Cassandra's Sister by Veronica Bennett

Author:Veronica Bennett [Bennett, Veronica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406351095
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2013-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

James, Henry and Eliza

Tom Lefroy was to return to Ireland in two weeks. When he and his young cousin George made the customary visit to Steventon the day after the ball, the call was brief even by duty-driven standards. Jenny barely had the chance to address him; each time she looked at him his attention was elsewhere. But on the way out of the garden gate he turned and ran back, hat in hand, to where she stood on the doorstep.

“Pray do not forget, Miss Austen, that you are cordially invited to my uncle and aunt’s ball at Ashe next Friday. May I engage you now for the first dance?”

“Certainly, Mr Lefroy,” she replied, and they smiled at each other.

Bundling up her skirts in the way she used to when she was a little girl, Jenny climbed the stairs three at a time. Huddled in her shawl, with mittens half-covering her hands, she now wandered about the cold sitting-room, thinking, thinking…

In the corner of the writing desk was the little pile of cross-stitched pen-wipers Cassandra had made for Edward years ago. Faded now, but still serviceable, they were as much a part of the familiar surroundings of Steventon as the carved chair Jenny now pulled out from under the desk, and the embroidered cushion on which she sat.

The sight of her sister’s handiwork drove all thought of story-writing from her mind. What flowed from her pen was a letter to Cassandra. A long, long letter. By the time Jenny had finished her hand ached and weariness had begun to overwhelm her. She was also, she noticed, weak from hunger. She had been too nervous to eat breakfast.

Tiptoeing down to the kitchen, she begged some bread and cold meat from Travers. Then she carried her spoils back upstairs, settled herself upon the bed and gave herself up to the dreams that Mama called “nonsense”. It was not nonsense, though. Jenny preferred to think of it as writing her own story instead of someone else’s.

She was twenty years old, the very age Cassandra had been when she became engaged to her Tom. Jenny’s own Tom (she could permit herself to think of him as that in dreams) was twenty-three, that perfect age between majority and marriage that she envied Cassandra for possessing. How extraordinary it was, that just as one Tom was leaving for the West Indies, another Tom had appeared from Ireland. Jenny had to concede that the first country was rather less exotic than the latter; but one’s own story was never as exciting as fiction, after all.

“Nothing can diminish my happiness,” she said aloud, licking her fingers. “I know he likes me. This is what Marianne felt when that scoundrel Willoughby courted her, and Elinor when she fell in love with Edward Ferrars.”

She sat up. Should she look over the manuscript of Elinor and Marianne? Now it had happened to her, should she revise the passages about falling in love, in case the real feeling was different from the one she had described?

She lay back, nestling among the pillows, and smiled to herself.

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