“Yes.”
He unlocked a drawer in the desk and took out a sheet of paper, opened another drawer to find a quill, a small knife, a bottle of ink, and a box of pounce, the sand-like substance for blotting. He arranged these in front of him, picked up the quill and the knife, and began to trim the quill’s end.
“I always felt like Shakespeare when we used to practice with those,” I said, grateful to change the subject.
“Forever on the verge of writing a sonnet—Oh, I wrecked it.”
“Here, here, let me see. Give me the knife.”
I took the quill to the window for better light, cut a new channel up the middle, and brought it back. Liam opened the ink bottle, dipped, and began. I leaned across the desk to read upside down:
33 Hill Street, 23rd September
Dear Sir,
He paused; a large drop of ink fell onto the paper, and he groaned. “I never did that in Preparation.”
He blew the paper dry and continued in a scratchy burst:
I am emboldened to write to you, a stranger, by the enclosed letter of introduction, as well as by the history of my family’s association with the Hampsons in Jamaica, the island of my birth, for I arrive in London with but little acquaintance.
He paused and read it over.
“After the death of my father . . .”
Liam frowned. “I remember.” He continued:
After the death of my father, the inheritor of an extensive coffee plantation who devoted his life, his fortune, and his sacred honour to the humane treatment of his slaves and their gradual manumission, as well as to the diffusion of the Gospel among the benighted population of that island . . .
“Will he believe any of this?” I was seized with doubt. “It’s preposterous. Who frees their slaves?”
Liam, still writing, did not answer at once. “A great lie is no harder to believe than a small one. It’s about utter conviction in the telling.”
“I still wonder at their making us slave owners. They stink of blood. Even ex–slave owners.”
“As long as you’ve money, you smell good.”
If you should have no objection to receive me into your house . . .
“I always hated that line. Like we want to be reminding him of Mr. Collins.” It came straight from the letter in which that pompous clergyman is first heard from in Pride and Prejudice.
“He might hope to rejoice in my absurdities.” Liam was reading over what he had written.
“But really. Are you sure we want to say that?”
Liam paused and tilted his head at me. “You suggest departing from the script, and sending him a letter of your own?” He asked it mildly, yet with an edge. I felt something shift beneath me, as I realized we had not moved on from the argument about saving Tom, but were continuing it in another form.
“No. I didn’t mean that. Go on.”
I propose to wait on you on September 28th, at 4 P.M. I remain dear sir, sincerely & etc.
Doctor William Ravenswood
He made two more copies before he was satisfied. Meanwhile, with a different ink and an unusual paper, I worked on our letter of introduction. Like the one to Henry Austen, it had been composed by Project Team members and memorized by us both. It purported to be from Sir Thomas-Philip Hampson, the owner of extensive property in Jamaica, and a distant Austen relative.
An audacious, genius move. The fifth and sixth Hampson baronets had spent most of their time in Jamaica. The seventh, the current one, was born there in 1763, but left for school in England, where he later settled. Times were changing: by the early nineteenth century, owners of large West Indian estates were nearly all absentees. The climate was harsh, the tropical ailments deadly, and the cruelty needed to keep the system running something polite people preferred not to face. But the more conscientious, or avaricious, made the dangerous crossing to see to things, like Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park.
Research had established that the seventh baronet had been in Jamaica several years ago, when he could have met us. Better, he was there now, and would be for months. A letter from Sir Thomas-Philip Hampson was entrée from someone plausible, important, and connected to the Austen family, whom we were in no danger of meeting in England, if all went according to plan.
I had to copy my letter over only once, pleased with my handwriting: spiky, bold, and decisive. Properly folding and sealing it, then enclosing it in Liam’s letter, was another adventure. The desk was a battlefield when we were through, dusty with pounce, scattered with ruined wafers, scraps of sealing wax, and discarded copies, evidence to be burned in the fireplace.
A REPLY CAME TWO DAYS LATER. IT WAS PROPPED AGAINST THE coffeepot and waiting for us when we sat down to breakfast: a solid, fern-folded piece of rag paper that we just stared at. More than any moment so far, more than when I had opened my eyes in Leatherhead, I felt the strangeness of what I was doing. We had interfered in history. We’d sent Henry Austen a letter that had never previously existed; he had read it, and sat down to reply, time he would have spent doing something else. Looking out the window on a sunny afternoon? Humming a little song as he studied himself in the mirror? I suspected he would prove vain about his looks; it went with what we knew about his charm, inability to keep secrets, unwillingness to choose and stick to one profession.
I picked up the letter, snapped the wax, and unfolded its crisp, perfect thirds. The handwriting was faultless: no blots, lines arrow-straight, words of unvarying size. We had spent a lot of time on the technical aspects of letter writing, a crucial signifier of belonging to a certain class. While the one that had gone out to him had been good, it had not been like this.
23 Hans Place, September 25
Dear Sir,
Your letter of the 23rd being received with pleasure, I look forward to making your acquaintance. Will you honour me with a meeting at my club, on Wednesday the 27th, at 6 P.M.?
“So he did have an objection to receiving you in his house.”
“He probably knows lots of people he would not want in his house.”
“He needs to vet you.”
“A colonial, a slaveholder, friend of some distant cousins?” He examined the letter. “I hope there are no physicians at his club that I should know from my schooldays at Edinburgh.”
“You can fake your way through,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Maybe the years in the tropics have weathered your complexion, and altered your appearance?” I looked at him: skin unlined and pale, with a rosy undertone. “Or something.”
ON THE BIG DAY, LIAM TRIED ON EVERY STITCH HE HAD ACQUIRED since we had come to 1815, leaving the rejects strewn around his bedroom and dressing room. He paced the third-floor landing, muttering, going into my room to study himself with dissatisfaction in the house’s only full-length mirror, and asking me about each outfit. “I need to seem rich. But quietly rich. A gentleman. But not a fop. What about this waistcoat?”