The Austen Girls

by Lucy Worsley

  Aunt Jane laughed.

  ‘I deserved that,’ she said. ‘I’m old enough to dance at balls just for the fun of it, but maybe not you, not yet. Now listen, Fanny, here’s something I’ve been waiting for a quiet moment to show you. It’s a letter from Mr Sprack the thief-taker. I’m not sure that your father would like this, but he’s written to ask if you will ever be in London. He says again that he needs an assistant, he says, someone “ladylike”, which is how he describes you. Oh, how poor Elizabeth would have been displeased!’

  Fanny was so surprised that she could almost have taken it for one of her aunt’s jokes.

  ‘Mr Sprack asked after me? Me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aunt Jane insisted. ‘He says here –’ in the half-darkness there was a scuffle of the unfolding paper – ‘that you were cool as a cucumber. “A regular ice-cold maiden” were his very words. A cool head, he says, is vital in the thief-taking business.’

  Fanny remembered the satisfaction of the moment when the trap had been sprung at the temple, and when the thief had been taken. It had almost compensated for the sick terror of the waiting, and the trial of having everyone staring at her while she gave evidence in court.

  ‘What about it, Fanny? I’m going to London next week – perhaps you’ll come with me and meet Mr Sprack again?’

  ‘Let me think it over, Aunt Jane,’ Fanny said.

  How extraordinary, Fanny thought. This was something she could never have imagined a year ago. An invitation to go up to London! An invitation to do something in the world!

  Aunt Jane subsided into silence as her book once again consumed her. She tilted it towards the fire and peered at it intently, totally absorbed.

  It was strangely quiet, Fanny realised. With the children upstairs, the snow outside the windows gave a peaceful feeling. Soon it would be time to draw the curtains, but for now she’d keep them open and watch the snow fall, hoping that it wouldn’t fall too fast for the carriage to bring Lizzie home again after the ball.

  Fanny remembered how, a year ago, her feelings would have been on fire about the ball. Her whole mind would have been occupied with who she’d dance with, what she’d say to her partners, whether people would think her hair too limp.

  ‘I must put the children to bed,’ she said, trying to push out of her mind the thought of the exciting alternative life Mr Sprack wanted her to take.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Aunt Jane, standing up at once. ‘I’ll do it. You deserve a night off.’ Without another word she was gone, in one of her sudden and mysterious disappearances.

  Fanny sighed, and walked about the library for a second or two, looking for a book to read herself.

  Her aunt was right. It was lovely to be quiet, and alone for a while, and not to have to think about either balls or household bills.

  What would she like to read?

  Her eye travelled over the shelves. All her favourite heroines were here … Eleanor, and Caroline, and Mrs Carrington, who had travelled all the way to Turkey.

  Anna is a heroine too, in a quieter way, Fanny thought to herself. She won’t be dancing either tonight.

  She imagined Anna, sitting by the fire at Steventon, placed between her father and her stepmother, mutinous as a mule, perhaps sewing something very badly, plotting, plotting how to escape from her life and weighing up all her options.

  Anna would certainly have loved to become a thief-taker’s assistant if she’d had the chance. She wouldn’t have hesitated for an instant.

  Fanny found herself sitting down at her father’s desk, and taking her father’s pen, and picking it up, playing with it. She was playing, too, with the picture in her mind, of Anna’s cross face, her beautiful hair, the passionate way she always spoke, even if she was saying the silliest, lightest thing in the world.

  A heroine.

  Fanny foraged for a fine, fresh piece of paper, and picked up the pen.

  ‘Anna,’ she wrote at the top, like the title of a story.

  She underlined it.

  She felt like she was poised on the brink of something, like that moment before pushing off on skates for the first time in the winter when the pond froze.

  And underneath the title she wrote, ‘Miss Austen, Thief-Taker. A Novel of Adventure.’

  And then she began.

  ‘Miss Anna Austen, sixteen years of age, was assistant to the celebrated thief-taker, Mr …’

  Yes, if she wasn’t going to go out, then at least Fanny would have a thief-taking adventure here at home, and Anna would be the heroine. It would be very pleasant to have a secret.

