Jane and His Lordship's Legacy

Chapter 12 The Devil in the Cards

6 July 1809, cont.

As evening parties go, ours was more generally unequal in its composition than most. We were treated to Miss Benn’s simplicities and vague utterances, which had the appalling habit of falling directly into such lapses in the conversation as must make them the most apparent. Lady Imogen Vansittart, on the other hand, deigned to speak to no one not of her intimate party and at her end of the table — that is to say, no one other than Major Spence or Mr. Thrace; while Henry, who was positioned at the table’s centre, spent the better part of the evening attempting to catch the conversation proceeding above him, while evading the notice of those conversing below. The Prowtings were divided between volubility and silence, with Catherine — who was placed next to Mr. Hinton — staring painfully and self-consciously at her plate. I several times observed Mr. Hinton to speak to her in a low and urgent tone, but she repulsed the gentleman’s attempts at conversation. Her earnest gaze was more often fixed upon Julian Thrace, but what attention he could spare from Lady Imogen was entirely claimed by Ann Prowting, who had been placed at the Beau’s left hand.

Ann’s devoted efforts at new-dressing her hair had certainly achieved a degree of novelty: the girl’s golden curls were gathered in a rakish knot over one ear, with a few tender wisps straggling to her nape. A quantity of white shoulder was exposed, as was an ample décolleté; and I might almost have suspected Ann of dampening her shift beneath the white muslin gown, in order that the thin fabric should cling to her limbs. She sat opposite to Henry, but succeeded in ignoring my brother completely. With a Julian Thrace at hand, who could spare a thought for an aging banker?

The young man who aspired to an earldom was the picture of easiness. Thrace could flirt with Ann Prowting, reduce a quail to bones with graceful fingers, listen to Lady Imogen with every appearance of interest, and address an amusing story to his host. Had I yearned to converse with him, I was placed at a disadvantage. My seat was towards the lower end of the table, next to Mr. Prowting; but I was able to observe the Beau’s artful swoops from one conversational plane to another, and decided that it was all very well done.

He had claimed my attention first by declaring, with affecting candour, that he had never before found an occasion to witness a coroner’s inquest — and had discovered the experience to be infinitely diverting.

“As a man raised for much of my life on the Continent,” Thrace explained to the table in general, “I am not so familiar as I should like with the conventions of English justice. To observe your yeoman class, displayed on a hard wooden bench and endeavouring to do their utmost in consideration of the Departed, was as instructive as a treatise on philosophy should be. I admired the succinctness and learning of Mr. Munro, the subtlety with which he asked his questions, and the respect with which he treated high and low alike.”

“I wonder,” the exquisite Mr. Hinton replied with a curl of his lip, “that you can reap so much benefit from so vulgar an episode. I could only endure the two hours I spent in the George, by resolving never to be found there again!”

Mr. Thrace smiled at the gentleman. “But perhaps, sir, you had not the peculiar interest I felt in the man’s demise. When I consider that had I left Middleton but five minutes earlier that evening, I might have saved the labourer’s life — or, heaven forbid! — met a similar fate at the hands of his murderer, I could not be otherwise than compelled by the coroner’s proceeding.”

A storm of questions greeted this pronouncement, with Mr. Thrace throwing up his hands in protest as the ladies all demanded that he explain himself.

“There is no mystery,” cried he. “I dined alone on Saturday with our excellent Middleton, Spence being absent from Sherborne St. John on a matter of business in Basingstoke, and Lady Imogen being as yet in London.”

“We sat in conversation so long,” Mr. Middleton added, “that it cannot have been earlier than midnight when you quitted the house, tho’ I pressed you most earnestly to remain, and should have summoned the housemaid to make up your room, had you allowed it. But you would not put me to the trouble, and rode out directly, the moon being nearly at the full, and the road well-illumined.”

“You noticed nothing untoward, sir, in your way back to Sherborne St. John?” Mr. Prowting asked keenly. “No mill in the roadway, as I believe these affairs are called among the sporting set?”

