First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (3 page)

“You never know.”

“Actually, I do know. You don’t have a job, you don’t cut your hair, and you love books. You represent everything my father abhors.”

“You’ve got to introduce us. I could learn to shoot things.”

“I don’t think arming you is a very good idea,” said Sophie.

“Well, even unarmed, I’m sure he’d find me delightful.”

“You have an awfully high opinion of yourself, don’t you?”

“Not really,” said Eric. “I mean, not like you do. I’m just American. Maybe we’re better at joking around and having fun.”

“What makes you think I have a high opinion of myself?”

“Well, you think you’re better than me, right?”

Sophie felt chastened. They had arrived at the gentle stone arches of Folly Bridge, and the Oxford traffic was now just ahead of them, at the top of a long flight of stone steps.

“Look,” said Eric, gently laying a hand on her arm and pulling her to a stop. “I’m not very good at first impressions. But think about it—we both like Jane Austen, we both like walks in the countryside, and I’m an uncouth American who would drive your parents crazy. I’m kind of a catch.”

She stared at the stones beneath her feet and felt her cheeks turn hot.

“We don’t have to get married or anything,” said Eric. “I just thought we had a nice walk and it might be fun to hang out or get a coffee or something. I’m only in Oxford for a few more days anyway.”

Sophie was dying to look at him, to give him her number, even to kiss him on the cheek and walk away with a toss of her hair, but she had never been good at this. And at the moment his insensitive impersonation of her was still pounding in her ears, doing its best to drive away that feeling she had had when he looked into her eyes.

Still looking down, she pulled away and said, “It was nice to meet you, Eric.” She was halfway up the steep stone steps that led from the riverside to the street when she impulsively turned back and called to him, “It’s Collingwood, by the way. I’m Sophie Collingwood. You can reach me at Christ Church. Just leave a message with the porter.”

Ten minutes later, Sophie stood in the Upper Library of Christ Church, surrounded by neoclassical bookcases of highly polished oak filled with bindings of leather and vellum and cloth that contained the library’s greatest treasures. Although she worked in a modern office downstairs, this was her favorite room in the college—second among Oxford spaces, in her opinion, only to Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian. For the past five years, through two degrees, she had come here whenever she needed a place for quiet reflection, a place to center herself before diving back into the raucous world of Oxford. Sophie had finished her master’s degree three weeks ago and was taking the Long Vacation to explore her career options. The college librarian had said she could keep her part-time job until the new term started. So, for a few more weeks, Sophie could stay connected to the world of education—a world she had been immersed in her entire life and where answers always came, if only you looked in the right place. Now she stood alone in the center of this glorious room and wondered if any of her questions—what to do about a man like Eric, how to soften her own sharp edges, and above all what to do with her life—could be answered by the priceless books that surrounded her.

“I
FELT THAT,
as a young lady whose love of books is equaled only by my own, you would enjoy such a spot,” said Mr. Mansfield.

“You were, as usual, correct, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane, running her finger along a row of gleaming leather spines and sighing audibly.

They stood, by invitation of his lordship, the Earl of Wintringham, in the library of Busbury House. Jane was overwhelmed. The trove of books in her father’s study at Steventon paled in comparison with this treasure house. Shelves seemed to stretch for miles, nearly disappearing overhead.

“I generally prefer to keep to my own sitting room,” said Mr. Mansfield, “but as you mentioned that you had just finished reading
Camilla
, I thought you might enjoy looking for new material in his lordship’s collection.”

“Indeed, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane, “I feel as if I could spend my life searching for things to read in a library as grand as his lordship’s. I see it was not just the possibility of friendship with young ladies who love novels that drew you to Hampshire. I am surprised you do not
live
in this room.”

Though their acquaintance had extended for only two weeks, Jane already felt that she and Mr. Mansfield were old friends. As she had learned at luncheon in the rectory that day when they had first spoken, Rev. Richard Mansfield was the rector of Croft-on-Tees, Yorkshire. When he had entered his ninth decade a few months earlier, his physician had encouraged him to seek warmer climes, so he had hired a curate and decamped to Hampshire, where he was now a guest of Edward Newcombe, the Earl of Wintringham, at Busbury Park. Earlier in his career, Mr. Mansfield had been a schoolteacher, and Robert and Samuel, the two sons of the earl, had come under his tutelage. He had since remained a friend of the family, and was now ensconced in a disused gatehouse at the end of the long east drive.

