“What did you say? Do not mumble! I deplore mumbling,” James said, though in a slightly friendlier tone.
“We are from Jamaica, not Bermuda—does not signify—a mere trifle,” I said.
“Jamaica. My wits desert me today.” Jane shook her head and brought her fingertips to her forehead.
“I very greatly doubt they ever do,” Liam said.
This earned him another stare from Cassandra. “If they were from Bermuda, Jane, they would know the Palmers.” Her speech was different from her sister’s, slower and crisply enunciated. There was something hostile in her precision. “But perhaps they know them anyway?” she finished, fixing her gaze on me.
“I do not have that pleasure.” I knew who she meant. Charles, their younger sea captain brother, had married a daughter of John Grove Palmer, former attorney general of Bermuda. She had died the previous year of complications following the birth of their fourth child.
“Where is my water?” James asked, and yanked the bell cord.
“Jamaica and Bermuda are not so very far apart,” Cassandra observed. I sensed an implied reproach in our failure to know the Palmers, but before I could respond, Jane said:
“Over a thousand miles.”
“What is that? Not a week’s sail on a swift cutter with favorable winds.” I couldn’t decide if they were sniping at each other, or if this was how they joked.
“Cass. You must be weary. Would you not like to wash your hands? Perhaps some tea? We have some very agreeable tart Henry has barely been able to touch.”
“I must see him!” Cassandra said, walking out of the room and up the stairs.
James had sat down again and thrown his head back. “I begin to despair of my water. Pray, Jane, what sort of people does Henry keep in his employ? Do you know where he finds them? Do you have the slightest idea where he finds them?”
Jane was still standing in the middle of the room, as were Liam and I. She turned pink and seemed about to say something, when we heard a rattle from the hallway. A servant I had never seen before hurried in, carrying a tray with a single empty glass and a pitcher of water. She was nearly as short as I, her face lined but her body slender as a girl’s. She had purple ribbons in her lace cap and brought a whiff of lavender; her plain black dress was elegant in its simplicity.
“Et alors!” she cried, putting down the tray. “You are here, Monsieur James! I knew you would come!” To my astonishment, James stood up and hugged her.
“How is Henry?” he asked. “I count on the unvarnished truth from you, Bigeon.” Of course: the longtime housekeeper, first working for Henry’s wife when she was still Eliza de Feuillide, then for the couple, now just for Henry.
“Monsieur Henri, hélas,” she said, shaking her head as James poured himself a glass of water and drank it down. “He must be seen to be believed. I will be looking for a new situation soon.”
“Madame Bigeon, for shame,” Jane said.
“Mademoiselle Jane, you know I am not one to mince the words.”
In the silence that followed, Liam and I shot a glance at each other, then he turned and looked at Jane.
“Might I see him now?” he asked. “It is my heart’s wish to put you at some ease on this.”
Surprising me again, James finished a second glass of water and stood up. “Let us go then, Doctor, and see for ourselves, shall we?” He held up a hand to his sister. “Jane, stay. You have been his nurse long enough; you are limp as a rag. Cassandra is here; she can take over.” He stood back with a supercilious flourish to let Liam exit the room first, and they were gone.
Madame Bigeon gave Jane a shrug, picked up the tray, and left too.
Jane let out a small sigh and sat down in a chair by the window. She hid her face in her hands and began shaking—with silent laughter, it took me a moment to realize. Getting herself under control again, she lifted her gaze to meet mine.
“Ah, Miss Ravenswood,” she said. “How seldom things ever go as we expect them to. And how tedious existence would be if they did.”
“Yours is a philosophical disposition today,” I said, taking the seat next to her.
“Certainly, the irony in longing for the comfort of one’s dearest—in summoning them of your own accord—and then, when they arrive—” She spread her hands. “I think Henry is better today, upon my word, I do. But I have created such a crisis now—everything in a stir, everyone’s peace cut up—now he must be sicker than ever, to justify their pains.”
“But think how you would feel, had it turned out differently. If you had not told them, and he—”
“You have nothing but logic and sense on your side, two things I cannot abide.” She was smiling. “Do not suppose I regret of my actions; I rarely do.” She paused. “It is amusing, that is all.”
“SO HOW WAS HE?” I ASKED IN THE CARRIAGE. WE HAD AGAIN LEFT Wilcox home, and were taking the long way back through the park, for though the wind was cold and the air damp, there was much to discuss.
“She’s right. He is better. Not great, but I see a difference. And he was able to keep some food down.”
“What did you think of Cassandra and James?”
“Did you see that look Cassandra gave me? Like I was something she’d found stuck to the sole of her shoe.”
“Do you suppose Jane had mentioned us when she wrote?” This gave me a chill; how would she describe us? It was too metafictional that we might appear as characters in the same letters we had come to steal for scholars of the future. For Eva Farmer.
“I was thinking they were annoyed to see outsiders at such a moment. But that’s an interesting idea.” There was a pause as we looked across the park: dead leaves swirling in the open stretch of ground under a sullen gray sky, only a few intrepid horsemen pursuing their exercise. “What could she have said, to put Cassandra on her guard so?”
“Or maybe ‘on guard’ is just how she is.”
“But we must win over Cassandra. She’s crucial; she has the letters.”
At that moment I thought of them—and the manuscript—as I never had before: not just the fruit of Jane Austen’s passing thoughts and enduring genius, but physical artifacts, with bulk and solidity. Did Cassandra keep the letters in a locked desk drawer? In a strongbox, under her bed? The Georgians liked locks: tea and sugar, not just money and silver flatware, were valuables they secured, and lock picking had been one of the arts we had learned in Preparation.
I shivered. Liam was continuing: “And anything that’s helped us with Henry and Jane—money, in his case; a certain charm, I suppose, in hers—our exoticism, say—won’t help. On the contrary, it doesn’t seem the sort of thing she likes at all.”
“So you need to figure out what she does like. You need to be the Henry Crawford here, working two sisters at once.” Henry Crawford, the clever and charming villain of Mansfield Park, is one of Austen’s most confounding creations; you feel as if he almost could be good, as if in the writing she was trying to make up her mind about him.