The Austen Girls Read online

  This book is dedicated to Katherine Ibbett, with whom I have danced at many balls

  Also by Lucy Worsley

  Eliza Rose

  My Name Is Victoria

  Lady Mary

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Fanny’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 2

  The stairs, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 3

  The Star Inn, Canterbury

  Chapter 4

  The ballroom, the Star Inn, Canterbury

  Chapter 5

  The breakfast table, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 6

  Hurstbourne House

  Chapter 7

  The dairy, Steventon Rectory

  Chapter 8

  The drawing room, Steventon Rectory

  Chapter 9

  Anna’s attic bedroom, Steventon Rectory

  Chapter 10

  The breakfast table, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 11

  Aunt Jane’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 12

  The Hursden Ball

  Chapter 13

  Out in the park

  Chapter 14

  The library, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 15

  The breakfast table, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 16

  The House of Correction, Canterbury

  Chapter 17

  The breakfast table, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 18

  Aunt Jane’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 19

  The front door, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 20

  The hay barn, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 21

  Fanny’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 22

  The breakfast table, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 23

  Chilham Castle, near Canterbury

  Chapter 24

  Aunt Jane’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 25

  The Star Inn, Canterbury

  Chapter 26

  The draper’s shop, Canterbury

  Chapter 27

  The attics, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 28

  Aunt Jane’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 29

  The temple, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 30

  The glasshouse, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 31

  The parsonage, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 32

  The town hall, Canterbury

  Chapter 33

  The parsonage, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 34

  Upstairs

  Chapter 35

  The library, Godmersham Park

  Chapter 36

  Return to Godmersham Park

  Chapter 37

  The library, Godmersham Park

  Epilogue: What happened in real life

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Fanny’s bedroom, Godmersham Park

  ‘The belle of the ball!’

  Anna was looking at herself in the mirror, pulling at her long curly hair, twisting it, piling it up on her head, letting it all fall down again with a theatrical sigh. ‘Will I get more partners with my hair up, or down?’

  ‘Oh, Anna,’ said Fanny. ‘Your hair will fall out if you pull it about so much. And when did you suddenly become Lady Full Of Herself? What if no one asks us to dance at all?’

  Fanny herself was on her knees, down on the Turkey carpet, picking up the pins Anna had swept off the dressing table and scattered on the floor while pinning up the hem of her skirt. She sighed. Of course Anna had left it far too late to get the skirt hemmed properly. Fanny’s thumb was still sore from the emergency tacking she’d done without her thimble, as a favour for her disorganised cousin.

  Fanny’s own dancing dress was laid out waiting on the bed, almost as if a proper lady’s maid had done it, that extra lady’s maid her mother said they needed at Godmersham Park, but which her father insisted they couldn’t afford. Gown, stockings, slippers. She’d had everything organised, yet here she was at the last minute, down on the floor in her chemise. It always seemed to be like this, with nine brothers and sisters, not to mention her cousin. Always someone else to look after. Always someone else to put before herself.

  But Fanny’s predicament, as usual, completely passed Anna by.

  ‘Fanny,’ Anna continued, suddenly serious, ‘do you have a secret feeling, deep down, that you’ll never, ever get a husband?’ She was pouting at her own reflection, turning her head this way and that.

  Fanny dug her fingers into the soft, rich, comforting carpet. Would she ever find a real-life husband? Would she even find a partner to dance with at tonight’s ball? She just didn’t know. But what she did know was that getting married was the only topic she, her cousin and her sisters ever talked about here at Godmersham Park. Marriage – a ‘good’ marriage, as Fanny’s mother always said, to ‘the right sort of man’ – was the goal towards which Fanny’s life had been building.

  Fanny often imagined that moment of the proposal, the way she would gasp, clasp her hands to her mouth and run, run, ever so fast, to tell her mother and sisters and Anna what had happened.

  She couldn’t really imagine what would come next, or what it would be like to be married. Or even what the man doing the asking would look like. The proposal, that was enough. That was all she wanted.

