by Jane Lark
“Yes. He’s a very pleasant man,” Cassandra said to Reverend Leigh.
“Well it is good to know I have a likable steward,” Reverend Leigh responded.
“Samuel has been here years—” Mrs Hill added.
“But is he reliable?” Lady S & S interjected, in her high voice which judged everyone and everything about her on a lower level than herself.
Jane had spent over an hour in the farmyard, speaking with Mr Butler, the maids and the farmhands, and she must therefore be a strange anomaly because she thought herself perfectly equal to speaking with Lady S & S, too. Perhaps because of her title Lady S & S might claim superiority, but being a baroness did not make her more than human. Jane bit back an urge to tease. She must save her laughter for outside the room.
Yet it was so wonderful to feel that laughter bubble up inside her; all her grey skies were clearing, and the laughter she had already shared with Cassandra flooded Jane’s heart with light.
“A servant may have worked for you for years and yet be stealing the key to the tea caddy behind your back, or filling your madeira with water to hide what they have drunk.”
Oh. Jane glanced at Cassandra and bit down harder on her lower lip, knowing that if Lady S & S could see Jane’s eyes she would see merriment in them.
“Miss.” A footman offered Jane some warm, spiced chocolate to drink. She nodded, her gaze turning to the full table. It was laden to overflowing. She had never seen a table so full at breakfast, there were cakes of different varieties, hot and cold rolls with butter and cheeses, and then a choice of coffee and tea as well as chocolate.
“Mrs Leigh. Mr Hill, Mrs Hill, Lady Saye and Sele,” Cassandra completed the good morning acknowledgements Jane had missed.
“Samuel Butler is a very honest man, Lady Saye and Sele,” Mr Hill responded to Lady S & S.
“He is indeed,” Mrs Hill added, “I have never heard a bad word said of him. He is much loved here.”
Loved… like the house… and the estate. It was an odd word to choose when speaking of a steward. Yet Jane could imagine the very charming Mr Butler being the owner of the word love spoken by many lips, not in a romantic sense, but in the sense of admiration. He had carried confidence with him, a belief in his own ability, and that had been an element of his charm.
But the whole concept of the word love, used in terms of Mr Butler, made Jane’s mind whirl with thought. Did the pride and love for a large estate also embrace the people then?
A desire to talk to Mr Butler again, with an aim to explore the emotions she wished to claim for Darcy, flooded Jane. She wanted to look into his eyes when he spoke about things, and judge the emotions of his heart, and his soul, and capture them in words to be able to express them through Darcy, perhaps, or if not through him, then another, later character.
Her heart flooded with warmth, and something wrapped tightly about it. An embrace that held her as she stepped back into a place that was as well known to her soul as the parlour at the parsonage in Steventon. There was such wealth here for stories—in the place and the people.
“You should not walk out so early, Miss Austen.” Lady Saye and Sele spoke to Cassandra and did not even look at Jane, as if, because Jane was the younger sister, she did not think her worth attention.
To be cut spurred Jane into response, she had a terrible weakness for being contrary. She answered, on Cassandra’s behalf, “We walked out early every morning at Steventon. A walk is good for the soul as well as the body.”
“Is this what you have been told?” The question was asked in a tone that said whoever had raised Cassandra and Jane was lacking, and of course that was Jane’s mother who was at the table too. “And to tuck up your skirts like maids.” She looked at Jane’s mother then. “How do you condone such behaviour?”
Jane’s mother’s mouth opened, as her eyebrows lifted and her pupils at the heart of her eyes widened. As a vicar’s wife Jane knew her mother had never been very good with meanness. She did not know how to respond. She had been used to kindness and pleasantries.
Jane was willing to answer. She knew exactly how to reply. “There was nothing amiss with our behaviour, my Lady. It is perfectly acceptable for two women to walk out together, and I cannot even consider it an issue if one of us had chosen to walk out alone. This is neither Bath, nor London—”
“But your petticoats are filthy. You appeared in the chapel like hoydens.”
