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

by Charlie Lovett

  “Am I a book collector, Uncle Bertram?” she asked as they reached the quiet streets of Maida Vale.

  “What do you do with a book when you get it?” Uncle Bertram asked.

  “I read it,” said Sophie. “Or else I ask you to read it to me.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I put it on my shelf so I can look at it again whenever I want to.”

  “And do you ever want to throw it away or sell it?”

  “Of course not,” said Sophie. “What a silly question.”

  “I have one more silly question, and then I can tell you if you’re a book collector.”

  “What is it?” she asked earnestly.

  “After you get a new book and you read it and you put it on your shelf, do you love it?”

  “Oh yes!” said Sophie.

  “Then you are a book collector,” said Uncle Bertram. “Just like me.”

  She laughed with glee. “I’m happy that I’m like you, Uncle Bertram.”

  “I’m happy, too.”

  —

  “SOPHIE! SOPHIE, ARE YOU all right?” Somehow Uncle Bertram was gone and faces swam above her. She lay on something cold and hard, yet her whole body felt sweaty. Everything above her—faces, cracks in whiteness, bits of color—was spinning slower and slower and then she was lying on the kitchen floor looking up at her mother and her sister and Uncle Bertram was dead and her world had been turned upside down.

  Hampshire, 1796

  JANE HAD LITTLE TIME to relish the thought that the word novelist could rightly be applied to her. What happened the following day put all thoughts of novel writing out of her head, and instead convinced her that, while she had previously thought herself to be, though sinful from birth, essentially a good person, she was in fact one in whom virtue and vice mixed unequally. And the evil in her own soul, of which the events of the day were such a brutal reminder, meant that in her case the mixture was unequal in favor of vice. When she next met Mr. Mansfield, she sought him out not as a friend or fellow lover of literature, but as a clergyman—perhaps, she thought, even as a confessor.

  “A lovely day for a walk, Miss Austen,” said Mr. Mansfield when he opened the door to the gatehouse to find Jane on the doorstep. “I had rather hoped you would come by. I’ve just finished reading a new novel and I wanted to discuss it with you. Let me fetch my coat and we shall stroll through the grounds while I tell you all about it.”

  “I would rather we speak inside, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane, her eyes on the ground.

  “If you prefer,” he said, stepping aside to admit her into the house. “I’ll just put the kettle on for some tea.”

  “I care not for tea, Mr. Mansfield. Please let us sit, so I may unburden myself.”

  “You are troubled?”

  “Deeply, sir. And I find I cannot share this trouble at the rectory. There my niece Anna plays and my brother Henry visits and all is stories and songs and delight and there is no room for the darkness in my heart. I would not wish it even on my dearest Cassandra—especially not on Cassandra.”

  “You may share your load with me,” said Mr. Mansfield. “After all, I am not only your friend; I am a priest.”

  “You are my tower of strength, Mr. Mansfield.”

  “God is your tower of strength, my child.”

  “And to him I have already spoken, and at length.”

  “Then speak to me.”

  “Yesterday,” began Jane, “as I have done many times before, I accompanied my father on a visit to a certain house in Whitchurch where a widow of some means has founded a home for fallen women desiring to repent and reform their lives. Father has been clergyman to these women, who are frequently too ill to be removed, for the past several months, the local rector, so he says, being too busy with his other duties. Too often, Father’s visits come at the time of death for one of these poor women, and he knows well that the presence of a young woman such as myself is sometimes a comfort to those facing judgment.

  “Yesterday was one such time, and after Father had performed the order for the visitation of the sick, I was left alone at the bedside of a woman whose years were not many beyond my own but who was so disfigured from illness that I should not have recognized her if she had been my own sister.

  “With death’s embrace near, she felt a need to tell me her story, and I was happy to listen, knowing it was the only thing I could do to bring her comfort. She had come ten years ago, she said, to London, penniless and without prospects. Begging, she found, did not feed her and she soon turned to the only profession that offered her a chance of survival—that sinful and insidious practice that infects our capital. Once the fatal step had been taken, try as she might she could not rise above this evil way of life. Two children she bore, and two children died in her arms, for the price of her virtue was still not enough to feed a family. When illness deformed her face, robbing her of what little beauty she still possessed, the price she could ask for her services declined to the point that she was living in the street when she was found by a clergyman and taken to the home in Whitchurch. There she could do little more than wait for death to come. It was a tale I had heard all too often in that place, though it did not fail to move me. She gripped my hands in hers with what little strength remained in her broken body, so I could not wipe away the tears her words brought to me.

  “And then she did the most extraordinary thing. She sat up in her bed, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘I forgive you, Jane.’”

  “That seems not so very remarkable,” said Mr. Mansfield. “I have often known those on their deathbeds to have a desire to bestow forgiveness, and as you were the only soul present, she naturally bestowed it upon you.”

  “But, Mr. Mansfield, she called me Jane.”

  “It is true that ‘Miss Austen’ would have been more proper.”

