The Jane Austen Society(88)

She just kept crying. It was, by far, the most emotion any of them had ever witnessed in her.

“I have literally nothing, Andrew, you know that,” she finally managed to say through her tears. “You know that better than anyone.”

“Frances, darling, that didn’t matter to either of us nearly thirty years ago—why on earth would it matter now?”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled at him lovingly for the first time in as long as that. “Are you sure?”

“Frances, I just watched you have your whole world ripped out from under you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have. It would be my honour, truly, to be your husband.”

Yardley ran behind the altar to have a few words with Reverend Powell, who immediately agreed as a representative of the Church of England to conduct the ceremony and dispense with the need for a license.

Adeline jumped up and, with a quick nod from Mimi, shoved the bouquet into Frances’s shaking hands. Evie ran back to the Great House to grab Josephine and Charlotte, knowing they would never forgive her if they missed such a longed-for event.

Frances turned to Mimi. “Are you alright, if we do this?”

“Oh, Frances, it’s the only thing that would make any of this alright.”

With those words of blessing, Frances Elizabeth Knight let Andrew Henry Forrester take her hand and lead her to the altar.

Dr. Gray was standing alone in the lime grove, listening to the bells peal three o’clock. The wedding had been over for a few hours, and the society had enjoyed Mimi’s cancelled wedding breakfast in the courtyard, courtesy of Charlotte and Josephine. Immediately afterwards, Yardley had gone with Adam to Adeline’s house to start going through all the books, Mimi had collapsed in the guest bedroom, Evie was helping Miss Frances pack quickly for her honeymoon, and Andrew had rushed back to Alton to wrap up some paperwork before catching the train to Brighton with his new bride.

Dr. Gray looked about himself at the surrounding fields, the walled garden up on the hill, the ha-ha that ran alongside the lime grove to keep out the sheep. He remembered walking here in the rain with Adeline last summer, the many visits to old Mr. Knight in his bedroom, the Christmas Eve service and the reading of the will shortly thereafter, an event which he now saw as the turn of the screw in all their lives. He allowed himself to think even further back, to the burial of his late wife in the parish graveyard, and his own wedding day decades earlier inside the little church, and the playing in the woodland with Frances and Andrew as little kids.

All of these memories, big and small, were equal in only one—but one very significant—way. They all belonged to the past, they were invisible matter, they could leave no trace or mark on the present. Only life in the moment could do that—only this second in the hour—only this one fraction of time that was gone before you could even complete the thought. It was all both that ephemeral, and that infinitely reliable.

If Dr. Benjamin Gray could have strung even just a few seconds from the past into something permanent, it would have been the feel of Jennie’s cheek against his neck. He missed that so much—missed her loving touch—missed being loved.

Instead he was reduced to being a lonely widower in need of salvation. Goodness knows where Liberty Pascal got some of this stuff, but when it came to Adeline Grover, Liberty never appeared to miss her mark. Dr. Gray had not been able to stop thinking about her suggestive comments since their walk.

It made a lot of strange sense. He had always felt as if Adeline was trying to prod him back to life somehow, back when they had crossed paths the most, when she was teaching at the village school—as if she was daring him into some kind of action. He saw now that on some unconscious level he had been asking her to. He had assumed at the time that the friction between them had all been to do with the school—the syllabus, the other trustees, the collective resistance to her teaching style.

But now he also saw—he hoped—that it was not about any of that. It was about him.

And he knew that she had cared.

He turned from the lime grove and headed through the woodland, then up a small incline into the walled garden made up of two different “rooms”: a front enclosure full of symmetrically planted lilac trees, and behind that another even larger space full of rosebushes and vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded on all sides by towering redbrick walls. In each of the three outside walls was a dark-red wooden door, leading to where he was not sure. He realized that in all the years he had visited the estate, he had never opened any of those doors.

When he entered the second enclosed garden space, he right away spotted Adeline sitting on a little bench against the farthest back wall, the small copy of Pride and Prejudice that he had given her at Christmas sitting open on her lap.

“Why, hullo. What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise.

“What are you doing here? Playing hide-and-seek with Liberty?”

“Just hiding.” He smiled and came over and sat down next to her on the bench. “Well, all’s well that ends well.”

“It was definitely like something out of Shakespeare, all those weddings at once.”

“Or Austen.”

She laughed. “It’s nice to see something work out, for once, even after all that time.”

“And they say you can never go back.”

“Do you believe that?”