First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (22 page)

“I’m just asking if we’re going to have a relationship that extends beyond bibliographical intrigue.”

“I don’t know,” said Sophie, feeling a twinge of guilt as she thought of Eric coming back from Paris. “We’re not going back to my room right now, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Where are we going?” said Winston.

“The Oxfordshire History Centre.”

W
INTER HAD GRIPPED
Hampshire early as Jane stood in the corner of the churchyard at the Busbury Park chapel. The wind bit into her cheeks and the dusting of snow that had fallen the previous evening swirled around among the gravestones, giving the whole scene an otherworldly appearance. Her family had accompanied her to Mr. Mansfield’s funeral—her parents; her brothers, James and Henry, who had come home for Christmas; and of course Cassandra, who now held her hand tightly. Although even Cassandra did not know the depth of Jane’s affection for or indebtedness to Mr. Mansfield, she, more than the others, comprehended that Jane had lost a dear friend, and she had been a great comfort and support to her sister in the past few days.

The Austens made up nearly half the congregation that had attended the funeral in the tiny chapel and now stood in the churchyard for the burial. Lord Wintringham was there with his two sons; his wife, Jane was saddened to learn, had passed away the previous spring. A large stone outside the door of the church marked her resting place, and here the two younger men had paused before the service to remember their mother. Jane had always found churchyards both heartbreaking and comforting, and today was no exception. Even on her most carefree childhood days, when some combination of Austen siblings would frolic among the gravestones in St. Nicholas churchyard at Steventon, she had never completely escaped the reality of what those stones represented. Today that reality pierced her heart like a dagger, but at the same time the words of comfort spoken by the clergyman, and the knowledge that her friend rested in the bosom of Christ, served as greater comfort than any companionship of family—even of her dear Cassandra—could ever hope to.

When the Grace had been proclaimed, the tiny congregation began to disperse—some back toward the main house and some toward the village outside the park. The earl tipped his hat to Jane as she passed. The Austens were just passing through the churchyard gate when Jane felt a hand on her arm and turned to find Mrs. Harris, who had kept house for Mr. Mansfield.

“Mrs. Harris,” said Jane. “How kind of you to come.”

“I’m sorry for you, Miss Austen,” said Mrs. Harris. “I know he was a good friend.” She gave Jane a nod of her head and a look that seemed to say perhaps she knew more about the intimacy between Jane and Mr. Mansfield than she ought to have. Jane knew from novels that housekeepers often overheard private conversations, but she could easily forgive the gentle Mrs. Harris such eavesdropping.

“He was,” said Jane. “And more than that.”

“I thought you should know,” said Mrs. Harris, “I unpacked his things when he returned, though they took him straight up to the big house. There was a book for you. I left it on the table there in the sitting room where you used to read to him. I thought you might still want it.” Jane gave a tiny, inaudible gasp. Was it possible that this was the second edition of Mr. Mansfield’s book?

“You are very kind. I shall stop by the gatehouse on the way home. And Mrs. Harris,” said Jane, taking the older woman’s hand in hers, “thank you so much for all that you did for him.”

“’Tweren’t nothing,” said Mrs. Harris. “I cooked and cleaned same as I would for anyone else. You gave him nourishment I never could.” Before Jane could respond to this kindness, Mrs. Harris slipped through the gate and hurried off toward the main house. Jane implored her family to start for home without her while she stopped off at the gatehouse, but Cassandra insisted on staying with her sister.

“So this is where you went off to all those days,” she said to Jane as they stood before the gatehouse. It seemed lifeless now. No light shone from within, and a workman was busy closing up the shutters, sealing the house like a tomb.

“It was a pleasant spot for me,” said Jane. “We spoke of literature and writing and . . . and other things. I shan’t be a moment.” Not wanting to prolong her stay in a room in which she had once felt so much joy but which now held no happiness, Jane dashed into the gatehouse, only to have her breath taken away. Not only was there no book on the table; the sitting room was nearly empty. Only a single heavy chair and the table by the window remained; the rest—furniture, books, rugs—was gone. Even the pictures had been removed from the walls, leaving rectangles of whitewash outlined in candleblack. Jane made a quick tour of the rest of the house and found the other rooms equally empty. Outside, she addressed the workman, now on a ladder closing out the sunlight from what had been Mr. Mansfield’s bedroom.

