The Jane Austen Society(24)
“Oh, I see. Yes. Well, I shall carry that message back to him.”
“Please do.”
Frances hung up and looked about herself at the empty hallway that led to equally empty rooms. She was the caretaker now, and the gatekeeper, of this once-great estate and its connection to one of the world’s greatest writers. She would have to learn to step into her father’s place and protect, as much as possible, what was left of the legacy of their family.
So she hoped Mr. Sinclair did not call again. She had always felt herself far too liable to persuasion.
Evie Stone sat alone on a little stool in the far corner of the library. It was well past midnight.
Unbeknownst to Frances and the other staff, Evie had been doing more than just diligently dusting the volumes in the Knight family library; for the past year and a half, she had also been doing a secret sort of cataloguing under the pretence of her daily tasks.
She was far more interested in Jane Austen than she had let on when first hired as house girl to the estate. She had read all of Austen’s six novels at the age of fourteen, giving her a significant chunk of her teens to reread them, then to fall inevitably into the same hole as so many others before her, in wanting to know more, to understand more, to figure out exactly how Jane Austen did it.
If Evie had anyone else but herself to blame for this preoccupation, it would have been that one great teacher the village had managed to provide, the year before Evie’s own premature exit from school. Adeline Lewis had come into the classroom with both a sense of urgency and a sense of humour. She seemed to intuitively know how long she could keep the attention of the most inattentive student and to work backwards from there. Suddenly the children were being read to from diverse works ranging over the centuries, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Evelina, to Orlando and All Quiet on the Western Front. Miss Lewis always took the time to explain various characters’ behaviour and motivations, connecting a wealthy landowner in Georgian England, or an army general in one of Shakespeare’s plays, to real-life figures of the day, the war providing ample examples of people both born and made for greatness.
The children had listened rapt as the war raged on outside their little village school, and the newsreels during the Saturday matinee movies showed the bombs dropping on London and Europe, and the telegrams started arriving more and more often to their own families’ doors. It seemed as if every other week another grief-stricken child would show up in class, their face white and tear-stained as they went about their lessons. The adults in the village appeared intent on instructing the children that it could be a long road ahead, and breaking down along the way wouldn’t help any of them. It was a lesson in stoicism and persistence that Evie would never forget.
It was now nearly one A.M., and Evie’s work that night had been proceeding unimpeded, until she came upon one of the earliest editions of Pride and Prejudice on the library shelves. Slowly opening the leatherbound book, she was delighted to find an inscription by Austen herself to one of her brother Edward Knight’s many children. Evie sat there running her fingers over Austen’s handwriting, as sacred as anything she had ever touched. This was Evie’s absolute favourite of all of Austen’s books, and of all the books she had read so far in her young life. For this, too, she had Adeline Lewis to thank.
Right from the start Miss Lewis had noticed what she called Evie’s “intellectual precociousness,” and the very first book she had pressed into the girl’s hands was her own well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice. As Adeline suspected, Evie had quickly picked up on the subtle and ironic humour in the text. The young girl had particularly loved moments such as Mr. Bennet’s asking Mrs. Bennet—after her one-sided litany on which of their five daughters the wealthy new neighbour, Mr. Bingley, might marry—if she supposed that to be Bingley’s “design” in moving there. Mrs. Bennet rudely scoffs, “Design? Nonsense, how can you talk so! But it is very likely that he may fall in love with one of them. . . .” To the delight of Evie, everything about Mrs. Bennet’s obtuseness and desperate one-track mind could be thoroughly and efficiently summed up in that one throwaway line.
But no sooner had Miss Lewis started at the school than the visits from a myriad of different, sheepish, male school board trustees had begun. Evie had watched with fascination as Miss Lewis held her ground with each of them, reinforced the value of her lesson plans, and practically dared the men to do something about it. One by one the men would leave the classroom visibly disturbed by their exchanges with her—even Dr. Gray seemed unable to manage Adeline Lewis, despite his usual calm but insistent bedside manner. When the students learned of Miss Lewis’s engagement to her childhood sweetheart, they suspected that she would not stay their teacher for long. Evie herself left school for good in the spring of 1944—a year later she learned that Miss Lewis had resigned from teaching, only to lose her new husband in battle, leaving her pregnant, unemployed, and alone.
Meanwhile Evie, confident in her high impression of Miss Lewis’s flawless literary judgment and her own untested gifts, had spent the past year and a half ploughing through the list of classics that Adeline had given her on her last day at school, a very different list from the one she had given Evie’s father during his long convalescence from that terrible tractor accident. Even without a clear sense of where further study could lead her, Evie was keeping up her reading in the hope that one day a grand opportunity would present itself. She was convinced that she only had to work hard in the meantime and be ready for it when it came.