The Jane Austen Society(68)

She looked up to see Yardley Sinclair standing in the threshold of the doorway leading from the Great Hall next door. He was staring at the little notebook open on her lap, in which she had just been scribbling furiously. He looked behind him and then, firmly but quietly shutting the door, took a step towards her.

“I might ask you the same thing,” she replied, leaving him silently impressed by her temerity.

“I was given a little peek in here earlier by Miss Frances, but there wasn’t time to see more. And then I found I couldn’t get to sleep, so thought I’d come down and get something to read.”

He took another step towards her and she quickly closed the notebook before her.

“Evie, does Miss Frances know you are in here?”

She nodded but stayed sitting on her little stool in the corner.

“Does she know what you are doing?”

She nodded again, but this time more slowly. “But only recently. After the will had been read.”

Yardley could tell that the young girl was going to stay firmly rooted in place, so he reached for a chair and pulled it out in front of her. “Do you mind?” he asked, this time more gently than he had been addressing her so far.

She shook her head, and he sat down across from her and held out his hand. “May I have a look?”

So many scenarios were suddenly playing themselves out in Evie’s mind, and she was far too young and inexperienced in the world of business to know what might be at risk by disclosing everything now, before she had even had the chance to share it all with Miss Frances. She was also troubled by how Yardley seemed to be having his run of the place after hours, on his very first visit. Maybe he was just an insomniac, but she had watched him as closely as anyone at the meeting that afternoon, and he had a most inquisitive eye. Evie’s self-appointed job, right now, was to protect Miss Frances and obtain as much value for her from the estate as Evie could—she just hoped that nothing she was about to do might derail any of that.

Evie also knew that Mimi wholeheartedly trusted Yardley, and Evie was in thrall to Mimi both as a movie star and a fellow Austen scholar. So with some hesitation she held out the notebook and watched, quite gratified, as Yardley flipped through its pages with increasing astonishment.

“My God, Evie.” He looked at her, tears in his eyes.

She nodded happily.

Then he started to laugh, dabbing at his eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket, and she found herself laughing, too.

“My God.” He stood up and started running his fingers along the spines of all the books on the shelf right behind him. “It’s all in here, isn’t it—everything she probably read—everything she read while she wrote those unbelievable books? And all these first editions. It’s unbelievable. It’s like a miracle.” He whirled around to look at Evie. “And no one really paid attention to any of it before?”

She finally stood up, too, and he realized anew how tiny she was.

“According to Miss Frances, her father—the late Mr. Knight—and his father before him, they neither of them had much time for Austen. Didn’t get the fuss.”

Yardley was randomly pulling out different books now, flipping through them, realizing just how minute and precise were the descriptions Evie had been allotting them in her little notebook.

“You know, Evie, you’re too young to appreciate this, but Austen’s books actually went out of print after her death. When Frances’s father was born, back in—what was it she said earlier, 1860?—the books hadn’t even approached their zenith in the Victorian era. It wasn’t until the turn of the century that critical consensus really started to coalesce. I don’t even think the first essay on Austen was until Bradley’s at Oxford in 1911.”

“Oh, I know that.”

He laughed again. “Yes, that was silly, of course you do.”

She had been saving the best for last. She went over to a shelf near him, took out the text on Germanic languages that was part of an imposing multivolume set, and opened it up before him. Inside its pages, as if marking the place, was a folded-up piece of yellowing paper, covered in deeply slanted, familiar handwriting.

Yardley took a deep breath. “Are you joking?”

“It’s the only one, though—I’d really hoped to find others. But it’s an important one. It explains a lot.”

“Can I open it?”

She nodded. “It’s not at all fragile—I think it’s been in here for over a hundred years, untouched. And it was not finished, and it was never sent. She must have been interrupted and lost track of where she’d put it. Or”—and here Evie got quite emotional—“she was getting quite sick, I think, at least enough to worry her. And perhaps she just forgot about it or bigger things took over, and she stopped caring about what she had had to say.”

Yardley took the letter gingerly from the book and sat down to read it. When he was finished, he took a second to compose himself. It was the single greatest discovery of his career, and one of the most important finds yet in Austen scholarship.

“You realize the date here? August 6, 1816? The day she finished writing Persuasion.” And then he started to laugh again. “Of course you do.”

Evie nodded and came over and sat back down across from him. “Cassandra wasn’t far, just a small trip away to some relatives it sounds, and yet Austen wasn’t going to wait one second longer to say what she had to say to her older sister. Imagine finishing those final, incredible chapters of Persuasion and then turning straight to writing this letter. That says something. It says some things that are pretty amazing about her—”