“My road did not lie in the direction of the pond, if indeed the poor man met his death in that place,” Thrace explained. “I set off at a canter in the direction of Alton, and thence towards Basingstoke, and achieved Stonings by three o’clock in the morning — my hunter, Rob Roy, being a devil to go, begging the ladies’ pardon.”

Ann Prowting here exclaimed at the beauty of Mr. Thrace’s horse, and the conversation turned more generally to the hunting field, and Mr. Chute’s mastery of the Vyne, and the particularities of certain hounds the gentlemen had known; and my attention might have wandered, but for Mr. Thrace’s enjoyment of general conversation, and his tendency to bring the attention of the whole table back to himself. Had I not observed the easiness of his manners, and the general air of modesty that attended his speech, I might have adjudged him a coxcomb, and despised him at my leisure. As it was, I merely wondered at his reverting so often to the unfortunate end of Shafto French. It is quite rare in my experience for a gentleman to concern himself with the murder of a labourer — unless, of course, he harbours some sort of guilty knowledge, or hopes to expose the same in another. I determined to make a study of Mr. Thrace, and refused a third glass of claret that my mind might be clear. Over the second course, a pleasurable affair of some twelve dishes, the Bond Street Beau related a roguish tale, full of incident and melodrama, concerning a necklace of rubies stolen by a British officer at the Battle of Chandernagar; a necklace of such fabled import, that it was said to have once graced the neck of Madame de Pompadour, and to be worth all of two hundred thousand pounds.[16]

“I am certain the stolen jewels are to blame for that unfortunate man’s death in your cottage, Miss Austen,” affirmed he with a gleam in his eye. “I might have offered the story to the coroner yesterday morning, but from a fear of putting myself forward in such a delicate proceeding.”

These words could not fail to alert Mr. Prowting’s attention; the magistrate was suddenly all interest. “Say your piece, man,” he instructed from his position opposite Henry. “If you know something that bears on the murder, you must disclose it to the Law!”

“Well—” Aware that the notice of the entire table was united in his person, Mr. Thrace inclined his head towards Lady Imogen. “I had the tale from your father, the Earl — who spent some years out in India as a young man, and heard the story at its source. It seems that a fabulous necklace was stolen at sabre point from one of the gallant French defenders so routed by Clive in that illustrious battle, which occurred in the last century, I believe.”

“Clive took Chandernagar from the French in 1757,” Major Spence supplied. “The battle secured Bengal for the English.”

“Exactly so,” Thrace returned. “The story, as the Earl told it to me, is that an English Lieutenant seized the fabled gems from a French defender at the fort’s capitulation, and brought them to England after much intrigue and bloodshed. They were later lost on the road — somewhere near Chawton, if you will credit it.”

Mrs. Prowting emitted a faint scream, one plump hand over her mouth, the other clutching her handkerchief.

“It is said,” Thrace further observed, “that, hounded across land and sea unceasingly by Indian pursuers of a most deadly and subtle kind, the Lieutenant landed in Southampton and made his way by feverish degrees towards London. Coming to St. Nicholas’s Church” — this, with a bow for Mr. Papillon, Chawton’s clergyman, who was seated at the bottom of the table — “he sought refuge in the sanctuary, where the Hindu fakirs, being unmoved by Christian belief, wounded him severely. In Chawton the trail of the purloined rubies comes to an abrupt end.”

“Are you thuggethting, thir, that thith thimple village ith in the unwitting pothethion of the Thpoilth of War?” enquired Miss Hinton. It was the first remark I had heard her to address to the upper end of the table; and I applauded its natural sense. She was not to be taken in by a spurious fribble, a Pink of the Ton; hers was a sober countenance, suggestive of a lady much given to reading sermons, and making Utheful Extracth. Mr. Thrace, his eyes on Catherine Prowting’s glowing countenance, slowly crumbled a piece of bread between his fingers.

