by Jane Lark
Jane bit her lower lip to hide the smile that kept pulling at her mouth, she was too excited to appreciate Reverend Leigh’s fears. Her tongue wished to burst out with words, as questions about the estate and those who had owned it spun around, caught in a whirlpool in her head. Who? Where? When? What?
Her thoughts about who might be at the house focused only on what excitement and adventure they might bring.
“The Steward’s residence is there, Reverend Leigh.” Mr Hill pointed to a property on the far side. Jane did not look, her heartbeat racing into a faster rhythm as her fingers itched to free the ribbons of her bonnet so that she might at least lean against the window and see farther ahead.
“These are the lodge gates,” Mr Hill said. His voice held as much pride as Jane’s mother’s when she spoke of their ancestors.
An even greater hope filled Jane.
She longed for Stoneleigh Abbey to be everything her imagination had anticipated.
“Do not expect to see the Great House for a while, Miss Jane.” She glanced back at Mr Hill. “We have another mile to travel. I’m afraid the drive is a long one, and it is not the best of approaches. We travel through the wood here, and then the rest of the approach is downhill into a dip. You will not see the house until we are upon it.”
“You must create a better drive, Thomas. If Mr Hill says this could be improved, then it ought to be improved.” Jane’s mother was still enthused too, her hurried words let it show. Jane glanced at her, and sent her a private smile. “That may be your mark upon the property,” her mother continued. “Mr Hill told us the fifth Lord Leigh undertook vast improvements within, and his father vast improvements on the size and grandeur of the property, and so you must make the drive worth their efforts.”
“Forgive me, it is not simply a matter of repair, Mrs Austen. A drive would be much better situated on the far side of the property. You will see when we reach it. It will become very clear. There is the river to cross and so a grand bridge required. It would not be a simple task.”
Mr Hill continued to discuss a potential new drive with her mother, as Jane looked from the window once more. They were travelling slowly through large, old trees. The coach rocked and creaked on its axle as it descended steadily. The rhythm of Jane’s heartbeat ticked like the sound of a great grandfather clock, echoing through her chest as the clock in the parsonage at Steventon echoed through the hall.
“I see it,” she said to the air, rather than to anyone in particular. Her words had Reverend Leigh twisting about to look through the window, and Cassandra leaning across the carriage. Her mother was trapped in the corner by the far window, on the other side of Cassandra, facing Mrs Hill. “I feel as though I should alight and walk the last stage,” Jane said. “So I might better appreciate the revealing."
“I would sooner reach the house and know all is well,” Reverend Leigh answered.
“It will be well or not, it is too late to change it,” Mr Hill responded.
Jane continued to look from the window as Cassandra pressed against her side, gripping her arm and trying to see past Jane. It was everything Jane had imagined, a ruined abbey that had returned to life—a ruin which her ancestors had brought back to life, with pointed roofs, arches and gothic windows. It was heaven to a lover-of-all-things-gothic, and it had once been an Elizabethan and then a Jacobean paradise. Jane looked at her sister, then at her mother. “It is beautiful!” Perfect. Wonderful. It was fiction come to life. Oh, Susan would be near fainting with excitement and palpitations. She would see the ghosts of hooded monks looking from the windows, and dark hidden passages. The pace of Jane’s heartbeat quickened further. She had only ever dreamed of such places, painting them on paper with words.
“It is,” Mr Hill confirmed, pride filling his pitch. Jane looked at him. He might be the owner of Stoneleigh Abbey, not its guardian, his expression and his posture held such… she could not think of a word… but then it came to her, love. He loved the great house.
Mr Hill became Mr Darcy, seated across from her with all of Darcy’s grand stance and aloofness, but then his eyes softened, and his smile lifted and his lips parted. Yes, Darcy would be a man who loved his home. If he were so stiff with strangers and so ill-at-ease within new situations, then his sanctuary, where all worries disappeared, would be his home. Darcy would smile as Mr Hill did, whenever Darcy returned.