  Epilogue

  What happened in real life

  Nearly all the characters in this story are real people, from Edward and Elizabeth Austen and their eleven children, to Fanny and Anna themselves, their aunt Jane, and even to Mrs Sackree the children’s nurse. Godmersham Park is a real house, still standing in Kent, although Anna’s home at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire has since been pulled down.

  Aunt Jane often used to stay at her rich brother Edward’s house at Godmersham Park, and used her experience of living there to help her imagine some of the big houses she made up and described in the six novels that she wrote in real life. Her family at Godmersham, their servants, their private feuds and their marriages, were vitally important to Aunt Jane and her stories. If you ever find yourself in possession of a ten-pound note, take a close look at it, and you’ll find pictures upon it of both Aunt Jane and the mansion of Godmersham Park itself.

  The trick played upon Mr Drummer was a real scam which was practised in Georgian England by unscrupulous shopkeepers. In real life, it happened to Aunt Jane’s own Aunt Jane, her mother’s brother’s wife. The lady was accused of stealing a piece of lace from a shop in Bath, and was sent to prison before finally, after a good deal of stressful arguing, being released. The laws in Georgian Britain were designed to protect property, rather than human beings, so it was perfectly possible that you could be sent to Australia for something that sounds as trivial as stealing a piece of lace. And if you were a pauper unjustly accused of a crime, it was equally possible that no one would investigate your case fairly, or stand up for you, or help you.

  There weren’t yet any proper police detectives, and it was the job of every citizen to help solve a crime. The unpaid magistrates who were supposed to administer the system did not always do their work properly, although it has to be said that in real life Edward Austen seems to have been diligent and well respected.

  Some people became specialist thief-takers, like Mr Sprack (a character I’ve invented). It was a job that was almost like being a private detective today. But the system wasn’t always fair. Aunt Jane was quite right to say that before the invention of the police and some reforms to the law in the nineteenth century, justice could often be bought and sold.

  In real life, Anna Austen did truly get engaged to one clergyman, Mr Michael Terry, in the teeth of opposition from her parents, only then to throw him over for another, Mr Benjamin Lefroy.

  Fanny did eventually change her mind and get married too, at the age of twenty-seven. This was pretty old for a well-off Georgian lady like she was.

  If you go to the Hampshire Archives in Winchester, you can read Fanny’s real-life diary, all about her brothers and sisters and the death of her mother. There are a lot of exclamation marks in it.

  When Fanny’s grandmother died, her father, Edward, inherited another big house as well, in addition to Godmersham Park. This one was in Hampshire, and he gave Aunt Jane and her sister, Cassandra, a cottage in which to live in the village nearby, and this is a place that you can still go to visit today because it’s run as Jane Austen’s House Museum.

  Fanny went to live in her father’s Hampshire house, would visit Aunt Jane in her cottage nearby every day, read all her novels and loved her dearly.

  But Fanny’s aunt Jane Austen died at the age of just forty-one.

  Fanny herself never wrote a published novel.

  Or at least, that’s the case a
s far as we know.

  Perhaps, like her aunt, Fanny wrote books secretly, and had their covers simply say that they were ‘by a lady’.

  Acknowledgements

  I first met Fanny and Anna when I was spending a good deal of time with the Austens for the purpose of writing a different book, Jane Austen at Home. For my research I visited Fanny’s home, Godmersham Park, for which I have to thank Rebecca Lilley, and I learned all about Anna’s home, Steventon Rectory, through the generosity of Debbie Charlton. In publishing, I love working with my friends at Bloomsbury, especially Zöe Griffiths and Emily Marples, and I’m thrilled that this is the fourth book I’ve had illustrated by the marvellous Joe Berger.

  Have you read this exciting historical drama from Lucy Worsley?

  Miss V. Conroy is quiet as a mouse, and good at keeping secrets. But when she becomes Princess Victoria’s companion, she finds she can no longer stay in the shadows.

