Jane Fairfax

by Joan Aiken

  Taking her arm again to cross the street Frank said in a low tone, “But you know my own wishes are quite to the contrary. I prefer dark beauty to hazel-eyed comeliness. — Besides, Miss Emma is too plump. And her reputed wit is no such thing. Your friend Rachel had far more real intelligence and understanding.”

  Comforted, Jane was able to smile at Mr Weston, just emerging from Ford’s.

  “Ah, there you are, there you are!” cried Frank’s father happily. “And with Miss Fairfax, I see! That is right, that is right! Is not my son a fine young sprig, Miss Fairfax? But I am forgetting, you have met before. I am glad to see ye. How is your good aunt, and your grandmother? Well? I am happy to hear it. Now, Frank my boy, we must be running along — we have several other calls to pay, and Mrs Weston will be expecting us — See ye soon, Miss Jane, you and Miss Bates must come out to Randalls one of these evenings, ay, you must come and give us some of your grand music —” and as he took Frank’s arm and hurried him off, with hardly time for a hasty “Goodbye” she heard him continue to Frank, “Ay — poor thing — ’tis a kindness to invite her to play, for the Bates ladies, you know, have no instrument —”

  Jane, left alone outside Ford’s, felt as if air and life had been abruptly sucked out of her. Frank and his father seemed so gay, so secure together. But she — how was she to bear this imposture? How contrive to see Frank again — to converse with him unobserved? Wherever they met, it would be in the presence, under the notice of other people, under cruel constraint. How could they ever manage to communicate at all?

  And yet Frank almost seemed to enjoy the prospect of such pretence, such concealment.

  What have I done? Jane asked herself again and again. What have I done?

  At last she made her way blindly into the shop.

  Next morning Jane, glancing from the casement in the front room, had a chance to see Frank Churchill, arm-in-arm with Emma Woodhouse and Mrs Weston, standing on the other side of the the road in front of the Crown Inn. They were apparently discussing the building: the club-room windows stood open, Frank stopped and looked inside, then made some inquiry of his companions. They shook their heads. All seemed to be on the friendliest, the kindliest of terms.

  Only pride, and a strong self-discipline, kept Jane from inventing some errand that would take her into the street. — But she could not bear to break into their group. They all seemed delighted with one another.

  Not for the first time, Jane now felt most cruelly the lack of a piano. It had always been her habit, at moments of loneliness or low spirits, to sit down and disperse her trouble by a couple of hours’ vigorous practice; now that relief was denied her. True, she could go along to the Coles’ house; but the little girls were continually in and out, interrupting, so was their talkative mother, there was no chance of privacy … Doggedly, she took out her little desk, which lived under her bed when not in use, placed it on the wash-hand-stand in the bedroom she shared with Aunt Hetty, and continued a half-finished letter to Rachel Dixon.

  Next morning Aunt Hetty, glancing out of the window as she did at least every half-hour when at home, exclaimed, “Upon my word, here come Mr and Mrs Weston! But where, I wonder, is the fine young man?”

  The Westons had brought a brace of pheasants; Mr Weston and his son, it seemed, had gone out shooting on the previous day in the copses of a neighbouring farmer and had had famous sport; “and somebody was saying, I forget whom,” explained Mrs Weston, “that old Mrs Bates was particularly fond of pheasant —”

  “Oh! My dear ma’am! My dear sir! What bounty! I always say that for true kindness our neighbours are not to be bettered! But where is your son? Where is the handsome young man?”

  The Westons looked a little shame-faced, but laughed it off.

  “He has driven to London to have his hair cut; he will be back this evening.”

  “To London? Sixteen miles! To have his hair cut? But what is wrong with Ben Strudwick in the shop below-stairs?”

  “Oh, well, Frank, you see, has been brought up to grand tastes. Nothing but the best will serve. I am afraid he is a sad coxcomb,” said his father laughing, “but he is young, after all, he must submit to have his leg pulled about it, eh, Miss Jane? When a young gentleman begins to study his appearance we know what to think, do we not?” And he made some playful allusion to Miss Woodhouse which Jane tried not to hear.