“I would not waste a dress by letting it become stained for the benefit of protecting anyone’s sensibility. We were in the farmyard. We wished to protect our dresses, however it would have been indecent to protect our petticoats and we did not have time to change them.”
Those around the table fell into silence. Jane swallowed. Perhaps she had gone too far. She looked at Cassandra, who gave her a very slight smile.
The silence remained.
Jane sipped her chocolate, to stop a smile of satisfaction. She had won a verbal fencing round with Lady S & S. Jane’s attention then turned to selecting food.
“I would very much like to see the inside of the house this morning, if you would show me around Mr Hill. You are free?” Reverend Leigh asked, breaking the short period of awkwardness.
“I am at your disposal, Reverend Leigh.”
“James must join you. He should see what might be his.”
“The inheritance is certain, Lady Saye and Sele, Reverend Thomas is the eldest of Lord Leigh’s cousins. There is no dispute.” Mr Hill’s unspoken words snapped, it will not be Mr Leigh’s in this lifetime.
“The Lord Chancellor shall—”
“Ma’am, I may speak for myself,” Mr Leigh stated bluntly, in an impatient pitch. He looked at Mr Hill, then his uncle, Reverend Leigh. “I should like to look about the house. What my mother-in-law says is true, I have a claim to the inheritance too,” his gaze passed to Mr Hill “and I shall test your opinion in the Lord Chancellor’s Court, so do not be so certain.”
“It was not that I wished to exclude you, sir…” Mr Hill answered.
Jane’s gaze turned from one person to another as the conversation continued.
Mr Leigh’s lips pursed as he grew more determined to ensure his claim to the estate was recognised, while Mr Hill’s pitch increased in depth and severity and Reverend Leigh’s cheeks flushed. Jane looked at Lady S & S; her face was as stiff as the busts of Jane’s ancestors and relations in the dark wood-panelled galleries.
Imagining Lady S & S as a white marble statue made Jane swallow back another laugh. Though perhaps it was not funny; there was probably a bust of her in her home in Broughton Castle. Jane looked at Lady S & S’s silent daughter. Mother and daughter were at either end of a spectrum, one mute and supressed, the other overly vocal, with a force of nature equivalent to a gale.
Jane bit into a slice of plum cake to hide her mirth.
Mrs Leigh looked up. Jane caught her eye. She was perhaps a decade younger than Jane. Her gaze enquired things her expression did not reveal. Jane longed to sit alone with Mrs Leigh for a moment and see if she could prize thoughts from inside Mrs Leigh’s head. Jane smiled. Mrs Leigh looked away in a shy manner.
“What might we do?” Jane’s mother asked. “May we help in anyway?” She looked at Mrs Hill.
“Help,” Lady S & S barked. “There are servants here to help.”
Jane smiled at her mother, encouraging her to continue, as no one answered Lady S & S.
“The baker told me yesterday he is not only here to bake the daily bread but to brew beer. I would like to see the brewery, if I might Mrs Hill? It would be interesting to see how the beer is made.”
“Have you a mind to brew beer at Frank’s, Mother?” Jane teased, but in a steady voice so others might think her serious.
Her mother smiled and a choked sound of amusement slipped from her throat, “Perhaps I would if I thought there might be room but sadly a town house will unlikely accommodate such a hobby.”
Cassandra sent Jane a wry smile. She knew J
ane had spoken to stop Lady S & S forcing her ill-judgement on their mother over an interest she would think peculiar.
“Then we shall definitely go to watch the brewing in process,” Mrs Hill confirmed.
“The baker ought to be disciplined, not honoured with visits from guests; this bread is too dry.”
Again, no one answered Lady S & S. The women’s conversation instead joined the men’s. They were discussing the large number of hallways and staircases Stoneleigh Abbey contained.
“It is a confusing maze, I shall probably never find my way around,” Reverend Leigh said in a jocular pitch.
“That is easily solved,” Jane’s mother answered, “simply put up sign posts at the juncture of each corridor.”
Mrs Hill, Jane and Cassandra burst into laughter. Reverend Leigh smiled and nodded at the idea, as though he might apply it.
“Utter nonsense,” Lady S & S complained.
