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

by Charlie Lovett

  When he turned back to me, I, wishing him to know that I had been assured of his absence before coming to Pemberley, mentioned that his housekeeper had assured us he would not return until to-morrow. He acknowledged the truth of this, and said that business with his steward had occasioned his coming forward a few hours before the rest of the party with whom he had been traveling. “They will join me early to-morrow,” he continued, “and among them are some who will claim an acquaintance with you—Mr. Bingley and his sisters.” And then he said the most extraordinary thing. “There is also one other person in the party who more particularly wishes to be known to you. Will you allow me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister to your acquaintance during your stay at Lambton?”

  He shortly took his leave of us, but what can this mean? That Mr. Darcy acts civilly not just to myself but to the Gardiners, that he wishes me to make the acquaintance of his sister? I must admit myself most astonished, and shall certainly write again if this unexpected introduction is made.

  Affectionately,

  Lizzie

  The text of First Impressions occupied the final fifty-two pages of Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale. Certainly Jane Austen had expanded it significantly in her version, but the basics of the novel were here: the haughty behavior of Darcy, the charm and dishonesty of Wickham, the flighty matchmaking of Mrs. Bennet, and the poise of Elizabeth. Sophie wished she could channel some of that poise right now. What would Elizabeth Bennet do? Before she could give the matter much thought, her phone rang.

  “I’m being a pest, I know,” said Winston. “I’m not supposed to keep calling but I just felt like a chat.”

  “That’s OK,” said Sophie. “I could use a little cheering up.”

  “Rough night?”

  “You could say that. My father brought in a book dealer to cherry-pick through the family library—so more of the Collingwood collection is to be lost forever.”

  “That’s a shame,” said Winston. “Didn’t he even let you pick out a few items for yourself?”

  “Oh, Father would never do that. What if I took a book that was valuable enough to repair the roof, or repaint the drawing room, or dig a moat?”

  “Glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” said Winston. “I wouldn’t want my favorite bibliophile to stop making me laugh.”

  Sophie sighed lightly at the thought that she was somebody’s favorite something. She wished for a moment that Winston were there, that they were tangled up in the sheets on that hard narrow bed in her room, and that Smedley, and Mr. Tompkins, and Richard Mansfield would all just disappear. She was on the verge of asking him to come up to Oxford after all when she looked down at Mansfield’s book, still open to the last page of First Impressions. Did Winston know? How could he not? And if he did, had this whole relationship just been his way of being sure that he, and not some other customer, would be the one to buy the book from Sophie? What was Winston’s endgame? Did he want to discredit Jane Austen before the whole world? Or did he want to hide First Impressions away and protect her reputation? Sophie could think of a thousand reasons why she shouldn’t trust him, but she also thought of the way his muscles had felt under her hands. Those muscles could be very useful in a confrontation with Smedley.

  “Are you still there?” said Winston.

  “Sorry,” said Sophie, “my mind was wandering.”

  “And where was it wandering that could be more interesting than my scintillating conversation?”

  “If you must know,” said Sophie, “it was wandering back to your bedroom.”

  “I see,” said Winston. “Jealous of my book collection, are you?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of your book collection,” she said, deciding to take the plunge. “But now that you mention it, what would you say if I told you I think I have a lead on that book you’re looking for?”

  “I’d say great. But I’d rather have you tell me about it personally. Very personally.”

  “And what would you say,” said Sophie, doing her best to suppress the thought of those arms wrapped around her, “if I told you that it’s possible it might be a very valuable little volume?”

  “I’d be surprised,” said Winston. “I honestly can’t see that it would have much worth. I suppose if it does, I won’t be able to afford it.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “Listen, do you still want to come up to Oxford and . . . get together?”

  “I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that I would like to get together in every way possible.”

  “Give me some time to get things sorted,” said Sophie, “and I’ll give you a call.”

  “I’ll be waiting by the phone,” said Winston.

  “You carry your phone in your pocket,” she teased.

  “Yes, well, that proves it, then.”

  —

  SOPHIE CLOSED Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale and returned it to her bag. Winston had seemed genuinely surprised when she had said it might be valuable. And he hadn’t seemed too concerned about getting it from her right away. It was hard to believe it was a coincidence that he had come to her, but it was harder to believe that he was that good an actor. She would tell him the whole story when the time was right, but what was the whole story? Had Jane Austen really stolen her plot and much of her text from Richard Mansfield? Maybe she was naive to feel this way, but Sophie just couldn’t believe it. The problem was, in the absence of other evidence, most people would believe it. She thought back over everything she knew about Mansfield (which wasn’t much) and Jane Austen (which was quite a bit) but could imagine no connection between the two.

  Unsure what to do next, she did know one thing: She couldn’t keep her discovery entirely to herself. It was too fantastic a story not to share. She had to ring Victoria.

  “Holy shit,” said her sister when Sophie had explained about First Impressions. “Do you really think Jane Austen was a plagiarist?”

