Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor jam-1 Read online

  Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

  ( Jane Austen Mysteries - 1 )

  Stephanie Barron

  A light-hearted mystery… The most fun is that ‘Jane Austen’ is in the middle of it, witty and logical, a foil to some of the ladies who primp, faint and swoon.

  Stephanie Barron

  Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

  Being the First Jane Austen Mystery

  This book is dedicated with love

  to the memory of Cass Sibre,

  in whose library, at the age of twelve,

  I first discovered Jane Austen.

  Editor's foreword

  IN THE SPRING OF 1995, I VISITED MY GOOD FRIENDS Paul and Lucy Westmoreland. The Westmorelands are of old Baltimore stock, tracing their lineage to a founder of the state of Maryland, and their home, Dunready Manor; dates to the Georgian period. The Westmorelands had recently completed the renovation of an outbuilding on the estate, the former overseer's house, an extensive project of rebuilding and restoration.

  Rescuing the solid stone foundation proved a formidable task. Used for decades — perhaps even more than a century — as a coal cellar, the enormous rock-lined room had to be emptied of its inky contents before being painstakingly sandblasted and lined with concrete. New support pillars were installed, new doors and stairways, and gradually the aged stone of the house's base assumed its former beauty and charm. But more important was the discovery made in the initial stages of the cellar's renovation. Beneath the hills of coal dust, rats’ bones, discarded timbers, and unidentifiable rags were several boxes of old family records. The Westmorelands placed them in a storage shed on the property and promptly forgot about them in the flurry of installing the house's new kitchen. But when I visited them that spring, we spent a rainy afternoon in the storage shed, carefully leafing through the fragile yellowed papers, and came to the conclusion that a professional curator was the only solution.

  For what we found that day was no less than an entire series of manuscripts we believed had been written by Jane Austen, a distant relative of the Westmoreland line. A daughter of Austen's brother James had married a man whose sister married a British Westmoreland — and by this circuitous route the manuscripts had made their way into the Westmoreland family and, eventually, to the branch of that family in the United States. There they were placed for safekeeping in the cellar, where later generations covered them with coal.

  The Westmorelands delivered the manuscripts for restoration to a local rare-books curator of their acquaintance and debated donating them to the Johns Hopkins University Library. Other claims — Austen collections at Paul's alma mater, Williams College, and elsewhere in the country, not to mention Oxford's Bodleian Library — competed for the gift. In the meanwhile, however, as the manuscripts were restored, they turned them over to me.

  The Westmorelands are possessed of an imaginative spirit and enjoyment of life that extends to the reading of detective fiction. And what so struck them about these manuscripts, apparently written by Austen herself, is that they recount experiences heretofore unknown to Austen scholars. Narratives in the form of journal entries and letters to her sister, Cassandra, and intended for her nieces — which perhaps explains their eventual appearance in the Westmoreland family line, united as it is to the family of James Austen's daughter — these manuscripts were never meant to be published. They are personal records of mysteries Jane Austen encountered arid solved in the course of her short life.

  I suggested that the best editor for such works would be an Austen scholar. The Westmorelands demurred. Knowing of my own interest in detective fiction and feeling that the manuscripts’ discovery was in part my own, they asked that I undertake the task of editing the notebooks for publication.

  FOR A WOMAN WHOSE WORK HAS ENDURED NEARLY TWO centuries, Jane Austen remains in large part a mystery herself. What is known of her life comes principally from her surviving letters and the memoirs of family members written after her death, from which several scholars have drawn admirable biographies. [1]

  Since many of her letters were written to her sister, Cassandra, who destroyed them after Jane's death[2], whole passages of Austen's life remain dark. The discovery of letters sent to Cassandra, along with the journal accounts I have edited here, must be considered a new window on the author's experience.

  Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, half a year after the outbreak of hostilities in the British colonies of America and at the height of the reign of His Majesty George III. The daughter of an Oxford-educated clergyman of modest means, she grew up surrounded by her six brothers and one sister in the small parsonage at Steventon, in Hampshire. Through the course of her forty-two years, France would be convulsed by revolution; Napoleon would rise to power; George III would go slowly mad, and his rule give way to the Regency of his son, George IV. It was a turbulent time in British history, in which the Tory (conservative and royalist) Austens would play no small part. Jane Austen's brother Frank, a seaman from his early adolescence, served under Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar and rose to become First Lord of the Admiralty at the age of eighty-nine; her younger brother, Charles, had a similarly distinguished, though less lofty, naval career. That Jane was aware of and compelled by questions of politics is evident in her letters to her family, and indeed in much of her more famous writing; for example, she addressed the moral turpitude of naval officers in Mansfield Park, the work she considered her most ambitious, where the themes of ecclesiastical reform and slaveholding in the Indies are also subjected to her caustic wit. That her fiction was drawn from events in her own life, or from her understanding of the experiences of others within her social set, is apparent from her reaction to events recounted in this memoir.

