Dear Frances,
This letter is so long overdue, that a wiser man would probably consider it ill-advised to ever send. But I find myself unable to leave the past alone. You must allow me to tell you how sorry I am for all the years that we did not speak, and for my misbegotten pride, and—more than anything—for not truly comprehending your unique and inimitable spirit. If I owed you anything, it surely was that.
Patience in love has not been my virtue, and yet in hurrying on, I ended up running a race with no destination, and with bitterness and hurt my sole companions. I can only hope that you have been wiser and kinder to yourself than I, in my neglect, have sadly failed to be.
I am writing this letter in the parlour of Chawton Cottage, where you have just left me, and I put it in your hands on this, Mimi’s wedding day, in the spirit of the friendship I fervently hope we now and forever share.
Yours most admiringly,
Andrew
Frances folded the letter and slipped it back into her skirt pocket. She was most confused. The letter addressed the past, but asked for nothing more. This made it just one more tense occurrence to add to an already bewildering list: the recent discovery that she had a brother, the surreptitious sale of the library out from under Colin, today’s letter terminating her tenancy of Chawton Cottage, and the consequent unburdening to Mimi of her own fiancé’s role in that. It suddenly seemed to Frances that the more she inched forward, the more she grasped for connection, the muckier everything got.
It made a case for staying inside, if nothing else.
But Frances knew that she would have to get up off this bed in a matter of minutes, enter the church alone, advise all the guests that the wedding was off, and then face Andrew in particular with as much equanimity as she could muster.
She lay back on the bed with a final sigh and let her memories drift even further, to her childhood, and to all the famous people that had visited the Great House over the centuries and, just like Mimi Harrison, slept in this very bed. Even the Prince of Wales, when she was just a girl of four. He had pinched her little cheeks at dinner and asked to sit next to her, and she had never forgotten it. Many of the men who had visited seemed to have seen in her the lack of a father, a loving and affectionate one at least—one who truly comprehended her in that affection—and had often singled her out for innocent attention. In this she could have seen the entire arc of her life if she could have been handed a crystal ball—the very thing she hoped, just now, despite the sounds of yelling and vase-throwing from the bedroom next door, she had given Mimi.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Chawton, Hampshire
April 20, 1946
The Wedding
The wedding had been called off.
Frances had come into the parish church just before noon, knocked on the front wooden doors held open in the warm spring air, and announced that Mimi Harrison had just received some difficult news from abroad and would not be getting married that day. The guests had all unwillingly dispersed, and the crowd that had gathered outside the church, including several London news photographers, had let out a collective groan for all their efforts.
The eight members of the society were now the only ones left behind. They sat together as a group in the front pew of the church, Reverend Powell busying himself in the sanctuary out of earshot.
Evie and Dr. Gray were reviewing the letter from the chairman of Alpha Investments, having been ignorant of the whole debacle until Frances’s ominous appearance in the doorway of the church. Mimi sat with her head on Yardley’s shoulder, her eyes stained black by mascara. Across the aisle Adeline was holding Mimi’s bouquet of blush-pink peonies, roses, and ranunculuses. Adam was sitting next to her; Frances and Andrew stood a little to the side of them all.
“I should thank you, Frances,” Mimi finally spoke, “for being so honest with me. A lot of people would not have dared.”
“Well, Andrew,” Dr. Gray spoke up, “I suppose you’ll tell us there’s no hope now for even a roof over Miss Frances’s head.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” He gave Frances at his side a quick, indecipherable look.
“Can we counterbid, for the cottage?” asked Yardley. “Make them an offer they can’t refuse?”
“Even if a majority of the trustees agree,” Andrew replied, “we could still run into trouble as a charity if we bid significantly above fair market value. We may think the cottage is worth whatever cost, and probably one day it will indeed be priceless, but right now it’s worth about three thousand pounds and that’s peanuts to a company like Alpha.”
“But surely we can try?” asked Evie.
“Forgive me, Mimi, but Jack’s on the board, right?” Dr. Gray asked.
She sat up a bit from her slumped position in the pew and nodded. “I suspect my powers of persuasion over him are minimal, though, right now.”
“Mimi”—Andrew stepped forward—“you said just now that Jack must have used the info you were sharing with him to make the deal with Colin, correct?”
She nodded again.
“Forgive me, too, my dear, but is there anything, anything at all, that you know about Jack and his dealings—business or otherwise—that could be used in turn? Seems only fair, under the circumstances.”
The entire row pivoted their heads to look at Andrew Forrester.
“Andrew Henry Forrester!” exclaimed Frances. “Are you suggesting—”
He held up his hand. “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m not suggesting the Austen Society do anything. Only Mimi knows in her heart what to do.” He looked about at all the faces staring at him and decided for the first time in his life to abandon restraint and go for broke.
“Frances, I think we do, too. Let me put that roof over your head, and my heart in your hands. No one ever deserved it more.”
And right then and there, before all seven other members of the Jane Austen Society, Frances Elizabeth Knight began to sob uncontrollably.
