First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen Page 5

  “So, Mr. Collingwood. I hear you have quite a book collection here at Bayfield House,” said Eric, winking at Sophie. She did her best to silence him with a glance, but she had never perfected the necessary subtlety of expression, nor did she think Eric would have stopped if she had. “Do you use the library often?”

  “Not often,” said her father with what Sophie knew was false politeness. “We have receptions there on occasion.”

  “No,” said Eric, “I meant do you use the books often. It must be a pleasure to have such a fine collection at your fingertips.”

  “‘Pleasure’ is not the word I would use,” said Mr. Collingwood in a low voice that was clearly intended to discourage Eric from further pursuit of the subject.

  “And do you frequently add to the collection?” said Eric.

  “Do I . . . ?” Mr. Collingwood could hardly have looked more shocked if Eric had asked him if he often performed human sacrifices in the parlor. “Do I add to the collection?”

  “Yes. I’m sure you must frequent the auction houses and the antiquarian book fairs.”

  “Tell me, young man, if you were swimming in the sea and there was a millstone tied round your neck, would you add another one?”

  “I don’t swim,” said Eric. “Never learned.”

  “That is entirely beside the point. The Bayfield House library is not something which I wish to add to; quite the contrary.” Sophie could see in her father’s expression that he was desperately trying to think of some new topic of conversation to introduce to avoid discussing family finances, and she was about to rescue him by mentioning the upcoming music festival at Chadlington, but Eric forged loudly on.

  “Then I suppose your brother must add to the family collection. Sophie tells me he’s quite the bibliomaniac.”

  “My brother?” spat Mr. Collingwood, now red in the face and clenching the spoon with which he had been dishing out the trifle as if it were a dagger he was about to wield on Eric. “Not that it’s any of your business, but my brother would have been a disappointment to his father and he is a disappointment to me. He has frittered away his inheritance on a flat full of worthless old books and has never contributed twopence to the upkeep of his family estate. Not that any of that gives you the right to call him a maniac. Now—trifle?”

  He held a spoonful of trifle over Eric’s bowl and Sophie feared that if Eric said yes her father would hurl the pudding downward with such force that it would spatter everyone at that end of the table.

  “Actually,” said Sophie, “Eric has to be going. Remember, Eric? You said you needed to be back in Oxford by eleven.”

  “Why, look at the time,” said Eric, standing up. “I really am most grateful, Mrs. Collingwood. Mr. Collingwood, I hope we have a chance to continue our conversation sometime.”

  Sophie’s father did not seem to have any idea how to respond to this comment, and Sophie grabbed Eric by the wrist and led him gently toward the door.

  “Good night,” he said, waving to the table with his free hand.

  A moment later, standing in the garden, Eric tried to pull her toward him. “Thanks for getting me out of there,” he said.

  Sophie pushed him away and dropped his hand. “Why did you goad him on like that?” she said. “I told you what a sore subject the library is for my father.”

  “I just showed your father for the buffoon he is. I thought you’d like it.”

  “My father is not a buffoon.”

  “He is a little. You practically said so yourself.”

  “Right—I said so, not you. I’m allowed to call him that; you’re not.” Sophie was trying very hard to stay angry with Eric—it was unforgivable that he had made such a scene—but every time she pictured her father brandishing a spoon full of trifle like a weapon, she could feel laughter bubbling up inside.

  “I just wanted to make you laugh. I mean, if you read Jane Austen you have to think that was funny. Your father is Thomas Palmer, right out of Sense and Sensibility.”

  “My father is not Mr. Palmer,” insisted Sophie, but she giggled when she realized how apt the comparison was.

  “You know who I’d really like to meet is your Uncle Bertram. I’m a bit of a book collector myself.”

  “I suppose Uncle Bertram would know what to do with you,” said Sophie with a smile. She could just imagine her uncle’s laughter when she told him about Eric, her father, and the trifle.

  “But I don’t suppose I ever will meet him,” he said, suddenly serious.

  “I don’t suppose so,” she said with a sigh. “Listen, Eric, it was very nice of you to come out and pretend to like that awful sculpture and talk with me about books and everything, but it’s late and I’m exhausted, and now I have to go back inside and placate my father by telling him that Americans don’t understand manners or something like that. So maybe you’d better just go.”

  “Kiss me.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We’re two lovers of old novels in a garden in the moonlight. Kiss me.”

  Sophie suddenly felt that she should like to do nothing more. So what if he was an ass now and then? He loved Jane Austen and he had driven all over Oxfordshire to find her and he made her laugh—and she had to admit he looked rather handsome with his hair cut.

  “I thought you weren’t interested in getting me into bed.”

  “I’m not. I’m interested in kissing you.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Look, I’m leaving for France in the morning and then Italy and then back home to America. When I walk out of this garden we’ll never see each other again, but we’ll always remember that kiss on a warm summer night.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” said Sophie, weakening.

