The Jane Austen Society (ARC)

by Natalie Jenner

  The Bennets, for all intents and purposes, simply didn’t like each other. He had not been expecting this at all from a lady writer with a commitment to happy endings. Yet, sadly, it felt more real to him than anything else he had ever read.

  Finishing the chapter where Darcy shows his estate to the woman who once so robustly spurned his marriage proposal, Adam finally started to drift off to sleep. He recalled the recent visitor to his own town, the tiny cross on a chain, the white winning smile: tokens of the faith and hope so sadly missing from his own life. He could not conceive of the willingness to travel so far for something so whimsical—yet an unguarded happiness had also radiated from within the visitor, real happiness, the kind he had always searched for in books.

  Reading Jane Austen was making him identify with Darcy and the thunderclap power of physical attraction that flies in the face of one’s usual judgment. It was helping him understand how even someone without much means or agency might demand to be treated. How we can act the fool and no one around us will necessarily clue us in.

  He would surely never see the American woman again. But maybe reading Jane Austen could help him gain even a small degree of her contented state.

  Maybe reading Austen could give him the key.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chawton, Hampshire

  October 1943

  Dr. Gray sat alone at the desk in his office, a small room off the larger front parlour that acted as his examining room. He stared miserably at the X-ray film before him. Both of Charles Stone’s legs had been so severely crushed, the good doctor could not imagine any degree of function being regained over time.

  He held the X-ray back up to the golden October light streaming in from the side window and squinted at it one last time, even though he knew there was nothing more to see—nothing that would make any of this one jot easier to relay.

  Having grown up in Chawton, Dr. Gray had moved to London during the Great War for medical school and training, returning to the village in 1930 to take over old Dr. Simpson’s practice. Over the past thirteen years, he had welcomed into the world as many patients as he had seen out. He knew every family’s history and their doom—the ones where madness skipped a generation, or asthma did not. He knew which patients one could tell the cold hard truth to—and which ones fared better not knowing. Charlie Stone would do better not knowing, at least for now. He would keep from the edges of despair that way, until the march of time and increasing poverty took precedence over his pride.

  Dr. Gray put his fingers to his temples and pushed in hard. Before him on the blotter pad rested a series of medicine bottles. He stared absent-mindedly at one of them, then pushed himself up from the arms of his wooden swivel chair with resolution. It was mid-afternoon, and normally the time that his nurse and housekeeper would be bringing him his tea. But he needed some air, needed to clear his brain and find some respite from all the cares that piled up before him every day. He was the general practitioner for the village of Chawton, but also its confidant, father figure, and resident ghost—someone who knew more about the future, and the past, than anyone else.

  He left his rose-covered thatched cottage through the green front door that was always open to patients and led straight out onto the street. Like all the former worker cottages, the house was so close to the main road that it practically half heaved itself onto it. His nurse, Harriet Peckham, tried to keep the front bay window’s lace curtains drawn as much as possible during patient visits, but the small beady eyes of the town had proven themselves even smaller still by a willingness to peer through the eyelet pattern and thin crack where the panels tried to meet.

  He started down the lane and saw the Alton taxi pulling up at the junction where Winchester Road split in two, and where the old pond had only recently been drained. Three ducks could still on occasion be spotted meandering about the roads, searching for their lost paradise. But right now Dr. Gray was watching three middle-aged women instead, as they stepped out of the cab amidst a flurry of hats and handbags, landing right in front of the old Jane Austen cottage.

  Despite the war now stretching across the Atlantic, women of a certain age still saw fit to travel to Chawton to see where Austen had lived. Dr. Gray had always marvelled at their female spirit in coming to pay homage to the great writer. Something had been freed in them by the war; some essential fear that the world had tried to drum into them had collapsed in the face of an even greater enemy. He wondered if the future, just as the cinema foretold, belonged to these women. Chattering, gathering, travelling women, full of vigour and mission, going after what they wanted, big or small. Just like Bette Davis in Jezebel or Greer Garson in his favourite movie, Random Harvest.