  In her most private thoughts, though, Fanny worried that all her sisters and cousins, all the other girls in Kent, indeed all the girls in England, would be engaged to be married before she was. Surely she was too quiet, her hair too limp, her skin too flaky, for anyone to choose her.

  Fanny imagined herself growing older, her carpet growing threadbare, the mantelpiece empty of invitations to balls … her mother often said how awful it must be to be a spinster.

  ‘Mmm,’ Fanny said at last, doubtfully, unwilling to answer her cousin’s question. She gathered up the fallen pins by popping them between her lips. That would give her an excuse to keep quiet. Anna had somehow poked her finger into Fanny’s fear of not doing the right thing, of disappointing her parents. As she always did. Anna was like that – she generally said what everyone else was thinking but dared not put into words.

  Standing up, Fanny started to pluck out the pins, and to prick them neatly back into her pincushion, a raggedy affair that had been a birthday gift from her younger sister Lizzie. Anna now noticed in the looking glass what Fanny was doing.

  ‘Fanny!’ she said, throwing up her hands, her hair unravelling again. ‘Pins in your mouth! You’ll swallow one and choke to death!’ She wrapped her hands round her throat, bulged out her eyes and began to mime a person choking to death.

  Fanny couldn’t help but smile, which of course made some of the pins fall back on to the carpet.

  ‘Frances Austen,’ her cousin now declaimed solemnly, as if at a funeral, ‘lived for nearly sixteen sweet years on God’s earth before choking on a pin. My friends, she was a good girl … yet she died an old maid. No man in the counties of Kent or Hampshire would have her.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Fanny said, laughing, and abandoning the pins at last. ‘You’re right. Despite what my mother says, I probably won’t ever get a husband. I can’t think who’d ask me. And I don’t know why you, all of a sudden, think that you’re going to be the belle of the ball.’

  ‘It’s a trick,’ Anna said. ‘Aunt Jane taught me, it’s a trick of the mind. You tell yourself, and tell yourself, that a certain thing is going to happen, and you start to believe that it’s going to happen, and then … it does. So I’ve decided that I am going to find a husband, and get married, and have a ho
me of my own, because I really, really must. Because I can’t bear not to have one any longer, and I’m going to do it tonight!’

  ‘Oh, Anna,’ said Fanny. ‘Slow down. This is only just the beginning. Nobody finds a husband at her very first ball.’

  ‘Oh, Fanny,’ Anna replied, almost crossly. ‘What a dreamer you are. Lots of girls find their husbands at their very first ball. It’s the best chance we’ve got! You’ve got to strike while the iron is hot, and people think you’re fresh and new.’

  She was staring at her own reflection again, and there was something a little grim in her face.

  Anna was nervous too, Fanny realised. Despite all her fine words and tricks of the mind.

  Fanny patted her cousin’s shoulder and turned away from the dressing table. Although she’d been doing her best to pretend to look forward to the ball, she’d been feeling a little sick all day.

  She’d been telling herself that it didn’t matter all that much, that it was only one winter evening, a quiet country ball in the quiet county of Kent.

  Her debut into high society wasn’t life or death. Of course not. It would be silly to think that it was.

  ‘Finding a husband really is a matter of life or death, you know, Fan.’ Anna was now strangling herself with her bunch of dark hair, brutally tightening it around her neck, lolling her head to one side and rolling her eyes like a corpse.

  What a ridiculous girl, Fanny thought fondly. Anna was so … loud and funny and confident and beautiful, the whole time. Of course she would find a husband easily.

  Whereas Fanny wasn’t any of those things. She loved her sisters, she loved reading … she never knew what to say to people. She was boring. Unlike Anna.

  It was at that very moment, when Anna was in the final throes of her death agony, that Fanny’s mother came in.

  It was obvious at once that Elizabeth Austen was in one of her states.

  ‘Girls! What are you doing?’

