jane was given such treatment, I asked, and what was her opinion of it?

I awaited her reply with a mixture of trepidation and guilt. I was desperate for the answer, but it felt wrong to manipulate a good woman like Martha Lloyd in this way. To my shame, the letter arrived with a package. Martha had taken the trouble to prepare a special remedy for the nonexistent sick girl, along with detailed instructions as to its use. As for the arsenic, she dismissed it in a single sentence. She herself had advised Jane against its use, for in her opinion it was a harsh remedy with many dangerous side effects.

I had no doubt that Jane would have heeded her advice, for although she often teased Martha about her potions, she had recommended them to me on more than one occasion. All the occupants of Chawton Cottage regarded a visit to the doctor as a last resort, and Martha was the one they trusted most when illness struck. So if Jane had not taken arsenic as a medicine, where had it come from? Was there one thing she habitually ate or drank that no one else in the household ever touched? Was it possible that whatever this was could have become contaminated with the poison? It seemed highly unlikely. But that left only one other conclusion: that somebody had deliberately administered the arsenic because they wanted her dead.

I had dismissed this idea at the outset, but now I was not so sure. I was not privy to everything that went on in her life: she was apt to offend some people with her sharp remarks. Had she gone too far? Upset one of the servants, perhaps, at the cottage or the Great House? For if it was deliberate, the perpetrator would have to have been close enough to have the opportunity, over a period of many months, to bring about their evil scheme.

***

As the school year drew to a close I became quite desperate to get to Chawton. Cassandra’s letters became brighter and more optimistic as another Christmas approached but contained no invitation to visit. In the end, it was Martha Lloyd who came to my aid once again. She wrote to tell me the amazing and wonderful news that at the age of sixty-three she was to become a bride. Her fiancé was none other than Jane’s brother Frank, the sea captain, whose wife had recently died, leaving him with six children still at home. She had agreed to take charge of his house and family in Portsmouth and would soon be leaving the cottage at Chawton. Would I be able to manage a trip to Hampshire, she asked, to attend the wedding?

Within an hour of receiving her letter, my reply was written. “You will help me, Jane, won’t you?” I whispered as I sealed it up.

I set off for Chawton in the third week of July, the day after the girls had left school for the summer holidays. On the journey I caught my first glimpse of Mr. Stephenson’s famous locomotive,
The
Rocket
, which was being tested on the new railway that an army of laborers were laying down between Manchester and Liverpool. The bitter smell of burning coal seeped in through the closed doors of the stagecoach and my stomach, already churning at the prospect of the quest that lay ahead, was turned to ice by the shrieking of the great engine as it flew past.

The thatched roofs and lush meadows of Hampshire belonged to a different world from the one I now inhabited: a world of slow, steady rhythms and old-fashioned ways. Stepping down from the coach to nothing but the sound of birdsong and the panting of horses, it was hard to believe that anything sinister could happen in such a place. I felt suddenly foolish. What was I thinking of, coming here with a hidden motive? Then I remembered something Anna had said on a hot May evening more than twenty years distant:
If
I
had
a
husband
like
that
I
would
poison
him
slowly
… I reminded myself that she lived in this very county, the respectable wife of a parson with a brood of seven children now. Dark thoughts will grow in any soil, I thought.

It struck me that Anna was the only person I had ever heard utter such a thing. Why, then had I not thought of it before? The answer came swiftly, in Jane’s voice.
Anna
loved
me
. It was beyond doubt that Anna had adored her aunt. Jane had cared for her when she was small and had continued to be the most special woman in Anna’s life, more of a mother figure than Mary Austen had ever been. I could no more suspect Anna of poisoning her aunt than murdering one of her own children.

I started counting all the people I could think of who visited the cottage on a regular basis and could, therefore, have had an opportunity to introduce arsenic into something Jane ate or drank. When I included all the family members and servants who had stayed at the Great House during the year before she died, the number exceeded thirty. I wondered how on earth I was going to investigate so many potential suspects, especially as I knew of no reason for any of them wanting Jane dead. Cass and Henry were the only beneficiaries of her will and the amounts she left were trifling, despite the success of her books. Cass, I was certain, would rather have died herself than see any harm befall her sister. Henry was a different character altogether; I had seen his ruthless side at close quarters. He had lost his fortune, of course, but was he really capable of murdering his own sister for a little less than a curate’s yearly stipend?

Fanny and Anna never mentioned him in their letters now. Cass had given me the occasional bit of news. There had been talk of him taking up a chaplaincy at the British embassy in Berlin, then news of him moving instead to a parish in Colchester. “He and Eleanor have little in the way of material wealth, but they seem very happy,” Cass had written a year or so ago. She had made no mention of any baby being born to the couple. It appeared that Miss Jackson had brought Henry neither children nor money.