  Dr. Gray permitted himself one night a week to indulge a passion he had shared with his late wife: a bus trip into the neighbouring town of Alton to see the newest movie release. The rest of his free time he spent trying to distract himself from thinking about Jennie. But now, when the movie-house lights dimmed, and the couples slouched against each other even farther still, he allowed himself to picture his beloved wife and their own nights out at the cinema together. She had always wanted to see the “weepies,” those woman-centred films starring such actresses as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, and he would sometimes put up a little fuss, a little push for a Western or a gangster film—but he always ended up enjoying her choices as much as she did. Sometimes they would even skip the bus after and walk the half hour home in the moonlight instead, talking over the film they had just seen. He couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say.

  He had always loved her most for her mind—and he was smart enough to know that she was much smarter than him. She had been one of the few women at his college and had spent equal time in the library and in the lab. Her sharp mathematical mind could have been a real asset to the war effort, but this was one of many things about her that he would never know. She had died four years earlier from a simple fall down the stairs leading to their bedroom, hitting her head in the absolute worst way, on the one jutting part of the lowest stair that he had always meant to fix. The internal bleeding was swift and acute, and he had been completely unable to save her.

  A doctor who can’t save his own wife achieves an unfortunate degree of notoriety to add to the grief and self-recrimination. No one was ever going to be harder on him than himself, but his professional pride often caused him to wonder if the other villagers might not blame him, too.

  As he passed the trio of women chatting excitedly in front of the little white gate to the Austen cottage, he tipped his hat at them. He was not one of the villagers who considered them a nuisance to be wished away. Every person who made their village a site of pilgrimage was keeping alive the legacy and the aura of Austen, and as a lifelong fan himself, he appreciated that the villagers were involuntary caretakers of something much bigger than they could guess at.

  He was turning onto the old Gosport Road that led to the Great House and neighbouring Knight estate when he saw a fellow member of the school board approaching him from that same direction.

  They tipped their hats at each other, then the other man started in at a clip, “Glad I ran into you Benjamin. Having a problem again at the school.”

  Dr. Gray sighed. “The new teacher?”

  The other man nodded. “Yes, young Miss Lewis, as you surmised. She has those boys on a steady diet of lady authors from as far back as the 1700s. Can’t make her see reason.” He paused. “Thought she might listen to you.”

  “Because why?”

  “Well, for one thing, you’re the closest in age to her.”

  “Not by much.”

  “And besides, you seem to have a pretty good grasp of her, um, teaching methods.”

  Dr. Gray’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “I’ve been the doctor here for many years now and would like to think I have a pretty good understanding of everyone in the village. It doesn’t necessarily follow that I have any particular influence over them.”

  “Ju
st give it a try, hmm? That’s a good man.”

  Dr. Gray did not think he could persuade Adeline Lewis of anything. He did know that his fellow school board trustees—all male, all well into their fifties and beyond—were a little afraid of the young woman only one term into her first teaching job. Adeline was very confident in her lesson plans and highly resistant to anyone trying to manage her. She also physically matched most of the men for height—which was not difficult to do, since only Dr. Gray was anywhere close to six feet tall. But perhaps most unnerving of all, Adeline Lewis was attractive, in a way that sneaked up on all of them, until they started to forget what they had come to say. She would stare straight in the eyes of the various board members, always ready to speak her mind, always up for a fight, and they each inevitably gave in to her. Dr. Gray shook his head in remonstrance whenever one of them opened their monthly board meetings with yet another tale of capitulation.

  “Well,” he replied tentatively, looking around as if hoping to see someone lying injured in the street and in need of his medical services instead, “I suppose I could stop in there now.”

  “There’s a fellow.” The other man smiled. “You’re sure we’re not keeping you from anything?”

  Dr. Gray shook his head. “No, just out for a walk to clear my head.”

