The Austen Girls

by Lucy Worsley

  Fanny scrunched up her handkerchief in her hand. In some ways, she felt worse than ever. If even Aunt Jane didn’t know what she should be feeling, then things were in a sorry state indeed.

  ‘It all depends, doesn’t it?’ said her aunt, seeing Fanny’s distress. ‘We need to know more. Does she love him? Does he love her? Is he kind? I fear that he must be poor – because if he was rich I think my brother James would have consented to the engagement at once. My brother’s finances mean he’d find it hard to turn down a rich match for Anna, unless the man was known to be cruel.’

  ‘Aunt Jane, I know I ought to congratulate her … but I can’t, I can’t. I’m just not sure about it.’

  ‘Fanny,’ her aunt said seriously. She beckoned Fanny closer to the table where she sat. Aunt Jane pushed her spectacles down the bridge of her nose, and craned her long neck forward so that she could look over the tops of the lenses and right into Fanny’s eyes.

  ‘Poor Anna is under so much pressure to get married,’ she said. ‘They never leave her alone, do they? We must get Anna here to Godmersham and talk to her properly and find out what’s going on. At once.’

  Aunt Jane now stood up and began to stalk about.

  ‘Your mother wasn’t thinking clearly this morning, she was distressed, but I’m sure she’ll agree.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Fanny? Yes? You’d like to see your cousin, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I would, Aunt Jane. But you know she was here only at Easter, and the stagecoach is very expensive, and if Uncle James is angry with Anna I don’t think he’d pay the fare for her to come again so soon.’

  ‘You’re right,’ her aunt said. ‘I’ve thought of that. I’ll offer to pay myself. I really must see my niece.’

  Fanny felt able to make the ghost of a smile.

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Aunt Jane,’ she said.

  She paused.

  She’d have liked to ask a question. She knew that Aunt Jane didn’t have any money, which was why she was living here at Godmersham rather than in a house of her own, and therefore she didn’t know how Aunt Jane could afford Anna’s coach fare. But she didn’t quite know how to put her question into words.

  But there was also something else she wanted to ask as well. And maybe she could bear to ask it, here in the warm quiet sunlit room with all Aunt Jane’s attention focused on her.

  ‘Aunt Jane, why didn’t my mother want to invite Anna? She loves Anna.’

  Aunt Jane sighed.

  ‘Your mother,’ she said, ‘is a busy woman. Busy! She has all you children to look after …’

  But Mrs Sackree does that, Fanny thought rebelliously.

  ‘… and your father to please, and the house to run, and the servants to manage, and, oh, you know, so many different people to please …’ She trailed off.

  ‘Aunt Jane, can you tell me why Mama is always so cross?’

  Aunt Jane was staring out of the window now, and Fanny knew that she often said important things when she wasn’t looking at you. So Fanny listened extra hard.

  ‘Your poor mother,’ Aunt Jane said, ‘is going to have another baby. That’s why she’s cross sometimes, and particularly at this moment, and that’s why she failed a little in generosity to Anna this morning, although she is, as you know, at heart a very kind and generous woman.’

  Fanny gasped.

  ‘Yes,’ Aunt Jane said. Her voice was carefully neutral, as if she wasn’t either happy or sad. ‘Then you’ll have ten brothers and sisters, isn’t that right?’

  ‘Eleven of us!’ Fanny was astonished. Really, another baby in the nursery? Another baby to play with. Another person to look after. Another mouth to feed. ‘Well, the little girls will be delighted.’

  They did enjoy playing with each new baby as if it were a doll, dressing it up, carrying it about.

  But Aunt Jane had said ‘your poor mother’. Fanny now pictured her mother sinking on to the sofa and saying that she would thank the Lord for a cup of tea and an early night. But however busy or cross she might be, Fanny’s mother was always, always there for a kiss last thing at night, and for a spoonful of syrup if you didn’t feel well. How surprising to think of her as an actual human being, with a life of her own.

  And then, Fanny thought a little grimly, if the new baby is a girl, that’ll be yet another one of us who must find a husband. Would there be enough husbands to go round?

  ‘Yes,’ said Aunt Jane again, vaguely. ‘And now, I must, I must finish, um, you know …’ She gestured at her desk.