“I am asked to dine with his lordship regularly,” said Mr. Mansfield as Jane pulled a lusciously bound copy of
Amelia
off the shelf, “but I prefer not to stay here. A drafty gatehouse is much more to my liking.”

“And, I suspect, gives you an independence you might not otherwise enjoy,” said Jane. Mr. Mansfield smiled.

“Let us say that the conversation at his lordship’s dinner table is not what I have come to expect from you, Miss Austen. It is far too much composed of gossip, especially when his lordship’s sister and her daughters are visiting from London as they are at present.”

“And you would rather have your intrigue in the form of novels,” said Jane, holding up
Amelia
and waving it at him, “than in the form of idle speculation by his lordship’s sister concerning her neighbors.”

“Though you jest, Miss Austen, you are correct. Why, just three nights ago, Lady Mary informed us all with breathless delight that she had heard, while staying with his lordship’s cousin in Kent, that a nearby house had been let to a bachelor with four thousand pounds a year. She told us this as if it were news as momentous as the French Revolution.”

“But you have said that Lady Mary has daughters,” said Jane, “so to her the news was certainly much
more
momentous than the beheading of a few thousand French nobles.”

“I am afraid you have lost me with your youthful logic.”

“Surely you know, Mr. Mansfield, as any good mother of daughters does, that a bachelor of such means wants nothing more than a wife. No doubt Lady Mary has a high enough opinion of her daughters to believe that he will choose one or the other of them. Marrying one’s daughter to a wealthy man is certainly more important than anything that could happen in France.”

“I did not think such a thing could happen, Miss Austen,” said Mr. Mansfield with a wink, “but I think it is altogether possible that you have read too many novels.”

“Well then,” said Jane, “I shall return
Amelia
to the shelf and borrow this volume of
The Spectator
to see if, in fact, it ‘tempers my wit with morality.’”

Summer was in full bloom on the grounds of Busbury Park, and Jane took to making almost daily visits to Mr. Mansfield. They walked in the park, through gardens, along carriage paths, and across fields, occasionally catching a glimpse of the impressive edifice of the main house, but more often enjoying the views across the gently rolling park. Jane loved the way the sheep gathered under the isolated trees in the meadows at the hottest time of day. She relished the view of the stone bridge at the far end of the lake and the broader vistas that one particular hilltop provided beyond the boundaries of the estate and across the fields of Hampshire. They talked of nothing but books—what they had read, what they hoped to read, and, in Jane’s case, what she hoped to write. When they returned to the gatehouse after their walks, Jane would invariably read aloud the latest chapter of her current project, a novel in letters called
Elinor and Marianne
. Mr. Mansfield would sit with his eyes closed listening to the gentle sound of her voice, then ponder the reading silently when she had finished. These were tense moments for Jane, for she valued his opinion, and knew that he would give it eventually. Often he approved of every word; other times he grimaced as he made suggestions.

“You needn’t make such a face, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane on one such occasion. “I take no offense at your criticism. Quite the contrary, I am honored that you grace me with your honest opinion. An opinion, I might add, which I believe strengthens my work.”

“I only felt that if Sir John Middleton were a more affable sort—the type to throw parties or host picnics—your younger characters might be thrown together with more frequency.”

“I confess I had not yet given much thought to the character of Sir John,” said Jane. “But I think you are right. And it should not take much rewriting to set him on a course to host picnics and balls aplenty.”

“It is, I think,” said Mr. Mansfield, “the sign of a well-crafted novel when the minor characters are as fully realized as the hero and heroine.”

“Wisely spoken, Mr. Mansfield. And I am certainly guilty of giving less life to those whose time upon the stage of my novel is but brief. It is a fault I shall endeavor to correct.”

“Tell me, Miss Austen—you have said that you read these same pages at the rectory. Do you receive advice from your listeners there as well? Does your sister Cassandra offer you suggestions?”

