Isobel felt determined to remain calm, to show no sign his presence distressed her. She wondered if decorum permitted a minimum time she could remain in the shop before departing without rudeness. She allowed the clock to add three seconds and turned for the exit.
‘You are not leaving?’ said he.
Isobel sighed, resigned that some conversation was required. She gave some polite opinions about the recent assemblies in town and remarked upon the recent storm. But when her thoughts on plays and rain were exhausted, she felt dismayed to find Mr Wilson making no reciprocal efforts for conversation. There were several topics into which a gentleman could enter: the wetness of the roads, for example, or the speed of postage. But he said and did nothing, though it seemed words were not far from his lips. She despised him for his lack of gallantry and longed to be gone from the room. Mrs Turner, who watched from the register, possessed little fame as a discreet woman, and Isobel imagined the report of this humbling interaction reaching Ramsgate by supper.
Isobel grew enraged. She shed her earlier pretensions to demureness and shifted her campaign to the offensive. ‘I wish you every happiness and joy, Mr Wilson,’ said she, and met his eye.
‘Thank you, Miss Thornton,’ said he, though the scrunching of his face indicated confusion.
‘Do you make for Kent soon? Or do you plan to travel first?’ she asked with a cringe, feeling fresh humiliation to inquire about the honeymoon plans of the man who had spurned her.
‘I plan to stay in Somerset for several weeks more,’ he replied, with another perplexed face.
‘Is Mrs Wilson keen to enjoy the upcoming assemblies?’ offered Isobel, growing more exasperated by the second. ‘There is a revival of a Cowper play next month, if to her standards.’
‘My mother is fond of Bath but shall remain in Kent for now. But I thank you for the wishes for her theatrical pleasure.’
Isobel furrowed her brow and winced at the indignity of being forced to clarify this most sensitive of topics. ‘I beg pardon,’ Isobel said. ‘I refer to Mrs John Wilson. Your new wife.’
The gentleman ceased his scarf inspection and looked up; a glimmer of hope seemed to dance across his face. ‘Ah. Perhaps you refer to Mrs Francis Wilson. My new sister.’ He moved towards Isobel.
‘Mrs Francis Wilson!’ repeated Mrs Turner from behind the counter.
John Wilson continued his path across the shop. Isobel turned away from him and grew fascinated with a mound of lace, breathing heavily.
‘Miss Isobel, I was detained in Bristol to celebrate the engagement of my younger brother, Frank, to Miss Bernadette Martin.’
‘Then you are not engaged?’ Isobel said.
‘I am not engaged. There was a frost in Bristol, and I was apprehended for the night. I sent word via express. Considering the roads and the state of the English post, it shall reach you sometime next week. I rode through snow to find you.’
Isobel was relieved of the power of speech.
‘We arranged to visit the Pump Room, Miss Thornton,’ he said with a tender smile. ‘Isobel. If you will do me the honour, we shall go there now.’
He held out his arm and Isobel took it, and she and John Wilson proceeded to Stall Street. While her face remained still and she said nothing, she allowed her heart a small leap of what a sentimental person might claim to be joy.
Jane put down her quill and cracked her knuckles. She read it back. She would improve the words later, but for the moment, the pain in her chest had departed. The revelation that it was the man’s brother who married offered a brilliant solution. This story lay in its infancy – she did not know where it would go and what words and characters would lead up to it – but this climactic scene would make a fine ending to a novel. A miscommunication tore lovers apart. The confusion now cleared up, the man and woman could reunite. The bond repaired; happiness restored.
The effort of willing new words from a blank page had the quality and consistency of torture. Jane knew the horror of painting oneself into a corner on the paper, and the ecstasy of escaping with no smudges made on the floor. She smiled at the speed at which the words had entered her head. She laughed at how they fell to the paper and almost wrote themselves. She wondered how many more words waited. Inspiration like this came rarely. Her mind lapsed into a thought of Charles Withers, of what he might be doing. She surrendered the pages to the desk and climbed back into bed.
Jane awoke to a companion in her bedroom.
