face. “I did love Samuel.”
“I know that, Adeline, I truly do.”
She started to cry, and he grabbed her hands in his.
“No one will understand,” she said through her tears.
“Is that important, to you?”
“No.” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “But it would have been important to Samuel.”
“You do him a great disservice if you assume that about him. Mr. Knight had that power over Frances, her whole life, and look at how he abused it. And anyway, what if you are wrong?”
She moved away from him a bit on the bench. “I’ll never know. That’s what’s so hard.”
“And I’ll never know if I could have saved your baby. Or Jennie. Or, frankly, so many other lives. I did my best though, I do know that. And when I couldn’t, I at least punished only myself.”
She reached up and touched his cheek with her tear-stained hand. “You’re not doing that anymore, though, right?”
“You knew?”
She kissed his cheek where her hand had been, hardly even able to look into his eyes. “Only recently. Mimi said something so innocuous, but it made me think. And then there was Liberty and the medicine-cabinet keys. I thought you were so disappointed in me, in my weakness—and then I realized you were just trying to save me from what you might be doing to yourself.”
“I have stopped, I promise you. What else would make me hire a world-class spy like Miss Pascal?”
Adeline now had to laugh in spite of herself.
“But it will always be a struggle. It will always be in front of me, Adeline, never behind me. That’s the Faustian nature of it. You invite it in, and it never leaves.”
She sat up straighter to face him. “So, what do we do now?”
He pulled her onto his lap and buried his face against her neck, letting himself feel the softness of her cheek, letting himself fall into her essential loveliness, however ephemeral, however fleeting.
“Have you ever tried one of those back doors?” he finally said, looking up behind them from the bench.
She laughed through her tears. “No, come to think of it.”
“Then I say, let’s go give Liberty Pascal her money’s worth.”
“Benjamin Gray…” Adeline murmured happily, as his lips found hers.
Epilogue
Chawton, Hampshire
March 23, 1947
The First Annual Meeting of the Jane Austen Society
The society now comprised forty-four members. They came from all walks of life, having seen the discrete advertisements in local Hampshire and London papers:
Notice of the first annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society, which is dedicated to the preservation, promotion and study of the life and works of Miss Jane Austen. In conjunction with the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, a charity founded to advance education under the Charities Act, the society has spent the past year working to acquire Miss Austen’s former home in Chawton as a future museum site and is pleased to hereby announce the recent acquisition of Chawton Cottage for that purpose. New members of the society are welcome to the first annual meeting to be held at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 23, 1947, at Chawton Cottage, Winchester Road, Chawton.
In addition to the three dozen newest members of the society, the original eight participants, including the five trustees of the Jane Austen Memorial Trust, would also be attending.
As an early agenda item at the meeting, the trustees would be announcing their unanimous decision to repay society member Mimi Harrison her original donation of forty thousand pounds, which had enabled the acquisition of the Chawton Great House Library. Last fall the sale of the library had realized a record four hundred thousand pounds over a dispersal of fifty days by Sotheby’s, and this had enabled the trust to purchase the steward’s cottage from Alpha Investments Limited for the reasonable sum of four thousand pounds. The trustees had also moved unanimously to gift fifty thousand pounds from the sale to Miss Frances Knight as the former and proper heir of the Knight estate, as well as in recognition of her successful efforts to secure the library and Chawton Cottage as a result.
Mimi Harrison was currently onstage at the New Theatre as Olivia in Twelfth Night, and so Sunday was chosen for the annual meeting as there was no evening performance that day. She would be bringing her new fiancé with her, a Harvard professor of American literature currently on sabbatical at Jesus College, Cambridge. She was also secretly planning to announce a gift to the society at the meeting: a turquoise-and-gold ring that had once belonged to