The Runaway Jane (The Runaway #3)

Chapter One

Sir Walter

There was beeswax burning in the drawing room when Jane came down, and she knew before she reached the bottom stair that something had been arranged without her knowledge.

Her mother kept the wax candles for Christmas and for the assemblies, and there had been no assembly mentioned and Christmas was eight months off, so somebody was coming who mattered enough to burn them on a Thursday in April.

Hill was in the passage with the good glasses balanced on a tray she plainly did not trust herself to carry any faster than a crawl.

“Sir Walter Ashby dines here tonight, miss. Your mother’s been at the silver since nine.”

Jane had heard the name from Lady Lucas on Sunday, said in the awed way in which names of men with money were generally spoken, and she had heard it again from her mother on Monday over the mending, in a high-pitched voice full of excitement.

Her mother was in the drawing room directing everyone at once.

Mary had got as far as opening the lid of the pianoforte before being told she would not be wanted at it tonight, and took the correction without any expression Jane could read, and went and sat by the window with a book instead.

Lydia was arguing that thirteen was nearly the same as fourteen and fourteen was nearly grown, and losing, loudly, until Hill’s name was invoked and she went up the stairs still arguing.

“You know why he’s asked,” Elizabeth said, coming to stand by her at the fire once the room had settled.

“I can guess.”

“Eleven thousand acres in Bedfordshire. Charlotte says both her mother and ours have described the house to her twice, though nobody in this family has ever set foot in it.” Elizabeth held her hands to the coals a moment. “I did not know whether to laugh at that or not.”

Their mother’s voice rose in the hall, the pitch she kept for being gracious where a guest could hear it, and the door opened before either of them said anything further.

He was a large man, dressed well but somewhat behind the fashion of the year, rings on both hands, what remained of his hair combed carefully forward over a forehead it did not much cover.

Five and fifty, she judged, or near it. He bowed to her mother and said the correct things and her mother said a great many more things than were correct, and then Jane was brought forward.

She curtsied. When she came up out of it his eyes had not come up with her.

She had been looked at before. She was nineteen, she had been four years in company, and she knew the ordinary way a man’s eyes moved over a woman he found handsome, which generally started somewhere and ended at the face.

Sir Walter looked at her the way her uncle Gardiner examined a bolt of cloth he was thinking of buying to sell later, and having examined it, told her mother that Miss Bennet was everything he had been given to expect.

Given to expect. So there had been talk before tonight, some understanding already half made between the older people, and nobody had troubled to mention it to her.

Hill called for dinner and Jane went into the dining room feeling uncomfortable on Sir Walter’s arm.

At the table Sir Walter talked about drainage.

He had put drains into his low fields against the advice of two men his neighbours considered a great deal cleverer than himself, and had been proved right, and the whole history of it filled the space between the soup and the fish, with figures.

There was a horse he had sold for two hundred guineas some years back and the sum came round twice before the second course arrived.

Her mother produced wonder wherever wonder was called for.

Her father ate. Elizabeth asked one sensible question about the drains and got an answer aimed entirely past her, at their mother, who nodded as if she had followed every word of it.

He turned to Jane somewhere in the second course and asked whether she was fond of the country.

“Very fond, sir.”

“Bedfordshire’s the better country. Flatter. A wife of mine would keep her own carriage. I don’t hold with ladies going about on foot.”

“Jane has always been thought to have a great deal of natural elegance,” said her mother, and Sir Walter agreed that she had, and looked at Jane while he said it, though not at anything about her that elegance or its opposite would have shown in.

“My first wife was a great walker when I married her,” he said, reaching for the wine without any change in his manner. “I broke her of it soon enough.”

Nobody at the table answered that. He did not seem to expect an answer. He went back to his plate, and Jane found her hand steady on the stem of her glass, which surprised her a little, and she held on to the steadiness as though it belonged only to her and he had no claim on it.

Her mother caught her arm in the passage when the ladies withdrew.

“You will be pleasant to him when the gentlemen come through, Jane, do you hear me. He is exactly what we have hoped for, and I saw the way he looked at you, everyone at that table saw it, and I will not have you go quiet on me now of all times.”

“I have hardly spoken ten words, Mama. There was no room for me to put a word in.”

“Then make the room. Do you know what he is worth? Do you ever think what becomes of us when your father is gone, five girls and that dreadful entail, and here is a man with no children living come into the county with a purpose, and you stand there as though I had asked something unnatural of you.”

Jane said nothing to that either, and her mother took the silence for agreement, patted her arm, and went ahead to see about the tea.

He stayed until half ten. He told the story of the horse again with the price a little different in the retelling, and at the door he asked, unoffered, for her hand to kiss and held it a moment longer than the leave-taking wanted.

He would do himself the honour of calling on Saturday.

Her mother said Saturday would suit them very well indeed, and the door shut behind him at last, and the whole house seemed to let out a breath it had been holding.

Jane went up and found Kitty and Lydia on the landing in their nightgowns, where they had plainly been for some time.

“Sarah says he has a lake at his house,” Lydia said at once, before Jane had reached the top stair.

“Sarah’s cousin was in service near Woburn and she says everybody there knows about him.

She says his second wife fell down the stairs at the house in town, and he’d been in a temper with her all that week, and the maids all knew it, and he came into money by her death same as the first, and no family in his own county will let a daughter near him now, which is why he’s come to look in ours. ”

“Sarah says a great deal,” Elizabeth said, coming up behind them, though something in her voice had gone flat when she said it.

“It was her cousin had it, not Sarah herself.”

“Go to bed, Lydia.”

Lydia went, well pleased with the stir she had made. Kitty followed her. Mary stood a moment in her own doorway and said, not looking at either of them directly,

“Gossip is not proof. But it is not nothing either,” and shut her door before an answer could be given.

Elizabeth took Jane’s hand on the dark landing and did not let it go for a while.

Neither of them said the thing they were both thinking.

Jane was glad of that. She had been thinking it herself since the fish course, and hearing it out loud would only have made it true a few hours before she was ready to have it be.

She lay a long time that night listening to Elizabeth’s breathing across the bed.

It was not the stairs that kept her awake, in the end, nor the fever that had killed the first wife, nor anything Sarah’s cousin had said.

Two women dying was very likely only two women dying, and she would not build a case against a man on a maid’s gossip carried three counties.

What kept her from sleep was smaller and would not be argued away so easily.

He had sat across from her above two hours tonight, spoken of her and to her and meant, apparently, to marry her, and in all that time he had not once needed to know how she felt about it.

Her feelings had simply not been acknowledged.

And there was her mother’s other question, the one about what became of them all, which was something to consider.

Although she had years before made a pact with Elizabeth to only marry for the deepest of love, she thought she needed to be a little more practical.

She had thought about that for years, at every quarter day, bent over an account book her mother had never opened.

Five daughters and the entail. She understood the arithmetic of it a good deal better than her mother gave her credit for.

But somewhere before four, with the window going pale grey at the edge of the curtain, she found there was one thing underneath all the rest that had settled itself without asking her leave, and it would not move however she turned it.

She could not marry him. She would never be able to love a man that could not even look into her face and acknowledge her thoughts and feelings.

She did not know what would come after that. She could not see one step past it, no more than she could see stars through a ceiling. She only had the one certainty she must escape the manipulations of her mother, and she kept pondering on it until she slept.