The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,1
Austen’s mother and sister’s graves are right here—do you see, miss, alongside the church wall?”
Her face lit up in gratitude, both for the information and for his slow warming to the conversation.
“Oh my goodness, I had no idea.…”
Then her eyes began to well up. She was the most striking human being he had ever met, like a model in a hair or soap advertisement in the papers. As the tears started, the colour of her eyes crystallized into something he had never before seen, a shade of blue almost like violet, while the tears caught on rows of inky-black lashes, blacker even than her hair.
Looking away, he tried to step around her carefully, his dog, Rider, now nipping about at his muddy boots. He walked over until he was standing next to the two large slabs of stone that stood upright in the ground. She followed him, the heels of her black pumps sticking a bit in the graveyard dirt, and he watched as she silently mouthed the words carved onto the twin tombstones.
Backing away, he fiddled about to find his cap from his pocket. Brushing back the lock of light blond hair that tended to fall across his brow as he worked, he tucked it up under the rim of the cap as he pulled it forward and down over his eyes. He wanted to be away from her now, from the strange emotion being stirred up in her by the unadorned graves of simple women dead these past one hundred years.
Off he wandered to wait with Rider by the main lych gate to the churchyard. After several minutes she finally appeared from around the corner of the church, this time stopping to read the inscription of every stone she passed, as if hoping to discover even more slumbering souls of note. Every so often she would teeter a bit as her heel caught the edge of a stone, and she would grimace just so slightly at her own clumsiness. But her eyes never left the graves below.
She stopped at the lych gate next to him and looked back with a contented sigh. She was smiling now and more composed—so composed that he finally picked up the whiff of money in both her poise and her manners.
“I’m so sorry about that, I just wasn’t prepared. You see, I came all this way to find the cottage, where she wrote the books—the little table, the creaking door,” she added, but to no visible reaction. “I couldn’t find out much about any of this while in London—thank you so much for telling me.”
He held the lych gate open for her and they started to walk back towards the main road together.
“I can take you to her house if you’d like—it’s barely a mile or so up the lane. I’ve done my morning haying for the farm, before it gets too hot, so I’ve time to spare.”
She smiled, a great big white winning smile, the kind of smile he could only imagine being American. “That is awfully kind of you, thank you. You know, I was assuming people came all the time, like this, like me—do they?”
He shrugged as he kept his pace slow to meet hers along the half-mile gravel drive that led down to the road from the Great House.
“Often enough, I guess. Nothing really much to see, though. It’s just workers’ flats now, at the cottage—tenants in all the rooms.”
He turned to see her face tighten in disappointment. As if to cheer her up, before he even knew what had come over him, he asked her about the books.
“I’m not even sure I can answer that,” she replied, as he pointed the way back down the country lane, opposite the end where his wagon sat with its load temporarily forgotten. “I just feel, when I read her, when I reread her—which I do, more than any other author—it’s as if she is inside my head. Like music. My father first read the books to me when I was very young—he died when I was twelve—and I hear his voice, too, when I read her. Nothing made him laugh out loud, nothing, the way those books did.”
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.”