by Joan Aiken
“Oh,” cried Jane, blushing, “I am sure there would have been no danger of that! Indeed I have not time for half that I wish to say! I long to make apologies, excuses, to urge something for myself. I have been so unfriendly, so rebuffing. If your compassion does not stand my friend —”
“You are too scrupulous!” cried Emma warmly, squeezing her hand. “Everybody is so perfectly satisfied, delighted, even —”
“You are very kind, but I know what my manners were to you. So cold and artificial! I had always a part to act. It was a life of deceit. I know that I disgusted you. Frank — Mr Churchill — once told me something that you had said to him regarding my reserve — that it was a most repulsive quality —”
“Pray, say no more! I feel that all the apologies should be on my side. When I think of that picnic — Let us forgive one another at once. We must do whatever is to be done quickest, and I think our feelings will lose no time there.”
Here now, thought Jane, is the real Emma, and why have I been so blind as never to see her before?
“Oh!” she cried out, “why were we not friends from the very beginning?”
“And the next news,” said Emma with a smile of comprehension, “the next news, I suppose, will be that we are to lose you — just as I begin to know you.”
And how much do I know you? wondered Jane as she watched Emma cross the street and walk rapidly towards Mr Knightley, who stood outside the Crown. Why are you in such abounding spirits? Is it entirely because of my news? Or is there something more?
Mrs Weston’s friends were soon made happy by the news of a daughter, safely born to her; and shortly after that a most startling, an almost unbelievable rumour began to percolate through the village.
This was no less than the engagement of Emma Woodhouse to Mr Knightley; kept secret from every soul, apparently, until Mrs Weston’s recovery made her the properest party to help reconcile old Mr Woodhouse to the arrangement. — It had been agreed that, for the time being, Mr Knightley should leave Donwell Abbey and live at Hartfield; in no other possible way could Mr Woodhouse, never at any time a friend to matrimony, have been reconciled to the marriage.
Mrs Elton, when the tidings reached the vicarage, was incredulous, then disgusted. “Poor Knightley — poor fellow! Sad business for him. How could he be so taken in? There would be an end of all pleasant intercourse with him. Shocking plan, living together. It would never do. She knew a family near Maple Grove who tried it, and had been obliged to separate before the end of the first quarter.”
Mr Elton hoped the young lady’s pride would now be contented; no doubt she had always meant to catch Knightley if she could.
Jane, receiving the news, felt a surprising, a shaming pang. There, she thought ruefully, is another little bit of my heart broken. How many times can a woman’s heart be broken in the course of a lifetime? I had believed that I was wholly recovered from my childish worship — for such it almost was — of Mr Knightley; but this seems to show that I mistook myself. I find that becoming entirely adult is a far slower process than one supposes … Knightley is a better man than Frank; I cannot deny it; and Emma Woodhouse is remarkably lucky to have him; and he will be good for her, he will soon teach her that it is not necessary for happiness to be the first in consequence; though I believe she has been learning that for some time now. It is queer: I have noticed a change in her ever since the day at Donwell and that dreadful Picnic at Box Hill. Perhaps her own behaviour then taught her a lesson, when she had leisure to think it over. Knightley will be good for her; and I shall be good for Frank. But Frank will be good for me too; I am sure he will be kind, and unfailingly cheerful, and cherish me and show me things to laugh about. — And he did know my friends at Weymouth, Rachel and Matt and Sam.
A note soon came from Randalls: Frank would be there next day. Could Miss Fairfax be spared for the afternoon?
Jane had already been for a carriage-ride with Mrs Weston, her future mother-in-law: a long, comfortable heart-to-heart, during which Jane had wept a little, and unburdened herself, and received assurances that what she and Frank had done was not so very bad, could readily be forgiven, and they all loved her as a daughter already, could not be happier at Frank’s choice. Indeed she soon felt that in Mrs Weston, kind, domestic, and fond of female company — and who had, after all, known her from the age of six — she might well discover more of a mother than Mrs Campbell, friendly but always absorbed in the Analytical Journal, had ever been.
At Randalls, there was Frank: loving, laughing, half ashamed of the long imposture, half ready to boast about it. His welcome to Jane was irresistible. Emma and her father had come as well, to visit the baby, and Emma said teasingly to Frank,
“I do suspect that in the midst of your perplexities you had very great amusement in tricking us all! I am sure it was a consolation to you?”
“Oh, no, no, no! How can you suspect me of such a thing? I was the most miserable wretch.”
“No; I am sure it was a source of high entertainment to you. Perhaps I am the readier to suspect because, to tell you the truth, I think it might have been some amusement to myself. I think there is a little likeness between us; if not in ourselves, in our destiny, which bids fair to connect us with two characters so superior to our own.”
