“I have had enough of it for a lifetime.”
She put down the tongs and gave me a look full of meaning. Sugar was the primary product associated with the Caribbean; there had been calls for boycotting it, to protest the conditions there.
Henry, who had seated himself near us, turned at this. “Sugar is a vice, I collect,” he said. “Yet one I would find hard to live without. But I am a poor weak creature, a slave of appetite, am I not, Tilson?”
“Like Odysseus lashed to the mast,” Mr. Tilson agreed.
“Hardly a vice.” I’d made a mistake. A dog whistle to Mrs. Tilson, my remark as overheard by Henry was an impolitely direct reference to geopolitics. “An indulgence—a luxury—but not a vice. I was wrong to speak as I did. Do not compound the error by endorsing my foolishness, Mr. Austen.”
“You are my guest; I would endorse foolishness far more flagrant.” He inclined his head. “How fortunate I do not have to; you spoke only simple truth, a rare enough thing in this world.”
I acknowledged this with a nod, outflanked. When I raised my eyes again, he was still looking at me, and Liam had started asking the Tilsons about the part of Oxfordshire that Mr. Tilson was from.
“Miss Ravenswood,” Henry said, leaning forward to speak in a low tone, “I hope you soon feel at home in London.” I caught a whiff of him, like freshly ironed shirt and something vaguely, not unpleasantly, medicinal. “Certainly it is different from what you are used to.”
I acknowledged it was, but that did not make it displeasing. “And my brother and I shall rely on you to be our Virgil, leading us through all this.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “I hope you do not equate London with Dante’s inferno. Although parts, perhaps, are not unlike. You need to stay out of those parts.”
“I already see I shall be much in want of guidance.” I tilted my head and smiled at him. Would it be too forward to remind him of his offer to introduce me to his sister?
“WELL?” LIAM DEMANDED IN THE CARRIAGE ON OUR WAY HOME.
“You were amazing! Well done.”
“But what did you think of him? Amiable?”
“He is.” The brother Jane Austen loved best, he would be irresistibly fascinating only for that. But then, those characters she gave his name to: Tilney, her most charming creation; Crawford, her most ambiguous. “But perhaps in the French sense, more than the English.”
“Too smooth and plausible?”
“Maybe.” But this wasn’t exactly it. So what, then? I thought again of how he had looked at me, a subtle smolder. “I think he must be a practiced flirt,” I surprised myself by saying.
“He is Jane Austen’s favorite brother.”
“So you think she will be a flirt, too?”
“Not exactly.” But he did not elaborate, just rested his head in his hands and exhaled audibly. “I kind of like him. But it’s more important that you do.”
“I like him well enough.” Well enough, I meant, to play my part of a potentially plausible match for a person who would soon lose all his money and could use the soft landing a wealthy wife would provide. No longer in my first youth, a little questionable thanks to my Caribbean background, I was possibly just about right for a widowed forty-four-year-old banker who had never quite lived up to his youthful promise.
The prospect of being dealt to him like a hand in a game of cards was both chilling and hilarious, like I’d been embedded in a Jane Austen novel still unwritten. This was the idea, why we’d come here in the socially mixable guise of brother and sister: to keep him interested, to have a reason to be around, until we could get to Jane Austen, the letters, the manuscript. Yet I realized, as we jolted home, that I was surprised it was working: so seemingly easily, so fast.
“I’m not much at flirting myself,” I admitted, wondering where this need to confess was coming from. The evening had unsettled me in a way I was still trying to figure out. “Too ambiguous. Too miss-ish.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You were flirting up a storm back there.”
If this was a compliment, it wasn’t one I wanted; I realized that my idea of myself was connected to not being a flirt, to being a person who was direct in speech and forthright in desires. And right now, I desired a change of subject. “So, Liam, where are you from?”
“London. Why do you ask?”
“You are Old British, then? Or are you from somewhere else originally?”
“We are all British now.” That was the official line, what everyone said after the Die-off and all that had followed. Britain, better prepared, had become a beacon among nations, a refuge to English speakers everywhere, reestablishing some of its nineteenth-century empire, though in changed form, for empires now were empires of the mind, human ingenuity and imagination the steam locomotives and coal mines of our time.
“But some are more British than others.” Also what everyone said; hierarchies had emerged, as they always do. “Are you Old British?”
There was a pause. “What makes you doubt it?”
“I’ve worked with you for over a year now, and it never occurred to me to wonder until recently. Whereas I’m—You talk to me for five minutes, and you know I’m not.” He made no reply, leaving me to suspect I’d hit on a sore point. “But it doesn’t matter. I was just curious.”
“What gave me away?”
“Look, it’s not like that.”
“Just wondering. What was it?”
He wasn’t going to let this go. “That night you came home from meeting Henry Austen, you sounded different, that’s all.”
We rode on in silence awhile before Liam muttered: “I’m from Ireland. But I left ages ago. I don’t really identify—” He did not finish his thought.
“Do I know my accents or what?” I said, hoping to take the conversation in a less murky direction. It made no sense that he was reluctant to acknowledge this, yet he was, and I felt embarrassed for him: for his affectation, for my having found him out. But he’d created such a convincing impression of Old Britishness during Preparation; one strengthened by his girlfriend, Sabina, whom I’d met a few times when she’d visited the institute, all tall blondness and bored, aristocratic drawl. “And there’s such a wonderful irony to it. Don’t you remember, we read that thing about contemporary views of foreigners, how in 1815 the English despised the Jews and the Irish more than anyone? Even more than the French!” Despite the two-decade war they’d just finished having.
Our hired carriage had two narrow seats facing each other, so shallow that we kept accidentally bumping knees and apologizing. Liam leaned back, and his lips twitched into a smile. “Perhaps it’s even why they sent us.”
“The diversity candidates?”