The Jane Austen Society(14)

Part of the comfort they derived from rereading was the satisfaction of knowing there would be closure—of feeling, each time, an inexplicable anxiety over whether the main characters would find love and happiness, while all the while knowing, on some different parallel interior track, that it was all going to work out in the end. Of being both one step ahead of the characters and one step behind Austen on every single reading.

But part of it was the heroism of Austen herself, in writing through illness and despair, and facing her own early death. If she could do it, Dr. Gray and Adeline each thought, then certainly, in homage if nothing else, they could, too.





CHAPTER FIVE

Chawton, Hampshire

At that same moment

Frances Knight could see the two of them on the bench in the courtyard below, having tea outside in the late-summer air. She had a little window seat in the second-floor gallery where she could sit beneath the Elizabethan stained-glass panelling, each window decorated by a different coat of arms for every successive freeholder of the estate, as well as their dates of ascension. She had used this window seat the most as a young girl growing up in the Great House, and again now, when getting out of doors seemed to be growing harder for her to do.

She recognized Adeline Grover from church and had at one time been somewhat friendly with Beatrix Lewis, the young woman’s mother. Dr. Gray, on the other hand, was the most visible person in the entire community—he had birthed dozens of babies in the village and tended to even more deaths and had dealt with a whole host of injuries and ailments in between. In recent months he had been ministering to her own father, although she knew that Dr. Gray had not been due at the Great House that day.

She wondered what the two of them were talking about and opened the lead crank of the window next to her in an effort to listen.

It was not at all what she had expected.

“Another little secret moment I just discovered . . . the scene where Mr. Knightley calls, and old Mr. Woodhouse hesitates to leave him to go out on his planned walk, and both Mr. Knightley and Emma are so quick to encourage him to walk alone. . . . Here, let me find it for you. . . .”

Frances watched from above as Dr. Gray pulled a small, slight volume from inside his coat pocket, while Adeline gave a slightly mocking gasp.

“You’re carrying Emma around now, Dr. Gray, right by your heart?”

He grinned as he flipped through the pages, until he found the line he had been searching for:

“‘Mr. Knightley called, and sat some time with Mr. Woodhouse and Emma, till Mr. Woodhouse, who had previously made up his mind to walk out, was persuaded by his daughter not to defer it, and was induced by the entreaties of both, though against the scruples of his own civility, to leave Mr. Knightley for that purpose.’”

Adeline wrinkled her nose. “I think you might be reading too much into that one.”

“Hmm, well, yes and no, perhaps. Certainly this part of the scene—which goes on for several lines, with Mr. Woodhouse continuing to demur, and Mr. Knightley continuing to not budge a bit—comically reduces the two men to their intractable natures, one all fussiness to his detriment and one all abrupt and overly decided to his. But if you think about it, this is the absolute most that Austen would be willing to show at this point, about the hidden currents of attraction between Emma and Knightley that they are way too bogged down by history and situation to acknowledge. This helps us to first mistake Knightley’s dislike of Frank Churchill as that of an elder overprotective family member—since she has her father wrapped around her little finger, someone in the book has to be up to the task—rather than the raging jealousy he is starting to be consumed by.”

“Mr. Knightley is another one who is so clueless—do none of these men know they are in love? Why are so many of her characters so lacking in self-awareness, do you think?” asked Adeline. “Is that the essence of our folly, our fate as humans: to not understand why we do things, or whom we love? Is that why so much of it ends up rubbish—and if it doesn’t, it’s just dumb luck?”

“It does seem to me that when her characters truly know and understand themselves from the start, they are less successful to the reader. Fanny Price comes to mind.”

Adeline knew how much Dr. Gray disliked Fanny Price.

“I think the reader on some level resents that purity of intent and action,” he continued. “It’s like, ‘Come on now, mess it up—do what other people would do. Fall for the Henry Crawfords.’ We love Jane Austen because her characters, as sparkling as they are, are no better and no worse than us. They’re so eminently, so completely, human. I, for one, find it greatly consoling that she had us all figured out.”

Frances slowly shut the window, then leaned back against the side of the nook and closed her eyes. It had been a long time since she had chatted with a friend about anything meaningful. The more she stayed indoors, the less people visited. She understood the logic to that—for all that friendship was not supposed to be logical.

It was now only her, her father—the ailing patriarch in his second-floor suite—and Josephine who resided in the Great House, along with the two young house girls, Charlotte Dewar and Evie Stone, who took care of the laundry and cleaning. For day employ, there was Tom, the stable boy, who also looked after the walled garden, caring for her beloved roses and apples and squash, and Adam Berwick, that sad, silent man, who tilled the fields for her.