Free Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House by Stephanie Barron

and Tom Seagrave. “Do you happen to know, Mrs. Braggen, from which of the captured prizes the Frenchmen hail?”
    Cecilia Braggen stared. “I have not the slightest idea, Miss Austen! And I would not have you to expect an officer among your charges. The officers are all housed in good naval families. I speak, in the case of Wool House, of common seamen.”
    “I do not believe that Captain Austen would wish his wife to risk exposure to illness at such a time,” observed Mrs. Foote gently, with a glance for the anxious and tongue-tied Mary. “And for my own part, I cannot
    undertake to carry all manner of disease into the nursery.”
    “Father would certainly forbid it in my case!” cried Catherine Bertie, “however much he might recommend the charity, in the general way. You must know, Mrs. Braggen, that I have never been strong—and the winter months are replete with danger for a lady of delicate constitution!”
    “It appears, Mrs. Braggen, as though you have won the heart of but a single recruit,” I told the hatchet-faced lady. “Pray inform me at what hour I must report for duty.”
1 The Reverend Thomas Fowle (1765-1797) became engaged to Cassandra Austen in 1792 but died of yellow fever in San Domingo five years later while serving as naval chaplain to his kinsman, William, Lord Craven.— Editor's note.
2 Jane is indulging in a pun. A patten was the small metal ring strapped onto ladies' shoes to elevate them from the mud of the streets during the winter season.— Editor's note.
3 In the Napoleonic period of warfare, it was customary to hold prisoners of war only briefly, in expectation of a bilateral exchange in which officers of both sides were sent home. Common seamen, however, sometimes lingered in prison for months.— Editor's note.

Chapter 5
The Odour of Chessyre's Fear

24 February 1807,
    cont.
    ~
    M ARY AND I WERE GRANTED A REPRIEVE OF SEVERAL hours before I should be expected to take up my new vocation; at present, Mrs. Braggen's serving woman—a close confidante, it seemed, of many years' standing— was in attendance upon the surgeon, Mr. Hill. I should have laughed aloud at this sacrifice of a personal maid, in testament to Mrs. Braggen's devotion to her adopted cause, had Catherine Bertie not warmly assured me that dear Cecilia had worn herself to a fag end in nursing the sick at Wool House. She had absented herself from its noisome interior merely to solicit the aid of her naval sisters. I might expect her return in the midst of my own service—the better to instruct me, I suspected, in the finer points of contagion.
    Mary and I bid (he ladies adieu —assured Mrs. Foote that we should not fail her on Friday evening—and tarried only long enough in the hall to be certain of escaping our departing friends. Happily, the rain had dwindled to a fine mist, exactly calculated to freshen Mary's complexion and add a springing curl to the wisps of hair escaping from my bonnet And so we set off.
    My first object was to select a joint suitable for Martha's delectation, and order it sent home to Mrs. Davies; my second was to ensure that my brother's wife did not come to any harm in the public market, where she intended to examine every egg ever laid by ardent hen. At the last, if time permitted, I intended a healthful walk up the length of the High—which in Southampton runs the entire extent of the ancient center of town, from the Quay at water's edge, north to the very Bar Gate. Southampton, like its sister, Portsmouth, has always been fortified with broad, stout walls and the Keep so necessary for the defence of the realm; all the efforts at improvement—the Polygon that ambitious builders would tout, as the next Fashionable locus for Gentlemen of Means, fine shop fronts along the broad sweep of the High, the modern villas erected in the hills beyond the town, by sailors turned once more on land—cannot disguise the pleasant utility of a stone escarpment twenty feet tall and eight feet wide,