Jane’s head ached. Her limbs felt awkward; she could not move with her famous grace. She pulled out the carved chair. Was this treasured thing, so meaningful to Jane, so trivial to everyone else, to be left for James and Mary?
She sat down unsteadily at the writing desk where Catherine Morland had followed Elizabeth Bennet and the Dashwood sisters into the corners of her heart. She took a piece of paper and smoothed it with shaking fingers. But when she reached for a pen, her feelings overcame her. She could not write to Cass until she had collected herself.
But she could not collect herself. She sat for a long time, her feet in their outdoor boots crossed beneath the chair, her elbows on the desk, her head in her hands. Desperation rose up, and brought tears, but she went on sitting there. Hating herself for even considering the word, she told herself that this was a betrayal. And it had been committed by the very people who were supposed to love her.
Mama’s enthusiasm she could comprehend, but Papa’s was unfathomable. Why should he be ready to leave his parish at such short notice, and go so far away? He of all people – the champion of Jane’s literary efforts, the defender of her observations, the wise circumnavigator of conflict with Mama. Why had he deserted his post when he was needed most?
Perhaps she was still seeing her father with a child’s trust. But for whatever reason, he concurred with Mama’s conviction that he had lived quietly for long enough, and that since he was no longer to serve the parish, there was no reason to live in it.
But Bath! Jane fetched a handkerchief and cried noisily into it. Unchristian though it might be, she could not help but pity herself and her sister. The helplessness of their situation was not merely unfair. It was demeaning.
She had never before been so strongly convinced of this. She and Cass had discussed Miss Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women when they had first read it, years ago. Cass had marvelled at the audacity of the suggestion that women should be educated to a high level and granted the opportunity to enter the professions, though to Jane this hypothesis had always seemed entirely correct. They had both laughed, however, when they had tried to picture a woman lawyer, in a wig and gown, or a woman Member of Parliament trying to make herself heard above the robust shouting in the House. Now, Jane’s frustration at being moved to Bath as if she were a piece of furniture, with no possible alternative simply because she was an unmarried woman, overcame her so violently that she cast herself down upon the bed.
She wept for a long time. If only her sister were at home! Jane knew her sister-in-law needed Cassandra more than she did at present, but how she missed her! On this dreary winter evening, with the rain dribbling down the window-panes and the larches behind the house groaning in sympathy with her mood, Jane wished and wished for her sister to appear.
But it was the wish of a child. Jane’s powers of reasoning told her that Cass could not return until Elizabeth could spare her, and that she had the advantage over her sister anyway. Unlike poor Cass, Jane did not have to spend their final weeks away from Steventon. While it was still their home, Jane could at least live in it.
“Where are you, Jane?”
It was Papa’s voice. Jane wiped her face and went out onto the landing. “Here, Papa.”
He was at the bottom of the stairs, smiling, with his whiskers brushed and his spectacles gleaming. Jane’s heart swelled at the sight; he was as excited as a schoolboy. “What is it, Papa?”
“Mary and James are here.”
Jane had no wish to see her brother or his wife. “Is Anna with them?”
“She is.”
“Please may I have her up here?”
“I do not see why not.” He disappeared, then reappeared holding his granddaughter by the hand. “Go up to your Aunt Jane, my child.”
Still in her cape and bonnet, Anna trotted up the stairs. Jane sank to her knees and clasped the little girl tightly to her breast. More tears came, but she did not care; children understood tears. Anna would understand what had caused these, and disperse them as only children could.
“Aunt Jane, I cannot breathe.”
Jane released the child. She took hold of both her hands and looked into the small face of the niece she loved best. “Anna dearest, come and help me write a letter to Aunt Cassandra. I confess I know not where to start, but you always have the cleverest ideas.”
“Why are you crying?” asked Anna, with troubled eyes.
Having been kept in ignorance herself, Jane was wary in case Anna had been too. “Have your Mama and Papa told you any news lately?”
