Hanging over me like twin black clouds were my mother’s death and my failure to go see Liam. I kept realizing things I had saved up to tell my mother about 1815, conversations I’d had in my mind that I would never have in reality. Waking up, I would forget she was dead, and then be newly orphaned once more.
I’d hesitated to visit Liam in the hospital, in case it was true that Sabina never left his side, but when I learned he was recovering at home, I realized going there would be worse. His wife, his fame—why should either give me pause? Yet they did.
We’d worked closely together for months; we’d been lovers; I’d cared for him during a serious illness. And each day that passed made a visit harder. Though the institute database yielded his contact information and a home address in upscale Maida Vale, all I did was stalk him online, finding the video clips particularly irresistible. Each one I watched took us further apart: increasing my sense of his importance, flattening the three-dimensional man I had known into pixels on a screen, until his five-year marriage to a tall blond heiress seemed more real than what had happened between us in the nineteenth century. It was insanity, I knew, yet I could not seem to act on my knowledge.
If he wants to see me, I told myself, he knows where I am and could send a word to the institute. I’d go see him at once, if he did. But he’s famous, he’s married, he’s recovering. I thought this until I began to believe it, until I managed to be hurt by his silence. He’d promised once to break off his engagement for me, but that had been in a different world. And was I ashamed of my own behavior? A little. Was I still in love with him? That was a question that seemed to belong to another time and another place.
SHORTLY BEFORE MY RETURN TO NEW YORK, NEW VIDEO APPEARED: Liam had been well enough to let a reporter into his house, a first interview since his time travel voyage. As a voice-over summarized the aims of the Jane Austen Project and the prior accomplishments of William Finucane, the camera panned around an expensive room, high-ceilinged and minimally furnished with antiques, French doors with views of a leafy garden, and came to rest on Liam, looking gaunt but calm, drinking from an early-nineteenth-century teacup. Wedgwood. I recognized the pattern; we’d had it in our house on Hill Street.
“So,” purred the reporter, so famous that even I had heard of her, “how does it feel to be the person who saved Jane Austen?”
“I am happy and proud to have been part of the project. I can’t claim any credit for the medical—It was my colleague, Dr. Katzman, theorizing—”
“But it is true that you created the atmosphere that made saving her possible? That you were able to infiltrate her life, to win her trust?”
“That was part of the mission.” He wore a zippered black sweater with a hood; his hair was still short from shaving his head against lice. I bent forward, bumping the screen with my nose, seeking a clue, a sign—what? He seemed just as when I’d first met him: formal, correct, unassailably Old British. Except now he didn’t have to pretend.
“That was the essential part!” Sabina, next to him on the sofa, came into view. She leaned over and touched his cheek, drawling: “William is so modest. It’s charming, but a huge problem,” and I turned away not to see his reaction, as nausea surged through me and I broke out in a cold sweat. I staggered to my feet and lurched to the bathroom, leaving the interview to play on as I fell to my knees in front of the toilet and threw up breakfast.
BACK IN NEW YORK, I FOUND I NO LONGER LIVED IN MY OLD APARTMENT, but in the top level of the house I’d grown up in. After my father died, alt-Rachel had sold the house for a co-op and kept one floor, which I suppose she’d found comforting, though I did not, since everywhere I looked I was reminded of my mother. I took daylong walks, the only things that made it possible to sleep at night. In the Met, I gazed at the Vermeers, grateful to find something unchanged. I went to the opera a lot.
Not that this version lacked consolations. The Die-off had been less drastic; you didn’t have to go all the way to the botanic garden to find a tree. I had seventeen new Jane Austen novels, and two that had been revised. Northanger Abbey was a smoother mix of social satire and Gothic parody, while Persuasion, now titled The Elliots, better fleshed out the Mrs. Smith–Mr. Elliot subplot. Persuasion was the title for a different novel from the 1820s, the decade that also saw publication of Annabelle and Vevay. These were inspired by her yearlong trip to the Continent financed by the success of 1819’s Ravenswood Hall, about a mysterious brother and sister who come to England from the Indies.
I loved how her writing deepened and adapted as Victorian mores fell like a shadow across England, how her wit resolved into a more sympathetic but still hilarious understanding of the human condition. Something like George Eliot, whom she lived long enough to meet—perhaps to encourage, since the younger novelist started earlier in this version, with time to write three more books after Daniel Deronda. Jane Austen thus lived long enough both to read Middlemarch and to have an opinion on the Bront?s.
It took me a while to grasp the implications of extending her life, how the arrival of seventeen more books altered her place in the canon. There was a moment when they were new, when no one had read them yet, but this change in the probability field rippled out in all directions, as new memories replaced outmoded ones, and inconsistencies knitted themselves together again, just as Eva Farmer had said. Biographies reflecting Austen’s life to eighty-seven, instead of forty-one, began to proliferate, until it became hard to find an old one.
Scholars were busy and happy with all the new Austen novels, but in the popular mind, scarcity has value. One effect of this new abundance was to make her a less significant literary figure, in the first rank of the second tier, not unlike Anthony Trollope, whom she was often compared to. Our mission, like Austen herself, was respected, but not breathlessly esteemed. It was all Bront?s here: they were the nineteenth-century writers everyone obsessed about. In this placid age, their emotionally overheated quality had an exotic appeal that Jane Austen, restrained, ironic, and prolific, did not.
Another reason for the fascination was that the Bront? Projects—they were up to six—sent to help the family, kept meeting disaster, with time travelers returning mentally ill, infected with drug-resistant TB, or not at all, and with no apparent improvement to the Bront?s’ short, doomed lives. A mystery. Who doesn’t love a mystery?