Jane, Actually Read online

  Jane told him of her wanderings as well, although hers was less of a Boy’s Own tale. She had been to India as well in 1891 and again shortly after Partition. And she had visited Hong Kong and Australia, although she had to admit that last story involved enough hardships to make it a suitable adventure tale. By the 1950s, however, she had returned to England and rarely left the British Isles until her trip to the US to meet Melody.

  She found Albert a charming correspondent. His background was more of the sod than of land but by his efforts he presented himself as a well-educated gentleman. They were both fond of Agatha Christie and exchanged tales of how infuriating it had been before the discovery of the afterlife to ever finish one of her stories. Albert was denied the ending of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by the not untimely death of the nonagenarian whose shoulder he peered over. He claimed, however, to have puzzled out the story, although it took him another year to find his logic proved correct.

  And they had both attended numerous performances of The Mousetrap,4 and hampered by their inability to hear, it took many performances before they could understand how the killer could possibly be …

  A flicker of the interface notified her that she had another email. She found a message from Melody reminding her of their early meeting at the avatar agency the next day and a suggestion that she not take her customary late night stroll.

  She replied immediately, a little annoyed to be told she couldn’t go out. “If I wish to walk, I shall walk,” she wrote back, although her high dudgeon was tempered by the knowledge that she couldn’t open the door and must wait until Melody and Tamara returned.

  Eventually her indignation quieted and she was left to deal with the guilt she had tried to ignore: I shall reply to Albert at my earliest opportunity and make a clean breast of it … tomorrow.

  1 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force

  2 The Second Great Fire of London, when the German air force dropped more than 24,000 high explosives and over 100,000 incendiary bombs on London. The iconic image is of St Paul’s Cathedral wrapped in smoke and flame, but which survived that night.

  3 In The Lost World

  4 A murder-mystery play by Christie that has been performed continuously since 1952. Attendees are urged not to divulge that the killer is

  Virtual Chawton

  Jane Austen’s online home

  On his iPad, Stephen pawed his way through the inventory, amazed again at the detail available at Virtual Chawton. He was now looking at the section detailing what the library at Chawton House no longer had in its collection or at the nearby Chawton Cottage. He knew, for instance, that Chawton Cottage1 had for many years been used to house estate workers and even served as a village library and that most of the Regency era belongings had been lost, sold, or pilfered. The inventory attempted to catalogue what exactly had gone missing.

  The inventories of what remained and what had been lost were so extensive and so freely available, that Stephen marvelled at what information the Austen claimant could have provided that wasn’t public. The philanthropist who’d funded the project had inadvertently made it quite difficult for anyone to claim Austen’s identity.

  There was speculation that the curators of the library and/or the cottage had withheld some crucial piece of information or that the Austen claimant knew of some memento hitherto undiscovered. But examining the inventory was ultimately a dead, if fascinating end.

  He was sitting on the hallway floor, next to his advisor’s office door, when he heard Dr Davis’s heavy tread approaching, put his tablet to sleep and stood waiting for her. He watched with some appreciation his advisor’s advance, amused how the people in the corridor shied away from her. She actually had a pleasant expression on her face, but her size and determined step ensured she had the right of way.

  She merely nodded to Stephen upon reaching the door and then unlocked it and entered. Stephen followed and deposited his bag on the spare chair. He waited for Davis to put away her purse, look through the letters she had carried in and finally give him her full attention.

  He was no longer frightened of her but she still did command his respect. She was a rigorous mentor who could spot a flaw in his reasoning just from his choice of adjectives and knew when he was hiding sloppy research. Unfortunately she was not quite as rigorous in her own scholarship. She attributed to Austen motives and ideals that Stephen thought heavy handed. He tended to think that most authors simply wrote and if their work exhibited themes and motifs and abstractions, that was just the happy coincidence of the author’s experiences and prejudices infiltrating their writing.

  But his mentor saw grand schemes in Austen, some of which Stephen begrudged, and others that he didn’t. His thesis, that Austen’s awareness of the political and social changes during the Regency was profound, coincided with Davis’ opinion. Her argument—that Austen was pursuing a feminist agenda that would have become apparent in Sanditon had Austen finished it—he found less convincing.

  Despite their less than perfect unanimity, he had enjoyed being her graduate student. Her recent idée fixe,2 however, was becoming tiresome.

  “So, Stephen, what have you learned about filing an exception to an identity?” she asked. She had folded her hands together in exactly the same way his high school principal had used when admonishing him for smoking grass underneath the stadium bleachers.

  “Uh, I learned you can’t really file an exception once an identity has been … bestowed. Another person can make a claim to the identity and if it’s deemed credible, then a review of the previous claim can be made. But you’d have to be dead to make that claim, and I don’t think you want to carry it that far.” He said this last with a smile, hoping he could get her to recognize the futility of her objections.

  She ignored his attempt at humour, however, and said, “Yes, that’s what I’ve learned as well. And what about the legal status this bestowal confers?”