  The other man tipped his hat again and continued on his way, cheerfully calling back, “Doubt having to set Miss Lewis straight will help with any of that . . .”

  Dr. Gray hesitated, turned to look back at his colleague, then forged on ahead until he reached the old Victorian schoolhouse across the road from the village cricket pitch. He supposed class would be ending right about now, at 3:30 P.M. Sure enough, when he strolled into the vacated senior classroom, he found Adeline Lewis standing at the board, chalk in hand, half writing and half gesturing to a young girl sitting at the teacher’s desk as if she belonged there. Dr. Gray noticed a copy of Virginia Woolf in the student’s hands.

  Marriage as a Social Contract to Avoid Poverty was being written in bright white letters across both sides of the chalkboard.

  Dr. Gray sighed again, and Adeline must have heard him, because she whirled about.

  “You’ve been sent to scold me,” she said with a smile—but it was the smile of the knowing, not the vanquished, and he felt his jaw automatically tighten.

  “Not to scold; to understand. A steady diet of women writers, Adeline, really—for a room full of adolescent boys?”

  Adeline looked down at the girl sitting at the desk, who had closed her Virginia Woolf and was now watching the two adults with unabashed interest.

  “Not just boys—Dr. Gray, you know Miss Stone.”

  Dr. Gray nodded. “How are you, Evie? How’s your father?”

  Evie’s father was the one whose X-ray Dr. Gray had just been worrying over. Charlie Stone had been critically injured in a tractor accident a few months earlier, and Dr. Gray knew how catastrophic this had been for the family, both financially and emotionally. He also knew that the father would never be returning to physical work again, even though Dr. Gray did not have the heart to communicate that yet to his patient in no uncertain terms. Most worryingly, Dr. Gray wondered how the large clan with five children under fifteen would manage going forward without the income of their sole provider. He had heard talk among the adults at the farm of pulling the oldest child, Evie, out of school for servant work, and this was just one of many secrets he had to keep.

  “He’s doing a lot of reading,” Evie spoke up. “Miss Lewis gave him a list of books to cheer him, and he’s working through it from the library, one by one.”

  Dr. Gray cocked one eyebrow at Miss Lewis as if stumbling upon evidence helpful to his cause. “I’d like to see such a list sometime, if I may.”

  “Hardly,” replied Adeline with a slight frostiness to her tone. “I am judged enough around here for my choices.”

  Evie continued to watch the two adults, having sensed a strange shift in mood between them, as if they had forgotten she was sitting there. Dr. Gray was usually so gentlemanly with the ladies—along with his salt-and-pepper hair, intense brown eyes, and broad shoulders, it was his manner as well as his vocation that kept him an object of interest and, young Evie suspected, lust among the village women. But with Adeline he always seemed, as now, both flustered and on the defensive. At the same time, Adeline was showing none of those same ladies’ usual deference towards him, which Evie suspected was irritating Dr. Gray even more.

  “Well, let’s ask Miss Evie, then, shall we?” Adeline was saying, and Evie popped out of her reverie to see both adults turn towards her.

  But she had no interest in getting in the middle of any of it, being fully on Miss Lewis’s side when it came to her teaching methods. Instead Evie grabbed her book bag from a nearby desk and, with a quick nod and a goodbye, scurried off along the old oak floorboards of the classroom.

  “Ah, to be fourteen again and without composure,” said Dr. Gray with a laugh when Evie was far enough away.

  “Oh, Evie Stone is composed enough alright. She just doesn’t feel like tangling with the likes of you.”

  Adeline came around to the front of her desk and leaned back against it, arms crossed, the piece of chalk still clasped in her fingers. She was wearing a straight brown skirt to her knees, with a cream-coloured blouse open a few buttons from her neck that accentuated her tawny complexion, and the same stacked-heel, laced-up brown Oxfords that Dr. Gray noticed on all the young working women of late.