I heard my name called and looked up. Still, after all these years, I had a fleeting sense that the figure waving from the window was Jane. It was Cass, of course, and soon she was out the door and coming along the path, hands outstretched in greeting. I saw that she was still dressed in black, like a widow in mourning. When she smiled at me, I saw that she had lost two of her front teeth, just like her mother. As she led me back to the house I half expected to see Mrs. Austen bending over the cabbages in her boots and workman’s smock. I had to remind myself that, like Jane, she no longer walked this earth.

Jane’s face was the first thing that I sought when I entered the parlor. I noticed that there was something hanging on the wall beside it: a piece of writing in a gilt frame that matched the one containing her portrait. “What’s this?” I asked Cass.

“It’s a poem,” she replied. “The very last thing that Jane composed. She dictated it to me two days before she died.” She glanced away. “I’ve had it in a drawer for ages, but I thought it ought to go on display.”

I took a few steps closer until I was able to make sense of the letters. “‘When Winchester Races—a poem for St. Swithin’s Day,’” I read aloud.

“She wrote it on St. Swithin’s Day,” Cass explained. “I don’t know why she chose that subject—it seems an odd thing to be thinking about when you’re…” She bit her lip.

“Would you mind if I copied it? I should like to be able to read it to myself sometimes, when I’m back at home.”

“Of course I wouldn’t mind.” She smiled. “You can do it now, if you like, while I make you some tea.”

She brought me paper and a pen and ink. I sat quite still for a moment, reading the poem through, with nothing but the ticking clock intruding on my thoughts. It was a strange poem about the saint taking revenge on the people of Winchester for having the nerve to hold their races on his holy day. I don’t know what I was hoping for; it was quite unlike anything else of hers that I had ever seen. There were six verses and every so often a word was underlined—presumably Jane had instructed Cass to do this—but the choice of emphasis seemed quite random. Nevertheless, I set to copying it.

“Where is Martha?” I asked when Cass returned with the tea.

“Gone to Winchester,” she replied. “She and Frank have to finalize the arrangements for the service. She’ll be home in time for dinner.” A fragment of her voice broke away with those last few words and I asked her what the matter was. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “It’s just foolishness. I’m as happy for Frank and Martha as anyone could be. It’s just that…” She trailed off, picking at the lace on her collar.

“Just that what?”

“They’re getting married in the cathedral. Where…” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. Now I understood. I had wrongly assumed that the wedding would take place at the village church.

“Why did they choose it?” I asked.

“The Dean is a friend of Frank’s from his schooldays,” she replied. “He married him the first time and took the funeral service for his poor wife. Frank says he would be offended if his wedding to Martha took place anywhere else.” She looked away then, fishing in her pocket for a handkerchief. It grieved me to see her tears, but I blinked back mine, afraid of upsetting her even more.

“Do you talk to her, Cass?” My voice sounded very loud in the little parlor.

She searched my face for a moment. “Yes, every day. Do you?”

I nodded. “I have the drawing you made hanging in my study, over the desk. I sit for ages, sometimes, just staring into her face, and after a while I hear her voice in my head. It seems so real to me; as if she’s standing right beside me.”

“I get that too.” Cass smiled. “It’s usually when I’m in the garden, though, not in the parlor. I don’t look at the portrait very often because it pains me to remember how she changed in those last months. Her face was so lovely, but it was ruined by her illness.”

I felt a prickle of apprehension. I wanted her to go on, to describe exactly what Jane’s face had looked like at the end, but now the opportunity had arisen, I found I didn’t have the stomach for it. I stared at her stupidly, trying to think of something else to say.

“It was horrible, what it did to her.” Cass shook her head. I held my breath. “It was as if someone had taken a paintbrush to her face and dotted it all black and white. They say the state of our skin reflects the state of the internal organs, don’t they?” She glanced at me, and I gave a quick nod. “I suppose it was a manifestation of the disease inside her stomach. It was the same with my brother James, you know.”

This took me so much by surprise I could not frame a sensible response.

“His face turned a horrible color.” She made a sound like green wood in a fire. “I remember going to visit him the week before he died. I hadn’t seen him for a while because Mama had been ill and I couldn’t get to Steventon. Martha was helping Mary to nurse him—she’d tried everything she could think of to make him well, but nothing worked—and she warned me not to be shocked when I saw him. I suppose she knew it would remind me of Jane. It did, of course. I knew then that he must be dying.”

The air inside the room seemed to have liquefied; the furniture was melting and changing shape. Had Cass really said what I thought she said? I opened and closed my mouth like a goldfish. “Was he… er, I mean… Did Mr. Lyford say what ailed him?”

