has had the sensitivity to send Anna to the Austens until I should begin to recover—she will cling to her father so even when I am there in the room—it is most seriously vexing and should be more than my nerves could stand to have to deal with the child now. It was also in my thinking that it may benefit all in the household to have to look after her—a welcome distraction from that dull business of grief. He will soon read to me from his own poetry. I think his Sonnets would be appropriate this evening. They always soothe me and heaven knows I need soothing tonight.
Ever your loving sister,
Mary Austen.
Cassandra’s immediate reaction to the letter was simple astonishment. This could not possibly be genuine. It must be a parody: Mrs. James Austen through the medium of satire. Perhaps—it went through her mind in the very first minute—this was by Jane? She was, after all, quite brilliant at capturing their sister-in-law for their private amusement. Only the other day back in Chawton, Cassandra had come across a comedic letter of complaint her sister had written years before, in Mary’s voice to the portrait painter: You claimed that you had captured me perfectly, and yet my family points out that your picture is of a woman most plain and, moreover, sour … She had enjoyed it anew and then burned it at once.
Her eyes moved back to the top of the page. She began it again. And this time her emotions were quite other and completely beyond her control. She felt tears course down her cheeks, her neck, over her hands onto the paper and did nothing to stop them. She could hear her sobs—choking, gulping sobs—pierce the air but did not try to arrest them. Instead she let her misery take flight, swell, fill, press into the walls of this mean little chamber they had thought good enough to put her in.
“How dare she?!” she cried.
Now she felt none of that passive self-pity.
“How dare she?!”
She was not revisiting her grief.
“HOW DARE SHE?!”
This was outrage, pure outrage that consumed and possessed her. How dare Mary peddle this hideous calumny? How could she—even she—write something so vile?
From the moment that the news had been broken to her—badly, insensitively, not as she would have liked or deserved, but no matter—Cassandra had identified that as the occasion to which she must rise. She could remember it—clear as a bell—all these years later. Listening to Mr. and Mrs. James Austen, asking for details, accepting their sympathies—her back ramrod straight, her voice calm and quiet—and thinking that this was the thing by which she would be defined from here on. She would have no other opportunity. Her future was to be denied her. She would have no marriage to succeed in, no vicarage to run, no children to raise. This was to be the test of Miss—forever, eternally Miss—Cassandra Austen. And by God—that God who had in His wisdom chosen to try and destroy her—she would pass it.
And pass it she had. Cassandra’s grief had been noble; her countenance quite simply remarkable. She had borne it with a fortitude that had astonished them all. They had talked of it, written about it, discussed their admiration of her openly and incessantly: In the face of the most appalling tragedy, she had shown a strength that placed her squarely in the upper echelons of strong women. That was her truth.
Yet Mary—who was with her then, who was there throughout all that misery—had somehow concocted another truth entirely. How wide had she spread it? How far had it reached? And Cassandra saw now, understood for the first time, the immensity of the task she had lately set herself: How impossible it was to control the narrative of one family’s history.
Well, there was at least one small thing she could do. She picked up the letter again, and—with as much violence as one old lady could bring to bear upon one old piece of paper—ripped it to shreds.
9
Steventon, May 1797
The next few weeks were, presumably, clement—it was that time of year when the mornings were bright and the evenings lengthening—but, in truth, Cassy had no sense of the weather. She lived under an immovable shroud of her own darkness. Oh, she carried on. Of course she carried on! Not once did she falter in that immediate resolution to remain dignified for everybody, to always appear strong.
In the mornings she worked in the house with a frenzied determination; she