* * *
He was becoming quite worried for Mr. Darcy.
It seemed to Adam that once a man notices a woman’s eyes to be fine, and tries to eavesdrop on her conversations, and finds himself overly affected by her bad opinion of him, then such a man is on the path to something uncharted, whether he admits it to himself or not. Adam did not know much about women (although his mother kept telling him it did not take much), but he wondered if in the history of life, as well as in literature, a man had ever fallen into such obvious lust as fast as Mr. Darcy, and not done anything about it except to inadvertently, and so successfully, push it away.
He appreciated more than ever that their small two-up, two-down terrace cottage, which sat next to a lane-way leading back from the main Winchester road, gave him his own bedroom and space to read. In his sparse room with its gabled ceiling was the plain twin bed—one half of a set—that he had slept in since his boyhood. A single oak armoire and an antique dresser stood in opposite corners of the room. And he had his shelf of books that had once belonged to his father—adventure novels, the boys’ treasury, and the greats like Conan Doyle and Alexandre Dumas and H. G. Wells. But now, next to his bed, lay a fairly thick hardcover book with a laminated cover, from the library, showing two women in bonnets whispering to each other, while a man in the background stood imperiously next to a garden urn.
He had discreetly slipped it across the counter at the lending library only two days earlier.
It was going fast.
But as much as it amused him, the book also confused him. For one thing, he wondered at the father character; he did not think it reflected well on Mr. Bennet to spend all his leisure time barricaded in his study or indulging his humour at the expense of everyone else. Mrs. Bennet was much more easily understood, but something about the Bennet household was still amiss, in a way that he did not recall encountering before in literature. Not among a big family at least. He had read books about orphans, and treachery among friends, and fathers sent off to debtors’ prison—but the biggest plots always turned on an act of revenge or greed or a missing will.
The Bennets, for all intents and purposes, simply didn’t like each other. He had not been expecting this at all from a lady writer with a commitment to happy endings. Yet, sadly, it felt more real to him than anything else he had ever read.
Finishing the chapter where Darcy shows his estate to the woman who once so robustly spurned his marriage proposal, Adam finally started to drift off to sleep. He recalled the recent visitor to his own town, the tiny cross on a chain, the white winning smile: tokens of the faith and hope so sadly missing from his own life. He could not conceive of the willingness to travel so far for something so whimsical—yet an unguarded happiness had also radiated from within the visitor, real happiness, the kind he had always searched for in books.
Reading Jane Austen was making him identify with Darcy and the thunderclap power of physical attraction that flies in the face of one’s usual judgment. It was helping him understand how even someone without much means or agency might demand to be treated. How we can act the fool and no one around us will necessarily clue us in.
He would surely never see the American woman again. But maybe reading Jane Austen could help him gain even a small degree of her contented state.
Maybe reading Austen could give him the key.
Chapter Two
Chawton, Hampshire
October 1943
Dr. Gray sat alone at the desk in his office, a small room off the larger front parlour that acted as his examining room. He stared miserably at the X-ray film before him. Both of Charles Stone’s legs had been so severely crushed, the good doctor could not imagine any degree of function being regained over time.
He held the X-ray back up to the golden October light streaming in from the side window and squinted at it one last time, even though he knew there was nothing more to see—nothing that would make any of this one jot easier to relay.
Having grown up in Chawton, Dr. Gray had moved to London during the Great War for medical school and training, returning to the village in 1930 to take over old Dr. Simpson’s practice. Over the past thirteen years, he had welcomed into the world as many patients as he had seen out. He knew every family’s history and their doom—the ones where madness skipped a generation, or asthma did not. He knew which patients one could tell the cold hard truth to—and which ones fared better not knowing. Charlie Stone would do better not knowing, at least for now. He would keep from the edges of despair that way, until the march of time and increasing poverty took precedence over his pride.
Dr. Gray put his fingers to his temples and pushed in hard. Before him on the blotter pad rested a series of medicine bottles. He stared absentmindedly at one of them, then pushed himself up from the arms of his wooden swivel chair with resolution. It was mid-afternoon, and normally the time that his nurse and housekeeper would be bringing him his tea. But he needed some air, needed to clear his brain and find some respite from all the cares that piled up before him every day. He was the general practitioner for the village of Chawton, but also its confidant, father figure, and resident ghost—someone who knew more about the future, and the past, than anyone else.
He left his rose-covered thatched cottage through the green front door that was always open to patients and led straight out onto the street. Like all the former worker cottages, the house was so close to the main road that it practically half heaved itself onto it. His nurse, Harriet Peckham, tried to keep the front bay window’s lace curtains drawn as much as possible during patient visits, but the small beady eyes of the town had proven themselves even smaller still by a willingness to peer through the eyelet pattern and thin crack where the panels tried to meet.
He started down the lane and saw the Alton taxi pulling up at the junction where Winchester Road split in two, and where the old pond had only recently been drained. Three ducks could still on occasion be spotted meandering about the roads, searching for their lost paradise. But right now Dr. Gray was watching three middle-aged women instead, as they stepped out of the cab amidst a flurry of hats and handbags, landing right in front of the old Jane Austen cottage.
Despite the war now stretching across the Atlantic, women of a certain age still saw fit to travel to Chawton to see where Austen had lived. Dr. Gray had always marvelled at their female spirit in coming to pay homage to the great writer. Something had been freed in them by the war; some essential fear that the world had tried to drum into them had collapsed in the face of an even greater enemy. He wondered if the future, just as the cinema foretold, belonged to these women. Chattering, gathering, travelling women, full of vigour and mission, going after what they wanted, big or small. Just like Bette Davis in Jezebel or Greer Garson in his favourite movie, Random Harvest.
Dr. Gray permitted himself one night a week to indulge a passion he had shared with his late wife: a bus trip into the neighbouring town of Alton to see the newest movie release. The rest of his free time he spent trying to distract himself from thinking about Jennie. But now, when the movie-house lights dimmed, and the couples slouched against each other even farther still, he allowed himself to picture his beloved wife and their own nights out at the cinema together. She had always wanted to see the “weepies,” those woman-centred films starring such actresses as Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck, and he would sometimes put up a little fuss, a little push for a Western or a gangster film—but he always ended up enjoying her choices as much as she did. Sometimes they would even skip the bus after and walk the half hour home in the moonlight instead, talking over the film they had just seen. He couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say.