“Alas no, sir—though I often entreat her. I fear she believes her honest reaction would harm my feelings or somehow damage our intimacy, and so she says only that she thinks each chapter ‘marvelous,’ or, what is worse, ‘the best yet,’ without giving any indication how the inferior previous chapters might be brought up to the level of quality of the most recent. Your honesty, sir, is one of many reasons I so value our friendship.”

Another reason was that, at his age, Mr. Mansfield posed no threat as a suitor. Though Jane took delight in writing of the courtship and wedded bliss of her characters, she was quite uncertain how she would react should the opportunity for such courtship fall into her own path. The chance to spend so much time with a mind so in sympathy with her own without the slightest thought for romance made Mr. Mansfield, to her, the perfect companion.

“O
F COURSE YOU CAN
come for a visit,” said Uncle Bertram. “You know you’re always welcome.”

“More than a visit this time,” said Sophie. “I need some advice.”

Her encounter with Eric Hall yesterday had driven home the fact that she was at a crossroads in her life. So, as the green fields of Oxfordshire slipped past the window of the train bearing her toward Kingham, she had called the person who had always helped her find direction—her Uncle Bertram.

“Nothing you want to discuss on the phone?” said Uncle Bertram.

“It’s more of what we’ve been talking about this past year,” said Sophie. “What I’m going to do now that I’ve finished my master’s. But it’s more complicated than that.” She paused for a moment and heard the patient, steady breathing of her uncle. “I met a man yesterday who’s taking a year off and traveling around Europe reading books.”

“Sounds delightful,” said Bertram.

“Well,
he
wasn’t delightful,” said Sophie, “not exactly. But he did make me think.”

“An essential quality in a man,” said Bertram. “Now, I’m off to a lecture at the V and A, but you come down any day this week and we’ll have a long chat.”

—

SOPHIE’S SISTER WAS WAITING
for her on the platform at Kingham station. After hugging her, Victoria tossed Sophie’s bag in the back of the Land Rover and pulled out of the car park for the ten-minute drive home.

Bayfield House, the country home where Sophie had grown up, stood at the top of a hill looking out across a wide valley in which sheep grazed. On the far side of the valley was the dark green of Bayfield Wood. Unlike most of the buildings in the towns and villages nearby, built with the local stone in a warm honey color, Bayfield was a gray stone edifice three stories high, built around a central courtyard, into which Victoria now steered her car. To some visitors it seemed a cold and imposing country house, but to Victoria and Sophie, who had delighted in exploring its mysteries as children, Bayfield was home.

Although Bayfield boasted an impressive library, her father had always treated books as decor, not repositories of knowledge or stories or inspiration. He kept the library locked, opening it only for monthly tours conducted for the sightseers who stalked the country homes of England and for the annual parties that coincided with what he considered the triumvirate of high holidays—Christmas, Ascot, and Henley. Even on those occasions, the wire mesh doors that covered the bookcases remained locked. When Sophie, at the age of six, had the audacity to ask if she could look in the library for something to read, her father replied, “Those books aren’t for reading.”

Sophie’s love of books and her father’s apparent resentment of their very presence in his home was just one root of the distance that had grown between them over the years—a distance Eric Hall had sensed and Sophie had refused to discuss. She knew that her own birth had caused complications that meant her mother couldn’t bear any more children; she knew, too, that while her father doted on Victoria, he resented Sophie for not being a boy. More than anything he had wanted a son, and, in ways subtle and not so subtle, he had reminded Sophie of this fact for as long as she could remember. Maybe that, as much as anything, was why she had turned to his younger brother, her Uncle Bertram.

The only time she had ever seen the bookcase doors of the Bayfield library unlocked was on Christmas, when Bertram visited. Every year, he threw open the doors of the library and withdrew from the pocket of the silk waistcoat he insisted on wearing to Christmas dinner a tiny golden key, with which he unlocked one of the bookcase doors. He never perused the shelves or took his time deciding which door to open. He always seemed to know exactly where to go, and within seconds of entering the room he had pulled a single volume off the shelf, relocked the cabinet door, pocketed the key, and proclaimed, “Merry Christmas to me!” Sophie was the only member of the family who seemed to find this ceremony worthy of attention. Victoria, older by three and a half years, had explained its origins to her one year when they were children:

“It’s an agreement he has with Father,” whispered Victoria. “Uncle Bertram gave Father some sort of money or inheritance or something to help keep the house, and he gets to take one book out of the library every Christmas.”

