The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen Read Online Free PDF

When I asked what had happened to it, she said she threw it on the fire when I was a month old. I did not throw Elizabeth’s letter on the fire. It was tucked away in the far corner of a drawer inside an odd glove whose partner was lost somewhere in the park, and by the time I remembered it was there she was well into her next pregnancy. I wondered if Anna’s mother had written a letter like that to her, and how old a child should be before being shown such a thing.
    On the day that Anna left us, Jane and I took Fanny fishing in the river. But in the absence of her cousin, the child was in a tricky mood. She tried our patience by throwing little handfuls of earth into the water when she thought we weren’t looking.
    “Fanny!” Jane cried. “You are turning the river into a mud bath! It is trout, not hippopotamus that we are after!”
    Fanny dropped her head, sullen as a horse in a heat wave. “This is the wrong place for fish,” she muttered. “Uncle Henry knows the best spots. He took Mama and me the day after her birthday and we caught three whoppers.”
    “Oh, Uncle Henry was here for Mama’s birthday, was he?” There was the slightest tremor of her eyelashes as she looked at me for confirmation.
    “Yes, he was,” I replied. I remembered it clearly, for it had been a strange, unsettling sort of day. I had been left watching Fanny and the rods while Henry went with Elizabeth to inspect the walled garden. As they scrambled up the riverbank she must have dropped the key to the garden gate. I saw it glinting in the grass a few minutes afterward and ran to catch them up. But they were nowhere to be seen. Then I saw a flash of color, the bright yellow of Henry’s coat disappearing into the little bathing house on the next bend along the river.
    Of course, there could have been any number of reasons for him going in there—a call of nature perhaps, or a sudden request from Elizabeth for a parasol to shield her from the sun. But it wasn’t the first time that this brother and sister-in-law had aroused my curiosity. I remember standing there, nonplussed, on the top of the bank. Fanny was calling out to me, telling me to come quick, that she had hooked a trout. My head twisted this way and that, like the hapless fish on the line, from the bathing house to the shouting child, from one river bend to the other, my mind a whirl of muddied images. I told myself that I was mistaken, that the sun had played tricks with my eyes, which have never been strong. Fanny landed her fish herself and before we knew it her uncle and mama were beside us, laughing as they slipped and slid the last few yards down the bank.
    “The key, ma’am,” I said, when Fanny had dragged Henry across to the keep net to see her fish. “You must have dropped it.”
    I watched her face. The limpid blue eyes were untroubled. The tendrils of blond hair quivered not an inch. “Oh, thank you, Sharp.” She almost managed a smile as she took it. “I wondered where it had gone! We had to ask old Baines to let us in, didn’t we, Henry?”
    I don’t know if he heard what she said. His head was next to Fanny’s, peering at the thrashing silver creature in the net. He simply laughed and raised his hand in a wave, as if nothing anyone could say or do could spoil the magic of the moment.
    That night, as I lay in bed, I turned it over and over in my mind. I had overheard enough conversations between my father and his customers to know that stories of men desiring a brother’s wife thrilled the drawing rooms of London. Could Henry really be guilty of such a thing? Was that why he came to Godmersham so often? Was his eager interest in the children just a ploy?
    I thought about how he had been spending his days during this visit. When he was not with the children, he was often shooting or fishing with Edward. And yes, he did spend time with Elizabeth—probably more time with her than with anybody else. Unlike Edward, she did not have an estate to run. She