The Jane Austen Society(17)

On his walk home from the stables Adam stopped to rest at the junction where Winchester Road split in two. If he turned a sharp left instead of proceeding on his way, he would end up at the old farmhouse where he had been born, now home to the substantial Stone clan. If he went on past that, he would eventually end up in the city of Winchester, a good sixteen miles away.

Adam had never been as far away as that, but he knew that Jane Austen in her final days had moved to rented rooms there, vainly hoping to find a cure for the mysterious illness that would soon claim her at only age forty-one. One month later Cassandra would watch from the upper-room windows as Jane’s coffin was transported by carriage to the famous Winchester Cathedral. Her beloved sister’s words of record—“ . . . it turned from my sight . . . I had lost her forever”—never failed to bring tears to Adam’s eyes. His own two brothers were buried hundreds of miles away beneath the Aegean Sea, nothing left of them at all but unmarked graves that he would surely never see.

The unnatural loss of youth not only hits us harder, it seems to insist on invading our days, as if the memory of the person lost too soon has a hidden, persistent source of energy. Cassandra had spent her final decades in Chawton heeding this force and safeguarding her sister’s legacy, whereas Adam feared he had failed the legacy of his brothers in not making more of his own life. Yet despite his depressed spirits, he was still always searching for something, for some way to make meaning from his life. He simply had no idea how to begin.

Heading now in the direction of home, the rain having stopped and the sun out again, Adam opened the low wooden gate next to the old steward’s cottage and walked over to the bench in the farthest corner of the yard. He often sat and rested here at the end of his day, preparing himself for his mother’s relentless questions the minute he got home. She was keeping close tabs on the state of the now-dying Mr. Knight, as well as tracking the social deterioration of Miss Frances Knight, one of the gentlest souls among them and an easy target for someone as aggressive as his mother.

Sitting on the bench, Adam could only imagine Jane Austen walking about the gardens, or resting on this very spot, as there was little physical sign of the house’s famous former resident. Instead he watched the new litter of tabby kittens dozing in the courtyard under the late-afternoon sun, heard the sound of the village junkman’s hand-pulled cart approaching, and caught sight of Dr. Gray and Adeline only now passing by the outside brick wall after him. They must have taken a longer route home through the fields.

Adam got up and walked back towards the gate. Turning to his left, he spied the pile of rubbish in front of the cottage, lying in wait for the junkman’s rounds. Protruding from the mound were the remaining three legs under the flat square seat of an antique chair. As a self-taught carpenter, Adam recognized the column shape of the chair legs and the straight lines of the seat as harking from the Regency period. His pulse quickened at the thought that perhaps this chair had once been used by the Austen family, maybe even by Jane herself.

He reached the pile of rubbish just as the junkman did.

“Having a little poke around as usual, are you, Mr. Berwick?”

Adam nodded and pulled at the chair, only to discover that most of its dark mahogany back was missing. In its present state the chair was useless, and he doubted he could carry it home without raising alarm at his own damaged state. As he released the chair, he spied something else, a small wooden toy of some sort, not immediately recognizable to him. Known in the village for his own handiwork, the gifts of small rattles and wooden ring-toss sets that he worked on when he wasn’t tending to the fields or reading, Adam wondered how old this forgotten object might be. Maybe it meant something more, a connection of some kind to the Austen family—maybe it meant nothing at all. But no one else in the village seemed to care about finding out any of that.

“You can keep that there, haven’t much use for something so slight.”

Adam gave a quick murmur of thanks and, tucking the object into his front jacket pocket, continued on his way. He was convinced that the other villagers viewed him as a subdued, broken man, not good for much, not creating any kind of legacy of his own. But at times like this, he wondered if he was also the only one paying attention to the rapid shortening of the days, the rubbish left by the side of the road, and the neglected and forgotten past.





CHAPTER SIX

Los Angeles, California

August 1945

At first Jack Leonard had found it mystifying, the obsession with Jane Austen.

The shelves of Mimi Harrison’s living room in the small bungalow perched high in the canyon were full of old leatherbound books (the one called Emma looked particularly beat-up) and the collected works of writers he had never even heard of: Burney, Richardson, and some poet called Cowper. He did recognize the name of Walter Scott, but only because the movie Ivanhoe had recently made another studio a ton of money.

The most common denominator with all of these writers appeared to be their connection to Austen, about whom he had been smart enough to ask around following that first encounter by the pool and the sight of the well-thumbed copy of Northanger Abbey in Mimi’s suntanned hands. Eventually she had mentioned her dad reading her the books as a girl, and the trip to some small town in England to walk in Austen’s footsteps (at that point he had wondered if she was both red-hot and insane), and the dream of one day making a film of Sense and Sensibility.