Evie sat alone in the library. It was late and the rest of the Great House had long since gone to bed, but she found she could still function just fine on four hours of sleep, so she continued to complete her work in the smallest hours of the morning.
The catalogue was now complete. In a frenzy she had worked through the final volumes the past few weeks and had, after two years, recorded everything of note about each and every book on the shelves. Two thousand, three hundred and seventy-five books to be exact. She had written down publication dates and edition numbers, then described in minute detail the binding and spine labels, the presence of any identifying seals, inscriptions or book plates, the condition of the boards, the presence and number of any illustrations or engravings or marginalia, the gilding of the pages.
Last fall she had started going to the Alton library on her days off and researching all the information that might be pertinent to her near-complete catalogue. She had then cross-referenced her findings with recent auction pamphlets and newspaper clippings found in the larger Winchester library on one of three day trips there, trying to learn about recent sales at auction and the condition and appraised value of similar texts.
She was excited to finish up tonight because sleeping just above her was Yardley Sinclair. When she had attended the reading of James Knight’s will and realized that a distant male relative could pop up at any minute and claim the contents of the library as his own, Evie had vowed to complete the cataloguing as soon as possible so that she could finally share with Miss Knight some accurate sense of its total value. When Evie had learned that one of the estate appraisers from Sotheby’s would be joining the society, the very Mr. Sinclair with whom she had many times ended up on the phone during his extended professional wooing of Miss Knight, Evie now had an equally pressing reason to complete her mission.
Because Evie had done the math—and if she was even just half as bright as she thought she was, there were possibly tens of thousands of pounds sterling worth of books in this one room alone.
Evie had separated onto two neighbouring shelves the most important volumes to her mind, which were also the most difficult to appraise. They included a first edition of the posthumous 1817 publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, with the preface by Jane’s brother James. There were also inscribed early editions of the books Austen had written and lived to see published, some of them still in fragile plain boards, which made them even rarer than the custom-bound versions more widely available on the market back then. There was the mysterious 1816 Philadelphia printing of Emma that had somehow made its way over the pond; first editions of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Fanny Burney’s Camilla, and Corinne by Madame de Staël; and an early edition in French of Dante’s Divine Comedy. A Third Folio edition of the collected works of Shakespeare could not even be properly valued, so rarely had it ever come up for sale according to the research Evie had done one Sunday afternoon at the British Museum. And, most amazing of all, there was the letter from Jane to Cassandra that Evie had found last September tucked and hidden inside an old Germanic textbook. A letter that the world did not know existed. A letter that answered a few questions scholars had had for decades—and raised many more.
As Evie sat on her little stool, her completed catalogue open on her lap, she felt the ecstasy of discovery. The passion of learning. The pride of having achieved something no one else had done before. She was not quite seventeen, and the village boys might circle round for a few years more, but she could not imagine a feeling more complete, more satisfying, than what she was experiencing at this moment. She thought of the famous Arctic explorers crossing flat white lands of ice, and Captain Cook sailing to the Pacific, and the men who had started and fought wars over the centuries, and all that male energy going outward, seeking to conquer, seeking to own. And she had gone inward in a way, into the confines of a neglected old house, not even truly a home anymore. She had seen the thing right under everyone’s eyes, and she hadn’t let it go or been subsumed by the rigours of daily life. She had made space for discovery in the midst of a most contained life, the life that the world seemed bent on handing her. She had watched Miss Frances float through that world like a ghost, and Adam Berwick sit alone atop his old hay wagon, and Dr. Gray walk through town with that strange faraway look in his eyes, as if he were looking past reality, past pain, to a kinder, gentler world. But a world that did not exist. For the world that really existed demanded the pain, and the living with it, and would never let you go even when everything else fell away.
Yet, even while immersed in that same world, Evie Stone had carved out something new and enlightening and earth-shattering, all on her own and on her own terms. No one could ever take that away from her.
“Evie, what on earth are you doing in here at this hour?”
She looked up to see Yardley Sinclair standing in the threshold of the doorway leading from the Great Hall next door. He was staring at the little notebook open on her lap, in which she had just been scribbling furiously. He looked behind him and then, firmly but quietly shutting the door, took a step towards her.
“I might ask you the same thing,” she replied, leaving him silently impressed by her temerity.
“I was given a little peek in here earlier by Miss Frances, but there wasn’t time to see more. And then I found I couldn’t get to sleep, so thought I’d come down and get something to read.”
He took another step towards her and she quickly closed the notebook before her.
“Evie, does Miss Frances know you are in here?”
She nodded but stayed sitting on her little stool in the corner.
“Does she know what you are doing?”
She nodded again, but this time more slowly. “But only recently. After the will had been read.”
Yardley could tell that the young girl was going to stay firmly rooted in place, so he reached for a chair and pulled it out in front of her. “Do you mind?” he asked, this time more gently than he had been addressing her so far.
