Jane and the Wandering Eye: Being the Third Jane Austen Mystery

by Stephanie Barron

  “Indeed, I have never found Lord Harold disreputable” I faltered, with a sudden colour in my cheeks.

  “But his behavior towards your friend the Countess was hardly honourable. I read the accounts of that notorious trial, you know. The papers wrote of little else that winter.”

  “Both Isobel and her present husband were acquitted by the House of Lords.” Impatiently, I thrust my mask in my reticule. “What was possible to proclaim to the public, of the sad business at Scargrave, and what of necessity remained closed to the general understanding, I am hardly at liberty to reveal. But I may freely assure you, Madam, that Lord Harold Trowbridge acted then in a manner that has fully won my respect and esteem.”11

  “I am heartily glad to hear it,” Madam Lefroy replied, “for I should not like to be uneasy about my dear Jane’s associations, at such a remove from Bath. I may well rejoice at the delay that has provided an occasion for finding you amidst the very best society this town may offer, however Whiggish its aspect. Is Lord Harold present, Jane?” Her head turned swiftly about the supper-room. “I quite long to make his acquaintance.”

  “I do not believe that he is. Business in Town, I understand, has detained him.”

  “A pity. I might almost have prolonged my stay in Bath on the hope of meeting with him.”

  “Prolong your visit for any whim, I beg. If the prospect of Lord Harold may serve to keep you by my side, I shall summon him from the ends of the earth!”

  “I require no very great inducement,” Madam replied with a smile. “There is so much of the diverting to be found in Bath! I might almost believe myself returned to Kent, and the days of my girlhood, when the Dowager Duchess presided at Fairlawn! The present Duchess entertains only rarely, you know—and her circle is hardly so lively as Eugenie’s.”

  I drew Madam Lefroy towards a pair of chairs just then returned to liberty. “You have enjoyed a singular intimacy with the Dowager, I collect.”

  “She is some years my senior, of course—but her warmth must always transcend age or station. A great many changes have occurred since first we called one another by our Christian names. How gay we all were, when the late Duke was alive, and all the world came to Kent!”

  My friend’s voice held a familiar note of regret. Anne Lefroy may be many years a clergyman’s wife, but she has not forgot the brilliance of her father’s house, or the elegant society of Canterbury in the days of her youth. She married late, and only, it is whispered, after a grave disappointment in her first attachment; and has suffered the remainder of her days in the retirement of a Hampshire village. She retains as yet the beauty that marked her youth—the fineness of bone and brilliancy of complexion that so transported Gainsborough—and hungers still for the best of the Fashionable World: stimulating conversation and the elegance of a select acquaintance. Indeed, it is her air of the great lady that inspired the affectionate title of Madam.

  “The sight of so many ravishing young gentlemen and ladies, all accomplished in the theatrical line, must recall the days of Eugenie’s youth,” she continued, as she glanced about the throng.

  “Had you occasion to see her play?”

  “I? Good Lord, no—I was barely out of leading-strings when Her Grace quitted the boards forever. But as a girl of sixteen I was privileged to participate in amateur theatricals, at Fairlawn of a Christmastide—Wilborough maintained a private theatre, you know, for his lady’s use—and all manner of personages were wont to parade in pantomime, for the amusement of Her Grace’s guests. The young Sarah Siddons and her brother Kemble, and the elder Conynghams, were summoned one year as I recall—and very prettily they played it, too, though not yet attaining the excellence of their London years.”

  I looked for the Medusa in scarlet, and the corpulent Henry VIII, and found them in animated conversation with Pierrot. “I did not know you were acquainted with the Conynghams.”

  “I cannot claim the honour, my dear, though Her Grace was so good as to introduce them to my society. They were not even thought of, when I enjoyed the art of their parents—and their parents are many years deceased.”

  “How melancholy to consider of it!”

  “Age will advance upon one,” Madam observed with a sigh, “though I must remark that Her Grace seems to keep its deprivations at bay! How very well she looks, to be sure! And the Conynghams appear to have survived their early loss. Mrs. Siddons had the raising of them, I believe. They were of an age to be thrown together with her children—she possesses no less than five, like myself—and I cannot think but that they do her credit.”