Her attitude and comments really did breach the boundary between arrogant and rude.
“If you will excuse me.” Jane set down her napkin. “I will go upstairs and change my muddy petticoats so they no longer offend, and Mother, I shall take you up on your idea and set up some signs as I pass, for you, Reverend Leigh.” Jane looked at Reverend Leigh and smiled. She could walk just as closely to rude as Lady S & S.
Reverend Leigh nodded.
Jane rose.
“I shall come with you,” Cassandra said, rising. “I am terribly bad with navigation myself, I am always getting my west muddled with my east; I shall end up in the wrong wing if I go alone.”
When Jane and Cassandra had left the room, and the second door on the opposite side of the eaves, the gap where the servants awaited requests, had been shut, Jane burst into laughter. Cassandra’s arm threaded about Jane’s as she laughed too.
“Oh, I have to think of a character that will be as pompous and egocentric as Lady Saye and Sele.”
“There must be a perfect story to encompass her, and she should be the villain,” Cassandra enthused.
“Oh, the villain! Now I am even more determined to think of a story.”
Once they were more decently dressed in the eyes of society—like Lady S & S’s—they found their way down a dozen different halls and stairs and joined their mother in the kitchens. The kitchens were in the Elizabethan wing of the abbey, and below stairs, so in actual fact it was within the ruins of the original abbey. The ceilings were all high vaulted arches curving into central pillars adorned with sculpted medieval faces and flowers. These would have been the monks’ crypts once, where perhaps they had stored precious items—or simply ale.
Jane loved the kitchens, the low gothic style ceilings and the heat of the ovens in the hearths. Those things gave the room an atmosphere she imagined having seeped into the walls for hundreds of years. It was as though the old walls stood about her with their lips closed on a million stories of sights they had seen and words they had heard.
The servants went about their business, coming and going. But it was those who were cooking that Jane and Cassandra watched with most interest, while Jane’s mother quizzed Mrs Giaaf on the running of the house, and for recipes and tips she might use herself. Then they went out to another building to watch the beer stirred, and Jane’s mother asked a dozen more questions.
Jane did not mind the slow pace of their day. She enjoyed absorbing everything here. Stoneleigh Abbey was a treasury for inspiration, her own crypt of precious things.
When they left the baker alone to continue his work, Jane’s mother walked out into the walled garden with Mrs Giaaf, still enquiring about all of Mrs Giaaf’s tasks in managing such a large house.
Jane and Cassandra followed, but once they were outside they took a different path, and left their mother to her vocal explorations while they disappeared in pursuit of more physical endeavours.
It was a beautiful sunny day, and not too hot to enjoy it. Neither of them had returned to their rooms to fetch bonnets.
They walked along a pathway with a row of lavender plants along one side, and roses on the other. The garden was for kitchen and medicinal purposes, and so Jane presumed both plants would be used for essences and flavourings. Jane’s skirt brushed against the lavender. Its strong sweet scent filled the air. The scent of the roses was more elusive. She turned and bent to smell one of the pale pink flowers; its perfume brought back memories of afternoons in the garden at Steventon.
For the last few months she had been wandering in the dark trying to reach home—now she had come home. Home was not a place. It was people. But it was more than that, it was the place her soul loved to be.
A cockerel called from the farm on the other side of the house.
Jane walked further along the path, looking at the fruit on the heavily trained apple and pear trees which lined the path ahead. At the end of it there was a wrought-iron gate.
People in Bath would have thought Jane foolish if she had told anyone how much her heart had wept for the country; there were large parks there to walk through, and plenty of walks out from the city into the fields beyond. It had never felt the same, though, to return to the enclosure of streets and high walls instead of the parsonage at Steventon, where from its windows she had looked out at the country and the life within it that fed the speculations and sillinesses which inspired Jane’s stories.
“Look!” Cassandra called. She stood before the wrought-iron gate, her fingers gripping the metal.
Jane caught up and looked through the gate. Beyond it the gravel walk disappeared into the wood. She looked at Cassandra; Cassandra’s eyes were on the woods too. It called to them both.
Male voices carried on the air behind them.
Jane turned.
