He listened to her rambling on, then shook his head as if in disbelief.
“You haven’t read her then?” the woman asked, a disbelieving light in her own eyes meeting his.
“Can’t say I’ve too much interest. Stick to Haggard and the like. Adventure stories, you know. Suppose you might judge me for that.”
“I would never judge anyone for what they read.” She caught the ironic look on his face and added, with another broad smile, “Although I guess I just did.”
“All the same, I never understood how a bunch of books about girls looking for husbands could be on par with the great writers. Tolstoy and such.”
She looked at him with new interest. “You’ve read Tolstoy?”
“Used to—I was going to be sent up to study, during the war, but both my brothers got called to fight. I stayed back here, to help out.”
“Do you all work the farm together then?”
He looked away. “No, miss. They’re both dead now. The war.”
He liked to say the words like that, like a clean cut, sharp and deep and irrevocable. As if trying to stave off any further conversation. But he had the feeling that with her this approach might only invite more questions, so he quickly continued, “By the way, see those two roads, where they meet—you came in from Winchester, from the left, yeah? Well, stick along here to the right—that’s now the main road to London—and you come into Chawton proper. That there’s the cottage up ahead.”
“Oh, that’s really awfully kind of you. Thank you. But you must read the books. You must. I mean, you live here—how can you not?”
He wasn’t used to this kind of emotional persuasion—he just wanted to get back to his wagon of hay and be gone.
“Just promise me, please, Mr.…?”
“Adam. The name’s Adam.”
“Mary Anne,” she replied, extending her hand to shake his goodbye. “Start with Pride and Prejudice, of course. And then Emma—she’s my favourite. So bold, yet so wonderfully oblivious. Please?”
He shrugged again, tipped his cap at her, and started to walk off down the lane. He dared to look back only once, from just past the pond where the two roads met. He saw her still standing there, tall and slender in her midnight blue, staring at the redbrick cottage, at its bricked-up window and the white front door opening straight onto the lane.
* * *
When Adam Berwick had finished up the rest of his day’s work, he left the now-empty wagon back by the kissing gate and trudged along the main road until he reached the tiny terrace cottage that had been his home for the past handful of years.
The family had once been much larger, his father and mother and all three boys, of whom he was by far the youngest. They had owned a small farm, proudly held on to through four generations of his father’s family. This legacy had required all the Berwick men to take on hard manual labour starting very young. And he had loved it: the repetition, the unvarying cycle of the seasons, the going-straight-to-bed with no time to talk.
But Adam had also been an attentive and diligent student, teaching himself to read when barely five years old from the books his father left lying around the house, then reading every single thing he could get his hands on. He would visit the larger town of Alton with his mother every chance he could get. His favourite moment, even more than the sweets shop and the single large jawbreaker she would occasionally buy for him, was the chance to look at the children’s books at the library and find something new to borrow. Because—and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this—inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world.
He could disappear inside that world whenever he needed to—whenever he felt the outside world, and other people, pressing in on him—a pressure from social contact and expectations that was surely routine for everyone else, but affected him much more intensely and inexplicably. But he could also experience things from other people’s points of view and learn their lessons alongside them, and—most important to him—discover the key to living a happy life. He had a feeling that, outside his rough farming family, people were existing on a very different plane, with their emotions and their desires telegraphed along lines never-ending, vibrating in as-yet-unknown ears, creating little frictions and little sparks. His own life was full of little friction, and even fewer sparks.
Winning the scholarship to college had been the one exciting moment in his young life, only to be just as quickly taken away from him when his brothers were sent to war. He had been both too young to fight and, according to his mother, too grown-up now for what she called aimless study. The war had changed everything, and not just for his family—although everyone in the village acknowledged that the Berwicks had been harder hit than most, with both older boys killed in battle in the Aegean Sea in 1918 and the father less than a year later by the Spanish flu. There was a solicitude now, for his mother and for him, a deep community caring that had, at times, been all that had buoyed them from the deepest despair.
But as much as they were kept from falling into the abyss, they remained forever teetering on the brink. Neither he nor his mother, despite their different temperaments, seemed to possess energy for anything more than submission to life—the idea that they might have to fight their way out of their lot was beyond them. So only a few years after the war, between the debts and the grief and his mother’s constant complaining, they had sold the farm back to the Knight family at a significant discount. Over the generations various Berwicks had worked at the Knight estate as household staff or servants, his own mother and grandmother among them, and now Adam, too, would join their employment by gathering the hay each summer, and tilling the fields, and planting a few rotating crops of wheat and hops and barley.
Eventually the Knight family, like so many others in the village, began to suffer financial troubles of their own. Adam felt that they were all tied together, very much interdependent, and that the sale of the farm to the Knights, and the employment for him, were part of a larger community effort to sustain and survive.
He was surviving on the teetering brink—at least, he acted as if he were. But inside him, in the place that only books could touch, there remained both a deep unknowing and the deepest, most trenchant pain. Adam knew that part of his brain had shut down from all the pain, in a bizarre effort to protect itself, and his mother was even worse, for she appeared to be merely waiting to die, while constantly warning him how bad things would be without her. In the meantime she was simply going through the motions of mothering him—having his toast and tea ready in the morning, and then, as now, his supper kept warm for him at the end of the day.
They would sit there alone together at the kitchen table, just as they were doing now, and he would tell her about his work, and she would tell him about whom she had run into in the village, or in Alton if it was her midweek shopping day. They talked about anything and everything except the past.
But today he didn’t tell her about the young woman from America. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. For one thing, his mother was always on him to find a wife, and this stranger to town was so beyond him in her beauty as to be almost otherworldly. His mother was also one of the villagers for whom the connection to Jane Austen remained more an irritation than anything else. She saved her most bitter complaints for the tourists and gawkers who, often enough, did descend on the small village demanding information, demanding to see something, demanding that life here be just like in the books. As if the villagers’ little lives were somehow unreal, and the real thing—the only thing—that mattered, and the only thing that ever would, had happened over a hundred years ago.