Jane and the Genius of the Place

by Stephanie Barron

  Mr. Grey must have determined at this point upon quitting the room; there was the slightest rustle from beyond the window, and the sound of my brother rising to his feet.

  “I will take what you have said under consideration, Austen,” Mr. Grey said sharply, “but I can offer you nothing further today.”

  “Very well. I hope I may always be of service.” A bell rang distantly in the house; poor Russell would be running, I knew, to show the gendeman to the door.

  “And Mr. Grey—”

  “Yes?” The voice came indistinctly, from the far end of the room.

  “I may assure you of one thing. I willfindyour wife’s murderer—and so help me God, I will see him hang.”

  The assurance may have been of less comfort than Neddie supposed.

  WHEN GREY HAD GONE, I PUT DOWN MY GARDEN TRUG— now overflowing with posies already wilting in the late-morning heat—and stepped through the French windows.

  “Is he gone?”

  “Safely down the sweep.” Neddie was engaged in the filling of his pipe, an indulgence he never practised before a lady; but I had an idea of his internal disquiet, and forbore to chide him. Tobacco, I believe, may be a spur to thought as much as a comfort to the nerves, and I saw no reason to deny him the remedy at such an hour.

  He settled himself in his favourite armchair and studied me with amusement. “How much of our conversation did you overlisten?”

  “Nearly all of it. You were aware of my presence?”

  “For the last half-hour. Grey may not have perceived you in his pacing about the room, but in following his figure to the garden prospect, I could not fail of detecting yours.” The amusement deepened. “And what is your considered opinion of the fellow, Jane?”

  “As you said of the Comte—I quite liked him.”

  “Yes,” Neddie mused. “It is a great failing in this line of work, to undertake to admire or pity anyone. He is made of stern stuff, Mr. Valentine Grey, and might be capable of anything.”

  “—Of steady industry; of sacrifice in the name of principle; of ruthless calculation in matters of business or state—but is he capable of passion? I cannot believe it.”

  “He was eloquent on the subject of his wife.”

  “He spoke well,” I conceded, “but more as a man whose passion is dead.”

  Neddie shrugged. “So, too, is the object of it.”

  “Real love endures beyond the grave, Neddie, as you very well know. Men may remarry; they may cherish a second wife, and a third—but their feelings remain tender in respect of the departed. Mr. Grey’s passion did not survive the first few months of his marriage, I suspect. He spoke as a man who has learned a part by rote.”

  “You are severe upon him.”

  “And yet, I cannot believe him capable of deception in an evil cause. He is the sort of man one instinctively trusts, and expects to perform with integrity. He will return again, I am sure of it—and tell you all you wish to know. His conscience will not allow him to rest, until he has done so.”

  “I hope you are not proved credulous, Jane”—Neddie sighed—“for I have gambled a good deal on a single throw. Grey may as readily determine that silence is his truest friend, and deny me the knowledge that must unlock this puzzle.”

  The great clock in the hallway began to toll the hour, and Neddie withdrew his watch from a waistcoat pocket. “Behind again,” he muttered, and commenced to wind it. “The Finch-Hattons are expected to dinner, and the sainfoin harvest has yet to be fired.”

  “Bother the Finch-Hattons,” I cried petulantly. “What do you make of Grey’s portrait of the Comte? There, at least, you must admit he was entirely frank. He went so far as to admit the letter.”

  “We may judge, then, that the admission suited his purpose—whatever that purpose may be.”

  “I quite long to meet the interesting Comte,” I persisted, as Neddie made for the library door. “Can not you conspire, Neddie, to invite him to take coffee with us some evening after dinner?”

  “I shall do better, Jane,” he said with a roguish look. “I shall persuade my elegant wife to set the neighbourhood an example, and pay a call of condolence at The Larches. The funeral is tomorrow, at eleven o’clock; but a Saturday visit on the part of the Godmersham ladies would be admirably in keeping with what is due to Mr. Grey.”

  “And so it should!” I exclaimed. “Dearest Neddie, for considering of it!”

  “I am always happy to oblige you, Jane, even in the matter of your morbid taste for bones. I confess myself most impatient to learn your opinion of the devious Comte de Penfleur.”

