The Austen Girls
Page 14
But that wasn’t Aunt Jane coming out from behind the columns. It was – yes – it was her brother Edward, almost a grown man in the dim light, and rather ridiculously holding a sword. And then following him was her father, with Aunt Jane in the rear.
‘Fortescue,’ said Fanny’s father. ‘Unorthodox to meet like this.’
‘Your daughter, the hussy,’ said Mr Fortescue, taken aback, ‘has been leading us a merry dance.’
Aunt Jane walked up close to him.
‘You know, Mr Fortescue, there’s a quick way to decide this,’ she said.
Mr Fortescue was clearly not used to being forcefully advised by a lady in spectacles. He took a step back, unfortunately taking the lantern with him, so now Fanny and her family could not see each other. A shiver of wind lifted the hair on Fanny’s neck.
Aunt Jane simply went on talking, raising her voice against the dark and windy night.
‘Mr Fortescue!’ she said. ‘If Miss Fanny Austen has come here to give a bribe, she will have two hundred pounds in her pocket. If, alternatively, she has come to catch a blackmailer in the act of extorting two hundred pounds – with myself, my brother and my nephew as her witnesses to her actions – then she will not have two hundred pounds in her pocket. Why don’t you just look in her pocket?’
There was silence.
‘Mr Austen?’ Mr Fortescue asked.
‘As my sister says, Fortescue,’ Fanny’s father responded.
Fanny stepped forward.
‘If you would just hold the lantern still, sir,’ she said crisply, ‘I shall empty my pockets for you.’ First, the pouch in the side of her cloak. Nothing but a handkerchief. Then the pocket she had tied on under her dress. Two shillings, the end of a pencil, and a small wooden horse.
‘That belongs to my brother,’ Fanny felt compelled to explain.
‘Come on, Fortescue,’ said Fanny’s father, slapping him on the back. ‘We’ll go back to the house and explain. I think there’s a nasty trick going on here, involving that draper’s shop on the high street, and I believe that my parson, unfortunate fellow, is in the House of Correction on false evidence. My sister has taken me through it all this evening. And Fanny is a good-hearted girl.’
The two magistrates moved off down the hill, Fanny’s father still talking and explaining. And in their wake, almost dizzy with relief, came Fanny. She occasionally stumbled in the grass, but Aunt Jane on one side, and Edward on the other, held on to her elbows.
‘Good God,’ said Edward, and neither Fanny nor Aunt Jane had the heart to reprove him for his blasphemy. ‘You ladies have saved Mr Drummer. I didn’t know you had it in you, Fan. You’re fine fellows. Fine fellows!’
‘If you’re right, Austen,’ Mr Fortescue was saying, ‘it sounds like he’s been hard done by. You’ll have the young man back in the parish as soon as I can spring him from the gaol.’
A big foolish grin spread itself across Fanny’s face as she saw the windows of the house come into view, and the glow of warmth and comfort from within.
There was only one thing missing to make her evening perfect. To be friends with Anna again.
Chapter 30
The glasshouse, Godmersham Park
But Fanny never really got the chance to speak to Anna before she left Godmersham.
Fanny’s mother said that she and Anna still had to share a room, even after Mr Terry’s departure, to save work for the maids. On each of the remaining nights of her stay, though, Anna refused to speak. She just crept into the bed and turned her face towards the wall, and lay there till morning. If Fanny woke in the night, she’d listen carefully for Anna’s breathing.
Usually, she couldn’t hear it, and she knew that Anna must be awake too, staring at nothing throughout the long hours of darkness.
So they never spoke of the horrible words Anna had hurled, nor of Mr Terry. And Mr Drummer’s name was certainly never mentioned between then, even though he had come back to the park, and been welcomed home with a party at which all of Fanny’s brothers and sisters were present.
Anna stayed upstairs during the party, almost as if she couldn’t bear to see other people having a good time.
