The Jane Austen Society(89)
“No, not now. Not after that.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “No one is more rigid and unyielding than Andrew Forrester.”
“No one that is except you,” Adeline countered.
“You’re probably right,” he gave in with a grin.
They stayed there quietly for a few minutes, listening to the starlings and finches singing from the tops of the orchard trees.
“We haven’t sat like this in a while,” Adeline finally spoke.
“Not since last summer, I think.”
She closed the little book on her lap. “We were discussing Emma I believe.”
“The obtuseness of old men.”
“Knightley’s not so old.”
“Old enough to know better,” Dr. Gray said. “Although perhaps age has nothing to do with it. Look at Evie. She’s, what, all of sixteen, and she’s got the entire British literary canon of the nineteenth century figured out.”
“What do you wish you had figured out?”
“You,” he said quietly, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and he realized he wanted to capture this moment forever. Wanted—finally—to try to string these seconds into something permanent all over again, however ephemeral and futile and fleeting this moment, too, would always be.
“I was pretty obvious, you know. I practically handed you teacher’s notes.”
He laughed. “And I failed the catechism miserably.”
She looked up at him, at his sad, handsome face. “I did love Samuel.”
“I know that, Adeline, I truly do.”
She started to cry, and he grabbed her hands in his.
“No one will understand,” she said through her tears.
“Is that important, to you?”
“No.” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “But it would have been important to Samuel.”
“You do him a great disservice if you assume that about him. Mr. Knight had that power over Frances, her whole life, and look at how he abused it. And anyway, what if you are wrong?”
She moved away from him a bit on the bench. “I’ll never know. That’s what’s so hard.”
“And I’ll never know if I could have saved your baby. Or Jennie. Or, frankly, so many other lives. I did my best though, I do know that. And when I couldn’t, I at least punished only myself.”
She reached up and touched his cheek with her tear-stained hand. “You’re not doing that anymore, though, right?”
“You knew?”
She kissed his cheek where her hand had been, hardly even able to look into his eyes. “Only recently. Mimi said something so innocuous, but it made me think. And then there was Liberty and the medicine-cabinet keys. I thought you were so disappointed in me, in my weakness—and then I realized you were just trying to save me from what you might be doing to yourself.”
“I have stopped, I promise you. What else on earth would make me hire a dungeon master like Miss Pascal?”
Adeline now had to laugh in spite of herself.
“But it will always be a struggle. It will always be in front of me, Adeline, never behind me. That’s the Faustian nature of it. You invite it in, and it never leaves.”
She sat up straighter to face him. “So, what do we do now?”
He pulled her onto his lap and buried his face against her neck, letting himself feel the softness of her cheek, letting himself fall into her essential loveliness, however ephemeral, however fleeting.
“Have you ever tried one of those back doors?” he finally said, looking up behind them from the bench.
She laughed through her tears. “No, come to think of it.”
“Then I say, let’s go give Liberty Pascal her money’s worth.”
“Benjamin Gray . . .” Adeline murmured happily, as his lips found hers.
EPILOGUE
Chawton, Hampshire
March 23, 1947
The First Annual Meeting of the Jane Austen Society
The society now comprised forty-four members. They came from all walks of life, having seen the discrete advertisements in local Hampshire and London papers:
Notice of the first annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society, which is dedicated to the preservation, promotion and study of the life and works of Miss Jane Austen. In conjunction with the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, a charity founded to advance education under the Charities Act, the society has spent the past year working to acquire Miss Austen’s former home in Chawton as a future museum site and is pleased to hereby announce the recent acquisition of Chawton Cottage for that purpose. New members of the society are welcome to the first annual meeting to be held at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 23, 1947, at Chawton Cottage, Winchester Road, Chawton.
In addition to the three dozen newest members of the society, the original eight participants, including the five trustees of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, would also be attending.
As an early agenda item at the meeting, the trustees would be announcing their unanimous decision to repay society member Mimi Harrison her original donation of forty thousand pounds, which had enabled the acquisition of the Chawton Great House Library. Last fall the sale of the library had realized a record four hundred thousand pounds over a dispersal of fifty days by Sotheby’s, and this had enabled the trust to purchase the steward’s cottage from Alpha Investments Limited for the reasonable sum of four thousand pounds. The trustees had also moved unanimously to gift fifty thousand pounds from the sale to Miss Frances Knight as the former and proper heir of the Knight estate, as well as in recognition of her successful efforts to secure the library and Chawton Cottage as a result.