  “With such a rearing, it should be marvellous indeed did the Conynghams abhor the stage.”

  “They were bred to the boards, as they say in theatrical circles. Miss Conyngham was educated in France, in company with the Miss Siddonses; and her brother, Hugh, was sent to the same college as the Kemble gentlemen patronised—a religious school somewhere in Flanders.12 Mr. Conyngham would be about the same age as Mr. Charles Kemble, the Siddons girls’ uncle, and both are Papists, you know.”

  “I was not aware,” I replied. “And do the Conynghams look to the Siddons family to patronise their careers? Mr. John Philip Kemble is presently the manager of Covent Garden, I believe—and might do much for his friends.”

  “There has been a little coolness in their relations, it seems,” said Madam Lefroy, “owing to an unfortunate love affair. Hugh Conyngham was excessively attached to the younger Miss Siddons, and thought to have married her; but the lady turned her affections elsewhere, and he has not yet got over the disappointment. However, she was of a sickly constitution, and passed away some years since.”

  “How tragic!”

  Our exchange was broken by the clang of a gong—we turned as one, and perceived once more the Dowager.

  Her Grace had got rid of the offending White Harlequin somewhere, and now leaned on her cane at the head of the drawingroom, as if on the point of speech. Lady Desdemona, seeming quite recovered in spirits, stood once again by her grandmother’s side. At the Dowager’s other hand was Henry VIII—or the actor Hugh Conyngham—possessed of his usual dignity. The entire rout fell silent.

  “Dear guests and fellow devotees of the theatre,” Eugenie said, the faintest suggestion of France in her guttural tone and tender way with consonants, “the artistes of the Theatre Royal have honoured us tonight with their presence. It is my noble office to present the celebrated Mr. Hugh Conyngham, who will speak a short passage from Macbeth for our enjoyment. Mr. Conyngham.”

  “Your Grace,” the gentleman replied, with the most elegant sweep of his hand, and the deepest of bows, “I am honoured to be of service.” And with that simple acknowledgement, he fixed his gaze upon the decorative plaster of the ceiling, his aspect at once become sorrowful, brooding, contemplative, and tortured by turns.

  My heart, I confess, gave way to a painful beating; I felt the impertinent blood rise swiftly to my cheeks; and was glad for the support of a chair. Macbeth, as Conyngham plays him, is the very soul of tragedy; and I am but too susceptible to its power.

  “If it were done,” HE BEGAN, IN THE HUSHED TONE AND SLOW pace appropriate to murderous thought, turning before our eyes like a cage’d tiger—

  “when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well

  It were done quickly. If th’ assassination

  Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

  With his surcease, success; that but this blow—”

  (Here, a swiftly upraised hand, a clenching fist, the agony of indecision in his aspect.)

  “Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

  But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

  We’ld jump the life to come. But in these cases

  We still have judgment here, that we but teach

  Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

  To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice

  Commends th’ ingredience of our poison’d chalice

  To our own lips. He’s here
in double trust:

  First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,”

  (The nobility of his consciousness! The foulness of his thought!)

  “Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

  Who should against his murtherer shut the door,

  Not bear the knife myself Besides, this Duncan

  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

  So clear in his great office, that his virtues

  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against

  The deep damnation of his taking-off;

  And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

  Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, hors’d

  Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

  Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

  That tears shall drown the wind.”

  (A long declining wail, as though uttered from within a tomb.)

  “I have no spur

  To prick the sides of my intent, but only

  Vaulting ambition, which o’verleaps itself,

  And falls on th’ other—”

  The last words, whispered and yet utterly distinct, came like the gentle slip of leaves from a November bough; and his lips had scarcely ceased to move, when the applause that was his due rang forth in strenuous tumult. Every throat swelled with praise, and the madness of cheering all but blotted out Hugh Conyngham’s gentler thanks. The actor’s brilliant eye, and the fever of his cheek, spoke with firmer eloquence, however; and I read in his looks a grateful understanding. For such an one, as yet so young in the life of the stage—for he can be but thirty—to take his place among the Garricks and the Kembles, if only in the estimation as yet of Bath, must seem like glory, indeed.

