The Austen Girls

by Lucy Worsley

  ‘And now it’s your job,’ said Anna’s stepmother. ‘You need to learn to run a house and farm. You’ll have to support your husband’s business, you know!’

  Anna looked as if she wasn’t listening. For a second, Fanny saw her as Aunt Mary must see her: ungracious and ungrateful.

  When Fanny’s own mother taught her things around the house, she was always eager to learn, eager to get a bit of her mother’s undivided attention. She would never think of answering back. But then, Fanny realised, she learned because she wanted to learn. Aunt Mary seemed to think that Anna had to learn, as if she had no choice.

  Perhaps that was right. Fanny knew that Anna wouldn’t get a dowry from her uncle James. Aunt Mary was only trying to prepare Anna for marriage to a farmer, or someone else who needed to earn a living.

  By contrast, Fanny’s mother thought that earning money was somehow a dirty thing to do. Much cleaner and nicer to inherit it. And that, clearly, was what Anna thought too.

  ‘I’m not going to have that sort of husband,’ Anna was explaining. ‘I’m going to have a rich one, who can employ a dozen dairymaids, so that I need know nothing about it!’

  Fanny winced. She knew Anna was thinking of Lord Smedley. But she also knew that when Anna had danced with him, for that surprising second time at Hurstbourne House, it was only because Anna, like the lord himself, had drunk too much French wine.

  Aunt Mary’s broom wasn’t wielded with a great deal of force, but it was definitely with a smack that it came down on Anna’s behind.

  ‘Anna!’ her stepmother almost shrieked. ‘You’re always like this when you come home from Kent. You’re so … dissatisfied with your family and your home. I’m sorry, Fanny,’ she added quickly, seeing Fanny’s hurt face, ‘but it’s true. Your mother and father give Anna ideas above her station.’

  Anna clenched her fists. Fanny could tell she’d very nearly raised her hands and simply swept the china dishes on to the floor.

  When Anna tried to speak, her voice was all wobbly. It was embarrassing and awful. Fanny stared hard at the milk, wishing that she could simply disappear into its still, white peacefulness.

  ‘It might be good enough for you, living here, like this,’ Anna was saying to her stepmother, her words coming out very small and strangled. ‘But I … want … more.’

  With that, Anna whipped around to face Aunt Mary. Perhaps she wanted to see what effect her words might have.

  Aunt Mary’s scarred face, pocked from long-ago smallpox, fell into a picture of dismay.

  And Fanny saw that after a second, Anna’s expression softened too. It was as if hurting her stepmother hadn’t given her the pleasure for which she’d hoped.

  ‘I know you long for a better father and mother,’ Aunt Mary said quietly, turning the broom in her hands. ‘I know that you would like to be a Miss Austen of Godmersham, not of Steventon. But truly, your father tries so hard for you, Anna.’

  Aunt Mary and Fanny waited awhile, aware that Anna’s anger was somehow spilling away into silence.

  ‘I’ve invited Mr Terry to tea,’ Aunt Mary said hopefully, as if offering a much younger girl a treat. ‘Mr Austen has been asking me to have him over. I don’t think he’s very exciting, but he’s said to be a nice young curate. You girls can practise your conversation on him.’

  ‘A clergyman!’ scoffed Anna. ‘Fanny’s mother says that clergymen are to be avoided like the plague.’

  ‘Erm, except Uncle James, of course,’ Fanny added quickly, feeling that Anna was a little tactless to pass her mother’s views straight on to a clergyman’s wife.

  And she and Anna now exchanged half-smiles. For of course Anna’s saying the word ‘clergyman’ had reminded them both of Mr Drummer … of ‘Dominic’, as Fanny had discovered that his Christian name was, by sneaking a look at the parish register.

  She and Anna had spent a good deal of time discussing Mr Drummer’s views on this and that, and following his recommendations for novels. They’d gone walking with him, listened to him in church and poured his tea on several occasions.

  But of course, they didn’t think of him as a potential husband. Fanny especially knew her parents would never approve of that match for her. She could just picture her mother’s face! But it did make her wonder if Mr Terry would be rather nice too.

  ‘Come on,’ said Aunt Mary, wearily, ‘let’s call a truce. You can leave the butter for now – I’ll do it later. But, Anna, I want you to be pleasant to Mr Terry.’