  The bulk of her fiction was written in its initial form when Jane was in her late teens and early twenties; she refined and finally published it during the Regency, which officially began in 1810, nearly eight years following the action of this manuscript. The Regency in England had as its counterpart the height of the Napoleonic Empire in France, and despite the ongoing state of war between the two nations, French fashions and political thought traveled across the Channel to powerfully influence English habits. Wealth and personal display were considered fashionable, and the social freedoms accorded women were somewhat greater than those they would enjoy during Victoria's reign later in the century. Dress was less modest, contact between the sexes less constrained, and the notion of a lady writing novels — or engaging in detection — was permissible according to the mores of Austen's time.

  Austen was recognized by those in her circle as a highly intelligent woman. That she often felt frustrated by the limited experience and opportunity accorded women is evident in this manuscript and elsewhere. Her father had attempted to ignore her sex in one important aspect when he sent Cassandra and Jane, then seven, to Oxford for private instruction; but Austen professed herself to be only half-educated, because she was denied the knowledge of Greek and Latin offered her brothers.

  I expect many to be shocked by the notion of Austen as detective; but it should not be surprising that a woman of her intellectual powers and perception of human nature would enjoy grappling with the puzzle presented by a criminal mind whenever it appeared in her way. Her genius for understanding the motives of others, her eye for detail, and her ear for self-expression — most of all her imaginative ability to see what might have been as well as what was — were her essential tools in exposing crime. Spending the bulk of her days in the country, where order was kept by a justice of the peace and more informally by the authority inhe
rent in the local gentry, Austen would look first to her powerful acquaintances for assistance in securing punishment for the guilty and justice for the innocent. As a single woman of modest means, she was forced to rely at times on the men in her circle, whose access to the worlds of commerce, law, and politics afforded them greater power in the cause of justice than she could attain. That they availed themselves of her intellectual ability is a testament to their good judgment.

  What follows is, as best we can judge, the first of Austen's detective adventures. It begins in December 1802, immediately following Jane's acceptance and rejection (within twenty-four hours) of Harris Bigg-Wither's proposal of marriage. She turned twenty-seven during the course of her narrative and, with her rejection of Bigg-Wither, must have faced the prospect of spinster-hood full in the face. Isobel Payne's invitation, coming at the height of what must surely have been a difficult period, provided Jane with a welcome avenue of escape. It would prove a painful time of self-reflection as well as diversion; but the narrative is remarkable for its blending of the criminal and the personal, the love of the chase and internal exploration of her own motives and dreams.

  TO EDIT AUSTEN IS DAUNTING. I DO NOT PRETEND to her skill. I only hope that the essential spirit of the original manuscripts blazes forth from these new pages, with all the power of that remarkable mind.

  Stephanie Barron

  Evergreen, Colorado

  June 1995

  Jane's Introduction

  17 March 1803

  No. 4 Sydney Place, Bath

  WHEN A YOUNG LADY OF MORE FASHION THAN MEANS has the good sense to win the affection of an older gentleman, a widower of high estate and easy circumstances, it is generally observed that the match is an intelligent one on both sides. The lady attains that position in life for which her friends may envy and congratulate her, while the gentleman wins for his advancing years all that youth, high spirits, and beauty can offer. He is declared the best, and most generous, of men; she is generally acknowledged to be an angel fully deserving of her good fortune. His maturity and worldly experience may steady her lighter impulses; her wit and gentle charms should ease the cares attendant upon his station. With patience, good humour, and delicacy on both sides, a tolerable level of happiness may be achieved.

  When, however, the older gentleman dies suddenly of a gastric complaint, leaving to his mistress of three months a considerable estate, divided between herself and his heir; and when the heir in question offends propriety with his attentions to the widow—!

  The tone of social commentary may swiftly turn spiteful.

  The deceased man's fortunes, once proclaimed as rivaling the gods’, are now all struck down. He is become to all men a figure of melancholy, a poor benighted dotard, seduced by youth and flattery where probity and good sense should better have prevailed. The lady is turned an object of suspicion rather than general pity; her mourning weeds are reviled as a mockery of propriety; her presence is not desired at the select assemblies; the solicitors burdened with the management of her affairs are much to be pitied; and scurrilous rumour circulates among the habitues of the opera box and card room.

  Her star is fallen, indeed.

  Such has been the fate of my poor Isobel. That a lady gently bred, possessed of intelligence and a discerning nature, should be so embroiled in scandal, must sober us all. None can assume that the winds of fortune shall always blow fair; indeed, the better part of our lives is spent seeking some shelter from their caprice. Women, possessed of a frailty in their virtues not accorded the stronger sex, are more surely victims of the random blast. In considering all that occurred during the fading of the year, I might be moved to rail against my Maker for suffering those least capable of bearing misfortune, to have found it so liberally bestowed. But that would be ungenerous in a clergyman's daughter, and too bitter for my spirit. I have determined instead to turn to the comforts of journal and pen, in the hope of understanding these events that marked the turning of my twenty-seventh year.