  Mrs Weston seemed more troubled at this evidence of foppery than her husband. But she said defensively that Frank was really a good boy, a dear, charming boy.

  The Bates ladies, when once more alone, could not get over the extravagance.

  “Sixteen miles, twice in a day! A chaise from the Crown! There is one, you can see, who has never needed to study expenditure!” They were discussing it all afternoon; since a fine rain had set in, Jane was unable to get out of doors. Frank will have had a wet day in London, she thought, and wondered what else he did there, besides getting his hair cut. But, of course, the Churchills must have many friends in London from former periods of residence there. No doubt he was passing his time in pleasant company.

  She preferred not to think about it.

  Mrs Cole called before twilight to shake her head over the folly and extravagances of young men. “Thank heaven her children were girls!” and to invite the Bates ladies to a gathering on the following Tuesday: “We shall have some music, some fine music; Miss Jane must bring all her best pieces.”

  “Ay,” said Aunt Hetty comfortably when the visitor had left, “the Coles are as friendly and sociable a couple as you could wish to meet. They can afford to be, you know. For his stable, and the hay-and-feed business in London have prospered so well, these last years, that he has been able to throw out a new wing on his house. You will see when we go on Tuesday, Jane.”

  “I have seen it already, aunt.”

  “Ay, so you have. How forgetful I grow!” laughing heartily at herself. “And Grandmamma is always happy to go and sit with Mr Woodhouse on such occasions, to keep him company, so that Miss Emma may also attend the party. Mrs Goddard will come to pick up Grandmamma, and they all play backgammon, and Miss Emma always takes care that they are supplied with very agreeable refreshments — wine and cake invariably, and sometimes a little supper — a fricassee of sweetbread, or asparagus, which Grandmamma is very partial to —”

  “But why,” said Jane, trying and failing to dispel the shade of resentment from her tone, “why should Emma Woodhouse be invited to dinner at the Coles’ while you and I may only come in after dinner —?”

  Aunt Hetty fidgeted with the fringe of her shawl.

  “Oh! well, my dear, the thing is — well, that is, the way that we are circumstanced — unattached ladies, you know, females without gentlemen are an encumbrance at a dinner-party — they must make up their table —”

  “But Emma Woodhouse is also an unattached female,” said Jane coldly.

  “But she, my dear, has thirty thousand at command; she must be of the first consequence in Highbury. The Coles know that! Why, they would not have dared even invite her, you know, a year or so ago, before Mr Cole did so well with his hay-and-feed business. And it is quite a condescension on her part to accept — they were not at all sure that she would. — But, of course, she will see so many of her friends there: good Mr and Mrs Weston, and young Mr Churchill — perhaps that is the reason why — and Mr Knightley, and the Ponsonbys, and Mr Cox, and young Mr Cox; the Cox ladies, you know, also come in afterwards, with Miss Smith — and she is Emma Woodhouse’s particular friend; so you have no need, my dear Jane, to feel slighted, not the least in the world —”

  Just the same, Jane did feel sore and slighted; she could not help herself.

  Next day at church Frank contrived to get near her, after the service, just for a moment, under pretext of inquiring as to the ownership of a dropped prayer-book, and asked in a low tone:

  “At what hour is your daily visit to the post office?”

  “At half past eight.”

  His ja
w dropped, visibly, but he rallied and said, “Then you may expect to see me there, one of these mornings,” before turning to offer the book inquiringly to another lady.

  The post office was situated in a turning at the less frequented end of the High Street. On Monday morning Jane looked for Frank there in vain.

  But, later that day, such a startling event occurred as must entirely drive Frank’s undependable behaviour and the Coles’ discriminating hospitality out of Jane’s mind: a carter pulled up in front of their house, inquired for Bates, or Fairfax, and proceeded to deliver an enormous, sacking-wrapped package.

  “But what is it?” cried Aunt Hetty. “What in the world is it? Sure, there must be some mistake!”

