Jane and the man of the cloth Page 0,114

contrived never to inhale it however many times a day he went through the ritual. His mother, Queen Charlotte, consumed from the age of seventeen only one blend4—of tobacco, ambergris, attar, and bitter almonds. —FAilor's note.

Sunday, 23 September 1804

IT WAS NEARLY THE HOUR FOR DINNER WHEN I RETURNED TO WINGS cottage from Wootton Fitzpaine yesterday afternoon, but the fog had lifted under the influence of a light breeze, promising a shift in the weather; and so I seized a few moments of liberty to slip down Pound Street to the linendraper's, of a mind to view Mr. Milsop's latest sketches of evening gowns, so important to the effect of a good length of peach-coloured silk, and to consider whether a demi-turban1 or a feather should be better suited to my headdress; and with such pleasant fancies dancing before my eyes, and banishing all thoughts of smugglers, their wives, and their purported bloodlettings, I very nearly ran down poor Mr. Dagliesh, who was engaged in conversing with a rotund lady of middle age, not five paces from Mr. Milsop's door.

“Miss Jane Austen!” he cried, with a flourish of his hat and a hasty bow. “I hope I find you well?”

“Very well, Mr. Dagliesh,” I replied, with a nod for his companion, who paid no heed to ceremony and made her lumbering way on up the street, leaving me to enjoy the gentleman's undivided attentions. “I am relieved to see you in excellent health.”

“Had you any reason to fear for it?” he enquired.

“Oh! No reason at all—though I guessed you were so much in demand, and in the middle of the night, too— about the shingle and the downs, in attending to all manner of wounds of a sudden received, whose victims have not the luxury of appearing by the light of day—that I thought you must soon be quite broken down.”

He started, and gave me a narrow look, and with a foolish smile, said that the demands of a country practise were sometimes unmanageable.

“Particularly when one is under the obligation of attending to one's friends,” I continued. “The demands of a stranger might be put off to another day; but the necessity of one's intimate acquaintance may not be gainsaid. And there has been so much of that sort of thing in Lyme, of late! A lady thrown from a horse here, a shot to the back there, a skirmish at sea that might leave a man at the mercy of Fate—I wonder you have slept at all, from riding to the Grange.”

“Miss Austen—” he began, and then halted in confusion.

“I know now why you could not be summoned, the very night of my sister's unfortunate injury—for you were undoubtedly in attendance upon some smugglers’ band, deep in the folds of the Pinny, or secreted in a convenient cave. And nothing is plainer than your failing to appear the morning of her departure for London, to pay your respects. It was the very morning that Mr. Sidmouth routed the dragoons, just below the Cobb, and even 1 observed Davy Forely the lander to have been shot Was it Mademoiselle LeFevre who cared for him there, in the kitchen garret, against the Preventy Men's discovery?”2

“I could not undertake to say,” the surgeon's assistant replied. “It was not there that I attended him, certainly. But tell me, Miss Austen—would you have a man die of a wound he did not merit, when a surgeon could easily be called? Is there some wrong you might find, in my ministering to such unfortunates? For to heal is my calling in life.”

“No wrong, Mr. Dagliesh—unless it be that your care for the local criminal set prevents you from attending to those more worthy of your attention. Had my sister died of her injuries, I should look with less gentleness at the manner in which you spend your evenings.”

“Heaven forbid!” he cried, with a sensible look. “And how does your sister? She continues to mend?”

“As swiftly as we might have hoped—her Ijmdon physician having no other claim upon his time and attention, that might prove more remunerative.”

“You are severe upon me.” He turned his hat in both hands, worrying at the brim. “But money has not been my object, though you would have my motives solely mercenary. I may go so far as to assert, Miss Austen, that neither my conduct, nor that of those I have attended, merits such censure; but honour forbids me saying more.” His look, when he raised his eyes, had something of

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