The Jane Austen Society(43)

Dr. Gray smiled at her astuteness. “Yes, of course—she will be a real asset to the society.”

“Has she said yes?” Adeline smiled back, nodding at the still-astonished house girl.

Evie looked at her revered former teacher and her trusted childhood doctor, and she wondered if this was the grand opportunity that she had been hoping and preparing for all along. Being part of something that would normally have been so far out of her reach. Having something to contribute. Knowing something that others did not.

“Yes,” she answered happily.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN

London, England

Midnight, January 3, 1946

Mimi sat by the open French doors to the suite at the Ritz, where she and Jack had been staying on holiday since New Year’s Eve. She was unable to get to sleep and was instead examining yet again the small box containing the two topaz crosses. As was his nature, Jack had immediately taken her at her word last fall when she had expressed interest in acquiring the jewellery from Sotheby’s. She had had to explain to him after the auction that she did not necessarily want to wear the necklaces—she wanted, instead, to safeguard them. She thought no one else could do a better job than a privileged fan like herself. Jack Leonard felt himself stumped, yet again, by the kind of worshipful love Mimi Harrison was doling out to everyone, it seemed, but him.

Work on Sense and Sensibility continued apace, and for every extra line that he got the screenwriter to give Mimi’s character, Elinor, Jack sneaked in a few extra ones for Willoughby, too. Jack was not the most experienced of producers, but he did have a knack for spotting the most interesting character in a script. In the alchemy that was all of Jack Leonard’s unique and uniquely questionable qualities mixed together, his understanding of the pulse of the moment struck Mimi as almost uncanny. Sometimes she felt as if he had been sent back in time by about two years, so intuitively correct was that understanding.

If she could have gone back two years in time herself, she would never have believed that she would have ended up engaged to Jack Leonard and wearing Jane Austen’s ring. Or moving to Hampshire. Or—dare she admit—even quite in love. Jack’s willingness to practically move mountains where she was concerned was extremely seductive and persuasive. It was as if she could see the wheels turning in his mind, could see the ulterior motives, yet the journey getting there was just too damn fun, and the destination too remarkable. She would have hated herself for falling for him except that she was a big girl and certainly not risking hurting anyone but—in all likelihood—herself.

It was also extremely difficult not to confuse Jack’s more extravagant and stubborn actions with a flair for generosity, if not a pure and selfless heart. She knew that his heart was both uncomplicated (the physical rewards of lust being paramount at all times) and highly compartmentalized into little separate chambers. Right now she might have the master suite and the upper hand, and all the privileges that entailed—but she also knew, from the string of conquests in Jack’s past, that she could end up just as easily relegated to the little garret at the very top, like Fanny Price at Mansfield Park.

All of this was why, after that first night they had slept together following the auction at Sotheby’s, she had tried her best to keep him from taking over too much of her. Jack, she intuited, didn’t just want a woman to give herself completely to him for free: he wanted squatter’s rights, a leeway, and a right of first refusal. For a man who approached everything at full velocity, proof of love and fit and courtship required, in Jack’s eyes, complete abandon and surrender.

She had to admit, as she looked back at his sleeping figure in the king-size bed behind her, physically at least Jack gave as good as he got. Perhaps the chemical attraction from the start had been the key after all—perhaps that was what everyone out there was getting wrong. She remembered her mother telling her once that you need to be extremely attracted to the person you married because one day that would be all that was keeping you together, as well as the only viable way of making up.

At the time Mimi, on her way to study history and drama at Smith, had thought her mother full of it. But life with Jack Leonard the past six months had shown her that there was a reason so much of popular culture came down to sex, and the having, or not having, of it, with the people to whom we were most in thrall. In her darker moments, recalling how a professor had once referred to an acting career for women as glorified prostitution, Mimi feared that so much of her on-screen success came from eliciting those same feelings in complete strangers. This had probably been one of the big drivers behind her quest, as she acquired more and more leverage in Hollywood, to take on increasingly complex and less glamorous roles.

She now knew that this was what Jane Austen was onto as well, with all her attending to the bad boys in her fiction. For if Fanny Price could almost capitulate and let Henry Crawford “make a small hole” in her heart, then there was no hope for the rest of us. Mr. Darcy was the perfect example of a man used to being eminently in control, and then within seconds of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, finding himself so at the mercy of his passion for her that he starts doing the very things he condemns and prohibits in everyone else. Terrified by his human vulnerability, Darcy proceeds to do everything to push Lizzie away except accuse her of some unspecified crime and have her carted off. Austen seemed to know the power of physical attraction (see Mary Crawford and the upstanding Edmund Bertram, or Wickham and Lydia, or even the Bennets twenty years before the plot). Mimi sighed at the idea that the big secret behind Jane Austen’s fiction could be something as prosaic, and animalistic, as that.