  But no, the package was carefully addressed to Miss Jane Fairfax, in care of Bates, High Street, Highbury, Surry. And when, with the utmost difficulty, it had been manhandled up the narrow, step, right-angled stairs and divested of its wrappings in the parlour, it proved to be a handsome upright piano, from Broadwoods, accompanied by a large parcel of music. — There was only just room for it, in one corner, by dint of removing one of the Windsor chairs to the bedroom shared by Jane and her aunt, and taking a leaf out of the Pembroke table.

  “But from whom can it be?” cried Aunt Hetty. “Was there no letter with it? No card? No message, no delivery ticket?”

  The carter shook his head.

  “Well! That is the greatest mystery in the world! I never was so astonished!” repeated Miss Bates over and over, when the carter had been despatched below-stairs to take a glass of beer in the kitchen with Patty.

  “It must, of course, be from Colonel and Mrs Campbell,” said Jane calmly, though her heart beat fast.

  “So kind! So very thoughtful! They know how you must miss your music! But how strange in the Colonel not to have mentioned it in one of his letters! Why did he not write beforehand?”

  “Perhaps a letter went astray.”

  “Ah! true, that might explain it.”

  The piano, despite being an embarrassment, was of immense comfort to Jane. She had seen nothing of Frank, beyond the brief glimpse after church; and this token of his thought, of his real consideration for her and her needs, was heartwarming indeed. She practised on the piano for a long time, as long as she thought her relatives and the neighbours could be expected to endure.

  On Tuesday morning Frank was at the post office counter, fruitlessly inquiring for a parcel of wools expected by his stepmother. He faced Jane with an expression of laughing guilt on his face.

  “Yesterday morning I confess it, I overslept. I am such an idle dog —!”

  Jane began a confused, hurried speech of thanks for the piano.

  “You should not — indeed you should not have —”

  “Indeed I should! To find you in want of something which I know to be as necessary to you as breath itself — and I so easily able to supply it —”

  The piano, Jane knew, must have cost him at least thirty guineas.

  “It is all wrong; it is not right —”

  “Shall I see you at the Coles’ this evening?” he broke in.

  “Yes, Aunt Hetty and I are to come after dinner.”

  He muttered something derogatory to the Coles’ taste in dinner guests.

  “Cox and his son! A shambling scrivener and a callow young clerk! — But listen to me now, I have something truly diverting to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “It relates to Miss Woodhouse.”

  “Oh?” said Jane again in a cooler tone.

  “Miss Woodhouse, it appears, sets herself up as a matchmaker and diviner of romantic attachments par excellence.” She would, thought Jane, remembering the wedding game. “It was she, so she herself asserts, who brought Miss Taylor and my father together. Next — so she told my stepmother — she claimed to have detected an embryonic passion between the vicar, Elton, and her own protégée, little Miss Smith. But that, unaccountably, seems to have gone astray; Elton shied off and transferred his affections to a lady in Bath. But now — and I have it from the horse’s mouth, from Miss Woodhouse herself, who lost no time in confiding her suspicions to me — she pretends to have discovered a submerged, frustrated romance between — guess who?”

  “How can I possibly guess?” said Jane coldly, but with an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart.

  “Between yourself and Mr Dixon, none other! All this was confided to me — almost a stranger — on our second encounter, when we were walking about the village the other morning with my stepmother. Was it not true, Emma wanted to know, that Mr Dixon greatly preferred your piano playing to that of Miss Campbell? that he perhaps even preferred your person? that he had pleaded for you to accompany the married pair to Ireland?”

  “She really asked you such questions?” said Jane, transfixed.

  “Yes! Was it not exceedingly singular? That she should make such confidential inquiries — about people she had never seen — to someone like myself whom she had only just met? Oh, she is a strange, free young lady, Miss Emma Woodhouse! It seemed to me singularly indelicate. But very diverting, you must agree!”

  “Oh, very,” Jane agreed, in a hollow tone.

  “And highly convenient for us!” Frank continued cheerfully. “That Miss Woodhouse should, for heaven knows what reasons, harbour such suspicions about you and Dixon must remove from her mind any possibility of observing a connection between you and me. The lady is barking up the wrong tree with a vengeance!”

  He seemed so entertained by the episode that Jane wondered, in a kind of bemusement, if all those former days at Weymouth had been completely erased from his mind; did the name of Dixon really now mean no more to him than an idle joke? Had she mistaken in him what seemed like a true perception of her feelings for Matt?