  1 The Romantic novel by Goethe, presumably read in the translation.—Editor’s note.

  22 August 1805, confd.

  THE FINCH-HATTONS CAME, IN ALL THE HASTE AND splendour native to the possessors of an elegant green barouche. They came—tho’ not, as commonly expected, for the dinner hour, but a bare three minutes after the household had sought our separate rooms to dress. A tremendous scurrying in the lower passages, an anxious banging of Elizabeth’s door, and the sudden catapult of Fanny into my bedchamber, alerted me to my doom.

  “Aunt Jane!” Fanny burst out in an ill-managed whisper, “you will never guess what has happened! Mamma’s guests are arrived, and a full hour before their time— and Mamma not even dressed! She begs that if you are more beforehand, that you might go down and do the civil for a while. Sayce is only just begun on Mamma’s hair—and you cannot think how droll Mamma looks, with curls all bunched on one side, and nothing at all on the other! I thought I should die of laughter, until she sent me away in a fury.”

  A fury, for Lizzy, must encompass nothing more than a penetrating look, and a suggestion that her husband should show Fanny the dressing-room door; but I apprehended the gravity of her condition in an instant. Lizzy with her hair undone is not to be contemplated.

  “Help me with these buttons, Fanny.” I shrugged myself into a passable dinner gown and presented my back to my niece. “If you can but find my pale blue slippers—I believe your mother’s pug has dragged one under the bed—I am at your service direcdy.”

  When I entered the drawing-room moments later, the Finch-Hattons stood aloof from one another, in attitudes of flight—for all the world like strangers at a ship’s embarkation. There was Lady Elizabeth, her driving shawl still pinned about her shoulders, and an enormous straw hat balanced like a charger upon her head. She had taken up a position near the front windows, which gave out on the entry and sweep, and seemed engaged in a study of her own conveyance. Her husband, Mr. George Finch-Hatton, stood scowling over his pocket-watch, as though the expected ship had failed to make the tide; while Miss Louisa, the eldest daughter, was perched on the edge of one of Lizzy’s litde gilt chairs, tapping her foot impatiendy.

  “What good fortune!” I cried, rushing in with extended hands, the very picture of effusive welcome. “We had not hoped for a glimpse of you until the dinner hour! I am charged with offering a most hearty welcome, in default of my brother and sister, who will no doubt be with us direcdy. And how did you find the road, Mr. Finch-Hatton? Your horses endured this heat tolerably well?”

  “Tolerably, thank you, Miss Austen,” he said, and returned to his watch with studied indifference.

  “Allow me to take your wrap, Lady Elizabeth.”

  “Thank you, Miss Austen, but I so detest the duty of wrapping myself up again—particularly when travelling without my maid—that I believe I shall retain it yet a while. Your sister is indisposed?”

  “Not at all—and most anxious to see you. She is merely dressing for dinner. I expect her every moment.”

  “I see. A pity, George, that we have so little time.”

  “But I thought…”

  “It is quite impossible for us to stay above a quarter-hour. We are expected at Eastwell tonight. An engagement of Mr. Finch-Hatton’s—”

  Expected at Eastwell! When they had been expected here for dinner! It was quite extraordinary behaviour— almost indicativ
e of a desire to snub my brother. But no—in that case, they should simply have sent a note, filled with regret at the necessity of despising his hospitality. Perhaps it was a family matter, too private for explanation; or perhaps our embroilment in the affairs of Mrs. Grey … I dismissed the last notion as absurd.

  “I see,” I said with an effort, and crossed to the bell-pull. “Perhaps I should summon Mrs. Austen, so that you do not escape her altogether. She would never forgive me.”

  “If you would be so good—”

  It was fully eight minutes by Mr. Finch-Hatton’s pocket-watch, I am sure, before my brother and his wife hurried through the door. I endured the interval as gamely as I might—but with litde pleasure, I confess. The Finch-Hattons are never a talkative family; in such circumstances, each seemingly lost in a private reverie, they were as mute as sybils. It was impossible to introduce the subject that must be uppermost in all our minds—Mrs. Grey’s death; delicacy forbade it. But each of my forays into conversation proved disappointing. Neither the subject of Race Week, nor last evening’s Assembly, nor even the prospect of long sleeves for winter dress, could animate the ladies; and as for Finch-Hatton himself— he was preoccupied with pacing off the length of the drawing-room, a habit acquired, I suppose, from his intimacy with architects.

