The Jane Austen Society(11)

It was the first sign of anything approaching vulnerability she had seen in him. She could tell he was supremely used to getting everything he wanted. She could tell he wanted her. The distance between his confident bravura and his interest in her was something only she could bridge. As Elizabeth Bennet would say, it was most gratifying.

She looked at him in his perfectly pressed white shirt and beige khakis that were the exact same shade as his close-cropped sandy-brown hair, and she saw the glint of the Cartier watch around his tanned left wrist, and the slightly faded spot at the base of his ring finger. There would be plenty more to find out about him, of that much she was sure.





CHAPTER FOUR

Chawton, Hampshire

August 1945

Dr. Gray had finished up his rounds for the day and decided to take a walk to clear his head. He headed down the main Winchester road past the Austen cottage, then walked briskly along old Gosport Road until he reached the long gravel drive that led to the Knight estate and the adjoining parish church of St. Nicholas.

A little farther down the lane he could see the Berwick hay wagon, now emptied of its bales of straw and done for the day, sitting next to the kissing gate. But this afternoon he was not looking to stretch his legs with a long walk through the summer fields to Upper and Lower Farringdon.

Instead he walked up the drive to the church. It was only a little past three, and he knew that Reverend Powell would be out on his daily rounds, visiting various ailing villagers either right before or right after him. Their two jobs were probably much more alike than either would want to admit. But where the reverend was being asked to change reality through prayer, Dr. Gray was being asked to prescribe hope in the face of reality. Two sides of the same fateful coin. Which side the coin would flip on—which corner of the stairs, which X-ray film, would rear its ugly head—was the darkness that it was his job to somehow manage and disperse, even as he himself so often wanted to surrender to it.

He had always loved the small stone church of St. Nicholas, set back from the road on its little walled incline. To him the church was the perfect size: small enough to always feel intimate, but just big enough to always seem full. Although he was never sure how much visitors were aware of it, the connection to the Austen family was at its most poignant here. The church was on the estate of Chawton Park which Edward, Jane’s older brother, had inherited from the wealthy childless couple who had adopted him, to avoid dying without an heir. The estate also included the little steward’s cottage where the Gosport and Winchester roads intersected, and where Jane Austen had finally found a home for her writing after years of dependency on several other male relatives. Here in this church, nearly a century and a half later, the Knights still held sway. The Knight family heraldry stained the panes of glass, the altar stood above the family crypt, and the pews were made from oak that had been felled on the Knight estate.

As Dr. Gray entered, he removed his hat and, after crossing himself, looked up to see Adeline Grover alone in the front pew, her long straight brown hair brushing against her full pink cheeks as she kept her head lowered in prayer. She was wearing a simple floral-patterned housedress that had been let out at the waist, with a white girlish collar and cuffs on its short sleeves.

Her husband, Samuel Grover, had ended up perishing last March in a dive-bombing attack off the coast of Croatia, unknowingly leaving her just one month pregnant. The baby was now all that she had, her husband’s body lying below one simple plain white cross on the rocky island of Vis. Dr. Gray had been surprised at the young woman’s composure throughout the ordeal. With all her brashness, he would have thought Adeline would become quite bitter, quite fast, if life dealt her an unfair hand. But instead she radiated a strange positivity, almost a desperate determination that somehow everything would turn out alright. He would have chalked it all up to her youth, but he knew from patients such as Adam Berwick that being young when tragedy strikes can make it even harder to endure.

From across the aisle he had watched her stand in church every Sunday for the past six months, both hands on her expanding belly, listening peacefully to the words of Reverend Powell. Perhaps expecting a child could do that—he would never know himself. But he wondered if the pregnancy was keeping her from fully experiencing her grief. He was the last person on earth to judge anyone for that; he sometimes wondered what good grief did at all.

Adeline looked up at the sound of his heavy step on the old stone floor but did not turn around. He watched silently as she crossed herself, then stood to move up the centre aisle towards him.

He remembered her and Samuel’s wedding day here last February, during the young officer’s final leave. Adeline had been radiant—but then again, she always looked bright-eyed and game for anything. Yet as wonderful and spirited as Adeline was, she had ended up too interesting and progressive a teacher for their slumbering Hampshire village. She had quit halfway through the last spring term, on the heels of her wedding, and dedicated herself to setting up house for Samuel once he permanently returned from the war. Even now, in the late-summer heat, with only a trimester left in her pregnancy, Dr. Gray would occasionally wander by the little Grover house to find Adeline knee-deep in the dirt of her garden patch, pulling up the courgettes and wax beans and beets to be pickled and preserved for the winter ahead.

He smiled at her approach, hoping she would not pass by without stopping to talk.

“Adeline, how are you feeling?”