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!”
1 For more information regarding the Austen family accounts at Ring Brothers, see “Persuasion: The Jane Austen Consumer’s Guide,” by Edward Copeland, in Persuasions, No. 15, pp.111–123, The Jane Austen Society of North America, 1993.—Editor’s note.
THE FIRST DAY
3
A SUMMONS TO THE VYNE
Sunday, 25th December 1814
Steventon Parsonage
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.
She was sitting between The Aunts, as she calls Cassandra and me, profiting from our collective warmth. James abhors the waste of fuel in a church stove, believing that discomfort is conducive to spiritual fervour. Caroline’s eyes were fixed steadily upon her father as he spoke, but her fingers beat the faintest of patterns upon her knee. She was, I collected, humming a secret song in her head. With very little encouragement her toes should soon be tapping too.
James was delighting us on this splendid Christmas morn with a grave reminder that the Christ Child’s birth was but a Prelude—Necessary, and therefore Joyous—to the Solemn Mystery of the Cross. The Virgin Birth in the stable must end with the Sacred Sacrifice at Calvary; the veneration of the angels, with the violent pounding of nails through flesh.
It occurred to me that this trend in James’s speech, being riddled with both Mysticism and Gore, was very nearly as pagan as the festooning of the church with holly boughs; and that perhaps I might twit him on couching his spiritual instruction in such crude and vivid terms as his villagers must relish.
But why bait a bull, Jane? He would only chide me for having missed the sacred point.
I glanced aside at Caroline; her eyelids drooped. She, too, had heard this sombre profession of Crucifix-in-the-Cradle from the time she could speak. Beyond her head, James-Edward was frankly nodding. He had been late abed after a stolen night of revels among his cronies at Ashe Park. He is a handsome lad, at just the age to reject his boyish pursuits and ape his elder heroes. The points of his collar are ridiculously high, his mop of brown hair is fashionably tousled, his cravat exceedingly ill-tied. From what little conversation we shared this morning, I should judge him to be torn between two modes of life: that of the Byronic Aesthete and that of the Corinthian Set. He wastes what free hours he may claim in scribbling poetry, or riding a borrowed hunter to hounds.
His father intends him for Oxford, and Holy Orders; I wonder very much what James-Edward intends?
I was recalled to virtue by the uncertain lifting of voices under the stone architraves. James had concluded his edifying words, and the congregation was on its feet. There might be no more than fifty parishioners in St. Nicholas church, but on this cold, clear Christmas morn they were united in wavering song.
Blessed be that lady bright,
That bare a child of great might,
Withouten pain, as it was right,
Maid mother Mary.
AN HOUR LATER, WE had endured the well-wishes of the villagers and tramped home, chilled to the bone, to partake of an indifferent breakfast. I consumed a modest portion of buttered toast, washed down with tea, being disinclined to sample the congealing eggs on the sideboard. James regaled himself on cold beef and ale. His wife had returned to her bed after Divine Service; she was firmly attached to her indisposition, and might not be seen again for the duration of our visit, tho’ we intended to remain a fortnight. Cassandra had already quitted the table; James-Edward was engrossed in a London newspaper several days old; and my mother was smiling benignly into the middle distance. I hoped she was revolving memories of happy seasons past, when my father was alive and all her children gathered in this breakfast-parlour.
Into this scene of hectic pleasure burst little Caroline, with shining eyes. “Papa!” she cried. “Look what the faeries have left upon my pillow!”
She held up a winsome-faced doll arrayed in the very latest mode, with hair of gold and a painted bisque face. Caroline had glimpsed just such a doll, in the possession of her younger Knight cousins, whilst my brother Edward and his household were on a protracted visit to Chawton Great House the previous summer. I had suspected how her young heart yearned for such a treasure—an intimate friend for confidences at bedtime; a silent audience for the stories she read aloud in her snug attic. I purchased the doll whilst visiting my brother Henry in London last month—but Cassandra and I had fashioned her clothes with our needles, from scraps of finery we had to hand. Her ball gown was dark green silk trimmed with gold floss; her headdress was fashioned of tiny crimson flowers and paste emeralds; and her tiny china hands were sunk in a pillow-muff of swansdown. There were additional costumes, as befit a dashing lady of the ton: morning dresses, walking dresses, carriage dresses, opera cloaks, and even a riding habit. But Caroline had not yet glimpsed these delights—they were to be doled out, piecemeal, over each of the season’s twelve days.
“That’s a very fine doll,” James-Edward told his sister as he set down his paper. “But she seems far too substantial for faeries. I reckon The Aunts had something to do with it.”
“The Aunts are faeries,” Caroline retorted snubbingly.
