Stephanie Barron: Jane and His Lordship's Legacy

“I have it on the very best authority, Miss Austen, that your understanding is excellent,” he began, “and therefore I shall not sport with your patience. Under the terms of the late Lord Harold Trowbridge’s Last Will and Testament, written by his lordship on the third of November last and witnessed by one Jeb Hawkins, Able Seaman, and one Josiah Fortescue, publican” — Chizzlewit’s distaste for such witnesses was evident — “you have been named as the legatee of a rather extraordinary bequest.”

I felt my countenance change, my visage flush. I knew all the circumstances under which that testament had been written: the third of November, 1808, the very day before Lord Harold’s aborted duel with a young American by the name of James Ord. The former had opened his box of matched pistols — made to his specifications by no less a master than Manton in London — and affected to practise with wafers and playing cards in the courtyard of the Dolphin Inn. His aspect had been brutal that morning, and it had not changed when I pled for the young man’s life. It was Lord Harold’s I secretly hoped to save; but he had ridiculed me — and put one of the pistols into my hands. He would have challenged my shrinking, and sought to determine whether I could stomach his way of life. Had he drawn up his Will before that hour, or much later?

Impossible to say.

“What can his lordship have wished to bequeath to me?” I enquired in a subdued tone. “I am wholly unconnected with his family.”

“—As has been vociferously pointed out by His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, Her Grace the Duchess, the Marquis of Kinsfell, and indeed, Desdemona, Countess of Swithin, all of whom seem convinced that Lord Harold’s wits were sadly deranged when he penned the document.” Chizzlewit studied me with a shrewd expression, his ancient lips pursed. “I may frankly assure you, Miss Austen, that his lordship has been frequently drawing up his Will, as necessity and the perils to which he was exposed demanded it. That this document supersedes and governs any previous form is indisputable, as I repeatedly assured His Grace. My commission as solicitor and executor of his lordship’s estate should have been long since carried out, to the satisfaction of all parties, had not the Wilborough family protested this legacy.”

Another lady might have been humbled by a sense of shame and mortification; I confess I felt only indignant. “And what is his lordship’s family, pray, that I should consider their opinion in a matter so sacred as a gentleman’s dying wish?”

“Nothing,” the solicitor returned with surprising mildness.

“It is for me, as their man of business, to dispose of disappointment and outrage. I have been doing so, for all the Wilborough clan, for some six decades. I was but eighteen and a clerk in my father’s chambers when the Fifth Duke proposed to marry a chit from the Parisian stage; and the furor over the marriage articles then may fairly be described as incredible. Instability and caprice have characterised all the family’s habits, against which Lord Harold’s lamented passing and general way of life may almost be called respectable. It has always been for the firm of Chizzlewit and Pauver to support the family and maintain a proper appearance of decorum before the ton; there our influence — and indeed, I may add our interest — ends, Miss Austen.”

“What is the nature of the legacy?” I demanded.

“It is this.” The solicitor drew a piece of paper — ordinary white foolscap, such as might be found in the public writing desk of an inn — from his leather pouch. Was it possible that this was Lord Harold’s Will, penned in his own hand? I felt my heartbeat quicken, from an intense desire to glimpse that beloved script — but the solicitor did not offer the paper to me. Instead, he took a pair of spectacles from his pocket and set them carefully on his nose. With a dry rasp of the throat, he began to read.

“To my dear friend, Miss Jane Austen of Castle Square, Southampton, I leave a lifetime of incident, intrigue, and conspiracy; of adventure and scandal; of wagers lost and won. To wit: all my letters, diaries, account books, and memoranda, that she might order their contents and draw from them a fair account of my life for the edification of posterity. There is no one in whose understanding or safekeeping I place a higher trust; no one whose pen is so well-suited to the instruction of an admiring multitude. With such matter at hand, not even Jane may fail to write. I should like her to entitle the work ‘Memoirs of a Gentleman Rogue.’ Miss Austen is to be the sole beneficiary of all proceeds from the publication and sale of the aforementioned work, to which my surviving family may have no claim. Neither are they to attempt to prevent its publication, upon pain of pursuit by my solicitors in a court of law.”

Mr. Chizzlewit raised his eyes from the paper and studied me drily.

At such a moment, in contemplation of his own death, much might have been said. But it was like Lord Harold to utter not a syllable of assurance or endearment; not for him the maudlin turn upon Death’s stage. He had probably believed this testament would never be read — but in the event it was, had been all business as he wrote: brisk, ironic, cynical to the end.

“Once the protests and objections of the family were laid aside — once all talk of contesting the Will’s provisions in court was at an end — I attempted first to fulfill the bequest in Southampton,” Mr. Chizzlewit said, “but learned that you had already quitted that city. It has been some weeks since I was able to trace you through your brother, Mr. Henry Austen of the London banking concern, and fixed the very hour you would be arriving in Chawton.”

“Good God,” I murmured blankly. “Is this a joke?”

“I fear not.”

I rose from my seat and took a turn about the room, agitation animating my form. “All his papers—! His most intimate accounts—! He must have been quite mad!”

“So His Grace conjectured. The Sixth Duke should rather have burnt the lot, than seen such a legacy pass into the hands of a stranger. Blackmail is the least of the ills Wilborough forebodes.”

“Well may I believe it.” At the thought of the outraged peer and his anxieties, I could not suppress a smile. “How is it that so much as a fragment of Lord Harold’s papers has survived His Grace’s wrath?”

“Lord Harold, being of a peripatetic habit, formerly made the chambers of Chizzlewit and Pauver the repository of his documents,” the solicitor answered primly. “It has been a heavy charge. Our premises have been violated no less than four times in the past decade, as we believe with the specific object of robbing Lord Harold of his papers, requiring us to stoop to an almost criminal ingenuity: to greater measures and vigilance — as well as the addition of a variety of locks. I must warn you, Miss Austen, that there are many who would not hesitate to incur bodily injury in order to secure a glimpse of these papers, or to excise their own names from mention within them. It is a powder keg you observe before you, ma’am, in the form of a Bengal chest. I do not envy you the responsibility of shepherding his lordship’s legacy.”

“May I refuse it?”

Mr. Chizzlewit scrutinised me in silence.

How could I refuse it?

All the mishaps and alliances, the seductions and great passions — the acts of heroism or cowardice that might be contained within that Bengal chest! — Written, without flinching, in Lord Harold’s own hand. It was possible he had even set down something of his sentiments towards me. Of a sudden I was tempted to fall on my knees before the iron hasps and force them with my fingernails.