IVY COTTAGE WAS SURROUNDED BY A LOW BRICK WALL AND A THICK hedge of boxwood. I liked it even before I stepped inside, to be met by the smell of old wood and beeswax. A front door opened to a hallway and a steep, narrow staircase, to four little rooms on the first floor and four above, while another staircase, more of a ladder, led to two attic rooms with sloping ceilings. The rooms were dim and furnished in a style that might have been popular fifty years earlier, the windows small and the timbered ceilings low; Liam had to duck to go through doorways. Mr. Prowting’s steward proudly pointed out the recent replacement of the thatch, the newly installed pump in the primitive kitchen, and less proudly the privy in the back, one of several outbuildings down a path through a kitchen garden, with fruit trees and a tidy well and fields beyond sloping to a pond. It emerged there was the possibility to rent further adjoining land as well, and Liam began asking the steward about pasturage, soil types, water meadows, and haying cycles, while I listened in silent amazement. We had studied farming of the period in Preparation, but not in such detail.
Edward seemed silenced too. Finally, when the steward had gone to the gate to speak to a passing tenant, he said:
“You cannot mean to live here.”
Liam and I glanced at each other; after a moment Edward continued, as if he’d found some answer in our expressions: “You would want to whitewash everything, to be sure and have it all thoroughly scrubbed. It is not as bad as I feared. You will want to stable your horses at the Crown; they are the best for that.” He paused. “Or do you mean to give up your horses?”
He must have thought we’d lost all our money. Or that we never had any; that we were only posing as wealthy people and were now reverting to our true level. Living in a cottage voluntarily had to be incomprehensible to a person like Edward Knight.
“We shall do no such thing,” said Liam, shocked. “We wish to live simply, Mr. Knight, but not in abject poverty. We have not lost the use of reason.” Edward brightened as Liam went on: “I think with the improvements you suggest—and a few more I have in mind—it can be very pleasant. You will see. Come and eat mutton by our fire, and you shall see.”
WE CAME TO TERMS TO TAKE THE HOUSE FOR A YEAR, AT A PRICE A fraction of the Hill Street rent. But we would not stay a year; we would have to vanish one day, to return to the portal in Leatherhead, and leave everyone wondering. No, that would not do; we would need a story. An impulsive tour of the Lake District, maybe. But how was it that I had just stopped agonizing about finding a place to live, and now I was anxious about my exit plan? It seemed a flaw in my character, this constant requirement of a worry to feed on. Then I realized, with an intuitive lurch, that my real problem was not how to leave the house, but how to occupy it, living in such a small space with Liam.
“You were asking him a lot of questions,” I said as we walked back to Chawton House alone, business having sent Edward Knight to Alton. “I don’t know if he was impressed, but I was.” A bantering tone seemed safest. “How do you know all that stuff?”
“Edward has a lot of books about agronomy.”
“Are we seriously intending to take up farming?”
“No point in moving into a house with so much land otherwise.”
“I don’t know the first thing about it.” Food in our world was made in 3-D printers, using laboratory techniques refined over the years since the Die-off to maximize nutrients and minimize waste. It was good, resembling in flavor and appearance whatever it was a simulacrum of—or so I used to think, until I had gotten to 1815 and had real food.
“It will give us the perfect excuse to visit the Austens. All those things they do—brewing spruce beer, growing potatoes, making bread, keeping chickens—we will need to watch, and ask questions. Be around.”
“Clever! I’m game. But no pigs. I draw the line at pigs.”
“One must draw the line somewhere,” he agreed gravely.
THE NEXT DAY WHEN I SHARED THE NEWS, JANE SEEMED PLEASED but almost as surprised as her brother. “You really mean to take it, then? Martha, you owe me a shilling.”
“You are a gamester? You bet on what we would do?”
“Only a friendly wager. She does not have to pay me. And I am sure she will not, since honor means nothing to her.”
“But I will never hear the end of it if not,” Martha said, looking up from her knitting. “How many servants will you keep, Miss Ravenswood? You will not have much place to put them. But perhaps you can find people from the village.”
I had been thinking about this as I lay awake the night before, wondering what I had gotten myself into, sad about the need to dismiss servants I had mostly been so happy with. Mrs. Smith probably would be horrified by the primitive smallness of Ivy Cottage after Hill Street. I would miss her pies and her calm steadiness. North might stay; she liked me, but what about her flightier sister Jenny? Wilcox was out of a job, given the lack of stables at our new home, but country air would be good for Tom, who had developed a worrying cough. I hoped this would be an opportunity to get rid of Jencks.
“This is quite a change for you, from what you told us of your life in Jamaica,” Cassandra observed. “Will you not find it all rather mean?” She was no longer hostile, as she had been at first in London, yet I always had the sense of her not being entirely sure about me.
“I like the idea of leading a simpler life.”
“Sometimes the idea is better than the reality,” Jane said. “Will you keep your house in town?”
“I do not know that we have decided. Do you think we ought to?”
She laughed her throaty chuckle. “That is the sort of simple life I like, when you may ask yourself such questions.”
There was a knock before the maid, flustered, showed in Henry Austen and Liam.
“Look who I found,” Liam said. There was an astonished hush, and then Jane jumped up and embraced her brother, followed by Cassandra and Martha. I rose too, unsure what kind of greeting was appropriate.
He finished embracing his sisters and Martha, then turned to me. A thin layer of dust coated him, and a strong tang of horse came from his traveling clothes: a many-caped riding coat, rough buckskin trousers tucked into tall boots. We paused for an instant; everyone in the room was looking at us. I held out my hand and he took it in both of his.
“You have just come from town, I collect?” I asked.
“The only explanation for my bedraggled appearance. Your brother saw me and hauled me in—but I shall go to the Crown in an instant, and make myself decent.”
“You are not proposing to stay there?” Jane asked. “Do not be absurd! You will stay with us.”
“Let me tell Betty to get the room ready for you,” Cassandra said, hurrying out.