  I NEVER FEEL THAT I HAVE COMPREHENDED AN EMOTION, or fully lived even the smallest of events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved sister Cassandra. Here, then, in my little book, I may parse my way to understanding all that I have survived in recent weeks. Indeed, I have gone so far as to walk into town for the express purpose of obtaining this fresh binding of paper, in the hopes that by setting the events apart — by giving them the narrative force and order of a novel, in fact — I might bring some order to the unwonted discomposure of my mind. This story will never be offered for the public reader, even were I to transform the names and disguise the places; for to so expose to the common traffic of drawing-room and milliner's stall what must be most painful in my dear friend Isobel's life, would be rank betrayal. Better to retrieve from Cassandra the letters [3] concerning these events that I sent to her from Scargrave, and insert them between the pages of this journal. It shall live in my clothes-press, and be opened only for the edification of my dear nieces, that some knowledge of the forces which so disastrously shaped Isobel's fortune, may prove a moral guide for the conduct of their own.

  What follows then, as my journal and letters so record it, is the history of the unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor. May that unhappy abode witness more congenial hours in the coming year than those I spent during the last.

  Chapter 1

  The Passing Ball

  Journal entry, 11 December 1802,

  written in the small hours

  “WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF IT, JANE?” THE COUNTESS of Scargrave asked. Her fingers gripped my elbow painfully.

  I gazed at the recumbent form of her husband with dismay. Frederick, Lord Scargrave [4], was decidedly unwell — so unwell that I had been called to his bedside an hour before dawn, an indiscretion the Earl would never have allowed while possessed of his senses. I pulled the collar of my dressing gown closer about my neck and placed my free hand over the Countess's.

  “I believe that your husband is dying, Isobel,” I told her.

  Her fingers moved convulsively under my own, and then were still. “Dying. Were I to hear it so declared a thousand times, I still should not believe it possible.”

  I surveyed my friend with silent pity, uncertain how to answer such distress. The transformation wrought upon her husband's agonised countenance was indeed extraordinary — and had required but a few hours to effect. That very evening, the Earl had led his Countess down the dance in Scargrave's ballroom, revelling in the midst of a company come to toast the fortunes of them both. Despite his eight-and-forty years, he shone as a man blessed with second youth, elegant and lively, the very charm of his race crying out from every limb. And tho’ he had complained of dyspepsia before, this illness came upon him of a sudden — and with a violence one may hardly credit to an overfondness for claret and pudding.

  “Had he taken aught to eat or drink in the past few hours?” I asked.

  My friend shook her head. “Only a milk toddy and some sweetmeats the maid brought to him upon retiring. But I do not believe he had long consumed them before the sickness laid him prostrate.”

  The stench of the Earl's illness rose from the fouled sheets the maids would not change for fear of paining him further. His breath was caught thick within his throat, and his strength worn down by dizzyness and a violence of puking such as one usually sees under the influence of a purgative. His eyes were rolled back in drowsy oblivion, his skin was pallid, and his features were bloated. It was a trial merely to observe such suffering; to endure it must have been fearsome.

  As I watched with Isobel by his bedside, awaiting the doctor summoned in haste from London, the Earl gave forth a great moan, rose up shuddering from his sheets, and clutched his wife's hand. “Blackguards!” his shattered voice cried. “They would take me from within!” Then he fell back insensible upon his bed, and spoke no more.

  Isobel was all efficienc
y; a compress she had in a moment, and ministered to her troubled lord, and the violence of feeling that had animated his poor body but an instant before, troubled him not again.

  I am no stranger to death — I have sat watch over too many unlovely ends by the side of my clergyman father, who believes the company of a woman necessary to sustain him in the most mortal hours of his ministry — but this was a sort of dying I had never witnessed.

  A chill draught wafted through the chamber door from the great hall below. I turned my head swiftly, in hope of the doctor, and saw only Marguerite, Isobel's maid.

  “Milady,” the Creole girl whispered, her eyes stealing from her mistress's face to the more dreadful one of the Earl, “the doctor is come.” Her countenance was pale and frightened, and as I watched, she made the Papist sign of the cross hurriedly at her brow, and ducked back through the doorway.

  I cannot find it in me to scold the maid for such foolishness. She is a simple girl from Isobel's native Barbadoes, who accompanied her mistress upon Isobel's removal to England two years ago. Marguerite has sorely missed her sleep tonight — it was she who fetched me hastily before dawn to the Countess's side. But even I, a child of coldblooded England less susceptible to horrified fancy, must confess to sleeplessness these several hours past. For the Earl has uttered such moans and cries that none may shut out his agony, and all within Scargrave's walls are robbed of peace this night.

  “Lady Scargrave,” the physician said, breaking into my thoughts. He clicked his heels together and bowed in Isobel's direction. A young man, with all his urgency upon his face.