Free Jane and His Lordship's Legacy by Stephanie Barron Page B

conversation. We should have considered that you were not equal to it.”
    “I ought to have been, Miss Austen. I ought to be equal to . . . many things.” She turned towards the window and stretched out her arms, as though she would fly from its casement to a wider world. I had been that way myself, once, in a small vicarage in Hampshire; I had dreamt of crossing the seas—of being an Irishman’s wife—had exulted in hope of adventure and limitless skies, and chafed against the boundaries of glebe and turnpike. A surge of fellow-feeling from my breast to Catherine’s, then; a recognition of hopes blighted and dreams put away.
    “Is Ann your only sister?” I enquired.
    “Elizabeth, my elder, is long since married,” Catherine replied. “We were all so unfortunate as to lose my two brothers to illness and accident; William being carried off while at school in Winchester; and John but a year later at home.”
    I had carelessly used the very same names in my request for a manservant; how Mr. Prowting must have felt it, and misunderstood my levity’s cause! I felt a surge of colour to my cheeks. “You have all my sympathy. Were they very young?”
    “William was fifteen, and John but nine.”
    “How dreadful!” I thought of Mrs. Prowting—of the black-edged handkerchief that appeared to be wedded to her palm—with a deeper comprehension. Despair and grief may appear to greater advantage when writ on an elegant form; but Mrs. Prowting’s large, comfortable bulk, though better suited to laughter, held as much right to suffering as my own. 2
    I saw Catherine over the stile in the meadow, with profuse thanks for the gift of eggs and cheese; and as she walked slowly into her house—into that orgy of preparation and exhilarated transport in which she was expected to take no part—I went back to the cottage.
    If I hurried, I might just have time to read another of Lord Harold’s papers before I journeyed to Alton, and met the coroner.
    Excerpt from the diaries of Lord Harold Trowbridge, dated 12 December 1782, on board the Indiaman
Delos,
bound for Bombay.
    . . . it is no bad thing to be a young man of two-and-twenty, with the Paradise of the Subcontinent looming off the bow, and all the riches of a sultan’s court waiting to be plucked. There are the women lodged in all the acceptable quarters—no longer young, or lacking in fortune and looks, and in short the very dross of English gentility, sent out as brides to men they have never met and a life in a climate likely to kill them before very long. They are desperate for sport and fun before the voyage should be over—knowing, from the most ignorant of presentiments, that marriage to a stranger cannot be very agreeable, and seduction from a shipmate must provide present excitement and the comfort of stories for telling hereafter. I have lifted five skirts to date in the languid forenoon of a becalmed passage, and Freddy Vansittart is no less lucky—with his dark looks and his roguish smile, he can win any number of hearts. Stella from Yorkshire will have him, and he does not take care.
    We have sunk to betting on the women as we do at cards, the boredom of this voyage being almost insufferable; and on occasion, when I am feeling low, I am thankful to God for Freddy Vansittart—his wild laughter and neck-or-nothing heart are all that stand between me and a pistol ball in the head. Like me, Freddy is a scoundrel and a second son; and if we do not hang together we shall most assuredly hang separately.
    I believe I have borrowed that last sentiment from another, but cannot recollect whom.
    I am not often so low. In truth, I cannot regret the chain of events that have sent me here—the violence of that meeting at dawn; the cut on Benning’s face that will scar it like my signature forever after; the loss of my father’s good opinion or the anger I met on every side; my mother’s tears or the sober interview with the solicitors. It is not as tho’ Benning