The Jane Austen Society(46)
Jack walked quickly after Mimi, who was now kneeling on the grass in a park across from the lane and next to the village cricket pitch.
“I really think I’m going to be sick,” she said as he approached. He put his hand down to help pull her up, and she swatted him again, this time seriously. “Jack, no, stop.”
Now he was starting to get a little mad. “For God’s sake, Mimi, this was supposed to make you happy. Can’t you just be goddamned happy, for once, for me?”
She looked up at him quickly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, my God, you go on and on about Darcy and Pemberley and how Elizabeth fell in love with him after seeing his house—”
“That was irony you goddamned idiot!”
“—and how romantic it all is, and how hot, and here I am, just trying to make you happy—”
“Or hot.”
“No,” he said firmly, “just happy, believe it or not.”
“By buying me a practical shrine. What the hell am I supposed to do with a shrine? I can’t live there, this can’t be our summer house, that would be insane.” She narrowed her eyes. “Oh, God, you’re not nuts, are you?”
“No, but I’m starting to think you are. Or I am for loving you.” He turned and stormed off.
She stayed kneeling there a few seconds longer, then pulled herself up.
In front of her stood two gigantic oak trees that bordered the eastern edge of the park, the curve of their branches forming a sort of natural proscenium arch. Through this clearing she could see all the golden-apple sunshine, like something out of a poem by Yeats, streaming through the bare branches of the trees and radiating about the rolling hills in the near distance.
It looked like heaven to her. Jack Leonard was trying to buy her a little piece of heaven.
Eventually she returned to the car and found him standing there, leaning back against it, map in hand. She came up and leaned her head against his chest, nuzzling him hard, and at first he didn’t respond. But eventually she could feel him kiss the top of her head and shake her a bit by each shoulder, and she looked up at him and laughed.
He would have loved to stay there against the car, feeling her push up against him like this, but he knew that they needed to get to their meeting with Frances Knight. As they walked down the lane towards the Great House, all the memories for Mimi started to come flooding back.
“You see I got quite lost, and this farmer, this very nice youngish man, showed me the graves of Jane’s mother and sister, and I’d had no idea they were there. Actually, you remember when we met, I’d just made Home & Glory?”
Jack did remember. He had wanted that script—the movie had gone on to be one of the top ten money-makers of 1944.
“I’d thought about that guy, losing both his brothers in the Great War. He looked nowhere near over any of it. Shell-shocked himself, in a way. I thought maybe the movie could help people see how much some families were sacrificing. Help them understand.”
“A one-woman USO.”
“Jack, seriously, short of the draft it was the best I could do.”
“No, I know—I’m still just stinging a bit from before.”
They stopped at the base of the gravel drive, and a hundred yards away stood the Great House, practically scowling down from its small incline.
She grabbed his jaw and pulled him in for a soft, open kiss.
“I am sorry, Jack—it’s not that I don’t appreciate it. It’s just so much, you know? To take in.”
“Money can buy you anything.” He shrugged as if it was no big deal.
“I don’t normally subscribe to that theory, but after this I may be coming round.”
He took her arm and they started up the long drive together.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Chawton, Hampshire
Three o’clock that same afternoon
Frances Knight was sitting in a small room, known as the reading alcove, that jutted out above the main entrance to the Great House as part of its imposing three-story porch. It was yet another perfect spot to watch out for visitors both expected and not, and family lore described it as one of Jane Austen’s favourite places in the house for that very reason. Even during the war, tourists could occasionally be seen venturing up the drive, not daring to open the low wooden gate a few hundred feet from the front steps, but just standing there, zooming in with their cameras, taking their one shot of the house that Jane Austen had almost lived in, but not quite.
After three months of persistence, and a burgeoning phone relationship with both Josephine and Evie, Yardley Sinclair had finally managed to get Miss Knight to at least entertain an offer on the steward’s cottage. She had not told her father yet, as he was in the final stages now, and she wondered if it might not be better just to wait. This was the absolute most calculating and manipulative idea Frances Knight had ever allowed herself to have, and some small strange sense of rebellion reared itself within her as she got a taste of what the future might feel like, once her father was gone.
Over time Yardley had explained to her, with all the patience of an archaeologist chipping away at an Egyptian ruin, that the rich American was willing to pay well above market value, several thousand pounds above, for the little cottage. That his plan was to immediately restore the cottage into a single-family residence again, ideally using the original layout from Jane Austen’s time.