EPILOGUE
Thursday, 2nd March 1815
Chawton Cottage
My brother Frank rode north this morning to convey the latest and gravest news from Portsmouth, having just received it of the Signals men over the Admiralty line.12
“You will have seen from the London papers that Napoleon escaped his prison at Elba on the twenty-sixth,” he said as he threw himself into a chair in our front parlour, “but it is in my power to tell you that he reached Paris yesterday. Other than Provence, which is Royalist, he met no opposition on his journey north. Everywhere the veterans of the Grande Armée have flocked to his sword. I am come to take my leave—for it is certain we shall be at war. I am in momentary expectation of my orders.”
I am sure my poor mother’s heart sank at this; she rejoiced in the cessation of hostilities only nine months ago, and hoped that Frank might be afforded an interval to know his children better. I felt the descent once more of a familiar anxiety—I am never easy when my brothers are exposed to the cannon of the Enemy—but I recognised the gleam of excitement in Frank’s eyes, and congratulated him. He has never got over missing the Trafalgar action by one unlucky day; I hope this new chance of battle brings him glory.
But as I mounted the stairs to my small bedchamber tonight and took out this journal, I found myself thinking of another set of men: those I had met at The Vyne during Christmas. Benedict L’Anglois—he had never been captured at the Channel ports in his flight two months ago. By the end of February his scheme was complete: Napoleon had broken free of his captors, while the better part of the English army was as yet in America. The Treaty of Ghent, having been lost and delayed in its delivery to Parliament, had only been ratified a fortnight since. No word of peace had yet crossed the Atlantic—where Wellington’s crack troops remained. It had been cleverly done. Buonaparte had watched the Congress of Vienna, where the cutting up of his great empire had angered the French; he had awaited his moment—and returned in triumph while no deadly force loomed on the frontiers to stop him.
How had Raphael West greeted this news? Was he even now bound for Paris, on some errand of the Secret Funds? Or was he in disgrace, for having failed in his errand of capturing the French spy?
I have had no real word from him since we parted at The Vyne on the Feast of the Epiphany. A few days after my return from Steventon to Chawton, my brother James forwarded a sheet of paper under cover of a letter of thanks to me, for having effected such an improvement in Caroline’s temper and spirits. It was the drawing Raphael West had made of me, crouching in the snow. James enclosed it without comment, and no word from West was scrawled on the picture—only his signature.
I have not shewn it to Cassandra.
Here in Chawton we have whiled away February with reading Mrs. Hawkins’s novel, Rosanne. It is a collection of sober things and exceedingly silly things, particularly on the subject of Love; she goes on rather better when she takes up Religion. The Authoress herself proclaims at the outset that her purpose is “to point out … the inestimable advantages attendant on the practise of pure Christianity.” That sentiment cannot help to recall Admiral Lord Gambier—who lost so much through his impure practise. The sacrifice of his niece to his wife’s mania for reputation has gone unpunished; as that lady wisely noted, no proof could be found of her guilt. The nephew and husband have abandoned her to chilly solitude in Bath—and have taken lodgings together in Town. Amy Gage and her son, tho’ provided for (and not in Bath), remain unacknowledged by the Admiral in all but spiritual ways. Edward Gambier’s expectations as heir seem secure.
I have almost come to the end of my work on Emma. She is a character I cannot suppose that anyone will very much admire, except for me—but perhaps I am a little weary of frivolity. Close observation of another young lady, of higher principles and dearer sacrifice, has taught me to value the word heroine. I only wish that I had achieved Justice—of which I spoke so often, and realised so little—for Mary Gambier in the end.
12 The Signals men in Portsmouth conveyed messages between the Navy port and the Admiralty in London through an elaborate semaphore tower line, staffed by naval offices wielding flags. Until the invention of telegraphy, this was the fastest method of transmitting orders or intelligence in England.—Editor’s note.
AFTERWORD
In this, the twelfth of Jane Austen’s detective adventures, we find the Georgian author embedded in the north Hampshire countryside she loved so well, and surrounded (with greater or lesser affection) by family and friends. The journal manuscript provides fascinating insights to Austen’s life during the period when England was once again at war with her former American colonies; and although Jane’s naval brothers, Frank and Charles, were not engaged in the War of 1812, their associates, such as Admiral Gambier, certainly were.
The interest Jane felt in the hostilities, including the negotiation of the Treaty of Ghent, is evident from her comments in a letter to Martha Lloyd dated Friday, September 2, 1814. She was staying with her brother Henry Austen in London at the time; and as Henry was a banker with connections among the Prince of Wales’s circle, he shared what he knew of official policy toward the Americans. “The[y] cannot be conquered, & we shall only be teaching them the skill in War which they may now want. We are to make them good Sailors & Soldiers, & [gain] nothing ourselves,” Jane writes indignantly.1 She goes on to assure Martha that she places her faith in the protection of Heaven—which she cannot believe the Americans to possess. Something of this scorn for American life surfaces as well in her early conversations with Raphael West. He earns her mistrust by the simple expedient of having an American father, albeit one whose art Jane admired. In the same letter to Martha, she relates her joy at having seen Benjamin West’s “Rejection by the Elders” on this visit to London.
Austen’s depiction of Raphael West as an artist-cum-intelligence agent is intriguing. The elder son of Benjamin West has left few traces to history, other than a collection of his sketches from a period of travel in the Catskills of New York, and some studies undertaken on behalf of his father. His remarkable visage is captured, however, in several portraits by Benjamin West. In one, a likeness of Raphael and his younger brother dated 1796, and currently in the Nelson Watkins Museum of Art, he appears as a young man living at the height of European Fashion, with his hair cut in the mode of the French Revolution and his dark eyes full of arrogance and discernment. He may then have been living in Paris, a hotbed of Republican sympathies, and it is as well that Jane did not encounter him at this point in his life; they should not have suited each other.
Finally, it is refreshing to experience what Jane calls “the gaieties” of the Christmas season two hundred years ago. The rituals of the twelve-days between Christmas and January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany, are steeped in the earlier mysticism of Celtic-Roman life in a way that feels uniquely British, and far different from the Germanic celebrations Queen Victoria would introduce some two decades later. Even Jane’s enjoyment in the warmth and beauty of The Vyne—which may still be visited today through the National Trust—survives, despite her perilous brush with murder.
Stephanie Barron
Denver, CO
June, 2014
1 Letter No. 106, to Martha Lloyd, in Jane Austen’s Letters, third edition, Deirdre Le Faye, editor. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.
Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas: Being a Jane Austen Mystery Page 26