Posted on Saturday, 15 February 2003
Saint Valentine's Day: Chawton, Hampshire 1843.
The old lady came down the stairs slowly, with the deliberate, careful step of the elderly. The little servant girl, knowing Miss Austen was steady on her feet left her to come down and carried on sweeping the floor.
Her voice was always lovely, "Milly, I have need of you. I need first you strong arms and then your bright young eyes."
"Why you see as sharp as anyone, dear ma'am," exclaimed the girl
Miss Austen lived in the way of genteel old ladies, in quiet, unacknowledged, refined poverty and Miss Austen lived alone in her brother's cottage, where she had lived for over thirty years. She was a Hampshire lady right and proper, her speech soft and accented. Her father, so Milly's great aunt told, was Rector of Steventon from the very first days of King George III and the clergy's widows and their single women, so aunty said too, were always poorer than church mice. Old Mrs. Austen was long dead; there was a grave in the churchyard. Nieces came to the house, great nieces too of all sorts of ages, sometimes Miss A went off visiting, but not much any more. A boy came down regularly, sent by the old lady's rich relations, to help keep the garden neat, to haul the coals and any other job too heavy for a girl to do. Miss Austen was neat and particular and careful in her ways, could not abide dogs, brooked no nonsense and was kinder than she looked. Habits of elegant economy were practiced always, butcher's meat was abhorred as too heavy for a delicate, elderly appetite, vegetables given in abundance by the poor were never scorned, butter was never spread thickly, cake was only made for visitors, no scrap of paper was ever wasted and candles were used with scrupulous care. Waste was vulgar, ostentatious, deplorable. The gentle glow of firelight was often the only light in the parlour of an evening. Though close on seventy. Miss Austen's hands were never idle for she could knit away in the dark, until the candles were lit briefly for the supper tea tray.
That bitter February night Miss Austen sat at her lone fireside, gazing at the coals, seeming not to notice the living, only to call back the dead into a tender remembrance. To Milly's fancy, there was a sad expression shadowing her mistress's face and she could have sworn that the old lady blinked away tears, not once but many times. Letters were the cause. The heavy trunk they had dragged down from Miss Austen's room was full of letters. From this, she lifted one by one packets of old letters, yellow with age, all bound neatly with faded blue tape until the room was untidier than Milly had ever seen it. The parlour was filled with the scents of dust and ancient paper and the dried flowers always to Milly's mind associated with Miss Austen's hoarded things.
Being a good girl, and in need of her wages, Milly never asked and never pried into what did not concern her, although she knew there had once been another Miss Austen, much loved and sorely missed, just as she surmised there must once have been a sweetheart, dead years before even the adored sister was laid to rest. Sometimes in her sleep, Miss Austen would talk to this sister and once Milly had heard her clear as bell say, "Oh Tom, you are burning up with fever so far from me."
"We must burn these, I think," said Miss Austen, "I have put it off for years and now it must be done. I may not live to do it another year. Dear child open the packets and read a little to me one last time," adding with a smile and a sigh, "Only thus, dear diligent Milly, do the dead speak to us
The earliest set of letters were two bundles tied together, marked "Letters between my dearly beloved parents before their marriage in 1764 ", there were more marked "Indian letters and other letters 1753-1792", "Letters from Eliza in France and elsewhere". Yet more were ticketed in a beautiful hand, "Letters of my engagement to T. Fowle". All of these letters, written on old-fashioned square sheets of paper, were consigned one by one to the dancing flames.
I can see their faces, hear their voices, thought Miss Austen as the features of her betrothed, dead in another century, flared into her memory, Why would I remember all so clearly now? For years, when in my soul I longed to be haunted, I could not summon up his image.
"Let us make some tea, my dear," said she, rising stiffly to her feet, "And then we will resume our labours."
For weeks and weeks, Miss Austen had been sorting: letters, papers, pictures, mementoes. To Milly's astonishment, she had cut tiny strips out of the letters, removing words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs with her tiny little embroidery scissors, so that the pages resembled nothing so much as the broiderie anglaise work Miss Austen sewed for family babies. These strange letters she packaged up, marking them "For Anna", "For Fanny", "For Caroline", saving the hundreds of tiny pieces, as if they were scraps of the richest silk to be made into a patchwork, in a beautiful carved ivory box.
"Brought from India," said Miss Austen, with another smile, "It was my Aunt Hancock's, then my cousin Eliza's and then it came to me. I always kept my most precious treasures in it. My dearest sister, she always laughed at me over the things I would keep, put it in the book as the habit of a very silly miss -but now they must all go."
One by one, she threw the fragments of paper into the fire, watching the old faded words vanish away,
"I should so like to be married. Any intelligent, handsome man, of good fortune and excellent education would do for me. I am not too nice in my requirements."
"Mr. Lefroy dances, and flirts prodigiously"
"I cannot care for Bath"
"My dearest, darling Cass, Time and our saviour's love heal all wounded hearts."
"Mr. J F is mighty witty and mighty sure of his ability to please"
"How I love Mrs. Lefroy"
"Despair is a so bad a companion,"
"I do not like Mrs. JA"
"Always with child or about to be brought to bed"
Words upon words upon words, all to perish, all to be lost, to keep Jane as safe and as secret as she had been kept in life. Anna, she knew, would be so angry. Fanny would approve. Few of the other women in the family remembered Jane, in all her laughing, brittle, contradictory, exultant brilliance, her glory. Anna would be so angry,
"Aunt Cass," she would say, "You have cut away her spirit, her fire, you have made her dull and narrow-minded. You have made her trifling."
But I have not, dearest Jane, dearest sis, said Miss Austen, talking to her sister in her head as she had done for twenty odd years, I have lop'd and cropp'd but I have not destroyed. I have left you as others found you, that is all. I have left the hints for the ingenious to follow, that would amuse you.
The most private letters followed, letters written only for Cass's eyes, Cass the beloved sister, not the rector's eldest daughter, not invaluable Aunt Cass who found it so difficult to love a child not her own. Next, all Cass's letters to Jane, every single one, lest the curious, the hungry, the unloving could surmise one sister from the words of the other. Milly watched as more went up, written in bolder more masculine hands, drawings went of people, houses and landscapes, and two locks of hair, entwined together, which perished together in the fire,
"This I will take to my grave," said Miss Austen, abstracting a ring containing black hair.
Milly read, and Miss Austen burned, until at length, the fire was almost choked with the weight of ash accumulated there. Such a mess would never do for the morning, the fire must be settled before the old lady could go to bed so that it would stay as banked up embers all through that cold, cold night.
"Rest easy now. You are perfectly safe," muttered Miss Austen, raking out the grate, "No one shall know what you chose not to tell."
Straightening up, her hand on her weary back, she turned her eyes, still such beautiful, dark eyes, on Milly, saying "Child come and say evening prayer with me for a while. You may sleep late in the morning."
Reaching over to the bookshelf, her hand went, by force of long, long, years of habit, to the place where lay her prayer book, marked inside "To Cassandra Elizabeth Austen from her loving Papa, 1783".
They read prayers together, the pale, neat old lady in her habitual black, and the young girl with her apron and her rough, red, work-worn hands, their histories making such a contrast to each other.
Author's note: Caroline Austen, Jane and Cassandra's niece remembered her Aunt Cassandra saying that some two or three years before her death, Cassandra doctored and destroyed her sister's letters. Cassandra died in 1845. All Jane's letters to her brother Frank suffered a similar fate after his death in 1865 when they were destroyed by his daughter.
The use of the date is my own abuse of history.