  Fanny’s mother was looking round the room aghast. Fanny had to concede that it did look as if a whirlwind had come in, rummaged round, and swooshed back out again. Anna always had that effect. She seemed magically to extract every item of clothing Fanny owned out of her presses and cupboards and throw them all down on to the floor.

  Elizabeth Austen stood, her hands on her hips, and groaned.

  ‘Girls,’ she said seriously. ‘You are not ready. You are not even nearly ready. It’s as if you’re not taking it seriously! This first ball of your first season, you know, is a matter of—’

  ‘Life or death!’ Anna shouted, twitching in her corpse-like pose half in and half out of her chair.

  Fanny was torn between whether to laugh, because Anna did look so ridiculous, or whether to try to appease the storm that must surely follow.

  To her surprise, Elizabeth’s pouchy cheeks quivered as if she was amused as well. In unkind moments, Fanny’s brother Edward would mimic their mother’s way of nibbling at a bread roll. He made her seem just like an inquisitive, twitchy-nosed guinea pig. And now, instead of exploding into one of her rages, Elizabeth stepped forward and picked up Fanny’s gown from the bed.

  She held it up to her own ample shoulders, pointed out one toe, and sighed.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I remember when I could get into a dress this tiny, and how I used to dance. I danced all night! We all did, my sisters and I.’

  For a second, she stood still, lost in her memories, rather than bustling ferociously about as she did most of the time.

  Fanny stood up and went over, joining her mother in admiring and stroking the dress.

  ‘Do you like it, Mama?’

  Elizabeth had been too busy to see the finished gown when it had arrived from the dressmaker’s the previous day. It had been Anna and Lizzie who’d been there by Fanny’s side, hooting and whooping, as she undid the box.

  ‘Very nice, dear,’ she said. ‘But choose a brighter colour next time. White will make you look like a village girl, not a Miss Austen of Godmersham.’

  ‘But, Mother!’ Fanny said. ‘Aunt Jane said that white was the only colour for …’

  She faltered. In retrospect, Aunt Jane’s words seemed a bit too ludicrous to repeat. Fanny also couldn’t be sure whether she’d been joking, like she so often was. Fanny looked again, doubtfully, at the white dress, and wondered if it was really … all right.

  ‘Aunt Elizabeth,’ said Anna authoritatively, standing up, ‘Aunt Jane said that Fanny must wear white. It’s the colour for a heroine at her first ball, and Aunt Jane said that Miss Fanny Austen of Godmersham Park must surely be the heroine of the ball.’

  Fanny wished she had just one jot of Anna’s confidence. For this had been exactly what her mother wished to hear.

  ‘You’re right, Anna,’ she said. ‘Miss Fanny Austen will be the belle of the ball, and I suppose it’s for the best that she should wear white. Modest and demure. Everyone will be looking at you anyway, Fanny! The eldest Miss Austen all grown up! Oh, how you’ll glow inside. I remember that feeling of all the gentlemen watching you as you begin the first dance.’

  Something else seemed to occur to Fanny’s mother. She tossed the dress back on to the bed – carefully, so it wouldn’t be creased – and grabbed one hand of each girl, pulling them down beside her on the mattress.

  ‘You might,’ she said, more thoughtfully than usual, ‘be feeling a little nervous. I do remember that too. And you’re such a nervy girl, Fanny. Anna’s much more like I was. But remember this. You must show the other young ladies how to behave. You’re from Godmersham Park! You have standards to live up to! Everybody in Kent knows that Mr Edward Austen is the most important gentleman in this neighbourhood. Don’t forget.’

  Fanny tried to peer round her mother’s substantial bosom to see what Anna made of that. She knew something of Anna’s feelings about the grand Kent-based Austens of Godmersham Park, as opposed to her own less-grand family, the other branch of the Austens who lived in Hampshire.

  But now her mother was rattling on, much more in her usual manner. ‘I mean to get you two girls off quickly,’ she said, ‘as there are so many of your sisters, Fanny, to get off too, and a quick start sets the pace. Mrs Lewes already has three daughters married! And not one of them yet twenty.’

