He had always loved her most for her mind—and he was smart enough to know that she was much smarter than him. She had been one of the few women at his college and had spent equal time in the library and in the lab. Her sharp mathematical mind could have been a real asset to the war effort, but this was one of many things about her that he would never know. She had died four years earlier from a simple fall down the stairs leading to their bedroom, hitting her head in the absolute worst way, on the one jutting part of the lowest stair that he had always meant to fix. The internal bleeding was swift and acute, and he had been completely unable to save her.
A doctor who can’t save his own wife achieves an unfortunate degree of notoriety to add to the grief and self-recrimination. No one was ever going to be harder on him than himself, but his professional pride often caused him to wonder if the other villagers might not blame him, too.
As he passed the trio of women chatting excitedly in front of the little white gate to the Austen cottage, he tipped his hat at them. He was not one of the villagers who considered them a nuisance to be wished away. Every person who made their village a site of pilgrimage was keeping alive the legacy and the aura of Austen, and as a lifelong fan himself, he appreciated that the villagers were involuntary caretakers of something much bigger than they could guess at.
He was turning onto the old Gosport Road that led to the Great House and neighbouring Knight estate when he saw a fellow member of the school board approaching him from that same direction.
They tipped their hats at each other, then the other man started in at a clip, “Glad I ran into you, Benjamin. Having a problem again at the school.”
Dr. Gray sighed. “The new teacher?”
The other man nodded. “Yes, young Miss Lewis, as you surmised. She has those boys on a steady diet of lady authors from as far back as the 1700s. Can’t make her see reason.” He paused. “Thought she might listen to you.”
“Because why?”
“Well, for one thing, you’re the closest in age to her.”
“Not by much.”
“And besides, you seem to have a pretty good grasp of her, um, teaching methods.”
Dr. Gray’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. “I’ve been the doctor here for many years now and would like to think I have a pretty good understanding of everyone in the village. It doesn’t necessarily follow that I have any particular influence over them.”
“Just give it a try, hmm? That’s a good man.”
Dr. Gray did not think he could persuade Adeline Lewis of anything. He did know that his fellow school board trustees—all male, all well into their fifties and beyond—were a little afraid of the young woman only one term into her first teaching job. Adeline was very confident in her lesson plans and highly resistant to anyone trying to manage her. She also physically matched most of the men for height—which was not difficult to do, since only Dr. Gray was anywhere close to six feet tall. But perhaps most unnerving of all, Adeline Lewis was attractive, in a way that sneaked up on all of them, until they started to forget what they had come to say. She would stare straight in the eyes of the various board members, always ready to speak her mind, always up for a fight, and they each inevitably gave in to her. Dr. Gray shook his head in remonstrance whenever one of them opened their monthly board meetings with yet another tale of capitulation.
“Well,” he replied tentatively, looking around as if hoping to see someone lying injured in the street and in need of his medical services instead, “I suppose I could stop in there now.”
“There’s a fellow.” The other man smiled. “You’re sure we’re not keeping you from anything?”
Dr. Gray shook his head. “No, just out for a walk to clear my head.”
The other man tipped his hat again and continued on his way, cheerfully calling back, “Doubt having to set Miss Lewis straight will help with any of that.…”
Dr. Gray hesitated, turned to look back at his colleague, then forged on ahead until he reached the old Victorian schoolhouse across the road from the village cricket pitch. He supposed class would be ending right about now, at 3:30 P.M. Sure enough, when he strolled into the vacated senior classroom, he found Adeline Lewis standing at the board, chalk in hand, half writing and half gesturing to a young girl sitting at the teacher’s desk as if she belonged there. Dr. Gray noticed a copy of Virginia Woolf in the student’s hands.
Marriage as a Social Contract to Avoid Poverty was being written in bright white letters across both sides of the chalkboard.
Dr. Gray sighed again, and Adeline must have heard him, because she whirled about.
“You’ve been sent to scold me,” she said with a smile—but it was the smile of the knowing, not the vanquished, and he felt his jaw automatically tighten.
“Not to scold; to understand. A steady diet of women writers, Adeline, really—for a room full of adolescent boys?”
Adeline looked down at the girl sitting at the desk, who had closed her Virginia Woolf and was now watching the two adults with unabashed interest.
“Not just boys—Dr. Gray, you know Miss Stone.”
Dr. Gray nodded. “How are you, Evie? How’s your father?”
Evie’s father was the one whose X-ray Dr. Gray had just been worrying over. Charlie Stone had been critically injured in a tractor accident a few months earlier, and Dr. Gray knew how catastrophic this had been for the family, both financially and emotionally. He also knew that the father would never be returning to physical work again, even though Dr. Gray did not have the heart to communicate that yet to his patient in no uncertain terms. Most worryingly, Dr. Gray wondered how the large clan with five children under fifteen would manage going forward without the income of their sole provider. He had heard talk among the adults at the farm of pulling the oldest child, Evie, out of school for servant work, and this was just one of many secrets he had to keep.
“He’s doing a lot of reading,” Evie spoke up. “Miss Lewis gave him a list of books to cheer him, and he’s working through it from the library, one by one.”
Dr. Gray cocked one eyebrow at Miss Lewis as if stumbling upon evidence helpful to his cause. “I’d like to see such a list sometime, if I may.”
“Hardly,” replied Adeline with a slight frostiness to her tone. “I am judged enough around here for my choices.”
Evie continued to watch the two adults, having sensed a strange shift in mood between them, as if they had forgotten she was sitting there. Dr. Gray was usually so gentlemanly with the ladies—along with his salt-and-pepper hair, intense brown eyes, and broad shoulders, it was his manner as well as his vocation that kept him an object of interest and, young Evie suspected, lust among the village women. But with Adeline he always seemed, as now, both flustered and on the defensive. At the same time, Adeline was showing none of those same ladies’ usual deference towards him, which Evie suspected was irritating Dr. Gray even more.
“Well, let’s ask Miss Evie, then, shall we?” Adeline was saying, and Evie popped out of her reverie to see both adults turn towards her.
But she had no interest in getting in the middle of any of it, being fully on Miss Lewis’s side when it came to her teaching methods. Instead Evie grabbed her book bag from a nearby desk and, with a quick nod and a goodbye, scurried off along the old oak floorboards of the classroom.