Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House Page 6

  “Scotland,” she said promptly, and dissolved in giggles at her own wit.

  OUR PLAN OF ATTEMPTING THE STREETS DIRECTLY AFTER breakfast was forestalled, however, by a visitation of ladies from the naval set, who had recently claimed our acquaintance. No less than three of them descended upon our lodgings at eleven o’clock—such an early hour for a morning call, that we were taken by surprise in the very act of tying our bonnet strings, preparatory to quitting the front hall.

  “Mrs. Foote!” Mary cried with pleasure, at the sight of the smallest lady among the party—a pink-cheeked, dark-haired creature very close to herself in age. “I had not thought you abroad, yet! What a stout woman you are! And how is the precious child?”

  “Elizabeth is thriving,” returned Mrs. Foote. She had been brought to bed of her fourth daughter only before Christmas, and looked remarkably well—an example that must prove encouraging to those in a similar state. From long acquaintance with the Foote family, and their various troubles, I sincerely wished them happy, and rejoiced to see the lady in health. Mary Patton had married Edward Foote only four years previous; she was his second wife, the first—an illegitimate daughter of a baronet—proving too unsteady for the care of her household or children. Having exchanged Patton for Foote, Mary has been increasing without respite ever since.2 As the Captain already possesses three children from his first unhappy union, he must certainly be accounted a prolific progenitor.

  “And you, Mrs. Austen?” enquired Mrs. Foote, with an eye to Mary’s figure, “are you in health?”

  “Excellent health, I thank you. My poor sister Jane is not so well.”

  “You have taken a cold,” said a faint voice at my shoulder. I curtseyed in the direction of Catherine Bertie,

  Admiral Bertie’s daughter—who, though nearly ten years my junior, has already lost her bloom to the effects of ill-health. “Pray, let me offer you my vinaigrette.”

  “What she needs is a good hot plaster,” declared a lantern-jawed woman of more advanced years. “I 3m Cecilia Braggen,” she added, as if by way of afterthought, “wife to Captain Jahleel Braggen. I do not usually force acquaintance, you may be assured; but I am come expressly on a matter of some urgency, and must solicit the aid and benevolence of you both. May we beg a seat in your parlour?”

  “Of course!” Mary breathlessly replied, and led her visitors within.

  I glanced at Mrs. Foote, who returned an expression of amused condolence; however urgent the matter to Mrs. Braggen, it could not command the entire sympathy of her companion.

  “Jane,” Mrs. Foote whispered, as we moved to follow the others, do not feel obliged to satisfy her in the least regard. I fell in with the woman as I progressed along the High. She could not be turned back. But I am come myself to press you all most urgently—your mother and Miss Lloyd included—to join us for an evening party at Highfield House on Friday.”

  “Friday? We should be delighted!” I cried. “I may answer for the others—we have no fixed engagements.”

  “That is excellent news. And perhaps we shall have cause for celebration! Edward confides that Captain Austen may soon be posted to a frigate!”

  “How very unlucky that the intelligence should already have spread so far,” I murmured uneasily. “There is just that degree of doubt in the case, that I should not wish the matter canvassed too soon. Mary, as yet, knows nothing of it.”

  “Then I shall not breathe a word,” Mrs. Foote returned in a whisper. “Better that the full joy of it should burst upon her unawares!”

  “… most distressing implications for the entire port,” Mrs. Braggen was exclaiming, as we joined the three women in Mrs. Davies’s parlour. “Nineteen of the prisoners have fallen ill already, and with no one to nurse them, the situation will soon grow desperate! You cannot conceive the conditions in which they lie; the inclement weather must sharpen every discomfort. I have undertaken to organise our little society in shifts for the remainder of the week; but we are sadly pressed for hands. May I count upon each of you for at least a few hours—today or tomorrow, if convenient?”

  I looked at Mary’s pallid face and anxious eyes, and saw her palms pressed against her stomach. “Of what are you speaking?”