  Well if you already knew, why the hell did I waste all that time looking it up? he thought.

  “It’s kind of meaningless, legally. All her copyrights have expired. She’s public domain. Some states have passed laws defining disembodied rights, but that has nothing to do with claiming her estate. There’ve been a few bills proposed to allow the disembodied to make an additional copyright extension, but it wouldn’t affect anything published before 1923.

  “And besides, she’s English, although that’s an abstraction that really doesn’t mean anything once you’re dead. UK law is also in flux, but it doesn’t matter. She can’t claim any proceeds from her previous work, just anything new, like Sanditon. What she has done is declare herself a corporation, and once she had the AfterNet’s blessing, other corporations were willing to make deals with her. Ultimately, it’s how well Sanditon sells that’ll truly define whether she’s accepted as Austen.”

  Davis nodded several times at this and Stephen got the feeling that again she already knew all this.

  “And what did you learn from Virtual Chawton?”

  “Look, Dr Davis, you know all this. What’s the point of me telling you …” The look on her face convinced him that his best strategy was to humour her.

  “OK, Virtual Chawton, as you already know, is amazing. But I can’t see how that’s going to help us … you. If anything, it makes it obvious that Austen must have known something pretty specific and obscure to prove her identity. Anyone can call up 3D plans of the cottage or the house and see the location, or the supposed location, of everything the house or the cottage ever contained. Maybe she hid a letter under a floorboard that said, ‘In the event of my death, this will be proof of my existence.’”

  “Don’t be facetious, Stephen.”

  “I’m not. Face facts; for all intents and purposes, she’s Austen.”

  She said nothing for a while and Stephen wondered if he’d angered her. His voice had risen slightly because he disliked the idea that she’d allowed herself to get fixated. And he had doubts that anyone could survive two hundred years of solitu
de and still be coherent enough to pose as Austen. But he admired Austen—that is the original author—enough to hope if anyone had the proper mental makeup, it would be her.

  “You’re right, Stephen. I have to accept what my peers, whoever they were, have decided. I’m sorry to have wasted your time on this. You’ll be happy to know I haven’t completely allowed myself to be absorbed in this quixotic quest. I looked over the draft you sent and can offer a few … recommendations.”

  She appeared to have shrugged off her irritation at his inability to help her and threw herself into her critique of his manuscript. Far from being fooled, however, he finally recognized what lay at the foot of her objections. It was so stunningly obvious: I didn’t realize it before because I was sure she was on the committee. She’s hurt she wasn’t asked to help identify the most important person in her life.

  1 Chawton Cottage was Jane’s home before her death. Sadly, Virtual Chawton only exists within the pages of this book.

  2 Obsession

  Mary Crawford

  It beats waiting tables

  “Thank you, Miss Crawford, you’re all done,” the technician told her. Mary opened her eyes and blinked at the brightness of the room after he’d turned the lights back on.

  “We’re done?”

  “Yes, you’re on file now, and when we call you, you’ll be ready to go.”

  He offered her his hand, a gallant gesture she thought, and helped her out of the comfortable chair in which he’d placed her. Then she realized it was a more than gallant gesture; the chair seemed reluctant to let her go.

  Then she stood, feeling just a little sleepy after her five minutes in the dark, resting comfortably while his equipment recorded her unique field signature.

  He ushered her out the door and she walked back to the reception area where she signed herself out and left the agency. She stood outside in the sun and for a moment panic gripped her.

  What if they never call? What if they call me for somebody gross? What if I’m awful at it? What if they call today?

  She tried to reassure herself that the agency wasn’t a scam, like all the “modelling agencies” in the city. I did hear about it on WNYC. If I can’t trust NPR,1 who can I trust?

  And so what if they don’t call? I got a lunch out of it. And if they call today, I get my ass back down here and I don’t care if it’s … it’s … She struggled to think of a truly evil woman, but realized it was a mostly male province. Which made her realize that it wouldn’t be impossible that she might be asked to be the avatar of a dead man.

  Wow, that would be weird. But not weirder than some of the exercises I’ve done in class.

  She headed back to the subway station, her mind more on her crazy acting exercises than where she was going and bumped into a busy commuter who grouchily told her to watch where she was going.

  Damn, get my head back in the game. She hugged her purse a little more tightly and tried to bring her awareness back to the present, the subway, her fellow commuters and the man smelling of urine scrounging for change.

  She hated the city and if she was honest she hated her decision to be an actress, but that was an admission that she kept firmly squashed into a small corner of her mind.

  She swiped her MetroCard through the reader on the turnstile but not in the swift assured motion of the other riders. “Please swipe again,” it prompted, which she did and luckily this time her performance was considered acceptable and she was allowed to pass.

