The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen (6 page)

“How could you stay away? If I lived here, this would be my favorite room.”

“My father and grandfather wouldn’t let me play in here or touch any of these books—they said they were too valuable. My dad and mum divorced when I was eleven, and after that I’ve lived elsewhere.”

“I see.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the magnificent collection. My fingers itched to take the books off the shelves and examine them. “You’re
really
going to sell all these?”

“I have no choice. My father left a ton of debts. I’ll be lucky if I manage to break even after selling this place. But enough talk of doom and gloom.” His eyes twinkled a bit mischievously now as he looked at me. “I have a confession to make.”

“A confession?”

“After our conversation last night, I was so intrigued by what you said—that there might be a missing manuscript hidden in this house, or at the very least, a guest registry book of some kind verifying that your favorite authoress had once stepped inside these walls—I couldn’t resist taking a look around myself.”

My heart began to drum. “And?”

“I started by looking through this desk, which turned up nothing.” He patted the beautiful antique desk, then gestured for me to follow him to one of the walls of bookcases. “Then I started in on these shelves. I got about a third of the way down this wall—I know I’ve barely scratched the surface in this room—and sorry, I didn’t find a guest book yet—but look what I
did
find.”

He stopped and pointed out a particular series of books lined up behind one of the glass doors. The twelve volumes were beautifully bound in dark blue leather and embellished with gold embossing and red and yellow flowers on the spine. I recognized them at once.

“It’s the Chawton House edition of Jane Austen’s novels and letters!” I said with awe. “There’s a similar set at the Huntington
Library in Southern California, in slightly different bindings. What a stunning edition.”

Anthony opened the cabinet, gently removed the first volume of
Pride and Prejudice
from the shelf, and handed it to me. “Is it valuable?”

“It certainly is.” The book felt wonderful in my hands. I held it up to my nose and drank in its aroma. “I think I’m addicted to the smell of books. It’s as comforting to me as Christmas.”

Anthony smiled, pleased.

I opened the book to the flyleaf. The pages were crisp, white, and clean. “It was published in 1906. This edition is rare. I’ve been trying to locate a set for our university library for several years, without success.
If
you can find one, it’s usually in the original bindings—and even then it’s worth many thousands of dollars.”

“What do you mean, ‘original bindings’?”

“Before industrialization, books were often published in simple, plain cloth covers, with the assumption that buyers would have them rebound. The books were pretty ugly, to be honest. Private collectors with money generally had them bound in leather and beautifully embossed. This collection is gorgeous and would be worth a lot.”

“It’s nice to learn that members of my family had taste and were discriminating about the books they acquired.” Anthony gazed around the room again with what seemed like newfound appreciation. Then, nodding toward the book in my hands, he added, “I admit, I couldn’t resist taking a peek.”

“A peek? What, you read
Pride and Prejudice
?”

“Just half a dozen chapters. I thought I’d be bored to tears—but to my surprise, you were right. It wasn’t bad. I would have probably kept going if I hadn’t been so tired.”

I couldn’t stop my smile.
Wasn’t bad
—it was a funny way to
describe a brilliant classic—yet how many times had I heard skeptical students make a similar comment at the beginning of a semester? “
Pride and Prejudice
has that effect on people. For many, it’s their favorite Austen novel.” Reluctantly, I returned the volume to the shelf.

“What’s your favorite?” he asked.

“
Persuasion.
It was the last novel she completed before she died, and I think it’s her most heartfelt and passionate work.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about regret and second chances. The heroine is considered a washed-up spinster at age twenty-seven. She was persuaded years ago to turn down a proposal from the penniless naval officer she loved—a decision she greatly regrets. He returns a rich captain, so filled with bitterness that it takes a while before he can admit that she’s still the love of his life.”

He nodded politely, without comment. I could see that it was going to take some doing to bring this man around to my way of thinking.

Looking around the vast room with its many thousands of volumes, he said, “Well, I guess it’s on to business. We have an ancient guest registry to find.”