  Chapter 1

  Journey to the Palace

  ‘Goodbye, Miss V.’

  I struggled to reopen the carriage door, for Edward had already clicked it shut before I had had the chance to say farewell properly to my mother. But I was too late. Her stooped back was already disappearing towards the entrance of our house, Arborfield Hall. She had one hand raised to her spine, as usual, as if she found it a great effort to walk.

  I gazed after her as she went, giving up my struggle with the handle.

  ‘Have fun!’ said Jane, my sister, who did at least manage to reopen the door. She climbed up the step to smack a kiss on to my cheek. ‘Goodbye, Dash!’ she said, kissing him too and almost smothering him under her ringlets. ‘Come back soon with lots of stories.’ She jumped back down on to the gravel. ‘Maybe you’ll have exciting adventures that you can write down into a book of your own,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘Goodbye, Jane,’ I said, although I don’t think she heard me. Exciting adventures were the last thing I required. Of course she meant well, but Jane never understood what I might or might not want to do.

  I thought she had gone, but here she was bouncing up once more upon the carriage’s step. ‘Mother will miss you, you know, Miss V!’ she said. And then, this time, she really did disappear, darting back across the gravel to the house.

  I am called ‘Miss V. Conroy’ because Jane, as the elder, is ‘Miss Conroy’.

  I am always ‘Miss V’ so that people will know that I’m not the first Miss Conroy. I was disappointed when my mother told me I would have to carry my ‘V’ with me, like a limp or an affliction of the speech. I thought I should like to slip through life as ‘Miss Conroy’; it sounds more discreet, less noticeable. People always wonder what the ‘V’ stands for, and they try to find out … I hate that. I hate people knowing about me.

  I am good at keeping secrets. I like to be neat and discreet. I like to sit quiet as a mouse, escaping notice. Hopefully escaping criticism. And that’s how I felt that morning when my father jumped into the carriage beside me, and with a jerk of the vehicle we moved off to begin the whole day’s journey to London.

  Of course my family might use my Christian name; that would be perfectly correct. But my father says that even when I was only one week old, my nursemaids reported that I was already a well-behaved young lady, a ‘miss’, not a normal, noisy, messy baby.

  As our carriage rolled out between the gateposts, it occurred to me that perhaps at our destination for the first time people would call me ‘Miss V. Conroy’ seriously, and not as a joke. I decided I must prepare myself for the possibility.

  I’d been up to London before, of course, with my father, in his blue-painted carriage. But we visited the shops and once the theatre, never staying more than one night. Certainly we had never stayed for several days, as was now the plan. I had packed very carefully, as always, and it had been hard to create space in my trunk for the great number of novels I thought I might need. I was a little anxious that the straps might tug loose and that my trunk and hatbox might fall off the back of our carriage. I kept trying to glimpse them out of the window. Dash was worried too, I could tell, as he sat between my ankles. I rubbed his ears to reassure him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my father said. ‘Edward will keep the luggage quite safe.’ My father had always had an uncanny ability to read the minds of other people. ‘And you will be kept quite safe too, you know,’ he added.

  I tried to raise a little smile to show that I believed him. I thought, as I often did, of my mother’s injunction that I should smile more.

  But to be truthful, I didn’t quite believe in the new Edward. He was a recent replacement for the old Edward, who had been my friend. All our footmen abandoned their own names and became ‘Edward’ when they entered my father’s service at Arborfield Hall, but they never seemed to stay all that long. I was glad when the last-Edward-but-one had left, for he had been a lazy telltale. The new Edward was so new that I couldn’t yet tell if we would be friends. I hoped so.

  The thought made me sigh. I wished I had more friends, lots of friends, like my sister Jane. But in truth there was only Dash. It was kind of my father to allow Dash to come with us when it would have been more convenient to have left him behind.

  ‘Now then, Miss V,’ my father said, resting his hands on the round brass knob that topped the cane standing between his knees on the carriage floor. He was leaning forward so that his chin almost sat upon his knuckles. As usual, his eyes were twinkling, amused. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you and I must have a little confidential conversation before we arrive. I want things to go quite pleasantly, you know.’