  “And yet equally surprising, for we had not been introduced. I did not know her name, and she could not have known mine.”

  “And yet she did.”

  “And to understand how, Mr. Mansfield, you must first know what happened at Reading.”

  Oxfordshire, Present Day

  “IT’S NEVER LOOKED so nice,” said Victoria, squeezing her sister’s hand. “He would have liked it.”

  “He loved the books,” said Sophie. “He never worried about dust.”

  “Are you OK?” said Victoria.

  “No,” said Sophie, “but keep asking.”

  The two stood in the library of Bayfield House, which would be crowded with visitors later that day. Their father had decreed that the library be opened for the reception following Bertram’s funeral. The housekeeper had dusted furniture and washed windows and polished doorknobs in preparation.

  “Tori, do you really believe Uncle Bertram’s death was an accident?” said Sophie.

  “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that Father said he slipped on the stairs because he was reading while he walked.”

  “Well, he did read all the time. You know that better than anyone.”

  “Yes, but not while he walked. I remember once we were walking down Elgin Avenue and I was reading and he said I shouldn’t read while I was walking because one day I would walk out in front of a taxi. And I laughed and put my book away and told him that would never happen because it was impossible to get a taxi in his neighborhood.”

  “But don’t you think maybe he read while walking when you weren’t around?”

  “I guess it’s possible,” said Sophie, “but something just doesn’t seem right.”

  “You’ve read one too many mysteries,” said Victoria. “You’re always trying to turn everything into Agatha Christie.”

  “You’re right, it’s silly,” said Sophie. “Maybe I just want someone to blame.”

  “But there’s no one.”
r />   “Would you mind if I sat here alone for a few minutes?”

  “Of course not,” said Victoria, giving Sophie a light kiss on the cheek. “I love you, you know.”

  “I know,” said Sophie. “I know.”

  Alone in the library, Sophie settled into the sofa in front of the fireplace—the same sofa that had so recently offered her refuge. That conversation with Bertram about walking and reading replayed again and again in her head. Tori was right—Sophie did let her imagination run wild sometimes, especially as a girl when she’d seen herself as a kind of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, but something about Uncle Bertram’s death wasn’t right. She could think of only one way to banish these thoughts. From the pocket of her black suit jacket she withdrew a note that had arrived in the post that morning. She had lost track of how many times she had read it since then, but she unfolded it once more and whispered the words to the empty library.

  Dear Sophie,

  I was so sorry to hear about your uncle. I heard the news from a bookseller here in Paris. I know how much he meant to you. I know I may come across as a bit insensitive, but believe me when I tell you that I genuinely feel for your loss. If your uncle was anything like you, and I suspect he was, then he was a special person indeed. I can only imagine how much you will miss him, and, though it may be little comfort, I hope you know that you are in my thoughts at this difficult time. I’m sorry about my behavior at dinner—I guess I acted rather selfishly that entire day, but as our friend Jane would say, “Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.” I feel like I should apologize for that kiss, too, but I won’t because I’m not sorry. I’ll be at this address for a few weeks, though I don’t expect you will feel like writing.

  Yours,

  Eric Hall

  Even though she had little hope of ever seeing Eric again, his note brought her comfort. Outside of the constant solicitous attention of her sister, it had been one of only two sources of solace in the past few days. The other had come when she and Victoria took the train into Oxford to retrieve some books from Sophie’s room. She had returned home with a box containing the sixteen books she had selected from Uncle Bertram’s library at Christmastime over the years. They sat on a shelf by her bed in chronological order of acquisition—although she had somehow managed to switch Pride and Prejudice with Boswell’s Life of Johnson. At Bayfield House she had carefully emptied the contents of the box onto her dressing table, stroking the spine of each book as she fitted it into place.

  Only when she had reconstructed her shelf of Christmas books and sat there remembering her selection of each volume did the full import of a conversation she had had with Uncle Bertram last December suddenly strike her.

  She was sitting by the fire in Uncle Bertram’s flat and they each had a book—he was reading Thomas Carlyle and she was reading Far from the Madding Crowd. She had reached that delicious point in the narrative where the hero seems to have all the forces of the universe arrayed against him, yet she knew that he would triumph, that Gabriel and Bathsheba would, before the pages had been exhausted, make that short walk to the church and happiness.

  She laid the book in her lap to rest her eyes for a moment and Uncle Bertram did the same.

  “Do you like it here?” he asked, as they both gazed into the dying fire.

  “Uncle Bertram,” said Sophie with a laugh. “What a silly question. I’m never happier than when I am here.”

  “You are never happier than when you are there,” said Bertram, pointing to the open pages of her book. “But I was speaking more generally. Do you like being in London?”

  “Of course. You’re the only Collingwood who really understands me.”

  “I did think I had taught you to listen better,” said Bertram. “You still haven’t answered my question. Take me out of the equation, even take Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens out of the equation and tell me, do you think you would like living in London?”

