First Impressions Page 7

  “To live,” said Sophie.

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sophie, turning toward her sister. “But it will be exciting.”

  —

  THE NEXT SUNDAY, Sophie stood waiting for the London train, holding a small suitcase and a box containing her Christmas books. Eric’s letter still rested in her pocket—somehow it had helped her find the courage to follow through with her plan. Victoria had returned to her job in Edinburgh, and, after a brief infestation of lawyers and a flurry of paperwork, calm had returned to Bayfield House. Sophie had resigned from her job at Christ Church and planned to return to Oxford before her lease was up at the end of the Long Vacation to pack the rest of her belongings.

  “You sure you’ll be all right, dear?” said her mother as the train approached the platform.

  “No,” said Sophie, “I’m not at all sure. But I’ve been in Oxford long enough. Uncle Bertram thought I’d like living in London, so that’s what I’ll do.”

  “You’ll call us,” said her mother hopefully.

  “Of course, Mother,” said Sophie, and she embraced her mother tightly.

  —

  SOPHIE HAD PROMISED her sister that she wouldn’t obsess over the circumstances of their uncle’s death, but she couldn’t help replaying two versions of the event in her mind as she and Mr. Faussett, the solicitor handling Bertram’s estate, mounted the stairs to her uncle’s flat. In one scenario, Uncle Bertram emerged from his flat engrossed in a novel, stepped on a circular advertising Chinese food, and tumbled headfirst down the long flight of stairs. This was the official version of the story. But in the other version, Sophie saw a shadowy figure struggling with her uncle and hurling him down the stairs to his death. She shivered as she stepped over the very spot where, she imagined, her uncle’s body had lain.

  “There is still a lot of paperwork to go through, Miss Collingwood,” said Mr. Faussett in what seemed to Sophie a falsely cheerful voice, “but there’s no reason you can’t stay here. We got everything cleaned up for you.” He leaned a shoulder into the door.

  Sophie knew something was wrong as soon as the door opened. The flat didn’t smell right. Instead of must and dust and paper and leather, it smelled of lemon and lavender and bleach. Sophie clung to her box of books like a life preserver as she stepped through the door. Yes, the flat was cleaner than she had ever seen it—no dust hung in the air—but there was something else. Only when she walked through the entryway and into the sitting room did she see them: empty shelves. Miles and miles, it seemed, of empty shelves. There was not a single book in the room. Sophie dropped her box and screamed. Without a thought for the mystified solicitor in her wake she dashed through the flat, only to discover the same thing in every room: sickening tidiness and empty shelves. Aside from the box she had dropped on the floor of the sitting room, there was not a single book in the entire flat.

  “What have you done!” she shrieked, nearly hysterical.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Miss Collingwood. Is there a problem?”

  “A problem? A problem! Of course there’s a problem. Look around you. Where are they?”

  “Where are what?”

  “The books! Where are his . . . that is, where are my books?”

  “Aren’t those your books there on the floor?” said Mr. Faussett.

  “Not those, the others. All the books. This flat was filled with books. Where are they?”

  “Ah yes, we took care of all that according to your uncle’s will.”

  “What do you mean according to my uncle’s will? Uncle Bertram left those books to me. He told me so himself.”

  “That may have been his intention,” said Mr. Faussett. “I gather he drew up his own will, which is never a good idea. He left you his flat and its furniture, but the residue of the estate he directed to be liquidated with the proceeds going to your father.”

  “Residue! You’re calling his books residue?”

  “Now if he had put ‘furnishings’ instead of ‘furniture’ that might have included the books. But as it is—”

  “You liquidated my uncle’s books?” Sophie collapsed into her favorite chair—the chair where she had sat for hundreds of hours reading with or to Uncle Bertram.

  “We sold them, yes. Your uncle had debts, you see, and the only way to pay them and the death duties and still leave you with the flat was to—”

  “Then you should have sold the flat and kept the books,” said Sophie weakly.

