Jane and the Barque of Frailty

Chapter 8 The Lumber-Room of Memory

Thursday, 25 April 1811, cont.

HENRY HAD SPARED MORE THAN AN HOUR FROM his banking concern to guide me through the exhibition, which being newly mounted, was the object of the Polite World’s interest for a fleeting time; so numerous were the patrons, that I confess I was nearly crushed in navigating the narrower passages. Picturesque landscapes, and vignettes of the sea; portraits of beauty and youth — they each had something to recommend them; but in truth my attention was equally held by the personages I saw everywhere around me. In a Hampshire village as intimate as Chawton, the society is unvarying; its delights are to be found in the small but telling transformations of personal character over time. In London, however, the richness and variety of the spectacle — in dress, equipages, retinues, and remarks — is an endless enticement to the ear and eye. I could not divide my time equally between the gallery walls and the opulent crowd milling about me; and so at length professed myself exhausted, and ready to quit the place.

Henry saw me safely into a hackney cab, being intent upon his offices in Henrietta Street; and tho’ the day was advancing, and I was a little tired, and considering of the last few pages of my book yet to be proofed, I let down the window of the coach and directed the driver in an entirely opposite direction to Hans Town.

“Pray convey me to the chambers of Mr. Bartholomew Chizzlewit,” I told him, “in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”

Henry was correct. I was missing Lord Harold.

I FIRST MADE THE REDOUBTABLE CHIZZLEWIT’S acquaintance nearly two years ago, in the cottage at Chawton which is now my home. Mr. Chizzlewit had journeyed from London for the sole purpose of putting into my hands a strange and enduring legacy: the private papers, correspondence, and journals of Lord Harold Trowbridge, second son of the fifth Duke of Wilborough: intriguer, man-about-town, and government spy. The Gentleman Rogue, as I was wont to call him, had long been an acquaintance of mine — having fallen in my way some years before, at the home of a friend newly-widowed and beset by unpleasantness.

Lord Harold progressed from an object of suspicion to one of profound attachment; his virtues being almost indistinguishable from his vices, his character one of iron tempered by great sorrow, his scruples unexacting as to means and almost wholly taken up with ends — he was, in short, the agent of my instruction in the ways of the Great World, and the most cherished friend of my heart. He was killed by a Buonapartist agent some three years ago; and I have not yet learned to supply his loss. But his papers, when I have the time and means to consult them, are a great comfort to me — reviving, for a little, the impression of his voice and mind, in the very signature of his hand.

They are also, I may add, a dangerous repository of intelligence, which any number of personages might do violence to obtain. There is enough matter stored in Lord Harold’s Bengal chest to end careers, induce violent hystericks, urge divorce or pistols at dawn — and having encountered the murderous effect of his lordship’s legacy in my own quiet Chawton, I resolved to despatch the chest to the security of Bartholomew Chizzlewit, who had served as his lordship’s solicitor almost from the cradle. Mr. Chizzlewit accommodated me with alacrity, and refused all my attempts at payment — remarking, in his enigmatic way, that it was a privilege to serve one who had merited his lordship’s trust, there being so few yet surviving in the world.

I drew a veil over my face — as behooved a lady reckless enough to consult the Law quite unattended even by her abigail — and paid off the driver at the door of the chambers. The rain had dwindled to a fine mist, but the aspect of the day was lowering and gloomy; Eliza would be dozing over her French novel, and never remark upon my absence. I was impatient beyond reason to settle down with a lamp, the panelled oak door thrust to behind me, and reach once more for the beloved wraith I had glimpsed by that Derbyshire brook only this morning.

A clerk, dressed all in black, suspended his quill as I entered the chambers. These were sensibly, if not richly, furnished with mahogany bookshelves and high tables laden with ledgers; a fire burned merrily in the open hearth; and the scent of cloves, heated by the flames, laced the air. There was no sign of the footmen in green livery who had attended the solicitor in all his state, at his descent upon Hampshire; but perhaps they were employed in Chizzlewit’s domestic establishment.

“How may I be of service, ma’am?” the clerk enquired.

“Miss Jane Austen, if you please, to see Mr. Chizzlewit.”

The fellow’s eyes ran from my bonnet to my boots. The coloured muslin I had chosen for the British Gallery was newly made up, a prize won of this trip to London; but I had been long enough in Town to learn that I presented a neat but hardly dazzling appearance. The usual run of the chambers’ patrons were of the cream of nobility, and quite above my touch. The clerk was not impressed.

“Are you expected?” he demanded impatiently.

“No. Is Mr. Chizzlewit within?”

