Jane Austen Stole My Boyfriend Read online

  I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Harry, so I lingered a little and petted his dog and forced Jane to wait so that we could all walk down the path together. She was a bit shy of him now, which probably meant that she had realized the significance of his little story. For Jane, she was very silent until after we parted from him at the gates of the parsonage and she waited for a moment, watching him as he jumped the bank into the field and then strode up the hill, followed by his obedient dog.

  ‘He looks like a knight from the tales of King Arthur,’ I told her, watching the way that the sun lit up his golden hair.

  ‘I thought you preferred dark-haired men,’ said Jane abruptly, and then she ran on into the house. I followed her thoughtfully into the parlour. Was she thinking of Newton? I wondered.

  We were supposed to do what lessons we could think of – Mrs Austen was too busy making up end-of-term laundry bills for the pupils to give us even her usual vague directions but we mostly discussed the best way of getting Mrs Austen to allow us to go to Bath with Eliza.

  ‘We’ll ask her after the play,’ decided Jane. ‘She’ll be in a very good mood then. She does enjoy plays.’

  Neither of us even thought of Mr Austen. We were so used to his agreeing to anything that was proposed by his womenfolk.

  The play was supposed to start at three o’clock dinner was early and rushed. As soon as it was finished everyone went over to the barn. The boys dressed there and Cassandra, Jane and I grabbed our gowns and took them back to our rooms. Eliza had brought her own gown no one had seen it yet, but it was something that she had worn ten years ago when she was a girl at the court of Versailles.

  My gown and Cassandra’s had both belonged to Mrs Austen when she was young. Mine was a beautiful shade of blue and had panniers on either side, holding out the skirt. I have drawn a picture of it here. It felt so strange to be wearing it it was almost like having two baskets, one at either side of my waist, underneath my skirt. That makes it sound silly, but I felt quite elegant in it. Jane, as a maid, was dressed quite plainly, with a gown of striped dimity and a huge mob cap covering her curls. I was a bit sorry that she wasn’t more elegant-looking, especially since Newton Wallop was playing the part of James’s servant, but Jane didn’t seem to mind; she was dancing around the room, repeating funny lines from her part.

  Eliza was late in coming over for the play, and James was sending frantic messages by Charles, and I didn’t actually see her until she strode on to the stage, pointing at Cassandra and declaiming:

  ‘There, Sir Anthony, there sits the deliberate simpleton who wants to disgrace her family, and lavish herself on a fellow not worth a shilling.’

  I felt Tom Fowle, Cassandra’s penniless fiancé, shake with silent laughter at my side as we waited in the wings, but I was too fascinated by Eliza’s gown to take much notice of him.

  I could well imagine her dancing in front of the King and Queen of France in this magnificent outfit. Her gown, like my own, had panniers, but poor Mrs Austen had never possessed anything like this creation of a bodice and petticoat of pale green lutestring (I think it is called that – a sort of glossy silk fabric anyway), all covered with a transparent gown of silver gauze – and the petticoat and sleeves were puckered up and tied with silk ribbons and small silk violets. Her dark hair was heavily powdered to a silver colour and rose so high on her head that I suspected that she had a small cushion embedded in it.

  A huge burst of clapping rang out after she had said her first words. The audience of the neighbouring families – the Digweeds, the Terrys, the Chutes and the Lefroys – all obviously knew Eliza and were expecting fun from her.

  I had never seen her act so well. ‘You thought, miss!‘ she shrieked at Cassandra. ‘I don’t know any business you have to think at all – thought does not become a young woman!‘

  And then, advising Cassandrato’illiterate‘thethought of her beloved from her mind, she had everyone on stage roaring with laughter. Whenever she pronounced the wrong word, like substituting ‘illiterate‘ for ‘obliterate‘, she put such emphasis on it that even the dullest and sleepiest audience could not fail to get the joke.