  “No,” said Sophie. “There has to be some sort of explanation and I have to figure out what it is. And I don’t give a toss how much that book is worth or how many people want it—I’m not about to start showing it around until I can prove that Jane was innocent.”

  “So she’s Jane to you now,” said Victoria.

  “I feel like I know her,” said Sophie. “I feel like her fate is in my hands.”

  “Why don’t you just burn the damn thing?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” said Sophie. “But I couldn’t. It’s just too . . . too . . . remarkable.”

  “The first draft of Pride and Prejudice,” said Victoria wistfully.

  “Yeah,” replied Sophie with a sigh. She still couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the momentousness of her find.

  “There’s something I’ve been wondering,” said Victoria. “If this second edition is so damn rare, how did two different people know that it even existed?”

  “Good question,” said Sophie. “I never really thought about that.”

  “There must have been some other clue, something that made them believe there was a second edition.”

  “Tori, you’re brilliant,” said Sophie, jumping out of her chair.

  “I am?”

  “You’re right. There has to be a clue and it has to be something they both saw. It’s the sword on the wall.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Victoria.

  “Winston and Smedley must have crossed paths somewhere and wherever they crossed paths, that’s where they found the clue. Where they crossed paths is the sword on the wall.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “Oh God,” said Sophie, her voice almost breathless. “I know what it is. There’s one thing Smedley and Winston have in common.”

  “What’s that?” said Victoria, still sounding confused.

  “They both went to St. John’s,�
� said Sophie. “St. John’s is the sword on the wall.” And with these cryptic words, she rang off.

  Leeds, 1796

  GILBERT MONKHOUSE STOOD in his printing-office in Leeds and inhaled the aroma of ink. It was a smell that had surrounded him since he was twelve years old and first went to work for Griffith Wright, printer of the Leeds Intelligencer. Griffith’s son Thomas had taken over the business in 1784, and for eleven years Gilbert had worked in the shop, living in the embrace of that wonderful smell. Gilbert had learned how to read at an early age—it came naturally to him—and it was his ability to read that had led him to Wright’s printing-office. From there, every night, he would take home the proofs of some book to read in his bed. Since he did not hold the position of reader in the printing-office, he never made marks on the pages, but he would remember any errors he noticed and point them out to the reader the next morning.

  Gilbert had started out sweeping floors and carrying boxes of type and reams of paper. When he was fifteen Mr. Wright had set him to work casting off copy—calculating the number of words in a manuscript so that an estimate of printing costs could be made. From there he graduated to the job of distributing type into letter cases. Taking a handful of some ten or twenty lines of type from a previously printed book, Gilbert sorted the metal letters into the boxes within the letter cases. At first he was allowed to sort only a few pages of type each day, for his unskilled fingers slowed the pace of work in the shop, but soon he found he could read the lines of type (which meant reading in mirror image), memorize the words, and distribute the letters with his thumb and forefinger with lightening speed and perfect accuracy. Experienced compositors in the shop bragged of being able to distribute forty thousand letters in a day; by the time he was eighteen, Gilbert could match that; at twenty he could sort nearly fifty thousand.

  What Gilbert, as a boy and as a young man, wanted more than anything else was to be a full-fledged compositor. He wanted to create books and newspapers by setting the type into words and lines and paragraphs and pages. True, authors might slave for months or years with quill and paper, but in the end all they created were texts. Compositors and printers created books, and that was what Gilbert wanted to do. When he turned twenty-one, Mr. Wright promoted him to the job of his dreams.

  With fingers trained for years as a type sorter, Gilbert now set about the process of taking the tiny pieces of type from the letter cases and arranging them in composing sticks, each of which held several lines of type. The type from these sticks he then arranged into galleys, which, when each contained a full page, he placed in the proper arrangement on the imposing stone for printing. He had spent his entire youth watching compositors—never was a young man so well prepared for his vocation. From his first day, Gilbert could match the fastest compositor in the office, and the readers were always happy to get proofs that Gilbert had set—they were nearly error-free. He loved to visit the local bookshop and pull from the shelf some book for which he had set the type. He felt like much more than a workman; he felt like a creator.

  In 1795, Gilbert’s uncle, a solicitor in Manchester, had died, leaving Gilbert a modest inheritance. At the time, Thomas Wright’s printing-office was having to turn away jobs—there simply wasn’t enough space for another printing press, and Mr. Wright had no interest in expanding. Gilbert had gone to his employer with a proposal: If Wright would loan Gilbert the sum of two hundred pounds, he would take that money, together with his inheritance, and open his own printing-office. Leeds was growing rapidly, and Gilbert believed there was plenty of work for two printers. Thomas agreed. Though he was sorry to lose his best compositor, he felt the investment in Gilbert was a good one.

