Jane and His Lordship's Legacy jam-8 Read online

  I could say little as he turned away, my throat constricted by tears; he has buried the carefree gentleman of Fashion, and we shall not see that ghost again.

  A rough young voice disturbed my reverie.

  “Are you the Squire’s lady?”

  I peered through the open doorway into the sunlit afternoon and espied a boy, of perhaps thirteen years, standing at the pony’s head. He was sharp-eyed, brown as a guinea hen, and wiry of limb. Tho’ his nankeen trousers were worn, they had been neatly patched. I judged him to hail from the yeoman class of Edward’s tenants.

  “I am Miss Austen,” I supplied, “and the Squire is my brother. My mother and I are come to take up residence in this house. What is your name, young sir?”

  “Toby Baigent,” he returned promptly, “from Symond’s Farm.” One careless hand gestured somewhere west, beyond my ken; I had not yet acquired the necessary knowledge of Chawton village to be able to reply with authority. “We heard you were expected, from Dyer’s folk. They’ve been working hard days a fortnight or more, now.”

  These words I interpreted as a reference to Mr. John Dyer, of Ivy House in Alton, a builder whose men were responsible for the blocked window and new privy so admired by my mother. “And we are very grateful for their labour,” I said. Toby Baigent spat indecorously in the dust. “Labour wasted, so my pa says. You’ll be leaving soon enough.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Reckon you’ll be cursed, in a house not rightfully your own.”

  “That’s enough, young Baigent,” said Joseph, our driver, with a lowering expression on his brow. “Be off with ye, before I find a better use for my whip, and tan your hide.”

  The boy smoothed the pony’s nose, his eyes fixed on the mane between the beast’s ears, then lounged his way down the street without a word.

  “Don’t you pay no heed to that young chuff,” Joseph advised me, his gaze following the boy’s thin form as he ambled towards his home, big with news. “He’s got more mouth than mind, as they say.”

  “What did he mean when he said this house was not rightfully ours?”

  “Speaking where he ought not, mum,” the driver replied; but he did not meet my gaze as he reached for my mother’s heavy trunk, and hoisted it with a grunt to his back. “Every folk knows as how the houses hereabouts, aye, and much of the land, too, belong to Mr. Austen. Where would you see the trunk stowed, then?”

  “The bedchamber at the head of the stairs.” I stepped aside to allow him passage. “The boy suggested we should be cursed. Decidedly strong language, Joseph. Particularly for a child of his years.”

  “P’raps he’s had it from the father.”

  “Is Farmer Baigent disposed to contest our right to the cottage?”

  The man persisted in studying his boots. “There’s been a bit o’ feeling, like, about Widow Seward.”

  “—who quitted her home to make way for us. But surely she was accommodated elsewhere in the village?”

  “Mrs. Seward’s gone to live with her daughter, Mrs. Baverstock, in Alton.” Another vague gesture, this time to the east. “It were a sad day when Mr. Seward died, mum. This house to be given up, and the tenancy of Pound Farm — which the Sewards’ve held for donkey’s years — made over to that new man, Mr. Wickham. The Baigents in particular don’t hold with Mr. Wickham, mum. They’d thought to lease Pound Farm themselves. Adjoins their property, like, at Symond’s Farm.”

  “I see. But my brother settled his affairs in favour of Mr. Wickham, no doubt for excellent reasons of his own. And is the animosity towards ourselves quite general throughout the village?”

  “I’m an Alton man,” Joseph returned with some asperity,

  “and can’t speak for those as live in Chawton. I did ought to be getting back to Mr. Barlow, if you take my meaning, once these bits of baggage are stowed.”

  I took his meaning; he did not wish to stand gossiping in the street with a relative stranger, under the scrutiny of his intimates and neighbours. It would require more than a protracted stay at the George to command Joseph’s loyalty.

  “The second trunk, and the two brown bandboxes belonging to myself, are to be placed in the room down the hallway on the left.”