“They told me something this morning.”
“Yes, dearest? What did they say?”
“That Grandpapa is not going to be the vicar of Steventon any more, and we are to move from Deane and come to live here at the Rectory.”
“That is quite true,” said Jane, “and I must write and tell Aunt Cass. But I have a headache. Will you be a good girl and sit at the desk with me?”
“I shall be glad to,” said Anna in her serious way. “Would you take off my gloves, please, Aunt? I cannot undo the buttons.”
Jane obliged, sniffing back tears. And when the slender eight-year-old fingers were free, aunt and niece went hand-in-hand into the sitting-room. Together they composed a letter containing the most heart-breaking news Jane had ever had to impart to her sister, leavened only by the brightness of Anna’s astonishment when Jane speculated that one day, perhaps, this very sitting-room and everything in it would be Anna’s own.
“Why, Aunt Jane!” she exclaimed, her eyes and mouth equally wide open. “If I truly may sit on your chair, at your desk, one day … might I be an author, like you?”
The desk and chair remained at Steventon. But by the day of moving, Jane had no heart for regret at leaving them behind. She was not sure her heart was even in the same place as it had always been, or that she had any true feelings at all. Months of agreeing when inwardly she objected, smiling when she had no desire for merriment, tirelessly dusting and wrapping and packing when she longed for all the things to be left exactly where they were, had hardened her.
She resolved that she would not weep, or allow her parents to suspect the depth of her unhappiness. Leave she must, so leave she would, without demur.
“We must make of Bath what we can,” Cassandra had said upon her return from Godmersham. “I cannot pretend to like the notion of James and Mary living in our house any more than you do, but since there is nothing we can do about it, we must do as the Bible commands. Blessed are the meek.”
Jane did not want to be meek, but she could no longer summon the rage of that first tearful hour. “Very well, Cass,” she had agreed. “When required, I can be as meek as anyone else. But I am sure that meekness will not make me inherit the earth. I would rather inherit the Rectory anyway, which I cannot do because Papa does not own it, and even if he did, it would go to exactly the same person who is having it anyway. James!”
“Oh, Jane, do not dwell on the ways of the world,” Cassandra had wisely advised. “It was ever a pointless exercise, and only makes for misery.”
Mama and Papa had at least taken note of James’s suggestion that they take a house in Bath, rather than an upstairs apartment. Jane did not know how to express her gratitude to her brother for this intervention. When she tried, he patted her hand and said, “I love Steventon in equal measure with all my sisters and brothers. When the time comes for me to leave it, if I do not live somewhere with room to move, and some greenery to look at, I shall die.”
Jane might have been unable to thank James, but she thanked God when she saw their new house. It was a town house, certainly, in a row with many others. But it overlooked rarely used public gardens. The river was nearby, crossed by the impressive Poultney Bridge, and the house itself was large enough for Cassandra and Jane to have a private room. It even had a garden, “the size of a Bath bun” in Cassandra’s opinion, which received enough sun for her lavender and Jane’s lettuces to grow.
“Y
ou see,” said Cassandra as they made ready for bed on the first night, “our situation is not so bad, is it?”
Jane had to admit she was right. “No, indeed. The sight of the city in the sunshine today has lightened my spirits considerably.”
“I am glad to hear it,” said Cassandra with relief. “How distressed you were, and how reasonable you are being now!”
“I am not Marianne Dashwood,” said Jane.
“Which reminds me,” said Cassandra. “Marianne Dashwood is in the box with Elizabeth Bennet and all the others, is she not? And the box is brought safely from Steventon, is it not? Well, now that you are in Bath again, you can revise Catherine, and perhaps start a new story.”
“Perhaps,” said Jane.
But the city of Bath did not yield the glorious immersion in fiction of her earlier sojourn there. Catherine stayed in the box, the paper on the writing table remained blank, and each day was so like the one before that the restlessness which descended upon Jane became almost too great to bear.