“Frances, please, don’t cry,” Andrew was whispering to her gently, patting his jacket pockets to find a handkerchief to console her.
She just kept crying. It was, by far, the most emotion any of them had ever witnessed in her.
“I have literally nothing, Andrew, you know that,” she finally managed to say through her tears. “You know that better than anyone.”
“Frances, darling, that didn’t matter to either of us nearly thirty years ago—why on earth would it matter now?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled at him lovingly for the first time in as long as that. “Are you sure?”
“Frances, I just watched you have your whole world ripped out from under you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have. It would be my honour, truly, to be your husband.”
Yardley ran behind the altar to have a few words with Reverend Powell, who immediately agreed as a representative of the Church of England to conduct the ceremony and dispense with the need for a license.
Adeline jumped up and, with a quick nod from Mimi, shoved the bouquet into Frances’s shaking hands. Evie ran back to the Great House to grab Josephine and Charlotte, knowing they would never forgive her if they missed such a longed-for event.
Frances turned to Mimi. “Are you alright, if we do this?”
“Oh, Frances, it’s the only thing that would make any of this alright.”
With those words of blessing, Frances Elizabeth Knight let Andrew Henry Forrester take her hand and lead her to the altar.
Dr. Gray was standing alone in the lime grove, listening to the bells peal three o’clock. The wedding had been over for a few hours, and the society had enjoyed Mimi’s cancelled wedding breakfast in the courtyard, courtesy of Charlotte and Josephine. Immediately afterwards, Yardley had gone with Adam to Adeline’s house to start going through all the books, Mimi had collapsed in the guest bedroom, Evie was helping Miss Frances pack quickly for her honeymoon, and Andrew had rushed back to Alton to wrap up some paperwork b
efore catching the train to Brighton with his new bride.
Dr. Gray looked about himself at the surrounding fields, the walled garden up on the hill, the ha-ha that ran alongside the lime grove to keep out the sheep. He remembered walking here in the rain with Adeline last summer, the many visits to old Mr. Knight in his bedroom, the Christmas Eve service and the reading of the will shortly thereafter, an event which he now saw as the turn of the screw in all their lives. He allowed himself to think even further back, to the burial of his late wife in the parish graveyard, and his own wedding day decades earlier inside the little church, and the playing in the woodland with Frances and Andrew as little kids.
All of these memories, big and small, were equal in only one—but one very significant—way. They all belonged to the past, they were invisible matter, they could leave no trace or mark on the present. Only life in the moment could do that—only this second in the hour—only this one fraction of time that was gone before you could even complete the thought. It was all both that ephemeral, and that infinitely reliable.
If Dr. Benjamin Gray could have strung even just a few seconds from the past into something permanent, it would have been the feel of Jennie’s cheek against his neck. He missed that so much—missed her loving touch—missed being loved.
Instead he was reduced to being a lonely widower in need of salvation. Goodness knows where Liberty Pascal got some of this stuff, but when it came to Adeline Grover, Liberty never appeared to miss her mark. Dr. Gray had not been able to stop thinking about her suggestive comments since their walk.
It made a lot of strange sense. He had always felt as if Adeline was trying to prod him back to life somehow, back when they had crossed paths the most, when she was teaching at the village school—as if she was daring him into some kind of action. He saw now that on some unconscious level he had been asking her to. He had assumed at the time that the friction between them had all been to do with the school—the syllabus, the other trustees, the collective resistance to her teaching style.
But now he also saw—he hoped—that it was not about any of that. It was about him.
And he knew that she had cared.
He turned from the lime grove and headed through the woodland, then up a small incline into the walled garden made up of two different “rooms”: a front enclosure full of symmetrically planted lilac trees, and behind that another even larger space full of rosebushes and vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded on all sides by towering redbrick walls. In each of the three outside walls was a dark-red wooden door, leading to where he was not sure. He realized that in all the years he had visited the estate, he had never opened any of those doors.
When he entered the second enclosed garden space, he right away spotted Adeline sitting on a little bench against the farthest back wall, the small copy of Pride and Prejudice that he had given her at Christmas sitting open on her lap.
“Why, hullo. What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise.
“What are you doing here? Playing hide-and-seek with Liberty?”
“Just hiding.” He smiled and came over and sat down next to her on the bench. “Well, all’s well that ends well.”
“It was definitely like something out of Shakespeare, all those weddings at once.”
“Or Austen.”
She laughed. “It’s nice to see something work out, for once, even after all that time.”
“And they say you can never go back.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No, not now. Not after that.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No one is more rigid and unyielding than Andrew Forrester.”
“No one that is except you,” Adeline countered.
“You’re probably right,” he gave in with a grin.
They stayed there quietly for a few minutes, listening to the starlings and finches singing from the tops of the orchard trees.
“We haven’t sat like this in a while,” Adeline finally spoke.
“Not since last summer, I think.”
She closed the little book on her lap. “We were discussing Emma I believe.”
“The obtuseness of old men.”
“Knightley’s not so old.”