  Would he prove equally forgetful in other respects? As forgetful as Matt Dixon?

  “I must go,” she said nervously. “They will be wondering, at home, why I am taking so long.”

  Again she tried to express her heartfelt thanks for the piano, while deploring the rashness, the extravagance of the gift. But he brushed her thanks aside and waved her a gay farewell, “Till this evening!” striding off in the direction of Randalls, which lay the opposite way to hers.

  “I say, though,” he turned to call out, laughing, “I wonder what Miss Emma will make of the instrument? She will think that Dixon sent it!”

  Chapter 13

  The party at the Coles’ was a large, cheerful, and fairly informal gathering.

  Despite being relegated to the inferior, post-dinner part of the company, Jane had taken great pains over her dress, and even greater pains over her hair. While engaged on this latter task, she could not help sighing for Rachel, and missing her sorely.

  “The people in Ireland are queer,” Rachel had written in a letter received that day, “but I grow to like them more and more. They are so easy, lively, and entertaining — so very different from Grandmother Fitzroy and her friends! I could listen to them talking forever — they have such a way of expressing themselves. I can see where Matt’s poetry comes from. (He is writing again, you will be glad to hear; working very hard.) The Irish even seem to enjoy my conversation — they are very kind to me!”

  At last, Jane thought, Rachel has found a company that appreciates her. I was right in what I did. Yes, I was right.

  Which conviction was no great comfort to her that evening when, with Aunt Hetty, she entered Mrs Cole’s new large drawing-room. The ladies who had dined in the house were there already, gathered near the fireplace, the gentlemen not yet entered.

  Jane immediately found herself subjected to an inquisition on the subject of the piano, news of which had already flown all over the village; Mrs Weston, Mrs Cole, Mrs Goddard, Mrs Cox, Mrs Otway, Mrs Gilbert, Mrs Ponsonby — all must have their curiosity satisfied as to the make of the instrument, as to tone, touch, and pedal; and had any indication been received regarding the donor? Was it not singular? Had she heard from Colonel Campbell? Or from
Mrs Dixon? The piano commanded far greater attention than all Jane’s previous history or travels abroad. Very heartily, after ten minutes of this interrogation, did Jane wish that the piano had never arrived in Highbury. Her face felt as false and stiff as a mask. She began to believe that the instrument might be more a penance than a pleasure.

  The only person who did not approach and make inquiry was Emma Woodhouse. She thinks she knows all about it already, thought Jane resentfully, and was not grateful for this consideration. — Emma, beautifully dressed, sat aloof and conversed with her little friend Miss Smith.

  After a while some of the gentlemen walked through from the dining-room, flushed and good-humoured with wine and conversation. Frank headed the file, and, after giving them a quick smile, passed clean by Jane and Miss Bates, who were seated near the door, and made his way straight over to Miss Woodhouse. He stood beside Emma and her friend until a seat came vacant, then appropriated it, and remained there, chatting gaily with the two young ladies for what seemed to Jane an interminable time; it might perhaps have been seven or eight minutes.

  By degrees, in came more gentlemen, and, following a break and a general movement in the company, Jane saw Mr Churchill glance in her own direction, address some laughing remark to Emma, who also looked towards her, then he stood up and began to thread a path through the crowd, making for her.

  At last he stood in front of her, upon his face a broad smile of satisfaction and amusement.

  She looked up at him gravely.

  “Good evening, Miss Bates!” said he to Aunt Hetty. “I have just been telling Miss Woodhouse how greatly I admire your niece’s style of hairdressing. So very original! I see nothing like it here. I conclude that it must be some London or Parisian fashion that she has brought here to dazzle the natives of Surry?”

  “Indeed, sir, she does it all herself,” said Miss Bates. “Is it not quite wonderful? No hairdresser from London, I think, could — but Jane is so very clever at all that kind of thing! In Weymouth, you know, she was able to study La Belle Assemblée and such journals — but, I was forgetting, you were in Weymouth yourself. I grow sadly forgetful! Now, is not this a pleasant party? So many friends — so many good people —”