The Jane Austen Society (ARC)

by Natalie Jenner

  At the time Mimi, on her way to study history and drama at Smith, had thought her mother full of it. But life with Jack Leonard the past six months had shown her that there was a reason so much of popular culture came down to sex, and the having, or not having, of it, with the people to whom we were most in thrall. In her darker moments, recalling how a professor had once referred to an acting career for women as glorified prostitution, Mimi feared that so much of her on-screen success came from eliciting those same feelings in complete strangers. This had probably been one of the big drivers behind her quest, as she acquired more and more leverage in Hollywood, to take on increasingly complex and less glamorous roles.

  She now knew that this was what Jane Austen was onto as well, with all her attending to the bad boys in her fiction. For if Fanny Price could almost capitulate and let Henry Crawford “make a small hole” in her heart, then there was no hope for the rest of us. Mr. Darcy was the perfect example of a man used to being eminently in control, and then within seconds of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, finding himself so at the mercy of his passion for her that he starts doing the very things he condemns and prohibits in everyone else. Terrified by his human vulnerability, Darcy proceeds to do everything to push Lizzie away except accuse her of some unspecified crime and have her carted off. Austen seemed to know the power of physical attraction (see Mary Crawford and the upstanding Edmund Bertram, or Wickham and Lydia, or even the Bennets twenty years before the plot). Mimi sighed at the idea that the big secret behind Jane Austen’s fiction could be something as prosaic, and animalistic, as that.

  Jack started to stir in bed, and Mimi watched as, half-asleep, his hand patted the empty space next to him where she had earlier been. Eventually his arm started to flail about until he finally opened his eyes and saw her sitting by the balcony.

  “Trying to make your escape?” He smiled, rubbing his eyes and jaw as he sat up in bed.

  She smiled back, then came over, and he started to tug at the belt of her pink silk robe. “Not so fast there, mister. You have a call soon—it’s four P.M. L.A. time, remember?”

  He yawned and sat up, and she affectionately patted down the shock of sandy-brown hair that was several shades lighter than his beard stubble. He had such a healthy Californian colour to him, for an East Coast businessman; next to the City solicitors he had been meeting with in London all week, he practically glowed.

  “Fine, but after that we’re going back to bed—early start in the morning.”

  “Where are you taking me now?” She went and picked up the phone with its base from the desk nearby and carried it over into bed with her, then lay down next to his warm, lean body.

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Is it far? Will I be blindfolded?”

  “Do you want to be?” he teased.

  “I don’t ever want what you think I want, which is usually what you want,” she teased back. “So, it will never work.”

  “That’s what they always say, until it does.”

  Starting to pull at her robe again, he was kissing her neck when the phone rang.

  “Don’t go anywhere, just lie here, with me.” He picked up the receiver and held his hand over the mouthpiece. “I’ll sell at a loss, and then we can pick up where we left off.”

  “Oh, Jack, don’t go getting all noble on my account.” She curled up against him and closed her eyes, wondering where he would be taking her next.

  Because she had only been here once before, and by train from the opposite direction, she did not at first recognize the surrounding vistas. They approached the village by driving south from outer London and then directly west from Kent, stopping along the way at Hever Castle, where Anne Boleyn had spent a dreamy girlhood full of Tudor splendour and scheming. Mimi thought the Astor addition and gardens beautiful, but the story of the young woman who had seduced King Henry VIII had always left her cold. She had even turned down the role a few years ago, when she was still young enough to play the ingénue. Now in her mid-thirties and free of her contract with the biggest movie studio in the world, she could see only a limited number of good years left in terms of roles. This was one reason why the idea of a summer escape in Hampshire had been so appealing. Perhaps she would even go back on the stage, an idea that Jack found ludicrous.

  “I wouldn’t be doing it for the money,” she explained, as their rented 1939 Aston Martin hugged the hedgerows whipping past.

  “There’s no such thing,” he scoffed from behind the wheel. “There’s no such thing as not doing it for the money. It just means it’s not worth much to anyone.”

  “It’d be worth something to me. You and I both know the roles have been drying up of late. I’m worried Monte is out there blackballing me, what with the few lousy scripts I’ve been getting.”

  “He wouldn’t dare—he knows we have too much on him.”

  Mimi shook her head. “I don’t think that worries him one little bit.”

  Jack reached over with his left hand and patted her thigh. “Well, Sense and Sensibility will change all that, don’t you worry.”

  “Yeah, but we’re still only in pre-production—anything could happen. God help me if any grey hairs start showing up between now and then. At least on the stage I can age gracefully. And besides, I don’t know how healthy it is to leave all the dreams of one’s youth behind.”

  He looked over at her quickly. “What else have you left behind? Certainly not your scruples—I can’t get you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “That’s not necessarily due to scruples, Jack,” she teased. “Unless your goal is to corrupt me. Is it?”

  “Not at all. In fact”—he yanked the leather-covered steering wheel to the left as they passed an intersection of three long white arrow-shaped signs—“in fact I think you’ve corrupted me. Look how far I’ve strayed from my regular course because of you. Producing Regency films, buying overpriced necklaces at auction that you are never going to wear, moving to the rolling hills of merry old England.”

