When they passed the village common at the triangular perimeter of the Alton town line, they could see ahead the opening up of vast farm fields bordered along the lane-way by holly and blackthorn hedgerows. Sheep could be glimpsed through the greenery, and in the distance several Shropshire horses could be seen pulling at last year’s desiccated fruit still hanging from an orchard grove. On the other side of the lane-way was a long row of single dwellings, some of them little thatched cottages and terrace houses set right on the road, others more substantial homes—the old estates, manses, and farmhouses of the past—set much farther back and preceded by stately long private drives.
“Well, you weren’t kidding,” Yardley was saying as they walked closely together, arms linked. “Some of these cottages are so small and self-contained, I feel like a bunch of munchkins could pop out at any minute.”
“I think quaint is the word you are looking for.” Mimi laughed. “I love it.”
“I can imagine your face now, when Jack told you he’d bought you that cottage. You must have felt like you’d died and gone to heaven.”
She smiled in recalling the memory. “That’s exactly how I felt. So, if you look up ahead at the end of this road, you can see the fields starting up again. The village sits plop in the middle of what feels like one big farm.”
“You know, I never told you this before, but when I was a young lad I actually dreamt of being a farmer.”
Mimi stopped to stare at Yardley. “You are full of surprises.”
“No, seriously, sometimes I still do. A gentleman farmer though. Back-breaking work and way too dependent on the weather for a full-time vocation.”
Up ahead they could see a fairly stocky blond man with a cap on his head leaving one of the little cottages on the right-hand side of the lane. Something about him struck Mimi as so familiar.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “I know that guy! I met him here, years ago, when I was just out of college.”
“Ah, yes, your first pilgrimage.” Yardley watched the man walk slowly up the lane in front of them, his head slightly bowed, two or three books held in the curve of his right arm. “Very earthy looking—very D. H. Lawrence. You do have an eye for these things, I’ll give you that.”
She playfully whacked Yardley’s side with the back of her hand. “It was so sad—he’d lost both his brothers in the Great War. It was one of the reasons I made Home & Glory years later.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Yardley said facetiously, “you’re a movie star. . . .”
Mimi ignored his playful dig. “He helped me find the graves, remember, of Cassandra and their mother? He’d never read a word of Jane Austen himself, though. It’s sad—he looks so, I don’t know, lonely somehow. The way he’s walking. He looked lonely then, too.”
“Where are we heading, by the way?”
“The first house on the corner of Wolf’s Lane, with the rosebushes out front and the green door. A Dr. Gray’s house.”
They watched up ahead as the man in the cap walked a few more yards and then turned to cross the street at the intersection of Wolf’s Lane and Winchester Road. He moved the books to his left arm, then knocked on the green front door of the rose-covered house with his right.
“Well, what do you know?” said Yardley. “One of the romantics.”
They looked at each other and smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Chawton, Hampshire
February 2, 1946
The Second Meeting of the Jane Austen Society
The first order of business was to welcome Frances Knight, Evie Stone, Mimi Harrison, and Yardley Sinclair to the Jane Austen Society and to approve both Frances Knight and Yardley Sinclair as the fourth and fifth trustees of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust. It had already been decided that Mimi should not take on the role and responsibilities of trusteeship, given her permanent residence in the States. And, as with Adam, Evie Stone would also be spared any of the possible legal, financial, and administrative burdens of involvement with the trust.
In light of his other role as executor of the Knight estate, Andrew was quick to point out Miss Knight’s potential interest in the cottage and the possibility of conflicts arising as a result. Accordingly, Miss Knight agreed to abstain from any vote on the use of trust funds to purchase the cottage or any other property to which she might still end up heir.
“So,” Dr. Gray said to the room from his seat near the front window, “we have five trustees in place, and a mission statement in the minutes that reflects our goal of acquiring the cottage as a future museum site in honour of Jane Austen. As chairman, I move that, in addition to our December motion to post a notice in the papers seeking public subscriptions, we now pursue with haste the possibility of any necessary bank loans.”
