The Jane Austen Society

by Natalie Jenner

  This 1896 will was the only one that the various Knight relatives would have been aware of over the years. Now everything was about to be upended by this most bitter, disapproving man.

  So this was the daughter’s reward, an inheritance of exactly nothing. Her recompense for all the years of loneliness, the caregiving, the apparently unforgivable sin of not providing an heir.

  Andrew stood up. He dreaded one day having to give the news to Frances. But they had been here, before, too.

  They were nothing if not familiar, the two of them, with sharing crushing disappointment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Chawton, Hampshire

  December 14, 1945

  Dr. Gray had not visited Adeline Grover for several weeks. He did not think it appropriate—her care was now entirely up to her and needed to be. He also did not want to be put in an uncomfortable position again or asked to do something he shouldn’t. The longer he went without seeing her, the greater the chance she would move through some of her anger (which so often of late seemed, disturbingly, to be directed at him) toward the start, at least, of resignation.

  He was sitting at his desk one dark, wintry Friday morning, when his nurse came in with a small envelope. He opened the holiday card in front of her, read it quickly, then stood up. Stuffing the card into the front left pocket of his suit jacket, he tried to simultaneously retrieve a small parcel from his desk drawer as nonchalantly as possible under Harriet’s eager gaze.

  “I’m going to go out on my rounds a little early this morning, Miss Peckham.”

  She stared at him curiously. He had never cared for her, even though she was a thorough and diligent enough nurse. But at moments such as this he could see the small eyes of the town upon him. He suspected she was a big source of the gossiping behind his back.

  So he did not tell her where he was going and hoped she had not recognized the handwriting on the envelope—he couldn’t imagine how.

  He picked up his coat and hat from the hallway stand and was gone before Harriet Peckham could say—or intimate—another word.

  A light sprinkling of snow covered the rooftops and the surrounding fields as he headed out, just enough whiteness to make it finally feel like Christmas—the first one since the war had ended. Dr. Gray knew that for many in the village, with the constant loss of life and increasing rationing, recent holidays had been much more muted than was good for the soul. At least they still had Christmas Eve service in the little parish church of St. Nicholas, which would be beautifully decorated with boughs of fir and ivy from the estate’s woodland, and he hoped that Frances Knight would once again invite everyone to the Great House afterwards for roasted chestnuts and mulled wine. This had been a Chawton village tradition for generations. For a second he wondered if it was how Jane Austen had celebrated Christmas with the Knight family, too, and he realized that Adam Berwick’s surprising plan must be getting to him.

  He opened the small wooden gate to the Grover garden and, noticing the top hinge was loose, made a mental note to arrange to have that fixed. As he walked up the frosted pathway, he saw the empty stakes from the tomato plants and the delphiniums, and the willow cloches for the sweet pea, everything looking just a little desolate and forgotten. He gave the red-painted door a firm knock or two, then waited as a light turned on in the centre hall against the dark December morning, and the door opened.

  “Dr. Gray,” Beatrix Lewis stated, then kept standing there as if waiting for him to say something. She had been staying with Adeline in her little cottage for months now, given her daughter’s low spirits and the lack of a man about the house to help her out.

  “Mrs. Lewis, hello, I came to pay a call on Adeline. Is she—is she up?” Something about the woman’s hard stare was making him uncomfortable.

  “Yes, but I wasn’t aware that she had called for you.”

  He unconsciously felt for the Christmas card now packed against his left chest, inside his jacket pocket. “Not precisely, but she had written, and with the holidays so soon upon us, I thought I would quickly check in on her, if that is alright.”

  Given that he had once carried her daughter’s near-lifeless body out of this same doorway and into an arriving ambulance, she was acting in a fairly cool way towards him. “Yes, well, your nurse telephoned just now to let us know you might be coming by today, so it’s not a total surprise.”

  “Look, if this isn’t a good time, I can really—”

  He heard Adeline’s footsteps coming down the stairs—such a rickety, narrow staircase it was—and the strangest feeling shot through him, a pang of inexplicable anxiety such as he had never before known.

  “Dr. Gray, hello. Mother, I’ll see Dr. Gray into the drawing room.”

  He followed her thin figure into the room on the right, then waited to sit down while she shut the double doors.

  “Please, have a seat.” She motioned to the larger settee a few feet in front of the bay window, behind which he noticed a makeshift window seat over an old water radiator. Several needlepoint cushions were piled high across the deep window ledge, along with an impressive stack of books and a little kitten curled up asleep. He gave it a tender pat, then looked back at Adeline inquisitively.

  “A present. From Adam Berwick.”

  He stopped petting the kitten and looked about himself. “I see you are all set up here,” he remarked as he fluffed up some of the cushions and started turning over some of the books.

  “Looking for clues?” She smiled wanly. “My little perch. Where I watch the world go by.”

  “Adeline,” he started to admonish her, then tried to soften his tone, “please don’t talk like—please don’t be so hard on yourself. This is an awful time—I know.”