  I lowered my eyes to my own hands on my lap. ‘Pleasantly’ was far more than I hoped for from this visit. I wished merely not to disgrace or draw attention to myself.

  ‘You must be excited to be taken to stay at a palace,’ he went on. ‘And it’ll be easy. All you have to do is to play with another little girl. All the girls in London would be glad to take your place! Eh, Miss V?’

  In truth I found the prospect as much terrifying as thrilling. This wasn’t just any little girl! How would we ‘play’ together? Could she even play the piano? Would she expect me to entertain her with witty conversation? That would be awful, for I had none.

  I glanced up doubtfully.

  My father caught this and gave me one of his sharp little nods of encouragement. ‘Come on! You can count on me!’ he said. ‘You can always count on a Conroy,’ he added, with a tap of his cane on the floor, ‘which means I know that I, in turn, can count on you.’

  Of course, he was right. Of course I was a lucky girl, and I was fortunate to have a father like him to help me. I’d get through it somehow. With Dash’s help too. He was a great icebreaker. Again I stroked his silky brown ears.

  My father sat back on the padded seat, quite at ease. There was a pink carnation in his waistcoat. He was watching me with his usual quizzical look. My mother, Lady Elizabeth Conroy, didn’t notice much because she was always so tired. But my father noticed everything.

  ‘I know that you’re a shy miss,’ he said, cocking his head to the side, ‘but so is the Other Party.’

  ‘You mean –’

  He nodded sharply and flashed his eyes towards the box where Edward sat next to the coachman. Of course. Not in front of the servants. I’d been brought up hearing these words every mealtime, every time the conversation got interesting.

  ‘The Other Party …’ I hesitated. ‘May I ask, please, Papa, how I should address her when we meet?’

  ‘Certainly!’ he said. But then a furrow wrinkled his pink forehead. ‘I thought your mother would have told you that.’

  He leaned forward on his cane and beckoned me nearer to him.

  ‘She is, of course, a princess,’ he said very quietly. ‘And you must say, “Your Royal Highness”. Never say “Princess”, that’s not correct when you’re talking to her, always “Your Royal Highness”. And wait until she speaks to you. And you know your curtsey?’

  I bent my chin again, r
ight down to my chest. My mother had said something vague to me about curtseys earlier this morning, but it had been in her usual dreamy manner. She had not been well recently. In fact, I could not remember her being perfectly well in my whole life.

  For a second, I had to blink hard to clear my eyes. This had been one of our mother’s bad mornings, when she had gone straight from her bed to recline on the chaise longue in the window, hardly stopping to dress herself properly on the way. On days like these she seemed reconciled to staying put there in her nightgown until dinnertime.

  ‘Of course you know your curtsey, don’t you, Miss V?’ she’d murmured, not turning her head, as I’d crept across the carpet towards her to remind her of our departure. Well, I thought I knew my curtsey, but I wasn’t entirely sure. And I hadn’t dared to ask her for clarification.

  Now I reminded myself fiercely that it had been a great step for her to have come down from her bedroom to see us off at all.

  ‘I … think I know how to curtsey, Papa.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. His eyebrows shot forward and his hands tightened on that brass knob as if he wanted to hurt it. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘My dearly beloved family have cotton wool for brains. Sometimes I think the good Lord has sent them specifically to try my patience.’ He fell to looking crossly out of the window, and silence reigned.

  I waited, mute, a careful hand on Dash’s head to warn him that now was no time to wriggle or bark.

  Eventually my father’s eyes wandered back inside the carriage and I tensed myself to take the pressure of his gaze. Surely he would not be cross today, with all the excitement and strangeness of departure. I was sitting demurely on the seat, knees squeezed together, my hair smoothly looped up at each side of my head – not falling forward in torrents of ringlets like the fashionable girls wore – waiting anxiously for the storm to pass.

  I was right. He was smiling again.