  James was splendid as Sir Anthony, and Mr Austen almost fell off his chair from laughing when he thundered magnificently:

  ‘Objection! – Let the boy object if he dare! – No, no, Mrs Malaprop, Jack knows that the least demur from any son of mine puts me in a frenzy directly. My process was always very simple – in their younger days, ‘twas “Jack, do this”; – if he demurred, I knocked him down – and if he grumbled at that, I just knocked him down again.‘

  When Eliza said in her best Mrs Malaprop fashion: ‘Nothing is so conciliating to young people as severity . . .‘ she gave a lovely artistic pause at the wrong word ‘conciliating‘ and at that very second Jane, with a quick flash of a grin, jumped forward and tickled Pug, who gave a loud shrill bark.

  I was standing beside Harry Digweed (who had the task of opening and closing the curtains) when she did that, and he was laughing so much that I thought the audience would hear him. But there was little danger of that. The audience, also, was roaring with laughter, and William Chute gave a loud ‘toot, toot‘ in imitation of a hunting horn, and that made Pug bark even more hysterically.

  I wished that Thomas could have been present to see me act as Julia, the girl who stays faithful to her lover, despite any objections.

  I didn’t really have to act – I just pretended that Henry, who played the part of Faulkland, was really Thomas and when I said lines like: ‘I never can be happy in your absence‘ I was saying the words to him. Afterwards Jane said that she could hear them ring with such sincerity she thought I was quite good enough to act in Covent Garden, or in the Theatre Royal in Bath (Jane will always exaggerate!), and when I spoke the last lines of the play and talked about ‘. . . hearts that deserve happiness being united at last‘ the thunder of applause was so loud that a barn owl, who had slept through all the many practices and throughout the whole play, suddenly woke up, swooped down over the heads of the actors and the audience, and flew blinking into the sunlight.

  ‘Bravo, bravo!’ called Mrs Austen. And then everyone was on their feet, clapping and stamping and shouting congratulations.

  Harry and Charles pulled the curtains open and closed so many times that we all began to feel dizzy as we bowed and waved and smiled – again and again and again.

  And then it was all over. The actors were all kissing and hugging each other in delight with themselves and with each other. Everybody admired Eliza’s wonderful gown, and James didn’t say a word about her arriving so late that she almost spoiled his play. In fact, he was the first to kiss her!

  And then, just as everyone was streaming out into the sunshine, laughing and talking, echoing lines from the play, I saw Jane slip back on to the stage. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I saw her hug Harry and I think I saw her kiss him on the cheek.

  Luckily Mrs Austen had already hurried off to see to supper. She would have died of horror to see Jane do something like that. I thought it was nice of her though. Otherwise, Harry might have felt a bit left out.

  Saturday, 16 April 1791

  I know it is far too early to hear from Thomas, but I still persuaded Jane to go for a walk by the churchyard, and I glanced, just casually, into the darkness of the hollow yew tree, but of course it was empty so we went back to the house. The pupils begin their holidays today and they have been thundering up and down the wooden stairs all the morning hauling down their trunks and their leather travelling bags.

  This is what Mr Austen’s farm cart, piled high with their luggage, looked like:

  After dinner we all walked up to Deane Gate Inn to see them off. As they were all clambering on to the stagecoach, Mrs Austen warned Gilbert East not to be late back after Easter – apparently at the beginning of last term he stayed at home after term began because there were some balls in his neighbourhood – and Gilbert pulled out of his pocket the poem she had written to him
then and he read it aloud. Everyone laughed, and Mrs Austen blew them all a kiss and only laughed also when Jane did the same.

  When we went back to the house I asked Mrs Austen about the poem she wrote to summon Gilbert back, and she produced a rough copy. Here are a few lines from it:

  I had not realized that Mrs Austen was a writer of poetry. Jane must have inherited her gift from her mother.

  Sunday, 17 April 1791

  Today was a quiet day. Eliza didn’t come down at all. After church in the morning, the boys all disappeared to the houses of various friends and neighbours, and Cassandra, Jane and myself went for a walk. Cassandra did most of the talking – we heard a lot about her beloved Tom Fowle and how, when we come back from Bath, Cassandra is going to stay for a week with his family in Berkshire. Cassandra, like me, can think only of when she will be able to be married – when Tom gets a parish from his rich relation, Lord Craven. That will not be for years and years, but it doesn’t stop Cassandra, who is very domesticated, from planning her bridal meal.