“Excuse me, but can you tell me what happened to everything in the house?”

“Furniture went back up to the big house,” said the man, not interrupting his efforts to look at Jane.

“But what about Mr. Mansfield’s belongings? His books and his effects?”

“Sold by order of the heir.”

“The heir?”

“Mr. Tobias Mansfield,” said the man. “The son. Got wind that his father died and asked that all his things be sold.”

“But there was a book there in which . . . that is, which Mr. Mansfield intended to present to me. As a gift.”

“All I know, miss, is a fellow come up from Winchester yesterday and took away everything. Books included.”

—

IN THE MONTHS TO
come, Jane would search every bookshop in Winchester for the book that Mr. Mansfield had brought for her, but without success. She would carefully watch the advertisements in the literary journals, but she never saw an announcement for
Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale
. By the time she had finished expanding
First Impressions
into a full-length narrative novel, she had assumed that the original version had been lost forever.

The copy of the first edition of
A Little Book of Allegorical Stories
inscribed by Richard Mansfield to Jane Austen followed a path not so different from that of millions of other books. From the dealer in Winchester it was sold to a clergyman who kept it until his death. His books were bought by another bookseller and the volume was sold to another reader and on that reader’s death the process was repeated. And so it went through the generations until the book was among a small collection left by a don to his Oxford college. There it was unpacked, cataloged, placed on a shelf, and ignored by readers for the better part of a century.

S
OPHIE REMEMBERED THE
first time Uncle Bertram had taken her to a library that was neither a place to check out books nor a public museum. He had just read a biography of Archibald Campbell Tait, the Victorian archbishop of Canterbury, and he wanted, he said, to know more.

“But you read the whole book,” said Sophie, who was fourteen. “How can you know more?”

“The man who wrote this book couldn’t read
all
the original source material,” said Uncle Bertram.

“What’s original source material?”

“Where do you think the author learned so much about his subject?” said her uncle. “He didn’t know the archbishop. So he had to read his letters and his diaries and his sermons.”

“Can’t you just buy those things at a bookstore?” said Sophie, who had come to believe that all worldly knowledge could be found in any well-stocked secondhand bookshop.

“Not everything has been published in a book,” said Uncle Bertram. “We’re going to look at the originals—the actual handwritten letters and diaries and sermons.”

He had taken her to the library at Lambeth Palace, the official home of the archbishop of Canterbury, on the south bank of the Thames in London. They had rung the bell next to a thick wooden door set into a high stone wall. When the door swung open, Sophie felt she was being admitted into a private castle. Traffic and tourists whizzed round them, but only she and her uncle passed into the quiet sanctuary. A librarian who seemed to be old friends with Uncle Bertram led them to a small reading room, where two or three other scholars sat at long wooden tables. Uncle Bertram enlisted Sophie’s help in filling out small slips of paper requesting the materials he wanted, and a few minutes later she was carefully untying strips of cloth that held together dusty stacks of folded letters. She wondered if anyone had looked at them in the past century.

Sophie couldn’t believe she was allowed to touch a notebook of sermons Tait had given in the 1840s or a series of letters to his wife. How could anyone who knew these things were right here in London not want to hold them, to experience the feeling of life and reality radiating off of them in ways that even a printed book could not provide?

Sophie came to love original source material. She loved the thrill that came with unfolding a piece of paper that had lain untouched for decades or even centuries and finding out something that other scholars had missed. At Oxford she spent as much time in archives working with unpublished materials as in libraries reading printed books.

The Oxfordshire History Centre was housed in a former church in Cowley. As Sophie and Winston entered, the high stained glass windows filtered colored light onto the researchers below. Winston gave a low whistle.

“You’ve never been here before?”

“Why would I?” he said.

“For a book collector, you have a lot to learn.”

Sophie did not know any of the staff who were working that afternoon, and she decided that was just as well. Since she had come here hoping to engage in criminal activity, better that she not be recognized. She pulled out the paper on which she had written the catalog numbers of the Cowley Grammar School archives and began copying them onto request slips. “Each reader can only check out one box at a time,” said Sophie, “so you sign requests for half of them and I’ll sign requests for the other half.”