When it was time to leave the mansion to go back to his parsonage, Mr Drummer took Fanny’s hand in both of his, and held it for a long time without saying anything. He’d thanked her earlier, over and over again, but now he just stood there, looking into her eyes. He looked, and looked, until Fanny felt dizzy. She scarcely even heard the noise of the children all around them. Then he turned and went. And a few days later, Anna had gone too, wrapped in a big old black cloak and never once looking back as the carriage pulled away.
It was properly winter now, and the first frost had come to Godmersham. Fanny’s mother had grown bigger in the belly, and ever slower at waddling round the house. She was scarcely to be seen outside her room, where it was unpleasantly hot. Fanny noticed that the goblets on the dinner table were growing smeary from being washed in cold water, and that the housemaids were leaving the grates dirty in the fireplaces.
Fanny decided that she ought to do something about the decay in the workings of the house, maybe at the very least to bring in some flowers. She thought she might use autumn leaves. It was the kind of fey touch her mother would never have allowed had she been feeling like herself.
But a cold morning out in the park picking up twigs of bronze and yellow foliage made Fanny feel alive and tingling round the ears. In the chilly greenhouse, unheated since the coal bill hadn’t been paid, she tried to jam her pickings artistically into the vases. The dry dead leaves kept falling off their stems. I must get Papa to give me a cheque for the coal merchant, Fanny said to herself. I know I can run the house perfectly well, I just need to be allowed to do it.
‘Lizzie!’ she called, seeing her sister creeping past the glasshouse. ‘Come in and help me! Where are you sneaking off to?’
Fanny could not help but think Lizzie had a guilty look about her. She wasn’t dressed for outdoors, and came into the conservatory tugging her thin shawl round her thin shoulders. But her cheeks were ruddy, and she looked happy, not cold.
‘Where were you off to?’ Fanny asked again a few minutes later, having shoved a knife into Lizzie’s hands, and having herself attacked the stems of some half-dead roses.
‘Well, I was going to see Mr Drummer,’ Lizzie conceded. That explained her lack of a jacket. His neat little parsonage was only a quarter of a mile down the drive, near the church, and it was hardly worth putting on a coat to get there on such a sunny day, even if it was raw and sharp.
Fanny pricked up her ears. She had such a possessive feeling about Mr Drummer, now merrily reinstalled as their neighbour, and preaching each Sunday to the assembled congregation from the estate. The forgiveness of sins was his favourite topic.
A pleasurable shiver ran down Fanny’s spine at the memory of a secret smile he had given her from the pulpit, just two days ago.
Now that he was back, everything in the world seemed to be settling down the right way up again.
Everything, that is, except for Anna and her silence.
‘And what did you want to talk to Mr Drummer about?’ Fanny asked lightly. ‘Have you sins to confess? You should tell your big sister if you have.’
To her surprise, Lizzie threw down the knife, and marched away to the other end of the conservatory. She stood there, hunched, looking out of a broken pane for several minutes, as if thinking something over.
Then, all of a sudden, she was back.
‘I think I will tell you, Fan,’ Lizzie said. ‘I know you can keep a secret. Like when you caught the blackmailer with Aunt Jane. It was mean of you not to tell me about that.’
Fanny turned and leaned her back on the slate-topped counter. Lizzie had piqued her interest. What secrets could her little sister possibly have? Fanny was so used to telling Lizzie that no, she couldn’t join her and Anna on a picnic, or no, she was too young to go out to a ball with them.
Soon she�
�ll be out dancing too, Fanny thought. People will expect me to try to find her partners.
She’d been to hardly any balls since Anna’s departure, making the excuse that her mother needed her at home. An excuse which wasn’t quite true, Fanny realised, when she examined it more closely. Elizabeth didn’t mind which of her daughters stayed with her. The truth was, as Lord Smedley had said, that Fanny only really wanted to dance with Mr Drummer.
But Lizzie was speaking now, and Fanny, unforgivably, hadn’t been listening.
‘What’s that, Lizzie?’ she was forced to ask. It was true that her sister was mumbling, addressing the knobbly cobbles of the glasshouse floor, which made her words hard to hear.
‘Yes, I’m engaged,’ she said, hanging her head.
