No one had ever believed that we could travel to 1815 and change nothing. Yet Liam was probably right: history consisted of big events and larger-than-life characters. Waterloo and Trafalgar and Borodino, Napoleon and Nelson and Kutuzov. Jane Austen. The rest of us contributed to history in our little ways, as drops of water make up an ocean: collectively powerful, meaningless alone. That Fanny Knight had nearly choked to death was not important, in this view. She hadn’t; that was the main thing.
And now her father had invited us to Chawton. This was huge. It probably never would have happened otherwise; that is, if she had not nearly died. I felt a chill pass through me as I considered this. It was as if something—the world, the future—had needed her to do so, in order for the next domino to fall. As if our arrival in 1815 with a mission had set something astir that had previously been quiet, altering the energy of the world and the outcome of events. This line of thinking was making my head hurt, so I turned to what I did know.
Edward’s main property was in Kent; the Chawton estate in Hampshire was smaller, not a place he spent a lot of time. But in 1809, when he’d offered his mother and sisters a choice of two possible houses, they’d picked Hampshire over Kent, for it was more like home: Chawton was near the vicarage at Steventon, where all the children except Edward had grown up, where Mrs. Austen had been a busy clergyman’s wife, with a herd of dairy cows, a large garden, and a houseful of boys the Reverend Austen was schoolmaster to. The cows and the boys were gone, Mr. Austen ten years dead, yet in many ways the life in Chawton of the three Austen ladies and their unmarried friend Martha Lloyd was a return to that earlier time: calm and self-sufficient, growing their vegetables, making spruce beer, and keeping chickens. The world beyond their village, with food riots and textile unrest, might almost not exist, or so I imagined. It would be fascinating to get out of London and see. And how would Cassandra react to us being Edward’s guests? She would have to accept us; indeed, it had seemed last night that she was starting to.
But there remained the Liam problem. What had happened, where had this come from, to catch me so off guard? I’d walked into his room with no other thought than a need to talk: looming insomnia, the wish for a friendly ear. I’d walked out with an overpowering wish to sleep with him.
And yet I’d done nothing about it, another puzzle. I am straightforward; my needs are simple. I like having sex, preferably with men, though I don’t rule women out. No one needs to be tied up or spanked, and no one needs to be in love. I’ve found this approach of not overthinking to work well. What I should have done was sit down on the bed, give him a long look, take one of his beautiful hands in my own, and let events unfold naturally. What I’d done instead was stammer like a teenager with a crush and run away. Inexplicable.
True, we were stuck in the early nineteenth century until next September and the Opportunity of Return, posing as brother and sister. Living as we did, there was risk of being caught in flagrante by a servant. And there’d be no getting away when things went south if he turned out to be one of my mistakes—gloomy, withholding, dysfunctional, or complicated. This did not seem impossible. Then, too, he was engaged. A man in love.
All good reasons to hesitate, but they felt after the fact: last night none of them had occurred to me. What was wrong, then? He’d never shown much sign of being attracted—maybe I wasn’t his type—but this was not a disqualifier. We were only human. I doubted he’d reject an unambiguous advance; and even if he did, I’d be no worse off than I was now. So why had I run away instead?
I saw again in memory his face as he had looked up at me, just before I’d fled the room. There had been something so guileless in his expression that I’d felt ashamed of my own desires. The Old British are prudes, I reminded myself—forgetting for a moment he wasn’t Old British, merely pretending. He’d not had the experiences I’d had of working in remote locations and extreme conditions, did not understand how it affected a person. Maybe, in that way, he was a little na?ve. Or maybe he had religious scruples, not that he ever spoke of religion. Or maybe he’d been saving himself for marriage?
This idea of my colleague as a thirty-seven-year-old virgin struck me so forcibly, sad and yet funny, that I gave a snort of laughter and felt better. I rolled onto my stomach and ranged under my nightgown, enjoying the warmth and smoothness of my skin, the soft resilience of my flesh. I imagined his hands on me instead of my own, and let myself forget, at least until I was done bringing myself off, that I had not really solved anything.
A FEW DAYS LATER, WHEN I HAD BEGUN TO WORRY THAT LIAM might have misunderstood, or that that the master of Chawton House had had second thoughts, Edward stopped in when we were still over breakfast to repeat his invitation. His business would keep him in town longer, he would need to be in Kent for three or four weeks, then he would be in Hampshire through the new year, on and off. We were welcome to come as soon as next month, though perhaps we would prefer to wait for spring, a more agreeable time there.
December, we said: we wanted to be in the country as soon as possible, to breathe the clean air and shake off the corrupting influence of London. Liam expressed himself with such warmth on this point that Edward looked taken aback, and suggested a week in Cheltenham or Weymouth—it would do us no end of good. Which we then had to promise to consider.
“I MUST GO TO THE TAILOR.” LIAM WENT TO THE WINDOW FOR A look into the street, at Edward Knight getting into his carriage. “Surely there will be shooting. I need outfits.”
“What a clotheshorse you are. Were you constantly shopping in our own time too?” I had resolved to treat Liam exactly as before, to take a leaf from his playbook and give away nothing. So far, it was going well. “I suppose you were.”
“I never had any money.”
“Oh. Great, so you can indulge your pent-up demand.”
“My long-suppressed desire to be Beau Brummell?” Liam murmured. “Sometimes 1815 does seem like an endless fancy-dress ball.”
“Or to be a gentleman.”
He gave me a sharp look. “Do you want to come to the tailor’s with me? I was thinking we could go for a walk, after. It seems a shame to waste the day.”
WE WERE IN HYDE PARK, THE UNSEASONABLY MILD WEATHER having held, when I saw Jane Austen at a distance. “Over there,” I said, trying to indicate without pointing, “at the edge of that group of people? There—don’t stare, but by that weeping willow, with two other women?”
By the time he saw her, she had noticed us too. She bade farewell to the women she had been walking with and came over. We asked after Henry’s health.
“He is very well. So well, I have left him on a bench—he insisted on coming out—so I could take a turn with Miss East and Mrs. LaTournelle. Will you join me in returning to him?”
The wind had picked up; it felt like November again. Jane put herself between us, and we were off. She began telling us about the new book they had started reading in the evenings: Guy Mannering, or the Astrologer, by the author of Waverley, which she feared no one would like as well as Waverley.