She shook her head, and he sat down across from her and held out his hand. “May I have a look?”
So many scenarios were suddenly playing themselves out in Evie’s mind, and she was far too young and inexperienced in the world of business to know what might be at risk by disclosing everything now, before she had even had the chance to share it all with Miss Frances. She was also troubled by how Yardley seemed to be having his run of the place after hours, on his very first visit. Maybe he was just an insomniac, but she had watched him as closely as anyone at the meeting that afternoon, and he had a most inquisitive eye. Evie’s self-appointed job, right now, was to protect Miss Frances and obtain as much value for her from the estate as Evie could—she just hoped that nothing she was about to do might derail any of that.
Evie also knew that Mimi wholeheartedly trusted Yardley, and Evie was in thrall to Mimi both as a movie star and a fellow Austen scholar. So with some hesitation she held out the notebook and watched, quite gratified, as Yardley flipped through its pages with increasing astonishment.
“My God, Evie.” He looked at her, tears in his eyes.
She nodded happily.
Then he started to laugh, dabbing at his eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket, and she found herself laughing, too.
“My God.” He stood up and started running his fingers along the spines of all the books on the shelf right behind him. “It’s all in here, isn’t it—everything she probably read—everything she read while she wrote those unbelievable books? And all these first editions. It’s unbelievable. It’s like a miracle.” He whirled around to look at Evie. “And no one really paid attention to any of it before?”
She finally stood up, too, and he realized anew how tiny she was.
“According to Miss Frances, her father—the late Mr. Knight—and his father before him, they neither of them had much time for Austen. Didn’t get the fuss.”
Yardley was randomly pulling out different books now, flipping
through them, realizing just how minute and precise were the descriptions Evie had been allotting them in her little notebook.
“You know, Evie, you’re too young to appreciate this, but Austen’s books actually went out of print after her death. When Frances’s father was born, back in—what was it she said earlier, 1860?—the books hadn’t even approached their zenith in the Victorian era. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that critical consensus really started to coalesce. I don’t even think the first essay on Austen was until Bradley’s at Oxford in 1911.”
“Oh, I know that.”
He laughed again. “Yes, that was silly, of course you do.”
She had been saving the best for last. She went over to a shelf near him, took out the text on Germanic languages that was part of an imposing multivolume set, and opened it up before him. Inside its pages, as if marking the place, was a folded-up piece of yellowing paper, covered in deeply slanted, familiar handwriting.
Yardley took a deep breath. “Are you joking?”
“It’s the only one, though—I’d really hoped to find others. But it’s an important one. It explains a lot.”
“Can I open it?”
She nodded. “It’s not at all fragile—I think it’s been in here for over a hundred years, untouched. And it was not finished, and it was never sent. She must have been interrupted and lost track of where she’d put it. Or”—and here Evie got quite emotional—“she was getting quite sick, I think, at least enough to worry her. And perhaps she just forgot about it or bigger things took over, and she stopped caring about what she had had to say.”
Yardley took the letter gingerly from the book and sat down to read it. When he was finished, he took a second to compose himself. It was the single greatest discovery of his career, and one of the most important finds yet in Austen scholarship.
“You realize the date here? August 6, 1816? The day she finished writing Persuasion.” And then he started to laugh again. “Of course you do.”
Evie nodded and came over and sat back down across from him. “Cassandra wasn’t far, just a small trip away to some relatives it sounds, and yet Austen wasn’t going to wait one second longer to say what she had to say to her older sister. Imagine finishing those final, incredible chapters of Persuasion and then turning straight to writing this letter. That says something. It says some things that are pretty amazing about her—”
“—and also some that aren’t,” Yardley cut in. “And yet how alive, how real—how human—she seems now.”
He read through the letter again, which was cut off abruptly halfway down the back of the single page.
“So Cassandra intervened, then, after all, in the budding romance with the seaside stranger.”
“I don’t have sisters—I have four very awful brothers—but that bond Cassandra and Jane had seems so intense. As if they were their own little family. Like Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, holding in the eye of the storm, everything to each other, leaving little room for anyone else. Easy enough for Cassandra, I suppose, having lost her fiancé so young, making her essentially a respectable widow of sorts. But where did it leave Jane?”
“You know,” Yardley mused aloud, “I always thought it odd that the family of some random guy from a seaside town, a guy Austen presumably had met only that one holiday month, would have written to inform her of his death. Letters must have been going back and forth between the two of them. Or the family knew there was a relationship of some kind, even if just in its early days.” Yardley sat back and placed the open letter carefully on his lap. “So she blamed Cassandra for the romance ending. For all those years.”
“The missing years. All those letters from the same time period gone, destroyed by Cassandra. We’ve always known that. But we never knew why.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” Evie sat there on her little stool, nodding happily at Yardley’s enthusiasm for her discovery.