  “I know you know.” She stared at him, not coldly like her mother, but resignedly. Finally she motioned again for him to sit down, while she sat primly in a carved wooden rocking chair across from the fireplace, facing him at an angle.

  “Thank you for your card,” he offered after a few seconds of silence.

  “You came over just to tell me that?”

  “Adeline,” he sighed, “please, let’s not do this.”

  “It’s just easier this way,” she sighed in return.

  “What—being rude to everybody—to your mother—to me?”

  “I just don’t have the energy like I used to.”

  “You were indeed quite energetic—almost too much so,” he said, attempting to coax a smile onto her pale, tightly drawn face.

  She couldn’t help but smile back. Sometimes she forgot how much he knew about her—forgot how long he had known the real her, the person she now only remembered herself to be.

  “Well, you’re welcome. For the card, I mean.”

  “Ah, that reminds me.” He reached into the pocket of his coat, which he had thrown over the back of the settee. “I brought you something. ’Tis the season and all that.”

  He pulled out the small rectangular package and stood up to hand it to her. She gave a small, self-conscious frown as she said, “I didn’t get you anything.”

  “Your card was enough.” He sat back down on the settee. “And anyway, as they say, it’s the thought that counts.”

  “I can only think of myself, it seems, of late. How to get through today, this hour. How to distract myself. How to forget.”

  “Have you thought about going back to teaching? I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t ask—I know it’s still early days.”

  She shook her head as she continued to hold the wrapped package in her hands. “No, I haven’t thought about it, not one little bit.” She raised the package up to her right ear and gently shook it. “Dickens? Too light . . . Eliot? No, too thin . . . Hmm . . . what could it be . . . ?”

  She came over and sat down next to him on the small settee. He realized that they hadn’t sat like this since the time last summer when they had taken tea together in the courtyard of the Great House. So much had happened since then, in a year when she had already had to e
ndure more than her fair share. He looked forward to 1945 coming to an end for both of them—there was always something to be said for a new year.

  She unwrapped the package slowly—she had enjoyed watching him try to act patient while she had teased him—and realized it was the same edition of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as the one of Emma that he had read to her while sitting in the courtyard together.

  “My favourite.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

  He smiled back. “It wasn’t hard to guess. You must have other editions—but this one you can carry around if you like. Look, Adeline, you need to start getting out again. You need to start walking, long walks, need to get the fresh, brisk air into your lungs and your head, need to just get out. I am always much better for getting out on my rounds. Always much better for talking to, and helping, others. It’s no magic prescription, but it’s a start. Reading is wonderful, but it does keep us in our heads. It’s why I can’t read certain authors when I am in low spirits.”

  “But one can always read Austen.”

  “And that’s exactly what Austen gives us. A world so a part of our own, yet so separate, that entering it is like some kind of tonic. Even with so many flawed and even silly characters, it all makes sense in the end. It may be the most sense we’ll ever get to make out of our own messed-up world. That’s why she lasts, like Shakespeare. It’s all in there, all of life, all the stuff that counts, and keeps counting, all the way to here, to you.”

  He watched as Adeline kept her head bowed slightly as he talked, not looking at him, just gazing down at the small book in her hands.

  “It’s amazing, though, how she tricks you with the surface of things,” Adeline finally answered, looking up at him. “When you think about Anne Elliot, for example, and this totally disastrous decision she makes at, what, eighteen? nineteen?—not to marry Wentworth, it has to be partly because her mother has died only a few years earlier. I can’t imagine feeling any different a year or two from now than I do today.”

  Dr. Gray didn’t even try to persuade her otherwise this time, but just let her talk, hoping it would help her get out of herself, if only for a moment.

  “Austen must have picked her to be fifteen when it happened for a reason,” Adeline continued. “In the book, the ages of everyone when the mother dies are set out fully, right from the start, when we know Austen was no stickler for details like that—but that is her way of cluing us in, that Anne is still in full mourning when she first meets Wentworth, and very vulnerable both to him but also to the ties and pressures of family, still so impressionable. So grief is in there, deep-seated in those books, even when it doesn’t look like it.”

  “We all live with grief eventually, every last one of us. Austen knew that. I also think she knew she was dying when she wrote parts of this book, knew that nothing could help her, and so tried not to worry her family when there was nothing to be done.”

  “She’s a better woman than me. I’ve got the whole village on edge.”

  It was the first joke he had heard Adeline make in months, and again he felt the essence of life break through. Just a crack—but it was there.

  “Listen, Adeline, when you are ready, I have a little project for you. Something else that I think might help. Ironically, it has to do with Jane Austen. Adam Berwick suggested it, of all people. Can we entice you out to hear more?”

  “Not out, no, but we could meet here.”

  The Adeline of old would not have let him pique her interest like this without demanding to know more. But it was a start, nonetheless.

  “That’s fine. We understand.” He paused. “Everyone is very worried about you, you are right about that. But I know you. I know what you are made of.”

