The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen Read Online Free PDF Page B

had all the time in the world to entertain her brother-in-law. Too much time, perhaps.
    There had been one incident, a couple months after I had taken up my post as governess, when he and Elizabeth had taken an afternoon walk. He had returned with a broken finger, saying that a buck had attacked them as they strolled toward Chilham Castle. Elizabeth was unhurt and praised Henry for his gallantry in fending off the beast. I thought at the time that it was unusual for deer to be aggressive in February, that autumn was the time for rutting.
    Rutting . The word lodged itself in my brain. Were they really in Chilham Park that day? Was he really attacked as he said? Or had he come by the injury some other way? The weather had been wild and windy. Had they been in the bathing house? Had the door blown shut on his hand when they tried to leave?
    Having taken this direction, my thoughts took me to an even darker place. Elizabeth had been delivered of her last-born child, Louisa, in the second week of November. I counted on my fingers. The birth had come exactly nine months after the accident in Chilham Park.
    The next morning I told myself that I had no proof of anything. All I could be sure of seeing was a flash of yellow cloth at the door of the bathing house. It could have been a servant’s waistcoat or a maid’s petticoat; it could even have been a duster, shaken out as the place was made ready for the summer. I told myself that I must put away my suspicions as so much fancy and foolishness. For a moment I saw myself as Elizabeth no doubt saw me: a pitiable spinster with so little in her world that she must live her life through books and invent illicit encounters.
    Henry left Godmersham later that same day and as May turned into June the heat of my imagination began to die down. By the time of Jane’s arrival I had succeeded in putting the whole thing to the back of my mind. But something in her eyes now, as she stood there on the riverbank, looking from me to Fanny and back again, reignited that uneasy feeling. It was the same look I had seen the day she took her luncheon with me in the morning room.
    Perhaps some sixth sense told her what I was thinking. She said nothing more on the subject of Henry, but I thought her rather more quiet and subdued as the afternoon wore on. There were no more hippopotamus jokes, no delicious barbs about the people she had encountered in the salons and ballrooms of Bath.
    Fanny seemed to catch on to her aunt’s change of mood, snapping out of her sourness into a stream of chatter. I wondered how much she was picking up from the adults around her, whether she had deliberately dropped Uncle Henry into the conversation to test her aunt’s reaction. She kept a diary, which she sometimes showed me and, while the entries were mostly mundane, they revealed a keen eye for observation. A year ago, four months after the Chilham Park episode, she had shown me a whole week’s worth of her jottings. Henry had been at Godmersham again and she had recorded every activity during his stay, including trips he made to Canterbury with her mother and father, places they had gone to dine, even a game of hide and seek that Henry, Elizabeth, and Fanny had apparently played by themselves.
    The day after his departure she had made a note of the fact that Mama had received a letter from Uncle Henry. I wondered at the time why she should record that occurrence, when her mother was sure to have received several other letters that day, as she would on most days. Now I asked myself if it could have been significant; had Elizabeth broken the news to Henry, during his stay, that she was expecting his child? Had he written to her the moment he got back to London, telling her of his delight at this news?
    As Fanny chattered to Jane about dragonflies and water boatmen and all manner of innocent delights, I puzzled over Henry. He was stepfather to Eliza’s child by her first marriage, but that child must be a grown man by now.