  “I’m afraid that wasn’t an option. Legally, I mean. We had quite a few dealers come through. Things went very quickly.”

  Sophie no longer had the strength to shout. She felt as if what was left of her heart had been ripped out of her chest. The library Uncle Bertram had spent his life building had been scattered to the winds, and instead of spending the rest of her life connecting to him through his collection, she was left with sixteen books to remember him by.

  “Do you know who bought them?” said Sophie softly. “I mean which dealers.” Of course she couldn’t afford to buy back even the smallest percentage of the collection, but still.

  “I could send you a list,” said Mr. Faussett.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “If there’s nothing else, Miss Collingwood, I have an appointment. I’ll leave you my card in case you need anything.”

  “No, that’s all,” said Sophie. “Thank you.” The solicitor laid a business card on Uncle Bertram’s desk and showed himself out.

  She sat in silence for nearly an hour after he left, her mind as empty as the shelves around her. Finally she got up to retrieve the books that had spilled out of the box she had dropped on the floor. They were more precious now than ever, and she checked each one for damage before starting to place them in a neat row next to the fireplace. It flashed across her mind to line her Christmas books up on the shelf where Uncle Bertram had kept his Christmas books, but as soon as she thought it, she realized that would be sacrilege. If she lived in this flat for the rest of her life, if she bought enough books to fill every shelf, that shelf would remain empty. Nothing could replace those volumes.

  —

  UNCLE BERTRAM HAD NEVER kept a catalog of his library, but he knew the names and locations of every book—especially the Christmas books.

  “How do you remember them all?” Sophie asked one day when she was ten years old.

  “Do you remember where all your fingers are?” asked Uncle Bertram.

  “Well yes, silly, but that’s because they’re a part of me, and I use them all the time.”

  “Well, it’s just the same with me and my books,” said her uncle with a smile.

  “I don’t think I could remember this many fingers,” said Sophie, waving toward the bookshelves.

  “But that’s because you came upon them all at once. I met these books one at a time. Now this book,” he said, drawing a thick leather-bound volume out of a plastic bag, “I shall remember because I bought it today with you. We took a walk in Hyde Park, and then we took the tube to Tottenham Court Road and walked down Charing Cross and you sat on the floor looking at illustrated books while I convinced Mr. Boxhill to sell me this for fifty pounds. And it was raining when we left, so I had him wrap it up in a plastic bag for me.”

  “And then we went for ice cream,” said Sophie.

  “Exactly. We went for ice cream. Now how could I forget all that?”

  “But that’s just one book,” said Sophie. “You can’t have gone for ice cream every time.”

  “No,” said Uncle Bertram with a laugh, “not every time. Now before I put this book on the shelf, I need to make sure everyone knows it belongs to me.”

  “How do you do that?” asked Sophie.

  “Watch,” he told her. He took the book to his desk by the window and picked up his fountain pen. Opening to the first
blank page, where the dealer’s original price of seventy-five pounds was still visible in pencil, he wrote, in a neat script, “Ex Libris B.A.C.”

  “What does that mean?” said Sophie.

  “Ex Libris means ‘from the library of,’” said Uncle Bertram. “It’s Latin. And B.A.C. are my initials—Bertram Arthur Collingwood.”

  “Do you write that in all your books?”

  “Not all,” said Uncle Bertram. “Come with me.” He led her into his bedroom, to the shelf where his Christmas books from Bayfield House stood. “Look into one of those.”

  Sophie pulled a tall thick volume out of the bookcase. She barely managed to maneuver it onto the bed, where she opened the cover. In the center of the blank first page was the inscription “Natalis Christi B.A.C. 1984.”

  “Natalis Christi means ‘Christmas,’” said Uncle Bertram, “and 1984 was the year I chose that book from Bayfield House.”

