Jane and His Lordship's Legacy Read Online Free Page A

Will and Testament, written by his lordship on the third of November last and witnessed by one Jeb Hawkins, Able Seaman, and one Josiah Fortescue, publican”—Chizzlewit’s distaste for such witnesses was evident—“you have been named as the legatee of a rather extraordinary bequest.”
    I felt my countenance change, my visage flush. I knew all the circumstances under which that testament had been written: the third of November, 1808, the very day before Lord Harold’s aborted duel with a young American by the name of James Ord. The former had opened his box of matched pistols—made to his specifications by no less a master than Manton in London—and affected to practise with wafers and playing cards in the courtyard of the Dolphin Inn. His aspect had been brutal that morning, and it had not changed when I pled for the young man’s life. It was Lord Harold’s I secretly hoped to save; but he had ridiculed me—and put one of the pistols into my hands. He would have challenged my shrinking, and sought to determine whether I could stomach his way of life. Had he drawn up his Will before that hour, or much later? Impossible to say.
    “What can his lordship have wished to bequeath to me?” I enquired in a subdued tone. “I am wholly unconnected with his family.”
    “—As has been vociferously pointed out by His Grace the Duke of Wilborough, Her Grace the Duchess, the Marquis of Kinsfell, and indeed, Desdemona, Countess of Swithin, all of whom seem convinced that Lord Harold’s wits were sadly deranged when he penned the document.” Chizzlewit studied me with a shrewd expression, his ancient lips pursed. “I may frankly assure you, Miss Austen, that his lordship has been frequently drawing up his Will, as necessity and the perils to which he was exposed demanded it. That this document supersedes and governs any previous form is indisputable, as I repeatedly assured His Grace. My commission as solicitor and executor of his lordship’s estate should have been long since carried out, to the satisfaction of all parties, had not the Wilborough family protested this legacy.”
    Another lady might have been humbled by a sense of shame and mortification; I confess I felt only indignant. “And what is his lordship’s family, pray, that I should consider their opinion in a matter so sacred as a gentleman’s dying wish?”
    “Nothing,” the solicitor returned with surprising mildness. “It is for me, as their man of business, to dispose of disappointment and outrage. I have been doing so, for all the Wilborough clan, for some six decades. I was but eighteen and a clerk in my father’s chambers when the Fifth Duke proposed to marry a chit from the Parisian stage; and the furor over the marriage articles
then
may fairly be described as incredible. Instability and caprice have characterised all the family’s habits, against which Lord Harold’s lamented passing and general way of life may almost be called respectable. It has always been for the firm of Chizzlewit and Pauver to support the family and maintain a proper appearance of decorum before the
ton;
there our influence—and indeed, I may add our interest—ends, Miss Austen.”
    “What is the nature of the legacy?” I demanded.
    “It is this.” The solicitor drew a piece of paper—ordinary white foolscap, such as might be found in the public writing desk of an inn—from his leather pouch. Was it possible that this was Lord Harold’s Will, penned in his own hand? I felt my heartbeat quicken, from an intense desire to glimpse that beloved script—but the solicitor did not offer the paper to me. Instead, he took a pair of spectacles from his pocket and set them carefully on his nose. With a dry rasp of the throat, he began to read.
    “To my dear friend, Miss Jane Austen of Castle Square, Southampton, I leave a lifetime of incident, intrigue, and conspiracy; of adventure and scandal; of wagers lost and won. To wit: all my letters, diaries, account books,