ANOTHER DAY I ASKED HER ABOUT EDWARD. “WHAT WAS IT LIKE, when he left to go and be adopted by the Knights? What did the rest of you think?”
“I was young then, perhaps seven or eight. I thought nothing in particular at the time. The house was full of boys coming and going—those were the years my father started taking in boarding pupils. Later, of course, I wondered about it. We all did.” She paused. “Henry was furious, for many years, that it was not he who was picked. But you must never tell him I said that.” She paused. “I think the Knights made the right choice, overall; Ned does seem the one born to be a squire.”
“But perhaps he grew into the role, once it was imposed upon him.”
“And perhaps there is no separating the one from the other.”
“Still, it did not strike you as peculiar—one boy selected, like a puppy from a litter?”
She laughed. “Life is full of such oddities, is it not? How did Mr. Darcy happen to fall in love with Elizabeth Bennet, when he could have had any lady in the kingdom?”
“Because you made her so lovable?”
“Oh, yes; perhaps that was why.”
IT ALL WENT SMOOTHLY, UNTIL ONE DAY IN EARLY AUGUST.
I had nearly finished the letter project, with the second-to-last bundle to return and the last to remove, and glad of it. Henry, taking a break from his ordination preparation, was expected for a visit any day now, which would be disruptive. Even if he did not stay in the cottage, as he had the last time, but in the Great House, he would be underfoot, interfering with my ability both to get into the box of letters and to talk to Jane as freely as we did only when alone. I was so close to being able to ask her about “The Watsons”; I had nearly done so several times and then lost my nerve, or decided I needed a smoother segue.
And then, I hadn’t seen Henry since I’d started sleeping with Liam. It wasn’t that I thought he would intuit it. Yet I dreaded the moment when I would find myself again in the company of both at once, officially sister of one and secret fiancée of the other. I longed to break the engagement; it was one complication too many, but ending things with Henry might make me less welcome at Jane’s house.
I couldn’t risk that. I had to get the rest of the letters and “The Watsons” first, and I wanted to continue monitoring Jane’s ailment, even though that was increasingly despair-inducing work, as a worry that I kept trying to dismiss kept coming back. She had another ten months to live, but she seemed to decline a little every day. There were no indications that Persuasion was finished, and few signs of it being worked on; on the days that she came downstairs to her table, she seemed to be mostly writing letters, to judge from the piles of them I would later see on the table near the door, waiting for the servant to take them to off to be mailed: to Anne Sharpe in Yorkshire, to Fanny Knight in Kent, to her brother Charles at sea, to Henry in Oxford. That we could somehow have altered the probability field so much as to make her die off early was a possibility I hated to entertain. But increasingly, I found myself doing so.
SHE HAD SEEMED ASLEEP THAT DAY; I WAITED A LONG TIME UNTIL satisfied that she was, before I stood up and went to the other side of Cassandra’s bed to pull out the box and extract a bundle of letters from under my dress. I had turned away to do this; as I finished pulling my corset back into place and smoothing my various layers of skirt, I heard a rustle and turned back, letters in my hand, to find Jane not just awake but sitting up in bed, staring at me.
“What are you doing?” she asked. It was not one of her good days; she’d complained of pain and had taken a small amount of laudanum. Not enough, apparently.
Numb with horror, I dropped to my knees, replaced the letters, and pushed the box back under the bed. Then I stood up again and tried to look innocent.
“What were you doing with those letters?”
First rule of lying: evade the question. “Did you dream something?”
She paused for so long I began to hope this might work. Then she said: “I know what I saw. Do not insult my intelligence, I beg you.”
This hit me in a soft point; who would dare do that? I stared at the floor. Then I looked up at her, but found I could not speak.
“Who are you, really?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing to suspicious slits. “There is something uncanny about you, Miss Ravenswood. If that is really your name. You know things you should not know, and you display an unusual interest in my family. Are you some sort of spy? Are you French, perhaps?”
I stared at her, still wordless.
“You will tell me what you were doing with those letters.”
“Jane, I—”
“Do not use my Christian name. Friends do not behave as you have. You will explain your conduct, truthfully and in plain words, or you will leave and never be received in this house again. I shall tell Henry—” She stopped, perhaps struck by how much I was already enmeshed in her life. “Who are you?” she asked again, this time with a helpless note that made my eyes fill with tears.
I came around to her bedside and fell to my knees. Shame washed over me—not just about the letters, but about all of it. What was I doing here? What kind of maniac travels in time? However I am punished, I thought, I will have deserved it.
“Forgive me,” I said, stretching my hands out toward her and hiding my face in the coverings of her bed. “Forgive me. Oh, please forgive me. The truth, Miss Austen, is so strange and improbable that I fear I cannot utter it.”
“You had best take your courage in hand, then.”
A sob shook me, and I sniffled, finding my handkerchief and wiping my eyes. Then I resolved to stop crying. “You will think I am lying, or out of my senses.”
“You will let me be judge of what I will think.”
I dared a look at her. Her face no longer cold with anger, it seemed to me stern and suspicious—but also curious. That she might think there could be an explanation for my conduct—and want to know it; that despite damning appearances, she had not given me up entirely—filled me with a reckless courage, like that of people who go into battle outnumbered and outgunned, preferring to die fighting.
“I come from far away,” I began slowly. “From a different place. And as it happens, I know the future. In the centuries to come, you will be acknowledged as one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.” Still sitting up in bed, she had wrapped her arms around her knees and was staring at me. “Not merely among the first rank of female writers, or writers in English, or nineteenth-century writers, or whatever. You will be immortal. That is why we are here. For—for research.”