An idea spun, like a breeze sweeping up the dust in an eddy. Not a hard powerful whirlpool of thought caught in the rush of a strong current of ideas, but in a slight whisper of the wind. Her imagination longed to speak of characters and stories. Jane grasped hold of the emotion she had felt on Darcy’s behalf and clasped it within her; the scene which would accompany that emotion would come soon, she knew it.
Hope.
She had left Bath with a tiny grain of sand of hope in her hand. Now it grew to the size of a pebble.
When Jane looked back out of the window, they were passing the first tall brick walls of the Jacobean house. Two sets of stairs climbed about either side of an arch, turned, and continued to climb to reach the entrance. The carriage did not stop.
She glanced at Mr Hill. Her mouth falling a little open in surprise.
He smiled. “Now you will see why the driveway ought to be moved to the far side.”
Jane looked back out of the window, denting the rim of her straw bonnet as she pressed her head against the glass to see farther ahead.
Cassandra’s fingers tightened about Jane’s arm as she leaned closer to Jane’s shoulder. “I cannot see.”
“Oh my goodness.” The words came out on a torrent of awe, it was beyond anything Jane had imagined. She looked at her mother. “You will love it. Wait until you see.”
Reverend Leigh looked at Jane, his eyebrows lifting in enquiry. He could not lean far enough about to see it either. “It is perfectly beautiful, stunning, Reverend Leigh. I have never seen anything like it.”
Mr Hill watched Jane with eyes that complimented her on her good taste. He smiled at her before she turned away to look again. Once more there was a hint of those emotions she expected to find in Darcy’s soul.
“Oh.” The sound slipped from Jane’s lips.
“Oh.” Cassandra echoed.
“Good grief.” Jane’s mother said as the carriage passed the side of an extremely grand and auspicious, Baroque building, almost twice the height of the Jacobean mansion Jane had previously thrilled at.
When the carriage turned the corner about the building they were all leaning forward to see, apart from Mr Hill and Mrs Hill, who remained in their seats. Mr Hill glowed with the pride in his expression.
“Well…” Reverend Leigh said on an outward breath of amazement.
Jane had no need for imagination as the carriage travelled the last few yards and drew to a halt.
Impatience to leap from the carriage tightened in her stomach, but she held on to her excitement, waiting as the carriage rocked when Rogers jumped down from his seat beside the driver. He came to the door Jane sat near, because it was the door which faced the wide steps leading to the entrance. Two dozen or so shallow stairs led up to the tall door on the first floor. There were windows below the ground level, which she presumed were for the servants’ areas. But above them…
When the carriage door opened, Jane rose, took Rogers’s gloved hand, and looked up. Above the first floor was window upon huge window.
Her imagination could never have pictured this. She hesitated in her descent, as her eyes absorbed every pale sculpted stone, row above row, and column after column. Tall and straight, with sharp Baroque edges, they were nothing like the curved columns and scrolled tops everywhere in Bath.
Jane stepped down onto the fine gravel and moved aside, letting go of Rogers’s hand, still looking up in awe. It was perhaps four times the size of the Jacobean house it was attached to, and it had no essence of gothic at all. It was grander than anything she had seen in Bath—perhaps excluding the Abbey there. But this had once been an
abbey too. Oh how did that feel.
“Oh my goodness. Look at it.” Cassandra said as she descended from the carriage.
“It is remarkable.” Reverend Leigh stated. “I have never seen the like. Beautiful indeed.” The awe in his voice caught with a note of surprise which said—is this mine?
Jane looked back at her mother, longing to see her reaction. She had spoken so often of this place. Told tale after tale of the deeds of their ancestors. It was Jane’s mother who had made the men into heroes and their wives heroines. Those stories had lived in Jane as vivid dreams and wondrous ideas of chivalry—and now she was here, and Stoneleigh Abbey was beyond any fable or fairytale in its splendour.
“Good grief.” Her mother stated.
“You are suitably impressed, I see,” Mr Hill said as he climbed out of the carriage, smiling, his pride captured in his movement and given a new life in his eagerness to show the house off.