  They all went out into the muddy yard.

  ‘How long is it until you go back to Godmersham?’ Anna asked, falling back and asking Fanny quietly. ‘Maybe I can come and visit you again?’

  Fanny knew what she was thinking about. Escape.

  But it was as if Aunt Mary ahead of them had read Anna’s mind.

  ‘Real life’s not like that silly story, you know,’ she called back to them. ‘What’s it called, Pride and Prejudice? Where the heroine ends up with the big house and that gentleman you girls keep talking about.’

  By now practically everybody Fanny knew had devoured the most deliciously romantic story she’d ever read.

  ‘Well, you don’t know that for sure,’ Anna said, addressing the mud rather than her stepmother.

  ‘Daffodils?’ asked Aunt Mary hopefully, changing the subject. Fanny realised that Anna’s stepmother was trying to divert her. Everyone knew that Anna loved picking and arranging flowers.

  ‘All right,’ Anna said, with bad grace, and trudged off towards the garden to find some for the tea table.

  Aunt Mary and Fanny looked after her, watching her dark hair getting wet and bedraggled in the warmish rain, her skirt splashed with mud.

  ‘Poor Anna!’ Aunt Mary said softly. ‘She wants to live in a different world.’

  It was true. The set of Anna’s back as she went signalled that she rejected everything in the rectory, in the village of Steventon, and even in the whole muddy county of Hampshire.

  But no matter how much Anna wanted it, Fanny thought, her dissatisfaction wouldn’t make Lord Smedley come to rescue her.

  Chapter 8

  The drawing room, Steventon Rectory

  Two hours later, Fanny was amazed by the way her cousin had somehow turned herself into a very different person. Anna had scrubbed her face at the pump in the back yard, smacked at her hair with a brush, and changed into her prettiest muslin dress, the one with all the buttons.

  Fanny had much less to do, for she’d managed in her neat way to get much less wet and dirty than Anna.

  And now Anna was in a better mood. Even a tiny tea party, with just one young man and two young ladies, was better than nothing. She seemed determined to enjoy it as much as she could.

  ‘What would Aunt Elizabeth do?’ Anna wondered out loud to Fanny, opening the shutters and scanning the dusty drawing room. Fanny tried to think of ways to make the old, low room more like the comfortable magnificence of Godmersham Park. Her mother, Fanny thought, might complain a lot, but she did work very hard at making the place pleasant for her family and all their guests. Her own home, Fanny now realised, was a warm house, warm with her mother’s love.

  ‘We could perhaps light a candle,’ she said.

  ‘It’s useless,’ Anna said. ‘This place will never look elegant.’ But she went to light a candle anyway, even though twilight was still some hours away. She was in the very act of striking the flint when Aunt Mary came in.

  ‘Anna! We don’t need that,’ she said at once. There’s plenty of light for Mr Terry to see.’

  ‘But it would make the room cosier!’ Anna said, annoyed.

  ‘And it would cost us a shilling.’

  There was no answering that. Anna grimaced at Fanny. Fanny knew that her cousin felt constantly trumped, blocked, disappointed by the endless question of pounds, shillings and pence.

  ‘But you can light the fire,’ Aunt Mary conceded. ‘Your father will want to dry his trousers. And when Mr Terry arrives, I don’t want you bera
ting him about the evils of the slave trade. Try to be demure.’

  Anna pulled the expression of a mule. ‘Aunt Jane,’ she said drily, ‘loves berating people on the evils of the slave trade. And no one stops her.’

  Making a fire was a different and much less attractive proposition than lighting a candle. It involved putting on aprons and going outside again and lugging wood.

  But after they’d made the effort, the room did look more welcoming. On the tea table lay the pot, the cups, and a plateful of sliced seed cake that Aunt Mary had made.

  ‘I hope she won’t claim it as her own,’ Anna whispered to Fanny.

  Anna’s stepmother felt there was nothing shameful in baking cakes herself.

  To Fanny’s surprise, there was a movement in the corner. Anna’s father must have come into the room unobserved, and had been sitting silently in his high-backed chair. Perhaps snoozing, Fanny suspected. His spectacles were halfway down his nose.

  ‘Pretty buttons,’ he said to his daughter.

