Jane and the Man of the Cloth

by Stephanie Barron

  “I do not pretend to comprehend your cousin’s place in your household,” I began slowly, “nor her entire relationship to yourself. But if I take your meaning correctly, you wish me to visit Mademoiselle LeFevre—to undertake a certain … intimacy.”

  Sidmouth had flushed at my initial words, and appeared in an agony of indecision as to his response; but now he bowed his head and touched a hand to his brow. “I cannot convince you of what you have no reason to believe,” he said quietly. “Rumour and calumny are accepted of themselves, and a simpler goodness hardly to be credited. I know to whom I owe your hesitancy. But for Seraphine’s sake I will say nothing of this here; I will merely trust in your goodness. You cannot turn away from a soul in suffering—your every aspect declares you to be a woman of sympathy and such warmth as is rarely met with.”

  Seraphine’s liquid voice rose in the final tremulous notes of an aria—the cry, no doubt, of a woman betrayed and dying, as with all such songs—and fell away into silence. There was a moment’s indrawn breath, a hesitation, and then a sudden patter of applauding hands.

  “I shall call upon your cousin as soon as ever I may, Mr. Sidmouth,” I said; and received a fervent look of gratitude in return.

  I HAD OCCASION TO CONSIDER ALL THAT PASSED SATURDAY E’EN, while sitting this morning with my mother in the little breakfast parlour of Wings cottage—which I must confess is decidedly shabby, when exposed to the strong sunlight of morning.

  “I still cannot comprehend, my dear, why Mr. Sidmouth should take his shoes to the blacksmith,” my mother was saying to the Reverend Austen, whose head would droop over his volume of Fordyce’s Sermons—when Jenny, our housemaid, threw open the door. Her fresh young face bore a look of alarm, and she twisted her apron in anxious hands.

  “Miss Crawford, madam, and Miss Armstrong,” she said, bobbing swiftly as the black-clad form of Augusta Crawford swept by her.

  My mother stood up abrupdy, her serviette dropping to the floor, while my father snorted to wakefulness and struggled to his feet A chorus of salutation all around, which afforded me just enough time to notice the marks of weeping upon Lucy Armstrong’s face; and then the ladies seated themselves without further ado.

  “We do not come to you this morning merely for the pleasure of a social call,” Miss Crawford began briskly, her hands gripping the reticule she propped upon her black-gowned knees; “no, I fear we are come with the saddest of tidings and the blackest of news.”

  At this, Lucy Armstrong could not stifle a sob; and drawing forth her handkerchief, buried her reddened cheeks in the sodden scrap of linen.

  “Whatever can be the matter?” I cried. “Surely Mr. Crawford remains in excellent health?”

  “Oh, Cholmondeley is as hearty as ever,” Miss Crawford replied, with sharp impatience. “It is not he “who was overturned on the road last night.”

  “Overturned!” my mother cried, her hand going to her heart; that she thought of Cassandra, and feared Miss Crawford’s intelligence, I instandy discerned, and moved to offer her the assistance of my arm. But she struggled free of me and crossed with unsteady gait to Miss Crawford’s chair. “Pray do not keep us in suspense!”

  “Overturned, indeed,” Miss Crawford said, with gruesome satisfaction; “and shot into the bargain.”

  “I think, Aunt, that the proper term is ‘unhorsed,’”

  Miss Armstrong interjected; but her faltering voice was heard only by myself.

  “Shot!” my father ejaculated, removing his reading glasses.

  “Through the heart.” Miss Crawford looked to the shaken Lucy, her aspect all disapprobation.

  “Of whom can you be speaking, Miss Crawford?” I enquired, with something less than my usual graciousness— for the picture of misery that was Lucy Armstrong suggested that it could be but one person. Surely only some injury to Mr. Sidmouth could have occasioned so much distress.

  “Oh, Miss Austen!” Lucy cried, her reddened eyes emerging from her kerchief. “It is so very horrible! Captain Fielding is dead—and I have nothing now to live for!”

  1 A curricle was a light, fast equipage that held only two people, and was usually drawn by one or two horses easily managed by a male passenger. It was considered a smart carriage, usually owned by young men, rather like the sports car of today. Austen, for example, has Henry Tilney drive one in Northanger Allbey, to the utter transport of his companion, Catherine Morland. —Editor’s note.

