Adventures with Jane and her Legacy 01 Jane Austen Ruined My Life (12 page)

"Miss Grant. So soon?" Mrs. Parrot's eyes widened with astonishment.

"You said to come back as soon as I finished
Emma
and read the letter."

She looked at me with suspicion. "In one night?"

"Yes, ma'am." My eyes were bleary, and I felt a little fuzzyheaded, but I had done as she'd directed. I couldn't wait any longer to find out the truth about Jack Smith.

She paused, as if deciding what to do. "Come. Let's take a turn about the garden." She reached to the side, and I saw
her slip a large iron key and another of her envelopes into the pocket of her cardigan.

Although the key wasn't nearly as large as the one that had opened the door to the Steventon church, its weight still caused her sweater to sag heavily on one side. I couldn't help but think that for whatever reason, she didn't want me inside the house. That piqued my curiosity. What--or whom--was she hiding? For a moment, I thought it might be Adam, but then I laughed at my own fancy. My dealings with Mrs. Parrot were definitely starting to make me paranoid.

She shut the front door behind us, and I followed her down the steps and across the road to the high iron fence that kept undesirables out of the private garden in the middle of the square. Tall hedges screened the interior from view, but I could hear the sounds of children playing.

"How long have you lived here?" Her particular piece of London real estate had to be worth a fortune, and Mrs. Parrot, in her serviceable skirt and cardigan, didn't exactly strike me as old money.

"I've lived at number 22 since I took over as caretaker," she replied.

Before I could quiz her further, we reached the gate, and she retrieved the key to open it.

"A good twenty years, I should think." She waved me inside. "These days, I don't keep up with the passage of time like I used to."

She shut the gate behind us, and we advanced onto the gravel path.

"Clocks and calendars are for younger people. This"-- she lifted a hand to indicate the verdant beauty of the garden-- "is timeless."

The beauty of the space distracted me from my questions for her. Instead, I found myself entranced by the carefully landscaped flower beds that wound between open spaces of green lawn. Elegant wooden benches were placed along the edges of the paths, each bearing a small brass plate. As we passed the first few, I could see that the inscriptions were memorials.

Mrs. Parrot led me to the middle of the garden and motioned toward one of the benches. "Have a seat, my dear."

I perched beside her, on the bench dedicated to one Honoria Wellstone, "from her loving husband, Arthur," and hoped that I could interrogate Mrs. Parrot with some appearance of subtlety.

"I think I've figured out what you've been pointing me toward," I began, but she interrupted me.

"You'd be a fool not to."

Well, so much for my belief in my own perspicacity.

"It's rather obvious, isn't it?" she asked with a gentle smile.

"That Jack Smith was one of her father's pupils and that Jane was in love with him? Yes, it's rather simple." I tried to act nonchalant.

"Oh, there's nothing simple about it, my dear. I said obvious, not simple."

"What do you mean?"

"What have you surmised so far?" She looked at me rather intently.

"I think that Jack Smith was one of those unnamed pupils of Jane's father when she was a teenager, or even earlier. He was the illegitimate son of a gentleman who provided for him but didn't make himself known to Jack. Like Harriet, in
Emma
. That's all I've got so far."

Mrs. Parrot nodded. "You're where you should be, then."

Her words made me uneasy. Was I merely a pawn in some game she was playing? Why was she sharing this with me of all people in the first place?

"Mrs. Parrot, you said you were one of the Formidables. What does that mean?"

She crossed her hands in her lap and studied some birds pecking away at the grass a few yards in front of us. "Normally, that information isn't revealed until you complete your tasks."

"Normally? You do this a lot?"

She paused. "No. Only rarely."

"But ..." My voice trailed off, because I couldn't articulate my objection. I just felt so ... in the dark about everything.

She smoothed out a wrinkle in her skirt. "Miss Grant, you seem to be under the impression that we're engaged in some sort of game."

I opened my mouth to interrupt her, but she gave me a look that made me hold my tongue.

"For you to even meet with me means that you have been thoroughly vetted. Your being here is not a matter of whim,
nor is it a passing fancy. This is not a game we are playing." She looked as grim as if she were informing me of a death in the family.

"I appreciate your meeting with me--"

"It's not a matter of appreciation, my dear. It's a matter of trust."

"Trust?"

"You are being given access to some very volatile information. I believe that you will conduct yourself accordingly."

"Why? You barely know me." Guilt settled heavy and low in my stomach.

"I know more than you might think."

Well, that was unsettling, and it nettled me more than a little. "Indeed?"

"Don't poker up. I may be old, but I'm not a fool. I wouldn't allow just anyone to waltz into our midst."

"Our?"

"You asked about the Formidables."

"It's really a group?"

"Of course, dear. Why wouldn't it be?"

Why wouldn't there be a supersecret cadre of women who had been hiding Jane Austen's letters for almost two hundred years? Gee, well, where to begin ...

"How many of you are there?"

"Enough to keep the secret, but not enough to make us conspicuous."

"But why the secrecy?" My mind spun at the enormity of
the prize they were keeping hidden from the world. Not just from scholars but from Jane Austen's legions of fans.

"Because she requested it."

"She?"

"Jane Austen."

Oh. Well, of course. Suddenly, I felt the uncontrollable urge to giggle. "Mrs. Parrot--"

"She had no wish to be known to the world, not even as the author of her novels. Can you imagine that she would feel any differently about her private correspondence?"

"No, I can't imagine that she would. But many writers have preferred privacy, and after their deaths, their letters and other papers have been shared."

