The Jane Austen Society(31)

“Adeline, darling, look what Mr. Berwick has brought you.”

Adeline looked down from her perch and peered into the basket to see a little kitten fast asleep.

She started to cry.

Mrs. Lewis was used to all this emotion, but the poor man could only stand there frozen in place, having no idea what to do or say, gripping the basket in his white-knuckled hands.

Mrs. Lewis put out her hand to touch his forearm gently. “Don’t mind her, it’s so sweet of you. She’s just still quite worn down. Look, I’ll go get us all some tea, shall I?”

As Mrs. Lewis left the drawing room, Adam put the basket down next to the stack of books in the window seat and noticed Persuasion at the very top.

Adeline was wiping her eyes with the edge of her housecoat. “I’m sorry, Mr. Berwick.”

“It’s Adam,” he said simply, then gently reached down into the basket and put the kitten in her arms. “Came from the old tabby at the steward’s cottage. It’s a few months along now.”

She stroked the tiny animal’s brown-and-ginger coat. “It was so thoughtful of you. I really am very sorry.” She had interacted so rarely with Adam Berwick in the past, such a shy and silent man, that she was now feeling terrible for having frightened him with this display.

He gave a little cough and looked about for a place to sit. She was sitting up there in the window, looking as if she could stay there for hours, with her books and her little pot of tea on a small wicker tray. Suddenly a mental image from years ago flashed through his head—lying up on the edge of a stone wall, surrounded by death in the little church graveyard, feeling like an effigy himself.

“Oh, I’m sorry, please, have a seat—bring that chair over, the rocking chair. It’s my favourite. Keeps me in motion.” She smiled wearily.

He brought the chair over from beside the fireplace and sat it down next to her. “You’re reading Persuasion.”

“You know it?”

He nodded. “A hard book, that.”

“Hard to read?”

“Hard to feel.”

“Oh, dear, yes, I don’t know what I was thinking when I picked it up—although it always makes me so happy in the end. You like Jane Austen, too, then?”

He nodded again while simultaneously looking everywhere about the room except directly at her.

“Of course I have to ask then, which of the books is your favourite?”

He looked down at his lap and gave her a small, self-conscious smile. “All of them. But Elizabeth Bennet is my favourite character.”

“Oh, me, too. There’s no one like her in all of literature. Dr. Gray goes on and on about his Emma, but I’ll take Lizzie over Emma any day.”

Adam was staring directly at her now, at the way she was speaking about the characters as if they were real people. They had always seemed so alive to him—it had never occurred to him that anyone else might feel that way, too.

“You talk to Dr. Gray about the books?” he asked, leaning over to give the kitten a little pat.

“Yes, he is a singular fan of hers, let me tell you. But it makes sense—he is such an odd mixture himself of—how did Austen describe Mr. Bennet? So ‘odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice’?”

“Dr. Gray is a good man,” Adam replied simply.

“Yes, he is—which is remarkable, given how clearly he sees everyone and everything.”

“Like Austen herself.”

“Yes.” Adeline sat up even straighter in agreement. “Exactly. The humanity—the love for people—mixed with seeing them for who they really are. Loving them enough to do that. Loving them in spite of that.”

Adam nodded. He had never loved anyone enough to do that. Had not been given the chance. Had not given himself the chance. Like Adeline right now, he had been sitting in a window seat, watching everyone else go by, not putting himself out there. And getting nothing in return.

That night he returned to his copy of Pride and Prejudice yet again. He thought back to his talk with Adeline, and of how they both loved Elizabeth Bennet, and he wondered how much of Jane Austen might be in that wonderful character after all. He would often stare at the small sketch of the baby-cheeked woman with tight brown curls and strong nose on the frontispiece of some of the books, and he wished he knew more. Wished the letters to her sister had been preserved—wished that the one sketch Cassandra Austen had done out-of-doors had revealed more than loose bonnet strings and an outward-seeking gaze.

It mystified him that he could have grown up in the same village where Austen had once lived—where she had written the final three books from scratch—yet see so little of her around him. Yes, there was the Great House still owned by the Knights, and the graves of the mother and the sister, and the old steward’s cottage in the heart of the village. But aside from one small memorial plaque placed on the cottage in 1917 on the centenary of Austen’s death—the kind that the country gave out to hundreds of distinguished Englishmen—there were no other traces of her life.

Adam found the courage to say as much to Dr. Gray a few days later at his annual checkup, now that Adam knew he was not the only man in Chawton to be so interested in the great writer. Harriet Peckham led him brusquely into the office, then remained in the front examining room tidying about as the two men spoke.