My Jane Austen Summer: A Season in Mansfield Park

find people here with whom I can connect, on that level.'

'Oh.' He pushed his glasses up and folded his arms. 'That's not what I understood it to mean.'

'Oh?' I braced myself.

'No, I understood Forster advocating that people connect what they profess to believe with their actions.' Omar looked up at me. 'This requires self-knowledge.'

'Oh.'

'Which is why I was confused you would come here to meet people who understand.' He walked out of the kitchen back into the hallway. 'Actors? Literature Live is the Grand Central Terminal of disconnected personalities,' he said. 'And this place is Fantasy Island for Janeites.'

I thought of Mrs. Russell wearing her costume on the train.

'You've got your work cut out.' Omar chuckled, which seemed better than lingering on my misunderstanding. Omar led us back into the ballroom, where we found a man jumping on the stairs.

'Hey, John.' Omar waved. Omar introduced me to John Owen, the project's conservationist. 'A friend of Nigel's.'

'Don't mind me,' John Owen said. 'I'm only testing the stairs.'

Omar put his hands in his pockets and we watched the man bounce on one step, and then move down to the next. I noticed he was wearing an odd combination of clothing: pants from an old office suit, a dingy soccer shirt, and sneakers with Velcro fasteners. 'What do you expect to find?' Omar asked.

We strained to hear him whisper, slightly breathless, 'A noticeable bounce may mean structural problems.'

'Is it bouncing?' Omar asked.

He stared past us in concentration. 'Not sure.' He went back up to a previous step. 'There may be something here.' He examined the steps, going from one to the other, jumping and trying again.

We took the stairs to the second floor while Omar explained that John Owen had been part of the original deal with Lady Weston. 'He putters around all summer with his crew of grad students who think they're having a symposium, fixing things, making sure the place isn't falling into irretrievable disrepair, in return for Literature Live's use of the property.'

I smiled. 'The students think they're having a symposium?'

'And they pay for the privilege.' Omar gestured to a lot of closed doors in the second floor hallway. 'None of this is open to the public. Some of these bedrooms serve as private offices for Archie and Magda and the lead actors, and since I'm not sure which are which, I just stay downstairs unless summoned.' As we walked down the hallway, Omar grinned, nudging me with his elbow. 'I don't think John Owen grasps the meaning of only connect, do you?'

'I think you're making fun of me,' I said, 'and we've only known each other since six.'

Omar touched the handle of another narrow door and explained about the third floor. 'Off-limits,' he said, 'just a lot of dead furniture up there, not interesting.'

I sensed My Jane Austen touching the handle from the other side of the door.

'Do you think we'll get a lease extension?' I asked, imagining the first real lines in my novel life interrupted by a real estate broker with a sign and a hammer, wondering if Omar had felt anything because he was holding his own hand.

'Depends. The taxes are exorbitant, and the new lord needs the cash to finance his bar bills.' Omar started down the stairs. 'The offices are over here in the east wing.' Omar led us down a curving hall and opened a door but we didn't go in. 'Nigel's office, the conference room, and library. Not interesting, just the admin heart of the festival.' Omar turned and bumped into me. 'Let's go, it's dark,' he said.

'But we must have seen less than half.'

'Tomorrow is another day, Scarlett. You can't see anything in the dark anyway.'

*   *   *

The great wooden door, not locked as feared, responded to my push, admitting me into the chilly stone nave of St. James's Church. I'd gently disengaged Omar by professing a need for more exercise, although he likely sensed I was up to something. Pulling the door shut, I waited for my eyes to adjust, dim evening light filtering through the ruby and cobalt of stained glass, delighted to sense that My Jane Austen was still with me.

Tiptoeing carefully over uneven stone to a dark wooden pew, I sat, breathing the musty air deeply through my nose, exhaling through my mouth, a visitor in a quiet tomb. A narrow shelf built into the pew before me held the diminutive Book of Common Prayer, the English version, smaller than those back home. The regular size hymnal hung over the shelf's edge, too big to fit. A needlepoint cushion hung from a hook below. Near the front of the church, stone effigies, perhaps the First Baron of Weston and his wife, slept in a bed of marble, their hands clasped in prayer these many years. I tried to be quiet but the pew creaked with every movement. Another entombed body lay prone in the far corner, all alone, facing the wall with the great window. Lifting the needlepoint cushion from its hook, I knelt and whispered the words from the funeral liturgy: 'All we go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song. Alleluia. Alleluia.' I repeated the phrase over and over, with a special heartfelt emphasis on 'yet even at the grave.' Usually the repetition would begin to soothe me and I would become lost in the words, but it wasn't working for me now. I kept thinking about the ancient sleepers and the universal smell of mustiness and how it smelled old but still alive. Still present among the living, but separate. At times like this, the utter permanence of death came home to me like a thick iron wall that closed forever between my mother and me. I could never tell her about Sue or ask her advice about my father or anything else. Death did not negotiate.

No longer whispering, I tried speaking quietly, 'All we go down to the dust.' Unable to focus on the prayer, I surrendered to the excitement growing in my spirit: the feeling of being in deep communion with a great mind. Even if the volunteers were a sorority of secret stockings like those of Mrs. Russell, and even if the academics were mostly incoherent to me, this festival was all about the book, Mansfield Park. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Jane Austen and her book. But here was a whole new rich, promising world opening up for me, something I hadn't been aware of two days ago. The novel was alive. This was what I had meant about living in a novel. We were all alive in Mansfield Park. This could never have happened in Texas.

And from this great distance, I could see clearly that Martin didn't get me. He'd never read Forster; he thought only connect was a dot game. Being married to Martin would mean sharing him for weekends of hunting and paintball. His ideal vacation would be scuba diving with the guys in some oversubscribed Central American destination. Perhaps I generalized, but it seemed Martin, as well as all the men in my social circle, relied on the same slim catalogue when choosing interests and vocations. We met in a bookstore, yes. But he wasn't buying books. He was checking out the chicks who bought books. I kept squeezing myself into underwhelming romances with men like Martin because I wanted one so badly. But they never had enough gravitas to survive on their own merits. In these relationships, we parked in each other's lives until something like holiday travel interrupted the flow, and when we got back into town, we couldn't remember where we'd left our cars.

Something creaked. I held my breath, and waited for a repeat of the sound I'd heard. Something besides me had moved. Although I thought I was alone in the dark, I couldn't really be sure. It sounded like something alive in another pew but I saw no one. The creak happened again. I sat up straight. My scalp tingled and fear gripped me. What if the tombs opened up? Too late to hide. From the front of the room, a dim figure rose from a pew, Heathcliff hiding in the dark. I scooted closer to the wall, bumping an overhanging hymnal on the shelf in front of me, sending it to the floor with a mighty resounding thud. He looked over at the disturbance and our eyes met. Young and serious, thirty by my guess, wearing jeans and T-shirt, probably frightened by my chanting and afraid to be in the same dark church with me. He had been lying on the pew. Now he stepped over the dead interred in the stone floor, in a church where protagonists had brooded for centuries, their rich stories lingering in the damp fertile air, encouraging all forms of yearning and despair, perhaps in my very pew.

I'd arrived at a place in the cosmos where I could connect, at last.

Five