"Yes, well, those were other writers. They were not Jane Austen."

"And the Formidables have kept her secret all this time?"

"Yes. Cassandra organized the group, of course. She enlisted some friends, the occasional niece and great-niece."

I paused, wanting to frame my next words just right. "I suppose I wouldn't be the first to say that what you're telling me is too fantastical to believe."

Mrs. Parrot smiled again, that gentle expression that made her eyes sparkle. "Certainly not. And you won't be the last."

But I would, I thought, with an unexpected jolt. If I followed through with my plan to expose the missing correspondence to the world, I would be the last person to sit like this with Mrs. Parrot, puzzling over the mystery of Jane Austen's lost letters.

The end justifies the means
, I reminded myself. The world had a right to know about those documents, to study them and to learn from them. In Jane Austen's day, a gentleman's daughter couldn't lower herself by engaging in trade, even one as removed from the actual sales transactions as a novelist might be. But in modern times, well, things couldn't be more different, could they? Had she lived now, she would have been praised and feted and interviewed and revered, not to mention made quite wealthy by her success.

"So you won't tell me any more about the Formidables?"

Mrs. Parrot eyed me carefully. "I won't. But I will send you to meet another member of our group."

From the pocket of her cardigan, she pulled the envelope. She placed it faceup in my lap. "She lives in Bath, so that is your next assignment. You're to go meet her, at this address." She tapped on the handwriting that sprawled across the face of the envelope. "She will give you the details of your third task."

I looked down.

"That's one of the streets where Austen lived when she moved with her parents to Bath."

"Yes, she did live there for a time, but that's purely coincidence."

"I can't believe anything about this is a coincidence."

Mrs. Parrot gave me another one of her smiles. "My dear, you should never fail to believe in the power of coincidence. I'm sure Jane Austen would give you the same counsel."

Having read Austen's novels so many times over, I could only nod in agreement. "Yes, I suppose you're right."

"Now, when shall I tell Miss Golightly to expect you?"

I looked down at the envelope. While I was willing to follow her instructions, the time had come to take on a task of my own, to a do a little research to see if I was indeed being sent off on a series of pointless endeavors or whether there was some method to Mrs. Parrot's madness.

"The day after tomorrow? I have an important errand I need to attend to first."

"More important than this?" Mrs. Parrot's eyebrows arched.

"Not more important," I corrected myself hastily. "Just ... necessary, I guess I should have said. Necessary for me to complete if I'm to do this next task."

She gave me a thorough looking over. "
Hmm
. Very well, then. I'll tell Miss Golightly to expect you the day after tomorrow."

"Thank you. Any particular time?"

"Late morning, I should think. You'll want to look around the town a bit before you meet with her."

"Yes. Yes, I will." I'd never been to Bath. I had only seen pictures, although I'd read about it extensively in the course of my studies.

"Well, then. That's that." Mrs. Parrot stood, and I did the same. She set off, retracing our steps through the garden. "After you've completed the task, come and see me again."

"Yes, ma'am." We made our way out of the garden, and she carefully locked the gate behind us. I walked her to her door. "Thank you again. I'll see you when I get back."

"Very good, dear." She reached out and set a gnarled hand on my arm. "I knew I'd made the right decision, trusting you." She gave me another of her soft smiles. "It's hard to do that these days. So few people understand what we're about." She dropped her hand and turned to unlock her front door. "Safe journey," she said before disappearing inside.

I stood on the front step for a long moment, filled with guilt and self-loathing. How could I betray such a sweet old lady? An old lady, what's more, who'd taken me into her confidence and put her every trust in me? Even if it all turned out to be a hoax, I was going to feel like an amoeba on a flea on a rat when I exposed Mrs. Parrot to the public.

Think about your future
, the little voice inside my head whispered, the voice that sounded a lot like Edward. It was that voice of pride and ambition that he had nurtured during our marriage, the one that had made me set aside my dreams of writing for the prestige of being a tenured professor and a scholar.

"Oh, shut up," I murmured as I jogged down the steps of Mrs. Parrot's town house.

A passing gentleman in a business suit carrying a briefcase and an umbrella gave me a strange look. I ignored him and continued on my way, the third envelope clutched in my suddenly sweaty hand.

I
f Mrs. Parrot didn't want to reveal anything more about Jack Smith just yet, I couldn't compel her to do so, but that didn't mean I was willing to let her call all the shots. And it certainly didn't mean I couldn't do some research of my own. The question was where?

The obvious choice was that most prestigious of institutions, the British Library, but it was not a library in the usual sense of the word, where you could just walk in and start browsing the shelves. No, even to look at the regular books meant registering for a pass and then waiting hours, if not days, for the requested materials to be pulled from the hidden stacks. I didn't have that kind of time--not to apply for a pass or to wait for someone to find what I needed.

Clearly I needed someone who had access to the library already, as well as someone with a little clout. And, as it happened, I was sharing a Grade II-listed Georgian town house with just such a person.

Adam.

But how to ask for his help without tipping my hand ...

"Would you have any interest in seeing the exhibits at the British Library?" I asked in a very casual tone the next morning at breakfast.

I had one day to accomplish my objective before I was due in Bath, so finesse had to bow to more expedient methods.

"I've seen it. It's cool." He was deep into the
Financial Times
and nursing a second cup of coffee.

"Do you want to go with me? See it again?" I made every effort to be nonchalant, but some hint in my tone must have clued him in.

"What's your angle?" He laid down the
Times
and took another sip of his coffee. A smile played around the corners of his mouth.