  Tonight, while I am wondering what else to put into my journal from this dull day, I was thinking about Cassandra. I feel sorry for her. After all, I am not as badly off as she is. At the worst I only have to wait another four years till I am twenty-one and can be married. Tom Fowle won’t be able to support Cassandra for another five or six years at least.

  Monday, 18 April 1791

  And now it is all settled. As Eliza had guessed, Mrs Austen was not keen to let us go to Bath under her niece’s care. However, she decided that she would have a short rest from all the housekeeping and dairy making and spend a couple of weeks with her brother, James Leigh-Perrot, and his wife at Bath. And that she would take us with her. Poor Cassandra is going to stay to look after the household affairs. Now we are busy washing and ironing and getting everything ready for a three-week stay in Bath, and we are leaving in two days’ time!

  I asked Jane what was going to happen about my letters from Thomas, and she said that we would ask Harry to send them to Eliza at her Bath address.

  I wish I could see Thomas before he sets out for the East Indies. It seems very unfair that I should not be able to.

  I asked Jane, jokingly of course, whether she thought I could ride as far as Southampton on my donkey and Jane was full of wild ideas.

  ‘Let us borrow the fare from Bath to Bristol from Eliza,’ she said in her usual dramatic way. ‘When we get to Bristol we will hide until Augusta goes out and then steal into the house and take some banknotes from her desk drawer. You could use these to buy a seat on the stagecoach to Southampton. If you took plenty of banknotes, you could put up in a respectable inn.’

  I asked her what we would do if Augusta returned and discovered us, and Jane had a prompt answer for that. She quickly produced her novel Love and Freindship (Jane never could spell ‘friend’) and read aloud from it and then gave me the rough copy to stick in my journal as an example of how I could behave in Edward-John and Augusta’s house in Bristol.

  This cheered me up a little, and I thought about what Eliza had said of speaking to the lawyer (who was so in love with her) at Bath.

  We went to find Eliza, who was out in the garden. James had brought out so many cushions that he had almost made a bed for her and she was reclining on them, propped up against an elm tree, her little pug on her lap, as James read aloud from the magazine called The Loiterer which he and Henry edited and tried to sell to the students at Oxford.

  Eliza, I think, was bored, because her eyes lit up at the sight of us, and in her usual dramatic manner she said, ‘Dearest James, how lovely of you to entertain me. But I must not keep you any longer. You are like all men; you want to be out hunting and shooting. Sit down, mes petites, sit and keep me company. Here, Jenny dear, you hold Pug. Why the sad face?’ she enquired after James had bowed and strode back across the lawn. Even his back expressed acute annoyance with us. He had been enjoying himself, reading to Eliza.

  Still, Mrs Austen will be obliged to us. She was hinting to James this morning that he should go and call upon Anne Mathew, the daughter of the wealthy General Mathew. She would be a good match for him, and Mrs Austen is very keen on the idea (according to Cassandra) and doesn’t think it matters that Anne is six years older than James. His mother wouldn’t want him to waste his time flirting with a married cousin.

  I stroked Pug and didn’t reply, and Jane said, ‘She’s upset at not having heard from Thomas.’

  ‘But, chérie, it is only a few days, you are not raisonnable.’ Eliza rolled each letter r in the back of her throat in the French style. I wish that I could speak French – it seems such a romantic language.

  ‘Aunt Leigh-Perrot had time to reply,’ I said dolefully. I had gone three times to the hollow tree, but there had been nothing there. And then Jane had gone over to the manor house to see Harry and he had been most upset that we thought he had not bothered to deliver the letter.

  ‘I’ll take it over no matter what – even if I am in the middle of sowing turnips,’ he said, according to Jane – who didn’t think he showed much romantic taste in mentioning turnips in the same sentence as love letters.