“Old enough to know better,” Dr. Gray said. “Although perhaps age has nothing to do with it. Look at Evie. She’s, what, all of sixteen, and she’s got the entire British literary canon of the nineteenth century figured out.”
“What do you wish you had figured out?”
“You,” he said quietly, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and he realized he wanted to capture this moment forever. Wanted—finally—to try to string these seconds into something permanent all over again, however ephemeral and futile and fleeting this moment, too, would always be.
“I was pretty obvious, you know. I practically handed you teacher’s notes.”
He laughed. “And I failed the catechism miserably.”
She looked up at him, at his sad, handsome face. “I did love Samuel.”
“I know that, Adeline, I truly do.”
She started to cry, and he grabbed her hands in his.
“No one will understand,” she said through her tears.
“Is that important, to you?”
“No.” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “But it would have been important to Samuel.”
“You do him a great disservice if you assume that about him. Mr. Knight had that power over Frances, her whole life, and look at how he abused it. And anyway, what if you are wrong?”
She moved away from him a bit on the bench. “I’ll never know. That’s what’s so hard.”
“And I’ll never know if I could have saved your baby. Or Jennie. Or, frankly, so many other lives. I did my best though, I do know that. And when I couldn’t, I at least punished only myself.”
She reached up and touched his cheek with her tear-stained hand. “You’re not doing that anymore, though, right?”
“You knew?”
She kissed his cheek where her hand had been, hardly even able to look into his eyes. “Only recently. Mimi said something so innocuous, but it made me think. And then there was Liberty and the medicine-cabinet keys. I thought you were so disappointed in me, in my weakness—and then I realized you were just trying to save me from what you might be doing to yourself.”
“I have stopped, I promise you. What else on earth would make me hire a dungeon master like Miss Pascal?”
Adeline now had to laugh in spite of herself.
“But it will always be a struggle. It will always be in front of me, Adeline, never behind me. That’s the Faustian nature of it. You invite it in, and it never leaves.”
She sat up straighter to face him. “So, what do we do now?”
He pulled her onto his lap and buried his face against her neck, letting himself feel the softness of her cheek, letting himself fall into her essential loveliness, however ephemeral, however fleeting.
“Have you ever tried one of those back doors?” he finally said, looking up behind them from the bench.
She laughed through her tears. “No, come to think of it.”
“Then I say, let’s go give Liberty Pascal her money’s worth.”
“Benjamin Gray . . .” Adeline murmured happily, as his lips found hers.
EPILOGUE
Chawton, Hampshire
March 23, 1947
The First Annual Meeting of the Jane Austen Society
The society now comprised forty-four members. They came from all walks of life, having seen the discrete advertisements in local Hampshire and London papers:
Notice of the first annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society, which is dedicated to the preservation, promotion and study of the life and works of Miss Jane Austen. In conjunction with the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, a charity founded to advance education under the Charities Act, the society has spent the past year working to acquire Miss Austen’s former home in Chawton as a future museum site and is ple
ased to hereby announce the recent acquisition of Chawton Cottage for that purpose. New members of the society are welcome to the first annual meeting to be held at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 23, 1947, at Chawton Cottage, Winchester Road, Chawton.
In addition to the three dozen newest members of the society, the original eight participants, including the five trustees of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, would also be attending.
As an early agenda item at the meeting, the trustees would be announcing their unanimous decision to repay society member Mimi Harrison her original donation of forty thousand pounds, which had enabled the acquisition of the Chawton Great House Library. Last fall the sale of the library had realized a record four hundred thousand pounds over a dispersal of fifty days by Sotheby’s, and this had enabled the trust to purchase the steward’s cottage from Alpha Investments Limited for the reasonable sum of four thousand pounds. The trustees had also moved unanimously to gift fifty thousand pounds from the sale to Miss Frances Knight as the former and proper heir of the Knight estate, as well as in recognition of her successful efforts to secure the library and Chawton Cottage as a result.
Mimi Harrison was currently onstage at the New Theatre as Olivia in Twelfth Night, and so Sunday was chosen for the annual meeting as there was no evening performance that day. She would be bringing her new fiancé with her, a Harvard professor of American literature currently on sabbatical at Jesus College, Cambridge. She was also secretly planning to announce a gift to the society at the meeting: a turquoise-and-gold ring that had once belonged to Jane Austen and was considered priceless, along with two topaz crosses.
Dr. Benjamin Gray, Chairman of the Jane Austen Society and the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, would be delivering the opening address. His wife, Adeline Lewis Grover Gray, was due to deliver their first child in a month’s time, and the date of the annual meeting had also been selected with that important obligation in mind.
Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Henry Forrester, Esq., had recently relocated to Chawton from Alton, where Mr. Forrester’s law offices had expanded to include two junior solicitors. He was now able to turn his attention to other endeavours, the most important of which was the small local hostel his wife had set up using her share of the estate sale. The hostel was intended for Jewish refugee children who had lost their families in the Holocaust and had no homes to return to after the war. That very month official adoption papers were being finalized by the couple for two of these children; with Mr. Forrester’s full support, their last name would be Knight.
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