“If they had one,” I mused, “you’d think they’d make it accessible, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what I thought—that it wouldn’t be buried too deeply, or shelved too high. I went through all of
these
cabinets last night, as far up as I could reach. How about if I continue on from here, and you start at the opposite corner.” If our first go-through failed, he added, we could use the library ladder to search the upper shelves.

We got to work. I made a thorough investigation of the books on the lower shelves of the left side of the room. Most of
the volumes were very old and looked like they hadn’t been touched in decades. We worked slowly, handling everything with the greatest of care. Anthony soon discovered an ancient family Bible, inscribed with the records of his family history. Lawrence Whitaker’s wife, Alice, died in 1789, only four years after the house was built. Lawrence was born in 1757 and died in 1814, leaving Greenbriar to his eldest son. There was a whole family tree listed after that, which Anthony had never seen before, and we both sat marveling over it for a while.

We then returned to our respective search areas and worked in relative silence for the next two hours. I coveted every beau tifully bound volume I saw. They covered the gamut from classical fiction and poetry to history, biography, geography, medicine, and science. Many had been bound and shelved as matching sets, sometimes more for the sake of appearance than by subject.

I had just turned a corner and started on the next side of the room, when I discovered it.

A slim volume, it was bound in burgundy leather, with no markings on the cover or spine. It was stowed at the end of a row of scientific journals of a similar color and size. When I opened it to the first page, I yelped with excitement. Handwritten in ink, and obviously with a quill pen, were the words
Greenbriar—Guest Ledger
.

Anthony, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor halfway across the room, deeply interested in one of the many volumes he’d piled up beside him, looked over at me distractedly. “Did you find something?”

“Yes, this is it! Greenbriar—Guest Ledger!” The pages were filled with long lists of names and dates, inscribed in a variety of different hands. “It begins in September 1785, and has entries
continuing up through 1940. It looks like they stopped using it around World War II, which is probably why your parents never mentioned it.”

In seconds, Anthony was at my side. “Well done, you.”

We crossed to the nearby couch and plunked down side by side. I thumbed through the volume, with him reading over my shoulder, to the entries for 1801.

And there it was.

“George Austen was Jane’s father!” I exclaimed with amazement.

Anthony uttered an expletive of shocked disbelief. “Oh my God. You were right. You were right!” Then he frowned. “Wait, I thought the letter said she lost the manuscript in 1802.”

We stared at each other. I flipped ahead to the summer of 1802. There was another entry.

Score!

Anthony eagerly insisted that we check further, to see if there were any more Austen entries. But although we went back to the beginning and studied every page through 1817, the year Jane Austen died, we only found those two.

“She was here twice,” I said excitedly. The entry didn’t mention how long they’d stayed, but, I explained to Anthony, travel at that time was so difficult, time-consuming, and costly,
that visitors generally came for at least a couple of weeks, often much longer.

“I wonder how they knew Lawrence Whitaker,” he mused.

“He wasn’t a relative. Maybe he was a friend of her father’s. George Austen knew all kinds of interesting people.”

“This is incredible. Truly. I can hardly believe it. One of my ancestors actually knew Jane Austen. She slept in my family’s house!” He grinned. “And now we have the thrill of the hunt.”

“The thrill of the hunt?”

“Yes. Now that we know she was here, we move on to the larger question: where’s that missing manuscript? What did Jane say? Let me see that letter again.”

I took out the copy of the letter, and we studied it together.

“‘
Do you recall my theory as to how it came to be lost? I still maintain that it was all vanity, nonsense, and wounded pride,
’” he read aloud. “What does she mean?”

“I don’t know.” I continued reading: “‘
I should never have read it out to you that night during our stay but kept it safe with all the others.’
Maybe,” I theorized, “in taking it out to read to Cassandra, she somehow misplaced it, and blames herself.”

“If that’s true, wouldn’t she have asked Lawrence Whitaker to help her find it?”

“Not necessarily. She says to Cassandra, ‘
You did persuade me to tell no one about it while I was writing it
.’ As if for some reason, she wanted to keep that manuscript a secret.”

