The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,3

called aimless study. The war had changed everything, and not just for his family—although everyone in the village acknowledged that the Berwicks had been harder hit than most, with both older boys killed in battle in the Aegean Sea in 1918 and the father less than a year later by the Spanish flu. There was a solicitude now, for his mother and for him, a deep community caring that had, at times, been all that had buoyed them from the deepest despair.

But as much as they were kept from falling into the abyss, they remained forever teetering on the brink. Neither he nor his mother, despite their different temperaments, seemed to possess energy for anything more than submission to life—the idea that they might have to fight their way out of their lot was beyond them. So only a few years after the war, between the debts and the grief and his mother’s constant complaining, they had sold the farm back to the Knight family at a significant discount. Over the generations various Berwicks had worked at the Knight estate as household staff or servants, his own mother and grandmother among them, and now Adam, too, would join their employment by gathering the hay each summer, and tilling the fields, and planting a few rotating crops of wheat and hops and barley.

Eventually the Knight family, like so many others in the village, began to suffer financial troubles of their own. Adam felt that they were all tied together, very much interdependent, and that the sale of the farm to the Knights, and the employment for him, were part of a larger community effort to sustain and survive.

He was surviving on the teetering brink—at least, he acted as if he were. But inside him, in the place that only books could touch, there remained both a deep unknowing and the deepest, most trenchant pain. Adam knew that part of his brain had shut down from all the pain, in a bizarre effort to protect itself, and his mother was even worse, for she appeared to be merely waiting to die, while constantly warning him how bad things would be without her. In the meantime she was simply going through the motions of mothering him—having his toast and tea ready in the morning, and then, as now, his supper kept warm for him at the end of the day.

They would sit there alone together at the kitchen table, just as they were doing now, and he would tell her about his work, and she would tell him about whom she had run into in the village, or in Alton if it was her midweek shopping day. They talked about anything and everything except the past.

But today he didn’t tell her about the young woman from America. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. For one thing, his mother was always on him to find a wife, and this stranger to town was so beyond him in her beauty as to be almost otherworldly. His mother was also one of the villagers for whom the connection to Jane Austen remained more an irritation than anything else. She saved her most bitter complaints for the tourists and gawkers who, often enough, did descend on the small village demanding information, demanding to see something, demanding that life here be just like in the books. As if the villagers’ little lives were somehow unreal, and the real thing—the only thing—that mattered, and the only thing that ever would, had happened over a hundred years ago.

* * *

He was becoming quite worried for Mr. Darcy.

It seemed to Adam that once a man notices a woman’s eyes to be fine, and tries to eavesdrop on her conversations, and finds himself overly affected by her bad opinion of him, then such a man is on the path to something uncharted, whether he admits it to himself or not. Adam did not know much about women (although his mother kept telling him it did not take much), but he wondered if in the history of life, as well as in literature, a man had ever fallen into such obvious lust as fast as Mr. Darcy, and not done anything about it except to inadvertently, and so successfully, push it away.

He appreciated more than ever that their small two-up, two-down terrace cottage, which sat next to a lane-way leading back from the main Winchester road, gave him his own bedroom and space to read. In his sparse room with its