Stephanie Barron: Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House

The mate hauled anchor, the sails rose up the mast; the canvas swelled with wind; and faster than I could have believed, Southampton slipped away behind us. My involuntary grip on the hoy's gunwales eased; I breathed more steadily, and was capable once more of observation. Never had I been privileged to travel so swiftly, in such relative silence. No wheels rattled, no horses' hooves rang like mallets on the paving-stones; we were sped by merest air, the fresh strong wind buffeting my bonnet. I grinned foolishly at the hoy's master, as though he were an angel bent on conveying me to Paradise.

“How do you like it, Jane?” Frank asked, crouching low as he made his way into the body of the hoy. “Are you warm enough?”

“I shall never be warm enough while winter holds sway in Southampton.” I wrapped my arms more firmly in my cloak. “The south of England provides quite the most penetrating damp of any I have known, though the locals will protest so much. Southampton may be rated high in the esteem of the Fashionable for its bathing and medicinal waters, but the Fashionable, you will allow, are not prone to bathe in February.”

“Not by design, certainly,” Frank returned, “although I recollect some few who have bathed by misadventure. More than one pleasure party has ended with your Fashionable beaux headfirst in the drink. But you are not indisposed? Not queasy in your workings? You do not feel the slightest threat of a fainting fit coming on?”

Poor Fly. He has been closeted too long with his Mary; and as she is increasing, and much prone to swooning after a hearty meal, Frank is grown convinced that all women are prey to it

“Not in the slightest,” I assured him. “I am admirably situated here; you may return to the bow with equanimity.”

“Pray join me,” he urged. “The sensation of wind and movement is delightful. I shall keep one hand firmly on your arm, never fear, Jane; you shall not risk the slightest injury. ”

I found courage enough to attempt it, and soon stood with my brother in the hoy's farthest extent. Here, the views of the Solent and its encircling landscape were unimpeded. Frank's eager hands made figures in the air: to the larboard side, the peaceful settlements of Netley, and Lee-on-Solent, and Gosport spilling down to the sea; to starboard, the last fringe of the New Forest; and ahead, the Isle of Wight looming like another country. Portsmouth commanded the headland directly opposite the island; and beyond them both, roiled the broader waters of the Channel, where Frank had mounted blockade against the French for so many tedious years.

“How diminished is civilisation and comfort, how false the air of security, of a town viewed from such a vantage,” I observed. “What might be taken, on dry land, for the power of commerce and Kingdom, appears the merest foothold at this distance. How greater still the diminishment, when all the wide waters of the ocean are at one's back!”

“I have always believed,” Frank added, “that could kings and emperors reign solely from the seas, and suffer the overruling might of Nature to humble and command them with every gale of wind, they might then regard themselves in the proper light The vastness of the world is an acute corrective, Jane, for over-weening vanity! As it is for many land-borne ills.”

I studied him soberly. “You miss a ship, Frank. Confess as much. You long to put to sea, however near Mary's time and however comfortable your present circumstances.”

“You forget the inadequacy of Mrs. Davies's fire, Jane,” he returned with brusque humour. “There is little of comfort in that.”

“We shall be gone from hired lodgings in a fortnight,” I said dismissively, “but your malaise shall prove as strong. The lease in Castle Square — that fringe you are so busily knotting for the parlour curtains — the bedsteads you turn, and the conveniences you fashion in your restless, tidy, sailor's way — they are nothing more than make-work, a sop to fill your time. You are unhappy, Frank. I am more convinced of it now, having seen you once again in your element, than I have been for many weeks. Though I have long suspected the cause.”

He offered no reply — only stared across the heaving water, his eyes narrowed. Salt spray had dried in a haphazard pattern of white droplets on his collar, his auburn hair was ruffled into curls by the force of the approaching rain. It is hard for such a man — trained from boyhood in every nerve and sinew to pursue the Enemy, to engage and subdue him — to subdue, rather, his own ardent spirit to the necessities of fortune. Frank is become like a powerful horse, honed for the Oaks or the Derby, that is put to plough the same featureless length of turnip patch day after day. Having won a little prize money, he saw fit to marry at last the lady who had waited so many patient months for his return from sea; and being a gallant son, he required his mother and unwed sisters to take up their abode in his company. Southampton was chosen, the treaty struck for a house in Castle Square; that house entirely refurbished; and our prospects of happiness in our situation, very great — but a plan for domestic happiness must prove inadequate to one of Frank's temperament.

He is a man accustomed to commanding three hundred tars, at least, in the midst of the greatest fleet on earth. He has chased the Enemy across every ocean on the globe, and seen the colours of French ships struck at his desiring. Now he turns and turns without employment, surrounded by too many muslin skirts, and the tiresome frivolities of a watering-place, with its Assemblies and circulating libraries and occasional theatrical play. He slips away to Portsmouth whenever convention will allow, and haunts the naval yard, where constant intelligence of the better fortunes of his brother officers — who possessed the luck to distinguish themselves with Nelson at Trafalgar — must poison his heart like gall. He bears so constant an aspect of forced cheer — such unfailing interest in the tedium of domestic life — that my heart aches for him, as must any heart of discernment and feeling.

“It is only that …” He faltered, and glanced down at his reddened fingers where they gripped the bow. “That is — you must be aware, Jane, from the intelligence of my letters in the year '05, how ardently I pursued the French Admiral, Villeneuve — across the Atlantic to the West Indies, and back again; how many months I spent vigilant, on blockade, before his Fleet even broke out of Brest. After having been in a state of constant and unremitting fag, to be at last cut out by a parcel of folk just come to join Lord Nelson from home, where some of them were sitting at their ease for months—”

“It is lamentable,” I said quietly. “We all feel your misfortune acutely, Frank.”

He shifted in the bow, unable to tear his eyes from the Solent. “I do not profess to like fighting for its own sake — and Mary is thankful to Heaven that I avoided the danger of that battle — but I shall ever consider the day on which I sailed from Nelson's squadron as the most inauspicious of my life.” [2] Frank's words to Jane closely echo sentiments he first expressed a few days after Trafalgar in a letter to his then-fiancée, Mary Gibson, written from the Canopus while off Gibraltar. — Editor's note.

There had recently been a rumour, I knew, that the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Grenville, had confidentially assured our acquaintance Lord Moira that the first fast frigate available should be given to Captain Austen. But as several fast frigates had subsequently gone to others, I placed no confidence in rumour. Like Patronage and Connexion, those twin hounds of a naval career, Rumour will forever abandon one prospect to bay after another more likely.