The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen

by Lindsay Ashford

  A few months later I went to stay with Jane in Southampton. I anticipated the visit with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Jane had written that Cassandra, her mother and Martha Lloyd would all be away when I arrived, so we could spend the whole week together undisturbed.

  ‘The wind from the sea makes the house rather cold, I’m afraid,’ she added, ‘but we can share my bed if you like.’ I had shared a bed many times with my cousins. The memory of Catherine and Constance laughing with me late into the night was something I cherished. But the thought of lying beside Jane was as far from that image as the moon is from the sun. I had no idea how it would feel; how it should feel.

  Jane’s bed was a wonderful tented creation of white dimity which, with the curtains drawn, reminded me of a ship in full sail. When I climbed in beside her I was trembling and, thinking I was cold, she wrapped her arms around me. I lay there very still until she said: ‘Are you asleep already?’ She tickled me and made me laugh so much I forgot to be afraid. Then we lay with our arms entwined, talking until the bell in the castle square rang two o’clock.

  The next two nights followed a similar pattern. I began to feel easy enough to stroke her hair as she stroked mine, to kiss her when we said goodnight. For that brief time I allowed myself to believe what I wanted with all my heart to be true. If what I felt inside was a sin, then I was prepared to face hell and all its demons. The words spoken by Anna at the picnic in Bath came back to me as I lay in her arms: You could have many years of heaven on earth before that.

  But on the third night, with a single sentence, Jane snuffed out that flickering hope. ‘I have loved only two men in my life.’ She was lying on her back, her profile a barely discernable silhouette in the dark space we shared. ‘The first was called Tom. He was Irish, the cousin of our friends the Lefroys. We were both twenty years old and we met at a ball in Hampshire.’

  ‘What happened?’ My question floated up to the canopy. I felt as if my soul was taking leave of my body.

  ‘We flirted outrageously.’ I could not tell if she smiled as she said it. ‘It went on for about a week, until his aunt put a stop to it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I had no money and he had a tribe of dependant sisters. They packed him off to London and I never saw him again.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh, indeed.’ I heard her give a little sigh. ‘I hear of him sometimes. He married well and had three children, I think, at the last count.’

  I hesitated a moment, trying to gauge her mood. He breathing was regular. Was she upset by this memory? Did she still yearn for this lost love? I could not tell. ‘What about the second?’ I ventured.

  ‘I met him on holiday in Sidmouth,’ she said. ‘It was the summer after we left Steventon. He was a curate and he had a brother who was a doctor. They were visiting the town together.’ She did not reveal his name and her voice told me that it still pained her to think of him. ‘We made an arrangement during the holiday,’ she said. ‘We were going to meet there again the following year.’

  I was afraid to ask what happened next. I lay there in silence, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘Papa had a letter from his brother a few weeks after we parted,’ she said at last.

  ‘What did it say?’ I held my breath.

  ‘That he was dead,’ she said simply. ‘I want no husband now.’ She reached for me in the darkness, her hand finding mine and squeezing it tight. ‘A little companionship and a dance now and then will suit me very well.’

  I kissed her cheek and found it wet with tears. I wiped them dry with the sleeve of my nightgown. Then I told her that I had never loved a man; that I had never truly thought of marriage. I did not tell her about the client of my father’s who had thrust his hand under my skirts as I reached for a book he had requested from the highest shelf; I did not describe the revulsion and self-loathing this had caused me, nor the dread it had engendered of any man’s touch. I have no doubt that such a confession would have provoked the most sincere and tender concern from Jane– but it was not her sympathy I wanted. It was clear, now, that she did not crave what I craved. If I was to keep her close, I must never, ever, give away my true feelings.

  ‘You are so wise,’ she whispered. ‘When I look about me and see what slaves most women become I think that though I will never be rich, I am happier than many. What an awful thing it must be, to await a confinement: to write those parting letters to friends and family.’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured, thinking of the letter Elizabeth had entrusted to me: the letter that had shamed me with its heartfelt expression of love and intrigued me with its postscript about Henry. I wondered if she wrote such letters anew each time a lying-in approached.