  2 Mathew Barnewall is described by Deirdre LeFaye, editor of the 1995 edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, as having been a “missing heir” to the viscountcy of Kingsland, whose early life was spent as an illit erate potboy in the slums of Dublin. His claim to his property and title was in dispute at this time. Whether Austen was aware of Barnewall’s history is unclear, but it probably accounts for her per ception of the incongruities in his personal demeanor and charac ter—a strange mix of crudity overlaid with hasty polish. —Editors note.

  17 September 1804, cont.

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  WHEN LUCY ARMSTRONG HAD BEEN MADE CALM, AND SENT UPSTAIRS to rest upon my bed with a cool compress on her eyes, we were able to satisfy our outraged curiosity in plying Miss Crawford with questions. It required but a few to determine the nature of the evil so recently befallen Captain Fielding; and not above four sentences sufficed for her relation of what little was known of his untimely end.

  The Darby household was only just preparing to depart for town and some shopping this morning, when the sudden arrival of a boy on a lathered horse claimed their attention. A man had been found upon the Charmouth road not far from the house, it seemed, quite dead; the marks of hoofprints round about showed him to have been thrown from his horse, and the animal fled. It but remained for Mr. Crawford to send the ladies on to Lyme in the coach, and for himself to accompany the boy to the scene of the disaster, and discover there the person of Captain Fielding, to the routing of the unfortunate Mr. Crawford’s senses. The surgeon Mr. Carpenter, who served as Lyme’s coroner, his assistant Dagliesh, and a local justice by the name of Mr. Dobbin, were immediately summoned; the mortal wound to Captain Fielding’s heart duly noted; and the conclusion reached that highwaymen had precipitated the gentleman’s misadventure, since his purse was observed to be missing.

  “And so we returned from Lyme to such a tumult!” Miss Crawford exclaimed. “My poor niece received the news with a pathetic sensibility; her mother fainted dead away; and my brother is even now shut up in his library with a bottle of claret for company. And since we knew you to be likely to discover the Captain’s death before very long,” she added, “we deemed it best to inform you as soon as possible, so that you might not hear it first upon the street, and receive a decided shock.”

  A shock it should have been; and I would be cold-hearted, indeed, not to feel towards Miss Crawford some depth of gratitude for her present consideration, did I not believe her to find a despicable enjoyment in the spreading of her intelligence. I thrust such uncharitable thoughts from my mind, however, and saw in memory once more the weathered face of Captain Percival Fielding; his bright blue eyes, that could hold such warmth, or shine with steely command; his grace and forbearance in the face of a debilitating injury; his determination to prevail over Lyme’s Gentlemen of the Night. Too young for such a miserable end, and taken too soon from the world; better, perhaps, that he had died while gallantly fighting the French off Malta, a few years past, than to have offered his life in defence of his purse. I felt all the tender emotion proper in the face of such a tragedy; but discovered, to my quiet relief, that I felt nothing more. My heart had been warmed by his gallantry, but my deeper emotions had remained relatively untouched.

  “A highwayman!” my mother exclaimed, her colour draining away. “I had not an idei of it. That Lyme should be so beset with lawlessness is in every way incredible. I thank God that my dear Cassandra is safe in London. Do not you think, Mr. Austen, that we should quit this place as soon as ever may be?” She turned in some anxiety to my father,
who for once appeared to give her fears some consideration.

  Miss Crawford glanced around our cottage’s small sitting-room with a calculating eye. “You are rather exposed to the street, my dear Mrs. Austen, in the placement of your windows. I should not feel safe, indeed, of an evening by the fire, without some stout barring of that door leading to the entry—perhaps you might have your young man thrust that heavy piece across the way?” She was intent upon a handsome, if somewhat scarred, secretary, that stood in a corner of the sitting-room, and which my father was in the habit of employing for his correspondence. “The windows might be effectively blocked, with the application of wood slatting.”