  Cecilia Braggen wheeled upon me. “Of the French prisoners of war, confined in Wool House. There are forty of them held there, in a room fit for at most half that number; and they are all shaking with fever. The men who guard them—Marines, for the most part, and decidedly ill-educated—appear indifferent as to whether the poor fellows live or die. But I am persuaded that if disease is allowed to ravage the prisoners’ ranks unchecked, it may soon spread to the Marines themselves—and you know what Marines are. The sickness will be all over the streets of Southampton in a thrice. We must act to stem the tide, before it is too late!”

  “Mercy!” whispered Catherine Bertie. She held her vinaigrette to her flaring nostrils, and closed her eyes.

  “But surely the French will soon be exchanged,” Mrs. Foote observed most sensibly. “I am sure they should fare far better on their native shores.”3

  “I have it on good authority—from no less a personage than your father, Miss Bertie—that an exchange is not to be thought of before May. So you see where we are. I have presented my arguments most vigorously to the Admiral, and he agrees that we must attempt everything for the prisoners’ comfort, and our own safety. He has offered me the services of his shipboard surgeon, a Mr. Hill.”.

  “You would have us to nurse the French officers presently held in Wool House?” I repeated, for the sake of clarity. “What an extraordinary idea!”

  “Do you speak French, Miss Austen?”

  “A little,” I replied, revolving the idea in my mind. I had just been struck by the possible utility of a nurse, and the method by which I might serve my brother and Tom Seagrave. “Do you happen to know, Mrs. Braggen, from which of the captured prizes the Frenchmen hail?”

  Cecilia Braggen stared. “I have not the slightest idea, Miss Austen! And I would not have you to expect an officer among your charges. The officers are all housed in good naval families. I speak, in the case of Wool House, of common seamen.”

  “I do not believe that Captain Austen would wish his wife to risk exposure to illness at such a time,” observed Mrs. Foote gently, with a glance for the anxious and tongue-tied Mary. “And for my own part, I cannot

  undertake to carry all manner of disease into the nursery.”

  “Father would certainly forbid it in my case!” cried Catherine Bertie, “however much he might recommend the charity, in the general way. You must know, Mrs. Braggen, that I have never been strong—and the winter months are replete with danger for a lady of delicate constitution!”

  “It appears, Mrs. Braggen, as though you have won the heart of but a single recruit,” I told the hatchet-faced lady. “Pray inform me at what hour I must report for duty.”

  1The Reverend Thomas Fowle (1765-1797) became engaged to Cassandra Austen in 1792 but died of yellow fever in San Domingo five years later while serving as naval chaplain to his kinsman, William, Lord Craven.—Editor’s note.

  2Jane is indulging in a pun. A patten was the small metal ring strapped onto ladies’ shoes to elevate them from the mud of the streets during the winter season.—Editor’s note.

  3In the Napoleonic period of warfare, it was customary to hold prisoners of war only briefly, in expectation of a bilateral exchange in which officers of both sides were sent home. Common seamen, however, sometimes lingered in prison for months.—Editor’s note.

  Chapter 5

  The Odour of Chessyre’s Fear

  24 February 1807,

  cont.

  ~

  MARY AND I WERE GRANTED A REPRIEVE OF SEVERAL hours before I should be expected to take up my new vocation; at present, Mrs. Braggen’s serving woman—a close confidante, it seemed, of many years’ standing— was in attendance upon the surgeon, Mr. Hill. I should have laughed aloud at this sacrifice of a personal maid, in t
estament to Mrs. Braggen’s devotion to her adopted cause, had Catherine Bertie not warmly assured me that dear Cecilia had worn herself to a fag end in nursing the sick at Wool House. She had absented herself from its noisome interior merely to solicit the aid of her naval sisters. I might expect her return in the midst of my own service—the better to instruct me, I suspected, in the finer points of contagion.

  Mary and I bid (he ladies adieu—assured Mrs. Foote that we should not fail her on Friday evening—and tarried only long enough in the hall to be certain of escaping our departing friends. Happily, the rain had dwindled to a fine mist, exactly calculated to freshen Mary’s complexion and add a springing curl to the wisps of hair escaping from my bonnet And so we set off.

