“But what?”
“Bloodletting can hardly make things worse at this point. Unless she gets tetanus from a dirty sharp.” Which she easily could; I tried not to think about that.
“But what do you think she has?”
“There’s a condition called hemochromatosis when people absorb too much iron from food. It builds up, especially in the liver, and causes problems. She told me a long time ago that she had stopped menstruating last year. That’s when it often starts to present in women, when they are no longer getting rid of excess iron once a month. But it was only recently that this idea hit me.” I took another sip of my claret and made a face. “Can I tell you the truth? If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wanted it to be hemochromatosis, because it’s one thing you can treat here with some effectiveness.”
“Not because you think it actually is?”
“It could be. I’m not saying it’s not.”
Liam leaned his forehead on his palm, resting his elbow on the table. “And if it is?”
“Bled regularly, she’ll improve.”
“You mean she’ll live longer? Longer than July 1817?”
“Maybe.”
Liam looked serious all at once.
“We’ve already messed with the probability field,” I went on. “So I thought, well?”
“Have you not seen any newspapers, the last few days?”
“No, did Napoleon escape again?” I was joking, but Liam’s expression chilled me. “What?”
“Wilberforce died on Tuesday.”
“What!” William Wilberforce, the renowned parliamentarian and opponent of the slave trade, had accomplished most of his important work by 1816, but he died an old man, in 1833. “That’s impossible.”
“There are newspapers downstairs if you care to look.”
“I believe it if you say so. Only . . .”
“Yeah.”
We sat in silence contemplating this. Premature death of a significant historical figure was a macroevent; there could no longer be doubt that we had disrupted the probability field. And I realized, despite what I’d just said, despite what I’d done to possibly prolong Jane’s life, that I had not believed it until now.
“Sometimes I think we shouldn’t go back at all,” Liam said at last, his voice so low I could hardly hear him. “Because, who knows what we may find there?”
This was a crazy idea; every rational impulse in me rebelled. All I said was “What would we do here?”
“What if we went to Canada? No one would know us as brother and sister there. We could start over with new names. We could marry.” He paused. “We still have some money. I wrote to some of our London bankers. I don’t think Edward did anything there.”
“We don’t belong in this world,” I said slowly. A picture rose in my mind of my neat apartment, its white kitchen and view down Vanderbilt Avenue to Grand Army Plaza. My life there seemed like a dream: a futuristic, sanitary dream where I had running water and electricity, a responsible job and my real name. I imagined my mother, painting in her attic, wondering if I was all right.
“We may find we don’t belong there either.” I could feel his eyes on me, but I could not look up. Perhaps I was afraid to; if I did, he would talk me into this, using his occult powers of acting and persuasion. “We’ve kicked off the traces. We’ve done exactly what we weren’t supposed to do, altering history.”
“I have, you mean. I’m the one who saved Tom; you told me it was a bad idea.”
“Oh, Rachel dear, we don’t know what it was. It might have been anything, or all of it together. Are you going to beat yourself up forever over one small kind act?”
I finally looked up. He was leaning across the table, long chin propped on one fist, and his gaze was everything I’d feared: ardent, full of longing, and deadly earnest. It’s hard to resist an expression like that, even on the face of a skilled actor. I let myself consider that maybe he was not seeking to deceive either me or himself. And what then? What was my responsibility in such a case? I stood up, my heart pounding; with terror, I think.
“Can I have a hug?” I said, and we started to laugh. “Can we maybe talk about this later? Is it bedtime yet?”
“It could be.” His arms were around me, my nose in his neckcloth, and I took in the smell of him: like coal smoke and bay leaf soap and something else I could not give a name to. “How I’ve missed you.”
IT WAS LIKE I’D PICTURED IT, AS IF I’D IMAGINED THE SCENE INTO being: the rumpled sheets of our bed in the raking light of a single candle, the vast darkness outside, the sounds of horses below in the yard. Lying naked and talking freely. Until then, we’d seen each other only in bits and pieces and had been ourselves only furtively; this was almost too much, like an overly rich dessert. We made love, talked, grew silent, fell asleep, then woke up and restarted the cycle, until the dim light of morning appeared at the windows and Liam said, “We should take the manuscript and go to Box Hill and read it there.”
BOX HILL IS THE SITE OF THE INFAMOUS PICNIC IN EMMA: UNLIKE Highbury, a real place, and not far from Leatherhead. In the shadow of the landaulet, sitting on a blanket we’d borrowed from our room, we read the whole thing aloud, taking turns as our voices gave out, though Liam did more because my untrained voice quit faster. When we were done, the day was almost over. I lay back on my elbows and surveyed the tidy green landscape sloping below us: hedgerow and river and road, the long shadows and golden late-day light. The horses stirred and munched grass; the wind sighed in the trees and the birds replied. All the world seemed alive in a shimmering net. I will never forget this moment, I thought, not if I live to be a hundred.
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah.”
It was Jane Austen, masterfully plotted and psychologically acute, but transformed: her satire turned savage, her fierce intelligence trained on life’s injustices, in particular those facing women. In a fit of sisterly malice, Penelope scuttles Emma’s engagement with Mr. Howard by persuading him that Tom Musgrave has had her first. Emma is forced to find work as a governess, but Penelope’s fate is worse: she ends up a kept woman, first step on her slide to ruin.
“You start to understand why she didn’t want to publish it,” said Liam, who was sitting with his arms wrapped around his knees, looking dazed.
“It will be huge. It will transform how people think about her.”
He gave me a considering look and scratched his back. “Assuming they ever see it.”
“It’ll be the making of you, remember?”