  ‘Thank you!’ Anna said lightly.

  Fanny sighed. Any compliment, even if it was just from her own father, left her red and trembling. But Anna took praise almost as her due. She was lifting her nose into the air now, and Fanny guessed what she was doing. Showing off her profile again.

  ‘Anna!’ hissed Fanny. ‘You look ridiculous like that.’

  A little sheepishly, Anna snapped her chin back down, as if for reasons unknown she’d just been examining the ceiling.

  There were sounds in the passage, and Fanny could hear talk of the rain, and the roads, and the Hampshire mud. Aunt Mary was bringing in the visitor, who was rubbing his hands and looking bedraggled.

  Anna put her nose in the air again. It seemed that she just couldn’t help it.

  ‘Terry!’ said her father, straightening his angular legs with the usual noisy complaint from his joints.

  James Austen was shaking hands with the newcomer. Fanny now saw, with a sinking of the heart, that he was not at all the ‘young’ man Aunt Mary had promised. Mr Terry looked almost as old as Anna’s father. He was wiping the rain from his spectacles before putting them fussily back on to his nose.

  But he was a man, and she and Anna were young ladies. They had better get on with being charming; that was what they were supposed to do.

  Anna’s father and Mr Terry began to talk, of Latin authors Fanny had not read, and of clerical grudges, and vengeful deans of whom Fanny had never heard and hoped never to meet.

  He seemed a poor stick, this Mr Terry, agreeing with Uncle James on everything. Anna cleared her throat, then offered him some tea.

  ‘Oh, no, let me pour myself for the young ladies.’

  He’d made the offer a little too late, but at least he’d noticed them, and seemed conscientiously determined to be polite.

  Mr Terry brought a teacup to Fanny, and then took another to Anna, who was sitting winsomely on a stool by the fire. As he drew near the flames, Fanny noticed that despite his stoop and his awkward manner, his face was a little less lined than she expected, and his hair was cropped short rather than completely bald.

  ‘Do you enjoy literature yourself, Miss Austen?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh, my daughter and her cousin like to wallow in trashy novels,’ said Uncle James dismissively. ‘They have no time for the greats.’

  ‘I am not as literary as my father,’ Anna said, meekly, for Mr James Austen’s poems were known – and the reading of them was dreaded – in the neighbourhood. ‘But I do like a good book. Perhaps not as much as my cousin Fanny, who is the greatest bookworm I know.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr Terry. ‘I like a love story myself.’

  Fanny tried to disguise her surprise. Really! He didn’t look as if he did.

  ‘This new book about, oh, the moody dashing gentleman and the spritely Lizzie, I enjoyed that most thoroughly.’

  Anna smiled. ‘Oh, you mean Pride and Prejudice? That’s a brilliant book. Fanny made me read it, and I think even my father might enjoy it. The misunderstandings! The happy ending!’

  He was smiling back at Anna now. Fanny noticed that her cousin’s face was all aglow. She’d once again become the Anna Fanny knew, the one full of jokes, who was called ‘a caution’ by all the servants at Godmersham Park.

  To Fanny’s surprise, Anna stood up.

  ‘I’m going to show Mr Terry the pleasure grounds,’ she said, in a manner that brooked no argument. ‘It’s not raining so very much now, and I want to get his opinion on the shrubs.’

  Fanny was clearly not included in the invitation. So, I’m to stay behind and make conversation with my aunt and uncle, she thought a little resentfully.

  Anna did not immediately leave the hearthrug, though, as if waiting for the inevitable comment that it was too wet, too late, too wasteful of time to traipse about in a shrubbery. Fanny knew that Anna had slightly oversold the shrubbery’s attractions by referring to it as a pleasure ground.

  And yet, Fanny thought defiantly, feeling sorry for her cousin, you could hear the nightingale on a summer evening at the far end up near the woods.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Mr Terry must see the pleasure grounds.’

  Anna held out her hand, and, as if irresistibly drawn by the force of her gesture, Mr Terry took it. And he indicated, clumsily, but in an extremely genteel manner, that she should precede him out of the door.

  Chapter 9

  Anna’s attic bedroom, Steventon Rectory

  ‘You were an awfully long time out in the garden with Mr Terry,’ Fanny said, between strokes of the hairbrush.