‘You will ruin that gown if you sleep in it,’ Mrs Austen said. Jane looked down at her twenty-pound dress and winced at the sight. Creases devoured the delicate silk overdress, some gold ribbon had come loose, and Jane’s blanket had crushed the petals of the embroidered roses.
‘What time is it?’ Jane asked.
‘After three,’ Mrs Austen replied. She did not look up but read from a page in her hands.
Jane sat up and rubbed her eyes. ‘What are you reading, Mama?’ she asked, though she already knew the answer. ‘Give that to me,’ she said. The words caught in her throat.
‘You told me you wrote no stories,’ Mrs Austen said.
‘Aye. That is old work, Mama,’ Jane protested.
Mrs Austen scrutinised the pages. ‘These are the stories your father sent to London. That was cruel of him to put ideas in your head, to give you false hope. Why have you kept these and tortured yourself, daughter?’ She turned the page over. ‘And this?’ Mrs Austen held up the last page of the manuscript which contained the fresh scene. Jane did not answer. ‘You are a grown woman,’ her mother continued. ‘Do you disagree?’
‘No, Mama,’ Jane said. ‘I am a grown woman.’
‘I came to see if you were all right. Clearly you are.’ She stabbed the page with her finger as she read. ‘While the rest of us know how serious this situation is, marriage remains a joke to you. You have little idea how low you will sink when we are gone. But while we run our nerves ragged trying to help, you please yourself.’
‘That is untrue, Mama. Please give me those pages.’ But Mrs Austen gathered the pages into a pile and rose to her feet. ‘Where do you take them?’ Jane begged.
‘This is for your own good,’ Mrs Austen declared, then dumped the novel into the fireplace.
Jane screamed. The fire, which had died earlier, roared to life with the added kindling. Jane dashed to the hearth. As a child, words describing fire had entertained Jane. She preferred incalescent: growing hotter or more ardent, set ablaze. Cassandra and their father had little interest in candles and flames, but Jane loved to observe things burning, as did her mother. She stuck her arm into the flames and managed to snatch out a single scrap of paper, as well as the now-charred pink ribbon, which had once tied the pages together. The flames devoured the other pages in a gleeful roar. A ball of heat seared the room, the dry pages seemed to explode, and the force blew Jane back onto her haunches. The show dazzled her. The room filled with the aroma of smoked paper, which both comforted and horrified her. Once nothing more remained to burn, Mrs Austen stood and left the room.
When the fire died, the ashes of First Impressions smouldering in the hearth, Jane held the single scrap of paper she’d retrieved from the pyre. She placed the piece in her pocket and exited the house.
Miss Harwood waited on her doorstep. She opened her door and ushered Jane inside.
‘You knew how it would go with him,’ Jane said.
‘Yes, badly,’ Miss Harwood replied. She offered Jane a chair. Jane sat down.
‘What is wrong with me?’
‘You are different,’ Miss Harwood said. She stoked the fire, newly ablaze, the hearth now filled with coal.
‘I do not want to be,’ said Jane.
‘Do not fret.’ The woman scribbled something on a piece of paper and handed it to Jane. ‘You will travel to London.’
Jane flinched. The heaving, rat-infested capital? ‘London is a day’s journey away.’
‘Do you have a better option?’ Miss Harwood asked.
Jane shrugged, taking the paper. ‘At this point, I have nothing.’
As Jane travelled to London the next day in a carriage of ill repute, she worried how to make it there without discovery. She selected the most dilapidated postal carriage she could find, which left from the back of the Black Prince Inn and guaranteed passage to London via the quieter roads. A man in a torn waistcoat and a stained admiral’s hat was Jane’s only companion in the public coach. He stank of rum and refused to meet Jane’s eye, a level of communication which suited them both. As he made no comments to Jane about the crime of a single woman travelling alone, Jane supposed he lay in worse trouble than she. Whatever fight he’d embroiled himself in or debt he’d racked up in the card houses of Bath, he seemed keen to leave the West Country in as quick and anonymous a manner as possible, which rendered him the perfect travel companion for Jane. He shut his eyes before the carriage moved.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Of all the dishonour Jane had brought on her sex over the years, this morning’s actions far exceeded it. A single woman travelling alone through the countryside, negotiating her fare, paying her own way, riding with strangers, were acts reserved for harlots and witches. No good woman who was the property of a respectable family corrupted her soul in such a fashion.
