IT WAS AN ENGLISH SUMMER’S afternoon of middling perfection in Chawton, and Mrs. Austen was alone in the garden. Eccentrically dressed in old clothes—although these days, even her best clothes were old, for what did it matter?—she knelt at her strawberries, attacking insurgent weeds with a trowel. Within the cottage the three other residents were to be found, as was their habit, in the drawing room.
Jane was at the little writing table, showing the same ferocious intensity in intellectual battle that her mother brought to the physical. Martha was copying receipts into her notebook. Cassy, in the armchair beneath the open window, sat in a wafting cloud of rose scent, and read that morning’s letter again. It was the fourth such missive that she had received since living in Chawton, and she still did not know why they were written. What was the purpose of this communication? How could it change things? What is done is done. Was the hope to inspire some sense of regret?
Their peace was disturbed.
“I am at the very end of my tether, and hanging on by no more than my fingernails.” Mary Austen appeared on the threshold. Anna, taller and lovelier than her stepmother but sharing the same cross demeanor, stood hangdog beside her.
“Good afternoon, Mary.” Jane slipped her page under the blotter and looked up. “What is it now?”
“I have reason to believe that your niece, my stepdaughter, is about to embark on another engagement! And this time with Ben Lefroy, of all people.”
The aunts offered cautious congratulation, and Anna returned an equally cautious smile. It was true that, as a match, Mr. Lefroy was less than ideal, but he was at least better than the last one.
“Of course obviously one does not want her to end up an old maid, but it is hard to have faith in her after what she has put us through. Honestly, I believe she does it only to vex us.”
It was Cassy’s belief that Anna was simply desperate to leave home and would do anything in her powers to effect it. Poor child, there was only ever one means of escape. She certainly did not have the air of a young woman in love. In fact she was a study in misery.
Mary bustled into the middle of the room and, as was her wont—her mind buzzing like a bluebottle from one unpleasantness to the next—alighted upon a new subject: “Each time I visit, I am struck by the same thought: Your brother Edward could have done so much better for you, had he so wished. Does it not peeve you, living here, when he has so many better properties in his gift? You have been too good-natured, and he has exploited that. It is my long experience that the undemanding single woman never gets her due.”
“And it is mine”—Jane rose—“that the demanding gets nothing at all. Truly, Mary, do not worry yourself on our account. We are as comfortable as can be, and endlessly grateful. Can I offer you a cool drink?”
“Certainly not. It is very cold in here.” Mary shivered theatrically. “Very cold and extremely dark.”
“Perhaps you are sickening, Sister?” Martha asked, worried.
“I never sicken. There must be a draft. Is there a draft? I fancy there is a draft. You should call out Edward’s man to make him take a look.”
“We would never trouble him for such a thing,” Martha replied. “And when work does need doing, then well: We can pay for it ourselves now. Jane is, after all, a very rich woman!”
Jane’s new “wealth” was much talked about in Chawton that summer, and dear Martha went to great lengths to drop it into any conversation. Since the week they moved in here, Jane had, as her sister had hoped, returned to her manuscripts. First she revised Elinor and Marianne, which became Sense and Sensibility, and—oh, joy!—found a publisher and had sold really quite well. At the urging of the household, First Impressions was next to receive her attentions. With its new title of Pride and Prejudice, that was doing even better. It was the fashionable novel of 1813, and its anonymous author at the top of her tree. She was set to make more than a staggering one hundred wonderful pounds. They all fell on the reviews as they came out, exclaimed at the sales as they heard them. Jane was toiling, with enormous pleasure and absolute satisfaction, on something quite new: the adventures of a young heroine, rich in morals and low in income. There was nothing anyone could do to burst her bubble of delight. Nevertheless, Mary must try.
“Rich? Oh, Martha, you are so sweet and so foolish. Jane has had a little windfall this year, and we are all very pleased for her. But, as I was saying to Austen only last evening, popularity is no measure of quality—or longevity, indeed. Novels are a fad, nothing more, nothing less. Austen says so, and who can know better than him? When I think of his poetry—oh, well, there I shall stop, for I do not wish to offend. Please bear in mind, my dears, that this wealth is, most likely, no more than a onetime occurrence and spread over a lifetime of seven years and thirty, what does it amount to? More or less, nothing.”
Again the bluebottle took flight, landing this time on Anna. “Now then. To return to more pressing matters, I have brought Anna to see her grandmother, in the hope of some old sense being talked into a silly young head. Come with me, child, and confess all.”