“The necklace was believed to be cursed — not simply from the manner of its possession, but from a flaw inherent in the stones themselves. Rubies, so like to blood, must draw blood to them; and so it proved in this case. The Rubies of Chandernagar destroyed each of their successive masters.”

“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and loothe hith Immortal Thoul?” observed Miss Hinton with complacency.

“I had not heard this story of my father,” Lady Imogen imposed, “tho’ I know him to have moved in a very rakehell set while in India. Chandernagar, however, was some thirty years before his time on the Subcontinent.”

“I believe the story has achieved a permanent place in the Indian firmament,” Thrace said, “due to its bloodthirstiness. No doubt your respected father learned it of an eyewitness.”

“But surely the marauding Lieutenant was a man of parts?”

Lady Imogen objected. “What are a whole company of Hindu against one hardened English soldier? Major Spence, for example, should never be parted from his treasure so easily!”

Her liquid eyes were dark with excitement, her voice throbbing and low. I observed that while her gaze was fixed on Julian Thrace, Major Spence was observing her; as he did so, an expression of pain crossed his countenance.

“The Lieutenant who seized them, to the ruin of their French owner, had his throat cut while he lay in that very inn which you, ma’am”—this, with a gracious acknowledgement of my mother—“have now the happy fortune to inhabit,” Thrace continued. “The wounded man dragged himself to the publick house, wounded and bleeding, seeking refuge from his pursuers. His body was discovered on the morning following — but of the rubies no trace was ever found.”

“Perhaps this is the root of the cottage’s ill-fortune,” Mr. Hinton observed languidly. “If your story is true, Thrace, the digger of the cesspit was not the first corpse to lie there. I daresay it was the necklace that good-for-nothing ruffian French was searching for, in the depths of Mrs. Austen’s cellar.”

“But it will not do, man!” Mr. Prowting exclaimed, and threw down his napkin. “Shafto French was drowned, as the coroner has said. He cannot both have been treasure-hunting in the cottage cellar, and breathing his last in Chawton Pond!”

A slightly shocked silence followed this outburst; one which the clergyman Mr. Papillon had the grace to end.

“But in the case of the Earl’s Indian story,” he observed with a correct smile, as though improving an archbishop’s views on Ordination, “nothing is clearer. Naturally the rubies were not to be discovered. The thieving Lieutenant gave up his booty with his life, and his murderer lived ever after on the proceeds.”

“One should suppose no such thing,” Mr. Thrace retorted, “it being attested by those who study these matters, that the stones never afterwards came onto the market. What sort of thief makes away with a considerable prize, and does not attempt to profit by it? No, no, my dear sir — the Rubies of Chandernagar are in one of two places: either hidden beneath the stones of your own St. Nicholas’s crypt, where the errant Lieutenant — already fearing for his life — placed them before receiving his deadly wound; or concealed still about the grounds of the late inn.”

My mother’s looks were eloquent: a mixture of rapacity and uneasiness.

“And does our home accommodate the murdered soldier as well?” I demanded lightly, “—his ghost creaking of nights upon the stairs of the cottage, crying out for vengeance?”

“You may inform us whether it is so in the morning, Miss Austen.”

Amidst general laughter, Lady Imogen protested, “For my part, I think it imperative that a search party be formed after dinner, as a kind of amusement, so that we might fan out across the countryside with lanthorns and dogs and discover the treasure. We might call the entertainment ‘Hunt the Necklace,’ and begin in St. Nicholas’s vestry!”

“Under the very flags of the church,” murmured Mr. Papillon distractedly, “or perhaps in the crypt! I cannot believe it possible — for there are several of the Deceased newly-laid in that part of the building, you know, and I cannot recollect any irregularities about the interments.”

“It is all a piece of horrid nonsense!” cried Ann Prowting with an arch look for Mr. Thrace, “but I am sure I shall not sleep a wink tonight, for gazing out my window at the cottage in my nightdress, in an effort to glimpse your ghost!”