  “Kiss me.” He did not move toward her or try to take her hand. He just stood there in the moonlight that filtered through the leaves of the willow tree and said it one more time, so softly that the words themselves were like shadows. “Kiss me.” And Sophie raised herself up on her toes and gently pressed her lips to his. He did not embrace her or even touch her except with his lips. He only kissed her and she kissed him and her knees went weak and her heart raced and she thought for a moment that she saw fireworks. Then he pulled away and ran a hand through her hair and whispered, “Good-bye, Sophie.” When he was gone, she stood alone on the grass, shivering in spite of the warmth of the night, and wondering what the hell had just happened.

  Hampshire, 1796

  JANE WAS NOT RETURNED to Hampshire above twenty-four hours before she ventured to Busbury Park and found Mr. Mansfield just setting out on his afternoon constitutional. “I confess, as pleased as I am to see you, that I am sorry to hear that the Dashwoods have been so neglected these past weeks,” he said.

  “I assure you, Mr. Mansfield, now that I am back in your company, they shall not be neglected until their story is complete.” Jane had not confessed her epiphany about her feelings toward him. There would be time for that later. Now she wanted nothing more than to talk about literature and feel that connection of the intellect she had missed so in Kent.

  “I hope, though you will not neglect the Dashwoods, as you say, that you will still have time to visit a poor old man with few friends and empty days.”

  “You paint a self-portrait of much pathos, Mr. Mansfield,” said Jane with a smile, “but despite your exaggerations, I assure you I shall return to you as often as the Dashwoods allow me.”

  —

  AS AUTUMN CAME to Hampshire and the weather turned cool, Jane and Mr. Mansfield often curtailed their walks, instead taking tea by the fire in the sitting room of the gatehouse. Jane was writing more quickly now, as her novel rushed toward its denouement, and her reading often took up nearly the whole of her visit. By the beginning of October she had almost finished, and, as she wished to prolong the pleasure of reading, she was deligh
ted with a sudden turn in the weather—a last bit of summer warmth before the grip of autumn became unbreakable—that allowed them to take a lengthy walk around the grounds.

  “I was shocked when you read yesterday of the marriage of Mr. Ferrars,” said Mr. Mansfield as they turned in to a walk between two rows of oaks. “I had thought for certain that Elinor and Mr. Ferrars were destined for one another, but I see it is not to be.”

  “The story is not finished, Mr. Mansfield.”

  “Yes, but Mr. Ferrars has married a young and healthy woman in Lucy Steele, and even if you were to kill her off, Elinor Dashwood should be no man’s second choice.”

  “Mr. Mansfield, I suspect that you are trying to get me to tell you the ending. I certainly would not do so, even if I knew it myself.”

  “While I believe, Miss Austen, that you are within your rights as a novelist to withhold the end until it is the end, I cannot believe that, so near the conclusion of your tale, you yourself do not know the fates of all involved.”

  “Am I a novelist, Mr. Mansfield?” Jane had never been called such, but found that she rather liked the appellation.

  “Certainly one who writes novels is a novelist—I believe even that great lexicographer Mr. Johnson would define you as such.”

  “But I can claim no true novels to my credit. No words of mine have been set in type or printed on paper or bound in covers.”

  “Do you imagine, Miss Austen, that a novel is a novel only when it is set in type and bound in covers?”

  “I imagine exactly that, Mr. Mansfield. Surely you would not call Christopher Wren an architect if he had merely dashed out some worthless sketches that were never turned into buildings.”

  “You cannot think that what you have written is nothing but worthless sketches.”

  “They are worthless if no one pays me for them,” said Jane. “Is that not Mr. Johnson’s definition?”

  “Indeed it is not,” said Mr. Mansfield. “Unless I am very much mistaken, Mr. Johnson’s definition of worthless is ‘having no value.’”

  “And what value do my sketches have?”

  “Anything that brings pleasure to others has inestimable value,” said Mr. Mansfield. “And your novel has brought great pleasure not only to me, but to all at the rectory who have the joy of hearing you read. But we are straying far from your question. You asked if you are a novelist. Let me ask you this, Miss Austen. Are you able to prevent yourself from writing?”

  “Indeed not. I find that my stories will not cease to crowd all other thoughts from my mind until I have committed them to paper.”

  “And do you have the utmost respect for both the truth of your characters and the emotions of your readers?”

  “Though I cannot claim to have readers in the traditional sense, I believe that I do.”

  “Then, Miss Austen, let there be no doubt about it—you are a novelist.”

  They walked a little farther in silence as Jane digested this proclamation. “Do you know, Mr. Mansfield,” she said, “how Mr. Johnson defines the word ‘novel’?”

  “Indeed I do,” he said. “‘A small tale, generally of love.’”

  “‘A small tale,’” said Jane. “Novel writing seems an altogether less intimidating occupation when one considers that one only need produce a small tale.”

  “And that brings us back to my grave concern about the fate of Elinor and Mr. Ferrars. For I can see no way that their tale can be of love. You must tell me what you contemplate for them.”

  But Jane merely tossed her head, smiled, and remarked, “How lovely it is here in the walk with the leaves turning.”