  And now, out there on the shelves of London booksellers, or perhaps already in the homes of collectors, were the books that Bertram had labeled “Natalis Christi B.A.C. 1985” and “Natalis Christi B.A.C. 1992” and dozens more. Sophie had followed her uncle’s habits, and so the books that she now carefully shelved in the sitting room each bore their own “Natalis Christi” inscription—some in the scrawl of her childhood, others in the more decorative script she eventually taught herself. She had shelved about half the books when her mother rang.

  “Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I’ve just heard about the books.”

  “I can’t believe Father didn’t tell me,” said Sophie, too tired to be really angry anymore. “I suppose it was his idea.”

  “You mustn’t blame your father, Sophie,” said her mother. “It broke his heart; it really did. He told the solicitor to find some other way, but in the end it was the only way to settle the debts of your uncle’s estate, and you know what pressure your father is under about money.”

  “I know,” said Sophie. She wanted to blame her father for selling the books, just as she wanted to blame someone for Uncle Bertram’s death, but she knew her mother was right. She knew, also, that her father had lived his entire adult life under the edict placed on him by his own father on his deathbed—preserve Bayfield. At all costs preserve Bayfield. He had promised to do it, and, Sophie thought, that promise had ruined his life.

  “Your father has promised to let you take a few books from the library next time you’re here. Something to start filling the shelves. He feels awful; he really does.”

  “So do I,” said Sophie. “I just wish he had told me instead of letting me find out like that.”

  “You know how your father is,” said Mrs. Collingwood.

  “Not so good with bad news,” said Sophie grimly.

  “Exactly,” said her mother. “You get some rest, dear, and things will look brighter in the morning. We’ll chat again soon. I just wanted to . . .”

  “I know,” said Sophie. “Thanks.”

  She sat quietly for a minute, then returned to the task of shelving her Christmas books. When she took the last book from the box, she saw Eric’s note in the bottom, where she had left it. She sat again in her chair, slipped the paper out of its envelope, and read.

  After she had read the letter twice over, she closed her eyes and did her best to do what she knew Victoria would tell her to do—mentally take stock of her situation. She had a flat in London, sixteen books, and a sweet letter from a man who had promised never to see her again. The question was: What should she do next?

  Hampshire, 1796

  “EVEN AS A CHILD, I had an unquenchable thirst for novels,” said Jane, ready now to confess to Mr. Mansfield what she had told no living soul. “It began in Oxford, when I discovered, on the bookshelves of Mrs. Crawley, to whom Cassandra and I had been dispatched for schooling, a copy of The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson. I was seven years old, if you can believe it, yet I consumed it in a matter of days, and after that I never lost a chance to read any novel that came my way.”

  “I confess,” said Mr. Mansfield, “that my history is not dissimilar, though you had a rather earlier start than I.”

  “At ten,” said Jane, “I went with Cassandra to the Ladies Boarding School at the old abbey in Reading, and I suppose you could say that I was at the center of a somewhat illicit trade in novels that took place amongst several of the girls. You would have loved the abbey, Mr. Mansfield. It was an ancient building with winding staircases, dusty turret rooms, and a plethora of hiding places for those of us youngsters whose reading material was unlikely to meet with the approval of Mrs. Latournelle, who ran the school. And as long as I spent an hour or two with my tutor in his study each morning, no one seemed to take the slightest interest in where or how I filled my days. So they were filled with Pamela and Joseph Andrews, and the abbey was a paradise.

  “There was another adult who lived at the abbey—a narrow, rangy young woman known to us only as Nurse. I suppose she earned that sobriquet because among her many duties was the care of children who had been taken ill. She moved slowly through the halls—tending fires, doing laundry, helping serve meals, and doing a thousand other tasks necessary to our daily life and comfort. She shut up the dormitory at night and woke those girls who slept through the bell in the morning. She saw to it that the younger girls were properly dressed. On nights when thunder crashed outside the abbey, Nurse would stay with us in the dormitory, and tell us stories. It didn’t take me long to realize that her stories came from Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders or Tristram Shandy, and that therefore Nurse must be a fellow reader of novels. I never saw her with a book in her hands, but I knew. Nurse was a reader like me, and therefore I felt that Nurse, in some small way, belonged uniquely to me. I never would have said such a thing out loud, least of all to Nurse herself, but it comforted me that she and I were linked by the worlds of Evelina, and Tom Jones, and Amelia.