“He told Mary he couldn’t be certain what it was. He mentioned cancer of the bowel and he said there was probably a weakness of the digestive system in our family.” She paused, frowning, and said: “Mama did not have it, though; she ate like a horse until the last week of her life and her skin was quite lovely when she died. I remember thinking it was as if the years had suddenly fallen away.”

I was nodding as she spoke, but my mind was racing ahead. Why had James displayed the same discoloration of the face as his sister? Could it be that
both
of them were poisoned? Or was Mr. Lyford’s conclusion the correct one? Had Jane and her brother died of some mysterious digestive disorder not mentioned in the textbooks I had read? A condition that affected some members of Jane’s family but not others?

“What about your father?” I asked. “Did he have problems with his stomach?”

“No,” she replied. “He never had a day’s illness in his life: he was absolutely fine one day, then the next he collapsed. They said it was a stroke.” She stared into the empty fireplace. “The only other person I’ve seen with a face like that was Elizabeth, but of course, she was only a relative by marriage.”

“Elizabeth?” I stared at her, incredulous. “Surely
she
died because of giving birth?”

“Yes, she did,” Cass replied. “It was ten days after poor little Brook-John was born. We all had dinner together, and suddenly she fell to the floor, just writhing in agony, poor thing. And black patches appeared on her face, before our very eyes.”

Something swam up from the depths of my memory: a line in a letter Jane had written at the time of Elizabeth’s death:
How
does
the
corpse
look?
I remembered it because it had puzzled me greatly when she showed the letter to me. It dawned on me now that Cass must have mentioned the condition of Elizabeth’s face when she wrote to tell Jane of the tragic event at Godmersham. No doubt Jane, with a writer’s fascination, had been curious to know whether Elizabeth’s complexion had reverted to its beautiful, unblemished state after death.

This revelation of Cassandra’s, coming hard on the heels of the news about James, sent me into a flurry of speculation. What if Elizabeth had been poisoned too? Her death was exactly like the descriptions I had read of victims of a single, large dose of arsenic, where an apparently healthy person suffers a sudden, violent end. Could it be that one person had killed all three members of the Austen family? If so, what was the motive?

The first question to consider was who might benefit from this series of murders, if murders they were. Henry’s name sprang to mind once again: he had inherited money from Jane and a living from James. But surely he was the last person to have wanted Elizabeth dead? I considered it for a moment. What if Elizabeth had grown tired of all the subterfuge and deceit? What if she had wanted their relationship out in the open, with a divorce from Edward? How would Henry have reacted to that? His fortune was still intact at the time, but to incur Edward’s wrath would have been financial suicide: not only would Edward have pulled out as a major backer, but he also would have sued Henry for thousands of pounds in damages in the criminal conversation case that would surely follow.
Men
have
murdered
for
far
less
, I thought.

The second question was one of opportunity. If my theory about Jane, James, and Elizabeth was correct, the perpetrator must be someone who had access to the homes of all three. Henry was a regular visitor to Chawton, Steventon, and Godmersham. He was not at Godmersham when Elizabeth died, but he could have bribed one of the servants to put arsenic in that last meal. So many staff went in and out of that great kitchen that it would have been very difficult to pin the crime on any individual, even if poisoning had been suspected. And Henry had been a very rich man at that time; it wasn’t hard to imagine some footman or groom or scullery maid taking a risk like that for the kind of money he could offer.

The fact that Henry had arrived in Kent within twenty-four hours of Elizabeth’s death was in itself most unusual, given that he lived sixty miles away. This eagerness to attend a scene of death was a consistent feature of Henry’s behavior: Mary had told me that he was the first member of the family to arrive at the house in College Street following Jane’s passing. He was actually residing at Steventon rectory when James died and had subsequently taken over the place with what many would consider indecent haste.

Once set on this path, my thoughts began to run away with me. What if there had been more to be gained from Jane’s death than a mere fifty pound legacy? What if he was creaming off the profits from the two novels published after her death, along with the profits from any new editions of her earlier books? Without Jane to keep a watchful eye on the accounts, there was no knowing what he might get away with. Cassandra was not the sort of person to question her brother about the money Jane’s estate yielded: no doubt she was grateful for whatever she received.

It was next to impossible to shake off these ideas. Cass asked if I would help her in the kitchen and though my body did her bidding my head was miles away. Hannah Pegg had gone to the Great House, where preparations for the wedding breakfast were being made, so Cass and I were soon up to our elbows in eggs and sugar, making dainty offerings to add to the feast. My task was to whisk twenty egg whites for thirty minutes and though my right arm ached with the effort, thoughts of Henry made me beat all the harder. I was gathering up all my memories of him, holding them up for inspection like fallen apples. Was he
really
capable of such heinous crimes? Could a man who sought out the prettiest, most expensive muslin for his sister also be capable of killing her for money? Could a man who cradled a baby in his arms and sang it to sleep think of murdering its mother?