First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen

by Charlie Lovett

  “Where are we going?” said Victoria.

  “Hampshire,” said Sophie. “A place called Busbury Park.”

  —

  SOPHIE WAS WAITING FOR Victoria outside the hotel when she got a text from Eric. “I came round to your place last night,” it said, “but you weren’t there. Hoping you are OK. If you need anything, or even if you just want to talk, call me. I’ll be waiting.” He was sweet, she thought. She didn’t know if Winston’s disappearance that morning was proof that Eric was right about him or that he was dead wrong.

  “OK, let’s review the situation,” said Victoria after Sophie had brought her up to date. “What do we think of Winston at this point? Marry, kill, or shag?”

  “Well last night it was definitely shag,” said Sophie, blushing. “Shag times two.”

  “Go, Sophie!” said Victoria.

  “But after that stunt he pulled this morning I am seriously thinking about moving him into the kill column.”

  “So Winston is a question mark. What about Eric?”

  “I certainly don’t want to kill him,” said Sophie. “He’s a nice guy, I think. He’s a friend. But I’m not sure he’s in the shagging column yet.”

  “So you’ll marry him.”

  “I doubt that.”

  They drove in silence for a time. Finally Sophie said, “I think there are more important things today than my love life.”

  “I know,” said Victoria. “I was just trying to lighten the mood. If you’d rather, we can talk about the fact that Winston is a thief, Eric is a liar, and some guy named Smedley may have killed Uncle Bertram and be after you.”

  “Us, now,” said Sophie.

  “Right, he may be after us.”

  “You forgot the worst part.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That if we don’t come up with some evidence to the contrary and fast, Winston might reveal Jane Austen as a plagiarist.”

  “That’s the worst part?” said Victoria. “Not the whole ‘somebody is trying to murder us’ bit?”

  “To me, it is.”

  “Well,” said Victoria, “either way, we’d better get a move on.”

  —

  FINDING BUSBURY PARK WAS not difficult, but finding a way in was another thing altogether. Driving along tiny lanes, they had nearly circumnavigated the tall stone wall that surrounded the estate when they could go no farther. In front of them was a hedgerow; to their left, the wall of the estate; and to their right, past a row of ancient shade trees, the open fields of Hampshire.

  “What about that gatehouse a little way back?” said Sophie. “Maybe we can climb the gate.” There was nothing else to do, so Victoria backed the car nearly a quarter of a mile down the lane and parked in front of the tall iron gate. There had been a matching gate on the other side of the estate that looked even more imposing. Sophie got the idea that this was the back entrance. It was not the sort of gate, in the end, that either of them could climb over, but Sophie managed to slide underneath and into the grounds of Busbury Park.

  “You always were the skinny one,” said Victoria. “There’s no way I’ll get under there.”

  “Wait there,” said Sophie. “I have an idea.” Next to the gate was a small two-story gatehouse, its outer wall forming part of the wall that surrounded the estate. Sophie was not surprised to find the door locked, but the board that covered one of the front windows was loose, and with one good tug, she pulled it off. The window behind had been broken and Sophie used the board to knock loose the glass hanging from the frame. In another minute she had climbed through and stood in a gloomy room, covered in what must have been several decades of dust. There was a simple stone fireplace against the far wall, and to her right was a solid carved chair and a heavy oak table. Rectangles of light on the sooty walls indicated where pictures had once hung, but other than the two pieces of furniture, the room was empty. She crossed the room, heading for a door to her left, when she suddenly felt a chill through her whole body.

  “Somebody tread on your grave,” Uncle Bertram used to say when the same thing would happen to her as a child. Sophie did not believe in ghosts or the supernatural, and had said so to Uncle Bertram many times when he guided her toward books like Dracula or The Turn of the Screw.

  “A man with so many books should know what’s real and what isn’t,” she told him one Christmas Eve when her father had let the two of them into the library at Bayfield House to read A Christmas Carol.