Darcy…
Suddenly Jane knew something she had never thought of before—Lizzy must see Darcy in his home, in the place where he felt safe and able to be himself. In the place that held his heart so tightly he could not retain his mask of indifference. The place where he had no need to hide any ill-content, because he felt none.
Oh, and Lizzy should catch Darcy at that first moment of his homecoming, when his eyes were alight, just as Mr Hill’s were, as Darcy looked up at his house. Then in the next moment—he would see Lizzy, and Lizzy would not know what to say, because she would know she had caught him in a very private moment. The look on his face must confuse her.
She would not have seen that man before; the one who had been hiding behind a mask of what she had believed to be arrogance. She would have an urge to run then, to escape her embarrassment. The moment would be coated with an unbearable awkwardness for them both—Darcy to have been caught out in such a moment, and Lizzy to be caught studying him in such a moment.
“There are forty-five windows in the living quarters alone,” Jane’s mother said.
“And such grand carvings above them all. And I love these angular columns, are they not far more stately in appearance than anything in Bath?” Cassandra added, as Reverend Leigh began climbing the stone steps.
“It is very impressive, is it not?” Mr Hill leant to whisper to Jane, as Mrs Hill let go of the hand he had offered, and she had taken, to climb down from the carriage. She walked on towards the house. She was a pleasant woman, but not as expressive in nature as Mr Hill.
Jane glanced across looking first at the back of Mrs Hill’s bonnet, and then at Mr Hill. She smiled at him. “Oh yes. Very impressive.”
“I take it you approve of your cousin’s inheritance then?”
“More than approve.” But it was not simply a cousin’s inheritance—it was the place of her past and her dreams.
“Come then.” He lifted a hand encouraging Jane, and then Cassandra, to climb the steps behind their mother, who was already ascending with Mrs Hill, following Reverend Leigh.
The door above them opened.
“Sir. Ma’am. Mr Hill, Mrs Hill, you are returned.” A woman in a white mobcap and plain, pale-grey dress stood at the door.
“And as you see I have brought with me Reverend Thomas Leigh, our new master.”
“Sir.” The woman bobbed a very deep curtsey before stepping back to let Reverend Leigh in. “Welcome to Stoneleigh Abbey. I hope you will be happy here.” She lifted her hand, encouraging them all to enter. Her face bore the same glowing pride Mr Hill’s had when he had first seen Stoneleigh Abbey from the carriage.
“Good grief,” Jane’s mother exclaimed.
“What a sight of splendour,” Reverend Leigh stated, his head turning from one side to the other as he looked around the entrance hall.
“I have never seen anything so glorious,” Cassandra uttered.
Jane could not speak. Her gaze lifted to the plasterwork on the ceiling; there was a myriad of curling white-plaster, palm leaves, figures and vines, all about the room, and adorning the beams, which stretched across the ceiling, supported by columns also topped by twisting, tangled leaves. But the numerous white fronds were not the most impressive ornamentation. That claim belonged to the numerous unicorns frolicking throughout the frieze, with fine sharp horns protruding into the room, heads lifted as though they shied or shook out their manes.
Jane’s gaze ran down an orange marble column before transferring to the fireplace at one end of the room. She looked all around her, her head spinning with awe as well as a desire to see every detail.
The room was symmetrical. At the far end stood another fireplace, and on every wall there was a different image, created from moulded plaster. It was spectacular.
“This is the creation of the fifth Lord Leigh, Lord Edward, Mary Leigh’s younger brother. I presume you have heard his sad tale.”
“Was he not mad?” Cassandra said, more to her mother, than to Mr Hill.
“He sadly was,” Mr Hill answered. “It is a very sorry affair, and yet in his madness he created this. The images about the room are the story of Hercules. See the first here.” He walked over to it, lifting his hand to point out the image above the fireplace on the left-hand side of the room. “Hercules is offered a choice of wives. He must choose between a woman of virtue or a woman of sloth. He chose the woman whom he might live a life of sloth beside, and they lived happily and had many children.