  The cheering did not cease; the clapping hands acquired a measured beat; and it seemed as though Hugh Conyngham must bow to the desire of the guests, and speak on—when the tenor of the hoarsest cries declined by an octave, and gained a sudden accent of horror and dismay. The acutest attention o’erspread the actor’s face; the crowd’s mood changed as perceptibly as though an icy draught had blown out the blazing fire—and I turned, to perceive a stumbling knot of bodies caught in an anteroom doorway.

  “I fear some part of the Duchess’s acquaintance are but too disguised in truth,”13 I said to Anne Lefroy. “We had best make our adieux, and summon the chairs, before this rout turns to a riot.”

  “Nonsense. It is nothing but a bit of theatre—the stabbing of Duncan, I suspect.” She stepped towards the anteroom with the others, and protesting, I followed.

  Craning on tip-toe, the better to discern the man who had stolen Hugh Conyngham’s scene, I comprehended a small salon to one side of the massive drawingroom, done up in Prussian blue picked out with gold. Its double doors were thrown wide and obscured by a press of bodies. The late Duke’s reception room?—Or perhaps a study? But all such observations were fleeting, for my eyes were fixed on one alone—the mettlesome Knight, my erstwhile dance partner. He strained in the grip of two stout fellows, and his reddened countenance worked in horror.

  At his feet lay the White Harlequin.

  The face still wore its mask, but behind the lozenge of velvet the eyes were sightless and staring. Blood pooled slowly on the Duchess’s Savonnerie carpet, as though the man called Portal had wished to exchange his white-patterned stuff for the rival Harlequin’s red.

  I raised one hand to my lips to stifle a scream, and with the other, gripped Madam Lefroy’s arm. She tensed beneath my fingers.

  A woman brushed past me with a flash of black curls, and fell in supplication at the Harlequin’s feet. The Medusa, Maria Conyngham. With shaking fingers she snatched at the dead man’s mask. “Richard! Oh, Richard!”

  The voice of a bereaved mother, or an abandoned wife—the soul of a woman destroyed by grief. The crowd parted to admit Hugh Conyngham to the hushed circle, and he knelt at his sister’s side.

  “Dead!” she cried, and fell weeping on his breast.

  “Kinny?”

  The voice, clear and sweet as a child’s, was the Lady Desdemona’s. She stood just behind Hugh Conyngham, on the edge of the crowd. The pallor of her face was extreme. But in her composure and the intensity of her dark grey eyes I saw something of the fierce Trowbridge will. Without even a look for the murdered Harlequin, she crossed to the Knight.

  “Kinny, what have you done?”

  “Nothing, Mona! I swear it! I found him just as you see!”

  “Then show me what is in your hand!”

  Her brother started, and released the thing, which fell clattering to the parquet floor—a bloody knife, chased in gold, as curved and deadly as a scimitar.

  1 In Austen’s day, it was the custom to travel about the streets of Bath and other major cities in hired sedan chairs carried by a man fore and aft.—Editor’s note.

  2 Eliza de Feuillide was both Jane Austen’s cousin and the wife of her brother Henry, but Jane usually refers to Eliza simply as her sister. It was a convention of the time to address relatives acquired through marriage in the same manner as blood relations.—Editor’s note.

  3 Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) was the foremost tragic actress of Austen’s day. With her brother, John Philip Kemble, Siddons dominated the London stage at this time, where it is probable Jane had seen her perform.—Editor’s note.

  4 Robert Adam’s renovation of Old Drury Lane Theatre in 1775 featured pale green and pink paint with bronze detailing—which the Dowager Duchess apparently emulated. Old Drury was pulled down and replaced by a newer building in 1794. This building burned to the ground in 1809.—Editor’s note.