“I will die in this place,” she told Cassandra one night. “I must have air. Cannot we prevail upon Mama and Papa to take us somewhere else?”
“Where do you suggest?”
“They are always saying they would like to visit Dorset. Lyme and Weymouth especially. Those places are by the sea, Cass. I could breathe there. Being here makes me feel as if I need … adventure.”
“Adventure?” said Cass, stopping in her task of hair-curling.
“I daily feel my prospects closing. There is nothing here for me. We might even try Wales. What do you think?”
“You had better ask them,” said Cass.
Jane’s suggestion was enthusiastically supported by her parents. “If we go as far as Weymouth, my dears,” suggested Papa, “we might as well go on to Hampshire and stay with James and Mary at Steventon. Mama and I can then come home, and you and your sister can go to Manydown. The Biggs are constantly inviting you. And you may also visit Martha at Ibthorpe.”
Jane expressed her joy in long letters to Martha, Catherine and Alethea, but it was a short letter from Mrs Bigg which interrupted the pleasurable preparations for their journey. Three days before they were to leave for Weymouth, Mama plunged the breakfast table into horrified silence.
“Mrs Bigg writes to tell me that her daughter Elizabeth has been widowed.”
Jane actually felt the blood drain from her cheeks, in a way often described in the kind of novels Catherine Morland liked to read, but which Jane had never believed could happen. Her breakfast turned to stone in her stomach as Papa and Cassandra questioned Mama, and the story was read out.
There was no mistake. William Heathcote, the charming, reserved clergyman whose physical beauty had been the first to stir Jane’s blood, had died of a sudden seizure a week previously. His young wife, bereft not only of her husband but of her house, which was provided by the Church, had immediately packed her bags and taken herself and her baby son back to live with her parents at Manydown House. Mrs Bigg was at pains to explain that Cassandra and Jane were welcome to visit as planned, but they would find Manydown in mourning for some weeks, and Elizabeth in black for many months beyond that.
“Then we shall change our plans,” declared Papa.
“Oh, no, George!” begged Mama. “The girls are looking forward to seeing the Bigg girls so much.”
“Exactly,” said Papa. “I meant, we shall alter our itinerary, so that the girls do not arrive at Manydown until the autumn. Perhaps the Biggs will even reinstate their traditional Christmas ball, if two young lady guests are present at that season.”
“I doubt it,” said Mama. “Not this year, anyway.”
Jane and Cass composed a letter to Elizabeth. Neither shed tears, and they did not speak, or write, of William Heathcote’s death in any terms but the conventional ones. But Jane was dispirited by the memories his passing produced. The ball where Elizabeth Bigg had met her future husband had taken place in a world now irrevocably lost to both Cassandra and herself: a world where Tom Fowle was still alive, where Tom Lefroy remained unsuspecting of Jane’s existence, where “the Johns” – Lyford, Portal, Harwood – and many other young gentlemen had clustered around the punch bowl and swung their partners more and more exuberantly as the punch disappeared. It was a long time ago, and everything since then had changed.
Harris
The visit to James and Mary at Steventon Rectory turned out better than Jane had expected. As summer turned into autumn the weather remained unseasonably warm, and her parents were able to spend the afternoons visiting many of their old parishioners with James, Mary and their grandchildren.
It was on one of these afternoons that Madam Lefroy drove over unannounced from Ashe. Less sprightly than of old, but exactly the same in every other detail, she was shown by Kitty into the garden, where Jane and Cass were sitting in the sunshine. Jane, as ever, was reading, and Cassandra sewing.
“What do you think, my dears? What do you think? And how do you go along in Bath, by the way?” asked Madam Lefroy. “Reverend Lefroy never could abide the place, though I am not averse to it; do not tell him, poor man.”
“Will you not sit down, Madam?” asked Cass, offering her own chair to the visitor. “Kitty, please bring another chair from the kitchen.”