  Oxfordshire, Present Day

  SOPHIE LAY AWAKE that night, longing for a good novel to take her mind off that kiss. Just before she’d turned in, Victoria had popped her head into Sophie’s room with a wicked grin on her face.

  “So,” she said, “this Eric Hall. Marry, kill, or shag?”

  “Kill,” said Sophie, almost certain she was lying. “Definitely kill.”

  “I doubt that,” said Victoria, and smiled at her sister before going to bed with assurances they’d talk about it in the morning.

  Now Sophie was left alone pondering that damn kiss. God, it wasn’t like she hadn’t stumbled home from parties in Oxford and had a snog in the shadows with some guy whose name she would forget the next day. She had done that several times since Clifton, actually. But this had been sober and deliberate and done with the full knowledge that it could lead nowhere. And she wasn’t even sure she liked him. When she remembered the way he made her laugh and how comfortable she was walking with him along the river or up the garden, she was sure she did. But when she thought of how he had acted at the pub and at dinner with her father, she wanted to hit him. But she couldn’t hit him because he was gone. Her mind shuffled through every page of Jane Austen, looking for a kiss like the one in the garden. What would Eliza Bennet think? Or Marianne Dashwood? I do not like him, she tried repeating to herself as she stared up at the cracked ceiling. I do not like him. But if that was true, then why did she feel so miserable that he would never return?

  At three, she finally gave up on sleep and crept downstairs. On a hook in the kitchen she found the key to the library. Even though she had no idea where her father kept the key to the bookcases, just sitting in the dark room surrounded by the smell of all those books calmed her. Tomorrow, she decided, she would go to London and join Uncle Bertram at an antiquarian book fair and Eric Hall would be forgotten. She could just imagine what her uncle would say when she told him about all this: “Dive into life, Sophie; have the adventure!” As she finally fell into sleep, she heard his voice telling her, “Sometimes you think too much.”

  —

  BAYFIELD HOUSE WAS USUALLY quiet on Sunday mornings. Sophie’s father would don his tweeds and head out into the countryside; her mother would pull on her gloves and slip out into the garden. Church was rarely on the docket. When she awoke late the next morning, however, Sophie heard loud voices and ringing telephones. Doors banged and feet pounded up and down stairs and a car started up in the courtyard and sped away, spewing gravel against the side of the house. In spite of all the commotion, no one seemed to notice that the library was unlocked and that Sophie was lying on the couch. When she finally made her way bleary-eyed into the kitchen in search of tea, her mother was sitting at the table staring at an uneaten slice of toast. Victoria stood looking out the window, her face impassive.

  “Good morning,” said Sophie tentatively.

  “He’s gone to London,” said Mrs. Collingwood, almost as if she hadn’t heard her daughter.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Before Sophie realized what had happened, her sister had wrapped her in an embrace and was sobbing on her shoulder. Sophie’s pulse quickened with fear.

  “Your father’s gone to London to attend to business,” said Mrs. Collingwood.

  “What’s wrong?” said Sophie, as Victoria dropped her embrace and slipped into a chair. “What business could Father have on a Sunday?”

  “Pour yourself a cup of tea and sit down, Sophie,” said her mother, turning at last to face her daughter. Sophie could see that she had been crying—her eternally stoic mother had been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and she gripped a wad of tissue in one hand. Sophie felt a rock in the pit of her stomach.

  “Mother, Tori, what’s happened?” she asked.

  “Sit down,” said her mother hollowly.

  Sophie sat and reached for her mother’s hand.

  “Oh, you poor, poor child,” said Mrs. Collingwood.

  “Me?” said Sophie. “What about me?”

  Mrs. Collingwood stared at her daughter blankly for several seconds before she continued. “It’s your Uncle Bertram,” she said at last, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Uncle Bertram?” said Sophie, dropping her mothe
r’s hand.

  “There’s been an accident,” said Victoria.

  “What do you mean there’s been an accident? Is he all right? Where is he?”

  “He’s . . . Sophie, your Uncle Bertram is dead,” said her mother.

  “No,” said Sophie, unable to even process the words. “No he’s not. Tell me what happened really.”

  “He slipped and fell down the stairs outside his flat,” said Victoria, reaching for her sister’s free hand.

  “No,” said Sophie, pulling away and standing up. “No, I want to talk to him. I need to talk to him. Where is he?”

  “He broke his neck, they think,” said Victoria in a dull monotone. “They found him this morning.”

  “That’s not right,” said Sophie, whose eyes had begun to glaze over. “I just talked to him.” The air seemed to have left the room. Something was wrong, very wrong. Perhaps she was still asleep and this was only a nightmare.

  “Your father’s gone to London to tend to . . . things. He wants to have the funeral here, though, so we’ll have to put on a brave face and . . . Sophie? Sophie, are you all right?”

  Sophie thought perhaps there were more words, but they came from the end of a long black tunnel, and then she was falling and falling and then everything was fine. She was twelve years old and she and Uncle Bertram were walking home from a book fair laden with purchases.