The Jane Austen Society(79)

Adam wiped his nose with a handkerchief from his pocket. “I keep coming back to the cottage, and all the books and things, and what if we lose it all? Let alone Miss Frances and the one home she has left?”

Dr. Gray came around to lean against the back of his desk, facing Adam. “That really doesn’t need to be your concern right now. I just wanted—Mrs. Berwick, too—we simply wanted you to have the information. But it’s nobody else’s business what you decide to do with it. And don’t panic about Miss Frances just yet—after all, Mr. Knatchbull may never sell any of it.”

Dr. Gray was touched, though, by the man’s visible conflict, the conflict Dr. Gray himself had been enduring. If they were caretakers out here of something bigger than themselves, then they each had a responsibility beyond their own self-interest that was incredibly difficult to deny.

“I want someone to tell me what to do.”

Dr. Gray gave his first genuine smile in days. “Trust me, Adam, we all feel like that sometimes.”

“What would you do?”

“I honestly don’t know. That’s what’s so trying about all of this. It’s so completely, so thoroughly, unique to you. Like all of life. None of us can ever say for sure what we’d do without feeling all of someone else’s slings and arrows along the way.”

Adam stuffed the handkerchief back inside his front jacket pocket. “I want to take a vote.”

“Come again?” Dr. Gray asked in surprise.

“The society. I want to tell them—I want you to tell them—and I want them all to vote. Miss Frances told me yesterday—I stopped in at the house on my way back from Wyards—she told me that this Mr. Knatchbull is pretty focused on the money from the house. She thinks we might get the books—says it shouldn’t be too difficult to pull off—but the rest of it all, and the cottage, who knows. So I want a vote, a proper official one, and soon. I trust everyone in the society.”

Dr. Gray looked at him carefully. “Adam, we don’t know everyone that well—Mr. Sinclair and Miss Harrison are pretty much strangers still, for all I like and respect them both.”

Adam shook his head firmly. “No, it’s fine. I trust them. I trust you.” He gave Dr. Gray a pointed, emotional look. “You knew all these years and you never said a word.”

Dr. Gray put his right hand out to touch Adam’s shoulder, an unusual display of the internal compassion he felt for all his patients but stoically concealed in the pursuit of his professional duties.

“Adam, it was important to do so, of course—but in some ways, if you think about it, it isn’t important at all. It doesn’t change anything—it doesn’t change what you shared with your father. The rest of it, even your mother’s role in all of this, is secondary, at least I think so. There’s the centre of the life, and there’s all the stuff that flies around on the periphery—and you, and only you, get to decide what you want to keep in place. Don’t let anyone else move it about.”

Adam nodded.

“But I still want that vote.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Chawton, Hampshire

February 23, 1946

Second Emergency Meeting of the Jane Austen Society

The agenda for tonight’s meeting was enough to put Andrew Forrester over the edge.

“So we’re here to hold a vote, one vote, on whether Adam should claim his inheritance of the Knight estate? A claim based on his alleged paternity by Mr. Knight, a fact even Adam was unaware of until just a day or two ago?”

Dr. Gray nodded. They were all assembled again in his front parlour. Everyone was there except Adam, which was more a relief than anything else, given the magnitude of the decision before them.

Mimi had met Yardley at the station that Saturday afternoon, having never returned to London after the first emergency meeting four nights earlier. She had stayed with Adeline the first night, then moved into the guest bedroom at the Great House. The country air was doing her good—she had never looked lovelier.

“But you knew about this? For how long?” Andrew asked Dr. Gray.

“I can’t get into that, Andy, as you well know,” Dr. Gray replied. “But I have here written permission from both Adam and his mother to disclose the nature of the claim to the current members of the society. These are for your solicitor files, as executor of the estate, to be locked away with the utmost confidentiality.” Dr. Gray passed the papers over to Andrew, then sat back down.

“Poor Adam,” Adeline spoke up. “He loses almost his whole family, and then this. How is he doing?”

Dr. Gray rested both his hands on the arms of his wingback chair closest to the fire and stared down at the floor. “I can’t say much, of course, as he is still my patient as well, but he has asked us all here today to vote on his next steps because he is too emotionally torn, I believe, to make the decision without our help. Our vote is not at all determinative or binding on him in any way. It’s purely to help him decide.”

“It must not have been an easy decision for you either, to say anything,” remarked Adeline.

Dr. Gray looked up in surprise at her understanding tone. It felt like many months since she had treated him with anything akin to compassion. It might not have seemed like much to the others, but to Dr. Gray her words offered both comfort and hope—the very sense of hope that he, like Adam, had long ago lost.