  But Uncle Bertram had only smiled and shaken his head and said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Miss Sophie Collingwood, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Well, she supposed Uncle Bertram had his answers now. After she had stood on the spot for a minute or two, the feeling, which was at once eerie and comforting, passed and she heard Victoria calling her name.

  She opened the door to her left and found herself in a smaller but brighter room. There was no furniture, but the window, which looked out onto the lane, was intact. It was a simple matter to unlock the window, throw up the sash, and call out to Victoria. Sophie pulled her sister up through the window, and in another minute they had thrown the bolt of the front door and were standing outside in the grounds of Busbury Park.

  “You might want this,” said Victoria, handing Sophie her bag. “Didn’t think you wanted to leave your stolen goodies on the side of the road where any passing bibliophile could just walk away with them.”

  “Thanks,” said Sophie, horrified that she had left it behind.

  “And I brought a torch,” said Victoria. “Just in case. So what now?”

  “Now,” said Sophie, “we go find Richard Mansfield.”

  Hampshire, 1797

  “YOU HAVE RISEN EARLY, sister,” said Cassandra as she stepped into the dressing room to find Jane at her writing table, working away by candlelight in the predawn of a December day.

  “I find it peaceful to write while others sleep,” said Jane.

  She had hardly been away from her writing table for the past few weeks. Since her visit to Mr. Mansfield’s grave, his voice had been driving her. All thoughts of Mr. Cadell’s rejection were now forgotten, and Jane focused only on those words she had recalled so clearly in the churchyard at Busbury: “Promise me that, until we meet again, you will not cease to write.” As she worked, she heard, too, Mr. Mansfield’s voice from an earlier occasion—the day she had finished reading him Elinor and Marianne. “It might,” he had said, “benefit from being written as a conventional narrative.” It was, in fact, this task upon which Jane had focused all her efforts in the weeks since her visit to Busbury. She found that with Mr. Mansfield’s encouragement the work seemed easy. Elinor and Marianne and the rest of the Dashwoods now occupied almost her every waking thought. With the Christmas theatricals, balls, and visits from family all on the horizon, she knew she would need to set aside her work soon, but that thought only drove her to rise earlier and stay up later than anyone else in the household.

  “Is it still the revision of Elinor and Marianne that occupies you so?” said her sister. “I do hope you will share the new version with the family.”

  Jane laid down her quill and looked up at the smiling face of her sister in the candlelight. “I fear I have neglected you these past few weeks, my dear Cassandra,” she said. “I am not a good sister when a story has hold of me like this.”

  “Nothing could keep you from being the most wonderful of sisters,” said Cassandra, “least of all your commitment to a talent given to you by God.”

  “Your patience is a gift to me,” said Jane, rising from her chair and crossing to embrace her sister. “Now I must tell you that, while I shall certainly fulfill your wishes and read from my novel when our family is gathered together, I shall not read from the pages of Elinor and Marianne.”

  “Indeed,” said Cassandra with a little yelp of excitement. �
��Is there a new story on your table?”

  “Not a new story,” said Jane, “for the Dashwoods still fill my time. But a friend has suggested that a change of title would not be unwise and I have finally hit on one that I find satisfactory.”

  “And who is this friend with whom you discuss your work away from your own sister?” teased Cassandra.

  “I should have said a late friend,” said Jane quietly.

  “Oh, Jane, I am sorry. It was Mr. Mansfield, was it not?”

  “Indeed,” said Jane, “and though he is no longer with us, it was Mr. Mansfield who gave me the idea for the new title. I was thinking of him this morning as I prepared to write about Willoughby’s carrying Marianne in from the storm. The two of us made quite a pair—Mr. Mansfield and myself. I with the impetuous eagerness of youth and he with the level head of life experience.”

  “I cannot think you impetuous, good sister.”

