by Jane Lark
She was not afraid of phantoms, even in the darkness, even in the old rooms. Any ghosts here would be, or have known, her kin. She would welcome them. They might help feed and release her imagination—give it wings to fly once more.
She was on the edge of it. Darcy had been so close earlier today.
~
Daylight streamed about the wooden shutters which covered the windows.
Jane rolled onto her back and her forearm lifted to rest across her eyes.
It was morning. What had happened to the darkness? She had fallen asleep without warning and slept past dawn, having tossed and turned previously.
Stoneleigh…
She was lying in bed, on a soft, wonderfully comfortable mattress, in Stoneleigh Abbey!
Her forearm fell on top of the covers and she laughed into the air.
She was lying in a beautiful bedroom in Stoneleigh Abbey!
Jane rolled to her side and threw back the covers. Why on earth would she wish to lie abed when there was so much to be discovered? Her bare feet brushed against the warm, waxed, wooden floorboards as she crossed the room to pull the bell rope and call for a maid. She needed water to wash, and a maid to help her dress. She wished to be outside in the early morning sunshine, in the fields, beneath the trees, and walking through the long grass in the meadows.
Once she’d rung, she crossed the room and turned back the shutters on one tall window.
The window allowed her to look down onto the central garden, a rectangle within the middle of all the buildings. It was very like the middle of an abbey cloister and the planting reminded her of a Tudor style, with low cut box hedging laid out in intricate patterns, with roses in between. Everything at Stoneleigh Abbey had a particular charm and this little area of garden was no different.
She had even fallen in love with the kitchens and store rooms, amidst the medieval arches of the oldest part of Stoneleigh Abbey, as much as the low ceilinged dark wood-lined Jacobean rooms and the high-ceilinged magnificence of the Baroque West Wing.
The room which she had fallen in love with, most, though, was the chapel.
They had come to it last, at the end of their tour of the huge house, when Lady S & S (as Jane had begun calling her in her thoughts last night) and Mrs Leigh had surpassed boredom and reached entire indifference. But Jane had walked into the chapel with immediate wonder. She had never seen anything like it. Chapels were dark, with wooden or stone pillars and beams, and ancient painted plasterwork, with family tributes on every side; banners, plaques and stone effigies. There were none here. The chapel was as much in the Baroque style as the rest of the West Wing.
She had looked up at the high ceiling, her mouth opening. The ceiling was covered in plasterwork, just as the entrance hall had been, as were the walls. Her gaze had fallen. The room was a large oblong. Strangely angular in nature. There was not a single arch. But there were pillars. The housekeeper had led them in through the servants’ door. The pillars supported the balcony which must be for the family’s use. Jane had looked up at the dark wooden front of the balcony. Over its edge had peeped more crimson velvet cushions.
Jane’s forehead rested against the glass of the window. All these windows must have cost a fortune in taxes over the years. The thought brought laughter into her throat. She let it escape. It seemed so strange to laugh again. It was too long since she had felt a desire to laugh.
She turned away from the window. Her ancestors had been rich, and they had wished to show it off, and now Reverend Leigh was rich, and perhaps her brother James might have a share in it. He had been named for the Leigh family; they were all Thomas, James or Edward. Her James, her family’s James, deserved to gain some benefit from this. He was just as much the late Edward and Mary Leigh’s cousin as Reverend Leigh, and he was the eldest man in their line.
A knock struck the bedchamber door.
“Yes, come in.”
The maid entered. “Miss.” She dropped into a very low curtsey, the depth of which Jane did not normally receive. But then she was a relative of the illustrious people who had lived in this house for centuries. Here, at least, perhaps she deserved such deference.
“May I have some water for washing, please, and then would you help me dress?”
“Certainly, miss.” The maid curtseyed again, before leaving Jane alone once more.
When Jane was clothed and the maid had gone, Jane left her room and ran, literally, the skirt of her dress and her petticoats gripped in one hand, to Cassandra’s room, to see if she was awake. She knocked on the thick wooden door. There was no reply. Jane did not knock again but opened the door and crept in. Cassandra was still in the tall canopied bed and the shutters were closed over the windows. Jane hurried across the room, slipped off her shoes and jumped on top of the mattress beside where her sister lay. “Wake up, do. There is far too much to see to sleep like a slugabed.”
“Jane.” Cassandra rolled to her back in complaint, yawning.
“Wake up!” Jane patted the top of the counterpane beside Cassandra’s hip. “We must get out into the grounds before we might be discovered and have to endure the sentence of Lady S & S’s company.”
Cassandra smiled. She and Jane had been far too close, for too long, for them not to be of one mind in such things.
Jane sat back and clutched her knees to her chest as she had done when she was young, when she and Cassandra had talked. But Jane felt young today. Young and alive.
“Yesterday I had a sense of Darcy. Can you imagine him in Pemberley? I think it may not be as grand as this and yet certainly as beautiful, and he would be a man who loved it and he’d be so proud of it, who else could not fall in love with it. Then I thought of Lizzy discovering his home and falling in love too. If she were shown about by a housekeeper as we were. Can you picture it? Her eyes everywhere, taking in every auspicious relation of his.”