Madam Lefroy sat down and settled herself as solidly as if she would never move. “What an obliging girl that is,” she observed as Kitty ran into the kitchen. “If she ever wants to give Mrs James notice she would be heartily welcome at Ashe. So, what do you say to my news?”
Cassandra reminded her tactfully that she had not told them it.
“Why, it is about my nephew, Mr Tom Lefroy!”
Jane’s heart leapt with such a bound she had to put her hand to her breast. She could not breathe until Madam Lefroy spoke again. If Tom had indeed been permitted to return, Jane was convinced she would kneel without embarrassment at Madam’s feet, and kiss the hem of her gown. She could not look at Cassandra.
“Thank you, Kitty,” said Cass calmly. She sat down and took up her work again. “And is your nephew well?”
“I should say he is very well,” replied Madam Lefroy. “My dears, he has made such an advantageous marriage! Quite an heiress, I understand. An Irishwoman, very pleasing to the eye by all accounts. But then he always was a very presentable young man himself.”
Madam’s eyes settled upon Jane. She met them briefly, but she could not continue to observe the determined carelessness she saw there. Dispirited, she kept her eyes on the book in her lap.
It was almost seven years since the Christmas ball at Manydown where Jane and Tom had met. The Irish Lefroys’ all-too-obvious fear that Tom would marry Jane had embarrassed Madam Lefroy so much that she had been unable to face the Austens for months, and she had not allowed the name of Tom Lefroy to pass her lips in Jane’s presence for years. But now, so anxious was she to impress upon the Austen family the excellence of Tom’s match, such considerations seemed forgotten. Jane was too crushed to reply.
“An Irish lady, you say?” replied the socially skilful Cassandra. “And where in Ireland do they live?” She led Madam Lefroy away from Tom’s marriage to his new house, and from there to his honeymoon journey, and from there to the Austens’ own travels in Dorset. And all the time Jane stared at the book, her brain beset by visions. The way Tom had flipped his coat-tails when they “sat out” between dances. The joy and indulgence upon people’s faces a week later at Ashe, when he and she had opened the dancing. The hair pushed impatiently back from his brow, his wrists in their starched frills, the neat closure of one boot against the other as he completed the measures. And especially that most cherished sight of all, his bright yet tender smile.
“Will you perhaps come and visit us in Bath, Madam?” Cassandra was asking.
“Oh, no, my poor legs will not allow me the luxury of travel these days, thank you all the same. But, Miss Jane, you are very quiet.”
Jane had to look up. But her throat had con
tracted; it was difficult to speak. Uncaring that she was being impolite, she stood up. “Madam,” she said, with a brief curtsey, “I am sorry, but I … I feel most unwell. Please excuse me.”
“Of course, my dear,” said Madam Lefroy in dismay, but without bewilderment. “As you wish. That excellent housemaid will bring you your tea upstairs, I dare say.”
Jane did not want any tea. Madam Lefroy sat with Cassandra a long time, while Jane lay on the bed and stared at the wallpaper, dry-eyed, silent, thinking. When she heard the carriage pull away she returned to the garden, where Cass sat with her head on a cushion and her work abandoned.
“You are weary, Cass,” said Jane, sitting on the grass at her sister’s feet. “You have had a sorry afternoon of it. Please forgive me for deserting you. ”
“It does not matter,” said Cass. “In your shoes I would have done the same.”
“I did not cry, though.”
“What did you do?”
“I thought about money, marriage and men. I thought about the things men do. It gave me little comfort, but neither would crying, so it was of little consequence. What else did Madam say? I hope she did not press you to divulge the reason for my distress.”
“I believe she had no need,” said Cass. “She did speak of you, however. She wished to know what story you are working on these days.”
“Infernal curiosity of the woman! And what did you tell her?”
“I said I did not know.”
“Quite right.”
There was a long pause, during which Jane pulled up blades of grass and dropped them, concentrating on the task as if it were very important.
Cassandra's Sister Page 17
