It should not be some horrible surprise.
It should not make her cry from disappointment.
She scolded herself, her words harsh, the echoes of those long ago nurses and teachers and parental figures.Stop that this instant, Jane. Pull yourself together. Don’t indulge that sniveling.
Eventually, she managed to stop the tears. She sat on the bed for some time, composing herself, for after one has given in to tears in such a way, it is far too easy to succumb to them again, and she must not allow that to happen.
Finally, though, she felt certain of herself enough to leave the room.
Cassandra saw her going into her writing room. “Did you go for a walk?”
“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “Out in the woods. It’s quite lovely weather today.”
“Pity you didn’t ask me to come along. I should have liked a walk today, I think.”
“Sorry,” said Jane.
“I’m glad you’ve gotten out of the house,” said Cassandra. “It’s all right to miss him, Jane. But it’s better now that he’s gone, do you see?”
“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “It’s much better.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JANE WALKED WITHCassandra on the morrow, and Cassandra thought they should walk into town. Jane would have rather stayed close to their cottage, but she also felt foolish about making any protest. What was she to say?Town reminds me of the mystery that I have not solved, and I don’t know if I wish to solve it on my own, and I hate myself for wishing he was around to help me solve it?
Jane had largely put all of it from her mind. She had a great deal of practice at weathering disappointments. Much of the time, life was neither easy nor gratifying. The sooner one made peace with that, and she meant that—real peace with it, not some kind of grudging disappointment, wishing things would be better deep down—anyway, the sooner one made peace with that, the better it all went.
So, she and Cassandra walked to town.
And she wouldn’t have spoken to anyone, except that when she and Cassandra were taking a turn down the main street before they went back up to the path back home, Betsy the tavern wench came running out of the tavern.
“Oh, Miss Austen, I have been waiting for you to come back!” said Betsy. “I found something. I need to tell you of it.”
Jane and Cassandra had both stopped walking.
“Well, all right,” said Jane.
“Not here,” said Betsy, looking up and down the street. “Come with me into the alleyway where we’ll be concealed. I don’t want him to know that I found it.”
Jane had no notion what this woman was talking about, but she also found her curiosity was piqued.
They went with Betsy into the alleyway.
“All right,” said Betsy, “so, you must understand that I do not go about cleaning the other servants’ bedchambers, not regularly, anyway. Obviously, everything needs to be cleaned at some point, but we let things go with our own chambers. I must scrub the tavern floor every night, but I am not in there scrubbing the servants’ rooms so often.”
“No, I suppose not,” said Jane, who wondered what this had to do with anything.
“It’s not that we like to live in filth or anything, it’s only that if you are quite tired, it doesn’t seem the thing to prioritize, and we are often very tired. With the tavern, it’s not like being in a household, where there are set tasks every day. Things can become quite haphazard and all manner of unexpected things can happen and one spends her whole day running here and there and back again, and the last thing I am going to do is go and clean servants’ quarters at the end of a day like that.”
“Yes, yes,” said Cassandra. “We do understand.”
“And we don’t think badly of you,” said Jane. “Why did you need to tell me this?”
“Well, I know it’s been some time,” said Betsy, “and you might be wondering why I just found it. But the other thing you have to understand is that he is not pleased with anyone going in there, even to clean, so I always do his chambers last, and I will sometimes skip it entirely if there isn’t time.”
“Whose?” said Jane.
“Mr. Hardy’s,” said Betsy. “He is the senior staff here, practically an owner, the way Miss Seward treated him, and hehas his own chamber, all to himself, doesn’t have to share with anybody, and I haven’t been in there since before Miss Seward died, you know?”