Surely Fanny had misheard.
‘I thought you said “engaged”!’ she laughed. ‘What did you really say?’
There was silence, just the nodding of Lizzie’s head.
Now Fanny could see that there was a huge beaming smile trying to peep out from behind her sister’s bashful expression.
Fanny’s hand flew to her chest, and she tried to find something to say. But her lips were too cold to move.
She reached backwards, her hands catching on the edge of the slate top, which was unpleasantly wet.
Lizzie engaged before her! Fanny began to glimpse the humiliation that was in store for her as the older sister of a girl who wasn’t even out in society, yet who’d stolen the prize of the first engagement.
At long last, after a pause that felt like an hour, Fanny realised what she ought to do. She stepped forward, opened her arms, and saw Lizzie’s happy face for just a second before she disappeared into her sister’s hug.
‘Congratulations, Lizzie!’ Fanny whispered into her sister’s hair. ‘Oh, congratulations! But who are you engaged to?’
Lizzie pulled away, incredulous.
‘Oh, Fanny,’ she said. ‘Who did you think? To Christopher, of course.’
Fanny smiled again, with a bit more warmth. Of course! Lizzie was engaged to Christopher Hurst, whom the whole family had known forever.
Christopher, from Hurstbourne House in the next village, whose father had land just like Mr Austen did, and with whom Edward went hunting and with whom Lizzie rode to hounds too whenever she could get her father to let her take out a horse.
But once again, Fanny had the sensation of being left sitting on the shelf. Were all the girls in the family going to find a husband before she did? Mr Drummer had been back at Godmersham for some weeks now. There’d be no need to worry about what her parents might say if the question of marriage never came up at all.
That was two engagements achieved within the family, and neither of them for Fanny.
Chapter 31
The parsonage, Godmersham Park
Lizzie’s engagement did not receive quite such a warm welcome at Godmersham Park as Anna’s had done a couple of months earlier.
‘Oh Lord, Lizzie, are you sure?’ were their mother Elizabeth’s words.
This was after Fanny had persuaded Lizzie to go back into the house with her and spill her secret to their parents. But it turned out that Christopher had done things exactly by the book, consulting Edward in private, receiving his paternal encouragement to ask Lizzie herself, and taking every step strictly in order.
Yet that evening, Fanny overheard her mother and Aunt Jane quietly discussing the engagement on the sofa in the library.
‘She’s so very young,’ Aunt Jane was saying. ‘It will have to be a long engagement. And do you think she truly knows her own mind?’
They’d broken off when they saw that Fanny was near, and once again she felt excluded. Lizzie, just like Anna, would now be drawn into the confidential conversation of the adult ladies, while Fanny was left to play nursemaid to the younger children.
By the afternoon of the next day, Fanny found herself trotting down the drive to the parsonage. She really wanted to talk about Lizzie’s engagement with a friend. And Mr Drummer is a family friend, Fanny told herself, severely.
Yet she’d neglected to tell anyone where she was going.
But Fanny now realised, as she jogged along, that she couldn’t really talk about Lizzie, as the engagement was not yet generally known. Perhaps she could ask whether Mr Drummer’s housekeeper could oblige with some sausages for the Godmersham dinner, which would otherwise be just potatoes. The butcher had refused to send any more meat until his account had been settled.
Mr Drummer’s housekeeper welcomed Fanny on the doorstep of the parsonage. She was a regular visitor, and she and her sisters often drank tea in the little house’s little parlour. Its fire was kept burning day-long while Mr Drummer composed his sermons at the gate-leg table by the window. He seemed to spend an awfully long time doing it, and Fanny’s sisters laughed at him for his slowness.
On her previous visit, though, Fanny had learned that he was doing something more significant than just writing the next week’s address to his parishioners.
‘I’m trying to polish up the poems I wrote when I was – ahem – in the House of Correction,’ he’d explained when she’d glanced at the table and asked why his sermon had such short lines of text.
Of course, she’d known he liked books. That had been one of the first conversations they’d had. But Fanny hadn’t realised just how seriously he took them.