“Let us hope, Miss Prowting,” murmured Mr. Hinton acidly, “you do not encounter Shafto French — or his murderers — instead.”

When the ladies retired from the dining parlour, it was a most ill-suited party that collected around the tea table in the Great House drawing-room. Lady Imogen took herself off to the instrument standing near the tall windows giving out onto the lawn, there to turn over the leaves of music with a deeply preoccupied air; she showed no inclination to revive the sport of Hunt the Necklace. Ann Prowting threw herself into a chair and yawned prodigiously, her conversation confined to such peevish utterances as, “Cannot we get up a dance this evening? I declare I am pining for a ball!” Her mother contented herself with arranging the stiff black folds of her dress and conversing most animatedly to Maria Beckford of the merits of Benjamin Clement, RN, who was perhaps not unknown to that lady; Miss Beckford listened in any case with the attitude of a sparrow trained upon a worm. Miss Benn had seated herself on the opposite side of Mrs. Prowting and was industriously knitting; while Jane Hinton drew forth a volume of sermons from her reticule and commenced reading, lips visibly lisping over the inaudible words.

This left me a choice of companions until the appearance of the gentlemen should restore Henry to me: Miss Elizabeth Papillon, sister to the rector of St. Nicholas’s and his spinster housekeeper, with whom I thus far had exchanged only curtseys; and Catherine Prowting. Naturally, I chose to approach the latter.

She was a solitary figure positioned near the hearth, in which no blaze burned; her eyes were fixed upon the empty firedogs, and so painful an expression of unhappiness was in all her bearing that I would have turned away without speaking to her, but for the sudden swift glance she gave me, and the lifting of her right hand as tho’ in supplication.

“Are you unwell, Catherine?” I asked without preamble.

“Only this wretched head-ache,” she replied in a suffocated voice. “I suppose I must ascribe it to the heat; but indeed I cannot bear it, and as soon as my father returns, I shall beg him to escort all our party home.”

“Are you displeased with the party? Is the Bond Street Beau not to your liking?”

She flushed. “Mr. Thrace is a most gentleman-like man in every respect. I own I am pleasantly surprised. If only the rest of the company were so well chosen!”

“Should you not lie down? I might enquire of Miss Beckford whether there is vinegar-water, for bathing your temples—”

She shook her head fiercely, which I should have thought would increase her pain; but if so, she was determined not to regard it. “Miss Austen — you have lived in the world more than I, and know far more of. gentlemen, and such things. ”

“A little, perhaps,” I returned guardedly; but my heart sank. Was I about to receive an unlooked-for confidence, and be burdened hereafter with an intimacy I had not sought?

“If only I knew what I ought to do, ” Catherine whispered, her fingers on her temples and her eyes closing in pain. “If only I understood my duty. ”

“Duty is the clearest path we know,” I told her. “It is the path of the heart that descends into obscurity.”

These words seemed to arrest her thoughts. The fluttering hands fell to her sides, and her mouth opened in a soundless O. At that instant, the drawing-room door opened and the gentlemen returned — faces flushed, heads thrown back in laughter at some jest of my brother’s — all except one. Mr. Hinton alone was morose and solitary. His sneering gaze fell upon Catherine where she stood at my side, and I observed her to stiffen, her lips compressed. Then, with an attitude of resolution, she approached her father and spoke low in his ear.

“All in good time, my dear,” he said heartily. “All in good time. The night is young, you know — and the card tables about to be brought out!”

She looked despairing; but her mother and sister were insensible to her pleas of ill health, and determined to remain as long as possible in such interesting company; and so Catherine retired to the far end of the room, intending to form no part of the groupings around the tables.

In a few moments I observed Julian Thrace to join her there. He seemed to enquire after her health, and unlike Mr. Hinton, I thought he should not be repulsed.

“Jane,” my mother said indignantly as she approached the fireplace, “wait until you hear what that woman has been saying to me. I will not call her a lady; I will not condescend to offer her that distinction.”

