Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas: Being a Jane Austen Mystery Read online

  “Yes, indeed. My brother, Mr. James Austen, is rector of St. Nicholas church there.”

  “How appropriate.”

  I must have looked my confusion.

  “It is, after all, the season of St. Nicholas. My own road, unfortunately, lies elsewhere—as you must have divined, at perceiving my approach from the opposite direction to your own. I have come, indeed, from Bath …”

  His position in the open doorway must be growing excessively uncomfortable, as the snow was driving harder than ever; certainly the draughts were no pleasure to those within.

  “… and I am expected this evening at The Vyne.”

  “The Vyne!” Cassandra exclaimed. “Are you acquainted, then, with Mr. and Mrs. William Chute?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” He inclined his head to her. “We have maintained a voluminous correspondence, but have yet to meet in the flesh. If I hope to do so before another twenty-four hours have passed, I must conclude our conversation and send you on your way.”

  “You do not accompany us?” I said hurriedly.

  A flicker of interest from those brown depths; and then their light was shrouded by half-closed lids. “I entrust you, rather, to my coachman. Tower is, as his name suggests, the epitome of strength. He has obtained the parsonage’s direction from your carter and has unharnessed two of my team. I shall take one horse and ride onwards to The Vyne; your carter shall take the other, and lead his poor nag home. She has gone lame in her off rear.”

  “But what of your baggage, sir?” my mother demanded. “What of your safety? We cannot possibly exile you from your own equipage, and in such weather! That is to be doing too much!”

  “Not at all, ma’am. I shall regard it as a trifle.”

  If I detected further amusement in his countenance, I did not betray him. I could well imagine that any man should prefer a brisk trot towards dinner and a fire, to a tedious seven-mile journey through snow seated on the box next to his own coachman. That Mr. West did not wish to embarrass us with his presence inside the carriage, I ascribed to an unexpected delicacy.

  “Tower shall join me once he has set you safely down at Steventon parsonage, madam,” he informed Mamma. “It is only a matter of three miles, and the road to The Vyne not much longer again than that. The horses were changed at Reading, and may easily stand the distance.”

  “You are very good, sir.”

  He smiled wryly. “Having been nearly the death of you, I cannot be too solicitous of your security.” A last quicksilver glance at me, the ghost of a nod, and his head was withdrawn from the body of the coach. The door slammed to, and we heard the rap of his knuckles without; the wheels began to turn.

  “Happy Christmas!” he shouted.

  I peered through the sidelight. But it was already fogged with moisture, and the darkness obscured every outline; he was an indistinct figure bracketed by horses, with a whirlwind descending.

  Happy Christmas, Mr. West, I mentally returned; and wondered what might bring a stranger to so wild a place as The Vyne at such a frigid time of year.

  2

  CHRISTMAS SPIRITS

  Saturday, 24th December 1814

  Steventon Parsonage, cont’d.

  “And so you are come at last.” Mary groaned as she lifted her head from the sopha cushions. “I declare I had quite given you up! The children have been asking for you since breakfast—and you know how their teazing makes my head ache. But you did not consider of me, I suppose, as you dawdled along the lanes. I am the very last creature alive, however, to complain of ill-usage at the hands of those I love.”

  “You can have no idea what we endured,” my sister, Cassandra, protested indignantly. “The conveyance James elected to despatch—I cannot in conscience call it a carriage—”

  “Poor Mary,” my mother broke in briskly. “Are you unwell? That will be very trying for James, with the Christmas service to manage.”

  “James!” she retorted with deepest loathing. “He has not been near me all week! It does not suit the rector of Steventon to nurse the sick. He is far too busy hunting!”