Off they went to the garden.
“Ignore it,” Cassandra said mildly, returning to her letter.
“Oh, I do.” Jane flicked her hand. “But I cannot help but find what she says interesting. You know, she really, genuinely, in her deep heart of hearts, pities all three of us. Here am I, England’s Happiest Woman—self-appointed, perhaps, but official nonetheless; the crown is secure on my head—and in comes Mary, assesses my lot, and can only see Tragedy.”
“She approaches the subject of Life with quite different criteria.”
“Yes, but is she alone?” Jane wanted to know. “Does everyone feel that way? Do they all look at us and see three creatures as joyless and stiff as”—she looked around and her eye caught the cold fireplace—“that poker? The fire screen? Some plank of dry wood? We took the sow’s ear that fate offered us, and fashioned from that something quite wonderful. And I do wonder at it, truly. Yet perhaps, despite all that luck and conniving and ultimate triumph, we are still as old, poor, and laughed-at as we always had feared.”
“Perhaps.” Cassy thought of an incident of the previous week. She and Jane had been walking through the village together, in matching bonnets. Their wardrobes had merged lately, and their middle-aged garb was, more often than not, almost identical: like strange, superannuated twins. They were clearly a comical sight, for a group of young laborers had laughed when they passed them. Jane had not noticed—she was too busy talking. Cassy had, though—and not cared. For what do we live but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn? “And what does it matter?”
“It does not matter in the slightest. I was merely curious. We novelists are curious creatures. We can never cease in our examinations of character and situation.”
“Oh, Martha.” Cassy laughed. “I think we are to be pitied, after all, are we not?”
“And on the subject of my curiosity and its insatiable nature,” Jane continued, “who is your letter from, may I ask? And do not say ‘Nobody,’ for you have read it one hundred times this afternoon, and ‘Nobody’ rarely warrants that level of scrutiny.”
“It is from a Mrs. Hobday. I do not know if you remember: We—”
“Hobday?” Jane exclaimed. “Why, yes: Curiously, the name does ring a bell. It deafens me, in fact. What does she want, after all these years?”
“She writes to inform me that her son—”
“Your Mr. Hobday.”
“The seaside gentleman?” Martha sat up.
Cassy shot a glance at Jane, who looked sheepish. “Mr. Hobday,” she continued, “has been recently presented with his third child. Very pleasant news, I am sure you agree.”
“We are all very happy for him,” Jane said drily. “And why does she imagine that you might want to know that?”
Cassy sighed. “That, I agree, is something of a puzzle, which I have been failing to solve. I could do with an astute lady novelist to shed light on the matter. If only I knew one…”
“At your service.” Jane walked to the window, looked into the garden, and thought. “Of course the pride of any fond mother—and she was the fondest, if I remember correctly—would chafe at the notion of another woman rejecting her darling. Perhaps she is still smarting, even after the passage of so many years.”
“But if that darling is now settled, and blessed with a growing family,” Martha put in, “that would be more than a little churlish.”
“Ah, you speak as one who is a stranger to churl.” Jane turned. “If only the whole world had your talent for resilience and forgiving, my dear friend.”
The room fell silent. Cassy was thinking, and had no doubt that they too were thinking—for all three now had the power to read the minds of the others—of Martha and Frank Austen. She had loved him for so long and so deeply, and yet never once had that love refused her permission to rejoice in his happiness at finding love with another. She possessed quite the purest of souls.
“It is also possible,” Jane then went on, “that the senior Mrs. Hobday is less churlish, more calculating. Perhaps she worries that the young Mrs. Hobday might not survive all this childbearing. She wants to ensure that the next Mrs. Hobday is there waiting in the wings, preparing to take center stage.”
“Heavens!” Cassy exclaimed. “What a dark, strange place is your mind, Sister.” She folded up the letter and put it away. “I cannot accept that theory. It is too sinister for words. And if you are right, then she can only be disappointed again.”
“Truthfully?” Jane moved to her side, and put a hand on her shoulder. “You do not regret it? You would never go back to him? Even now, that you no longer have the worry of me and our mother? I do wonder sometimes. Both of you were made, surely, to be married ladies. I never was, of course. But you two: You would have been such excellent wives. Is there not, deep within you, some small, closed, secret chamber of disappointment?”
Martha smiled. “I, for one, was never presented with a choice.”
“And I”—Cassy squeezed the hand that now held hers—“regret nothing. Look at us. We have found our Utopia! I can imagine no better life than the one we have here.”