  For if the Finch-Hattons are impoverished in speech, they are rich in the passion for improvement. Their estate at Eastwell is never suffered to remain long in one condition—a team of builders must be permanendy installed somewhere in the deer park, I believe, as feudal lords once commanded a host of vassals; and there a legion of gardeners is perennially in pursuit of the last word in landscape fashion. The present house—the third to be built on its site—is a fantastical thing, half riding-school and half-Parthenon.1 Mr. Joseph Bonomi had the designing of it, and managed it in so outlandish a taste—which he persuaded the Finch-Hattons to believe was at once classical and modern—that it is quite the talk of the neighbourhood, though perhaps not in the manner his patrons intended.

  Conceive, if you are able, a largish white block of a building, divided along its front with pilasters and capitals set into the facade; exactly three great windows on one side of the entry and three on the other, and an immense arched portico, nearly three storeys in height, dominating the whole. Cumbersome, inelegant, unlovely, and awkward—but classical and modern enough in its expression, that Lady Elizabeth might believe herself a citizen of Rome. I have visited the family at Eastwell several times, and can never find that the place has grown in my estimation. It is peculiarly suited to the humours of its inhabitants, however, who are in general as awkward and inexpressive as their walls. The Finch-Hatton ladies never speak if they can help it, and then only in plaintive tones; the Finch-Hatton men, when not looking at their pocket-watches, prefer to be out-of-doors.

  “Lady Elizabeth!” my sister Lizzy cried from the doorway. “What is this I hear of your not intending dinner? Is it possible? And I have had white soup enough for an army simmering in the kitchens!”

  “It may yet serve, dear madam, if Buonaparte has his way,” Mr. Finch-Hatton observed drily, and thrust his watch at last into his pocket. Perhaps he had placed an idle bet or two as to the time required for Lizzy’s preparation. “You look well, Austen,” he said to my brother with a bow; “surprisingly well, under the circumstances.”

  “You mean the evacuation orders?” Neddie enquired smoothly, as though Mrs. Grey had never lived, much less died. “I cannot take them in earnest, however diligently I set the servants to packing.”

  “Then I pray the Monster may land on my doorstep rather than yours,” Finch-Hatton returned. “I hope I shall know how to receive the renegade! I have been drilling my tenants these two months at least; and there is powder and shot enough in the stores to hold off an entire brigade of cavalry!”

  “I applaud your foresight, sir,” Neddie said, “but I cannot expect so litde of our gallant Navy. With an Austen and a Nelson scouring the Channel, the Monster shall not pass beyond a nautical mile from Boulogne.”

  “But tell me, Lady Elizabeth,” my sister broke in, “must you certainly go on to Eastwell tonight? If it is the lateness of the hour that concerns you, I am sure there are bedchambers enough.”

  “Lateness of the hour! It is not above six o’clock. I am sure that at Eastwell we dine fully as late as you do at Godmersham, Lady Elizabeth returned frostily. “We are never behindhand, you know, in matters of elegance.”2 Lady Elizabeth is the daughter of an earl, a fact she would have no one forget—particularly the daughter of a baronet

  “You! Behindhand! As though anyone could think it,” Lizzy returned, with that pale green gleam in her eye that suggested an inner amusement “I believe that everything at Eastwell is in the first rank of taste—would not you agree, Jane?”

  “Entirely,” I murmured. Knowing my opinion of the place all too well, Lizzy was cruelly impertinent; but I endured the test to perfection, and betrayed nothing in my countenance.

  “Pray tell me,” Neddie persisted, “what improvements do you presendy undertake about that remarkable place? Not that it could be said to require improvement, but I know your artistic spirit too well. It will never rest while the least suggestion of beauty remains at bay.”

  Well put, I silendy commended my brother. He had got the notion in one. At bay would beauty forever remain, however desperately the Finch-Hattons pursued it.

  “The interior of the house is quite nearly complete,” Lady Elizabeth confided, unbending a litde, “but for the trifling matter of some painted Chinese papers that are intended for the drawing-room, and are shockingly delayed en route. And then there is the matter of the dining-parlour’s draperies—I could never be sanguine regarding the shade of pomegranate silk; it seemed to me to border on the tawdry.”

