Jane Austen Mysteries 08 Jane and His Lordship's Legacy (3 page)

"That's enough, young Baigent," said Joseph, our driver, with a lowering expression on his brow. "Be off with ye, before I find a better use for my whip, and tan your hide."

The boy smoothed the pony's nose, his eyes fixed on the mane between the beast's ears, then lounged his way down the street without a word.

"Don't you pay no heed to that young chuff," Joseph ad-vised me, his gaze following the boy's thin form as he ambled 14 ~ Stephanie Barron

towards his home, big with news. "He's got more mouth than mind, as they say."

"What did he mean when he said this house was not right-fy ours?"

"Speaking where he ought not, mum," the driver replied; but he did not meet my gaze as he reached for my mother's heavy trunk, and hoisted it with a grunt to his back. "Every folk knows as how the houses hereabouts, aye, and much of the land, too, belong to Mr. Austen. Where would you see the trunk stowed, then?"

"The bedchamber at the head of the stairs." I stepped aside to allow him passage. "The boy suggested we should be
cursed.

Decidedly strong language, Joseph. Particularly for a child of his years."

"P'raps he's had it from the father."

"Is Farmer Baigent disposed to contest our right to the cot-tage?"

The man persisted in studying his boots. "There's been a bit o' feeling, like, about Widow Seward."

"--who quitted her home to make way for us. But surely she was accommodated elsewhere in the village?"

"Mrs. Seward's gone to live with her daughter, Mrs.

Baverstock, in Alton." Another vague gesture, this time to the east. "It were a sad day when Mr. Seward died, mum. This house to be given up, and the tenancy of Pound Farm--which the Sewards've held for donkey's years--made over to that new man, Mr. Wickham. The Baigents in particular don't hold with Mr. Wickham, mum. They'd thought to lease Pound Farm themselves. Adjoins their property, like, at Symond's Farm."

"I see. But my brother settled his affairs in favour of Mr.

Wickham, no doubt for excellent reasons of his own. And is the animosity towards ourselves quite general throughout the vil-lage?"

Jane and His Lordship's Legacy ~ 15

"I'm an Alton man," Joseph returned with some asperity,

"and can't speak for those as live in Chawton. I did ought to be getting back to Mr. Barlow, if you take my meaning, once these bits of baggage are stowed."

I took his meaning; he did not wish to stand gossiping in the street with a relative stranger, under the scrutiny of his inti-mates and neighbours. It would require more than a protracted stay at the George to command Joseph's loyalty.

"The second trunk, and the two brown bandboxes belong-ing to myself, are to be placed in the room down the hallway on the left."

"Very good, mum." He bent slightly under the strain of my mother's things, and made his strenuous way into the house.

I confess I did not waste a great deal of time in re-volving the grievances of the local folk during the ensuing hour, as I dusted china and aired linens. There were beds to be made up, foodstuffs to be stored, the Pembroke table to be positioned in a number of places, none of which pleased my mother; and our small treasure of books to be unpacked and placed upon the shelf. I may perhaps have considered with exasperation that se-curity in his own position, in the essential rightness of his ideas, that had preserved my brother's complacency on the subject of his tenants, and prevented him from imparting a warning as to the sort of reception we might expect here; but I thought it very likely Neddie had been too distracted by private concerns--by the well of grief into which he continually dipped--to spare any thought for the villagers. Not arrogance, but absence of mind, was surely accountable for my brother's lapse.

"Well, Jane," said my mother as she entered the front pas-sage, "here is our neighbour, Mr. Prowting, come to offer his services; but I have assured him there is not the slightest need 16 ~ Stephanie Barron

to put himself out--Jane will have everything in hand, I told him, being a clever girl and decidedly capable when she sets her mind to it, though not so efficient in the domestic line as her elder sister, being no hand at all in the stillroom. Make your courtesy to Mr. Prowting, my dear. My younger daughter--Miss Jane Austen."

Mr. Prowting was a man of some means--one of Chawton's dignitaries, in the commission of the peace of the county as well as its Deputy Lieutenant.1 He was a grey-haired, portly, and rather carelessly-dressed gentleman of middle age, beaming all his benevolence.

I dropped a curtsey and said, "I have heard much of you, Mr. Prowting, from my brother Mr. Austen. You are our nearest neighbour, I collect."

