The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,22

legs and the straight lines of the seat as harking from the Regency period. His pulse quickened at the thought that perhaps this chair had once been used by the Austen family, maybe even by Jane herself.

He reached the pile of rubbish just as the junkman did.

“Having a little poke around as usual, are you, Mr. Berwick?”

Adam nodded and pulled at the chair, only to discover that most of its dark mahogany back was missing. In its present state the chair was useless, and he doubted he could carry it home without raising alarm at his own damaged state. As he released the chair, he spied something else, a small wooden toy of some sort, not immediately recognizable to him. Known in the village for his own handiwork, the gifts of small rattles and wooden ring-toss sets that he worked on when he wasn’t tending to the fields or reading, Adam wondered how old this forgotten object might be. Maybe it meant something more, a connection of some kind to the Austen family—maybe it meant nothing at all. But no one else in the village seemed to care about finding out any of that.

“You can keep that there, haven’t much use for something so slight.”

Adam gave a quick murmur of thanks and, tucking the object into his front jacket pocket, continued on his way. He was convinced that the other villagers viewed him as a subdued, broken man, not good for much, not creating any kind of legacy of his own. But at times like this, he wondered if he was also the only one paying attention to the shortening of the days, the rubbish left by the side of the road, and the neglected and forgotten past.

Chapter Six

Los Angeles, California

August 1945

At first Jack Leonard had found it mystifying, the obsession with Jane Austen.

The shelves of Mimi Harrison’s living room in the small bungalow perched high in the canyon were full of old leatherbound books (the one called Emma looked particularly beat-up) and the collected works of writers he had never even heard of: Burney, Richardson, and some poet called Cowper. He did recognize the name of Walter Scott, but only because the movie Ivanhoe had recently made another studio a ton of money.

The most common denominator with all of these writers appeared to be their connection to Austen, about whom he had been smart enough to ask around following that first encounter by the pool and the sight of the well-thumbed copy of Northanger Abbey in Mimi’s suntanned hands. Eventually she had mentioned her dad reading her the books as a girl, and the trip to some small town in England to walk in Austen’s footsteps (at that point he had wondered if she was both red-hot and insane), and the dream of one day making a film of Sense and Sensibility.

He had listened, patiently for him, to all of this, all the while wondering if Jane Austen was somehow the key to getting Mimi Harrison into bed. But between dinners out and cocktail receptions and red-carpet walks, Jack Leonard was starting to feel that migraine coming on again, as he walked Mimi to her front door night after night. For one thing, she was no spring chicken anymore, as her latest box-office receipts were finally starting to reflect, so all the games made less sense to him and—worse still—would have less of a physical payoff. For another, he could tell she was interested in him, too.

That Mimi might have been fighting against a strong physical attraction to him, in deference to her usual better judgment, would never have crossed his mind.

One thing he had learned in Hollywood was that there was no better way to sleep with a leading lady than to make her one. He hadn’t paid much attention to the recent Laurence Olivier–Greer Garson adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, but now that that was out of the running, he turned to Mimi’s own interest in Sense and Sensibility. He liked the idea of three young sisters under twenty (casting was already going on in his head on that one) and had a genuine appreciation for Willoughby’s willingness to seduce young women out of wedlock. He thought there was a backstory in there that could be alluded to in defiance of the Code. The more he learned about Austen from Mimi, the more he was impressed by how she mostly wrote about bad behaviour. As far as Jack could tell, there weren’t too many pure heroes in