“That will do, Caroline,” James said. He glanced quellingly at me. “I could have wished that my permission had been sought before such an extravagant gi
ft was bestowed upon the child. It is unlikely that her behaviour merits it.”
Caroline looked stricken, and clutched the doll to her bosom. “If you would refer,” she said with awful dignity, “to the untidiness of my lessons yesterday, I assure you, Papa, that I shall endeavour to write more legibly. I shall contrive to leave off blots. Only James did not mend my pen properly.”
“Nonsense,” my mother declared, in her son’s general direction. “The child is good as gold. Come here, Caroline, and let me have a look at your treasure!”
Caroline obeyed her grandmamma with alacrity.
“What is to be her name?”
“Jemima!” Caroline breathed.
“Pray present us,” my mother said. It was exactly the sort of formal nonsense in which Caroline should delight; she forced the doll to curtsey. They would be trading teacups in a very little while.
“I must suppose,” James said to me in a lowered tone, “that I have you to thank for this … gross indulgence. This is the result, I presume, of a lady’s having come into her own funds. An independence that must be deplored, when it is allied with lightness of mind.”
James has long despised my habit of penning novels, and regards my forays into authorship with an alarm that increases as my fame widens. It is unseemly, he believes, for a spinster of middle years to engage in such a display of intellectual arrogance. It is unseemly, as well, for a lady to earn her own money—and control its disposition herself. James should like to intervene on my behalf, and is jealous of my brother Henry’s influence, Henry being a banker well-established in London and a knowledgeable man of the world.
The secret of my authorship having unfortunately got out, through the offices of that same Henry—whose pride in my accomplishments cannot be contained, any more than his delight in sharing news—I am now known to be the Lady lately hidden behind the covers of Sense and Sensibility as well as Pride and Prejudice. I had thought that my third novel—Mansfield Park—might mollify James, as one of its principal subjects is Ordination; and aside from a minor portrait of a gluttonous Canon, there can be nothing improper in my depiction of the clergy from beginning to end. But having secured his set of my presentation volumes, James was subdued in his praise; it was “commendably less vulgar in stile,” and my insipid mouse, Fanny, “admirable in her contemplation of Duty.” I valued Henry’s delight in the witticisms of Mr. Crawford, and the viciousness of Mrs. Norris, infinitely more. As I have not the slightest hope that James will approve of my newest heroine, as yet unrevealed to the world’s censorious eye—for a sillier, more indulged child than Emma Woodhouse never existed—I must accept his disapprobation of my life and character as the cost of pursuing Art.
“My dear James,” I said as I rose from the table, “I am sorry to prove such a perpetual disappointment. You may have the satisfaction, perhaps, of viewing my torment in the Afterlife—when my portion shall be so much smaller than yours.”
He opened his mouth to respond—shall I admit that I had not the slightest interest in what my brother had to say?—but was forestalled by the sudden appearance of his housemaid, bearing a missive upon a silver tray. She bobbed a curtsey and extended the tray to me.
“Thank you, Sarah.” I took up the folded square of hot-pressed paper, sealed with bright blue wax in a design I did not recognise, and tore it open.
The Vyne
Sherborne St. John
25 December 1814
My dear Jane,
You will forgive me the liberty of addressing you, and not the good Rector and his wife, when you know the delight that news of your presence in the neighbourhood has afforded me! When Mr. West revealed his precipitate introduction with all your party upon his arrival last e’en, I was fit to be tied—for berating his stupidity in not having conveyed you here! What fun we should have had, Jane, had your overturned carriage led you to harbour for the season at The Vyne! But Mr. West was too circumspect; too much the gentleman in his consideration; too good, indeed, to be worth bearing! He repents of his virtue even now, and adds his pleas to mine. If you and yours—the Parsonage Party, as we have taken to calling you—do not take pity upon us, and dine here this evening, we shall positively murder one another out of sheer boredom. Pray do not protest, but come to us as soon as you have received this missive. We shall not be happy unless you consent to remain our guests for several nights, at least.
I have required John Coachman to wait upon the pleasure of all your party, not excepting the children.
Yours ever,
Elizabeth Chute
4
A-WASSAILING WE WILL GO
Sunday, 25th December 1814
Steventon Parsonage, cont’d.
“And so Mrs. Chute would have us fill out her numbers,” Mary said waspishly. She was propped up in her bed, a quantity of pillows disposed behind her back. “James will be wild to go, of course—The Vyne Hunt invariably meets on St. Stephen’s Day, the men being fretful after a protracted period within doors. Trust a gentleman to leave his lady to bestow the servants’ Christmas boxes, while he dashes about on horseback!—And then demand a cold collation and mulled wine upon his return, I daresay, once all the servants have gone off on their holiday. Only consider, Jane, how much work that will mean tomorrow, if we accede to Mrs. Chute’s inordinate pleas, and drag ourselves to The Vyne! It is such a great, old, draughty place—and without servants it shall be a veritable Purgatory.”