  It was the most honest and personal thing she had ever heard him say, and she was sure her mouth was still open as he turned and left the room.

  From the front window seat she watched him leave down the garden path. She let the kitten curl up in her lap, then waited until Dr. Gray was no longer in sight, before turning to his little present and opening it to page one.

  “Right, well now, what is it you two wanted to talk to me about?”

  Adam gave a little cough and looked as if he was going to bolt.

  “Adam . . .” Adeline started, feeling more familiar with him ever since he had come by with the kitten.

  The farmer shuffled a bit in his seat by the fireplace in the Grover front parlour. “We’ve been thinking, Dr. Gray and I, about trying to make a place in honour of Jane Austen. In Chawton. Maybe the old steward’s cottage.”

  Adeline looked over at Dr. Gray, who was sitting on the small settee in front of the bay window. “The two of you cooked this up? Two men?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid.” Dr. Gray grinned at her almost sheepishly. “It would be a big project—we’d need to incorporate as a charity or a trust of some kind, then find the money to acquire the property and any artifacts we can get our hands on, including a lot of what’s kicking about the old Knight estate, I suspect.”

  “Have you talked to Miss Frances yet about any of this?”

  The two men shook their heads.

  “The Knights still own the cottage as far as I know,” Adeline said with her typical sense of authority. “So you’re going to have to start there—and with old Mr. Knight so ill, it may not be the best time to raise any of this.”

  “Well, what do you think?” Dr. Gray asked gently. “Would you be interested in helping?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Am I a project then, too?”

  “No, not at all—I mean, I—we—wouldn’t ask if we didn’t think you’d normally want to help.”

  “If I was still normal, you mean.”

  Dr. Gray sighed and could feel both their eyes now upon him, making him unusually flustered. “No, again, not at all—we just wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to help if you weren’t up to it, right, Adam? We just wanted to invite you to join. Just in case.”

  Adeline stopped rocking in her chair next to Adam on the sofa by the fire. “Okay, fine, count me in—I surely have nothing better to do. So, it’s the three of us to start, and hopefully of course Miss Knight, if she’s up to it herself. We’ll need to get a solicitor on board, too—Samuel was training with one over in Alton when he got called up. . . .”

  “Andrew Forrester.”

  She looked over at Dr. Gray, surprised as always by his razor-sharp memory. “You know him, then?”

  “We went to school together.”

  “You’re the same age?” she said in surprise again. “Really? He just seems so . . . old. Or at least old-fashioned. And quite a stickler for detail, as I understand. He might not want to get involved with something as amateur as this.”

  “Why don’t I ask him about first steps at least?” Dr. Gray said to them both.

  Adam concurred, then he and Dr. Gray both waited for Adeline, with her natural air of authority, to resume talking. She looked at their expectant faces and asked, “And what will we call ourselves then? The Society for . . .”

  “ . . . the Preservation of . . . ?” Dr. Gray suggested.

  “How about simply the Jane Austen Society?” Adam spoke up without missing a beat, and the other two both turned to him in surprise.

  “Perfect,” agreed Adeline, a wide smile breaking across her face for the first time in weeks. “Absolutely perfect.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Chawton, Hampshire

  December 17, 1945

  A few mornings later, Dr. Gray ran into Andrew Forrester as he was leaving Mr. Knight’s sickbed. Eager to speak with Andrew on behalf of the newly formed society, Dr. Gray asked if they could take a walk outdoors to talk in private.

  They exited from the southside door of the Great House and walked along the lower bricked terrace surrounded by towering conical yew hedges. They then proceeded along a gravel path adjoined on one side by deep forest until they reached the upper terrace, a low-walled site topped with lattice brickwork, fanciful balust
ers, and a view of the entire estate below.

  “Okay, we seem to be far enough out of earshot now,” announced a bemused Andrew. He looked down at the beautiful Elizabethan house and the sloping expanse of snow-covered lawn before them, recalling the hours of tobogganing they had done there as boys. “You said you had a proposal to make me.”

  As Dr. Gray now described the “little project,” as he liked to call it, Andrew at first was not sure that he needed to hear more. After all, he had read a few of the Austen books over the years and enjoyed them well enough, but the idea of devoting hours each month to preserving her physical history in the small farming village of Chawton seemed—as fastidious as he was—a bit exacting for his moderate level of interest.

  But as his old friend spoke, Andrew realized that the very thing the society wanted to do might soon be out of reach. He was the only one of them who knew just what was at stake, for Frances most of all. If Mr. Knight had his way, the entire estate could end up one day in the hands of some unknown distant male relative, and then who knew what would happen to any of it. Worse still, the new will included a particularly punitive clause, one that provided Frances with nothing more than a small annual allowance and a right to reside in the steward’s cottage only for so long as the property belonged to the Knights. The minute any male heir sold off the cottage, Frances would essentially be homeless, in what appeared to be a backdoor attempt to keep the cottage from being turned into some kind of Austen amusement park. It was as if Mr. Knight had already been clued into the society’s plans.