  “Look, we’re doing critical and thematic analysis of the text, Dr. Gray—what, so if they’re all off seeking treasure or fending away pirates, that’s more relevant? Understanding social mores through the lens of literature is just as important for young men as it is for young ladies. Or don’t you think it important at all?”

  Dr. Gray took off his hat, and she watched silently, head tilted to one side, as he tousled his hair and then sat down in one of the extra-small desk seats in front of her.

  “What?” he asked as she stared at him.

  “You look so small, sitting there. You always look so tall.”

  “I’m not that much taller than you, I believe.”

  “No . . . but it feels like you are.”

  “Can’t you add some Trollope at least, some good old Doctor Thorne or the like?”

  “You and your Trollope.” She now crossed her legs at their ankles as if she had all the time in the world to debate him, while still watching him curiously. “Listen, we know you love Austen as much as I do. I do talk about the Napoleonic Wars and abolition and all that.”

  “I’m sure you do.” He grinned. “I am sure you cover it all. You are nothing if not thorough in your lesson planning. But the other board members—”

  “And you . . .”

  “No, I agree only to an extent—but mostly because I don’t want you to lose your job. When we hired you for this opening, I was pleased that you could stay close to home and help out with your mother. Pleased that one of Chawton’s own, so to speak, was going to have a part in moulding our youngest minds.”

  “Dr. Gray, why so formal? Just tell me what you want me to do. You know I’ll always do it. Eventually,” she added with a playful smile.

  He was looking at her as she spoke, trying to do something with the dawning consciousness that she was mocking him in some way. Or, at the very least, daring him. He often felt that way around Adeline—it was most unnerving.

  “Hey, Addy!” a young man’s voice boomed down the classroom corridor.

  Dr. Gray turned in his seat to see Samuel Grover, another of the village youth, striding happily towards them in full uniform.

  “Hey, Dr. Gray, how are you?” The young man joined Adeline at the desk, put his arm about her waist, and gave her a lingering kiss on the cheek.

  As the village doctor, Dr. Benjamin Gray had cared for both Samuel and Adeline for many years now, watching them grow up together, both brown haired and brown eyed and quick to laugh, little mirrors
of each other. They had done their parents proud since then, Samuel training in his father’s footsteps to be a solicitor, Adeline receiving her teaching diploma. But Dr. Gray had had no idea that they were now officially a couple.

  He stood up rather abruptly, grabbing his hat. “Well, I should be going. Miss Lewis, Samuel—I mean, Officer Grover.”

  Dr. Gray headed back towards the main school door and Adeline ran after him.

  “I’m sorry, wait, I’m sure we weren’t finished,” she called out, catching hold of the back of his coat sleeve to slow him down.

  He looked down at her hand on his sleeve and noticed for the first time her engagement ring, a small solitaire garnet stone.

  “I didn’t know,” he said quickly. “I should have congratulated you both. Please give my best to Samuel.”

  “Dr. Gray, is everything okay? I really will think about what you said—I probably have gone a little overboard lately. Drunk with power, as they say.” She offered him a wide happy smile, and he saw for the first time how very happy she was, too.

  “When is the date?” He twisted the hat still in his hands.

  “We’re in no hurry.”

  “You are both still so young, after all.”

  “Not too young for Samuel to be sent off to fight for king and country. But, yes, still quite young, as you are always reminding me. It’s alright—it’ll be something to live for,” she said with a grin.

  “I’m sure it will, for you both. Well, best be getting on.” He put his hat on his head and headed back down the road that led into town.

  Just as predicted, the exchange with Adeline Lewis had done nothing to clear his head.

  CHAPTER THREE

  London, England

  September 1945

  The main room on the lower level of Sotheby’s was packed, the bamboo-sided chairs with intricate needlepointed seating having been supplemented on this occasion by extra ones from the other rooms downstairs. Still, many in the crowd found themselves having to stand with their backs to the mirror-panelled walls, reflecting all the people in the room many times over. This only contributed to the air of excitement that buzzed throughout the room as the auction-house director ascended the podium.