THE AUSTEN Christmas MURDERS
letter 1
From Miss Jane Austen to Miss Austen
Steventon, 16 December 1798
My dearest Cassandra,
Thank you kindly for the copy of Mary’s Dream or Sandy’s Ghost, which you sent from Canterbury, but it is most unfair of you to task my fingers with perfecting a new Scotch air when yours are not here to turn my pages. If your design was to preserve your ears until I master it, I shall have my revenge when you return.
Despite the urgency of your requests, I’m afraid I cannot oblige you, or impose on our brother’s generosity to the post boy, by returning the last chapters of Elinor & Marianne. Alas, since you remained in Kent to keep Christmas in high style with Neddy and his family, while I returned to Steventon to perform the double office of nurse to our mother and housekeeper to our father, I have not been at liberty to render the composition perfect. Instead, I shall give you such an account of my beneficence these past few days as to prick your conscience until it bleeds.
Since my last letter, I have trimmed a cap for Mary’s baby, commenced work on a shift for Dame Culham and spent the money I set aside to pay our brother Charles, should he be
successful in carrying out my commission, on no less than five pairs of worsted stockings for the poor. As if this wasn’t charity enough, Mrs Lefroy wishes me to assist in her efforts to distribute the cowpox about the county. Be not alarmed if you return home to a village of horns and udders: she assures me it is in a noble cause.
I expect your happy party at Godmersham is inundated with invitations to festive gatherings, and Beth may even be planning to host her own. Pray tell me, has Neddy restored the ballroom to its intended purpose yet? Better still, has he restored the library? So far we have but one foray into wider society to look forward to. A card arrived this morning from Elizabeth Chute requesting our presence (yes, even mine!) at a Children’s Ball at The Vyne on Christmas Eve. An odd choice of occasion for a childless household, I agree. I can only conjecture that the usually eremitic Mr Chute conceded to the scheme in hopes that the presence of so many young people might induce his wife to produce some offspring of her own. Unless she has not told him, and it will be as much of a surprise to the old man to find himself hosting as it was for us to be invited. It is a masquerade, on the theme of fairy tales and folk heroes. I already have my work cut out (in the form of my old blue petticoat and five yards of spotted muslin) and am sanguine I shall produce an acceptable costume in time.
You need not waste too much pity, therefore, on your poor relations, as we are not wholly without sources of amusement within our diminished family circle. Why, earlier this evening, our brother James summoned us to Deane Parsonage in honour of
my birthday and to encourage Mary to quit her extended period of lying in. Mother refused to join us, claiming she remains too unwell to go clinking about in pattens. Since she has recovered enough strength to dig her garden and scold me most severely on my inattentiveness during my short tenure as mistress of the rectory, I suspect she is as weary of paying court to our sisterin-law as I am.
Thus, Father and I walked à deux through woodland and over muddy fields, only to spend a tedious hour yawning and shivering by Mary’s bedside as James informed us of his plans to convert the cellar into a kennel, and she fretted over a faint blemish on James Edward’s forehead (or Edward, as his mother calls him to distinguish him from his father. Although not, I fear from his uncle or cousin). At one month old, our latest nephew is as fat as butter. Mary, meanwhile, insists she remains too delicate to quit her chamber. After her previous mishap in childbed, I cannot begrudge her determination to recover at leisure. However, I do think it rather hard on poor little Anna to have gained a stepmother only to lose her again so soon. I don’t remember Beth ever waiting that long to be churched but perhaps one grows more expedient at lying in after five children. Although I cannot see how.
Eventually, from a lack of anything more to say to each other, we resorted to charades. I know it is our tradition to wait until Christmas Eve to share our efforts, but as so many of our family are dispersed this year, we sought to get ahead of the post office by composing them early. Mine was lauded as the most amusing (by myself at any rate; James declared it
‘unexcogitable’ and my father refused to adjudicate). I have no doubt you will make short work of it.
When my first is a task to a young girl of spirit, And my second confines her to finish the piece, How hard is her fate!
But how great is her merit, If by taking my all she effects her release!
Mary, being too dull to compose a charade, regaled us instead with a short history of the terrible curse that lingers over the Portals. According to our sister-in-law, the Christmas before the outbreak that cut down Sir Robert and his two youngest daughters, and left Lady Isabella so horribly disfigured that she retired from society altogether, the family invited tragedy upon themselves by prevailing on their eldest child, Mary Ellen, to marry against her strongest inclinations. Mere hours after she was given away in holy matrimony to a young William Chute, the former Miss Portal fled her wedding breakfast never to be seen again. Mary insists the missing bride was immediately torn apart by wolves and that her spirit now haunts the woods between Steventon and Deane. This ghastly tale having dampened the mood somewhat, my father and I crept home by the light of the first moon, starting at every hoot of the owl and screech of the fox. Especially as our path took us directly past Ashe Park where, Mary had assured us, Lady Isabella returns each Christmas (the veil between the living and the deceased being generally acknowledged to be thinnest at this time of year) in hopes of communing with her dead relations. Father says it is nonsense and, in all probability, Mary Ellen eloped with a
handsome soldier but I noted his step was sprightlier than usual and, in his haste to reach the rectory, he nearly left me behind several times in the darkness.