“Which woman, Mamma?”

“The Hinton creature. In her lisping, oily way she has desired me to understand that his lordship’s treasure chest is everywhere known to be residing in our cottage, and that speculation is rife as to the morals of my younger daughter. That intimathy on both thideth undoubtedly exithted, Miss Hinton would have me know, without the benefit of the marriage vow, is firmly established; and the horror of the ladies in the surrounding country, at being forced to acknowledge a hardened bit of muslin such as yourself — if only to remain on good terms with the Squire, whom she also suggested is of the lowest depravity imaginable, as evidenced by his heartless actions towards his tenants — is an insult from which the best local families are unlikely to recover. As though you were a Cyprian of the most dashing kind! It is too bad, Jane, when all he left you was a quantity of paper! I could cry with vexation!”

“Miss Hinton said all this?” I demanded with amusement. “I am astonished at her powers of articulation.”

“I do not mean to say she spoke it out plain,” my mother retorted impatiently, “but I am not so green that I cannot divine the meaning of a pack of lies. It is insupportable, Jane, that the Rogue should see fit to sink your character from his very grave!

And you not a penny the richer!”

“Lord Harold’s notice remains one of the chief delights of my existence, Mamma,” I answered quietly, “and I shall never learn to despise it. If I care nothing for the malice of a Jane Hinton, why should you listen to her words? It is all envy, ignorance, and pride; and we need consider none of them.”

My mother being very soon thereafter claimed for a table of whist, I was relieved of the necessity of calming her further, but longed to share Miss Hinton’s absurdity with Henry — who should value it as he ought. That the spite of the lady sprang in part from the ill-will of the brother, I had little doubt; and wondered whether Jack Hinton was determined to part Catherine Prowting from my dangerous company. The girl’s indecision might account for the troubled looks, and pleas of a head-ache. One fact alone in my mother’s recital gave rise to apprehension: that so many of the inhabitants of Chawton and Alton purported to know of my affairs, and were conversing freely about Lord Harold’s chest. I had not yet accustomed myself to the littlenesses of a country village; and tho’ I had perused some part of the chest’s contents, I was not yet mistress of the whole. I resolved to spend the better part of the morning in achieving a thorough understanding of Lord Harold’s early life.

The resolution was strengthened by a chance comment from a surprising quarter: Lady Imogen Vansittart, who passed so near to me in her progress towards the gaming tables that she must speak, or appear insufferable.

“I find, Miss Austen, that we have an acquaintance in common,” she said with her bewitching smile. “The Countess of Swithin is my intimate friend. I believe you were acquainted with her uncle, the late lamented Lord Harold Trowbridge?”

“I have had that honour — yes,” I replied.

“Poor Desdemona is very low. She practically lived in Lord Harold’s pocket, from what I understand. And who can blame her, with such a father? Bertie is the meanest stick in the world — I should not be saddled with him for a parent for all the Wilborough fortune! Marriage was the wisest choice Mona ever made. It freed her from one form of imprisonment — tho’ we must hope it did not throw her into another.”

I was at a loss for a proper response to this observation, and so managed only to say, “I cannot wonder that the Countess should mourn her uncle. They were very good friends as well as relations.”

“I understand Mona nearly rode out from London in search of you herself,” Lady Imogen observed. “She was quite wild with fury that his lordship had left you all his papers. Care- less, she called it.”

A thrill of apprehension coursed through my body, setting it to tingling as tho’ Lord Harold’s hand had caressed my skin.

“Papers? What papers?”

“Those in the Bengal chest, of course. The diaries and correspondence his lordship guarded with such vigour in life.”

Lady Imogen tossed me an arch look. “Do not play the village idiot with me, Miss Austen. The Great World has long been agog to know what was recorded of its vicious propensities in Lord Harold’s inscrutable hand. My own father — who has been intimate with his lordship these thirty years — would part with half my inheritance to know in what manner he himself figures in those pages, and which secrets have been let slip like the veriest cat out of the bag.”

