Stephanie Barron: Jane and the Canterbury Tale

Or at least that’s what they want their wives believing.

Thursday, 21 October 1813

It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when the carriage drew up before the doors of Godmersham Park, and I confess I retired immediately, regretting that the fire in the Yellow Room’s grate had turned entirely to ash. The Yellow is generally my bedchamber, or Cassandra’s, when we are come to stay with Edward in Kent—and a very comfortable room it is, only not in the dead of night, when the buttercup hue of the silk hangings are entirely devoid of warmth, and the autumn draughts are hurrying along the Great House’s corridors like so many unquiet souls.

Fanny’s maid was sitting up in expectation of her, but having accepted of the sleepy girl’s services only long enough to know my tedious length of buttons was undone, I stepped out of my wine-coloured silk and straight into bed. My endurance for such endless amusements dwindles with each passing year; I have not endeavoured to make a study of insomnia, or cultivated the practice of judicious napping upon the sopha each afternoon, that I might hope to shine in Society.

In this I must be a sad disappointment to Fanny, whose spirits remained so elevated throughout our brief carriage ride home—Chilham being but a few miles from Edward’s estate—that in her mind it might have been only eight o’clock, and the whole evening before us.

I did not neglect to twit her on the immensity of one of her conquests.

“Mr. Thane?” She spoke airily, with an insouciance I failed to credit for an instant. “He is very elegant , to be sure, but I could not be entirely easy in his company, Aunt. He lacks … conversation.”

“Conversation?” her father repeated, indignantly. “Manners and all sense of propriety are what he lacks, my girl—and don’t you mistake!”

Fanny opened her eyes very wide; I detected a hint of a smile about the corners of her mouth, but could not be certain of this; the glow of a carriage’s side-lamps will make of every shadow a genii.

“Papa!” she exclaimed. “Do not tell me you were put out by Mr. Thane’s air of town bronze?”

“Town bronze! Is that what you call it?”

“Oh, not I ,” Fanny assured Edward innocently. “It was Mr. Tylden who described him thus. The clergyman, you know. He informed Mrs. Wildman that Mr. Thane displayed the very best sort of ton .”

“—For a sadly ramshackle family,” I murmured almost inaudibly. It seemed Mr. Tylden suited his praise to his auditors.

“I thought Mr. Thane excessively handsome,” piped up Harriot Moore, from the corner of the conveyance, where she was quite crushed against the bulk of her husband.

“But as personal perfection invariably masks a host of worldly faults,” returned George Moore coolly, “we cannot suppose Mr. Thane possesses even one amiable quality.”

I have neglected to mention the Moores until this moment, which would sadly discomfit one of them. Mr. Moore is a tiresome creature in his early forties, the son of the late Archbishop of Canterbury, and tho’ commendable for the gravity of his thoughts and the depth of his understanding—neither of which I should attempt to deny—he is sadly wanting in a sense of humour . Mr. Moore is rather too apt to stand upon ceremony, and consider what is his due in matters of precedence, and the deference that ought to be shewn to the son of so august a prelate—a prince of the Church. As he is unlikely to attain those heights his father once commanded, despite taking Holy Orders, I must suppose that an insistence upon precedence and deference are all that are left him. But I cannot abide a clergyman who must harp upon the grim vicissitudes of human existence, and neglect to revel in its absurdities. For what else do we live, if not to make sport of our neighbours, and be laughed at by them in turn?

Harriot Moore is a very different creature than her husband, sweet-natured and loving and a trifle simple-minded, tho’ generally prized as being the youngest sister of Edward’s cherished Elizabeth. She is Mr. Moore’s second attachment, and a full ten years her husband’s junior. Harriot makes it her business to be as much in company at Godmersham as Mr. Moore will allow. On the present occasion, the pair have been staying with us nearly a week, with the object of attending the wedding at Chilham, for both Harriot and George Moore have long been on excellent terms with the Wildman family.

“I was sadly disappointed in Mr. Tylden’s sermon,” he declared, turning the conversation adroitly from Julian Thane and his disputed degree of polish. “I thought it dwelt too much upon the temporal, and too little upon the sacred aspects of matrimony. Had I been offered the duty of uniting such an ill-sorted pair as that soldier and Mrs. Fiske, I should have known where my conscience lay—I should have abjured them sternly to cast off the enticements of the Fashionable World, and prepare rather for the inevitable end of their earthly toils.”

“But is not that your funeral text, dearest?” Harriot enquired with pardonable bewilderment.

“You do not, then, regard an excess of gallantry and beauty as the perfect foundation for conjugal bliss?” I demanded, with a mental wink at Mr. Tylden.

“Both have brought Mrs. Fiske—I should say Mrs. MacCallister —nothing but grief in the past,” Moore replied.

“You are acquainted with the lady, I apprehend.”

He shrugged. “Only a little, and quite long ago.”

“Pshaw!” cried Harriot gaily. “You were in love with her, George, before she consented to have Fiske! And the merest child Adelaide must have been, too—no more than seventeen, and you a widower in your thirties! I am sure I shock you, Jane,” she confided, leaning a little across her husband, “but I ran a very poor second to Adelaide Fiske, when Mr. Moore looked about him for another wife. I was six-and-twenty, you know, and long since on the shelf.”

Mr. Moore stared coldly before him, unmoved by his wife’s raillery. “Your penchant for levity betrays you, my dear.”

Throughout this interesting exchange, Fanny might have been deaf and mute. An odd little smile still hovered at the corners of her mouth, but she was not attending to the Moores’ debate; she had learnt long ago to ignore her Aunt Harriot’s tedious partner in life, and quite often her aunt as well. Fanny is enough of an Austen to refuse to suffer fools gladly; but in the present instance, I suspected her thoughts were more pleasurably engaged.

So, too, did my brother Edward.

“Jackanapes,” he muttered—a reference that must be for Mr. Thane and his town bronze—and subsided against the carriage’s squabs.

I lingered in my bed until ten o’clock, when a scratching at the door proclaimed my coffee was arrived. The fire had been lit several hours before, but I had slept on regardless, being aware that Fanny would certainly not be stirring. One rarely appeared downstairs before noon, the morning after a ball.

Yesterday’s rain was in abeyance, but the skies remained persistently grey, and a renewal of showers could not be far off. It would be a day for sitting close to the library fire, in one of Edward’s comfortable armchairs, and attempting yet again to absorb the interesting narrative of Self-Control , by Mary Brunton. I say, yet again , because try as I might I cannot like the novel. It is an excellently-meant, elegantly-written work, without anything of nature or probability in it. However, it shall serve very well for my purpose—which is to hide my own little scrapbook of jottings, as I doze by the fire.