“I cannot undertake to say. If I may send in your card … ”

The truth is that I possess none. Country ladies of modest means and uncertain age do not leave their cards at each other’s houses; all such formality belongs to Town, and the society of the fashionable select, or such gentlemen of trade as are required to offer their names as surety of respectability. I had never squandered the contents of my slim purse on hot-pressed squares engraved with black ink — but the insolence of this clerk was causing me to regret my providence.

“Pray enquire whether Mr. Chizzlewit is at leisure to receive Miss Jane Austen,” I rejoined, my voice overly-loud, “and if he is not — I shall engage to appoint an hour convenient to us both.”

“Is there some difficulty, Edmund?” a mild voice enquired — and I glanced over my shoulder to discover a gentleman younger than myself, in buff pantaloons and a well-made coat of dark blue superfine, his cravat dexterously tied. One of the noble patrons, no doubt — who possessed a card, and was expected, and should never be made to feel shabby-genteel by a person of little manners and less birth.

“This lady is wishful to see you, sir,” the clerk answered woodenly. “I was informing her you was engaged.”

“But happily you were mistaken,” the gentleman said, with the ghost of a smile in his eyes. “I am quite at leisure to consult with … Mrs ….?”

“Miss Austen,” I said quickly. “But I believe there is a mistake. It is Mr. Chizzlewit I require to consult.”

“I am Sylvester Chizzlewit,” he returned. “But perhaps you are better acquainted with my grandfather — Mr. Bartholomew Chizzlewit?”

“Indeed! He once informed me that the firm’s service to the ducal House of Wilborough dated from his grandfather’s time — and I perceive now that the tradition is an enduring one.”

“Wilborough!” The lurking smile broke fully on the gentleman’s face, transforming it from polite indifference to the liveliest interest. “And your name is Austen. I believe I may divine your errand, ma’am. Pray allow me to convey you to the private patrons’ chamber.”

BEFORE DESPATCHING THE BENGAL CHEST TO LONDON nearly two years ago, I had spent any number of hours in organising its contents. Lord Harold had pursued no particular method while amassing his accounts. He had merely tossed his correspondence and journals into the depths of the chest as tho’ it were a diminutive lumber-room. Over time his records of travels in India, his schoolboy missives from Eton, his maps of Paris scrawled with marginalia, and his passionate letters to ladies long mouldering in the grave, formed an incoherent jumble. During a succession of winter days in my Hampshire village, I had established my own system of classification as rigourous as any natural philosopher’s: at the bottom of the chest I placed the childish scrawls of letters written to his beloved mother; next, his first desperate entanglement with a lady and the dissolute accounts of young manhood: gaming hells, club debauches, meetings at Chalk Farm at dawn.[9] The squandering of a second son’s income could be traced in the piles of old debts, the dunning letters of tailors, wine merchants, chandlers, and gunsmiths; the sale of a string of hunters at Tattersall’s. The inevitable exile to India filled the next layer, and the layer after that; the fifth Duke’s death and his lordship’s accession to an uncle’s fortune; his investments in the Honourable Company; the Revolution in France and the demand for his talents as a secret government envoy. It was in this guise I had finally encountered him: the Gentleman Rogue at the height of his powers — polished, cynical, adept, and aloof. He caught and held my interest precisely because the greater part of his mind was always withheld from me — who had never found it very hard to understand everybody.

“My grandfather will be pleased to learn that you have paid us this call,” Sylvester Chizzlewit told me. “I hope I may assure him of your continued health and happiness, Miss Austen?”

“I am well enough,” I replied, “but I collect that Mr. Chizzlewit is not. He no longer sits in chambers?”

“He was much beset by an inflammation of the lung this winter, and undertakes a trial of the waters at Bath. We are hopeful they may prove beneficial. Miss Austen, I must beg you to remain where you stand, and avert your eyes, as the measures we have adopted for the concealment of our keys will admit the confidence of no one.”

The words were uttered with as much courtesy as the intelligence of his grandfather’s indisposition, or his wishes for my continued health; but there was a firmness in tone that brooked no question or delay. I turned my head away, and heard a soft click under Sylvester Chizzlewit’s fingers, as tho’ a panel in the wainscotting had slid back on hidden springs.

“Very well,” he said, raising a formidable ring of keys; “we must now seek the mates of these from Jonas.”

Jonas, it was presently revealed, was an elderly clerk whose white hair sprouted in tufts about his head, and whose back was stooped with a deformity of the spine. He smiled vaguely when roused from his ledgers in the room adjoining Sylvester Chizzlewit’s; his myopic pale eyes roamed over my figure.