  “Come, come, Miss Crawford,” my father interposed jovially. “If a highwayman were to prospect for riches in Lyme, he should hardly look to Wings cottage. We lack the sort of style to invite a concerted assault. I should imagine myself safer here,” he continued, with a wicked gleam in his eye, “than were I an intimate of Darby—so lonely as you find yourselves, out on the Charmouth road, which we must assume the highwaymen frequent.”

  A highwayman indeed, I thought. I should rather believe it a smuggler’s man, dispatched to foil the Captain’s officiousness, and stealing his purse out of simple efficiency—for Fielding should assuredly have no use for it where his spirit had gone.

  Or perhaps the monies were seized in an endeavour to effect the appearance of misadventure, the better to preserve the murderer’s security.

  At this last thought, which so smacked of calculation, I could not prevent Mr. Sidmouth’s face from rising in my mind. With an involuntary sinking of the heart, I forced the image aside, the better to attend to Miss Crawford’s intelligence.

  “I fear, Mrs. Austen/’ the good lady said, with admirable self-command in the face of my father’s teasing, “that the dear Captain was too good for us. He was just such a noble character—such a feeling and excellent fellow—as is taken too soon from this earth. It is ever the way. Once a man is prized, he is lost.”

  She leaned towards me with a rustle of black bombazine, the better to confide. “I feel for Lucy very much, you know, from detecting in her case something of my own poor history—though Mr. Filch had already proposed, and Captain Fielding had not. And my carriage was ordered some months at Mr. Filch’s sudden death, and was to have been very fine indeed, with the intertwined devices of the houses of Filch and Crawford upon the doors.1But no matter.” Feeling, perhaps, that I showed too much indifference to the vanished chaise, she returned her attention to my mother, whose aspect was all sympathy. “I comfort myself with the certainty that the Captain’s loss shall blight dear Lucy’s life, and that she shall die of a broken heart; and then they will be sorry.”

  ‘Of whom can you possibly be speaking, madam?” my father enquired, all bewilderment.

  “Why, the men who took the Captain’s life, of course!” Miss Crawford rose and shook out her dusky skirts. “I shall attend the hanging, and send news by way of Bath, that Lucy may find some comfort in it—however brief. Mr. Carpenter is to hold an inquest, you know, in three days’ time at the Golden Lion; and I have every confidence that by then, Mr. Dobbin the justice will have found his men. And now I must fetch my niece, and be on my way, for there is Lucy’s packing to be thought of; she departs with Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong upon the morrow— though if she survives the journey home to Bath, I shall be very much surprised.”

  And so the Darby ladies departed; and we were left to ail the disturbance of disbelief, and conjecture, and sympathetic pity; though of my own dark thoughts regarding Geoffrey Sidmouth, I said nothing to my dear mother or father. The former was engaged in dispatching James about the secretary’s removal, and considering how best to place it to advantage across the sitting-room doorway, while the latter devoted himself to humourous asides on the nature of highwaymen, and the likelihood that they should rob my mother of her virtue before her purse. I took refuge, for my part, in writing of all that had occurred to Cassandra, in the belief that it should effect some order in the sad tumult of my mind.2

  18 September 1804

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  THE DAY BROKE QUITE STORMY, AS THOUGH ALL THE SEACOAST mourned the Captain’s passing; and the inmates of Wings cottage lay late abed, hugging their dreams close against the rawness of the day.

  From my bedroom window now, I may gaze upon the waves as they lash and turn against the Cobb, and know a little of what it must be to spend a winter in Lyme. The air, the sky, the sea are all one, in a turbulent greyness; a mournful picture, and rendered sadder still by the ceaseless crying of seabirds. Strange, that on a day of sunlight and wind, the calls of the gulls can lift the spirit; while on a day of lowering clouds, they seem the very souls of the departed, returned of a purpose to haunt those who live where the earth ends, and the sea meets the limidess sky. But I would sink into morbidity, did I allow my thoughts to wander further; and I must shake myself loose, and venture into town, and find in idle activity some diversion for the perplexity of my mind.

  For I cannot believe that Captain Fielding died by misadventure. There is a purpose in his death, as there was in the gruesome hanging of poor Bill Tibbit That I find a motive for Mr. Sidmouth in the effecting of both murders, must be persuasive; and that I am alone in doing so, must astonish. For I am but a stranger to Lyme and its relations, while others, more intimate with the passions that animate their neighbours, should labour under a suspicion equally portentous. And yet no hint of such suspicions have I heard.