  We remained awkwardly in the parsonage’s central hall, our clothing sodden and our tempers frayed. Despite the coldness of our welcome, we were anything but strangers to this house—fully half my life was lived within these walls, and I might find my way from kitchen to garret in pitch darkness without a single misstep. Judged by worldly eyes, Steventon parsonage is little more than a cottage—the front entry a latticed door, flanked by double windows to right and left. It was never an elegant abode, tho’ my father sheltered eight children and generations of pupils here. Ten bedchambers above-stairs, three of them in the garrets; two wings at the back of the house, where Cassandra and I shared a bedchamber and a small dressing room we dignified with the name of boudoir. Our father, I recollect, was so good as to purchase matching tented beds for his daughters, swathed in blue-and-white-check dimity, from Ring Brothers’ establishment, in Basingstoke; years later, my brother spent the giddy sum of two hundred pounds to new-furnish the parsonage for his bride—the sum being a wedding gift from Anne Mathew’s father, old General Sir Mathew. He cannot have spent a tenth of such riches since.1

  But that is to be digging up matters better left buried. Anne was James’s first wife, a mild and sweet-faced creature who expired a few years after acquiring the pretty mahogany table and dozen matching chairs. They have grown worn and neglected under Mary’s authority.

  There are other ghosts than Anne, however, in this dearest of childhood homes. I glanced around the low-ceilinged front hall with an aching heart, half-expecting my beloved father to emerge from his study, white head bent in amusement to the piping voice of a young scholar struggling with his Latin; but such fancies are in vain. Papa died years ago in Bath, far from Steventon, and there he remains—solitary in the churchyard.

  When my mother was mistress of the parsonage, it was filled with candlelight and warmth. We were buried in the north Hampshire country each winter, to be sure, the village boasting but a string of cottages and its twelfth-century church—but Mamma did not stop to consider of her dignity, nor pine for the brilliance of Society. She cultivated such acquaintance as she found, among Great and lowly alike, from Lord Bolton at Hackwood Park to the meanest villager in his hovel. I know for a certainty that funds were scarce, but we rarely wanted for much. The parsonage was inveterately cheerful. Curtains of cherry red hung from the windows, and the low beams echoed with myriad voices.

  Mary had wrapt herself in shawls and was propped among her cushions by a churlish fire. She had not troubled herself to stir the coals, nor had she unwrapt a languid hand in welcome. Impatient with such die-away airs, I tore at my bonnet strings and discarded the offending object on the flagstone floor, unwilling to dampen the seat of a hallway chair.

  “We were overturned, Mary,” I said as I strode into the room, “and but for the kind offices of a complete stranger, should be frozen stiff, somewhere between the Winchester and Andover roads. If Mamma has not caught her death, it will be the wonder of the season—and we are all sorely in want of our dinners. Happy Christmas.”

  She shifted round slightly so as to face me, her wan face expressionless. “Your dinners? How extraordinary. I have no appetite at all. The slightest morsel is as ashes in my mouth. James has a little gruel, to be sure, when he comes in at this hour—you will observe how late it has grown whilst you idled in Basingstoke! But perhaps Cook has considered of you. A cold collation, left out on the sideboard.”

  Impossible that she should grasp the severity of our ordeal; it should be left to Cassandra or me to chivy the housemaid into preparing hot coals for the warming pans and hot bricks to the feet, when once we made our cheerless way to bed. Not for the first time did I wish myself wedged back into the publick stage with Martha, still swaying towards Bath!

  My mother had disappeared into the dining parlour in search of sustenance; she had long known what Mary was. Cassandra, being more selfless than Mamma and more c
haritable than I, attempted once more to move the poor sufferer before us.

  “You know we always make you better once we are come.” She crossed the room and perched herself upon the sopha’s creaking arm. A few drops of melting snow fell from her bonnet to Mary’s faded hair, drawn back in a makeshift knot at her nape. But Mary persisted in staring bleakly at the leaded casement, like a child in a fit of the sullens.

  “Such gaieties as we shall have,” Cassandra attempted, hastening to remove her gloves, the better to wrestle with her bonnet, “now that Christmas is upon us.”

  “Twelve days entire of rank frivolity,” I agreed sardonically.

  “We shall call upon the Terrys, and the Harwoods, and the Bramstons at Oakley Hall,” Cassandra enumerated, more for the benefit of ourselves than the listless Mary. “And we may claim a new acquaintance at The Vyne! A Mr.—West, was it not, Jane? Our deliverer from the snowbank. I have not seen Mr. and Mrs. Chute this age. What a delight it shall be to meet once more!”

