The Jane Austen Society(36)

Adeline looked over at Dr. Gray, who was sitting on the small settee in front of the bay window. “The two of you cooked this up? Two men?”

“Yes, I’m afraid.” Dr. Gray grinned at her almost sheepishly. “It would be a big project—we’d need to incorporate as a charity or a trust of some kind, then find the money to acquire the property and any artifacts we can get our hands on, including a lot of what’s kicking about the old Knight estate, I suspect.”

“Have you talked to Miss Frances yet about any of this?”

The two men shook their heads.

“The Knights still own the cottage as far as I know,” Adeline said with her typical sense of authority. “So you’re going to have to start there—and with old Mr. Knight so ill, it may not be the best time to raise any of this.”

“Well, what do you think?” Dr. Gray asked gently. “Would you be interested in helping?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Am I a project then, too?”

“No, not at all—I mean, I—we—wouldn’t ask if we didn’t think you’d normally want to help.”

“If I was still normal, you mean.”

Dr. Gray sighed and could feel both their eyes now upon him, making him unusually flustered. “No, again, not at all—we just wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to help if you weren’t up to it, right, Adam? We just wanted to invite you to join. Just in case.”

Adeline stopped rocking in her chair next to Adam on the sofa by the fire. “Okay, fine, count me in—I surely have nothing better to do. So, it’s the three of us to start, and hopefully of course Miss Knight, if she’s up to it herself. We’ll need to get a solicitor on board, too—Samuel was training with one over in Alton when he got called up. . . .”

“Andrew Forrester.”

She looked over at Dr. Gray, surprised as always by his razor-sharp memory. “You know him, then?”

“We went to school together.”

“You’re the same age?” she said in surprise again. “Really? He just seems so . . . old. Or at least old-fashioned. And quite a stickler for detail, as I understand. He might not want to get involved with something as amateur as this.”

“Why don’t I ask him about first steps at least?” Dr. Gray said to them both.

Adam concurred, then he and Dr. Gray both waited for Adeline, with her natural air of authority, to resume talking. She looked at their expectant faces and asked, “And what will we call ourselves then? The Society for . . .”

“ . . . the Preservation of . . . ?” Dr. Gray suggested.

“How about simply the Jane Austen Society?” Adam spoke up without missing a beat, and the other two both turned to him in surprise.

“Perfect,” agreed Adeline, a wide smile breaking across her face for the first time in weeks. “Absolutely perfect.”





CHAPTER TWELVE

Chawton, Hampshire

December 17, 1945

A few mornings later, Dr. Gray ran into Andrew Forrester as he was leaving Mr. Knight’s sickbed. Eager to speak with Andrew on behalf of the newly formed society, Dr. Gray asked if they could take a walk outdoors to talk in private.

They exited from the southside door of the Great House and walked along the lower bricked terrace surrounded by towering conical yew hedges. They then proceeded along a gravel path adjoined on one side by deep forest until they reached the upper terrace, a low-walled site topped with lattice brickwork, fanciful balusters, and a view of the entire estate below.

“Okay, we seem to be far enough out of earshot now,” announced a bemused Andrew. He looked down at the beautiful Elizabethan house and the sloping expanse of snow-covered lawn before them, recalling the hours of tobogganing they had done there as boys. “You said you had a proposal to make me.”

As Dr. Gray now described the “little project,” as he liked to call it, Andrew at first was not sure that he needed to hear more. After all, he had read a few of the Austen books over the years and enjoyed them well enough, but the idea of devoting hours each month to preserving her physical history in the small farming village of Chawton seemed—as fastidious as he was—a bit exacting for his moderate level of interest.

But as his old friend spoke, Andrew realized that the very thing the society wanted to do might soon be out of reach. He was the only one of them who knew just what was at stake, for Frances most of all. If Mr. Knight had his way, the entire estate could end up one day in the hands of some unknown distant male relative, and then who knew what would happen to any of it. Worse still, the new will included a particularly punitive clause, one that provided Frances with nothing more than a small annual allowance and a right to reside in the steward’s cottage only for so long as the property belonged to the Knights. The minute any male heir sold off the cottage, Frances would essentially be homeless, in what appeared to be a backdoor attempt to keep the cottage from being turned into some kind of Austen amusement park. It was as if Mr. Knight had already been clued into the society’s plans.

But if the society could somehow get their hands on the cottage, Andrew told himself, either now from Mr. Knight or in the future, then they were the one group that could ensure Frances always had a place to live—the cottage was already subdivided enough to preserve sufficient rooms for her upstairs.