  Echoing my thoughts, Jane said: ‘I imagine that Elizabeth must have a whole cupboard full of them.’ When she uttered these words, she could not have known of the dreadful event that had occurred just hours before.

  She had informed me, upon my arrival, that Elizabeth had been safely delivered of her child, a boy, who had been named Brook-John. There was no reason to suppose that the confinement had been anything other than satisfactory and the mother was evidently recovering well. But on the fourth morning of my visit a letter arrived by express, informing us that Elizabeth had fallen violently ill after eating her evening meal and within half an hour of her collapse she was pronounced dead. She was but thirty-six years old.

  The letter had been sent by Cassandra, who had gone to Godmersham to assist with the birth. The following day we received another, which described the terrible suffering the death had wrought on the family. Edward was beside himself with grief, saying that he could not bear to attend the funeral and see his beloved wife laid in the ground. Poor Fanny was clinging to her aunt for comfort while trying to be a mother to the little ones. And then there was Henry, who had apparently arrived within twenty-four hours of Elizabeth’s death. When Jane told me this I had to look away for fear of showing my expression. How on earth could Henry have got there so quickly? It suggested that he had one of the servants in his pocket, primed to inform him of any sudden turn of events. Highly likely, I thought, if he had a personal interest in the birth of Elizabeth’s child.

  Jane’s reaction to the death of her sister-in-law, once the shock had subsided, was not quite what I expected. Evidently she was uncertain how to respond, for as we sat writing letters of condolence, she asked me for my opinion of the reply she had made to Cassandra. In it she expressed concern first of all for the children, but after just four sentences she asked if Cassandra had seen Elizabeth’s dead body. ‘I suppose you see the corpse,’ she wrote, ‘how does it appear?’ I wondered why she should ask such a thing but I did not want to make what had no doubt been a difficult task harder by querying her words. I suggested she might add a few lines in praise of her late sister-in-law, but this she rejected outright.

  ‘How can I eulogise a woman who despised me?’ she demanded. ‘That would be hypocrisy indeed!’

  In the end she added a sentence about Elizabeth’s devotion to her children. I thought she had written more than that, but when she gave it to me I saw that most of the new paragraph was about her concern for Edward, and whether or not, when it came to it, he would attend the funeral after all. Then Henry’s name caught my eye. ‘Of Henry’s anguish, I think with grief and solicitude,’ she had written, ‘but he will exert himself to be of use and comfort.’

  Anguish. With that one word she had acknowledged Henry’s special place in Elizabeth’s heart. What would become of him now, I wondered? If any of those children were his, he would certainly wish to keep up his frequent visits to Godmersham – but how painful for him, with her gone! In spite of everything that had passed between us, I could not help but feel for him.

  But it was Fanny, of course, whose feelings were uppermost in my mind. I could hardly bear to think what it must be like for her, grieving for her mother while having to put on a show of fortitude for her younger brothers and sisters. It was a mercy
Cass was there, I thought; between them, she and Sackree would get Fanny through this awfulness.

  It never occurred to Jane or to me to question what had happened to Elizabeth. There was nothing unusual about a woman dying in childbirth, even if she had come through many previous confinements without mishap. With hindsight I can see that to murder a woman in the days following her lying-in would be shockingly easy – both in the execution of the crime and its concealment. If someone had asked me at the time if Elizabeth had any enemies, anyone who hated her enough to wish her dead, only one name, I think, would have sprung to mind. And it would have been the wrong one. I have to repeat that to myself in the darkness that descends on me so often now; I have to tell myself that even if I had suspected something was not right, I could not have prevented what followed.

  Chapter Twenty

  With much regret I left Jane the next day, for she was to take charge of Edward and Elizabeth’s older boys, who were away at school in Winchester when their mother died. Her next letter told me of her very inventive ways of attempting to keep their spirits up at such a dreadful time. One afternoon, she reported, she had taken them up the river Itchen in a boat. ‘Both boys rowed a great part of the way,’ she wrote, ‘and their questions and remarks were very amusing: George’s enquiries were endless and his eagerness in everything reminds me often of his Uncle Henry.’ She had underlined the last four words.