“Father says those books aren’t for reading,” said Sophie.

“I’ll bet Uncle Bertram reads them,” said Victoria, winking at her little sister.

—

“IT’S ANOTHER OF MOTHER’S
classic events,” said Victoria now, as they got out of the car. “Good intentions and dreadful sculpture.”

Sophie laughed. “I’ve missed you, Tori,” she said.

“Edinburgh is too far away,” said her sister. For the past six months she had been working for an Internet advertising company in Scotland. “But we have all day to catch up. Trust me, you won’t want to spend your time looking at the art.”

The sculptures were indeed hideous. It looked as if the artist had made plaster casts of the most unattractive people he could find, and then broken off body parts and scattered them around the garden. Arms hung from trees, heads floated in the pond, legs grew up next to the rosebushes. It was supposed to be some sort of social statement. As far as Sophie and Victoria were concerned it was a statement that the artist should get into another line of work.

“We’re not allowed to say how awful it is,” said Mrs. Collingwood to her girls as they were setting up the refreshments table. “We just smile and pour tea and remember it’s all for charity.”

“But did you know?” said Sophie. “I mean, how bad it would be?”

“Oh, my dear, of course not. But we’ll have a good laugh about it in the morning.”

And so Sophie, in her favorite summer dress, spent the day walking through the garden telling people that cream teas were available in the summerhouse, bringing cups to old ladies too tired to move from the benches around the pond, and talking to her sister while the two of them washed dishes.

Late in the afternoon, as the crowd was waning, the two sisters were strolling up the garden looking for abandoned teacups when their mother called to Sophie from where she stood chatting with a young man.

“Sophie, come here. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Good thing I have a boyfriend at the moment,” said Victoria with a giggle, giving Sophie a playful shove in the direction of their mother, whose matchmaking was notorious.

She didn’t recognize him at first. He had cut his hair and shaved, and although he was wearing jeans, they were new and untattered, and he wore them with a checked button-down shirt that made him look almost civilized.

“You must be Sophie,” he said, holding out his hand to her as she approached. She was just on the verge of revealing him, of saying, “Eric, I see you’ve met my mother,” but he caught her eye again—how did he do it?—and something in his gaze made her play along.

“Yes, Sophie Collingwood,” she said, gripping his hand as firmly as she could, wondering if she could cause physical pain.

“Eric Hall,” he said. “I was just admiring your mother’s viburnum.”

“I’m sure you were,” said Sophie. “It’s so admirable.”

Sophie’s mother ignored her daughter’s sarcasm and said, “Eric here is a book lover, like you, Sophie. Although it doesn’t keep him from appreciating a fine garden.”

“No indeed,” said Eric. “Or fine sculptures. I especially like the pile of torsos next to the rhododendron.” Sophie and her mother glanced at one another and each suppressed a laugh. “I would love to have an escort round the garden, Mrs. Collingwood, but I’m sure you must be much too busy.”

“Sophie will be happy to show you round,” said Mrs. Collingwood. “Won’t you, Sophie?”

“Blissfully,” said Sophie. Her parents were constantly trying to force her into an attachment—usually with a wealthy young man who might one day be counted on to preserve Bayfield House for the Collingwoods. That her mother was now thrusting the hitchhiking academe Eric Hall on her she found more than a little amusing.

“So, Mr. Hall, was it?” said Sophie. “What brings you to Bayfield House?”

“I’ve come to admire the sculpture,” said Eric.

“Oh come on, you know as well as I do that this stuff is abominable,” she said, turning and walking up the garden.

“Well, that’s one more thing we have in common.”

“How did you find us, anyway?” asked Sophie, genuinely curious. Though she found his showing up uninvited a bit annoying, walking with Eric was certainly more pleasant than fetching tea for old ladies.