Jane had twinged with guilt as she exited the house that morning. She’d told everyone she was going for a walk, as she normally did. Her mother nodded her assent to the voyage and did not look at her. In her pockets, Jane placed three biscuits from the larder (the hard ones no one missed) and a little over five pounds – all her money in the world. She felt shame for lying to her papa. He wished her a good walk and offered to accompany her, his eyes misting as he smiled at her. She detected a sternness between her parents as she exited the house – the Reverend and Mrs Austen usually sat together in the bay window. The Reverend read Lloyd’s Post while Mrs Austen darned stockings and they laughed and joked about things. But this morning the Reverend sat at his desk, while Mrs Austen sat in the window alone. Jane flattered herself as being the cause of the rift.
The carriage left Bath at half-past nine in the morning and made its way east through the outskirts of town. The honeystone Palladian columns out the window gave way to stone cottages, then huts with smoking chimneys, then the jade fields of Somerset.
The rolling fields of the West Country became the oak forests of Berkshire. They stopped at Reading to water the horses. The driver stretched his legs but neither Jane nor her snoring companion left the safety of their wooden cage. She peered gingerly out of the carriage window and looked around the Reading town square, half expecting her mother to come bounding into the carriage and demand she return home.
Another post carriage travelling back towards Bath stopped on the other side of the road. The driver did the same as theirs, watering the horses and himself. Jane looked through the other carriage’s window, where a family laughed and chatted. From their bright clothes and large suitcases, Jane imagined they were on their way to holiday in Bath. She considered jumping inside with them. There was one space spare. She could return to Bath before the alarm was raised, no harm done. She placed her hand on the carriage door, but then the driver took his seat and flicked the reins once more. The carriage rolled forward, and Jane sat back. If she’d had any desire to hold on to what shreds of her dignity and reputation were left, she obliterated it now. There was no turning back.
On the outskirts of Windsor, a spectacular holly oak at least 50-foot high marked the road to London. Jane momentarily forgot her humiliation and turmoil and turned to admire its glorious branches, which had withstood the weather and the years. Nothing else marked the road from then onwards except field after field bathed in green, and as the bump and roll of the wheels eased into a rhythm, Jane fell asleep.
She awoke as the carriage drove through Kensington. The smells hit her before the sight of the pretty buildings did: above the green of Hyde Park and the grandeur of Kensington Palace she choked on wafts of coal smoke, the stinking reek of sewage and the bilious stench of a decomposing estuary at low tide. The capital city seethed and tumbled, spewing forth a perfume of people and buildings, alleys and grime. As the carriage rolled through Embankment, a factory on the south bank disgorged plumes of black smoke into the air and a pipe which led out from its bottom dumped rotting animal matter into the Thames. Jane recalled her hatred of the capital, with its screeching hawkers, the Machiavellian court, the soot and fog. She chose trees and grass over marble and people. But it was here, beneath the misery of the docks, that Cowper wrote Olney Hymns; amongst the pomp of court where Frances Burney wrote Evelina; under the vapour of Southwark where Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Jane nodded her head with begrudging respect to the miserable city which produced such genius. Pressure makes the diamond, she noted. Grit makes the pearl.
Jane disembarked at the last stop, in Piccadilly. Miss Harwood had given her an address for a house in East London, 2 miles away. Jane looked up; Sir Christopher Wren’s dome loomed in the east. She walked towards it along Embankment, stopping once to hold her nose at the perfume of the Thames.