“Do we need to act so fast?” asked Evie.
“Yes, I’m afraid,” replied Andrew. “Although we have no reason yet to worry, a potential heir could launch a claim at any point within the next twelvemonth. If they manage to get a court order in their favour, they could then dispose of the property or any portion of it in whatever manner they choose. We want to be ready to make a quick offer should that happen, in the hopes of staving off any other competitive bids.
“Of course, if the estate resolves itself as it should”—Andrew looked pointedly in Frances’s direction—“Miss Knight could then do whatever she wanted with the cottage, so long as it is sold at market value or less. A trustee must not profit—or be perceived as profiting—unduly from a sale of their own asset back to the trust. Even at fair market, we’d still need a court order to approve any such sale by a trustee, although I don’t see any real issue with that, given the charitable purposes of all of this.”
“Exactly how much money do you need?” Mimi asked from her seat on the sofa facing him.
Dr. Gray glanced quickly at Andrew and gave a little cough. “Five thousand pounds, give or take.”
“I’d like to help out then, if I may.” Mimi looked about the room at the faces staring openly in astonishment at the movie star in their midst. “I’d like to pledge five thousand pounds to get this all started.”
Adeline watched with amusement from her chair next to Dr. Gray as both he and Andrew started to chivalrously shake their heads at the offer.
“Miss Harrison, really, that is too generous of you,” Dr. Gray spoke up. “We simply cannot take such a sum from you. I’m afraid we must insist.”
“May I at least provide something of value as collateral then, should you borrow any monies?”
Adeline continued to watch as Dr. Gray practically blushed under Mimi’s persistence.
“In fact, I brought something here today that I could lend to the society.” She took a small velvet box from her purse on the floor next to her and held it open.
Inside sat the two topaz crosses.
“They were acquired for me recently at auction, ironically for exactly five thousand pounds.”
Andrew got up and came over, well aware of the two necklaces from the Sotheby’s catalogue. “May I?” He held the box up to the front window until the afternoon winter light caught the amber in its dwindling rays.
“They belonged to both Jane and her sister—gifts from their sailor brother,” Mimi was telling them all. “They are the only known pieces of jewellery belonging to Austen, in addition to a bracelet and this ring. My engagement ring actually.”
A little self-consciously she now took the ring off and held it out before her, then watched as Adam, the farmer she had met years ago, came forward shyly. He held the ring in his hand and showed it to Adeline, who had joined him by his side.
“All these objects are only going to increase in value,” Yardley said, speaking up for the first time from his seat next to Mimi on the sofa. “The more money we can raise—and fast—the better.”
“Then let’s get drafting that advertisement, shall we?” Andrew asked the room.
As the rest of the meeting proceeded, Evie Stone remained in the far
corner of the drawing room, sitting on a little piano stool that must have belonged to Dr. Gray’s late wife. Evie was indulging her always active imagination as she observed the five trustees before her. For months she had been watching the Knight family’s lawyer not look at Miss Knight whenever he had the chance, and her do the same, and Josephine—as unromantic and tight-lipped as she was—had let something slip once about old Mr. Knight wrecking Miss Frances’s one chance at love with a smart village boy. On the other hand, Mimi and Yardley seemed to be chummy, but in a familiar, brother-sister kind of way.
But years of reading Jane Austen had made Evie alert to characters who, for whatever reason, can’t see things right in front of their noses, and right now she was most intrigued by Adeline Grover and Dr. Benjamin Gray.
Dr. Gray was sitting on the right-hand side of Adeline, and as she took notes, he would occasionally lean over and point out a word or two that she had skipped or got wrong, and Adeline seemed to be vacillating between letting his hand redirect her pen and smacking it away. At one point Evie had got up to serve more tea, and when she offered the cup and saucer to Dr. Gray, he had immediately taken the pad of paper away from Adeline and leaned back so that the teacup could be passed to her instead. He had then tried to assume the note taking himself, only for Adeline to reject the cup of tea and firmly take the pad of paper back from him. Dr. Gray was known in the village for his chivalry, but his solicitousness towards Adeline at this moment was most noteworthy for her total rejection of it.