  “Then you are more easily pleased than I,” Mary retorted spitefully. But her attention was reclaimed, and she forced herself upright against the sopha cushions. Her form emerged from the shawls; a drift of Paisley slid down her shoulders. “Mrs. Chute is an excessively vulgar woman, I believe, who presumes to comment upon those above her station. Only think, Cassandra—she deigned to give me what she termed a ha’porth of advice. Utterly unsolicited, I assure you. ‘If Mrs. James Austen were only to undertake some useful employment’—careening about the country on horseback with that wretched Vyne Hunt, no doubt—‘she should be much improved for it, and throw off these airs and megrims.’ Mrs. Chute shall think better of her insolence, I suppose, when she sees me in my grave.”

  “Now, Mary,” my mother interjected as she reentered the parlour bearing a platter in both hands, “here is a fine bit of ham and a round of Stilton. I declare I have not seen such a Stilton in many a year!”

  “A gift to James from the parish, I suppose,” his wife noted indifferently.

  “Should you like a morsel?”

  “Of so strong a cheese! No, indeed. I should fall ill directly.”

  We had risen at cock-crow to prepare for the long journey from Chawton Cottage to my brother’s house—all of seventeen miles—and even without the chaos of recent hours, should have dearly loved a little consideration. But it was ever thus, in James’s household: the invited guests must immediately minister to the desperate heroine who commanded the scene, and no concerns but hers were broached. I might happily have strangled Mary many years since, so poor a patience do I possess for nerves; and therefore cannot trust myself to cross her doorstep unattended.

  She hunched one shoulder at Mamma and returned her gaze to the blank windowpane; my mother sank down into a chair and threw up her hands.

  I seized a knife and cut into the ham with heartless industry.

  Pray apprehend: Mary is not ill, exactly; she merely fancies herself so. She quacks and physicks herself, and announces portentously that the End is Near; she lies upon the sopha the better part of the day and laments the coldness of a world indifferent to her dying. She refers to her grave with all the consideration of an old friend; but where it may lie, and what may drive her into it, remains a subject of conjecture among her intimates. Tho’ a trifle thin, Mary possesses as sound a body as the rest of us. It is her mind that is ill. A want of energy and interest are the chief evils—although I suspect that Mary secretly revels in the distinction her humours give her. Her portion in life is meagre, her social ambitions constrained; but as an invalid, her stile is equal to the greatest duchess’s in the Kingdom.

  “I daresay you wish to know how we left Martha.” Cassandra had succeeded in removing her bonnet and was smoothing her disarranged hair. Our dearest Martha may be Mary’s sister, but there cannot be two more dissimilar women in the Kingdom; where one is indolent, the other is active; one self-absorbed, the other benevolently inclined towards all the world. I carried my plate of ham as close as possible to the fire, too chilled to remove my pelisse, and took up the tongs. Once stirred, the embers glowed with faint life; I tossed some kindling upon them and was rewarded with a flame.

  “Pray do not trouble, Jane,” Mary said sharply. “For what do we possess a parlour maid?”

  “Merest show, apparently.” I grasped a log in my gloved hands. “Draw your chair nearer to the hearth, Mamma, and allow me to take your wrap.”

  “Martha,” Cassandra persisted a shade more loudly, “was excessively well. We saw her safely onto the stage at Basingstoke, and have every expectation she will reach her friends in Bath by nightfall. She begged that I wish you all the joy of the season.”

  “Martha does not know what it is to be ill,” Mary said fretfully. “She has no compassion for those who suffer.”

  Thus she despatched her sister, whilst I despatched the ham.

  It is a pity, indeed, that James’s choice did not light upon Martha when he went looking for a wife among the Lloyds of Ibthorpe. It is many years since I ceased to regard Martha as an acquaintance, and embraced her wholeheartedly as a relation. A friend of the bosom in my distant girlhood—a companion in wet country walks and overheated Assembly-Room balls—she is become as much a sister to me as Cassandra. Since her mother’s death, indeed, she has made her home with us at Chawton. Martha should never have met us with gloom, or served my mother’s parsonage with neglect. But it is probable the high spirits and excellent sense of my dearest friend should have been entirely thrown away upon my eldest brother. The loss of his Anne, a mere eighteen months after the birth of their only child, seems to have turned his heart queerly—tho’ I do say it of a clergyman, whose solace ought to be in the prospect of Better Things.