“But then, jealous, Hera tricked him into a fit of madness and he murdered his wife and children. According to the myth, it is then his labours began; he accepted them as a penance for the things he’d done. Each panel about the room shows the beasts he had to fight, from the first when he killed a lion and put on its skin. I cannot help but see Lord Edward’s inner pain when I look at them. I know he felt that he fought with monsters in his head.”
When Mr Hill ceased speaking the room was silent. The sound of a cockerel crowing rang from outside. Jane looked back, as the housekeeper shut the door
“And the unicorns…” Cassandra asked.
“They are the family emblem. You will see them everywhere,” Mr Hill answered.
Cassandra’s cheeks turned a little pink. “Of course.” She had not remembered… Yet nor had Jane. She could not recall her mother telling them, and that was unusual because she had related so many adventures lived out by the people who had resided in this house.
Unicorns. They were fitting. Her ancestors’ lives had been full of legendary tales. It was no wonder Jane’s head had been forever creating characters and stories as a child.
Jane turned and walked to the window to look out. There was a wall a few yards from the front of the house and behind that a farmyard full of goats, geese, chickens and pigs. Just like the area in the grounds of the parsonage in Steventon. But beyond the farmyard were meadows, and beyond that a wood on a hill, and to the left there was a meandering river.
Unlike the fields beyond the parsonage in Steventon, these fields and woods must belong to Stoneleigh Abbey. They now belonged to Reverend Leigh.
Jane turned around and looked at him. He was looking at the ceiling, at the central roundel. It was a beautiful rococo giant plasterwork of Hercules joining the gods amongst the clouds above Olympus, surrounded by cherubs.
Jane’s gaze explored all the images again. It was hard to believe this beauty had come from the mind of a cousin. She could believe that it had come from madness, though; it expressed a clutter of emotions. It was remarkable. Edward Leigh had had a gift for creativity, no matter that he must have suffered such mental distress.
When her gaze fell, Mr Hill smiled at her with that look of shining pride, and a depth of love for the house.
“It is remarkable,” Reverend Leigh stated. “Who did the fifth Lord Leigh commission?”
“Francesco Vassili, an Italian stuccoist.” Mr Hill looked as if it was his favourite occupation, to be asked about the house which he had taken care of for so many years as guardian of both its mistress and itself. His expression
said he treasured Stoneleigh Abbey as if he owned it.
Darcy, answering such questions of his property, Pemberley, slipped into Jane’s mind. She would have to puzzle out how. She would sort it out later and seek a way for Lizzy to meet Darcy in his home. Her thoughts became full of Darcy’s pride becoming something warm and just.
She sighed. The images of imagination and the insights that led to inspiration were so close, yet still silent when it came to a story that would capture them and wrap them all together. Her characters were holding back. She had caught moments of emotions and glimpses of responses, and yet how they fit together into a scene was a puzzle her mind had not allowed her to see.
She sighed out the breath she had held as she had tried to think. At least her characters had spoken. She would not then berate them for speaking too slowly. Her mind would piece the scene together if she gave her imagination time.
“You must take refreshment,” the lady in the mobcap, who Jane presumed to be the housekeeper, said. “I am sure you are in need of tea.”
“Yes we are,” Mrs Hill answered. “We have travelled a long way and in a great hurry, Mrs Giaaf. I am thirsty and I am sure Reverend Leigh, Mrs Austen and her daughters are, and I know Mr Hill is.” Mrs Hill looked back at her husband with a smile.
The housekeeper smiled at him too, in a way which implied a good deal of respect, before she turned and walked across the room to open a door. “Come this way,” she glanced back when she spoke, then immediately walked on, leading them through to a drawing room adorned with red velvet furniture, pale blue painted panelling and grey marble fireplaces. They were not allowed to absorb the scene, though, but immediately led into another room, designated as the dining room, though it was not a stately place. It was a light, beautiful room, decorated in white and looking out onto the river.
Through the long windows Jane could see the river weaving across the meadows below, and the hill above the meadows, topped with trees. She glanced at Mr Hill. “Stoneleigh Abbey has the most inspiring setting.”