Some kind of battle was going on between these two, Evie was convinced. At the recent Christmas Eve gathering, Adeline had been in full mourning, pale and withholding, and uncharacteristically but understandably bitter. Dr. Gray had been particularly solicitous towards her then as well, in a way that Evie had recognized as being something beyond mere sympathy for Adeline’s situation—and something beyond Evie’s own ken.
And there was another moment blazed on her flawless memory—from more than two years past—when Dr. Gray had come by the schoolhouse one day, almost sheepishly, to speak to Miss Lewis about her class syllabus. They had been talking about Evie’s own father, and the reading list Miss Lewis had given him for his long convalescence, and Dr. Gray had smiled teasingly at the teacher and said, “I’d like to see such a list sometime, if I may.” Dr. Gray seemed to have always had more than a passing interest in Adeline, her preoccupations, and her pain, as if she were a mystery of some kind that he were trying to get to the bottom of.
Evie Stone, then all of fourteen years old, had picked up on the feeling that everything being said in the little schoolroom was not at all what was wanting to be said. She wasn’t even sure the two grown-ups in front of her knew what that was. There just seemed to be a ton of thwarted energy in the room between Adeline and Dr. Gray, as if they were somehow being held back by outside forces, or maybe even forces of their own making. After all, if Evie recalled correctly, Miss Lewis had just become engaged to her childhood sweetheart, and Dr. Gray was quite a bit older and already the subject of much village gossip. If they were flirting, it was so subtle and indistinct as to appear undetectable even by them. Evie now wondered if that was how people ended up alone and adrift, like Miss Frances and Mr. Forrester. Evie was determined never to become that way in life, for in that direction she saw a quiet but preventable tragedy, if only people could be brave enough to go after what they really wanted.
At times such as this, Evie was grateful to be only sixteen and laser-focused on her secret ambitions. There would be time enough for romance one day, but for now it would only get in the way, however much Tom in the stables might circle her, or the much-older Adam Berwick might act so awkward and shy.
But Evie was indeed very young, and perhaps not quite as intelligent as she liked to think.
Adam Berwick sat in the opposite corner of the drawing room from Evie. But he was not watching her discreetly or amorously. He, too, had spent his young life in a fog of grief and singular focus, fed by his own world of books. His dreams and ambitions for higher education had been ripped out from under him by the unfortunate toll of the First World War on his family. He had gone to work every day merely to survive, saving for himself a few hours every night to disappear into fictional worlds of others’ making. He was hoping to find some answers inside these books, answers for why he didn’t care about some things and cared too much about others. He had always felt different from everyone else around him, different in a way that was so essential to his being that it practically blocked everything else out, it was so huge. It was as if a whole other world were inside him, so big that he couldn’t see it without somehow getting completely out of his own way. But there was no one to help him do that, and try as he might, he couldn’t do it on his own. Not with his innate temperament, the lack of family support, or the particular lessons he had been forced to learn so far in life.
When he first started reading Jane Austen, Adam had immediately identified with Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. He had worried about Darcy, about how he could be in such obvious lust with the heroine Elizabeth Bennet and yet make such bewildering social missteps instead—missteps that Adam himself could relate to, despite not being an educated man of property, wealth, and high rank.