  She laughed out loud. “You do have a point. But knowing you, you must be getting something out of it.”

  He looked over at her again. For the first time in his life, Jack Leonard was with a beautiful woman and it was her character he most wanted to seduce. He wanted Mimi Harrison to love him despite every voice of reason in her head, just like a character out of her beloved Jane Austen. Mimi mentioned often a Henry Crawford from Austen’s books, but of all the volumes on her bookshelves Mansfield Park was the thickest, and even Mimi couldn’t sell the plot. A bunch of young people half-related to each other putting on a play so that they can make out with all the people they are not supposed to, was the best she could do. Even for Jack, that would not be enough to get him to read an actual book. Which was too bad, because contained within the pages of Mansfield Park was the playbook for making a good woman fall for a cad.

  “What do I get out of it?” he repeated. “I get the love of a good woman—a very good woman.”

  She stifled a fake yawn. “How boring. That will never be enough for you.” She suddenly put her right hand out across his chest and half exclaimed, “Wait, what did that sign say?”

  “Yardley told me about this place, said you’d been here years and years ago, said you always dreamed of coming back.” Jack put the car into park at the side of the road where it intersected with another and turned off the ignition.

  “Oh my God, Jack, I can’t believe it.” She got out of the car, smoothing her tweed skirt beneath her winter coat, and held her hands to her cheeks. “Look at it—chocolate-box perfect. Seriously.”

  Jack got out of the car, too. If a village could be asleep, Chawton was it. There weren’t even any sidewalks. Just one pub, one tearoom, one little post office that they had passed along the way.

  “I think I’m getting the jitters.” He leaned in to grab the car keys out of the ignition. “Oh, wait, what am I thinking, locking up? Not even the criminal element would bother with this place.”

 
; “No, you’re so wrong,” Mimi gushed, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him across the road, until they were standing in front of a fairly substantial, L-shaped two-story house, with a bricked-up window, redbrick walls, and a little white portico over the front door.

  He watched in amusement as she looked side to side before taking a step closer to the building.

  “No worries, Mimi my dear—I doubt there are any news photographers in a place like this.”

  “No, it’s not that—I just don’t want to be intrusive. We both know how that feels. But see, this window—I read somewhere that this is the parlour where Austen wrote.”

  Mimi turned to him, and the look on her face was as priceless as anything could ever be in Jack Leonard’s world.

  “There was a door to the dining parlour that creaked, and she wouldn’t let it be fixed,” Mimi was rambling on, “so she’d write in the morning—while her mother and Cassandra helped with the household—they let her write, you see, because they knew. Because she was such a goddamn genius, you couldn’t help but know. And the creaking door would warn her when someone was entering, and she’d slip the blotter over the papers, and underneath are Captain Wentworth, and Anne, and ‘you pierce my soul’ and ‘half-agony, half-hope’ and, oh, God, how fantastic is this!”

  “I thought Henry wanted to do the piercing of the holes” was all Jack could rejoin, and Mimi still had the presence of mind to playfully swat him as he started to step back into the road.

  “It’s too perfect that that’s what you remember from five hundred pages of Mansfield Park.”

  He did not bother correcting her that he hadn’t read it yet; he didn’t see the point.

  “It’s just such a ‘vivid’ image,” he teased instead, as he pulled her back from the house.

  “Look, this is swell and all, but I actually brought you here to meet someone.”

  She stepped back to look at him. “In Chawton? Whatever for?”

  “Yardley set it up. There’s that woman here—remember, the one who doesn’t go outside?—who has an extremely large estate and some connection to Austen, and to this house, and I’ve finally managed to convince her to meet with us.”

  Mimi just stood there, staring.

  “The house, Mimi—this house. I bought it for you. Well, I’ve made an offer on it. And I haven’t had one of those turned down yet.” He gave her a knowing wink.

  Mimi turned away from him and felt as if she might throw up.

  “I don’t understand,” she finally said, leaning back against the redbrick wall that enclosed the cottage garden at a sharp point next to the junction of the two main roads.

  “I just told you, I made an offer on the house. Well, to take over a hundred-year lease on it at least—apparently that’s how they do things over here. Anyway, Yardley has been working on the deal for me. It’s taken quite some time. It turns out the old girl’s quite stubborn, reclusive or not.”

  “I still don’t understand,” she repeated. “Why?”

  “Because I love you, silly. Because I know how much it would mean to you—well, at least, Yardley told me, but it didn’t require any imagination, trust me. Why wouldn’t this be a dream come true for an Austen fan like you?”

  “But I can’t live there!” she cried as she started to bolt, and he had to pull her back from the road again as they were finally approached by signs of life, a distinguished-looking man in a dark grey coat and hat, carrying a doctor’s bag.

  “Shh, Mimi, please, it’s a good thing!” Jack called out, but she had run off. All he could do now was hurriedly nod to the man who had stopped to stare after the retreating female figure, a confused look on his face. Jack knew that look well.