Cassandra sat up and leant forward, to hug Jane. “Yes, I imagine it all.” She smiled then threw the covers back and climbed off the bed. “Will you help me dress, so I need not call a maid.”
“Of course.”
Jane was silent as Cassandra gathered her clothing. Inside her head Jane could see the portraits at Pemberley. The rooms would not be dark but light, and she could see a portrait of a young woman hanging before Lizzy too. A young woman in white. “I think I should give him a sister. Do you not think? Someone he loves. It is not only the house, but his sister he loves. The two together would soften his nature entirely. I have already written that he has no parents, of course; it is why he has inherited, but then if his sister were young that would make him her protector and she would see him as her hero, and Lizzy would see how she looks to him. Do you not think that would give Lizzy a better cause to question her judgement of him, and her refusal of his offer?”
Cassandra turned, her smile was wide. “I do. But most importantly, I am thrilled to hear you speak of stories.”
“Frank said the issue with First Impressions was that Darcy should not be turned about solely by Lizzy’s rejection. He told me that her cutting dissection of his character wounded a man’s pride, and it might most likely be women who read my story but it would be a gentleman publisher who bought it, and so I should make it kinder to his sex. Would not Lizzy loving what Darcy loves have more weight?”
“I think it a wonderful notion.” Cassandra walked over to the bed, hugged Jane and kissed Jane’s cheek. “But please do not pick up your quill again quite yet; I shall not see you again for a se’nnight if you do, and I would like to walk outside.”
Jane laughed, slipping off the bed to help Cassandra dress.
They left the house through the front door. It was seven in the morning. They had only seen the servants walking through the house, no one else was up. They were probably not even awake.
Jane lifted the skirt of her dress, ran down the long flight of shallow stone steps from the front door to the gravel drive, then turned around and looked up to enjoy the view of the pale stone and
giant numerous windows in the morning light. It was beyond beautiful. It was glorious.
Cassandra stood on the top step still, holding the iron railing and looking to her left.
Jane turned to follow her gaze. “Oh. Shall we go and look?” There was a red stone gatehouse there. It was built in the same colour stone as the almshouses in the village.
“It looks so old,” Cassandra said when she walked down the steps.
“It looks like a part of the old abbey. How old do you think it is?”
“Medieval, surely.”
When Cassandra stepped from the bottom step onto the gravel, Jane wrapped her arm through her sister’s. They walked along the path, past the sheep pens on one side and the wall before the farmyard on the other. They were as much friends as sisters. Jane had needed no imagination to write Lizzy’s relationship with her sister Jane. A smile tugged at Jane’s lips. It was Cassandra who had insisted that Lizzy’s sister ought to have Jane’s name.
“It would stir up Susan’s soul, she would be in a fit of anticipation and excitement at this moment.”
Jane laughed. “She would, and I have made up my mind, if I ever have the story back, I shall change Northanger from a castle to an abbey. Do you not think that an abbey is much more gothic?”
“Definitely more gothic. You only need look at this.” Cassandra pointed ahead.
They walked towards the high arch of the gatehouse.
The giant, dark, worn, wooden doors looked so wonderfully aged. Another person might say they were rotten in places; Jane could only think of all the decay as a sign of past life—history.
“This gatehouse is as grand as a mansion to me. If I ever have the chance to build a folly, I will make it like this.” Cassandra’s voice rang with a theatrical edge.
“I love it.” Jane answered. “I love the walls and the windows, and the narrow stairs into the living quarters.”
“And look at this.” Cassandra’s arm slipped free from Jane’s. “What do you think of this?”
Everything about Stoneleigh Abbey was exploration and adventure. Jane longed to have Susan to write again.
The item Cassandra had queried was a long wooden bench which ran along one wall of the gatehouse. The wood was even more tired in appearance than the doors. But there were several, odd and inexplicable large holes within it. “Perhaps it may have been a set of stocks, for more than one man or woman to be assaulted with rotting vegetables, and it has been made into a seat.”
“Ma’am.”
Jane turned as Cassandra did, at the sound of a man’s voice. He wore a pair of good quality leather boots, brown breeches, a slightly darker brown redingote and a black waistcoat over his shirt. Jane would guess he was a servant, and yet not a lowly servant. His neckcloth was clean, yet not very fancily tied.
“I am Miss Jane Austen. Hello,” Jane smiled.
“And I am Miss Austen,” Cassandra added.
The man bowed, with one arm crossing his middle. “Miss Austen. Miss Jane. Well met.” He said the last when his head had lifted.
Jane smiled more broadly, the welcome was formal, very last century and extremely gallant—in the style of a hero. “Mr…”
“Samuel Butler, Miss.” He smiled at Jane, then looked at Cassandra. “The steward here. May I be of help?”
“Ah.” The sound erupted from Cassandra’s throat. Jane wondered if Cassandra had thought him a ghost, they had been so busy involving themselves in the aura of the medieval heart of the abbey. “What is this?” Cassandra asked.
“That, Miss Austen,” he spoke as he walked over to the wooden bench-like object, that Cassandra had pointed at, “is the old bench where visitors to the Abbey left their weapons before they entered to receive the monks’ hospitality. Their swords, bows and quivers were left upright in the holes here.” He leant down and touched a round hole within the bench.
