The Jane Austen Society(69)
“—and also some that aren’t,” Yardley cut in. “And yet how alive, how real—how human—she seems now.”
He read through the letter again, which was cut off abruptly halfway down the back of the single page.
“So Cassandra intervened, then, after all, in the budding romance with the seaside stranger.”
“I don’t have sisters—I have four very awful brothers—but that bond Cassandra and Jane had seems so intense. As if they were their own little family. Like Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, holding in the eye of the storm, everything to each other, leaving little room for anyone else. Easy enough for Cassandra, I suppose, having lost her fiancé so young, making her essentially a respectable widow of sorts. But where did it leave Jane?”
“You know,” Yardley mused aloud, “I always thought it odd that the family of some random guy from a seaside town, a guy Austen presumably had met only that one holiday month, would have written to inform her of his death. Letters must have been going back and forth between the two of them. Or the family knew there was a relationship of some kind, even if just in its early days.” Yardley sat back and placed the open letter carefully on his lap. “So she blamed Cassandra for the romance ending. For all those years.”
“The missing years. All those letters from the same time period gone, destroyed by Cassandra. We’ve always known that. But we never knew why.”
“Until now.”
“Until now.” Evie sat there on her little stool, nodding happily at Yardley’s enthusiasm for her discovery.
“So.” He passed the letter back into her waiting hands and stood up, too full of excitement to stay seated. “So Persuasion was indeed her revising of her own life. Her working through the great disappointment. Her working through her residual anger at her sister.”
“By writing this, I think she tried to put a lid back on that anger for good. I think she knew she was not long for this world, and she wanted peace in her heart, full and total peace, and writing this marked the final forgiveness of her sister. And she needed to feel that, needed to be free of it.”
“You know it’s so strange, but I always wondered if someone like Jane Austen could have existed in the pages of her own books. If you think about it, if Cassandra hadn’t interfered when Jane was—what, twenty-three years old? Twenty-four?—who knows what might have happened. We might never have got the three final books of genius if Austen had gotten her man in the end.”
“I think Austen knew that only too well,” Evie replied. “Especially when you think about so many women at that time dying in childbirth, at least two of her very own sisters-in-law, and her fear about all of that, too. The letters that do survive say as much.”
“Evie, I know we don’t know each other very well. . . .”
“Oh, no, I think we do.” She smiled at him. “I think we are very alike.”
He laughed again. “Yes, poor thing, we are. Is the catalogue complete then, well and done?”
“Yes, tonight. I finished it all tonight.”
He shook his head at her. “Amazing. Truly. Listen, will you trust me with this, with the notebook?”
“Yes,” she answered slowly. “I can’t let you take the letter though. But I made a copy.”
“Of course you did. No, you are absolutely right, you cannot risk losing or disturbing any of the contents in here. Your estimations are right-on, by the way. We’re looking at a hundred thousand pounds at least, if not hundreds. It would be one of the greatest estate-library sales in history, whoever inherits it. We have to do everything we can to keep this intact for now, everything—for Miss Frances, for the society, yes, but most importantly for our understanding of her.”
“I completely agree,” Evie said. “I was hoping you would feel the same way.”
“We both love Jane Austen,” he replied with a wink. “Why ever would we not?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Alton, Hampshire
February 1946
Colin Knatchbull-Hugessen was an indiscreet and silly man of forty-two years of age. He had been living the bachelor life in a small row house on the outskirts of Birmingham. One day in February, as he was checking the racing times in the morning paper, his eye caught the following announcement in The Times:
Notice of the establishment on December 22, 1945, of a society dedicated to the preservation, promotion and study of the life and works of Miss Jane Austen. The Jane Austen Society is working with the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, a charity founded to advance education under the Charities Act, to acquire Miss Austen’s former home in Chawton as a future museum site. Subscriptions and donations of funds from interested members of the public, to advance this purpose, are welcome and may be remitted to the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, care of Andrew Forrester, Esq., High Road, Alton, Hampshire.
At the very same moment that Colin was skipping quickly past this announcement, he received a telephone call from his late mother’s solicitor with the news that James Edward Knight was dead.
The solicitor had learned of the death through remarkable diligence. Since being retained by Colin’s mother decades earlier, he had had his clerk check the principal probate registry in London every three months to search for the surnames Knight, Knatchbull, and Hugessen. He also sent his clerk every few months to Winchester to check the local Hampshire registry as well, knowing his late client had been the third cousin three times removed of Fanny Austen Knight Knatchbull, the eldest of the eleven children of Edward and Elizabeth Knight. The lawyer was worried that a will might enter probate and Colin’s chance to claim an inheritance from such a vast and landed family could be missed within the twelve-month window provided for at law.