“‘Open Garden and Sculpture Show at Bayfield House’—the signs are in every tearoom in Oxford. And I told you I could borrow a car.”

“But I never told you I lived in Bayfield House.”

“No, you didn’t. Lucky for me the only other open garden and sculpture show in Oxfordshire today was only forty miles from here. I should’ve known yours would be the house near Adlestrop.”

“Why Adlestrop?” said Sophie.

“You must know why,” said Eric. “Jane Austen’s cousins lived there. She visited, what, two or three times?”

“Three,” she said, smiling. “So how was the other sculpture show?”

“Well, the sculpture was much better, but the company wasn’t nearly as nice.”

“You need to work on your lines,” said Sophie, almost instantly regretting her abrasiveness.

“You know, I’m not a horrible person. And I’m not trying to get you into bed or anything. I just fancied an afternoon in the country and I thought you would make good company.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” said Sophie. She had promised herself, standing in the Upper Library yesterday, to stop being so defensive, stop assuming—for she had finally admitted to herself that this was what she had been doing—that every man she met would break her heart the way Clifton had. “Maybe we could start over?” she said.

“Why not? Hi, I’m Eric Hall.” When he held out his hand Sophie felt charmed and, she was surprised to find, a little disappointed (that he wasn’t trying to get her into bed).

“Sophie Collingwood,” she said, shaking his hand once more, but this time without trying to crush it. “You’ll have to forgive me; university life has made me a bit of a cynic when it comes to men.”

“Look,” said Eric, “I’m sorry about the other night in the pub. I could claim that I was drunk or something, but the fact is I was an ass, and I apologize.”

“Apology accepted,” said Sophie.

“So, what was it like growing up in a grand country house?”

“The best part was lots of empty rooms to escape to with a good book and lots of woods and fields to tromp round in with my sister. The worst part was listening to Father complain constantly about how there isn’t enough money to replace this roof or rebuild that wall. That, and having people constantly ask, ‘What was it like to grow up in a country house?’” she teased.

“Another topic, then,” said Eric. “Your mother tells me you’re quite the bibliophile.”

“My mother used the word ‘bibliophile’?”

“Not exactly,” he said with a laugh. “She said something about the miracle of pulling Sophie away from her books for an afternoon.”

“A bibliophile raised in a family that doesn’t know the word,” said Sophie. “That’s me.”

“So how did you become a book lover?”

She leaned against the stone wall at the end of the garden and gazed out across the glowing Oxfordshire countryside toward the ridge five miles away, where she could just see the silhouette of the church tower in Stow-on-the-Wold.

“My Uncle Bertram,” she said.

—

SOPHIE HAD ALWAYS LIKED
Uncle Bertram. He told her stories and engaged her in conversation in a way that other adults at Bayfield House rarely did. She had been eight years old when her uncle brought her to London for a weekend to see a Christmas panto. “He took
me
when I was eight,” said Victoria, by now a sage of eleven and a half. “You won’t like it. His flat smells funny and there aren’t any toys and there’s no garden.” Sophie was unimpressed with the panto—it all seemed rather silly to her. When Uncle Bertram asked her afterward what she wanted for dinner she couldn’t think of anything, so he took her for pizza. She didn’t particularly care for pizza.

She gritted her teeth as she stood on the doorstep of his flat in Maida Vale, prepared for the odor Victoria had warned her of, but as they walked in and Bertram busied himself turning on lights, Sophie found she quite liked the smell. It was something like dust and candle wax, and if she took a deep breath it burned her nose the tiniest bit. It seemed almost alive. Only when she had stepped into the sitting room did she begin to suspect its origin. The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. Stacks of books stood neatly arranged on every horizontal surface—tables, windowsills, even the top of an unplugged television. Since Sophie had been forbidden to explore the library at home, her only real experience with books had come at school and from the few children’s picture books that lay on the bottom shelf of a cabinet in the nursery. She sensed immediately that this was something altogether different. It was a library, yes, but she knew these books had been
read
. They weren’t arranged in long lines of matching bindings like the ones in Bayfield House, and almost every volume had slips of paper protruding from the top. She wondered if Uncle Bertram had marked all the best bits.