“But if this was an abbey,” Cassandra pushed, “why would the monks have swords and bows?”
“It was an abbey, miss, but monks in medieval days would offer rest and food to travellers of any status and rank. The knights and soldiers they welcomed would have born arms.”
Jane looked up at the carved stones in the arch above them; her head suddenly full of ghosts, the kind of spectres that Susan would have seen—those of imagination. How many people had walked through these gates? They were all walking now within her, she could see them, clothed in different decades of fashion, in armour, and Jacobean grandeur. King Charles I on his horse, his standard bearer beside him, and his army behind them.
Her imagination was truly alive again.
“Would you like me to show you around the grounds, ladies?” Mr Butler offered.
“Oh, yes. Please. Thank you. I would be very grateful for it.” Cassandra answered.
Jane would have preferred to look around alone, and discover, rather than be shown, but it was too late; Cassandra had not looked at her before speaking. Mr Butler smiled at Jane, as if he knew she would have refused. He was perhaps a dozen years older than Jane, yet she had a sense he was flirting with them. Especially when he gave her a smile that was far too beguiling. Beguiling smiles were to be run from, she had learned. Especially when they had a practiced air.
She turned away.
Cassandra’s arm linked with Jane’s; Cassandra had known she would have preferred to explore. The gesture implied an apology.
But perhaps Mr Butler might enlighten Jane with details she would not discover alone.
Jane looked at her sister, and in so doing, caught Mr Butler’s eye. He smiled again, as he moved to walk slightly ahead of them.
The last stone step of the stairs leading down from the door behind him had been worn down into a deep dip. By the thousands of feet crossing over it, Jane supposed.
Visions within her imagination played out images of foot after foot touching that step. Her ancestors. Her Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandfather had most likely stood upon it. She would stand upon it before she left.
“This way, ladies.” Mr Butler lifted a hand. “Would you look about the farmyard first, the walled garden, or perhaps the river walks?”
“The farm,” Jane answered. It would remind her of her life at Steventon. The life she had missed with a broken heart.
He smiled. Blast him, why could some men simply smile and speak to your senses? It was not that she was attracted by his flirting, or that she even thought he was flirting to attract either her or Cassandra—only that he was as naturally charming as the house he was steward over.
He showed them about the farm, introducing them to both the labourers and animals, and the dairy, where the dairy maids were busy churning the butter. The time passed so quickly that before Jane knew it, it was almost nine and time to return to the house for the morning service in the Baroque chapel, so she and Cassandra had no time to explore further nor even return to their rooms to make themselves tidy.
When they parted from Mr Butler he smiled in his far too charming way, a lock of his fringe falling forward as he bowed in that old fashioned, exuberant style. “Good day to you Miss Austen, Miss Jane.” He looked at each of them, then turned away.
Cassandra’s eyebrows lifted once Mr Butler had turned. Jane’s teeth caught hold of her upper lip to prevent an overly animated smile, which he might look back and see, and misconstrue.
“Such a gallant man,” Cassandra whispered, linking her arm with Jane’s as they started to walk back towards the house. “A perfect hero, do you not think? Might he appear in a story one day?”
Jane laughed. “Who knows? He certainly had a way about him, but I have learned my lesson with men who have a way about them.”
“But have your heroines—if they are just starting out upon life, and romance? How shall they know who is all charm and who is all seriousness?”
Jane laughed louder, the sensation rippling through her awareness. Cassandra laughed too as they continued walking and Jane pressed Cassandra’s arm against her side in a gesture of
affection.
~
“Your colour is very high,” Lady Saye and Sele said when Jane and Cassandra walked into the morning room.
Breakfast awaited them. A huge feast was spread out on the long table.
Jane’s stomach growled. It had been growling at her throughout the morning service, and she had been fighting to hide the sound by turning the pages of her prayer book to stop the noise echoing in the large box-like chapel.
Jane’s gaze reached through the windows to look at the river as she walked across the room to the chair she had occupied the day before. It had been nice to explore the farm, but she still ached for a long walk through the meadows, or along the river’s edge, alone. Yet her appetite was immense, and her stomach refused to wait a moment more. “I am so hungry,” she stated as a footman pulled out the chair for her and her gaze turned to the food before her.
“My stomach was rumbling hideously throughout the service,” Cassandra answered quietly, sitting in the seat beside Jane, which had also been withdrawn by a footman.
“Mother,” Jane said, by way of good morning. Then she looked at her cousin. “Reverend Leigh.” He bowed his head a little, acknowledging her greeting, and his lips lifted into a smile. Jane looked at her other cousin, James Leigh. “Mr Leigh.”
He inclined his head slightly. “Miss Jane. Miss Austen. Did you you have a nice walk? I saw you return to the house before the service.”
“We did,” Cassandra answered.
“Mr Butler showed us all about the farm. Stoneleigh Abbey has a productive dairy.” Jane looked at her mother.
“Mr Butler…” Reverend Leigh queried.
“Your steward,” Mr Hill answered.