  And so now, a year later, Gilbert stood in his own shop, blissfully happy. He had six employees, but he still worked as a compositor himself for several hours every day, and he still took proofs home every night. Tonight he had stayed at the shop late to finish printing the final pages of the proofs for a book unimaginatively titled Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale. It was the second edition of a book he had printed the previous year—a rather dull collection of moral tales by a Yorkshire clergyman. What had surprised him about this job was the addition of the “Cautionary Tale.” Though he would print anything he was paid to print, Gilbert was not above passing literary judgment on the works that came through his press. This long story was, he thought, one of the finest pieces he had ever set in type.

  Gilbert was quite used to reading proofs in large, unfolded sheets, each containing, in this case, sixteen pages of the book. With a stack of these sheets draped over his arm, he locked up his office at half-past ten and walked the short distance to his lodgings—a small room above a milliner’s shop in the high street. Lighting a lamp by his bedside, he settled in to read the proofs. Outside of his employees and those of Mr. Wright, Gilbert had few friends. His family lived far away, in Peterborough, and of female admirers he had none. One might be forgiven for thinking that the man reading the printer’s sheets alone in his lodgings late at night was lonely or even unhappy, but nothing was further from the truth. Gilbert Monkhouse was the happiest man in Leeds—at least for a few more hours.

  Oxford, Present Day

  SOPHIE DRAINED HER coffee, took a two-minute shower, and pulled on some fresh clothes. Out of term time, the library at St. John’s would open at ten; it was quarter past by the time she walked out of the house onto the Woodstock Road and headed toward the center of town. It was a fifteen-minute walk to St. John’s, and Sophie felt the cool morning air clearing her head. She had focus now, and a mission. Somewhere in the St. John’s College Library was the precipitating clue—a book or a letter or a manuscript that had caused two very different men to go looking for the book that lay safely in her handbag. Whether that clue would exonerate Jane Austen, Sophie did not know, but finding it was her logical next step.

  Having worked at the Christ Church Library for all of her five years at Oxford, Sophie knew librarians at just about every Oxford college. She was pleased to discover, on flashing her ID and gaining entry to St. John’s, a familiar face at the circulation desk—a tall, lanky graduate student with a mop of black hair, a suit that looked as if he had slept in it, and dark-rimmed glasses.

  “Sophie Collingwood, good to see you.”

  “Good morning, Jacob,” she said, smiling. Seeing an old friend—even if in reality he was little more than an acquaintance—who was not a part of all this intrigue was refreshing. Here, at least, was someone she could trust.

  “I thought I’d see you at the end-of-term do over at Worcester,” said Jacob.

  “Death in the family,” said Sophie.

  “Sorry to hear it. Well, it’s good to see you anyway. Pretty quiet around here between terms, so always nice to see a friend.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Jacob,” she said, smiling.

  “Now, what can I do for you on a morning so fine that you really shouldn’t be spending it in a library?”

  “I’m doing some research on Jane Austen.”

  “You’d do better at the Bodleian,” said Jacob. “Or even back at Christ Church. They both have better collections of Austen than we do.”

  “I’ve been there already,” Sophie lied. “What I’m looking for could be anywhere. I’m trying to find a connection between Austen and an obscure northern clergyman.”

  “Sounds intriguing.”

  “It’s really not,” she said. “It’s utterly boring and probably a waste of time, but I’m working for this rare book dealer now and one of his clients seems to think I’m his private researcher.”

  “As long as he’s paying you,” said Jacob.

  “Would I be here if he weren’t?” said Sophie with a smile. “Anyway, I’m looking through any early editions of Austen I can find for . . . well, I don’t know what for—inscriptions, I guess, or marginalia. Anything that might show a connection.”

  “I’ll go down t
o rare books and bring you anything we have with an Austen connection,” said Jacob. “In the meantime you can have a look through the stacks and see if there’s anything there. There won’t be any early Austen, but who knows, you might find something.”

  Sophie spent the next hour paging through every book by or about Jane Austen in the stacks, beginning with the oldest ones, which were late-nineteenth-century editions of the novels. She didn’t expect to find anything, but what if some other scholar had made a marginal note somewhere? When Jacob returned she was almost invisible behind stacks of books, none of which contained anything more than the occasional underlining by a thoughtless undergraduate who didn’t understand the concept that library books were borrowed, not owned.

  “Not a lot in rare books,” said Jacob, holding up a small stack of volumes and a flat gray box. “A few early editions of some of the novels and a box of papers from the 1920s from a don who did some research on Austen. Doesn’t look like he ever published anything, so it’s just notes and a few odd chapters of typescript.” He set the books and the box down on the table next to Sophie and returned to the circulation desk.

  It took only a few minutes to discover that the books held no clues. There was an ownership inscription in the second edition of Mansfield Park and a date written on the endpaper of the first edition of Persuasion, which had been published posthumously in a set with Northanger Abbey, but no mention of Richard Mansfield. She was just about to turn to the box, which seemed much more promising, when it suddenly occurred to her what she had just held in her hand.