Mr Hill, Mr Leigh, Reverend Leigh and Mr Butler were coming out of the house, accompanied by Mrs Leigh. It was the first time Jane had seen her cousin’s wife without the company of Lady Saye and Sele.
“Mr Butler is there a key to this gate?” Cassandra called across the garden.
He looked over and his lips curved into one of those charming smiles.
There was another paradox here among those at Stoneleigh Abbey—Lady S & S’s starchiness so close to Mr Butler’s easy, approachable and likable ways. Jane noted it, every nuance in every expression and gesture, it was all being saved up somewhere within her head, in a mental storeroom of resources.
“I do not have one on me, Miss Austen, forgive me!”
“But I have one in my room!” Reverend Leigh called. “Mr Hill gave me all the keys yesterday! It would be nice to have occasion to use them! I shall go and fetch them now!” He looked about, as if he expected congratulations for the idea, before he turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction.
The rest of the party then walked towards Jane and Cassandra. “Well met cousins!” Mr Leigh called. He had the stance of a man who believed he owned the ground he walked upon, but it was not with pride or love, but with an impression of avarice. Perhaps it truly was not only Lady S & S who had come to fight for his right to the inheritance.
Jane looked at Mr Butler. He was the man she most wished to study. He was a fascinating character. She wished to paint him in her memory as she might paint a flower in water colours with a brush, and at this stage she was looking for every slight change of light and hint of a shadow.
His walk was easier than the others, and his hand reached out so that his fingers might brush across the leaves of raspberry bushes, as though he caressed the plants. He looked like the owner of this garden too, but the sense of his ownership said he walked through his home not his property, and his affection for it hovered in his eyes. It was very clear that to Mr Butler, Stoneleigh Abbey was paradise.
Jane approved and she captured the sight in her mind, holding the emotions she saw in his expression in her memory. Though she doubted she would ever forget her hours here, every moment, whether in the house or the garden, would be recalled forever—like a dream which she had lived in reality.
�
�Miss Austen. Miss Jane.” Mr Butler bowed.
Jane smiled at him, and he smiled at her. Perhaps she had been staring too much, but he did have very nice blue eyes, as well as a charming smile. There was much to be said for a handsome pair of eyes. Jane turned to curtsey to her cousin and his wife.
Mr Leigh bowed, very slightly, as Mrs Leigh merely nodded.
“We need not wait for the key if you do not wish to, Mr Leigh,” Mr Butler stated.
Mrs Leigh’s gaze had hovered on the path as she had walked beside Mr Leigh, her fingers resting on his arm, but she looked up and turned to Mr Butler when he spoke.
Jane had met enough men with dancing eyes and easy comradery to know that any woman’s eye would be turned by a man like Mr Butler.
“How so?” Mr Leigh challenged.
The charming smile Mr Butler had, that might win a person’s trust in a moment, lifted his lips. “You are slender, and there is space enough at the side of the gate to slip through. I have done so since I was a child.”
“You played here as a child?” Jane asked, her interest peaking higher.
“My father was the steward here then.”
It was no wonder, then, that he felt pride and emotion for Stoneleigh Abbey if it had been his childhood home.
“Here, let me show you the knack of it.” With that Mr Butler gripped a bar, and then slid his body about the edge of the gate’s pillar and the wall.
Mr Leigh followed with a smile, then looked at Mrs Leigh, and lifted his hand. She looked up, but her gaze did not seek her husband; Jane saw her catch Mr Butler’s eye. She then looked at Mr Leigh, reached through the gap to grip his hand, and climbed through to join the men on the far side.
Jane glanced back at Mr Hill, but he had not come across the garden to join them. He was standing speaking with Mrs Hill, Mrs Giaaf and Jane’s mother.
“Are you coming, Miss Jane?” Mr Butler held his hand out towards the gap, as he stood on the far side.
“No, Cassandra and I shall be kind to Reverend Leigh and wait until he brings the key.”
Mr Butler actually gave her a little shrug, along with his charming smile. Jane shook her head, biting her lip on an answering smile that would tell him far too much about her thoughts.