“Keys,” he murmured, as if to himself. “But can she be trusted? His lordship thought so, aye — but his lordship’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That will be quite enough, Jonas,” Chizzlewit said sharply. “Pray bestir yourself.”

The old man sighed, and eased his arthritic frame from the high stool on which it was perched. “None too young, is she, and not what his lordship might be expected to favour. A lady-bird, they said, as was in his keeping, but I cannot credit it. Too long in the tooth by half … ”

I was put to the blush, and knew not where to look, but Mr. Chizzlewit preserving a perfect gravity, I attempted insensibility, and followed in Jonas’s muttering train.

The clerk led us down a corridor lit by flaring lamps set into the woodwork, and into a pleasant room devoid of company. A handsome table held down the centre of the room, and several easy chairs were scattered about, but no fire burned in the imposing hearth.

Jonas crossed to the chimneypiece, and took up a position on one side. Mr. Chizzlewit stood at the other. Without a word, the two inserted their keys into indiscernible holes in the woodwork, and at the count of three, sprang the locks in a single motion.

The chimneypiece swung outwards, as tho’ it were a door: revealing a considerable chamber behind, inky with blackness. Sylvester Chizzlewit coolly reached for a taper that lay on the false mantel, and lit it in the flame of an oil lamp. Then he held it aloft.

“I must beg you, Miss Austen, not to attempt to look within. Jonas, we require the Bengal chest.”

TO BE LEFT ALONE WITH MY TREASURE WAS TO FIND again the comforting embrace of a familiar friend. When the door of the patrons’ chamber had closed behind the solicitor and his clerk, I ran my fingers over the raised figures carved in teak (most of them grossly improper), the heavy iron hasps and hinges, and the sloping initials cut on the lid. Then I drew an ornate key from my reticule and — glancing over my shoulder with apprehension, for Jonas’s air of mystery was infectious — set it in the lock.

There were too many riches within. I might have been tempted to peruse the journals that described his lordship’s trek by horseback into the wilds of Central Asia; his visits to the court of St. Petersburg, and his views on the murder of the present Tsar’s father; his abduction of a lady from a harem near Jaipur; or his tête-à-tête with Napoleon Buonaparte, in a Paris prison from which he subsequently escaped, in lowering himself through a series of drains — but I had not come to Chizzlewit’s chambers solely to indulge in memory. Lord Harold was killed in the autumn of 1808, and if memory served, he had been much taken up with government policy at that time, being newly returned from the Peninsula. George Canning had then held the Foreign Ministry, and Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the Ministry of War. Lord Harold must certainly have been acquainted intimately with both.

The journal I sought was a slim one bound in bottle-green calf, the chronicle of the Rogue’s final year — begun in January of 1808 and ending abruptly with the first few days of November. I skimmed rapidly through several passages; his lordship had been writing from Oporto. The relevant entries spanned several months.

I could make little of all this; the web of policy, again, too entangled to comprehend. Certainly the abortive defence of Sweden had been followed by the even more ignominious expedition to Walcheren, an island in the Scheldt, which Lord Harold had not lived to see — forty thousand troops, thirty-five ships of the line, more than two hundred smaller vessels, and very little to show for it, while behind our backs, the French arrogantly installed Buonaparte’s brother on the throne of Spain. Again, the pressing need to crush the Enemy in the Peninsula had given way to a fool’s errand in the northern seas. Lord Harold was clearly disturbed by a discrepancy in intelligence— but he wrote to himself in these pages, as a man does when he ruminates upon anxieties in his mind: elliptical and reflective, without the need for explanation. Not for the first time, I wished acutely for his living presence.

One name, however, had leapt out at me from the journal’s pages: Moira. Lord Harold had known Henry’s intimate friend, the debt-ridden Earl. I should have expected it; both men had been bred up as Whigs from infancy.

The plaintive sounding of a clock somewhere in chambers alerted me to the fact that the day was much advanced; Eliza would be wondering if I were lost. I slipped the bottle-green volume into my reticule and locked Lord Harold’s chest.

ELIZA WAS, INDEED, ANXIOUSLY AWAITING MY return — but it was Madame Bigeon who informed me of the fact. Manon’s aging mother answered my pull of the front doorbell. When I would have stepped into the hall, she urged in a rapid undertone, “Pray, mademoiselle, do not for the love of Heaven delay, but go for Monsieur Henri at once!”

“Is it Eliza? She is — unwell?” I managed.

Madame shook her head. “It is the Runners. Bow Street is in the house!”