  My first object was to select a joint suitable for Martha’s delectation, and order it sent home to Mrs. Davies; my second was to ensure that my brother’s wife did not come to any harm in the public market, where she intended to examine every egg ever laid by ardent hen. At the last, if time permitted, I intended a healthful walk up the length of the High—which in Southampton runs the entire extent of the ancient center of town, from the Quay at water’s edge, north to the very Bar Gate. Southampton, like its sister, Portsmouth, has always been fortified with broad, stout walls and the Keep so necessary for the defence of the realm; all the efforts at improvement—the Polygon that ambitious builders would tout, as the next Fashionable locus for Gentlemen of Means, fine shop fronts along the broad sweep of the High, the modern villas erected in the hills beyond the town, by sailors turned once more on land—cannot disguise the pleasant utility of a stone escarpment twenty feet tall and eight feet wide, perfectly suited for a promenade in view of the sea. The garden of our prospective house in Castle Square is bordered by the city’s battlements, and from its height—achievable by flights of steps at several points along the wall’s length—one might gaze at the New Forest beyond. The sea washes steadily at the great wall’s foot; and I imagine that in warmer months—my window flung open to the night air—I shall fall off to sleep amidst the gentle susurration of the waves, and dream that I am rocking aboard one of my brother’s ships.1

  So absorbed was I in this pleasant thought, that I was almost propelled headlong into the arms of the brother in question, as he stood outside the door of the Dolphin Inn, gazing earnestly upwards at one of its bow windows.

  “Frank!” I cried; and, “Dearest!” exclaimed Mary at the same moment

  He turned, and appeared not to recognise us, so absorbed in thought was he. But then his expression changed; he shook off abstraction and mustered a smile. “You have caught me out, Mary, in a private dissipation— I never can pass the Dolphin without remarking upon the strange picture by way of a ship, that they have propped there in the window; a very strange ship, from its construction, and hardly one I should consent to command. The wind is filling the sails from entirely the wrong quarter, to judge by the ensign; and how any fool of a painter could expect such a craft—but enough, you are laughing at me, and no husband worth respect should consent to be laughed at,”

  I was convinced, from an intimate knowledge of my brother’s ways, that some other object had drawn his eye to the Dolphin’s window; but I forbore to question him. Over Mary’s head, his gaze slid anxiously to my own; but I preserved my serenity of countenance, and he appeared relieved.

  “You are in time, Mary, to renew your acquaintance with Captain Sylvester,” Frank told his wife. “See—he is just coming along the opposite side of the High, and Mrs. Sylvester with him. Should you like to cross, and say how d’ye do?”

  Mary expressing her willingness to perform this small social duty, we had soon exchanged one paving for another, and stood in a tight little knot of the Navy, while the Sylvesters—he a hale fellow of perhaps fifty, she a smaller article with an expression of bird-like intelligence—offered all that was solicitous regarding Mary’s condition and Frank’s shipless state. Our direction being consulted, the couple then obligingly turned back in order to accompany us on our way to Queen Anne Street. Amidst all the chatter of, “When do you expect to be removed to your home?” and, “When may we visit you in Castle Square?” and, “Pray allow me to relieve you of the burden of your eggs, Mrs. Austen—” an exchange of Captain Sylvester for Frank was made at Mary’s arm. I found my brother at my side.

  “I have seen him,” he murmured low in my ear. “I have found him out. Chessyre.”

  “He lodges at the Dolphin?”

  Frank nodded abruptly. “It was no very great matter to learn his direction. The whole town may know it, provided they frequent the more disreputable taverns and houses of ill repute by the quayside. Mr. Chessyre, I find, is intimately known in certain circles that should never gain admittance to the Dolphin.”

  “And you spoke to him? You learned the truth of the engagement?”

  “You possess far too wide a knowledge of the world, Jane, to assume that truth is so easily secured,” my brother replied grimly. “Do not sport with my under standing by undervaluing your own; I am not in the humour for it.”

  Mary’s laughter pealed delightedly before us; Captain Sylvester—or his diminutive wife—must be roundly entertaining.

  “What did Chessyre say?”