  “There was only one rule at the abbey that was enforced with threats of punishment: Once the girls were secure in their beds for the night we were to remain there until the bell rang the following morning. Oh, Mr. Mansfield, I cannot tell you the fear placed upon me on those two occasions when we were forced to watch as Mrs. Latournelle took a birch twig to the back of the legs of a girl who had snuck out at night. The screams of those girls and the blood running down their legs gave me nightmares for weeks.”

  Jane shivered with the recollection and fell silent for a moment. Mr. Mansfield did not urge her on or offer her false comfort; he merely sat quietly and waited. Jane liked that—liked that he knew her well enough to know that the rest of the story would come, like all stories, in its own time.

  “It was on a night in early December that I faced what seemed to me the greatest dilemma of my young life. In the long days of August I had been able to read in bed, but as I lay awake this night, darkness had fallen hours ago. A full moon had risen over the wall of the garden, but the shadow of the building opposite did not admit its beams into the dormitory. On most nights I would have returned my book to its hiding place in the mattress, but I was deeply engrossed in Miss Burney’s Cecilia.”

  “And who can blame you?” said Mr. Mansfield. “It is one of my favorites.”

  “Well, try though I did, I could not fall asleep. While the other girls slept around me, my sister Cassandra breathing heavily in the next bed, I finally crept to the window and gazed longingly at a corner of the garden, brightly illuminated by moonlight. I could not imagine that, at this deep hour of the night, Mrs. Latournelle would be anywhere other than sound asleep in her room, so, tucking the third volume of Cecilia under my nightshirt, I eased open the window and caught hold of the ivy that grew on the abbey’s stone wall. With little effort I was soon safe on the ground.

  “Oh, the enchantment of midnight in that garden, Mr. Mansfield—no breeze stirred the trees, no nightingale sang; it was the perfect place to read. I made my wa
y to that corner of moonlight, pulled out my book, and perched on a small stone ledge that protruded from the garden wall. To my delight, the moonlight was bright enough for me to read the words, in which I instantly lost myself. But hardly had I read a page when I heard the snap of a twig, a small enough sound in itself, but to me it seemed to rend the silence of the garden like a thunderclap.

  “Only a few yards away, I saw the familiar figure of Nurse making her way swiftly toward a corner of the garden wall. I slipped into the nearby shadows, trembling with fear lest I be detected. I thought perhaps she was merely out for a late-night walk, suffering from the insomnia that a particularly exciting passage of a novel can produce. But as soon as I conceived this explanation, I was forced to discard it, for a cloaked figure suddenly appeared, climbing over the garden wall from the streets of town. I was just close enough to hear, as the two figures conversed, that the stranger was male, but their whispered voices were too low to understand. As you can well imagine, Mr. Mansfield, being only ten and having learned from a careful reading of literature that no other relationship is possible between two people who meet in a garden by moonlight than that of lovers, I immediately began filling in with my imagination the gaps that their unintelligible whispers left in the evidential record.

  “Nurse had a secret lover, no doubt the son of a wealthy landowner whose father had forbidden him from consorting with a housemaid. That maid had been banished and had come to Reading, but her lover had followed, and on nights when the moon was full they met in the garden where he made love to her with poetry and pledges of undying fidelity. It was a doomed romance, but all the more beautiful for its hopelessness. So firmly had this story taken root in my imagination, that I continued to embellish it even after the man had slipped back over the wall and Nurse had returned inside. I was just on the verge of infecting the lover with some deadly disease or perhaps having him join the navy at the insistence of his father when the weighty hand of Mrs. Latournelle fell upon my shoulder.

  “‘And what can you be doing in the garden at this time of night, Jane?’ she growled. I needn’t tell you that my blood ran cold with fear.