  “Very good, mum.” He bent slightly under the strain of my mother’s things, and made his strenuous way into the house. I confess I did not waste a great deal of time in revolving the grievances of the local folk during the ensuing hour, as I dusted china and aired linens. There were beds to be made up, foodstuffs to be stored, the Pembroke table to be positioned in a number of places, none of which pleased my mother; and our small treasure of books to be unpacked and placed upon the shelf. I may perhaps have considered with exasperation that security in his own position, in the essential rightness of his ideas, that had preserved my brother’s complacency on the subject of his tenants, and prevented him from imparting a warning as to the sort of reception we might expect here; but I thought it very likely Neddie had been too distracted by private concerns — by the well of grief into which he continually dipped — to spare any thought for the villagers. Not arrogance, but absence of mind, was surely accountable for my brother’s lapse.

  “Well, Jane,” said my mother as she entered the front passage, “here is our neighbour, Mr. Prowting, come to offer his services; but I have assured him there is not the slightest need to put himself out — Jane will have everything in hand, I told him, being a clever girl and decidedly capable when she sets her mind to it, though not so efficient in the domestic line as her elder sister, being no hand at all in the stillroom. Make your courtesy to Mr. Prowting, my dear. My younger daughter — Miss Jane Austen.”

  Mr. Prowting was a man of some means — one of Chawton’s dignitaries, in the commission of the peace of the county as well as its Deputy Lieutenant.[2] He was a grey-haired, portly, and rather carelessly-dressed gentleman of middle age, beaming all his benevolence.

  I dropped a curtsey and said, “I have heard much of you, Mr. Prowting, from my brother Mr. Austen. You are our nearest neighbour, I collect.”

  “Indeed, indeed — our home is but a stone’s toss from your doorstep, my dear Miss Austen, and easily accessible by a stile in the adjoining meadow.”

  I could not have avoided a glimpse of Prowtings, as the house was called, had I wished it; the place was a fine, modern building of substantial size on the same side of the Gosport road as our own, but happier in its situation, being set back a good distance from the carriage-way. Their beds should not be shaken in the dead of night by the passage of the London coach-and-six, as I imagined our own should be.

  “Mrs. Prowting and my daughters, Catherine-Ann and AnnMary, would, I am sure, have joined me in this brief visit of welcome,” he said, “but that the latter is practising upon the pianoforte, and the former is lying down with the head-ache. The heat of July, you know, is quite a trial to young ladies prone to the head-ache.”

  “So I understand. Tho’ increasing age, I might add, is no preservative against the malady.” I was too well acquainted with my mother’s imagined sufferings whenever heat, or cold, or too much of both, should disoblige her expectations and send her reeling to her bed.

  “Mrs. Prowting wished me to convey her compliments,” he said with a bow, “and desires me to press you most earnestly to join us for dinner this evening at Prowtings. You need not make yourselves anxious on the subject of dress; we are all easy in Chawton, Mrs. Austen, with no unbecoming formality.”

  “Thank you most kindly,” my mother replied. “We should be very happy to accept your invitation.”

  I was about to add my thanks to hers when the sound of an equipage drawing up in the street outside our door claimed all our notice. Mr. Prowting turned, as though in expectation of espying a neighbour come upon a similar errand of civility; but I understood instantly from his expression that the person now alighting from the chaise-and-four was a stranger even to him. A spare, stooped, ancient man, dressed all in black and grim of expression, hob
bled forward as though a martyr to dyspepsia. The newcomer wore a tricorn hat and supported his infirmities with a beautifully-carved walking-stick of ebony and gold, which stabbed at the pavings of our walkway with such vehemence that I almost expected sparks to fly from its tip.

  He was followed by two lackeys in a livery of primrose and black, bearing between them a massive wooden chest bound with silver hasps. The chest’s aspect was arresting: it was carved and painted with curious figures that were hardly native to England. It was clear that the party’s object was our cottage, but what their purpose might be in seeking it, I had not the least idea.

  “Good day to you, sir,” Mr. Prowting said in the peremptory tone of one who has served as magistrate.