  Sophie was silent for a long moment. She had never considered the experience of London independent of the experience of being with Uncle Bertram. She had rarely been in the city without at least seeing him, and it took a great effort of imagination to consider how she should like the one without the other.

  “I think I would,” she said at last. “When I think of all we have seen and done here, I’m inclined to believe Dr. Johnson was right.”

  “That the man who is tired of London is tired of life?” said Bertram.

  “Exactly. But I still consider you London’s chief attraction.”

  “So after Oxford you might think of moving here?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do after Oxford,” said Sophie. “You know that. But I do know I’d like living in the same city as you.”

  “But I won’t always be here, you know. I’m not a young man.”

  “You are a young man,” she said. “At least too young to be having this conversation.”

  “And you, my dear, are perhaps too young to understand the need for such a conversation. There’s something I’d like to tell you.”

  Sophie leaned forward in her chair and placed a hand gently on her uncle’s arm. “You’re not sick?”

  “No, no,” said Bertram, standing. “This is news for the distant future, I hope. But someday, when my time comes, I would like for you to have all this.” He waved his hand to indicate the room.

  “The books?” said Sophie, for an instant breathless with delight, until she considered that the gift was contingent on her uncle’s death.

  “Not just the books, but the flat as well. No one I know would be happier here.”

  “Oh, uncle!” cried Sophie, wrapping her arms around him. “But I hope to be a very old woman before I sit by this fire without you.”

  “I hope that as well,” said Uncle Bertram. “But I thought you should know. Now, since you will have to wait to get your hands on all these musty old volumes, and since Advent is nearly done, I think it’s time you picked out this year’s Christmas book.”

  —

  NOW SOPHIE’S CHRISTMAS volumes could soon be returned to Uncle Bertram’s flat and reunited with the rest of his books. Only it wasn’t Uncle Bertram’s flat and they weren’t his books. It was all hers now. But while the books she had chosen over the years comforted her; the promise of owning all of her uncle’s library did not. To be in that cozy flat among those glorious books but without her uncle meant that something was deeply wrong with the world.

  “Sophie, it’s time.” Victoria stood in the library doorway, a silhouette in her black dress, holding out Sophie’s handbag for her. Five minutes later they were in the back of a black car, crunching down the drive.

  The funeral was a simple service in the local parish church. Uncle Bertram had been cremated, and his ashes were buried in the churchyard. It ought to have been a cold winter day, with clouds hanging low in the sky and a sharp wind whistling through the unmown grass of the graveyard; but it was lovely—a warm blue sky, immaculately trimmed green grass, and a gentle breeze to keep the heat from bearing down on the black-clad mourners.

  Back at Bayfield House, Sophie, feeling like the unacknowledged chief mourner, drifted through the visitors—distant cousins she had never met, business associates of her father, friends of her mother—without making any meaningful contact. Victoria and her mother were both in full hostess mode, and in the crowd Sophie felt more alone than she had all week. She was in the library peering through the metal grid at a shelf of travel narratives when she heard a voice beside her.

  “I was so sorry about your uncle, Miss Collingwood. He was such a wonderful man.” Sophie turned to see the short, round, and balding figure of Augustus Boxhill, one of London’s leading antiquarian booksellers. She had met Mr. Boxhill many times at his shop in Cecil Court when on the prowl for books with Uncle Bertram.

  “It was kin
d of you to come, Mr. Boxhill.”

  “I suspect,” said the bookseller, looking around the room, “that you and I may be the only people here who really knew your uncle.”

  “That looks like the first edition of Voyage of the Beagle,” she said, nodding at a row of four volumes at the end of a shelf. “I’m sure Father will be happy when he finds out what that will fetch at auction.”

  “Thanks to your uncle, you know more about books than most collectors twice your age,” said Mr. Boxhill.

  “And without my uncle,” said Sophie, “I’ll have no one to share all that with.”

  “Bertram was a good customer,” said Mr. Boxhill, “but more important, he was a good friend. I think he’d want me to tell you that there are a lot of us out there who share your passion. You’re not alone, Sophie.”

  “I know,” she said, softening. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Boxhill.”

  “If there is ever anything I can do for you,” he said, pulling a card from his pocket and pressing it into her hand, “I hope you won’t hesitate to call on me.”

  But what could he do for her, thought Sophie. More important, what should she do? Uncle Bertram’s death and her inheritance of his books and flat seemed to have forced the issue that she was expecting to spend the next several weeks wrestling with—what to do with her life now that her formal education was finally over. Once again, she could hear her uncle’s voice telling her to embrace life and have adventures—but she could also hear his books calling to her and she could imagine sitting in his flat reading, communing with him through all those volumes and all their connections to him and each other. She pondered the relative merits of a quiet life alone in a flat full of books and a bold plunge into a world outside her comfort zone. She hadn’t even noticed as the din of the reception slowly faded, but she was alone in the library, looking out the window over the garden, when she said aloud, “Why not both?”

  “Sophie, are you all right?” said Victoria, stepping into the room.