  “Very little. For a man much given to boasting when disguised in drink, he preserved a Delphic silence in his own rooms. I prodded—I pleaded—I threatened by turns; but the Lieutenant remains obdurate in his charge of murder. He would have it that Tom Seagrave demanded blood for blood, at the death of his Young Gentleman; and therein lies the end of the matter.”

  “And did Chessyre witness murder with his own eyes? Or does he merely assume the act, from the dirk’s being first in Seagrave’s possession?”

  “He insists he saw the Frenchman, Porthiault, hold out his sword in surrender, that Seagrave took it, as is the custom, as the French colours came down; and that while the enemy captain stood defenceless, Seagrave cut him to the heart” Frank’s voice was heavy. So determined a recital—complete with facts, and clear in its account—looked quite black indeed.

  “Then why did Chessyre say nothing against his captain until he reached port?”

  “From fear of Seagrave. To hear Chessyre tell it, he might as well have thrown himself into the sea, as accuse the man aboard his own ship. I cannot blame him for keeping silent, if there is truth in his charge. Such an act of murder—for that is what every man of feeling must hold it to have been—would urge the Lieutenant to believe Seagrave on the verge of madness. I confess, Jane, that having seen Chessyre—having heard his account with my own ears—I comprehend the grim looks of Admiral Bertie. So harsh a testimony could well sink my friend.”

  “And do you believe it, Frank?”

  He was silent just that instant too long. “I confess I do not know what to believe.”

  “Will none of Seagrave’s crew give Chessyre the lie?” I cried.

  “None has come forward. It is possible that they are all in the most fearful indecision.”

  Much would be required, for a man to risk the contempt of the Admiralty—the loss of confidence were he proved wrong—the negative consequences for his career. Silence, in such a pass, would seem the wisest policy of all.

  But silence was not my brother’s choice.

  “Jane, the Captain’s trial is to be held two days hence on board Admiral Hastings’s ship, moored in Portsmouth harbour. I intend to be present for the proceedings—and to offer my most fervent testimonial as to the worth of Seagrave’s character.”

  “The case shall turn upon evidence, Frank, and not upon a judgement of character. If you would clear Captain Seagrave’s name, you must learn why his lieutenant intends him to hang.”

  My blunt words occasioned little more than a grunt of displeasure from Frank; he could not love the duty that must destroy the honour of one man, or the other.

  “You have but two choices,” I persisted. “To regard your friend as innocent, or to believe Lieutenant Chessyre’s charge. If t
he latter—your friend’s cause is lost. If the former—then we must consider the possibility that the Lieutenant would shift guilt upon the Captain, because he is mortally afraid of being charged with murder himself”

  “Chessyre?” Frank cried, as one amazed.

  “I can account for his actions in no other way— excepting the spur of truth. And you will not allow him to speak from truth.”

  “But why should Chessyre kill the French captain? Seagrave has never suggested that he did; and if Seagrave did not see the hand that struck Porthiault down, then how may we accuse Chessyre of the act?”

  “I confess the entire affair confounds reason. I am almost persuaded that both men are mired in half-truths and prevarication. No other construction may be placed upon events.”

  “A very simple construction might be placed upon them,” Frank countered grimly. “Shall I tell you what it is? Eustace Chessyre is an aging man. He has been thirteen years a first lieutenant, and is unlikely ever to achieve a further rank. Two younger men in Seagrave’s command—second lieutenants, both of them—have been promoted to master and commander from beneath Chessyre’s eye. He told me so himself. The success of his subordinates has made him bitter, Jane. He has been passed over, from among the ranks of his own men. He cannot bear the indignity—and he blames Seagrave for its accomplishment. He regards his captain as blocking his advance—as deliberately thwarting Chessyre’s career—when by all accounts poor Tom has done nothing but look out for the man in his progress through the service.”

  I considered this theory. “And thus we find the goad to murder. You believe the fellow nursed his grievance, and merely awaited opportunity to exact revenge?”

  “If he was so struck by Seagrave’s act—if indeed he witnessed the Captain’s hand strike down an enemy officer after receiving that officer’s sword—then why did he not denounce my friend at the very moment? Instead we find him appointed commander of the French prize, and beating back to Portsmouth without a murmur.”