Miss Austen - Gill Hornby Page 0,1

done. She muttered about possibly traveling farther on to a nephew, affecting an uncharacteristic indecisiveness brought on by advancing age.

“Fred will bring in your trunk. Please.” Isabella signaled toward the door, which opened at once from the inside. “Ah, you are there, Dinah.”

There. Dinah. She must remember that. She might be needing Dinah.

“Miss Austen is with us.”

Dinah squeezed out a negligible bob.

“Shall we go in?”

* * *

CASSANDRA HAD FIRST CROSSED this threshold as a young woman. She was tall then, and slim; many were kind enough to say handsome. Was time playing its tricks, or had she worn her best blue? A crowd of family had assembled to greet her; the servants—excited, admiring—jostled behind. She had stood still and thrilled at it—the power of her position! The force of that moment!

Oh, she still looked in the glass when she had to. She knew she would not be called slim now, but spare. Her spine, once a strict perpendicular, was kinked and shortening; her face so gaunt that her once-proud nose—the Leigh nose, the stamp of a distant aristocracy—more like the beak of a common crow. And the people who loved her then were gone now—as she herself was gone, almost. Those receiving her today—poor Isabella; difficult Dinah; Fred, who now passed through the vestibule, grunting and dragging her trunk—of course knew the facts of her history, but had no sense of the truth of it. For whoever looked at an elderly lady and saw the young heroine she once was?

They moved through to the wide wood-paneled hall. Cassandra followed them meekly, but once there was suddenly seized with alarm. She made for the generous stone fireplace, clung on for support, and looked with horror at the scene around her.

She could hear Dinah mutter: “Lord save us. She’s turned up and lost ’er senses. As if we don’t have enough on our plate.”

And Isabella whisper: “Perhaps it is more sorrow or sentiment that affects her. After all, this must be the last time that she will ever come here.”

Cassandra knew better than to acknowledge them. It was one of those conversations conducted as though she could not hear it, in which the young so often indulge around the old. But as if she could be overcome by sorrow or sentiment, when for decades they had been her constant companions. No. It was not the fact that this was the last visit—she gasped for air, her hands shook—it was the fear that she had left it too late. The house was already in a chaos of removals.

“My dear, are you sure you are quite well?” Isabella, softening, took her elbow, giving her something to lean on.

A portrait of the Fowles’ benefactor, Lord Craven, had hung above that fireplace ever since she could remember. Now it was gone from the wall.

“That coach was too much for you.” Isabella talked loudly as if to an imbecile, while untying the ribbon around Cassandra’s chin. “All that way in this cold weather.” Her bonnet was removed. From where she was standing, Cassandra could see into the study where the shelves had been emptied. Which books were gone? They had had the whole set of Jane’s. Who had them now?

“And she’s come alone then, I can’t help but notice.” Dinah was behind her, loosening off her cloak.

The furniture still in place looked abject, humiliated, like slaves in the marketplace.

“Perhaps her maid is away?”

“Which leaves who looking after ’er, may I ask?” Dinah flung cloak and hat over her arm. “Me and whose army?”

A vicarage without a vicar was always a sorrowful sight. Cassandra had borne witness to it more often than most, yet it still affected her every time. The Fowles had lived in this house for three generations. It had been handed on, father to son—all good clergymen, all blessed with fine wives—but that chain was now broken. Isabella’s father was dead, and her brothers had refused it. No doubt they had their reasons, and—to squander all that family heritage—Cassandra sincerely hoped they were good ones.

Church tradition allowed the relicts of the family two months to vacate the house for the next incumbent. And, although it was not anywhere written, Church tradition seemed somehow always to rely on the vicarage women to effect it. Poor Isabella. The task she had before her was bleak, miserable, arduous: just two months to clear the place that had been their home for ninety-nine years! Of course she had to start on it at once. But still, the Reverend Fulwar