Just so did James’s wife greet the happy news that we were bid to join the Christmas gaieties at one of the first houses of the neighbourhood—with all the promise of informed and intelligent conversation! Heaven forbid we should stir ourselves to partake of such delights; better to wander forlornly through the stuffy rooms of the parsonage and sigh over the world’s neglect.
“Depend upon it,” Mary added as she reached for her smelling-salts, “that is Elizabeth Chute’s object in offering her pressing invitation. She requires more hands in the absence of her staff tomorrow.”
I had expected perversity from Mary, and her very predictability now suggested a method of persuasion. She should always be inclined to do exactly the opposite of what was desired.
“James never intended to go,” I said with a casual air. “He declared your Spiritual Crisis to be at such a critical point that he means to remain in prayer with you for the rest of the day. On his knees. Before the altar of St. Nicholas’s. Hunting would be sheer misery, he says, when a Tormented Soul languishes for want of aid. He appears to believe that you harbour a Devil, Mary, that must be cast out. He bade me tell you to dress yourself very warmly, as you know the church is both damp and freezing.”
She stared at me, her vinaigrette suspended. “Why cannot James comprehend that mine is a bodily wasting? There is nothing spiritual in the matter at all.”
“Indeed, I urged him to reconsider, for I cannot think the atmosphere of St. Nicholas’s to be salutary for one in your dangerous condition.”
“No, indeed! He cannot be so cruel! So lost to all humanity!”
“I’m afraid he regards it as a kindness,” I said solemnly. “Only think. He has sacrificed his chance at sport with Mr. Chute—to ensure the salvation of your soul.”
“Abominable cheek!” Mary said contemptuously. “I will rise this instant. Send Sarah to me, Jane—for your brother shall never contrive to work his tricks upon me at The Vyne!”
THE UNFORTUNATE JOHN COACHMAN had been walking his horses up and down the lane before the parsonage for nearly an hour by the time we were collected upon the doorstep with our satchels. James-Edward was to ride up beside the coachman on the box, while the rest of our party were arranged three to a side within the closed carriage. It was not a fashionable conveyance, being an old travelling chariot that had probably been procured on the occasion of the Chutes’ marriage, some twenty years before—but it would serve. The lanes about The Vyne, and indeed throughout all of northern Hampshire, are notoriously bad in winter, and the fresh fall of snow should have made
them impassable to a hired cart or James’s gig, the latter being a one-horse conveyance employed for his visits to the sick and dying among the parish. I blessed Elizabeth Chute’s kindness in having provided for her guests so well.
John Coachman had warmed his bricks in our kitchen while we busied ourselves, and these greeted our feet as the carriage door was shut. Caroline wriggled excitedly between her parents, Jemima resplendent upon her lap. “Shall they have a Yule log?” she enquired. “And shall we play at Snapdragon?”
The very word recalled a memory of hilarity: a darkened Godmersham withdrawing-room; a bowl aflame with lighted brandy, glowing eerily blue among the shadows; and eager hands reaching into the bowl, for raisins snapping with brandy and flames!
“You most certainly shall not,” Mary sniffed. “You are far too young to put your fingers into fire.”
“Then I shall snatch the raisins for you, Caroline,” my mother interjected.
And so, between scolds and caresses, we made our stately progress towards The Vyne. The house sits some three miles north of Basingstoke, and Steventon is at least another mile further west—we should be full an hour upon the road at our present pace.
How shall I describe The Vyne? I suppose from its initial aspect, as one turns off the Sherborne St. John road half a mile past the village, into the long expanse of lane leading to the house. On every side are groupings of copses surrounded by empty meadows, the very sort of ground a man like William Chute must value for sport. He is Master of The Vyne Hunt, a distinction accorded him by his neighbours, in recognition of the fact that he has bred and maintained the best pack of foxhounds known in the entire country. But I was speaking of the great house—which deserves to be as admired as Hatfield or Stratfield Saye, both its neighbours. The Vyne has presided over this part of Hampshire since medieval times; sheltered Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII under its roof; holds the tomb of the first Speaker of Parliament; and gave up a Recusant traitor to execution in Queen Elizabeth’s Tower. The present family have no direct claim upon this illustrious history, The Vyne having passed through more ancient hands to modern cousins. But the house itself recalls vanished dignities. Its south front, complete with sweep and porch and flanking towers, is mellow Tudor brick; its north front is a Neoclassical dream, rising from a lake, with specimen trees dotted across its lawn. There is even a portico, all columns and pediment, designed by a disciple of Inigo Jones.
Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas: Being a Jane Austen Mystery Page 3