  What was I to think of this? After two years of total silence on the subject she clearly wished to resurrect it. There was no more about Henry in that letter, though, for she launched straight into a piece of news that was to bestow boundless benefits. It seemed that Edward had suddenly decided to give his mother and sisters a permanent home on his estate in Hampshire. They were to move into the old bailiff’s cottage in the village of Chawton the following summer. This intelligence gave me even greater cause for wonder than her comment about young George. For Jane and her female relatives had been moved from pillar to post for the better part of a decade, forced to accept smaller and poorer lodgings with each advancing year. Why had Edward waited until now to give them a home of their own? I had a feeling that Elizabeth had stopped him; that her dislike of Jane had led her to talk Edward out of doing what he could so easily have done when their father died. It seemed both petty and mean but I could think of no other explanation for this act of generosity coming so swiftly after her death.

  To say that Jane was happy is an understatement. The pretty house with its view of all the comings and goings at the coaching inn across the street was the perfect place for her: the place in which she truly blossomed as a writer. Nothing had been said of the novels Henry had hinted at and I had begun to wonder if he had lied to me that day at the White Hart, but within two years of the move a signed copy of her first published book, Sense and Sensibility, arrived at the Bourne, much to the excitement of Mrs Raike and Rebecca.

  I remember unwrapping it and running my fingers over the smooth skin of its spine; breathing in the aroma of new leather and printer’s ink. It triggered a strange mix of emotions. There was the elation at Jane’s achievement and a thrilling sense of anticipation of what the pages held. But there was also a pang of envy, for this book was a stark reminder of my own buried dreams.

  Determined to banish such an unworthy sentiment, I plunged into the world of the Dashwoods. How I smiled when I encountered the character called Fanny, for she behaved in a way that reminded me very much of Martha Lloyd’s description of her sister: Fanny Dashwood’s meanness over the china at Norland mirrored what had happened when Jane and Cass had to quit the rectory at Steventon. This, I thought, is Jane’s revenge on Mary.

  We celebrated in great style when I visited Chawton that year, with several bottles of Martha’s elderberry wine. I did not have the bitterweet pleasure of sharing Jane’s bed, as she and Cassandra occupied the same room. I was put in Martha’s room, as she was away from home, and we spent the better part of each night in there. During the early part of the evening we would read Jane’s book aloud to each other or discuss the next one to be published. She confirmed what Henry had already let out: that she had written three novels before she turned thirty. The third one had been accepted for publication with a small advance paid, but four years on had still not appeared in print. Weary of waiting, she had revised her first novel and sent it to another publisher. This, I assumed, was the client Henry had told me about.

  Jane was just beginning to write Mansfield Park when tragedy struck her family again. This time it was her cousin Eliza. The death was painful and lingering. She was thought to be suffering from the same condition that killed her mother, but the doctors could not be certain. Jane was with her when she died. She sent me a long letter from Henry’s London home.

  ‘Eliza has died after a long and terrible illness,’ she wrote. ‘Henry long knew she must die and it was indeed a release at last.’ She described the great sorrow of Madame Bigeon and her daughter, who had become like family to Eliza. But of Henry she said: ‘His mind is not a mind for affliction. He is too busy, too active, too sanguine. Sincerely as he was attached to poor Eliza he was always so used to being away from her that her loss is not felt as that of many a beloved wife might be.’

  What a sad epitaph for the vivacious dark-eyed beauty who had dazzled the salons of Paris and London. What would Henry do now? He was forty-two years old and free to marry again – unless, of course, he chose to pursue another married woman. It occurred to me that for Henry, forbidden fruit was very likely the sweetest. Those long years of intrigue with Elizabeth must have left their mark. Such a man would no doubt be partial to the thrill of subterfuge.