"Indeed, indeed--our home is but a stone's toss from your doorstep, my dear Miss Austen, and easily accessible by a stile in the adjoining meadow."

I could not have avoided a glimpse of Prowtings, as the house was called, had I wished it; the place was a fine, modern building of substantial size on the same side of the Gosport road as our own, but happier in its situation, being set back a good distance from the carriage-way.
Their
beds should not be shaken in the dead of night by the passage of the London coach-and-six, as I imagined our own should be.

"Mrs. Prowting and my daughters, Catherine-Ann and Ann- Mary, would, I am sure, have joined me in this brief visit of welcome," he said, "but that the latter is practising upon the 1 To be in the commission of the peace for the county, as Jane phrases it, was to be appointed a justice of the peace, or magistrate. Deputy lieu-tenant was a post appointed at the pleasure of the lord lieutenant of the county, usually the county's ranking peer, and carried with it certain ad-ministrative duties.
--Editor's note.

Jane and His Lordship's Legacy ~ 17

pianoforte, and the former is lying down with the head-ache.

The heat of July, you know, is quite a trial to young ladies prone to the head-ache."

"So I understand. Tho' increasing age, I might add, is no preservative against the malady." I was too well acquainted with my mother's imagined sufferings whenever heat, or cold, or too much of both, should disoblige her expectations and send her reeling to her bed.

"Mrs. Prowting wished me to convey her compliments," he said with a bow, "and desires me to press you most earnestly to join us for dinner this evening at Prowtings. You need not make yourselves anxious on the subject of dress; we are all easy in Chawton, Mrs. Austen, with no unbecoming formality."

"Thank you most kindly," my mother replied. "We should be very happy to accept your invitation."

I was about to add my thanks to hers when the sound of an equipage drawing up in the street outside our door claimed all our notice. Mr. Prowting turned, as though in expectation of espying a neighbour come upon a similar errand of civility; but I understood instantly from his expression that the person now alighting from the chaise-and-four was a stranger even to him.

A spare, stooped, ancient man, dressed all in black and grim of expression, hobbled forward as though a martyr to dyspepsia.

The newcomer wore a tricorn hat and supported his infirmities with a beautifully-carved walking-stick of ebony and gold, which stabbed at the pavings of our walkway with such vehemence that I almost expected sparks to fly from its tip.

He was followed by two lackeys in a livery of primrose and black, bearing between them a massive wooden chest bound with silver hasps. The chest's aspect was arresting: it was carved and painted with curious figures that were hardly native to En-gland. It was clear that the party's object was our cottage, but 18 ~ Stephanie Barron

what their purpose might be in seeking it, I had not the least idea.

"Good day to you, sir," Mr. Prowting said in the peremptory tone of one who has served as magistrate.

The gentleman in the tricorn lifted up his gaze, a withering look of contempt on his countenance. He did not deign to re-turn Mr. Prowting's salutation, nor did he waste another instant in surveying his figure. He merely turned his eyes upon my mother and myself, came to a halt at our doorstep, and lifted his hat with extreme care from the exquisitely-powdered wig that adorned his head.

"Have I the honour of addressing the Austen household?"

"You do, sir," said my mother doubtfully. "I am Mrs. George Austen."

"My compliments, ma'am," he replied, "but I need not dis-turb you further. It is Miss Jane Austen I seek. Is she at leisure to receive me?"

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Chapter 3

A Contested Provision

4 July 1809, cont.

~

"I am Miss Austen," I answered, in some bewilderment.

"Bartholomew Chizzlewit, of Lincoln's Inn, at your service, ma'am."1 The elderly gentleman bowed low. "I must beg the in-dulgence of perhaps half an hour of your time, on a pressing matter of business that has already been delayed some months."

"A matter of business, sir?" I repeated. I could claim no busi-ness in the world, save the arrangement of domestic affairs too inconsequential to be of concern to such a man.

1 Lincoln's Inn is one of the four Inns of Court, formed in the Middle Ages to provide lodgings for young men studying law. It sits roughly half a mile from Covent Garden in the center of London, and in Jane Austen's day was a common locus of solicitors' and barristers' chambers, as it re-mains today.
--Editor's note.

20 ~ Stephanie Barron

"Indeed. A matter of so delicate a nature, ma'am, that I must demand complete and uninterrupted privacy"--at this, his gaze shifted narrowly to my mother's countenance--"for the discharging of my trust."

