“Yes.”
The silence that followed was strangely comfortable, and it lasted so long that I began to wonder what they were doing downstairs. Probably I should rejoin them. I was about to stand up and say so when she spoke.
“I shall not come back down tonight; it would be too much of a spectacle. Please tender my excuses to your brother for running away.”
“You do not need to make any excuses,” I said, a little more vehemently than necessary.
“You are charming in your quick sympathy, but also mysterious. What do you imply by that singular emphasis?”
“You may claim all the privileges of the artist. Including that of being whimsical.”
“The artist?” Again I had the sense of a laugh held back in the way she said it.
“Was the word ill-chosen? I think not.”
She adjusted her position to lie on her back and look at me. “Forgive me if I injured your feelings earlier, Mary.” I was on the verge of denying she had when she went on: “Martha is right, you know. I feel such an affinity for both you and your brother, for all that I have known you such a short time.” She paused. “Though in novels, such an immediate intimacy is generally not to be trusted.”
“Like Isabella and Catherine in Northanger Abbey,” I said, and caught my breath in horror as I realized my mistake, adding hastily, “I mean, the way Elizabeth and Wickham talk so unguardedly, the first time they meet in Pride and Prejudice.”
“Northanger Abbey?” she repeated, sounding puzzled, as well she might. That novel had come into the world titled “Susan,” after the original name of its heroine, and was sold to Crosby and Co. for ten pounds in 1803 but languished unpublished, for reasons lost to history. It was not until she finally had money of her own from writing that she was able to ask Henry to go and buy the book back for the same sum, not mentioning until afterward that it was by the author of the successful Pride and Prejudice. I like to imagine Henry casually revealing this on his way out of Crosby’s office, manuscript in his arms. But I also wonder: couldn’t her brothers have pitched in to come up with ten pounds a little sooner, so she could try her luck with another publisher? Was this not seen as important, or was she too proud to ask?
“Is there such a novel? I do not think I have heard of it. I would remember such a title. And characters named Catherine and Isabella?” She would later change Susan to Catherine, or maybe had already done so; the book would not be published until after her death.
“I was mistaken,” I said, hoping the dimness of the room would hide the confusion on my face. “I was thinking of something else, another novel—”
“So Henry has told you of my misadventures with that book.” A statement, not a question, and I exhaled in silent relief. “He never could keep a secret. But it does not matter. We are nearly sisters by now.” She paused. “Still, I urged him, in my last letter, not to keep this engagement concealed much longer, and I shall tell you the same.”
I had no reply to this. I did not want to alter history any more than I already had; a mysterious person agreeing to wed Jane’s favorite brother and then vanishing would surely become part of the Austen family lore and be irresistibly fascinating to the same biographers I was trying to aid with the rescue of the lost letters to Cassandra. It was all too meta. Also, it would be apparent to those at the institute, back in my own time, that I had done this, something I absolutely should not do. “Is there a reason for your wishing to keep it a secret?” she asked, not accusingly but so gently I felt ashamed. “You can tell me, you know. Unlike my brother, I am vastly discreet.”
“It seems too soon after everything with the bank,” I said. This did not strike me as particularly convincing, but it was the best I could come up with. “There is what you have mentioned—the risk of creditors coming after the money I would bring to the alliance. And even if that is unlikely, to lose the money of so many people—and then to immediately turn around and wed a West Indian coffee heiress—it might strike the world as lacking in repentance.”
“You are right, of course; I had not seen it in quite that light.” She paused. “We need to marry your brother off first; then your own wedding can pass almost unnoticed.” It was hard to know from her tone if she was joking. “But why is he burying himself in the country, in this case? It does not seem the right way to go about the thing. What is his age, Mary?”
“Seven and thirty.”
“I think I understand why he did not marry in the Indies. But what, do you suppose, is holding him back here?” She considered this problem as dispassionately as if Liam were a character in a novel. “Was that not his design in coming to England?”
“His and my design in coming to England,” I began slowly, “was first, to move to a more temperate and civilized land where we were not confronted daily by the moral horror of slavery. Second, with the dream of meeting the author of my favorite books in all the world.” She laughed. “I hope I have known you long enough that I can say this and you will not think me a lunatic. From the first time I read your works, I was amazed. They are witty and sparkling, but with such a deep understanding of human nature. I was consumed with curiosity about the person who could write like that.” I paused, feeling light-headed. “Of course, my highest aspiration was to perhaps meet you once. Not in my wildest flight of ambition would I have aspired to call you by your Christian name and sit in your bedroom.” She was silent; I feared I had said too much. “Do not think me a lunatic, I beg you.”
“I do not.” But her tone was different, warier.
“You do not want to be known, to be a public figure. I understand that. Yet you must reckon with the consequences of your own genius.”
“And they are what?” she asked, sounding amused.
“That everyone will want a piece of you. Think of Mr. Clarke, the prince’s librarian. Now imagine a world full of people like him, but less polite. More demanding.”
“Mr. Clarke is an excellent argument for remaining as anonymous as possible.”
“And I will make of myself another, and ask you something I long wanted to know but feared to bring up.”
“An alarming introduction. What is it?”
“Your brother told me that the two books you published first, as well as ‘Susan,’ were the works of your early adulthood, completed before you were five and twenty. Did I understand him correctly?”
“That is something close to the truth. But why—”
“And you wrote nothing else, between around 1800 and a few years ago? Such a long silence, from such an inventive mind, I confess myself at a loss to understand.”
She said nothing for a moment. “I suppose I was at a loss as well.”
“Did you really not write, in all those years?”
“Is that what Henry told you?”