“Lady Imogen,” said a gentle voice at my shoulder, “I believe you are wanted at the faro table. Mr. Thrace is attending you.”

“Good God, Charles, do you wish to see me ruined?” Lady Imogen reached her hand to Major Spence’s cheek, where he stood correctly awaiting her with no quarter offered his weak leg. “You know my luck is damnably out. There will be a line of duns a mile long awaiting us at Stonings, and you do not prevent me from wagering everything I have!”

Major Spence’s sombre gaze shifted a fraction to meet my own, and I thought I read in its depths a kind of apology, and a plea for discretion. But then the steward’s grey eyes returned to the bright image before him, and he lifted her hand from his cheek. “Julian will not be happy unless you play. Therefore I charge you only to play well, my lady.”

“Such a steward!” Lady Imogen observed mistily; “so caring and thoughtful in every respect, that I might run roughshod over your heart and mind both, and you will not presume to manage me. Take care, Charles,” she threw over her shoulder as she left him, “or I shall accept that proposal of marriage you offered me. It would ruin us both, I assure you.”

Major Spence did not allow his expression to change as his eyes followed Lady Imogen to the faro table; and in that perfect reserve and preservation of countenance I read the strength of the man. Perhaps I alone would name such a look as passion — but I, too, had loved a wild thing once to my loss. A simpleton could perceive that the steward was languishing for the Earl’s daughter.

Spence bowed correctly in my direction, enquired if there was anything I wanted — if I was amply supplied with muffin and tea — and then took up his place beside my mother at the whist table.

I am no card player. The elder Prowtings and the Papillons made up one party of whist; Mr. Middleton, Miss Beckford, my mother, and Major Spence another; while Lady Imogen was claimed by Julian Thrace.

“She is said to be a gamester of the most hardened kind,”

Henry murmured in my ear, “tho’ she is but two-and-twenty. It is not to be wondered at, with the Earl for a father. The gaming trait is fatal in the Vansittart blood. It is said to rival even that of the Spencers.”

“Did you know, Henry, that the Earl was a friend of Lord Harold’s?”

“I did not. But they were both of a Whiggish persuasion; and I confess I cannot be surprised. The Earl’s society is rackety enough, Jane — his lordship being cheek by jowl with the Carlton House Set; and Lady Imogen’s mother, you know, ran away with a colonel of the Horse Guards when her daughter was only three.”

“How diverting is your knowledge of the Great, Henry!” I sighed. “The appearance of Mr. Thrace — the prospect of losing so considerable an inheritance as Stonings — must make her ladyship quite blue-devilled.”

“I should think the earldom would be entailed on the male line,” Henry said doubtfully. “Absent the upstart Beau, the title will pass to a cousin of some kind. But it is certainly true that Stonings at present forms a significant part of Lady Imogen’s jointure. At her marriage or her father’s death, the estate should come to her; but his lordship now appears inclined to allow Thrace to live in it. Spence told me as much himself.”

“So it is for Thrace that Major Spence is undertaking repairs?” I enquired in astonishment. “That cannot be an easy circumstance — when the Major has so clearly lost his heart to Lady Imogen.”

“Do you believe it? Perhaps he means to rescue her ladyship from an unendurable future. Julian Thrace will be three-andtwenty in three weeks’ time, and on that date the Earl will throw a ball and invite the entire county. His lordship intends, so Spence assures me, to appoint Thrace his heir — to Lady Imogen’s loss. She must either marry, or in some other wise put an end to the Bond Street Beau’s pretensions.”

“—By discovering, perhaps, that Thrace is not at all what he claims,” I said slowly. Three weeks was little enough time to secure a fortune. Who would know the truth about Thrace? An acute observer — a man of the world — a self-trained spy with his finger in every tonnish plot. Lord Harold might know, and guard the facts in his subtle papers. Did Lady Imogen comprehend as much? Was direst need the spur to her playful conversation?

