The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner Page 0,37

door unlatched behind him, as if hoping someone would steal the bottle while he was away.

He sat down at his desk, staring at the clear, slow-moving liquid. He always tried so hard, always came up with a thousand reasons not to. And then always, always, came up with one or two really good ones why. He could hear all the voices in his own head, not yet deafened—those of his late wife, his medical colleagues like Dr. Westlake, Reverend Powell to whom he had confessed. But the thing that no one warns you about, when the pain is too great—when the pain is so great that you’d rather die than face another day of it—is that the pain becomes bigger, and more real, than anything else. It’s like that circle of grief which is not supposed to shrink, even with time, but also not to grow—it’s as if it is still expanding with the pain, feeding on it, infecting everything else around you. A calculating, inextinguishable darkness that covers everything, even the few things that you were promised would remain outside the grief, by all those well-meaning people who simply had not yet experienced a grief as bad as yours.

You feel so trapped, with no way out, and you stop caring about the best way to be. About the proper way to live, the smart way. For if merely living becomes the sole end game, then what does it matter what you do to sustain it?

The bottle sat before him, promising something that no one—that nothing else—could give him. He defied his Lord to judge him—he was past caring what would happen if he got caught. If he did end up caught one day, at least it would mean he had survived longer than he had thought possible.

He reached out for the bottle, and just like poor Adeline, all alone in her own bedroom, curtains pulled against the light of day, he took his first sip and let deliverance—however temporary, however illusory—wash over him, too.

* * *

Adam Berwick was home early from work, now that the harvest season had ended and the days were becoming increasingly short. By the middle of the afternoon he could feel night waiting impatiently to descend in the sudden silence of the songbirds and the long shadows of the sun. With his ploughing almost done for the year and the stable chores limited to feeding the livestock, he looked forward to the upcoming seasonal respite.

For one thing, it would give him plenty of time to read. Adam needed that because he now spent every winter rereading the collected works of Jane Austen; sometimes he even read Pride and Prejudice twice.

He was sitting at the kitchen table with a strong cup of coffee and his well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice before him, enjoying the first botched proposal scene with Mr. Darcy, astonished every time at the man’s insensitivity. Adam was nothing if not sensitive—perhaps too much so. Reading as Mr. Darcy unknowingly dug a bigger and bigger hole for himself—“Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?”—Adam always found himself practically yelling out loud to Fitzwilliam Darcy to stop and save himself from further humiliation at his own hands.

Adam loved being in this world, transported, where people were honest with each other, but also sincerely cared for each other, no matter their rank. Where the Miss Bateses of the world would always have a family to dine with, and the Harvilles would take in the grief-stricken Captain Benwick following the loss of his fiancée, and even the imperious and insensitive Bertrams would give Fanny Price a roof above her head. And the letters people sent—long, regular missives designed to keep people as close to one’s heart and thoughts as possible, whatever insurmountable distance might be between them at present. He wondered at the solicitude in that, the deep and unwavering caring, and what he could do—at as little risk socially as possible—to experience any of that in his own, stymied life.

“Queues were awful again today—one orange per customer, and only the bitter ones at that. Then I run into Harriet Peckham at the post office—no mail for us as usual, by the way—and she tells me Adeline Grover’s not doing so well,” his mother announced almost triumphantly as she walked straight past him into the kitchen and threw her ration book, small string