  ‘But there is a difference,’ cried Eliza. ‘Your aunt is an old lady who has nothing to do in her life other than to write letters. The good captain, ah, now that is a different matter. He is busy, shouting orders, standing on his ship deck . . . La, la, I do not know, but I’m sure a thousand things must occupy him. How can he sit down and write a pretty love letter when his men are standing by, waiting for him to shout, “Lower ze boat, my hearties.”?’

  I had to laugh at that, especially as Eliza made no effort to copy a sailor-like voice but pronounced the words in the refined tones of a Parisian lady.

  ‘I know why you haven’t heard from him,’ exclaimed Jane when we were reluctantly responding to Mrs Austen’s shouts from the open window.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. Jane had stopped in the middle of the gravel sweep in front of the door and was staring at me with serious eyes.

  ‘He’s been taken prisoner by French brigands, of course.’ She looked quite satisfied by that explanation and shook her head when I pointed out that England was no longer at war with France.

  ‘Once a brigand, always a brigand,’ she said wisely. ‘We should write and find out his news – and tell him ours.’

  She raced upstairs, seized a pen, sharpened it to a fine point, trimmed the feathered end carefully and took a piece of scrap writing paper from her desk.

  Then she folded the paper in four, wrote the address, scattered some sand on it, opened it out, turned it over and wrote the message on the inside in her most elegant hand. Then she refolded the paper, melted the end of a wax stick, dropped a blob to seal the letter, told me to stick the copy into my journal and then jumped up. ‘Let’s go and see Harry,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘I bet he will ride straight up to Deane with it. That will be in Southampton by tomorrow morning.’

  Jane’s letter to Thomas:

  Tuesday, 19 April 1791

  It’s very early in the morning and I am writing in my journal before the others are awake. Everything is ready for our journey to Bath. The post-chaise will call for our bags and trunks and then, at Deane Gate Inn, only a short walk up the road, we will get on the coach and start on our journey to Bath.

  Jane is very excited about it, but I am not. I wish now I could stay on in Steventon and keep inspecting that hollow tree to see whether Thomas has remembered me. Everything is so uncertain for me. I feel that I am in danger of going back to being the very insecure, worried girl that I was before I came to Steventon.

  Perhaps Thomas doesn’t love me any more. That thought keeps coming into my mind. Perhaps he has found another girl whose parents are very pleased at the idea of a match between their daughter and the handsome naval officer with his own property in the Isle of Wight and his uncle, the admiral.

  After all, my brother has turned him down. When he got back to Southampton, Thomas must have thought
of that. He must feel very angry.

  Tuesday night, 19 April

  By six o’clock in the evening we had been travelling for hours. The journey across the Salisbury Plain was long and tedious. Eliza entertained us in the early part by telling us about an undercover agent a –rrrrevolutionary who took part in storming the Bastille. She told us some hair-raising stories of this daring individual who even swam through the murky waters of the River Seine in Paris, with his pistol clenched between his teeth. Although Eliza’s husband is an aristocrat, she seems to find this ‘rrrrevolutionary’ undercover agent very attractive, and Jane’s eyes were sparkling with excitement. Mrs Austen fell asleep in the middle of the story and then Eliza dozed off, but Jane and I discussed the undercover agent for a long time. We planned a book about him, with Jane writing the story and me providing the sketches.

  After we finished discussing this I began to feel sleepy, and even Jane started to yawn. Everyone woke up suddenly at Andover when the coach stopped. A stout woman got in and sat next to me, squeezing us both up against the window. Jane started to have a little fun.

  ‘Mama,’ she said in a penetrating whisper, ‘did you hear what the ostler said about the highwaymen?’

  Mrs Austen gave her an annoyed glance. ‘Don’t be silly, Jane. I heard nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Dear Mama,’ confided Jane in a whisper, supposedly meant for my ear, but definitely aimed at my fat neighbour. ‘She doesn’t wish to frighten us, but I know that she has stowed her diamond necklace in her left boot.’

  Poor Mrs Austen! I doubt that she ever owned a diamond necklace, but if she had I fancy it would have been long sold to buy a couple of Alderney cows. She would get more satisfaction from supplying her large household with milk, cream and butter than in flaunting a diamond necklace to impress her neighbours.