  “It can’t be . . .” Dr. Gray was muttering to himself. He turned to Jack, who simply shrugged nonchalantly. “Sorry, it’s just, your wife—she looks a lot like—”

  “Just doing the tourist thing,” Jack said quickly, cutting him off.

  “She seemed very upset.”

  “Don’t worry yourself about it, just a bit of carsickness. These narrow, winding roads, you know. Anyway, what is it you people say? Cheerio?”

  Jack walked quickly after Mimi, who was now kneeling on the grass in a park across from the lane and next to the village cricket pitch.

  “I really think I’m going to be sick,” she said as he approached. He put his hand down to help pull her up, and she swatted him again, this time seriously. “Jack, no, stop.”

  Now he was starting to get a little mad. “For God’s sake, Mimi, this was supposed to make you happy. Can’t you just be goddamned happy, for once, for me?”

  She looked up at him quickly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, my God, you go on and on about Darcy and Pemberley and how Elizabeth fell in love with him after seeing his house—”

  “That was irony you goddamned idiot!”

  “—and how romantic it all is, and how hot, and here I am, just trying to make you happy—”

  “Or hot.”

  “No,” he said firmly, “just happy, believe it or not.”

  “By buying me a practical shrine. What the hell am I supposed to do with a shrine? I can’t live there, this can’t be our summer house, that would be insane.” She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, God, you’re not nuts, are you?”

  “No, but I’m starting to think you are. Or I am for loving you.” He turned and stormed off.

  She stayed kneeling there a few seconds longer, then pulled herself up.

  In front of her stood two gigantic oak trees that bordered the eastern edge of the park, the curve of their branches forming a sort of natural proscenium arch. Through this clearing she could see all the golden-apple sunshine, like something out of a poem by Yeats, streaming through the bare branches of the trees and radiating about the rolling hills in the near distance.

  It looked like heaven to her. Jack Leonard was trying to buy her a little piece of heaven.

  Eventually she returned to the car and found him standing there, leaning back against it, map in hand. She came up and leaned her head against his chest, nuzzling him hard, and at first he didn’t respond. But eventually she could feel him kiss the top of her head and shake her a bit by each shoulder, and she looked up at him and laughed.

  He would have loved to stay there against the car, feeling her push up against him like this, but he knew that they needed to get to their meeting with Frances Knight. As they walked down the lane towards the Great House, all the memories for Mimi started to come flooding back.

  “You see I got quite lost, and this farmer, this very nice youngish man, showed me the graves of Jane’s mother and sister, and I’d had no idea they were there. Actually, you remember when we met, I’d just made Home & Glory?”

  Jack did remember. He had wanted that script—the movie had gone on to be one of the top ten money-makers of 1944.

  “I’d thought about that guy, losing both his brothers in the Great War. He looked nowhere near over any of it. Shell-shocked himself, in a way. I thought maybe the movie could help people see how much some families were sacrificing. Help them understand.”

  “A one-woman USO.”

  “Jack, seriously, short of the draft it was the best I could do.”

  “No, I know—I’m still just stinging a bit from before.”

  They stopped at the base of the gravel drive, and a hundred yards away stood the Great House, practically scowling down from its small incline.

  She grabbed his jaw and pulled him in for a soft, open kiss.

  “I am sorry, Jack—it’s not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s just so much, you know? To take in.”

  “Money can buy you anything.” He shrugged as if it was no big deal.

  “I don’t normally subscribe to that theory, but after this I may be coming round.”

  He took her arm and they started up the long drive together.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Chawton, Hampshire

  Three o’clock th
at same afternoon

  Frances Knight was sitting in a small room, known as the reading alcove, that jutted out above the main entrance to the Great House as part of its imposing three-story porch. It was yet another perfect spot to watch out for visitors both expected and not, and family lore described it as one of Jane Austen’s favourite places in the house for that very reason. Even during the war, tourists could occasionally be seen venturing up the drive, not daring to open the low wooden gate a few hundred feet from the front steps, but just standing there, zooming in with their cameras, taking their one shot of the house that Jane Austen had almost lived in, but not quite.

  After three months of persistence, and a burgeoning phone relationship with both Josephine and Evie, Yardley Sinclair had finally managed to get Miss Knight to at least entertain an offer on the steward’s cottage. She had not told her father yet, as he was in the final stages now, and she wondered if it might not be better just to wait. This was the absolute most calculating and manipulative idea Frances Knight had ever allowed herself to have, and some small strange sense of rebellion reared itself within her as she got a taste of what the future might feel like, once her father was gone.

  Over time Yardley had explained to her, with all the patience of an archaeologist chipping away at an Egyptian ruin, that the rich American was willing to pay well above market value, several thousand pounds above, for the little cottage. That his plan was to immediately restore the cottage into a single-family residence again, ideally using the original layout from Jane Austen’s time.

  Frances could tell that Mr. Sinclair was a huge fan of her ancestor, and during their series of calls it always took some doing to put off the visits from him that he would often suggest. To sweeten the deal, he kept mentioning that the American and his fiancée had acquired some of the Godmersham estate pieces, and having this cottage might thereby also enable the acquisitions to stay in England, right in their ancestral home.