  “That is often the way with pomegranate,” Neddie remarked, with a compelling command of countenance. “One may meet it anywhere—and not always in the best company.”

  “Exactly! I believe I shall change it out for green,” Lady Elizabeth said complacently. “But it must await Mr. Finch-Hatton’s present passion, which quite consumes our energies.”

  Lizzy’s brow furrowed slighdy in an effort to discern which, of the numerous Finch-Hatton projects, Lady Elizabeth intended. “The construction of the foyer’s free-floating dome?”

  “The dome!” Finch-Hatton himself cried out, as if in pain. “No, no, my dear lady—the dome is quite complete, the most marvellous thing you shall ever observe! St. Peter’s is nothing to it! Although it might be accused of wanting in frescoes—but I shall attend to that presently, when the necessary Florentines may be shipped with safe-passage.”

  “Florentines,” Neddie murmured. “Of course.”

  “What I would speak of, my dear Mrs. Austen,” said Lady Elizabeth with her first suggestion of animation, “is Mr. Finch-Hatton’s design of the park. It is to be entirely new-laid—approach, prospect, shrubberies, and all!”

  “The park?” I could not but be surprised. “But I thought it had been done in your father’s time, by Mr. Capability Brown.”

  “Not Brown himself,” Finch-Hatton supplied carelessly, “but one of his journeymen. And as for Brown, well—”

  “Oh, do not vex me with the name of BrownV cried Lady Elizabeth. “When I consider how much of the Picturesque that man destroyed, with his sweeps of turf, and his litde clumps of trees, and his ha-has built up like a moat about the house, I could weep with vexation!”3 Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1715-1783), the supreme interpreter of the natural style in landscape gardening, transformed the English countryside in the eighteenth century. He abolished rigidly geometrical park designs, such as the formal terracing and allees of the French style then predominating, and achieved a free-flowing, bucolic terrain dotted with copses tiiat has come to epitomize the late Georgian landscape.

  A ha-ha was an elaborate livestock guard, separating the area of free-ranging parkland from die more formal garden space. It was formed of either
a sunken ditch or a raised wall. Maria Bertram, in Austen’s Mansfield Park, is trapped by a locked ha-ha gate at her betrothed’s estate—a symbolic reference to die prison of social convention.—Editor’s note.

  Lizzy and I exchanged a speaking look. Neither of us could ignore Lady Elizabeth’s recourse to the Picturesque. It had become the chief phrase of Mr. Humphrey Repton’s acolytes—those who would dot the landscape with scenes both romantic and wild. Eastwell Park, I surmised, would swiftly be turned into a wilderness, with haunted grottoes and abandoned cottages just ripe for a wandering hermit; a lake would be constructed, with an earth-work island, raised expressly for the purpose of displaying a Gothic ruin—all of it quite modern, of course. How it would all appear, with the Roman fantasy of a house as backdrop, I could hardly imagine.

  “And so you aspire to the Picturesque,” Neddie offered, in a dangerous spirit of encouragement.

  “How often have I observed to Mr. Austen,” my sister Lizzy said provokingly, “that the little copse on our hill is too insipid for words!—That the walled garden lacked all enchantment! That the path of the Stour might be swelled to something greater—an ornamental pond, perhaps, for the siting of a Chinese pagoda! I even appealed to his desire for coarse-fishing—but to no avail!”

  “Perhaps not a pagoda” Mr. Finch-Hatton countered doubtfully, “but a smallish ruin, now—”

  “And that avenue,” Lady Elizabeth added sadly. “Bent-ley, as I believe you call it—”

  “Bentigh,” Neddie corrected gently. “It was planted in the first Mr. Knight’s time.”

  “So I assumed,” she rejoined placidly. “I am sure it is shockingly old-fashioned.”

  “I believe the lime trees are over fifty years old,” Neddie agreed. His lips were a trifle too compressed, as though the humourous had given way to the insulting. “Nasty, unnatural sorts of things, limes—don’t you agree, Jane?”

  “My dear,” cried Lady Elizabeth, “I truly believe that the Austens might benefit from an introduction to Mr. Sothey! Is it not the very thing? Would it not be a service in the calling of Art?”