Jane and the Canterbury Tale

the raving figure in the window.

“But as Martha struggled,” I observed with as much calm as I could command, “her fingers tore at your coat, securing a loose button. And you never noticed. That was fatal to Julian, was it not? I imagine you felt some horror when you learned of your mistake. Taken in company with the incriminating note you failed to secure—it was in search of that you took the risk of visiting Martha’s bedchamber yesterday—you may congratulate yourself, Mrs. Thane, on having thoroughly botched the business. And secured a noose around your son’s neck.”

“You are a vile creature,” she whispered.

“It seems the only just return for your earlier efforts,” I added serenely, “to hang young James Wildman.”

“What?” Old Wildman sat up, his hands clenched upon his knees. “What do you say of my son, Miss Austen? What has Augusta done to James? I will be told!”

“—Only borrowed his duelling pistol to despatch Curzon Fiske.” It was my brother who spoke this time, in an aside to his neighbour. “Your James stood between Julian Thane and an inheritance Mrs. Thane was determined her son must have—your fortune, old friend.”

Spots of mottled colour stood out on Old Wildman’s cheeks. His eyes sparked dangerously. “Do you mean to say that you crept out by night and shot poor Curzon Fiske? Good God, ma’am! To what possible end?”

“I discovered Martha in her meeting with the seaman in the back garden,” Mrs. Thane said in that same rapid, maddened accent. “Adelaide had sent her. Martha was frightened. She was always afraid of me—and I made her divulge the whole—where Fiske meant to wait, and with what hopes. I saw how he might be used. I took James’s pistol from the gun room, and when the thing was done, I left it in the churchyard. One death, after all, might bring about another.”

“Or several,” Edward observed. “What unnatural mother, Mrs. Thane, should willingly send her daughter to gaol, for a murder she did not commit, and say not one word to preserve that child’s life and reputation?” He turned away in disgust.

“Adelaide is nothing to Julian!” Augusta Thane cried. “She proved as much when she disdained my counsel, and threw herself away on Curzon Fiske! Aye, might they both die and be damned, for the insult they served me! A thousand such should be ample sacrifice for my son!”

“And young James Wildman, as well?” I murmured.

“Good lord,” Old Wildman muttered. “Of course. I see it now. Would that I had cut my tongue out, before I said aught of my intentions! It was too vast a temptation for you, Augusta. I never dreamt, you know, that anything would ever happen to James, and make Julian my heir—simply meant it as a kindness to you, and a mark of my concern for all your family. What a fool I’ve been!”

“Julian deserves your fortune!” Mrs. Thane flashed. “He was born to it. Anyone who saw my son and yours, standing side-by-side, should immediately know which ought to be the other’s master! Julian, so noble, so elegant in every aspect, his mind informed and his manners the equal of the Great—to be … usurped in his degree, by a cousin with nothing more to recommend him than an amiable air and the fortunate accident of birth!”

“Augusta,” Old Wildman said warningly. “Don’t say what you’ll regret. Come down from that window like a sensible woman, now.”

A sensible woman? I glanced at Edward, appalled.

And at that moment, Augusta Thane began to laugh.

It was a hideous and chilling peal of merriment, all the more terrible for being utterly free of hysterics. I would swear that Mrs. Thane was not mad, but as sane as I am—and that it was the Devil she saw, advancing across the room in the form of my brother, to lift her down from the window.

As the thought entered my mind in one blazing instant, she stepped forward into air, her gaze fixed upon the sky—and still laughing, was gone.

Chapter Thirty-Five Exit Dancing

“… be pleased

That neither of you lies dead or about to be seized

And imprisoned. Thus we’ll reach the end of this road.”

Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale”

Thursday, 11 November 1813

And so I am come at last to the close of my two months at Godmersham, and my interesting sojourn among the rich and contented folk of Kent—who have provided unexpected matter for study, and enlivened with their prevarications and poses the essential folly of my fictitious Emma. I have found occasion, during the relative peace of the past fortnight (which encompassed only one concert, one bout of unexpected houseguests, an intimate dinner for fourteen at Chilham Castle, and a third expedition to Canterbury gaol in the Magistrate’s company), to turn once more to that bewitching creature of my own invention—who, tho’ full twenty years of age and the mistress of her father’s establishment, is utterly unlike my own dear Fanny. Emma is happy and vain, secure and carefree, bossy and endearing; while Fanny—Fanny, I fear, has been crossed in love, and in a manner likely to blight her future for some time to come. She is less cheerful, less active, less given to sudden quirks of humour—and more melancholy in her looks when she believes herself unobserved. In short, she recalls to mind another girl of twenty, whose first attachment proved to be less than she had dreamt—myself, in the aftermath of my beloved Tom Lefroy’s abandonment.

If I might have spared Fanny this pain—! I, who know too well the black despair of disappointed hopes—! But I should then have spared her Life, in all its desperate striving; and I would not have Fanny miss a particle of real feeling that comes in her way. She will be a better woman, I daresay, for having endured the heartbreak of Julian Thane.

He left the country with his sister and her husband the morning after our final dinner at Chilham, which—tho’ awkward enough—served as a useful coda to the unhappy events that had bound the two households. No mention was made of the hateful woman whose desperate last act of self-murder, had at least been accompanied by a full letter of confession, signed and dated in her hand. In this, Augusta Thane succeeded in saving both her children— not merely with the sacrifice of her neck, but in the explicit details of each mortal act she had accomplished: the shooting of Curzon Fiske on the side-path near St. Lawrence churchyard, and the brutal slaughter of Martha Kean. Her account was at once so thorough, and so entirely without remorse, as to convince any reader of its veracity, and clear all suspicion of others from the Magistrate’s and coroner’s minds. The happy release of Mrs. MacCallister that very evening, at which I assisted, was the sole episode on which my brother Edward might congratulate himself; and the earnest hand he offered both the lady and her husband, and the manner in which he then expressed all his joy in Adelaide’s deliverance, may be taken as evidence of his previous misery at the progress of the affair.

And so the folk of Godmersham had accepted Old Mr. Wildman’s invitation to dine, as a gesture of thanks and expiation; we had gone to Chilham, and canvassed the hopeful future of the MacCallisters—their expected travels in Cornwall; their brother’s decision to join them on their wedding-journey; the Captain’s hopes of his duties on the Marquis of Wellington’s staff; the likelihood of Buonaparte’s defeat, now that the French were crippled from their exploits in Russia. Fanny endeavoured throughout the whole, to appear as tho’ she had not a care in the world, and knew nothing of the true history of poor Martha Kean. Julian Thane, for his part, was sombre and grave. He was