“True, true,” he answered warmly.
“Do you remember the wedding game that we used to play?” Emma said to Jane when the two girls, apart from the others, were walking in Mrs Weston’s herb garden.
“I always hated it,” said Jane involuntarily.
“How queer! Why?”
“I don’t quite know. Perhaps because I was afraid that I would never get married. I was so plain. And I hated talking about clothes, because I never had any new ones of my own.”
“And now you are so elegant!” Emma laughed. “Do you know, I used to envy you so! I almost hated you, because my mother used to listen to you playing the piano; she never listened to me. And she left you that hundred pounds. For years I bore you a grudge over that. And people were always saying we should be friends, because we were the same age; that seemed, somehow, to make us into rivals. And you were so much better than I was at everything — lessons, and music and races —”
“How horrible! I suppose,” said Jane, thinking, “In a small neighbourhood such as this, people like us, who have some similarities, are almost forced into rivalry by their acquaintances continually comparing them —”
“And then, later, when you kept going away and coming back — then I envied you even more. Because you had seen the world and I had not! London — the West Indies — Weymouth; can you believe it, I have never left Highbury in my whole existence! I think that is why I like to make up stories about people. It is something I can do, it gives me a feeling of power, of being able to alter their lives.”
“Rather dangerous?” said Jane doubtfully.
“Very much so! Now, I believe you are right. It led me into idle, mischievous ways — matchmaking, trying to dissuade poor little Harriet from wishing to marry Robert Martin.”
“Did she wish to, then? And you dissuaded her?”
“Yes I did; to my black shame be it said. And worse than that! But all came right; she is to marry him after all, now.” A shade of trouble, and then a blush, crossed Emma’s face; Jane wondered if Knightley (whom she had not seen since the engagement was announced) had any hand in the business, and was confirmed in her guess when Emma said, “Mr Knightley put it right. Mr Knightley always puts me right when I go wrong. I think that he and I have always loved one another, though we did not discover it until so very recently. When we are married, he says that I had better begin to write novels — that will satisfy the inventive part of my frivolous nature.”
“Oh!” cried Jane on a simple note of pure sorrow, “What a great deal of time we have wasted!” With an aching sense of loss she remembered those acorn tea-cups that she had kept for so long, in hopes that some day Emma would come and share a small festivity with her. Half
mocking herself, and Emma too, she added, “And Mr Knightley always wanted us to be friends!”
“Yes, and if we had been we should have changed each other’s lives.”
“To an incalculable extent,” agreed Jane, thinking of Rachel Dixon. “Now we shall never have the chance; it is too late.”
And Emma said with equal sadness: “Yes, that is true. But at least we have stopped being enemies.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joan Aiken was born in Sussex in 1924. She was the daughter of the American poet, Conrad Aiken; her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge, also became a novelist. Before joining the ‘family business’ herself, Joan had a variety of jobs, including working for the BBC, the United Nations Information Centre and then as features editor for a short story magazine. Her first children’s novel, The Kingdom and the Cave, was published in 1960.
Joan Aiken wrote over a hundred books for young readers and adults and is recognized as one of the classic authors of the twentieth century. Amanda Craig, writing in The Times, said: ‘She was a consummate story-teller, one that each generation discovers anew’. Her best-known books are those in the James III series, of which The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was the first title, published in 1962 and awarded the Lewis Carroll prize. Both that and Black Hearts in Battersea have been filmed. Her books are internationally acclaimed and she received the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the United States as well as the Guardian Award for Fiction in this country for The Whispering Mountain.
Joan Aiken was decorated with an MBE for her services to children’s books. She died in 2004.
Also by Joan Aiken
THE SILENCE OF HERONDALE
THE TROUBLE WITH PROJECT X
HATE BEGINS AT HOME
THE RIBS OF DEATH
THE WINDSCREEN WEEPERS
THE EMBROIDERED SUNSET
THE BUTTERFLY PICNIC
DIED ON A RAINY SUNDAY
VOICES IN AN EMPTY HOUSE
CASTLE BAREBANE
THE FIVE-MINUTE MARRIAGE
THE SMILE OF THE STRANGER
THE LIGHTNING TREE
THE YOUNG LADY FROM PARIS
FOUL MATTER
MANSFIELD REVISITED
DECEPTION
BLACKGROUND
EMMA WATSON
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First published by Victor Gollancz Limited 1990
St Martin’s Griffin edition published 1997
This ebook published by RHCP Digital 2018
Text copyright © The Estate of Joan Aiken, 1990
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978–1–448–12044–4
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