  Anna was already tucked up in the bed she was sharing with Fanny in her little room up in the eaves of Steventon Rectory. But now she bounced out of it once again. It was as if she could not keep still, even for a minute.

  ‘Oh, Anna, be careful with the feathers,’ Fanny sighed. Anna had started prancing about while trying on Fanny’s own new Sunday bonnet. Fanny wished she’d packed it away in her box rather than leaving it out on Anna’s dressing table. Or rather, on Anna’s plank of wood balanced between two chairs.

  ‘Mr Terry!’ Anna snorted, in something like disgust. ‘Do you think that Lord Smedley would like this hat?’

  She gazed at herself, apparently enraptured by her own reflection as it hovered by Fanny’s shoulder in the looking glass. Propped up on the plank, the mirror leaned precariously against the faded blue wallpaper.

  ‘I think,’ said Fanny, ‘that he’d probably describe it as a bonnet for a bumpkin. My mother doesn’t really approve of it. Not London-y enough.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Anna kept her own counsel, and Fanny could tell that she didn’t really approve of it either. ‘Did Aunt Jane help you choose it?’

  Fanny smiled.

  ‘Oh, Anna,’ she said. ‘You know that my mother won’t let Aunt Jane take me shopping. No, I chose it myself.’

  She gave a few more brushes, but only really for the show of it. It was always quick to comb out her fine hair, whereas Anna usually took ten minutes and a lot of wailing to get through hers. Fanny realised that she was overbrushing her hair because she was nervous about what she was going to say next.

  ‘Anna,’ she began tentatively.

  There was something in Fanny’s voice which made her cousin stop preening. Her stance was wary and stiff.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Um, you know you mentioned Lord Smedley?’

  ‘What about him?’

  Anna’s tone was aggressive. She jutted out her chin and pulled the bonnet low across her eyes.

  Fanny groped for words, but found them not.

  It really was too difficult to go deeper into these dangerous waters. But Fanny had underestimated Anna’s obsession with her dancing partner.

  ‘I think his sister is probably going to write to me soon, don’t you?’ Anna said, stroking the bonnet. ‘He knows I’m here in Hampshire.’ Anna had what might have been described as a tremulous smile playing across her lips. Her cousin did seem to enjoy p
layacting these different parts, Fanny thought, the vain girl, the disgruntled girl, the girl who might be in love … ‘I’m pretty sure she will,’ Anna said complacently. ‘Lord Smedley said he would get her to ask me to stay with them, last time we danced.’

  Anna and Lord Smedley had danced, Fanny knew, a grand total of three times. If his sister did really write with an invitation for Anna to visit, then perhaps yes, Anna could expect a proposal to follow.

  And yet, it had been two weeks since the last ball in Kent, and no letter had come.

  ‘Are you really, truly sure, Anna?’ Fanny said gently, avoiding her cousin’s eyes. ‘That you’re going to hear from him? It’s not just that mind trick of Aunt Jane’s?’

  Although Fanny didn’t dare look at Anna, she could tell by a kind of quivering in the air that Anna had grown tense and still and grim again.

  She said nothing.

  Oh dear, Fanny thought desperately.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Anna said. To Fanny’s surprise, her voice was quiet and resigned. ‘An actual lord, let alone a rich one, would be too good for a girl like me.’

  Fanny’s comb hovered in mid-air. What did Anna mean? Was she serious? Was she being ironic?

  Anna now sighed, and hurled herself backwards on to her bed.

  ‘I know what you think, Fanny,’ she said wearily, as if casting off her act, ‘that Lord Smedley won’t really ask me to marry him.’

  Fanny still sat frozen before the mirror, worried that this was some kind of a trap. Was Anna trying to get her to say that Lord Smedley was too high a prize for a girl who lived in a shabby old rectory? Or was Anna fishing for reassurance that Lord Smedley really did like her after all?

  She sat there, thinking, her mouth opening and closing silently. All of a sudden the words came tumbling out.

  ‘It’s not his money, or his title, Anna,’ she said.

  Now Fanny had finally started to speak from her heart, her way was clear. She burned with love for her unhappy cousin. ‘I just think he doesn’t have a good character.’

  But Fanny hadn’t quite got the measure of Anna’s bitterness.