Yours festively, J.A.
PS Kiss the children for me.
KCOLMEH SI REWSNA EHT SPP
Miss Austen
Edward Austen’s Esqr
Godmersham Park
Faversham Kent
Chapter One
Hampshire, England, 17 December 1798
Jane lingers at the entrance to Ashe Park, the misty morning imbuing her with a degree more courage to pause and ponder the fate of the missing bride than the eerie darkness of the previous evening would permit. Alas, all that is visible of the once grand house from the lane between Steventon and Deane is an avenue of lime, crowded with brambles and leading to an apparent wilderness. The spiteful vegetation is so overgrown, a lone horse could pass through the thicket without being cut to shreds. Between two stone pillars, one half of an ironwork gate remains upright, while the other hangs open at a precarious angle, as if daring Jane to enter. Sage-green paint peels from the ornate frame, exposing the rusted metal beneath. At the tip, an expansive cobweb is draped artfully over a decorative scroll. The delicate thread is encased in a brittle film of ice, giving the impression that a slovenly young lady has abandoned her crochet to the elements. Jane shivers as
she imagines Mary Ellen passing through these gates for the last time, in hopes of finding her liberty, while her family toasted her marriage behind her.
Jane had heard tell of the apparition that haunted the woods, of course. While they were growing up at the rectory, her elder brothers had delighted in terrifying her and Cassandra, and whichever hapless schoolboys happened to be boarding with them at the time, with tales of ghosts and murder. Especially throughout the long winter evenings, when all other sport was unavailable. Yet, somehow, Jane had not connected the unfortunate Mary Ellen with the Portals’ subsequent decimation. The family’s grief is one with which she is familiar, owing to the elaborate memorial to the two younger girls set in the nave of St Nicholas’s church. In her youth, Jane spent many hours memorizing every curl and dimple of two fat cherubs, carved from Portland stone and set in a triangle pediment above the Austens’ usual pew, as she prayed for the forbearance not to yawn or fidget while her father delivered his Sunday sermon. To young Jane, the infants seemed a playful, comforting presence, but Cassandra’s lip would tremble and her eyes turn glassy whenever she fixed on the words carved below:
in memory of cecilia portal, aged 14 years, and augusta portal, aged 11 years both cut off by the smallpox, 24 december 1783 ‘in their death they were not divided’
Over time, Jane realized that the reason the inscription would prompt Cassandra to press her hot palm to Jane’s was not only because it immortalized two sisters at a similar distance in age to themselves but also because it appeared directly after the Austen girls’ own close brush with a fatal disease.
In the spring of 1783, Mrs Austen announced she had enrolled Cassandra in a small private school, recently established by a friend of the family in Oxford, as a companion to her cousin. Jane, who was seven at the time, did not receive the news well. She was already indignant at having to surrender Cassandra for weeks at a time whenever her mother’s sister, Aunt Cooper, invited her to visit them in Bath. She would not willingly give up her sister for the duration of an entire term. Accordingly, Jane cried and sulked and stormed about the rectory until Mrs Austen agreed to send her too. It did not take long, only until her mother calculated that, with both girls away and their bedroom unoccupied, she could take in two schoolboys at more than double the rate she was paying for her daughters’ education. Jane’s enduring memory of her time away was of growing impatient as to when she and the other girls were to begin the grand affair of learning, rather than constantly being reminded to straighten their caps and clean beneath their fingernails.
That was until their schoolmistress announced she was removing her establishment to Southampton where the girls would enjoy the sea air and play on the
ramparts and, less auspiciously, be packed into cheap lodgings, and exposed to all manner of deadly ailments by the returning troops. After Jane succumbed to typhus, she lay in her flea-ridden cot for what felt like weeks, her head thudding and her mouth full of bile, as Cassandra stared at her in wide-eyed helplessness. Mercifully, Mrs Austen arrived in time to throw open the windows, strip the sodden bedsheets and chide Jane back to health. As soon as all three girls were well enough to travel, Mrs Austen and Mrs Cooper whisked them away to their respective homes with no more thought to their education. But soon after they reached Steventon, a stark reminder arrived of how grave the danger had been to Jane in a letter to Mrs Austen from her brother-in-law, notifying her that, although Mrs Cooper had succeeded in restoring her daughter to health, she had succumbed to the disease herself and was to be buried the following day. It was the first terrible loss Jane can remember afflicting the family and, to this day, the only time she has seen her mother weep openly.
Now, the bitter wind whistles a haunting cry through the bare branches of hawthorn, oak and ash, encouraging Jane to continue her journey to Deane. Ordinarily, she would not call on her sister-in-law again so soon, but Mary’s reluctance to quit her chamber after the birth of her baby is becoming a concern for her wider family. While Jane may sympathize with the heightened anxiety of a new mother, it will be necessary to expose