As Jane left the precinct of St Paul’s and travelled east, the characters changed from bishops, curates and well-heeled parishioners to those they were charged with saving: the seamstresses, flower sellers and laundresses of Cheapside. The architecture transformed from elegant marble columns and cerebral brass domes to rotting timber and crumbled brick. The lanes were paved with jagged cobblestones and painted with mud, the elegant drainage systems of Mayfair and Piccadilly replaced by homemade remedies of bucket-emptying and gravity. Grease washed the wattle-and-daub buildings in a film of grime. Jane had never visited such a place. A man in a soup-stained cravat poked his tongue out at her, declared that he loved her and then followed her down the laneway. Seeing as though they had never met before, she doubted his love was genuine. She hurried ahead of him and told him her father was a constable. This seemed to satisfy him, for he sat down in a pile of rotting cabbages and began to snore.
Jane sighed with relief and caught her breath. She walked three blocks more and arrived at the house in question, double-checking the address on the paper. This was it. Jane scratched her head. It was a two-storey structure in the Tudor style, sandwiched between two large modern buildings which squeezed it from either side. The black timber frame sagged at the centre. The white clay walls were stained with yellow, and the thatched roof caved in. It was a structure suspended in mid-collapse.
Jane tapped the oak door. No one answered. The lattice casement windows were blacked out and sealed shut. She knocked once more, louder this time, and called, ‘Hello?’ She looked up to the roof. The chimney puffed no smoke.
‘Who are you?’ a voice said. Jane turned around. A woman limped towards her. Her white hair reached her navel; with no pins or ties holding it from her face, it roamed free around her in a great volume of fuzz, like spun sugar. She had patched up her black dress with odd swatches of mismatched material: a plaid square covered one shoulder; a brown rhombus repaired a giant hole in her skirt. She bundled several cabbages under her bosom; the exact number was hard to tell.
‘My name is Miss Austen,’ Jane replied. ‘Are you Mrs Sinclair?’
‘That depends,’ the woman replied. She unlocked the door, went inside and closed it behind her.
‘I come on the advice of Miss Harwood,’ Jane called through the heavy oak door. The door inched open. Jane stepped inside, gingerly, wondering if she was walking towards her demise. The blacked-out windows encased the dwelling in virtual darkness.
‘Are you going to help? These won’t light themselves,’ Mrs Sinclair said as she lit a candle. Jane fumbled around, found another and did the same. ‘How is Emily?’ the woman asked.
‘She lacks for coal,’ Jane replied, looking around, ‘but she investigates her prospects as a painter.’ The women lit another few candles and the room was illuminated. Jane saw a dirt floor, a hearth and two chairs. ‘A homely abode,’ Jane offered with a no
d. She wondered why the woman bothered with the candles; there was nothing to warrant illumination. She squinted at the woman in the candlelight. Her face resembled a raisin.
Mrs Sinclair lit a fire. ‘There always has been, and always will be, someone like me in this place.’
Jane raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t doubt it.’ She looked around the dirty room. A thousand such decrepit buildings littered Cheapside.
‘What do you want?’ asked Mrs Sinclair. She motioned for Jane to sit down.
‘What is it you do?’ asked Jane in reply, seating herself in a rocking chair so old it had ceased rocking.
‘I am a matchmaker,’ said Mrs Sinclair.
Jane stood back up. ‘How wonderous!’ she said. ‘I have travelled across half of England, ruining whatever shreds of my reputation remained, all to visit a matchmaker. At home there are three on every corner.’ Jane kicked herself for her gullibility and desperation. She had known not what to expect on her way to London; she had given little thought to what she would find there, training focus instead on escaping the house without suspicion. But whatever she had imagined, another stupid matchmaker did not make the list. She moved to the door, beyond annoyed.
‘I am not that kind of matchmaker,’ said Mrs Sinclair. She shifted a log with a blackened poker and a flame bloomed.
‘What kind are you, then? How are you different from the multitude who slither around Bath?’
‘I deliver.’
Jane scoffed. The fire cracked and spat and devoured the kindling. She thought of her manuscript, nothing but black flakes now, and sat down once more. ‘You can deliver for me? I need a husband,’ she said.
Jane in Love Page 4