  “Nor did I think myself so at the time,” said Jane, laughing at the recollection of how she had denied this very fault to Mr. Mansfield on their first meeting. “But it is good that the wisdom of a little more maturity has shown me to have been so, for it was the contrast between those two remembered characters—old Mr. Mansfield and young Miss Austen—which gave me the idea for my new title.”

  “Well, tease me no longer, sister. What is this title?”

  “I think,” said Jane, “of calling the novel Sense and Sensibility.”

  —

  ALMOST AS SOON AS she had finished Sense and Sensibility, Jane turned her thoughts to the other project she and Mr. Mansfield had discussed: a mock gothic novel that would poke fun at books such as The Mysteries of Udolpho. Her father, who detested the genre, took special delight in the story.

  “What will Mrs. Radcliffe think?” he said, rubbing his hands together and smiling one evening as the party were settling in the sitting room to listen to Jane read from her story.

  “Indeed, Father, I do not wish to cause offense to Mrs. Radcliffe or to any author. But of course if my stories remain forever within the confines of this rectory, I suppose I need not worry about causing offense to the great writers of the land.”

  “Your stories will one day burst the bounds of Steventon,” said her father, “never you fear. And I should pay dearly to see the look on Mrs. Radcliffe’s face when she reads this one. Now, I believe we had reached chapter six and you had promised us a conversation about reading between Susan and Isabella.”

  Jane settled in her chair and began to read the scene in which her heroine, whom she called Susan Moreland—though she was by no means certain that she should keep that name—was discussing the plot of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novel Udolpho with her friend, the shallow and self-serving Isabella Thorpe.

  “When you have finished Udolpho,” said Susan, “we will read The Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

  “And are they horrid?” said Isabella. “Are you sure they are all horrid?”

  “Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read every one of them.”

  “But you must name them!” said Mr. Austen, interrupting Jane’s narrative. “Do not leave us hanging. What deliciously horrid books await Miss Thorpe? For myself, I should put Castle of Wolfenbach on her reading list.”

  “Orphan of the Rhine,” chimed in Cassandra.

  “Oh and you must include Necromancer of the Black Forest,” said Mrs. Austen. “For I have never read a more horrid book.”

  “And Midnight Bell, and Mysterious Warnings,” went on Mr. Austen.

  “Very well,” said Jane, holding up a hand. Interruptions from her readers were not unusual, but this one had been particularly enthusiastic. “I shall provide the particulars of Miss Thorpe’s reading, but now may I proceed with the story?”

  “You may,” said her father, settling back into his chair with a smile. “And do let it be horrid.”

  Jane called the new story simply Susan. It was not that she disliked the title Mr. Mansfield had suggested; rather, she felt that her unfinished novel was not deserving of his title. As she worked through the autumn of 1798 crafting the adventures of her heroine and bringing her ever closer to that edifice where her fate would be decided, Jane wondered if she would be able to make of them a work that could live up to the title Northanger Abbey.

  Hampshire, Present Day

  THE SUMMER HEAT was already bearing down even though it was only midmorning. Sophie and Victoria headed up the overgrown drive, happy for the shelter of the trees that provided shade. After about ten minutes of walking they rounded a bend and a vista opened before them. On a knoll about a quarter mile away they could glimpse a corner of what was certainly the main house. In the valley below was a small lake, with a copse of trees on one side and open fields on the other. Despite the warm fresh air, the park felt as neglected as the gatehouse. Several fallen trees lay untouched; the grass, without sheep to keep it in check, had grown tall and tangled; and even from this distance the lake looked green and choked with algae. No breeze stirred the leaves overhead, and the whole park was draped in silence.

  Yet in spite of all this, Sophie felt she could see the park as, perhaps, Jane Austen had first seen it, as Eliza Bennet had first seen Pemberley—the sun sparkling off the blue water of the lake, the breeze whispering in the trees, the whole park pulsing with life and potential.

  “I guess it was nicer in 1796,” said Victoria.