  ‘Your letter? Yes, of course. And then you’ll write to Anna? For us both?’

  ‘I’ll write at once,’ said her aunt. ‘Don’t you worry. I’m very good at that.’

  Fanny stood and got ready to leave. Aunt Jane was already bent back over her desk.

  ‘Let your mother tell you in her own good time about your new brother or sister! No need to mention that, you know.’ She threw the words over her shoulder.

  ‘Yes, Aunt Jane,’ Fanny said.

  She waited a moment in case her aunt had anything more to say, but there was only the scratching of her pen. Fanny turned and walked out, with a slightly straighter spine.

  It had been a thoroughly adult conversation.

  And at no point had Aunt Jane pressed Fanny on what was becoming the last thing she wanted to think about: how in the world she was going to find a husband of her own.

  Chapter 12

  The Hursden Ball

  That night, all too soon it seemed, it was time to go out on the husband hunt again.

  Fanny put on her pale pink slippers, and her new pale pink dress. She thought it was a good dress for spring, and when she walked into the ballroom at Hursden she found that the whole colour scheme was pale pink too.

  ‘Tulips!’ whispered Elizabeth loudly in Fanny’s ear. ‘The cheap option. You can see they’ve just got them from the garden outside, as if they might not even have hothouses here. Mr Austen, have they a hothouse here at Hursden?’

  But Fanny’s father was already heading for the card-playing in the other room. His disappearing back made her feel bereft. She hadn’t yet been to a ball with her mother, and she was worried that Elizabeth would be a sterner chaperone and judge of her performance on the social scene than her father.

  Just then Christopher Hurst came up, bowed and asked Fanny for the first dance.

  Her heart almost thudded with relief.

  Yes, Elizabeth was smiling with satisfaction, and, oh yes, now she was taking herself over to a sofa near the wall, there to rest her feet and talk to her friends, leaving Fanny in relative peace.

  ‘Thank you, Christopher,’ she said as they took their places in the set, side by side. ‘You’ve made my mama very happy by asking me to dance right in front of her like that. And me too,’ she added quickly. ‘I’m glad to dance with you myself! But she wants so much for me to have lots of partners.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re a good dancer. You don’t stamp on my feet.’

  Fanny’s smile grew even broader. It was perhaps true that her neat little feet carried her more easily across the ballroom than some of the other partners Christopher probably had to haul around.

  ‘You dance very well, too, Christopher,’ she said, although it was a lie. She remembered, as the players struck up, what an effort it always was to force him to keep time to the music. ‘And have you been out shooting today?’

  She glimpsed Aunt Jane, crossing the ballroom to bring Fanny’s mother a glass of lemonade.

  ‘Getting the hang of this, I see, Miss Fanny,’ said Aunt Jane’s wry smile.

  But all too soon the first dance in the chaste embrace of Christopher from next door was over, and Fanny felt herself to be down on the deck again. Would anyone ask her for the second dance? Triumph or disaster?

  George Broadstairs, Steven Armes, Richard Goodall.

  One by one, they all saved Fanny’s honour.

  But with each of them,
once the initial glow of relief at being rescued faded, she found herself making the same small talk. Even falling back on the same question about shooting.

  Aunt Jane had called the young men of hereabouts ‘ballroom creepers’, and Fanny could see why. They all seemed so young, and they crept so cautiously around the floor, without much energy or desire.

  Fanny longed to be violently twirled into the music of the waltz, one-two-three, one-two-three, turn, and turn, just as Mr Drummer had done the night they’d danced together alone.

  Mr Dominic Drummer!

  She found herself scanning the faces of the late-arriving guests, but then remembered that he wouldn’t be there.

  Of course not; he had mysteriously disappeared. And how could she possibly find a replacement who could dance as well?

  She sighed so loudly that Richard Goodall heard.

  ‘Miss Austen! Are you tired?’ he was saying anxiously. ‘Come, let me take you to sit down with your mother.’

  It would have been ungracious of Fanny to refuse.

  So she suffered the indignity of being escorted right across the crowded floor and placed beside her mother on the sofa.

  ‘Fanny!’ Elizabeth hissed. ‘I saw you sighing and yawning at that poor young man. This simply isn’t good enough. Not good enough at all!’

  Fanny looked at the floor and shuffled her slippers.

  ‘Sorry, Mama,’ she said.

  Now she’d have to sit on the sofa looking interested and hopeful, as if she wanted someone else to ask her to dance. And her mother would closely observe to make sure that she didn’t go off into a daydream.

  The ball had turned into an ordeal, to be got through as best she could without further humiliation. Perhaps all balls would be like this without – well, to be honest – without her favourite dancing partner, Mr Dominic Drummer.

  Chapter 13

  Out in the park

  A few days later, Fanny was lying on her back, looking at the sky. It held traces of cloud, like chalk dust gathered in the folds of a blue cloth, but the cloth itself was a bright, summery blue. And there by her side on the rug lay her cousin. Anna was back at Godmersham.

  As soon as Fanny had set eyes on Anna, her heart had melted and her conflicting feelings about Anna’s engagement eased. She could see how important it was to Anna that she might soon be married with a home of her own, and would no longer have to be the very least important Miss Austen, poor relation of the many Misses Austen of Godmersham Park. And how distressed she was at the thought that this husband might escape her.

  The problem of Anna’s parents’ refusal to allow the engagement to stand was burning as brightly as ever. Would Anna get her heart’s desire? The tension, not knowing, was both exciting and terrible. Fanny rolled over on to her side to see what Anna was doing.

  Her eye fell at once on something that lay between them: an empty bottle.

  ‘Good Lord, Anna,’ Fanny said crossly, her mind taken quite away from thoughts of the future, ‘have you really drunk all the lemonade?’

  Anna sniggered.

  ‘You sound just like my stepmother,’ she said. ‘Don’t enjoy yourself, Anna, don’t indulge.’

  Fanny sighed.

  ‘It’s not that,’ she pointed out. ‘I might have wanted some myself.’

  Anna was instantly contrite.

  ‘Sorry, Fan,’ she said. ‘I do know that I can be selfish. But I’m not as selfish as people are always telling me that I am,’ she muttered, turning away and ripping up a handful of grass.

  Fanny fell back again and looked up at the sky.

  ‘I think that’s a cuckoo, isn’t it?’ Anna asked idly. ‘Our cuckoos at Steventon are quite pretty.’ It seemed that Anna could afford, at last, to be gracious about the place, now she finally had the prospect of leaving it for good.

  ‘I wonder if Uncle James’s letter is well on its way?’ Fanny asked. ‘It might almost be at Canterbury already!’

  She simply hadn’t been able to resist returning to the great topic of the day.

  ‘Well, Uncle Edward wrote to him, oh, five days ago now,’ Anna mused, ‘so that would certainly give a letter time to get there, and one to come back?’

  When the Kentish Austens had taken Anna, shaken and weepy, back into their bosom, her pitiful condition had convinced the whole family that Anna’s engagement must be allowed to stand.

  Anna had wept with rage and frustrated desire in Fanny’s room, while Aunt Jane and Fanny herself had stroked her hair. Even Anna’s aunt Elizabeth had come rushing in to give her a kiss.

  ‘Never mind, Anna,’ she’d said. ‘I’ll speak to Mr Austen. I’ll tell him to tell your father that your looks are being injured by this silly business of his withholding consent.’

  ‘It’s not so much my father,’ Anna moaned, ‘as that bloody Mary.’

  Even in Anna’s distress, Aunt Jane could not let this stand.

  ‘Bad language is no way to speak of your stepmother,’ she said sternly. ‘She may not be all soft and cuddly, but she’s a sensible woman.’

  ‘And it may be,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that Mr Austen can do something for the young man.’

  ‘He’s not that young,’ Anna had sniffed. She’d come around to the idea of having a husband much older than herself, even if thirty (Mr Terry’s age) sounded awfully ancient. Anna had decided to think that it made him seem distinguished. If he didn’t have a fortune, at least he had the status of being properly grown up.

  So more letters had been written to Uncle James and Aunt Mary, imploring them to let the engagement stand, and to ask the ‘young man’ to come on a visit to Kent as well so that everything could be sorted out.

  Fanny’s whole body tensed up with excitement every time she thought about the prospect of the letter from Steventon arriving. Would the letter come? Would Uncle James relent?

  ‘What do you think,’ Fanny now asked, sitting up, ‘my mother meant, when she said that my father might be able to “do something” for Mr Terry?’

  ‘Why, Fanny!’ said Anna. ‘You goose. Give him money, of course. He hasn’t a bean. I wonder if your father has in mind to give him the living of the parish, now that Mr Drummer is gone. Then we could live here, in your parsonage. Mr Terry could replace Mr Drummer easily, I’m sure.’

  Fanny was taken aback by Anna’s callousness.

  ‘Anna, we were friends with Mr Drummer, don’t you remember?’ Fanny declared hotly. ‘He was kind to us, when no one else was. And he loves books – how lucky to have a parson in this very park who likes novels. We can’t just replace him. It’s all a misunderstanding, I’m sure. He wouldn’t steal anything.’

  It was, Fanny now realised, as if she’d been trying not to think of him, except as a good dancer, and to forget what had been said. There had been that mysterious conversation at the breakfast table. Her parents had told her not to think about him, and she hadn’t. Unlike Anna, she often obeyed them like that.

  In retrospect that did seem … odd of her. As if she hadn’t a mind of her own.

  Fanny suddenly realised that she cared very much about whether Mr Drummer would come back or not, and she could not possibly countenance even Anna living in Mr Drummer’s house. But she chose not to put that thought into words.

  ‘I never even asked what had happened to Mr Drummer,’ she muttered, to the grass as much as to Anna. ‘And Aunt Jane told me to be bold!’

  ‘But your father must have said something?’

  Fanny could see that Anna was almost incredulous at her lack of curiosity.

  ‘Well,’ Fanny said, ‘apparently, Mr Drummer was accused of stealing, from a shop in Canterbury. All very embarrassing. And I believe that he might be in the …’ She stopped.

  Fanny was starting to feel ashamed that she didn’t know. ‘I think he might be awaiting trial in the House of Correction.’

  ‘But surely Uncle Edward could get him out?’

  To Anna, of course, everything seemed easy.

  Fanny stared at he
r.

  ‘Oh, Fanny, you moonstruck calf,’ Anna said, holding out a hand to help Fanny up. ‘Do you do everything your parents tell you without ever asking why?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Fanny. ‘I just … went along with what Papa said, which was that I wasn’t to worry.’

  But Anna wasn’t listening.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘You’ll never become a heroine if you let people boss you around like this. I do like the thought of having Mr Drummer’s house, but even I don’t like the thought of his being in the House of Correction. For a crime which he may not even have committed! Stealing! It sounds so unlikely!’

  Fanny groaned, but she allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She hated to bother her parents and draw attention to herself. But she could see that Anna was right. Simple friendship, let alone any other kinds of feelings, compelled her to find out exactly what had happened.

  Chapter 14

  The library, Godmersham Park

  Fanny and Anna went storming down the hill. Fanny’s feet were fuelled by a growing sense of righteous indignation about Mr Drummer. She must challenge her father at once to tell her the truth.

  She would not be put off by his bluster, his loud laugh, or his general air of blinking bonhomie.

  They surged in through the front door, surprising old Pemberton the butler, who was dozing in his tall-backed chair. It was pleasantly cool in the marble entrance hall after the sun outside.

  ‘Where is Mr Austen?’ Anna demanded.

  He blinked at her sleepily. ‘Mr George?’ he asked. ‘Or Mr Henry? Gone out, perhaps to the woods …’

  It was true that Anna was much more likely to be asking for her young cousins rather than her uncle, maybe to organise a game of cricket.

  But Fanny couldn’t be bothered to explain. She was too indignant. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said, gathering her skirts again. ‘We’ll try the library.’

  Yet when they reached the great polished mahogany door it was dauntingly closed. It looked a little like the lid of a coffin. Fanny’s courage failed her. She stood back to let Anna knock.

  But Anna had her hands behind her back. She was wearing her mulish expression. Yes, she was definitely going to make Fanny do this all by herself.