  The gentleman in the tricorn lifted up his gaze, a withering look of contempt on his countenance. He did not deign to return Mr. Prowting’s salutation, nor did he waste another instant in surveying his figure. He merely turned his eyes upon my mother and myself, came to a halt at our doorstep, and lifted his hat with extreme care from the exquisitely-powdered wig that adorned his head.

  “Have I the honour of addressing the Austen household?”

  “You do, sir,” said my mother doubtfully. “I am Mrs. George Austen.”

  “My compliments, ma’am,” he replied, “but I need not disturb you further. It is Miss Jane Austen I seek. Is she at leisure to receive me?”

  Chapter 3

  A Contested Provision

  4 July 1809, cont.

  “I am Miss Austen,” I answered, in some bewilderment.

  “Bartholomew Chizzlewit, of Lincoln’s Inn, at your service, ma’am.”[3] The elderly gentleman bowed low. “I must beg the indulgence of perhaps half an hour of your time, on a pressing matter of business that has already been delayed some months.”

  “A matter of business, sir?” I repeated. I could claim no business in the world, save the arrangement of domestic affairs too inconsequential to be of concern to such a man.

  “Indeed. A matter of so delicate a nature, ma’am, that I must demand complete and uninterrupted privacy” — at this, his gaze shifted narrowly to my mother’s countenance — “for the discharging of my trust.”

  An instant of silence followed this declaration, as my mother attempted to make sense of it and I considered the disorder of unpacking that was everywhere evident within the cottage. How was I to even attempt a tête-à-tête?

  “I am putting up at the Swan in Alton,” the attorney added firmly, consulting a pocket watch, “and have ordered my dinner for precisely six o’clock. If you find you are unable to accommodate me today, Miss Austen, I must beg you to wait upon me in Alton tomorrow morning, well in advance of my intended departure for London, which I anticipate occurring at ten o’clock. I may add that I am unaccustomed to brooking delay.”

  “Extraordinary behaviour!” Mr. Prowting exclaimed. “You can have not the slightest pretension to these ladies’ consideration, sirrah, much less the freedom to demand the terms of your admittance to their household.”

  “Sir,” Chizzlewit declared in a voice rich with contempt, “I neither know nor care whom you might be, but I must emphatically state that a man of your obviously rustic experience and modest station can claim no influence with the representative of the noble and most puissant house of His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, whose forebears and heirs I have had the honour to serve as solicitor these sixty years and more.”

  “Wilborough?” my mother cried in startled accents. “Good Lord, Jane — has the Rogue left you something after all? I should not have believed it possible! That a gentleman — even one of Lord Harold’s unsavoury reputation — should offer the insult of monetary consideration to one whose reputation he has already sullied beyond repair—”

  “Mamma,” I said firmly, “I believe I should receive Mr. Chizzlewit and learn the burden of his news. I shall require the use of the dining parlour for an interval. You might walk in the direction of the Great House before dinner — and observe whether the tenant, Mr. Middleton, is entirely worthy of my brother’s trust.”

  “But my dear Miss Austen—” Mr. Prowting protested. “A young lady of your sensibility—”

  “I am nearly four-and-thirty years of age, good sir, and feel not the slightest anxiety at receiving so respectable a person as Mr. Chizzlewit. Would you be very good — and attend my mother on her walk?”

  If the servant of the noble and most puissant house of Wilborough was dismayed by the surroundings in which he presently found himself, he did not betray his discomfiture. I seated myself on one of my mother’s straight-backed chairs and waited while Mr. Chizzlewit disposed himself in another. With a wordless gesture of his right hand, he had ordered his minions to follow him; they set the curiously-carved chest on the dining-parlour floor and then retreated impassively to await their master’s pleasure.

  “I have it on the very best authority, Miss Austen, that your understanding is excellent,” he began, “and therefore I shall not sport with your patience. Under the terms of the late Lord Harold Trowbridge’s Last Will and Testament, written by his lordship on the third of November last and witnessed by one Jeb Hawkins, Able Seaman, and one Josiah Fortescue, publican” — Chizzlewit’s distaste for such witnesses was evident — “you have been named as the legatee of a rather extraordinary bequest.”