“So.” He passed the letter back into her waiting hands and stood up, too full of excitement to stay seated. “So Persuasion was indeed her revising of her own life. Her working through the great disappointment. Her working through her residual anger at her sister.”
“By writing this, I think she tried to put a lid back on that anger for good. I think she knew she was not long for this world, and she wanted peace in her heart, full and total peace, and writing this marked the final forgiveness of her sister. And she needed to feel that, needed to be free of it.”
“You know it’s so strange, but I always wondered if someone like Jane Austen could have existed in the pages of her own books. If you think about it, if Cassandra hadn’t interfered when Jane was—what, twenty-three years old? Twenty-four?—who knows what might have happened. We might never have got the three final books of genius if Austen had gotten her man in the end.”
“I think Austen knew that only too well,” Evie replied. “Especially when you think about so many women at that time dying in childbirth, at least two of her very own sisters-in-law, and her fear about all of that, too. The letters that do survive say as much.”
“Evie, I know we don’t know each other very well. . . .”
“Oh, no, I think we do.” She smiled at him. “I think we are very alike.”
He laughed again. “Yes, poor thing, we are. Is the catalogue complete then, well and done?”
“Yes, tonight. I finished it all tonight.”
He shook his head at her. “Amazing. Truly. Listen, will you trust me with this, with the notebook?”
“Yes,” she answered slowly. “I can’t let you take the letter though. But I made a copy.”
“Of course you did. No, you are absolutely right, you cannot risk losing or disturbing any of the contents in here. Your estimations are right-on, by the way. We’re looking at a hundred thousand pounds at least, if not hundreds. It would be one of the greatest estate-library sales in history, whoever inherits it. We have to do everything we can to keep this intact for now, everything—for Miss Frances, for the society, yes, but most importantly for our understanding of her.”
“I completely agree,” Evie said. “I was hoping you would feel the same way.”
“We both love Jane Austen,” he replied with a wink. “Why ever would we not?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Alton, Hampshire
February 1946
Colin Knatchbull-Hugessen was an indiscreet and silly man of forty-two years of age. He had been living the bachelor life in a small row house on the outskirts of Birmingham. One day in February, as he was checking the racing times in the morning paper, his eye caught the following announcement in The Times:
Notice of the establishment on December 22, 1945, of a society dedicated to the preservation, promotion and study of the life and works of Miss Jane Austen. The Jane Austen Society is working with the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, a charity founded to advance education under the Charities Act, to acquire Miss Austen’s former home in Chawton as a future museum site. Subscriptions and donations of funds from interested members of the public, to advance this purpose, are welcome and may be remitted to the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, care of Andrew Forrester, Esq., High Road, Alton, Hampshire.
At the very same moment that Colin was skipping quickly past this announcement, he received a telephone call from his late mother’s solicitor with the news that James Edward Knight was dead.
The solicitor had learned of the death through remarkable diligence. Since being retained by Colin’s mother decades earlier, he had had his clerk check the principal probate registry in London every three months to search for the surnames Knight, Knatchbull, and Hugessen. He also sent his clerk every few months to Winchester to check the local Hampshire registry as well, knowing his late client had been the third cousin three times removed of Fanny Austen Knight Knatchbull, the eldest of the eleven children of Edward and Elizabeth Knight. The lawyer was worried that a will might enter probate and Colin’s chance to claim an inheritance from such a vast and lande
d family could be missed within the twelve-month window provided for at law.
Colin was less concerned with his family tree than the lawyer. The news of James Knight’s death moved him not at all. He had no real connection to the family, and little interest in genealogy or history in general. He liked to visit his local pub for a pint—or two—every afternoon, bet on the horses, go to football matches, and occasionally bed the waitress at that same pub in exchange for small gifts of a varying nature.
Over the telephone the lawyer carefully explained to Colin the potential windfall he could receive through the death of this distant relative connected to the world-famous writer Jane Austen. To Colin’s mind, Austen was a romance novelist of some kind, although he had enjoyed the Laurence Olivier–Greer Garson adaptation of Pride and Prejudice a handful of years ago. He also knew that his most unsuccessful attempts to bed ladies of a certain age seemed proportionately connected to their love of this writer—which had probably contributed to a certain enmity he felt towards the authoress on his own behalf.
The lawyer urged Colin to appear in person at the Hampshire probate registry to file a claim under the Inheritance Act as promptly as possible. In the meantime, the lawyer would write to the executor on record for the estate, a Mr. Andrew Forrester, explaining the entitlement of Colin Knatchbull-Hugessen, as the closest living male relative of James Knight, to the latter’s entire estate, excluding the right to residence in the Chawton cottage held by Frances Elizabeth Knight and the living allowance, and the gifts in stipend for the servants.
This was the letter that Andrew Forrester read to Frances Knight two weeks before the next scheduled monthly meeting of the Jane Austen Society.
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