  She joined the throng on the platform waiting for the train and wondered again why she did this, why she kept putting herself out there. She was not a confident performer, her teachers always instructing her to project, not to hug her body, to throw back her shoulders, to find her voice in her stomach or one of a thousand other tried and tested tricks of the trade, all of which momentarily sufficed to fool her teachers into thinking they had imparted some wisdom that would help a difficult project. But when she returned to that exercise the next day or week or month, she would fall back on her reticence and again her teachers would wonder whether they needed to have the talk with her, the talk where they would confide that not everyone is suited for the life theatrical.

  Her train arrived and she entered, not moving quickly enough to find a seat and instead grasped a pole, her mind still wallowing in her failures.

  She thought several times a teacher would give her that talk and she would be released of having to follow a dream of which she no longer dreamed. But the talk never came and time and again, like right now, she realized ruefully, she would deny her doubts. She put herself out there precisely because she was afraid not to. Because if she didn’t try she’d hug herself right out of existence.

  Anyone watching her would have seen an actress registering determination, but privately it felt like resignation. I will keep trying because not trying is too awful to contemplate. And until then, she knew that she must find some work as her savings and scholarships were insufficient. Besides, what better acting experience could there be than pretending to be someone who’s dead.

  1 WNYC is a public radio station in New York City and an affiliate of National Public Radio

  Bath, England

  Looking for traces of Jane

  Court smiled sweetly at the woman as she waited for him to don the gloves. The very young woman returned a blank stare. Clearly his charms were wasted on her so he concentrated on squirming his large hands into the small, latex gloves. They should be cotton archivist gloves, as the box packaging indicated, and he assumed they’d run out of those gloves and substituted medical supply gloves, size small.

  He could not jam his fingers completely into the gloves, leaving translucent appendages dangling from the end of each fingertip, but he held out his arms for the ledger anyway. The woman, not wearing gloves herself, put the ledger in his arms and told him he could sit at the desk behind him, and then left the counter.

  “Much obliged,” he said to the retreating back of the woman, who was quickly swallowed up by the stacks in the basement of the register office.

  He took the book over to the indicated desk and sat with his back to the counter. He tried opening the book, but it was an almost impossible task with the flubbery worms depending from his fingers and quickly pulled off the gloves. Then he looked inside his messenger bag, found one of the individually wrapped wet wipes he kept there, tore it open and cleansed his hands. The sharp smell of alcohol reached his nose, mingled briefly with the musty smell of the book and then evaporated.

  Finally he was able to open the book and feel the dry crinkle of the paper as he leafed through. He felt that little thrill that any but the most insensitive must feel when holding history. And that thrill was magnified when he reached the relevant dates in the record of births and deaths recorded in the book.

  Many of the records for the Bath and North East Somerset Council were already digitized, but the cutoff was 1837, and so he found himself actually leafing through the pages of this ledger for 1775, looking for a birth sometime in …

  And then he found the notice he’d sought on 23 February: the record of the birth of a son Robert to John and Mary Gorell.

  It has to be him, he thought, although he expected to find the name Gorrell spelled with two “Rs”, although he was hardly surprised at a minor discrepancy in spelling. He had to admit to a certain excitement. He hadn’t had time to follow up the rumour of the letter on his previous visit, but he hadn’t taken it seriously then. After all, precious few of Jane’s letters had survived Cassandra’s culling,1 but this ledger entry actually provided an unbroken chain to Jane’s lifetime. Which made it all the more important he track down the letter.

  He used his camera to take a photo of the entry and reviewed it. Then he thought to take a larger photo that showed the entire ledger and then a photo of the counter with the words Bath and Somerset Council Records over it. After that, as the woman had not returned to the counter, he took the ledger from the desk, placed it on the counter and took anot
her photo.

  Finally, he rang the bell on the counter and after a minute the woman returned, holding a meat pie in one hand, and asked him, “Wotcher want?” around a mouthful of pasty.

  “I need to make a copy—a certified copy—of this page. Is that possible?”

  The young woman swallowed and said, “We can print out a copy. It’ll take a few days and then we can mail it to you,” she said.

  He considered this and asked, “What will it look like. I mean will it look like a page from this book?”

  “Naw, it’ll look like …” the young woman glanced around and from some recess under the counter she produced a sheet of paper. “It’ll look like this.”

  It was a sample of a birth record with the recorded names as John and Mary Smith and their son John, printed on council letterhead and a place for the register to sign. It was legal looking enough, but hardly had the impact of what he needed.

  “I would like to order that, but I was wondering … I’m a writer and this record is important to my research. I need something a little more … do you have a supervisor?”

  The young woman looked annoyed at this and Courtney realized he had offended her, which wasn’t his intent.

  “Give us a minute,” she said and turned, stuffing the last of her pasty into her mouth as she left.

  From somewhere just out of sight, he heard the woman say, “Doris, there’s an American here. He wants to talk to my supervisor.”

  “Oh very well. What have you done now?”

  Courtney prepared his most pleasing smile before Doris arrived. He was in luck, he saw, based on the woman’s appearance in her late forties, her hair swept up into a bun. She was still attractive, in an appropriately librarian manner, with immaculate makeup, and her elegant clothes hid some of the excesses of middle age.