“What are we looking for?” asked Winston.

“Anything to do with Richard Mansfield.”

“I feel like a secret agent,” he whispered in her ear. His hot breath almost made her wish they had gone to her room first, but when the archivist stepped up to the counter to take their request slips, all thoughts but research left her mind.

A few minutes later they sat side by side, sifting through the first two boxes of papers. Most were folded tightly and tied into packets with narrow strips of cloth. The cloth was almost black with dust on the outside and a clean white on the underside—a sure sign, thought Sophie, that no one had looked at these papers since they had first been bundled up. As the clock ticked slowly overhead, they carefully untied packet after packet, only to discover endless pages of accounts, correspondence with tradesmen, and lists of awards.

Sophie loved a story, and these papers told one. She found herself tracking the progress of certain students, following the troubles of tradesmen who did subpar work, and being drawn into the drama of hiring a new mathematics master. When Winston proclaimed he had finished his first box, Sophie was barely through the second bundle of at least a dozen.

“How did you get through so fast?” she asked.

“Same way I read all my assignments at Rugby—scanned everything and picked out the important words. There’s nothing to do with Mansfield in here, trust me. Shall I go get the next one?”

“You can help me with mine,” said Sophie. She didn’t like the idea of his getting ahead of her. What if there
was
something related to Mansfield and Austen? And what if Winston, with his rapid scanning, found it before Sophie could? She realized that not only did she want Austen to be exonerated, but she wanted to be the one to do it. She handed him the most unpromising bundle in her box—a sooty pile of papers with a label tucked under the tie reading “accounts 1825–27.”

“This is way too late for Mansfield,” said Winston.

“Still, we’d better check,” said Sophie. “You can’t always trust labels.”

She increased the pace of her own search, still not keeping up with Winston, but regretfully setting aside any number of dramas.

As soon as she opened her third box Sophie saw it. She turned her body slightly to shield Winston’s view, but he was already rifling through the papers in his box, and besides, it was unlikely he would notice. Winston didn’t catch subtle details. The cloth strip that tied one of the bundles in this box had several bits of white facing out. Unlike all the other bundles she had examined, this one had recently been untied and retied. She gently untied the cloth and turned over the slip of paper on the top of the bundle. It read: “Richard Mansfield 1758–80.” Fingers trembling, she unfolded the first document. It was a list of students who had been at Cowley in 1758. She went on to the second item.

The documents appeared to be in chronological order, but Sophie resisted the urge to skip ahead to the end of the stack. A clue could be anywhere, she reasoned. Most of the documents had to do with mundane matters of school life. She was beginning to despair of finding anything, when she reached a small group of papers about an inch thick that had been tied together within the larger batch. Again, the fabric tie showed tell-tale bits of white. The label read: “R.M. papers after death 1796.”

“Nothing here,” said Winston, closing his box. “I’ll go get my last one. They close in twenty minutes. You’d better get cracking. Anything good in yours?”

“Nothing yet,” said Sophie, flipping the packet over to prevent him from seeing the label.

“Maybe Mansfield wrote the thing after all,” he said.

She felt a surge of anger toward him that dissipated almost as quickly as it had come upon her. She needed him for protection against Smedley, she reminded herself; he was big and strong. And good in bed, she thought. He just wasn’t a scholar or a particularly passionate defender of Jane Austen. Of course, if Mansfield really did write
First Impressions
, Winston would suddenly be descended from a famous author. Was it possible that he didn’t
want
to exonerate Jane?

Sophie pushed these thoughts aside, realizing that she had only a few minutes to examine the final Mansfield bundle in private while Winston waited at the counter for his last box. She quickly untied the strip of cloth and began to scan the documents. The first several were letters from the headmaster who had followed Mansfield, asking for advice. These were arranged in chronological order, and the dates grew gradually further apart, until the correspondence became simple annual updates on the health of the school.