“Why, I wonder? And more to the point, after she left, wouldn’t you think that
somebody
would have found it? And if so, knowing it was a work by Austen, why didn’t they sell it?”

“They wouldn’t have known it was hers. It wouldn’t have had her name on it. This was 1802. Jane Austen didn’t publish her first book until 1811, and even then, all her books were published
anonymously. When she came here with her family, she was nobody—just the unmarried, twenty-six-year-old daughter of a retired clergyman. The manuscript, if someone found it, wouldn’t have had any monetary value at the time.”

“So…if someone in this house—one of the servants, a maid or a footman, or even Lawrence Whitaker himself—came upon an anonymous manuscript that wasn’t worth anything, what would they do with it?”

“I suppose they’d read it—if they could read. They’d keep it if they liked it, or burn it if they didn’t.”

He grimaced. “Let’s hope it’s not the last option.” After a paused, he added, “What would a Jane Austen manuscript look like?”

“From the few manuscripts we have as evidence, mostly of unfinished works, it seems, in Jane’s mind, that they had to look like a book. She used to write on ordinary sheets of writing paper that she folded in half and hand-stitched along the spine. So it’d be a series of small paper booklets, each about eight pages in length.”

“Do you think—presuming said person did
keep
the manuscript—there’s even the remotest chance that it might still be stashed somewhere in this house?”

My heart leapt at the thought. “It’s possible. But we’re talking two hundred years. It could have been found, later, by someone who had no idea what it was, and moved any number of times.” I glanced around the vast room we were sitting in. “How many rooms does this house have?”

“You don’t want to know.” We both sat lost in thought for a moment. “Where do people usually stash things?” he said.

“In the bottom of a dresser, or locked in a desk drawer, or in a box at the back of a closet. If it’s valuable, in a safe.”

He sighed. “There is a safe, in my father’s old study, but it
only contained his important papers and my mother’s jewels. And if there
was
anything secret in a drawer or a closet, I would have found it decades ago.”

“Really? Why’s that?”

“I loved reading mystery novels growing up, and solving puzzles—things like the Rubik’s cube—and I used to play detective in just about every room but this one. Looking for hiding places was my
raison d’etre
. I crawled under furniture and into wardrobes, I investigated every nook and cranny of this house. I found all sorts of things to spark a young boy’s interest—but nothing remotely resembling a stack of old, handwritten manuscript booklets.”

“Did you look in the attic or the cellar?”

He stared at me. “Now there’s an idea. The attic and cellar are both huge. I didn’t like going into either one when I was young and haven’t seen them in ages.” He stood abruptly. “Let’s go take a look. I’m going to have to clear them out anyway at some point. I’ll find some torches.”

He returned a few minutes later with two flashlights. Anthony had to duck through the doorway as we climbed down the narrow, ancient staircase to the cellar. Adrenaline rushed through my veins. We were halfway down when I said, “I can’t believe I’m here, and we’re actually doing this—looking for a missing manuscript by one of the most beloved writers in history.”

He stopped and turned, his eyes serious. “Samantha. Before we go any further, I should probably make sure we’re clear about one thing.”

“What?”

“We both know how unlikely it is that we’ll come across anything. But if we do—you realize that whatever we might find would belong to me, right?”

The question took me by surprise. “Of course,” I said, a bit offended that he’d even felt the need to ask.

He nodded, then moved on down the stairs. I followed him, frowning, wondering for a moment if Anthony’s sudden interest in Jane Austen sprang not from excitement about the possibility of a newly discovered work, but instead from the money that it might bring. Because, undoubtedly, such a manuscript would be worth a great deal.

I shook off the thought, determined not to let it infect my mood. Whatever Anthony’s motivation might be, at least he was on board—and he seemed to find the pursuit as exhilarating as I did. For the next two and a half hours, as we went through the cellar (cold, dark, creepy, and more or less empty) and the attic (warm, dark, musty, and very cluttered), I concentrated on the “thrill of the hunt,” as he’d put it—filled with anticipation about what we might uncover.