suppose you’ll tell us there’s no hope now for even a roof over Miss Frances’s head.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” He gave Frances at his side a quick, indecipherable look.
“Can we counterbid, for the cottage?” asked Yardley. “Make them an offer they can’t refuse?”
“Even if a majority of the trustees agree,” Andrew replied, “we could still run into trouble as a charity if we bid significantly above fair market value. We may think the cottage is worth whatever cost, and probably one day it will indeed be priceless, but right now it’s worth about three thousand pounds and that’s peanuts to a company like Alpha.”
“But surely we can try?” asked Evie.
“Forgive me, Mimi, but Jack’s on the board, right?” Dr. Gray asked.
She sat up a bit from her slumped position in the pew and nodded. “I suspect my powers of persuasion over him are minimal, though, right now.”
“Mimi”—Andrew stepped forward—“you said just now that Jack must have used the info you were sharing with him to make the deal with Colin, correct?”
She nodded again.
“Forgive me, too, my dear, but is there anything, anything at all, that you know about Jack and his dealings—business or otherwise—that could be used in turn? Seems only fair, under the circumstances.”
The entire row pivoted their heads to look at Andrew Forrester.
“Andrew Henry Forrester!” exclaimed Frances. “Are you suggesting—”
He held up his hand. “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m not suggesting the Austen Society do anything. Only Mimi knows in her heart what to do.” He looked about at all the faces staring at him and decided for the first time in his life to abandon restraint and go for broke.
“Frances, I think we do, too. Let me put that roof over your head, and my heart in your hands. No one ever deserved it more.”
And right then and there, before all seven other members of the Jane Austen Society, Frances Elizabeth Knight began to sob uncontrollably.
“Frances, please, don’t cry,” Andrew was whispering to her gently, patting his jacket pockets to find a handkerchief to console her.
She just kept crying. It was, by far, the most emotion any of them had ever witnessed in her.
“I have literally nothing, Andrew, you know that,” she finally managed to say through her tears. “You know that better than anyone.”
“Frances, darling, that didn’t matter to either of us nearly thirty years ago—why on earth would it matter now?”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and smiled at him lovingly for the first time in as long as that. “Are you sure?”
“Frances, I just watched you have your whole world ripped out from under you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have. It would be my honour, truly, to be your husband.”
Yardley ran behind the altar to have a few words with Reverend Powell, who immediately agreed as a representative of the Church of England to conduct the ceremony and dispense with the need for a license.
Adeline jumped up and, with a quick nod from Mimi, shoved the bouquet into Frances’s shaking hands. Evie ran back to the Great House to grab Josephine and Charlotte, knowing they would never forgive her if they missed such a longed-for event.
Frances turned to Mimi. “Are you alright, if we do this?”
“Oh, Frances, it’s the only thing that would make any of this alright.”
With those words of blessing, Frances Elizabeth Knight let Andrew Henry Forrester take her hand and lead her to the altar.
* * *
Dr. Gray was standing alone in the lime grove, listening to the bells peal three o’clock. The wedding had been over for a few hours, and the society had enjoyed Mimi’s cancelled wedding breakfast in the courtyard, courtesy of Charlotte and Josephine. Immediately afterwards, Yardley had gone with Adam to Adeline’s house to start going through all the books, Mimi had collapsed in the guest bedroom, Evie was helping Miss Frances pack quickly for her honeymoon, and Andrew had rushed back to Alton to wrap up some paperwork before catching the train to Brighton with his new bride.
Dr. Gray looked about himself at the surrounding fields, the walled garden up on the hill, the ha-ha that ran alongside the lime grove to keep out the sheep. He remembered walking here in the rain with Adeline last summer, the many visits to old Mr. Knight in his bedroom, the Christmas Eve service and the reading of the will shortly thereafter, an event which he now saw as the turn of the screw in all