  Certainly James did not attempt to supply Anne’s gentle place in his second attachment; his union with Mary might best be regarded as a marriage of convenience, undertaken by a gentleman perplexed with the care of managing a parish and raising a female child entirely alone. If there was an initial liking in James’s choice—if indeed there was even love—it has long since gone off, like a beauty’s brief and early bloom. Such an unhappy situation cannot be without its ill effects upon every member of the household.

  Mary consented to raise little Anna, James’s child; but what maternal love she claims is reserved, in rare moments, for her own progeny: James-Edward, a youth of sixteen who spends the better part of his year at Winchester School, and Caroline, a young miss of nine years who wanders the hedgerows in summer and hides in the garrets with stolen books during the long winter months. It was the “teazing” of these two that had set our Mary’s head to aching; but as I had heard not a peep from the adjoining rooms in the interval following our arrival, I concluded both children were gone out—Caroline to visit her pony in the stables, perhaps, and James-Edward to one of the happier households of Dummer or Sherborne St. John. After the bustle of Winchester, I should imagine the poor boy was desperate for any amusement that might offer, for certainly none was to be found within the parsonage.

  As for Anna—she is now grown and married a month to her improvident curate, Ben Lefroy, the youngest son of my own dear departed friend, Madam Lefroy. Ben is indolent and barely inclined to shift for himself, much less a wife; to unite their fortunes must be regarded as one of the worst decisions either party ever made; but as a certain release from the household at Steventon, Anna’s match may be credited a success.

  I was summoned from my ruminations—and my enjoyment of the ham—by all the noise of arrival emanating from the rear of the house.

  “James!” Mary said with a curious air of satisfaction. She drew her draperies once more to her chin, cast her head languidly on the sopha pillow, and stared fixedly into the blank windowpane—the very image of one sunk in suffering.

  The heavy tread of booted feet sounded in the passage. There was a flicker as James paused to light a wall sconce with his taper, the only light in the parsonage save the glow from the hearth.

  “P
ray secure an oil lamp, dearest, whilst you are about it,” my mother called out. “Else you are likely to trample us in all this gloom.”

  “Mama!” James hastened through the parlour doorway, his hands outstretched in welcome; one of them still clutched the burning taper. I slipped it from his fingers as he embraced our parent, and tossed it into the fire.

  “Jane! And Cass! Welcome, welcome! I trust you arrived safely before the snowfall?”

  “We arrived safely,” Cassandra replied, with a hint of unaccustomed irritation. “Happy Christmas, James. You look very well.”

  And naturally she was correct—I have never had a glimpse of my eldest brother when he is not beaming with the most sanguine self-satisfaction. It need not concern us that his pate has suffered a diminution in its luxurious hair, or that his figure has increased beyond what is strictly acceptable in a man of Fashion, or that he is buried in the country with only four-and-twenty families to admire his sermons of a Sunday morning. James is above such worldly concerns. He inhabits the realm of the Spirit; and those of us required to ascend to its heights in his train, may only congratulate ourselves.

  If we did not, we might be tempted to seek our beds with as much lassitude as the unfortunate Mary.

  “My dear,” he said sternly to his wife the instant my thoughts chanced to light upon her, “do not alarm me with this attitude of dejection. Say not that you have suffered a relapse of your habitual complaint!”

  Mary merely sighed, her shoulders drooping. Being lost in contemplation of the grave, she could not lift her head.

  James knelt by the sopha and secured her hand. “You must endeavour to overcome your worse self, my dear. You must pray to our Lord to arm you against the Devil—who comes in the form of an oppression of spirits, and wrestles for your soul!”

  My eyes met Cassandra’s over our brother’s bowed head. He was murmuring words of scripture into Mary’s palm. It was as I had foreseen: our lighthearted Christmas season was at an end before it had begun.