Darcy just couldn’t help himself, that much was clear to Adam—even if it wasn’t clear to Darcy. The character would spend over one hundred pages rationalizing all sorts of behaviour and reactions, grabbing on to straws, projecting onto Bingley the undesirability of marrying into the Bennet family, and rupturing his best friend’s budding romance with the heroine’s sister—all the while not understanding his own reasons for acting like this. To Adam’s mind, Darcy fancied himself an appointed puppet master, pulling others’ strings—the strings of those less able than him in some way, dependent on his intellect and judgment and financial largesse. For the first half of the book at least, Darcy seemed to be using Bingley as a strange sort of proxy for himself—trying to enact through Bingley’s and Jane’s break-up the extinction of his own feelings for Elizabeth.
Adam had slowly realized, the more he read, that he had made his social self a strange, sad proxy for his true self, too. It was as if he had decided early on to not process certain unspoken attractions, but to retreat instead, and his social person lived one sort of life while his inner self remained closed off even from himself. Now he was nearing forty-six years of age, and his mother was not well. One day soon she, too, would be gone, and he would live all alone in that empty house until he might as well be gone, too.
Looking about the room, he finally understood that he had hatched the idea of the Jane Austen Society in part because of his loneliness. He had no essential family ties tethering him to any kind of legacy, no one that would miss a thing about him when he was dead. He was wrong about that, of course, as lonely people often are; everyone in the village had grown to rely on him for small chores about their properties, as well as the pleasant and reliable rumbling sound of his wagon heralding the changing of the seasons. The tip of his cap at the doors to the library. The cradling of a new puppy in his arms. The little hand-carved wooden rattles left on the doorstep whenever a baby was born.
He felt gratified, sitting there in Dr. Gray’s drawing room, that the society was finally taking shape. But he also felt apart from everyone except Evie, whose own family circumstances and thirst for learning seemed to equal his own.
And he remained dumbstruck at the vision of Mimi Harrison, who, upon their introduction on the steps of Dr. Gray’s house, had immediately reminded Adam of their first time meeting over a dozen years ago. He considered it a strange twist of fate, how that one encounter in the parish churchyard had led them both here.
He was also relieved to see that Adeline Grover finally had a bit of her colour back—perhaps even too much of it. She was keeping herself busy taking notes of the meeting. Dr. Gray now sat across from her (having moved at some point in a fluster of papers and pens and teacups and chairs), with Andrew Forrester on one s
ide of him and Miss Frances on the other. All three of them as children had been two years ahead of Adam in the little village school, Mr. Knight having been too cheap to arrange for his only daughter’s education at home. Andrew and Dr. Gray had been friendly rivals back then, and at one point were rumoured to have formed a little love triangle with Miss Frances, but Dr. Gray had never stood a chance against Andrew Forrester as far as Adam could tell. Miss Frances had been a noted beauty as a young woman, with her pale grey cat’s eyes and long golden tresses kept half up and half loose about her neck, but over time everything had started a slow fade, until the eyes were now pale to the point of haunting, and the hair was greying and kept in a tight bun high up on the back of her head.
That left Yardley Sinclair, sitting next to Adeline, ever intent on her notes before her.
And—just like that—just like it always happens—Adam Berwick was in love.
Adam walked Adeline home in the darkness as far as her front gate. She was thinking of inviting him in for supper, but he seemed distracted and quite unlike his usual self. She wondered if the launch of the society had been a little too much for him, given how naturally shy he was. She did not recall him saying a single word at the meeting. That was a shame, because on his occasional visits during her recent illness and loss, they had taken to discovering their mutual love of Jane Austen, and she had found him to be an extremely insightful reader of the books.
On this walk home they had been discussing Adam’s favourite character, Elizabeth Bennet.
“I never thought it believable,” Adeline was saying, “that someone as smart as Lizzie would fall for a cad like Wickham.”
“It was all Darcy’s doing,” Adam replied, “slighting her at that first ball. Gets her back up—makes her want to find reasons to dislike him.”
“‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.’ Ouch.” Adeline laughed. “It would take some doing to get me back after words like that, I can tell you. But you’re so right—she is vulnerable for once to a fake like Wickham because Darcy’s hurt her, and it’s getting in the way of her seeing things clearly.”
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