The Jane Austen Society(45)

“What do I get out of it?” he repeated. “I get the love of a good woman—a very good woman.”

She stifled a fake yawn. “How boring. That will never be enough for you.” She suddenly put her right hand out across his chest and half exclaimed, “Wait, what did that sign say?”

“Yardley told me about this place, said you’d been here years and years ago, said you always dreamed of coming back.” Jack put the car into park at the side of the road where it intersected with another and turned off the ignition.

“Oh my God, Jack, I can’t believe it.” She got out of the car, smoothing her tweed skirt beneath her winter coat, and held her hands to her cheeks. “Look at it—chocolate-box perfect. Seriously.”

Jack got out of the car, too. If a village could be asleep, Chawton was it. There weren’t even any sidewalks. Just one pub, one tearoom, one little post office that they had passed along the way.

“I think I’m getting the jitters.” He leaned in to grab the car keys out of the ignition. “Oh, wait, what am I thinking, locking up? Not even the criminal element would bother with this place.”

“No, you’re so wrong,” Mimi gushed, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him across the road, until they were standing in front of a fairly substantial, L-shaped two-story house, with a bricked-up window, redbrick walls, and a little white portico over the front door.

He watched in amusement as she looked side to side before taking a step closer to the building.

“No worries, Mimi my dear—I doubt there are any news photographers in a place like this.”

“No, it’s not that—I just don’t want to be intrusive. We both know how that feels. But see, this window—I read somewhere that this is the parlour where Austen wrote.”

Mimi turned to him, and the look on her face was as priceless as anything could ever be in Jack Leonard’s world.

“There was a door to the dining parlour that creaked, and she wouldn’t let it be fixed,” Mimi was rambling on, “so she’d write in the morning—while her mother and Cassandra helped with the household—they let her write, you see, because they knew. Because she was such a goddamn genius, you couldn’t help but know. And the creaking door would warn her when someone was entering, and she’d slip the blotter over the papers, and underneath are Captain Wentworth, and Anne, and ‘you pierce my soul’ and ‘half-agony, half-hope’ and, oh, God, how fantastic is this!”

“I thought Henry wanted to do the piercing of the holes” was all Jack could rejoin, and Mimi still had the presence of mind to playfully swat him as he started to step back into the road.

“It’s too perfect that that’s what you remember from five hundred pages of Mansfield Park.”

He did not bother correcting her that he hadn’t read it yet; he didn’t see the point.

“It’s just such a ‘vivid’ image,” he teased instead, as he pulled her back from the house.

“Look, this is swell and all, but I actually brought you here to meet someone.”

She stepped back to look at him. “In Chawton? Whatever for?”

“Yardley set it up. There’s that woman here—remember, the one who doesn’t go outside?—who has an extremely large estate and some connection to Austen, and to this house, and I’ve finally managed to convince her to meet with us.”

Mimi just stood there, staring.

“The house, Mimi—this house. I bought it for you. Well, I’ve made an offer on it. And I haven’t had one of those turned down yet.” He gave her a knowing wink.

Mimi turned away from him and felt as if she might throw up.

“I don’t understand,” she finally said, leaning back against the redbrick wall that enclosed the cottage garden at a sharp point next to the junction of the two main roads.

“I just told you, I made an offer on the house. Well, to take over a hundred-year lease on it at least—apparently that’s how they do things over here. Anyway, Yardley has been working on the deal for me. It’s taken quite some time. It turns out the old girl’s quite stubborn, reclusive or not.”

“I still don’t understand,” she repeated. “Why?”

“Because I love you, silly. Because I know how much it would mean to you—well, at least, Yardley told me, but it didn’t require any imagination, trust me. Why wouldn’t this be a dream come true for an Austen fan like you?”

“But I can’t live there!” she cried as she started to bolt, and he had to pull her back from the road again as they were finally approached by signs of life, a distinguished-looking man in a dark grey coat and hat, carrying a doctor’s bag.

“Shh, Mimi, please, it’s a good thing!” Jack called out, but she had run off. All he could do now was hurriedly nod to the man who had stopped to stare after the retreating female figure, a confused look on his face. Jack knew that look well.

“It can’t be . . .” Dr. Gray was muttering to himself. He turned to Jack, who simply shrugged nonchalantly. “Sorry, it’s just, your wife—she looks a lot like—”

“Just doing the tourist thing,” Jack said quickly, cutting him off.

“She seemed very upset.”

“Don’t worry yourself about it, just a bit of carsickness. These narrow, winding roads, you know. Anyway, what is it you people say? Cheerio?”