  She prepared to stand up, pitching herself forward to get the momentum to stagger to her feet.

  ‘So it’s quite unnecessary,’ Elizabeth Austen said briskly, ‘to feel at all nervous. The dancing will be over in no time, and you’ll be plodding up the aisle, and then children will come, and you’ll miss your lost youth, like I do. Now, let’s get you dressed.’

  At once she began to whisk round the room, her little feet moving with remarkable speed. She was here, there and everywhere, picking up stays, quickly and firmly lacing Fanny into them, giving two twists to Anna’s hair that made it look better than anything Anna had yet achieved, and only growing impatient towards the very end, with the clasp of Fanny’s seed pearls.

  ‘There!’ Elizabeth said, surveying her handiwork. Fanny wished for the umpteenth time that her own fine hair, so colourless, was luxuriant like Anna’s. However carefully she tonged it, Fanny’s pale hair never held a curl.

  It had been a long time since her mother had looked at her, really looked at her, like that. Would she pass muster?

  But Elizabeth’s guinea-pig cheeks raised themselves up into a slow smile.

  ‘Good luck, girls!’ she said, with satisfaction.

  Then she dropped her voice, as if she thought that nobody would hear. ‘I’m certain they’ll be married before Christmas,’ she said.

  Elizabeth pointed to the door. The general had given her orders. Fanny and Anna nodded at each other and stepped forward. There was no choice. There was no going back now.

  Chapter 2

  The stairs, Godmersham Park

  Just outside the bedroom door Anna stopped so suddenly that Fanny cannoned into her cousin’s back.

  The obstruction was her father, on the landing
in his best coat, the one that made him suck his stomach in before he could button it up. He now stuck out his leg, and eased himself into a low bow.

  ‘Quite charming!’ he said. ‘You look charming, girls. And your carriage awaits!’

  Elizabeth was smiling and clasping her hands.

  ‘Oh, Mr Austen,’ she said. ‘Look how … marriageable the girls are! Very pretty indeed!’

  She lowered her voice to continue, but Fanny’s mother’s idea of a whisper was just as loud as a normal person talking at a normal volume, and Fanny could hear her perfectly well.

  ‘They’ll be off our hands in no time,’ she said in his ear. ‘Then just four more of those great hungry useless expensive girls to go!’

  Fanny could feel her cheeks turning pink. Being bowed to, by her own father, was all so very different from being told off for running, or shouting, or for not watching her little brother and he could have fallen under the horse’s hooves and did she not have eyes in her head to see and suchlike.

  Her father beamed and resumed his normal height.

  ‘Not really girls any more,’ he said in his jovial way, as if he were addressing his fellow landowners at a political dinner. ‘The girls have become young ladies. Young ladies!’ he repeated, so loudly that the townsfolk of Canterbury several miles away might possibly have been able to hear him. ‘But there’s still work to be done. We must get them hitched!’

  ‘Mr Austen! What an inelegant expression!’

  Elizabeth’s tone rose to match her husband’s. They often spoke to each other as if they were shouting across the hunting field.

  ‘HITCHED,’ Fanny’s father said again, huffing and puffing and straightening his coat. ‘And at the very least,’ he continued, ‘they can dance tonight with that nice Mr Drummer. He’s a fine young fellow.’

  ‘Mr Edward Austen!’ groaned his wife, striking a blow on his arm. ‘No, and no again. Not Mr Drummer. He’s beneath the attention of the Austen girls, even Anna.’

  Fanny wondered who this Mr Drummer was, not having heard the name before. But it was Anna who forced the question into her parents’ torrent of talk.

  ‘Mr Drummer …?’ she managed to say.

  ‘Clergyman! Appointed him to the parish – got it all signed and sealed this afternoon.’ Edward had already lost interest in the subject, and was taking Fanny’s elbow to escort her down the stairs.