The Jane Austen Society(2)

Off he wandered to wait with Rider by the main lych gate to the churchyard. After several minutes she finally appeared from around the corner of the church, this time stopping to read the inscription of every stone she passed, as if hoping to discover even more slumbering souls of note. Every so often she would teeter a bit as her heel caught the edge of a stone, and she would grimace just so slightly at her own clumsiness. But her eyes never left the graves below.

She stopped at the lych gate next to him and looked back with a contented sigh. She was smiling now and more composed—so composed that he finally picked up the whiff of money in both her poise and her manners.

“I’m so sorry about that, I just wasn’t prepared. You see, I came all this way to find the cottage, where she wrote the books—the little table, the creaking door,” she added, but to no visible reaction. “I couldn’t find out much about any of this while in London—thank you so much for telling me.”

He held the lych gate open for her and they started to walk back towards the main road together.

“I can take you to her house if you’d like—it’s barely a mile or so up the lane. I’ve done my morning haying for the farm, before it gets too hot, so I’ve time to spare.”

She smiled, a great big white winning smile, the kind of smile he could only imagine being American. “That is awfully kind of you, thank you. You know, I was assuming people came all the time, like this, like me—do they?”

He shrugged as he kept his pace slow to meet hers along the half-mile gravel drive that led down to the road from the Great House.

“Often enough, I guess. Nothing really much to see, though. It’s just workers’ flats now, at the cottage—tenants in all the rooms.”

He turned to see her face tighten in disappointment. As if to cheer her up, before he even knew what had come over him, he asked her about the books.

“I’m not even sure I can answer that,” she replied, as he pointed the way back down the country lane, opposite the end where his wagon sat with its load temporarily forgotten. “I just feel, when I read her, when I reread her—which I do, more than any other author—it’s as if she is inside my head. Like music. My father first read the books to me when I was very young—he died when I was twelve—and I hear his voice, too, when I read her. Nothing made him laugh out loud, nothing, the way those books did.”

He listened to her rambling on, then shook his head as if in disbelief.

“You haven’t read her then?” the woman asked, a disbelieving light in her own eyes meeting his.

“Can’t say I’ve too much interest. Stick to Haggard and the like. Adventure stories, you know. Suppose you might judge me for that.”

“I would never judge anyone for what they read.” She caught the ironic look on his face and added, with another broad smile, “Although I guess I just did.”

“All the same, I never understood how a bunch of books about girls looking for husbands could be on par with the great writers. Tolstoy and such.”

She looked at him with new interest. “You’ve read Tolstoy?”

“Used to—I was going to be sent up to study, during the war, but both my brothers got called to fight. I stayed back here, to help out.”

“Do you all work the farm together then?”

He looked away. “No, miss. They’re both dead now. The war.”

He liked to say the words like that, like a clean cut, sharp and deep and irrevocable. As if trying to stave off any further conversation. But he had the feeling that with her this approach might only invite more questions, so he quickly continued, “By the way, see those two roads, where they meet—you came in from Winchester, from the left, yeah? Well, stick along here to the right—that’s now the main road to London—and you come into Chawton proper. That there’s the cottage up ahead.”

“Oh, that’s really awfully kind of you. Thank you. But you must read the books. You must. I mean, you live here—how can you not?”

He wasn’t used to this kind of emotional persuasion—he just wanted to get back to his wagon of hay and be gone.

“Just promise me, please, Mr.…?”

“Adam. The name’s Adam.”

“Mary Anne,” she replied, extending her hand to shake his goodbye. “Start with Pride and Prejudice, of course. And then Emma—she’s my favourite. So bold, yet so wonderfully oblivious. Please?”

He shrugged again, tipped his cap at her, and started to walk off down the lane. He dared to look back only once, from just past the pond where the two roads met. He saw her still standing there, tall and slender in her midnight blue, staring at the redbrick cottage, at its bricked-up window and the white front door opening straight onto the lane.



* * *



When Adam Berwick had finished up the rest of his day’s work, he left the now-empty wagon back by the kissing gate and trudged along the main road until he reached the tiny terrace cottage that had been his home for the past handful of years.

The family had once been much larger, his father and mother and all three boys, of whom he was by far the youngest. They had owned a small farm, proudly held on to through four generations of his father’s family. This legacy had required all the Berwick men to take on hard manual labour starting very young. And he had loved it: the repetition, the unvarying cycle of the seasons, the going-straight-to-bed with no time to talk.