The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,21
own family from the brink. But she never flaunted herself as a saviour—she just loved so thoroughly, and so wisely, that the saving of others was the inevitable result.
Adam felt as if he could hardly save himself, let alone anyone else. Yet on his loneliest of days, he sometimes felt as if he was being saved by Jane Austen. He could only imagine what the villagers would say about him if they suspected any of that. Still, he often wished there were someone with whom he could discuss Austen and her books. The only person he had met so far lived on the other side of the world.
Of course, he had recognized the young woman in blue the very first time he had seen her face at the cinema. He had since become a devoted fan of Mimi Harrison and had watched all of her movies, including Home & Glory three times. He thought of her out in Hollywood, reading the books again and again. It bemused him to have something in common like this with a movie star. He knew it said a lot more about Austen than it did about him, but it also made him feel a little less odd, a little less damaged, all the same.
On his walk home from the stables Adam stopped to rest at the junction where Winchester Road split in two. If he turned a sharp left instead of proceeding on his way, he would end up at the old farmhouse where he had been born, now home to the substantial Stone clan. If he went on past that, he would eventually end up in the city of Winchester, a good sixteen miles away.
Adam had never been as far away as that, but he knew that Jane Austen in her final days had moved to rented rooms there, vainly hoping to find a cure for the mysterious illness that would soon claim her at only age forty-one. One month later Cassandra would watch from the upper-room windows as Jane’s coffin was transported by carriage to the famous Winchester Cathedral. Her beloved sister’s words of record—“it turned from my sight … I had lost her forever”—never failed to bring tears to Adam’s eyes. His own two brothers were buried hundreds of miles away beneath the Aegean Sea, nothing left of them at all but unmarked graves that he would surely never see.
The unnatural loss of youth not only hits us harder, it seems to insist on invading our days, as if the memory of the person lost too soon has a hidden, persistent source of energy. Cassandra had spent her final decades in Chawton heeding this force and safeguarding her sister’s legacy, whereas Adam feared he had failed the legacy of his brothers in not making more of his own life. Yet despite his depressed spirits, he was still always searching for something, for some way to make meaning from his life. He simply had no idea how to begin.
Heading now in the direction of home, the rain having stopped and the sun out again, Adam opened the low wooden gate next to the old steward’s cottage and walked over to the bench in the farthest corner of the yard. He often sat and rested here at the end of his day, preparing himself for his mother’s relentless questions the minute he got home. She was keeping close tabs on the state of the now-dying Mr. Knight, as well as tracking the social deterioration of Miss Frances Knight, one of the gentlest souls among them and an easy target for someone as aggressive as his mother.
Sitting on the bench, Adam could only imagine Jane Austen walking about the gardens, or resting on this very spot, as there was little physical sign of the house’s famous former resident. Instead he watched the new litter of tabby kittens dozing in the courtyard under the late-afternoon sun, heard the sound of the village junkman’s hand-pulled cart approaching, and caught sight of Dr. Gray and Adeline only now passing by the outside brick wall after him. They must have taken a longer route home through the fields.
Adam got up and walked back towards the gate. Turning to his left, he spied the pile of rubbish in front of the cottage, lying in wait for the junkman’s rounds. Protruding from the mound were the remaining three legs under the flat square seat of an antique chair. As a self-taught carpenter, Adam recognized the column shape of the chair