She stared at me and then laughed her low chuckle. “She said only what everyone already knows,” Jane began, and yawned. “Yet if she was expecting men to snap our chains, I cannot but regard her as vastly na?ve. Why would anyone ever willingly surrender such advantages as birth and nature have bestowed on them? You might as soon ask me to go down into the offices and insist that my housemaid let me scrub the floors.”
She closed her eyes and settled herself more comfortably, stretching and fidgeting and then growing still. “Mary Wollstonecraft, indeed,” she said in a tone that suggested a private joke, and fell silent. Her breathing grew slower and deeper, until I was sure she was asleep.
Motionless in my straight chair next to the bed, I surveyed my surroundings. If I were a collection of letters, where would I be? There were two small closets in the room, whose doors stood partly open, affording glimpses of clothes neatly folded on open shelves, other clothes hanging on hooks; some shoes on the floor. A dressing table, with a drawer too shallow for anything like letters, held the usual array of dressing table items.
With another glance to make sure she was really asleep, I dropped to my knees for a look under Cassandra’s bed, where I saw a rectangular box of an encouraging size. Moving around to the opposite side of the bed, where I would be less visible should Jane open her eyes, I pulled it out.
The box was made of dark wood, smoothly finished, closed with a metal fastening, but not locked. With a wild glance at the door—which remained closed—I lifted the lid.
Sheets of paper folded into squares, tied together with black ribbons in a dozen or so bundles, bore the unmistakable handwriting of Jane Austen, addressed to “Miss Cassandra Austen.” Feeling my heart speed up, I closed the box again, pushed it under the bed, and leaned back on my hands. I just knelt there awhile, focusing on my breath, before I dared to peek over Cassandra’s bed for a look at Jane. But she was still asleep.
I realized, the way the obvious can lie in plain sight and yet ambush you, that I hadn’t the slightest desire to see those letters. She was Jane to me now, my brilliant sardonic friend; not a historic figure, not a research subject. What she wrote to her sister was none of my business, and reading someone’s mail was a deeply dishonorable act. The idea of it filled me with shame.
But this was what I was here for. I thought of Dr. Ping’s words: You must resist the temptation of involvement. I hesitated, speared on the horns of my dilemma, then pulled the box out again, grabbed a bundle at random, and shoved it down the front of my dress, scratching tender skin with sharp edges of paper as I pushed it past my breasts, the way I had traveled with my forged fortune all those months ago. Would it stay? My corset was confining, yet there was nothing below it to catch the letters, and I had a nightmare vision of them falling out at my feet as I was saying goodbye to Cassandra or Martha on my way out. I closed the box and put it back under the bed, returning to the chair next to Jane. But from then until I was safely home, I kept one hand demurely on my belly at all times, like the bride in The Arnolfini Portrait.
THERE WAS STILL DAYLIGHT COMING IN THE WINDOW OF MY bedroom—the days were long, if mostly gray. I closed and locked the door behind me, pulled the bundle of paper out of my corset from the bottom, and put it on my bed. For a moment I was afraid to look, as if the letters had some malevolent power representing my betrayal of Jane. Then I untied the ribbon, trying to memorize how it was knotted, and fanned them out, counting thirteen. I carefully unfolded each, looking only at the dates on the top right corners. They were all from 1800; I knew there were only five extant letters from Jane to Cassandra from that year. I unhooked the chain around my neck and lifted the spectronanometer up to the light, trying to remember the sequence of squeezes to activate its camera functionality.
Our guidance had been to make a physical copy of each letter, using the contemporaneous technology of paper and ink, and to scan them as backup. The compromise I had reached with myself was that I would do only the latter; that way, I did not have to read them. When I returned to my own time, the letters would be stored in the memory of my spectronanometer, Jane would be long dead, and they would be someone else’s to render, read, and transcribe. I had only to successfully steal and return them without being caught.
“IT’S QUITE A HAIRSPLITTING DISTINCTION,” LIAM SAID LATER. We had gone for a walk in the long, lingering summer twilight. “Talmudic, even; I love it. But how will we know it’s recording the images properly?”
Back in our own time, the spectronanometer would have to pair with a device that would extract its data; there would be no certainty until then. Yet it was a robust technology, not new. There was no reason to think it would be squirrelly. “The main thing is, do you agree with me? About not wanting to read the letters?”
Liam, looking off down the lane, toward where the sun was setting in a tangle of tree and hedgerow, did not answer right away. “No mission ever stayed in the past as long as ours, or tried to immerse themselves quite so much. I wonder if they will ever let anyone do it again, once they realize what it does to a person.” He paused. “But maybe they won’t realize. We will pretend there, as we pretend here, and that will become our reality again.” He glanced sideways at me. “You think?”
“Meaning, we will present it as a logistical problem, not a moral obstacle, why we didn’t physically copy the letters?”
“Something like that.”
“It would be hard to explain otherwise, wouldn’t it?”
“Impossible.” He rubbed his eyes, and I felt with a sudden sharpness the enormous gap between this world and that one.
STEALING, SCANNING, AND RETURNING THE DOZENS OF LETTERS was a delicate task that took patience, cunning, and the better part of the summer. Jane continued to have ups and downs; fairly often she got up for the day, sitting at her writing table or in the garden, meaning no access to the bedroom at all for me. And even on the days she felt worse and stayed in bed, she had heeded my advice about laudanum and asked for it rarely. When she wasn’t drugged, she seldom slept deeply enough to make me feel like I could go into the box under her sister’s bed.
What we did instead was talk.
I told myself I had no need to read her letters because I was learning, more directly, answers to many questions we had come to 1815 with. About Thomas Lefroy—she had been drawn to him, she confessed, as he to her; he was by far the wittiest man she had ever met, and the brightest who was not her father or one of her brothers, the handsomest too.
“But it could not be, and we knew it. That was the entire beauty; that it could not last.”
“So it was almost as if you were imagining yourselves characters in a story.”
“Oh! All the time.”
“A remarkable degree of detachment for such a young woman, I should think.”
“What did I have else, but my intellect, and the cool judgment to use it?”
“You say that, too, like it is nothing remarkable.”
She gave me a droll look. “Mary. How long have we known each other now?”