  Further consideration in the solitude of my chamber, however, has given rise to the idea of Mr. Sidmouth, overcome with rage upon his arrival at Darby Saturday e’en. It must be acknowledged, however imperfectly it is understood, that Geoffrey Sidmouth bore Fielding a decided hatred—and his nature, I suspected from everything I had yet seen, was prone to violence. Seraphine was the first cause of the discord between the two men, for reasons that remained obscure to me; and though Sidmouth had mastered his rage for the length of a dinner, what might not have occurred on another night of waning moonlight, at a lonely turning of the road?

  The master of High Down behaved in Fielding’s presence as a man whose honour is offended; and from the Captain’s contemptuous disgust of Sidmouth’s treatment of Mademoiselle LeFevre, I could imagine him as likely to defend the lady at pistol point as any other military fellow with a lively regard for reputation. Though it be murder in England, duelling remains the gentleman’s choice for the settlement of disputes; and where better to throw down a glove, than on a quiet stretch of road? But in any contest between the two, I should favour Geoffrey Sidmouth to prevail; and the Captain’s ruined form would seem to prove the truth of my conjectures.

  When confronted with such thoughts as these, I could wish my understanding less able, and my fancies of less persuasive merit. But having once parsed the riddle, what alternative may I choose? Do I thrust away the weight of my fears, as reflecting a woman’s foolish misapprehension? Or do I consider with care the path of any further investigation, so decidedly necessary if guilt or innocence is to be proved? For the possibility of Sidmouth’s innocence cannot be discounted; and indeed, though reason might construct a case for his culpability, I find my heart cries out within me that it is impossible. What, then, is to be done? For I cannot long survive the suspense of such conflicting emotion; nor the thought that I harbour a strange sensibility for a man who might very well prove a murderer.

  (Here the uniting breaks off, and is then resumed.)

  I was disturbed in the very act of considering my future course, by the arrival of a visitor whose appearance and intentions may only be deemed fortuitous. Providence, assuredly, is a mysterious mover, and who is Jane to ignore its direction?

  The sound of a carriage halting before the door, and the bustle in the entry that presaged a visitor, gave pause to my pen; and it required but a moment for the conveyance of a card, bearing a name strange to me—and yet familiar.

  “Miss Austen, miss,” Jenny broke in, as she peered ar
ound the door, “there’s a gentleman below as wishes to speak with you. He’s sent up his card, and very fine it is, too.”

  Mr. Roy Cavendish, the scrap of paper read. His Majesty’s Customs House, Lyme.

  I looked to Jenny swifdy. “The gentleman is even now below?”

  Her white cap bobbed above widened blue eyes. “He’s a King’s man, in’t he? Whatever can he want with you, miss?”

  “And my parents?”

  “The Reverend’s showing him his chess set. The missus is darning a sock.”

  It seemed best to relieve the poor man direcdy. “Please convey my sentiments to Mr. Cavendish, and say that I shall attend him presently,” I told Jenny, and gathered up my little book.

  “IT IS A PLEASURE, Miss AUSTEN.” ROY CAVENDISH BENT LOW OVER my hand as I halted in the sitting-room doorway. He retained, still, the unfortunate appearance of a frog that I had remarked while observing him from the Cobb, the very morning he had come to oversee the seizure of a smuggler’s cargo—which seizure Mr. Sidmouth had effectively routed. But I noted that his dress was respectable, his figure neat, and his hand steady; though a repulsive moisture overlaid his palm, and his grip was reminiscent of something noisome cast up upon the shingle.

  “The pleasure is mine, Mr. Cavendish,” I said doubtfully, and sought my habitual seat. Despite the poor condition of the day, my father had deemed it wisest to seek the out of doors, and had prevailed upon my mother to accompany him, with the promise of tea and muffin on the high street. Mr. Cavendish took advantage of my ease to find a chair himself, and, flipping the tails of his coat over his legs, sat down with something of a flourish— quite at odds with his staid appearance.

  “You will wonder why I am come,” he began, “being a stranger to yourself, and indeed, to most concerns that should preoccupy a lady.”