An instant of silence followed this declaration, as my mother attempted to make sense of it and I considered the dis-order of unpacking that was everywhere evident within the cot-tage. How was I to even attempt a
tete-a-tete
?

"I am putting up at the Swan in Alton," the attorney added firmly, consulting a pocket watch, "and have ordered my dinner for precisely six o'clock. If you find you are unable to accom-modate me today, Miss Austen, I must beg you to wait upon me in Alton tomorrow morning, well in advance of my intended departure for London, which I anticipate occurring at ten o'clock. I may add that I am unaccustomed to brooking delay."

"Extraordinary behaviour!" Mr. Prowting exclaimed. "You can have not the slightest pretension to these ladies' considera-tion, sirrah, much less the freedom to demand the terms of your admittance to their household."

"Sir," Chizzlewit declared in a voice rich with contempt, "I neither know nor care whom you might be, but I must emphat-ically state that a man of your obviously rustic experience and modest station can claim no influence with the representative of the noble and most puissant house of His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, whose forebears and heirs I have had the honour to serve as solicitor these sixty years and more."

"Wilborough?"
my mother cried in startled accents. "Good Lord, Jane--has the Rogue left you something after all? I should not have believed it possible! That a gentleman--even one of Lord Harold's unsavoury reputation--should offer the insult of monetary consideration to one whose reputation he has already sullied beyond repair--"

Jane and His Lordship's Legacy ~ 21

"Mamma," I said firmly, "I believe I should receive Mr.

Chizzlewit and learn the burden of his news. I shall require the use of the dining parlour for an interval. You might walk in the direction of the Great House before dinner--and observe whether the tenant, Mr. Middleton, is entirely worthy of my brother's trust."

"But my dear Miss Austen--" Mr. Prowting protested. "A young lady of your sensibility--"

"I am nearly four-and-thirty years of age, good sir, and feel not the slightest anxiety at receiving so respectable a person as Mr. Chizzlewit. Would you be very good--and attend my mother on her walk?"

If the servant of the noble and most puissant house of Wilborough was dismayed by the surroundings in which he presently found himself, he did not betray his discomfiture. I seated myself on one of my mother's straight-backed chairs and waited while Mr. Chizzlewit disposed himself in another. With a wordless gesture of his right hand, he had ordered his minions to follow him; they set the curiously-carved chest on the dining-parlour floor and then retreated impassively to await their mas-ter's pleasure.

"I have it on the very best authority, Miss Austen, that your understanding is excellent," he began, "and therefore I shall not sport with your patience. Under the terms of the late Lord Harold Trowbridge's Last Will and Testament, written by his lordship on the third of November last and witnessed by one Jeb Hawkins, Able Seaman, and one Josiah Fortescue, publi-can"--Chizzlewit's distaste for such witnesses was evident--

"you have been named as the legatee of a rather extraordinary bequest."

22 ~ Stephanie Barron

I felt my countenance change, my visage flush. I knew all the circumstances under which that testament had been writ-ten: the third of November, 1808, the very day before Lord Harold's aborted duel with a young American by the name of James Ord. The former had opened his box of matched pis-tols--made to his specifications by no less a master than Man-ton in London--and affected to practise with wafers and playing cards in the courtyard of the Dolphin Inn. His aspect had been brutal that morning, and it had not changed when I pled for the young man's life. It was Lord Harold's I secretly hoped to save; but he had ridiculed me--and put one of the pistols into my hands. He would have challenged my shrinking, and sought to determine whether I could stomach his way of life. Had he drawn up his Will before that hour, or much later?

Impossible to say.

"What can his lordship have wished to bequeath to me?" I enquired in a subdued tone. "I am wholly unconnected with his family."

"--As has been vociferously pointed out by His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, Her Grace the Duchess, the Marquis of Kinsfell, and indeed, Desdemona, Countess of Swithin, all of whom seem convinced that Lord Harold's wits were sadly de-ranged when he penned the document." Chizzlewit studied me with a shrewd expression, his ancient lips pursed. "I may frankly assure you, Miss Austen, that his lordship has been frequently drawing up his Will, as necessity and the perils to which he was exposed demanded it. That this document supersedes and gov-erns any previous form is indisputable, as I repeatedly assured His Grace. My commission as solicitor and executor of his lord-ship's estate should have been long since carried out, to the sat-isfaction of all parties, had not the Wilborough family protested this legacy."