Stephanie Barron - Jane and the Barque of Frailty

“Are you expected?” he demanded impatiently.

“No. Is Mr. Chizzlewit within?”

“I cannot undertake to say. If I may send in your card … ”

The truth is that I possess none. Country ladies of modest means and uncertain age do not leave their cards at each other’s houses; all such formality belongs to Town, and the society of the fashionable select, or such gentlemen of trade as are required to offer their names as surety of respectability. I had never squandered the contents of my slim purse on hot-pressed squares engraved with black ink — but the insolence of this clerk was causing me to regret my providence.

“Pray enquire whether Mr. Chizzlewit is at leisure to receive Miss Jane Austen,” I rejoined, my voice overly-loud, “and if he is not — I shall engage to appoint an hour convenient to us both.”

“Is there some difficulty, Edmund?” a mild voice enquired — and I glanced over my shoulder to discover a gentleman younger than myself, in buff pantaloons and a well-made coat of dark blue superfine, his cravat dexterously tied. One of the noble patrons, no doubt — who possessed a card, and was expected, and should never be made to feel shabby-genteel by a person of little manners and less birth.

“This lady is wishful to see you, sir,” the clerk answered woodenly. “I was informing her you was engaged.”

“But happily you were mistaken,” the gentleman said, with the ghost of a smile in his eyes. “I am quite at leisure to consult with … Mrs ….?”

“Miss Austen,” I said quickly. “But I believe there is a mistake. It is Mr. Chizzlewit I require to consult.”

“I am Sylvester Chizzlewit,” he returned. “But perhaps you are better acquainted with my grandfather — Mr. Bartholomew Chizzlewit?”

“Indeed! He once informed me that the firm’s service to the ducal House of Wilborough dated from his grandfather’s time — and I perceive now that the tradition is an enduring one.”

“Wilborough!” The lurking smile broke fully on the gentleman’s face, transforming it from polite indifference to the liveliest interest. “And your name is Austen. I believe I may divine your errand, ma’am. Pray allow me to convey you to the private patrons’ chamber.”

BEFORE DESPATCHING THE BENGAL CHEST TO LONDON nearly two years ago, I had spent any number of hours in organising its contents. Lord Harold had pursued no particular method while amassing his accounts. He had merely tossed his correspondence and journals into the depths of the chest as tho’ it were a diminutive lumber-room. Over time his records of travels in India, his schoolboy missives from Eton, his maps of Paris scrawled with marginalia, and his passionate letters to ladies long mouldering in the grave, formed an incoherent jumble. During a succession of winter days in my Hampshire village, I had established my own system of classification as rigourous as any natural philosopher’s: at the bottom of the chest I placed the childish scrawls of letters written to his beloved mother; next, his first desperate entanglement with a lady and the dissolute accounts of young manhood: gaming hells, club debauches, meetings at Chalk Farm at dawn. [9] This was the traditional meeting ground of duelists, outside London. — Editor’s note . The squandering of a second son’s income could be traced in the piles of old debts, the dunning letters of tailors, wine merchants, chandlers, and gunsmiths; the sale of a string of hunters at Tattersall’s. The inevitable exile to India filled the next layer, and the layer after that; the fifth Duke’s death and his lordship’s accession to an uncle’s fortune; his investments in the Honourable Company; the Revolution in France and the demand for his talents as a secret government envoy. It was in this guise I had finally encountered him: the Gentleman Rogue at the height of his powers — polished, cynical, adept, and aloof. He caught and held my interest precisely because the greater part of his mind was always withheld from me — who had never found it very hard to understand everybody.

“My grandfather will be pleased to learn that you have paid us this call,” Sylvester Chizzlewit told me. “I hope I may assure him of your continued health and happiness, Miss Austen?”

“I am well enough,” I replied, “but I collect that Mr. Chizzlewit is not. He no longer sits in chambers?”

“He was much beset by an inflammation of the lung this winter, and undertakes a trial of the waters at Bath. We are hopeful they may prove beneficial. Miss Austen, I must beg you to remain where you stand, and avert your eyes, as the measures we have adopted for the concealment of our keys will admit the confidence of no one.”

The words were uttered with as much courtesy as the intelligence of his grandfather’s indisposition, or his wishes for my continued health; but there was a firmness in tone that brooked no question or delay. I turned my head away, and heard a soft click under Sylvester Chizzlewit’s fingers, as tho’ a panel in the wainscotting had slid back on hidden springs.

“Very well,” he said, raising a formidable ring of keys; “we must now seek the mates of these from Jonas.”

Jonas, it was presently revealed, was an elderly clerk whose white hair sprouted in tufts about his head, and whose back was stooped with a deformity of the spine. He smiled vaguely when roused from his ledgers in the room adjoining Sylvester Chizzlewit’s; his myopic pale eyes roamed over my figure.

“Keys,” he murmured, as if to himself. “But can she be trusted? His lordship thought so, aye — but his lordship’s dead, isn’t he?”

“That will be quite enough, Jonas,” Chizzlewit said sharply. “Pray bestir yourself.”

The old man sighed, and eased his arthritic frame from the high stool on which it was perched. “None too young, is she, and not what his lordship might be expected to favour. A lady-bird, they said, as was in his keeping, but I cannot credit it. Too long in the tooth by half … ”

I was put to the blush, and knew not where to look, but Mr. Chizzlewit preserving a perfect gravity, I attempted insensibility, and followed in Jonas’s muttering train.

The clerk led us down a corridor lit by flaring lamps set into the woodwork, and into a pleasant room devoid of company. A handsome table held down the centre of the room, and several easy chairs were scattered about, but no fire burned in the imposing hearth.

Jonas crossed to the chimneypiece, and took up a position on one side. Mr. Chizzlewit stood at the other. Without a word, the two inserted their keys into indiscernible holes in the woodwork, and at the count of three, sprang the locks in a single motion.

The chimneypiece swung outwards, as tho’ it were a door: revealing a considerable chamber behind, inky with blackness. Sylvester Chizzlewit coolly reached for a taper that lay on the false mantel, and lit it in the flame of an oil lamp. Then he held it aloft.

“I must beg you, Miss Austen, not to attempt to look within. Jonas, we require the Bengal chest.”

TO BE LEFT ALONE WITH MY TREASURE WAS TO FIND again the comforting embrace of a familiar friend. When the door of the patrons’ chamber had closed behind the solicitor and his clerk, I ran my fingers over the raised figures carved in teak (most of them grossly improper), the heavy iron hasps and hinges, and the sloping initials cut on the lid. Then I drew an ornate key from my reticule and — glancing over my shoulder with apprehension, for Jonas’s air of mystery was infectious — set it in the lock.

There were too many riches within. I might have been tempted to peruse the journals that described his lordship’s trek by horseback into the wilds of Central Asia; his visits to the court of St. Petersburg, and his views on the murder of the present Tsar’s father; his abduction of a lady from a harem near Jaipur; or his tête-à-tête with Napoleon Buonaparte, in a Paris prison from which he subsequently escaped, in lowering himself through a series of drains — but I had not come to Chizzlewit’s chambers solely to indulge in memory. Lord Harold was killed in the autumn of 1808, and if memory served, he had been much taken up with government policy at that time, being newly returned from the Peninsula. George Canning had then held the Foreign Ministry, and Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the Ministry of War. Lord Harold must certainly have been acquainted intimately with both.