  When Jane sent me Mansfield Park I was quite amazed by her boldness. Henry and Mary Crawford were the very essence of Henry Austen and his late wife. The character of Henry Crawford, with his good looks and charming, devious ways, was unmistakable, as was the lively, dark-eyed Mary, who was so like Eliza that she even played the harp. Was this how Jane had perceived the Henry Austens’ marriage, I wondered? Something more akin to a brother and sister, both free to pursue others while residing under the same roof?

  I could not help spotting another familiar character on the pages of the new book: Maria Bertram put me very much in mind of Elizabeth Austen. She was the beautiful, self-regarding daughter of a baronet and Jane had even gone as far as to give her a surname that began with the same initial as Elizabeth’s maiden name. I thought I perceived some further, more subtle trickery in the use of two names so very similar – Maria and Mary – which echoed Henry Austen’s involvement with two women who bore the same Christian name.

  I have mentioned before that I believe Mansfield Park was a channel for Jane’s suppressed rage at her brother’s behaviour. Watching her cousin die could only have inflamed her anger, and yet she could not hate Henry; on the contrary, she found it impossible not to go on loving him as she had always loved him. And so she meted out imaginary justice on the pages of her novel. Let Henry Crawford be exposed as the wicked seducer of a married woman; let Maria Bertram be cast out from respectable society for betraying her husband. For in fiction the righteous must triumph and sinners always get their just deserts.

  Jane’s letters reported that the real Henry continued to live a gilded life, although there were some who proved impervious to his charm. A few weeks into his widowhood he went to see Warren Hastings. It seemed that the extravagant lifestyle led by Henry and his wife had left him in a precarious state. Jane wrote that he had already tried – and failed – to claim back the lands that had once belonged to Eliza’s late husband, the Comte de Feullide. Now his only hope was to discover whether Mr Hastings had made a will in Eliza’s favour and, that being the case, whether the money would revert to him on the old man’s death.

  It seemed that Henry had used Jane’s books as a pretext for the visit, for she reported her delight at the comments she received about Pride and Prejudice.

  ‘Henry has told Mr Hastings who wrote it, even though it was supp
osed to be a secret,’ she wrote, ‘but I am quite delighted with what such a man writes about it. His admiring my Elizabeth so much is particularly welcome to me.’ The next paragraph made it clear that Henry’s thinly disguised strategy had failed: ‘Mr Hastings never hinted at Eliza in the smallest degree.’ The underlining spoke volumes. Apparently, Warren Hastings was not going to acknowledge Eliza as his natural daughter, which meant there was unlikely to be any will in her favour. Henry’s hopes of the golden goose were come to nought.

  Remembering the questions the old gentleman had asked as we danced in Bath, I wondered if he had since gleaned some intelligence that had fixed his opinion of Henry. Had Warren Hastings read Mansfield Park? No one acquainted with Henry and Eliza could fail to recognise them in the personages of Henry and Mary Crawford. Had Jane’s book revealed more of Henry Austen than Mr Hastings had been able to stomach? If Eliza really was his daughter, it was not difficult to imagine how such a revelation would make him feel – especially if his money had made Henry the gentleman-about-town he could never otherwise have been.

  As Jane’s star climbed ever higher, Henry’s was about to fall from the firmament. The autumn of eighteen-fifteen was Henry’s final season as a man of wealth and distinction. It was also the last time I saw my dearest Jane alive.

  Chapter Twenty-­One

  I made the journey to Jane’s village in the last week of September, having left Mrs Raike in London at the home of her cousin in Cheyne Walk. There was not much to see as the mail coach crossed the border into Hampshire, for a veil of low cloud hung over the trees and hedgerows, blurring the autumn colours. The horses slowed to walking pace as we drew near to Chawton. The Winchester road was a mess of mud and fallen leaves and a mizzle of rain had turned the roofs of the houses a darker shade of gold. Jane was at her usual post in the front parlour, where she was making some alterations to Emma. She spied me through the window and came running out of the cottage as I stepped down.