  5 This was the original Bath theater on Orchard Street, where Jane was a frequent patron. Its company divided performances between Bath and Bristol, playing houses in each city on alternate nights—Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in Bath; Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in Bristol.—Editor’s note.

  6 Elizabeth Farren was a member of the Drury Lane company during the 1780s and the recognized mistress of the Earl of Derby, who made her his second countess at his first wife’s death in 1797.—Editor’s note.

  7 James Gillray (1757-1815) was the foremost political caricaturist of Austen’s day. His satiric prints began to make their appearance in the 1780s. The aquatint engravings generally made sport of fashionable scandals or political missteps, much as do present-day political cartoons.

  8 These were the government’s public funds, one of the few reliable investments in Austen’s day, which generally yielded annuities of four percent per annum.—Editor’s note.

  9 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the noted Georgian playwright of The School for Scandal and owner of the Drury Lane Theatre, was also a member of Parliament. Sheridan first came to Jane’s notice in 1787, when he made a four-day speech against her family’s friend Warren Hastings, the former Governor-General of Bengal, during Hastings’s seven-year parliamentary trial for impeachment.—Editor’s note.

  10 The Pump Room was one of the social centers of Bath. It adjoined the King’s Baths, near the Abbey and Colonnade in the heart of the city, and was frequented by the fashionable every afternoon. There they would congregate to drink a glass of medicinal spring water presented by liveried pump attendants; to promenade among their acquaintance; and to peruse the calf-bound volume in which recent arrivals to the city inscribed their names and local addresses. Austen describes the Pump Room to perfection in Northanger Abbey, in which Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe make the place their second home.—Editor’s note.

  11 Jane refers here to the events related in the first volume of her edited journals, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (New York: Bantam Books, 1996).—Editor’s note.

  12 John Philip and Charles Kemble both attended a Roman Catholic college in Douay, Flanders. Their father was Catholic, their mother Protestant, and according to custom the sons were reared in their father’s faith while Sarah Siddons was raised in her mother’s.—Editor’s note.

  13 To be “disguised” in
Austen’s day was to be quite thoroughly drunk.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 2

  Wilberforce Elliot Pays a Call

  12 December 1804, cont.

  ~

  THE UPROAR OF THE ASSEMBLED GUESTS WAS SWIFT AND sudden. The Dowager Duchess of Wilborough screamed, the Knight was wrestled into a chair, and not a few of the guests made swiftly for the door—being disinclined, one supposes, to a meeting with the constables that evening, and all the tedium it should require.

  For my part, I had not the slightest hesitation in remaining. The murder of the White Harlequin had rendered Lord Harold’s business irrelevant; but he should assuredly be summoned now from London, and my observation of all in the Wilborough household should be as gold. My thoughts were suddenly diverted, however, by Anne Lefroy’s seeking a chair, her pallor extreme. Madam can never rely upon a physical courage in the face of blood, and I feared she should faint. Where were Henry and Eliza? A swift glance for a tower of birds’ nests and ship models—and I waved my sister to my side.

  “Do you look to Madam Lefroy,” I enjoined, “while I attend to the murder.”

  “But of course.” Eliza was all efficiency. “Henry! A glass of water, if you please—or better yet, brandy! And quickly!”

  I returned to the anteroom doorway, and there found the Knight in the midst of an outburst.

  “But do observe the open window! I assure you, whoever committed this dreadful deed has jumped to the paving below! Quickly, Jenkins—to the street, or he shall escape us entirely!”

  The man Jenkins hesitated, bewildered, and glanced to the Dowager Duchess.

  “Go, go—and take Samuel with you!” she urged him. The footman dashed for the stairs.

  The massive Moor, his face blackened with burnt cork and his turban formed of a lady’s cashmere shawl, pushed his way to the fore of the pitiful scene.

  “My name is Gibbs,” he said, “and I have the honour to act as Her Grace’s physician. I must be permitted to examine the gentleman.”

  “It is Mr. Richard Portal,” Maria Conyngham told the doctor. She was weeping still, but struggled for composure. “He is our company’s manager. Your physick will avail him nothing, however. The knife blade found his heart.”