My own father. would part with half my inheritance to know in what manner he himself figures in those pages, and which secrets have been let slip like the veriest cat out of the bag.

“Is Lady Imogen expensive?” I asked Henry.

“Ruinously so. It is said that young Ambrose, the Viscount Gravetye’s heir, cried off from an engagement when acquainted with her true circumstances, and that only old Coutts stands between her and disaster.[17] Observe: Lady Imogen will end the evening by wagering that emerald circlet with young Thrace — for she cannot abide to lose.”

“Particularly to him. ”

They were a compelling pair: the Beau with his guinea-gold hair in fashionable disorder and his coat of the most elegant cut gracing a sportsman’s form; the easy humour of his smile; the warmth in the lazy blue eyes. And Lady Imogen: dark, hectic, her lips parted with excitement at the turning of every card, her alabaster throat a lily rising from the vessel of her gown. They reminded me of two others who had once played at faro—

Lord Harold, and the woman he believed a spy, long since fled from England in the arms of her betrothed. But Lord Harold had always been in command of himself as well as the cards; I doubted Julian Thrace was so masterful.

“The lady looks to win,” Henry said admiringly. It is a curious game, faro — played upon a little baize table set between the two players. One must deal the cards, and the other guess as to their face value before each is overturned; a talent for tallying sums, and holding a keen memory of all the cards played, will serve the gambler well. The tension in Lady Imogen’s body suggested that a good deal rode on the outcome of this hand; she was half-risen from her seat, her cheeks flushed and her dark eyes sparkling.

“And so to the final card,” she said in that low and throbbing voice, “and so to the final card! Turn it over, Thrace! Show its face! My luck cannot desert me now!”

He smiled, and with long fingers turned the card to the fore; she sprang from her chair, face exultant and fierce as a huntress’s, oblivious of those who watched her from the flanks of the room.

“The Devil!” she cried out, impassioned. “The Devil is in these cards, and by God, the Devil is with me! I shall outrun you yet, Thrace — you and all the petty duns of England who would see me ruined!”

In the heavy silence that followed this extraordinary outburst, the doors of the sitting room were thrust open to reveal a manservant bearing a note on a silver tray. The assembled guests stared at him in fascination as he moved towards the magistrate, Mr. Prowting.

The gentleman took up the note, perused it swiftly, and then raised his head to stare accusingly at me.

“Is anything amiss, sir?” I enquired.

“Gentlemen and their boots be demmed! Footprints in the cellar, likewise! It is as I expected. Bertie Philmore has returned to the scene of the crime — and has been caught stealing into your cottage, Miss Austen!”

Letter from Lord Harold Trowbridge to Mr. Henry Fox, later 3rd Lord Holland, dated 13 December 1791; one leaf quarto, laid; watermark fragmentary ELGAR; signed Trowbridge under black wax seal bearing arms of Wilborough House; Personelle, Par Chasseur Exprès, in red ink.

(British Museum, Wilborough Papers, Austen bequest)

My dear Henry—

You ask if I am well; and I suppose that I am in health enough. The trifling mark of a foil on my left shoulder is healing nicely, and gives no trouble, save to impair my aim with a pistol in that hand — but as it is not the one I write with, I may give you a letter long enough to satisfy the main points of your last. Many of our old friends are gathered here at Aix and elsewhere in the province, laying in provisions and bartering for places in the boats putting off at Marseille. There is a rumour abroad that a party of considerable size is lost and wandering in the Pyrénées, giving the Comte much cause for uneasiness; the snows are already deep at the pass’s height, and his daughter has not appeared although she is daily expected. I hope to meet you soon, with a group of thirteen, and drink a bumper of wine to your health; but if the Comte pleads his cause well enough I may be forced to return and form a search party for Hélène — even if only to retrieve the frozen end of a father’s hopes. It is said that the Committee intends to seize all émigré goods before long; let us trust we shall be paid before they do.

My most cordial regards, dear Fox — and God keep you—

Trowbridge