The last of these letters was dated January 1796. “I was delighted to receive your
Little Book of Allegorical Stories
,” wrote the headmaster. “There are several of these that I will share with the boys from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, and they will appreciate them all the more knowing they come from a much loved former leader of their flock.” At the bottom of the bundle were two unopened letters, both addressed to Mansfield at Croft Rectory, Yorkshire. Both were still sealed, with a wafer of gum and flour like those she had read about in Jane Austen, Sophie supposed. She glanced up and saw that Winston was still waiting for his box, casually chatting with a young woman behind the counter. She needed something with which to pry open the two letters—letters that neither Richard Mansfield nor anyone else had ever read. Her nails were too short to slip under the paper; her pencil was too thick. Desperate, she reached up and pulled out a hair clip. Thank goodness she had made some effort to look nice for Winston this morning.

Turning her back to the counter, she slipped the metal edge of the clip under the flap of the first letter and gently popped it open. She unfolded the single sheet of notepaper to discover a letter from a clergyman, asking if there were an open post for a curate at Croft parish. Sophie sighed in disappointment. She picked up the second letter and was just about to open it in the same way when she noticed a tiny cut just above the seal of the flap, as if someone had cut the paper with a razor blade. Whoever had untied this bundle had also cut into this letter. But why open the one and not the other? Willing herself to examine the clues one step at a time, rather than immediately unfolding the letter, Sophie turned the paper over and looked at the address. Eighteenth-century hands were hard to distinguish from one another, especially with a sample of only five words, but it certainly did look familiar.

Her whole body trembled now as she carefully unfolded the letter. She and Winston were the only researchers left in the room, and she could hear him still chatting with the girl behind the counter. She smoothed out the letter on the table and read:

Steventon, November 23, 1796

My Dear Mr. Mansfield,

I have shared
First Impressions
only with Cassandra and my niece Anna, to whom I read in my room each afternoon. Anna, I’m afraid, is so excited about the story that she keeps mentioning the names of Eliza Bennet and Mr. Darcy downstairs in the sitting room, and I’m sure the other occupants of the rectory must be filled with curiosity, but so far your little project remains, for the most part, a secret. I look forward to your return.

Yours very affectionately,

J. Austen

Sophie was thrilled and devastated all at once. Here was a previously unknown letter from Jane Austen that firmly established her connection to Richard Mansfield, but again it seemed to imply that Mansfield wrote
First Impressions
. It wasn’t positive, she told herself, but at the same time she knew it didn’t look good. The three pieces of evidence she now had—the inscribed first edition of
A
Little Book of Allegorical Stories
from St. John’s; the second edition, containing
First Impressions
; and this letter—together certainly pointed toward Mansfield as the author. But Sophie refused to believe it. She knew that Jane had written
First Impressions
. She just couldn’t prove it. Not yet. Sophie looked up to see Winston taking delivery of the final box. Almost without thinking, she slipped the letter into the back pocket of her jeans. By the time Winston returned to the table she had retied the Mansfield bundle and was shutting up the box.

“She gave me the last two,” said Winston. “And she says we can have an extra fifteen minutes.”

“You work on those,” said Sophie. “I need to pop to the ladies’.”

“Nothing in that box, then?”

“Nothing,” said Sophie. After returning the box, she went to the lobby, where she retrieved her handbag from a locker. A minute later she was secure in a stall of the ladies’ loo and had slipped the Jane Austen letter into the St. John’s copy of
Allegorical Stories
. Theft was getting easier and easier, she reflected.

Just as she was about to return to the lobby, she heard her phone vibrate from the depths of her bag. Pulling it out, she saw she had two texts from Victoria. The first read: “Managed to get off Thurs. so coming to see you,” and the second, “Booked on the night train, will arrive London early.” The thought that her sister would soon be on her way brought a surge of relief to Sophie. Here, at last, would be someone she could trust completely. She texted back, “In Oxford. Let me know what train and I’ll meet you. Love you!”

She felt a lightness in her step as she returned to the lobby. Victoria would be able to help—she was always good at forming a plan of action. Jane Austen was not doomed yet. When she reentered the reading room, Winston was bent over one of the boxes, and only one librarian remained behind the counter. Sophie’s mind returned from Victoria’s text to those white flashes of cloth and that tiny cut in the Austen letter. Someone had been here before them. Someone without much experience dealing with eighteenth-century documents had slit the flap of the letter and been the first person to read it since Jane Austen had written it. And someone had been a little careless in retying that bundle. Either that or he didn’t care about covering his tracks.