  I felt my countenance change, my visage flush. I knew all the circumstances under which that testament had been written: the third of November, 1808, the very day before Lord Harold’s aborted duel with a young American by the name of James Ord. The former had opened his box of matched pistols — made to his specifications by no less a master than Manton in London — and affected to practise with wafers and playing cards in the courtyard of the Dolphin Inn. His aspect had been brutal that morning, and it had not changed when I pled for the young man’s life. It was Lord Harold’s I secretly hoped to save; but he had ridiculed me — and put one of the pistols into my hands. He would have challenged my shrinking, and sought to determine whether I could stomach his way of life. Had he drawn up his Will before that hour, or much later?

  Impossible to say.

  “What can his lordship have wished to bequeath to me?” I enquired in a subdued tone. “I am wholly unconnected with his family.”

  “—As has been vociferously pointed out by His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, Her Grace the Duchess, the Marquis of Kinsfell, and indeed, Desdemona, Countess of Swithin, all of whom seem convinced that Lord Harold’s wits were sadly deranged when he penned the document.” Chizzlewit studied me with a shrewd expression, his ancient lips pursed. “I may frankly assure you, Miss Austen, that his lordship has been frequently drawing up his Will, as necessity and the perils to which he was exposed demanded it. That this document supersedes and governs any previous form is indisputable, as I repeatedly assured His Grace. My commission as solicitor and executor of his lordship’s estate should have been long since carried out, to the satisfaction of all parties, had not the Wilborough family protested this legacy.”

  Another lady might have been humbled by a sense of shame and mortification; I confess I felt only indignant. “And what is his lordship’s family, pray, that I should consider their opinion in a matter so sacred as a gentleman’s dying wish?”

  “Nothing,” the solicitor returned with surprising mildness.

  “It is for me, as their man of business, to dispose of disappointment and outrage. I have been doing so, for all the Wilborough clan, for some six decades. I was but eighteen and a clerk in my father’s chambers when the Fifth Duke proposed to marry a chit from the Parisian stage; and the furor over the marriage articles then may fairly be described as incredible. Instability and caprice have characterised all the family’s habits, against which Lord Harold’s lamented passing and general way of life may almost be called respectable. It has always been for the firm of Chizzlewit and Pauver to support the family and maintain a proper appearance of decorum before the ton; there our influence — and indeed, I may add o
ur interest — ends, Miss Austen.”

  “What is the nature of the legacy?” I demanded.

  “It is this.” The solicitor drew a piece of paper — ordinary white foolscap, such as might be found in the public writing desk of an inn — from his leather pouch. Was it possible that this was Lord Harold’s Will, penned in his own hand? I felt my heartbeat quicken, from an intense desire to glimpse that beloved script — but the solicitor did not offer the paper to me. Instead, he took a pair of spectacles from his pocket and set them carefully on his nose. With a dry rasp of the throat, he began to read.

  “To my dear friend, Miss Jane Austen of Castle Square, Southampton, I leave a lifetime of incident, intrigue, and conspiracy; of adventure and scandal; of wagers lost and won. To wit: all my letters, diaries, account books, and memoranda, that she might order their contents and draw from them a fair account of my life for the edification of posterity. There is no one in whose understanding or safekeeping I place a higher trust; no one whose pen is so well-suited to the instruction of an admiring multitude. With such matter at hand, not even Jane may fail to write. I should like her to entitle the work ‘Memoirs of a Gentleman Rogue.’ Miss Austen is to be the sole beneficiary of all proceeds from the publication and sale of the aforementioned work, to which my surviving family may have no claim. Neither are they to attempt to prevent its publication, upon pain of pursuit by my solicitors in a court of law.”

  Mr. Chizzlewit raised his eyes from the paper and studied me drily.

  At such a moment, in contemplation of his own death, much might have been said. But it was like Lord Harold to utter not a syllable of assurance or endearment; not for him the maudlin turn upon Death’s stage. He had probably believed this testament would never be read — but in the event it was, had been all business as he wrote: brisk, ironic, cynical to the end.