  “It must have been a beautiful estate,” said Sophie with a sigh. “It’s sad to see it so neglected.”

  “Who knows,” said Victoria, forging ahead, “maybe one day it will be beautiful again.”

  Another few minutes brought them in full view of the house. It had once been grand, certainly—the epitome of the eighteenth-century country house. More like Rosings than Pemberley, Sophie thought—that is, it seemed more intimidating than romantic. But as they drew closer she realized this was due more to its obvious state of disrepair than to any arrogance in the architecture. Weeds grew in the gutters and several of the windows were boarded up. The rest were tightly shuttered. Several large pieces of stone had fallen from the facade. Two wings protruded from the center section of the house, and when they had walked around one of these they saw, a short distance down the hill, the chapel. It looked much older than the house itself, and stood in the shadow of a vast yew tree. A low stone wall surrounded the structure, and Sophie could just see the tops of a few gravestones peeking out of the tall grass.

  Without speaking, she trekked off across the field toward the chapel, and in another minute she was pulling the grass away from one of the more imposing gravestones.

  “It’s hard to read,” said Victoria over Sophie’s shoulder.

  “Nobody’s cleaned it for a couple of hundred years,” said Sophie, kneeling down and running her fingers along the inscription in the crumbling stone. “Edward Newcombe,” she read. “Third Earl of Wintringham, 1750 to . . . I think it says 1811.”

  “And here’s his wife,” said Victoria, who was inspecting the adjacent stone.

  “I doubt a visiting clergyman would get a stone this big or this close to the door,” said Sophie. “Let’s start at the edges.” She took one side of the graveyard and Victoria the other and they began examining the smaller stones that lay near the wall of the churchyard. Sophie was kneeling in deep grass, trying to decipher the inscription on a stone in the most remote corner, when her ankle hit something hard and she stifled a cry of pain. She moved to one side and brushed the dirt and dead grass off of a fallen marker a little more than a foot wide and perhaps twice that long. There was no inscription on the side facing up, so she pried the stone out of the earth and began brushing the damp dirt from the other side. By the time she could read the letters carved on the stone, her hands were coated in dirt.
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  The stone read, simply, “R. M. 1796.”

  This was it. This was Richard Mansfield’s gravestone and it told her nothing, pointed her nowhere. Sophie sat down in the grass and felt empty. She expected to be overcome with emotion, to finally cry those tears she had held inside since Uncle Bertram’s death. But instead she felt nothing. Her world was a blank. The loss of her uncle, the loss of his books, the loss of the family library, and the loss of her literary idol weighed on her as one solid mass and seemed to press the breath out of her body. She might have sat there forever, she thought, but for the one bright thought that slipped into her mind like a shaft of light in the darkness. She had a sister, she thought, as she heard Victoria’s voice. She still had Victoria.

  “Hey Soph, don’t you think we ought to look inside?”

  Inside, thought Sophie. What if there was some further clue inside the chapel? It was a thread of hope—a thin, fragile thread, but she would follow it nonetheless. She hoisted herself up and walked to the west end of the chapel, where Victoria stood in front of a thick wooden door.

  “Locked, I presume,” said Sophie, seeing her glimmer of hope dim.

  “There is a lock,” said Victoria, “but it’s a rusty lock.” With one swift kick, she snapped the latch and the door flew open. “I knew those kickboxing classes would come in handy.” The echo of the door bursting open died down and they stepped into musty gloom.

  “It smells like death,” said Sophie with a shiver.

  “Come on,” said Victoria. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  The narrow windows admitted just enough light that they could read the memorials on the walls without the aid of the torch. On the north wall, wedged between elaborately carved memorials to various members of the Newcombe family, Sophie found a small marble plaque. She read it over several times in silence and then called softly to her sister. Victoria slipped an arm around Sophie’s waist and with her sister at her side, Sophie read the words on the plaque aloud: