The Jane Austen Society

by Natalie Jenner

  Frances picked up the phone that rested on a small desk at the far end of the hallway, below the substantial hanging Jacobean staircase that led to the upstairs rooms.

  “Frances Knight,” she said uncertainly, making it sound more like a question than a statement.

  She heard a man clear his throat on the other end, as if he had been waiting quite some time to speak with her.

  “Miss Knight, hello—my name is Yardley Sinclair. I work with Sotheby’s, the auction house, here in London.”

  “Yes.” She waited.

  “Yes, I see, thank you—thank you for taking my call. I am telephoning because I just supervised the sale of the Godmersham estate a few weeks past.”

  This estate had once also belonged to the Knights, but had been sold decades earlier to pay off significant tax and other debt owed by the family.

  “Oh, yes, so I’d heard.” She and her father had learned about the sale of the estate and all its contents from Andrew Forrester, who had obtained a copy of the Sotheby’s catalogue through a colleague in the City for their perusal.

  “I’m terribly sorry, I hope you don’t mind my calling like this—I would much rather visit in person. You see, I am the biggest fan of your famous ancestor. The biggest.”

  “How would one measure that?” Frances asked, and she heard a panicked pause, followed by a strange attempt at a laugh.

  “Oh, I see, how funny—yes—I suppose you hear that all the time.”

  “Yes,” she replied again, and waited.

  “Yes, well, you see, with the Godmersham sale, we saw a few of Miss Austen’s possessions go off to America, to different buyers, and one of them has asked me to reach out to you.”

  “Mr. Sinclair, is it? Look, I’m terribly sorry, but this is not a good time. My father, James Knight, is not well.”

  “Oh, I see. I am so sorry.”

  “Thank you. I am sure you understand.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, it’s just, this particular buyer—well, he is very persistent—he’s in love, you see, and extremely well-off—and apparently the sky’s the limit when it comes to his fiancée. And she, too, is quite obsessed with Miss Austen.”

  “That’s all fine, but of no concern to me. Not at present.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Oh, I see. Yes. Well, I shall carry that message back to him.”

  “Please do.”

  Frances hung up and looked about herself at the empty hallway that led to equally empty rooms. She was the caretaker now, and the gatekeeper, of this once-great estate and its connection to one of the world’s greatest writers. She would have to learn to step into her father’s place and protect, as much as possible, what was left of the legacy of their family.

  So she hoped Mr. Sinclair did not call again. She had always felt herself far too liable to persuasion.

  Evie Stone sat alone on a little stool in the far corner of the library. It was well past midnight.

  Unbeknownst to Frances and the other staff, Evie had been doing more than just diligently dusting the volumes in the Knight family library; for the past year and a half, she had also been doing a secret sort of cataloguing under the pretence of her daily tasks.

  She was far more interested in Jane Austen than she had let on when first hired as house girl to the estate. She had read all of Austen’s six novels at the age of fourteen, giving her a significant chunk of her teens to reread them, then to fall inevitably into the same hole as so many others before her, in wanting to know more, to understand more, to figure out exactly how Jane Austen did it.

  If Evie had anyone else but herself to blame for this preoccupation, it would have been that one great teacher the village had managed to provide, the year before Evie’s own premature exit from school. Adeline Lewis had come into the classroom with both a sense of urgency and a sense of humour. She seemed to intuitively know how long she could keep the attention of the most inattentive student and to work backwards from there. Suddenly the children were being read to from diverse works ranging over the centuries, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Evelina, to Orlando and All Quiet on the Western Front. Miss Lewis always took the time to explain various characters’ behaviour and motivations, connecting a wealthy landowner in Georgian England, or an army general in one of Shakespeare’s plays, to real-life figures of the day, the war providing ample examples of people both born and made for greatness.

  The children had listened rapt as the war raged on outside their little village school, and the newsreels during the Saturday matinee movies showed the bombs dropping on London and Europe, and the telegrams started arriving more and more often to their own families’ doors. It seemed as if every other week another grief-stricken child would show up in class, their face white and tear-stained as they went about their lessons. The adults in the village appeared intent on instructing the children that it could be a long road ahead, and breaking down along the way wouldn’t help any of them. It was a lesson in stoicism and persistence that Evie would never forget.

  It was now nearly one A.M., and Evie’s work that night had been proceeding unimpeded, until she came upon one of the earliest editions of Pride and Prejudice on the library shelves. Slowly opening the leatherbound book, she was delighted to find an inscription by Austen herself to one of her brother Edward Knight’s many children. Evie sat there running her fingers over Austen’s handwriting, as sacred as anything she had ever touched. This was Evie’s absolute favourite of all of Austen’s books, and of all the books she had read so far in her young life. For this, too, she had Adeline Lewis to thank.

  Right from the start Miss Lewis had noticed what she called Evie’s “intellectual precociousness,” and the very first book she had pressed into the girl’s hands was her own well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice. As Adeline suspected, Evie had quickly picked up on the subtle and ironic humour in the text. The young girl had particularly loved moments such as Mr. Bennet’s asking Mrs. Bennet—after her one-sided litany on which of their five daughters the wealthy new neighbour, Mr. Bingley, might marry—if she supposed that to be Bingley’s “design” in moving there. Mrs. Bennet rudely scoffs, “Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them. . . .” To the delight of Evie, everything about Mrs. Bennet’s obtuseness and desperate one-track mind could be thoroughly and efficiently summed up in that one throwaway line.

  But no sooner had Miss Lewis started at the school than the visits from a myriad of different, sheepish, male school board trustees had begun. Evie had watched with fascination as Miss Lewis held her ground with each of them, reinforced the value of her lesson plans, and practically dared the men to do something about it. One by one the men would leave the classroom visibly disturbed by their exchanges with her—even Dr. Gray seemed unable to manage Adeline Lewis, despite his usual calm but insistent bedside manner. When the students learned of Miss Lewis’s engagement to her childhood sweetheart, they suspected that she would not stay their teacher for long. Evie herself left school for good in the spring of 1944—a year later she learned that Miss Lewis had resigned from teaching, only to lose her new husband in battle, leaving her pregnant, unemployed, and alone.

  Meanwhile Evie, confident in her high impression of Miss Lewis’s flawless literary judgment and her own untested gifts, had spent the past year and a half ploughing through the list of classics that Adeline had given her on her last day at school, a very different list from the one she had given Evie’s father during his long convalescence from that terrible tractor accident. Even without a clear sense of where further study could lead her, Evie was keeping up her reading in the hope that one day a grand opportunity would present itself. She was convinced that she only had to work hard in the meantime and be ready for it when it came.

  Then one day Evie read a piece on Virginia Woolf in a copy of The Times Literary Supplement left by the fire for kindling, and it quoted Woolf as saying that Jane Austen was the hardest of all great writers
to catch in the act of greatness. For Evie, working for the Knight family, although on the decline, was bringing her one step closer to that greatness. Miss Lewis had said as much to her one day in the village, when she learned where the young girl would be working. Evie continued to console herself over the early departure from school by thinking about her unique proximity to the very environment that had helped inform some of the greatest novels ever written.

  This was when the idea of trying to get even closer to the Austen legacy had first popped into Evie’s head.

  As she had learned from Miss Lewis in school, Austen’s father had enjoyed a library of hundreds of books in their parsonage home in the village of Steventon, and young Jane had been encouraged to read anything and everything she found on its shelves. Miss Lewis similarly believed that there was no such thing as a “bad” book in terms of content: her mantra to both the class and the trustees was that if something had ever happened before in real life, then it was completely fair game to put it down in print. In fact, it was demanded of it. Miss Lewis was convinced that young Jane’s being allowed to run rampant among fairly “adult” material had informed her gift for irony at an ideal age, giving her years of juvenile writing to perfect it.

  Evie knew that the Knight family library, as it stood today, must also contain books that Austen would have borrowed, and the more time that Evie spent both overtly dusting and covertly examining the volumes in the library, analyzing their bookplates and marginalia and degree of wear, the more it occurred to her that a cataloguing of sorts could help compose a picture of Jane’s reading tastes from that last critical decade of her life.

  So Evie secretly kept a small scrapbook hidden in one of the shelves, and in it she wrote down anything of note as she worked her way through the thousands of volumes, one by one. She had been at this for nearly a year and a half, most often late at night when everyone else had gone to bed, having herself been allocated a small bedroom in the third-floor attic. This was generous of Miss Knight to provide, as it saved Evie a long walk home at the end of the day. But she had not yet confided in anyone, not even Miss Knight, about what she was doing, sitting here on the little stool, night after night. Young and unschooled though she was, Evie was convinced that this library held valuable insights into Jane Austen—and possibly a few books of immeasurable worth—and she was canny enough to know to keep this pursuit to herself, at least for now. Earlier that same day she had heard Miss Knight on the phone with someone from Sotheby’s and learned just enough to confirm that, with the war now over, interest in Jane Austen’s possessions, letters, and handwriting was starting to significantly heat up.

  So far, Evie had catalogued fifteen hundred of the over two thousand books on the shelves, averaging a handful of volumes a night. She had estimated from the start that it would take close to two years to get through each and every book to the extent that she intended. She knew that the entire exercise would end up meaningless unless she went through every single page of every single book. The risk of missing a small set of initials, a scratch of handwriting—or, God forbid, a marking by Jane Austen herself—was simply too great.

  The most onerous and time-consuming work involved copying down all the title and copyright page information, as well as any lengthy marginalia, into her little notebook. Some nights, only a few volumes could be summarized as a result. She did give herself weekend nights off, primarily because she usually went home to help her mother on the farm and to visit with her father. She knew herself well enough to know that—just as with Miss Adeline’s list of books—she would otherwise compulsively proceed apace, day after day, with no nightly break from the challenge she had set herself.

  Now, on this quiet, moonlit September night, with only a low-placed kerosene lamp to guide her, Evie was turning the pages of a volume—one of ten in a set—of an ancient Germanic-language text. Each text was several hundred pages long, making the entire collection thousands of pages of work for her. The odds of finding any margin notations at all in a work on the German language and its origins struck even her, for all her investigative spirit, as virtually non-existent.

  At moments such as this, Evie always felt the most tempted to cut a few corners and race ahead. But her ability to forge on and heed that other voice in her head—the one that told her she was special, no matter what the outside world reflected back at her—was one of the things that she knew made her unique. So she always listened to this insistent inner voice, no matter how apathetic or tired she felt, and right now this voice was telling her not to give up.

  It was now nearing two A.M., Evie’s usual finishing time. Through trial and exercise she was learning to live on four hours of sleep a night. She was confident she could keep to this routine for at least several more months. Besides, lack of sleep was no deterrence—her days at the house were busy yet so mundane, so bereft of intellectual challenge, that she found herself living for these quiet nights to herself.

  As Evie turned the pages of the large, dense volume still in her hands—pages so thick that it took actual effort sometimes to pry their edges open—she could feel a slight bulging in the section coming up. She skipped eagerly ahead to it, and as she flipped over the final page, a letter fell out.

  The handwriting was familiar to her from some of the earlier annotations, inscriptions, and margin markings she had found. No postmark was on the outside folded cover, the letter apparently having never been mailed.

  She could not believe her eyes as she read it, at first too quickly, as if convinced the paper might disappear as mysteriously as it had been found—and then three more times, each time more slowly than before. It was the very thing she would have been looking for, if only she could have guessed what that could possibly be.

  Immediately she set out to copy the complete letter into her little notebook as faithfully as she could, making sure her own lines began and ended with the exact same words as those in the letter, and inserting every grammatical or spelling error, and every well-known dash.

  She had had moments before in the library, late at night, that had approached a small degree of the euphoria she now felt as she scribbled away, but nothing else had ever come close to this. She finally understood why she had spent so many futile nights sitting here, on her little stool, alone. This was why she had never given up. And this was why Miss Adeline had been right all along.

  She had, with this discovery, brought the world closer than it had ever been before to the greatness.

  She had, as Miss Woolf herself once described it, caught Jane Austen in the act.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Chawton, Hampshire

  October 1945

  Harriet Peckham knocked on Dr. Gray’s half-open office door late one Friday afternoon, and he looked up to see a new expression on her face. Lately he had taken to mentally cataloguing Miss Peckham’s various expressions, which he did not think boded well for any longevity in their working relationship. He would have preferred a nurse who was always pleasant of face and no-nonsense in manner—none of the hinting and insinuations that Harriet liked to throw about, as if trying to see what would stick.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Gray, to interrupt, but Mrs. Lewis is on the phone.” Harriet leaned forward a bit and added, almost in a hush, “Adeline Grover’s mother.”

  “I know who she is Miss Peckham,” Dr. Gray replied quickly. “I will take the call in here.”

  “Very well, Doctor.” Harriet whirled about in the doorway and left.

  Dr. Gray picked up the phone, then waited for the tell-tale click from the hallway line before saying a single word.

  “Mrs. Lewis, what is it? Is it Adeline?”

  “Yes, Doctor, we’re sorry to bother you so close to the dinner hour.”

  “It’s no bother at all. Is she starting her labour?” He looked over at the calendar on the wall. “Although I should think it’s a bit early for that—she has, what, one more month to go?”

  “We’re not sure, Dr. Gray—she’s just not right.
And she’s very worried, more than I have ever seen her.”

  “Well, that’s saying something.” He got up and started packing his medical bag from the desk. “You were right to call. I am leaving now—tell Adeline I’ll be there in five minutes.” That would give him just enough time to get to the other side of the village.

  He walked as fast as possible along the main road with his black medical bag in hand. When he reached the little thatched Grover cottage set back from the road, he slowed himself down, as his breathing was becoming a little laboured and he didn’t want to worry Mrs. Lewis any more than necessary. Already he could see her standing in the open cottage doorway waiting for him.

  “You made remarkable time. Adeline will be so grateful,” she said, and he followed her straight up the narrow staircase without removing his coat.

  Adeline looked a little less than grateful when he entered her bedroom. “Mother, honestly, I told you, I am sure it is nothing serious.”

  Dr. Gray came straight over and sat down next to her on the edge of the bed, ignoring her words, and took her wrist in his hand to feel for her pulse. With his stethoscope already about his neck, he listened to her heart and lungs, then felt her forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Well, did I pass?” Adeline said with only the hint of her usual teasing smile.

  “Tell me your symptoms.”

  She looked over at her mother in the doorway. “Mum, can you please go make Dr. Gray a nice stiff gin and tonic? He’s going to need one by the time we’re both done with him.”

  Her mother reluctantly headed back down the stairs, leaving the door open.

  “I am sorry that you had to go to all this bother.” Adeline pulled herself up against the pillows he was now propping for her. “It’s just some cramping.”

  “Where?”

  “Quite low in my stomach.”

  “Any pain in your lower back as well?”

  “Not really—just the tiniest bit, and it comes and goes.”

  “Any bleeding?”