‘And are you talented in the literary department yourself, Miss Austen?’ he’d asked, seeing her look of pleasure. ‘Perhaps … like some other members of your family?’
All at once, Fanny had realised that he knew the secret of how her aunt Jane spent her time.
‘No, no,’ she’d said, quickly, ‘I’d like to try, but I haven’t the courage. But I admire those who do. Especially those who earn a living from their pens. Why do you smile?’
‘Because, Miss Austen,’ he’d said, ‘if I may be so bold, a young lady who is known in these parts as a thief-taker can hardly lack the courage to pick up a pen and put it to paper.’
Fanny could all too well imagine her mother’s dismayed reaction to any suggestion that she might try her hand at writing anything.
Mr Drummer seemed to think it was easy, but he couldn’t possibly know what it was like to be a Miss Austen of Godmersham, with all its odd restrictions on what you could and couldn’t do. Unless perhaps she could explain it to him one day?
But now, in the parlour, he was heaving a histrionic sigh as he put away the pages of his work into a folder.
‘I would so like to supplement my income by my pen,’ he admitted after greeting Fanny.
‘And … may I say this?’ he added, pushing his folder away and turning toward the teapot. ‘I hope it does not offend if I say that your aunt has been a great inspiration for me in that regard.’
Fanny had been sitting down on the hearthrug since Mrs Heathcote left the room after bringing in the tea. Of course, the housekeeper had carefully left the door open to preserve propriety. Fanny nevertheless turned her head sharply towards it.
What if Mrs Heathcote were still in the hall? This was the darkest of secrets, her aunt had made her promise never to tell. But Mr Drummer seemed to be in her aunt’s confidence already!
‘Tell me,’ she asked in a rush, drawing up her knees to her chin and wrapping her arms around them. ‘There’s one thing I’ve never understood. How it is that you know Aunt Jane?’
‘Well,’ he said, smiling at her solemnly, ‘I read a marvellous book. Pride and Prejudice. We spoke about it before. So, I wrote to the author, at the address of the publisher, a long letter saying what I liked about it and how clever I thought it, and saying a few words about my own position as a young curate with good intentions but no situation. And to my surprise, I got a letter back. It was not only from the author herself, whose … sex … was quite other than I had imagined, but it also contained a most kind, most generous, offer of a post. She said she thought she might enjoy – as she put it – having a literary parson.’
‘And was it …’ she began.
‘Yes, it was,’ he said simultaneously.
‘… Aunt Jane!’
Fanny leaped to her feet, and almost clapped her hands.
‘Oh, that’s why it all happened,’ she said. ‘Aunt Jane is so mysterious. She never explains anything. I’m sure you know that my family don’t know that she writes books. They just think she’s a bit clever and odd.’
‘Quite right of her not to tell them,’ he said seriously. ‘A lady who writes may draw the wrong sort of attention to herself. As may a clergyman who dabbles in inky pleasures. Perhaps I should desist since I’m safely back on solid ground.’
He looked down so sadly at his unfinished poem that Fanny longed to squeeze his shoulders to cheer him up, as she might have done if it were one of her brothers who couldn’t finish his school lesson.
‘Oh, but you have talent,’ she said. ‘I’m sure of it. You must follow my aunt’s example, and work away!’
He didn’t look up, but Fanny could tell that a blush was mounting up his throat.
At that moment, she wished with her whole heart that he could become a published author. Nothing seemed more desirable.
‘Your encouragement means a great deal, Miss Austen,’ he softly said.
Chapter 32
The town hall, Canterbury
The roar from within the courtroom was audible even on the street. The sound seemed to come out through the gloomy doorway to fight with the other noises of the Canterbury marketplace, where sheep were bleating, servants who wanted masters were calling out their skills, and the women selling loaves and apples were almost screaming out their bargain prices.
James handed Fanny out of the coach and paused, standing before her, blocking her way. She realised, to her surprise, that for once he was looking her in the eye.
‘Good luck, miss,’ he said.