THE DAY OF THE DINNER, I HAD A BATH AND SPENT MORE TIME than usual thinking about my appearance, though I did not try on everything I owned. By then I had just three dresses for evening, and only one I liked: white silk with subtle dots, a simple design that I admired in the late-afternoon light bouncing off my dressing room mirror. Thanks to Grace, handy with curlpapers, I had a tidy knot in back and demure corkscrews at the hairline instead of my usual tangle of ringlet. Olive-toned skin, brown eyes under a wide forehead tapering to a narrow chin, mouth generous, nose aquiline. I have always liked my nose, but that afternoon I examined it with tender concern and a question I had never asked myself before: Did I look too Jewish?
More to the point, would Henry Austen suspect? I narrowed my eyes and looked at myself, trying to see what a stranger would. A Caribbean background was exotic and dubious, a screen on which people could project their notions of the other: Moorish, mulatto, Sephardic, whatever. Continuing to study my image, I reflected that context was disguise, and Liam was providing it. Tall, pale, and angular, he looked British, had already convinced Henry Austen he was a gentleman—we would not have been invited otherwise—and I was being introduced as his sister.
So much depended on this night. A more cautious person would have been frightened, but I was excited. Even if in the course of the day I developed an eye twitch, and the jolty trip west to Chelsea in a hired carriage felt like a ride in a tumbrel to my own execution. Liam was more taciturn than usual, arms folded and expression abstracted as he stared out the carriage window.
“Remember,” he said as we turned in to the circle of Hans Place, “be friendly. But reserved.”
What did that mean? “Right. I’m on it.”
He winced. “And—if you could—stay in character a little more, even when we’re alone? It would never do to slip up, if something takes you by surprise. You sound so American sometimes. Like just then.”
I studied his long face, trying to fathom the mind that lay behind it. I had the accent cold; if anything defines a doctor, it is being able to memorize and produce on command. I heard Mary Ravenswood’s voice in my head, found myself using her vocabulary and her syntax—in thought and aloud—without trying. And the weirdness of this sometimes gave me the urgent need to salt my discourse with medical jargon, an obscenity, an Americanism, or a choice word in Yiddish, the lingua franca of New York—anything to avoid vanishing into the part of a Jane Austen heroine. “Very well,” I said, my diction flawless. “Thank you for recalling me to my duty.”
It might have seemed that our conversation the night Liam came home from meeting Henry Austen would have brought us closer. But he never alluded to it again, and I think that things people say drunk should not be used against them—and anyway, what had he said? Nothing important. It was more a feeling, and feelings are wispy things.
HENRY AUSTEN HAD VERY WHITE LINEN, A CRAVAT THAT CRADLED his neck in bleached, pillowy ruffles of textile perfection; as Liam introduced us, I was transfixed by its play of light and shadow. Whether to shake hands is the woman’s prerogative, so I held mine out—I needed to be assured of his physical existence amid the unreality of this moment. His skin was smooth and soft, hand pleasantly warm; it enclosed mine with a firm grip, like something it had a right to. A man who knows what he wants, I thought, and felt a warning flutter. Arousal? Alarm?
“I am honored, indeed, to meet you, Miss Ravenswood.” He bowed over my hand, redeeming the formality of the gesture with a conspiratorial smile. Medium height, tidily built, exquisitely tailored, with his own hair and the prow-like Austen nose of the portraits, he looked just as I had expected, like he had walked out of my own thoughts. Or maybe even a little better. “After all that your brother told me of your originality and charm . . . But I sense, he did not exaggerate.”
He had bright hazel eyes and a direct gaze, and I had an impression of being surveyed—in discreet, gentlemanly fashion, but surveyed—as I replied: “You have the advantage of me then, for he refused to say more than a word of you. For all I begged.” The day after their meeting, sunken-eyed and subdued, Liam would say only that they had dined very well—nineteenth century for drinking yourself into a stupor—and repeat that Henry Austen was lovely, and that we were both invited to dinner.
Henry glanced at Liam, who raised an eyebrow and shrugged in a way that did not deny my accusation, before he turned away to look into a large atlas that lay open on a table nearby.
“Your brother is the very soul of discretion, is he not? He did not want to tell, though it was the truth, ‘Oh, that Mr. Austen, he is old beyond his years, of a crabbed disposition and with one foot in the grave, yet we must humor him, for Sir Thomas-Philip has sent us with a letter . . .’”
“I already see you are none of those things, sir.”
“Distingué, let us say. Everything sounds less painful in French.”
“You are familiar with France?”
“As much as anyone can be in such days as these. My dear wife”—his gaze, which had been on me all this time, skittered off to the mantelpiece, then returned—“was educated there, and her first husband was French, poor man.” At my look of concern, he added: “A count, you know. Guillotined. Dreadful business.”
“Oh, how ghastly.” I turned toward where his glance had gone, and found a miniature propped on the mantel, between a porcelain spaniel and a candle box. “Is that her portrait?” I asked, though I already knew. Eliza Hancock in her teens: huge dark eyes, wedge of a chin, elfin smile, and a lot of eighteenth-century hair. A lively letter writer and urbane flirt, she was courted in widowhood by two of her first cousins. Henry was eventually successful; his oldest brother, the clergyman James, not so much. Which must have caused some awkward moments, even in a family as affectionate as the Austens.
“She has been gone these two years.” He took down the tiny painting and placed it in my hands.
I studied the portrait. “I am sorry for your loss.” I looked up at him and sensed from the hasty way his eyes rose to meet mine that he had been studying my chest. Which, in his defense, was hard to miss; décolletage was the focus of fashionable 1815 evening wear, the breasts as usual cantilevered upward by the corset, but unlike in day wear, not modestly concealed by a fichu or a spencer.
Amused but embarrassed, I handed the portrait back with a little bow, and looked around his drawing room, desperate for a new topic. The room that met my eyes was studied shabbiness and leather-upholstered disarray, piles of books and a worn but important-looking Turkish rug. “Your home is charmingly situated; positively rustic.” Chelsea, at that time, was more like a village, not really part of London. “Have you lived here long?”
Liam had withdrawn, seeming absorbed in the atlas. From his vantage point behind Henry’s back, he chose this moment to look up and nod, smiling. Was he mocking my conversational efforts, or encouraging them? Why wasn’t he helping me out?