Jane disembarked at the last stop, in Piccadilly. Miss Harwood had given her an address for a house in East London, two miles away. Jane looked up; Sir Christopher Wren’s dome loomed in the east. She walked toward it along the north bank, stopping once to hold her nose at the perfume of the Thames.
As Jane left the precinct of St. Paul’s and travelled east, the characters changed from bishops, curates, and well-heeled parishioners to those they were charged with saving: the seamstresses, flower sellers, and laundresses of Cheapside. The architecture transformed from elegant marble columns and cerebral brass domes to rotting timber and crumbled brick. The lanes were paved with jagged cobblestones and painted with mud, the elegant drainage systems of Mayfair and Piccadilly replaced by homemade remedies of bucket-emptying and gravity. Grease washed the wattle-and-daub buildings in a film of grime. Jane had never visited such a place. A man in a soup-stained cravat poked his tongue out at her, declared that he loved her, and then followed her down a lane. Seeing as though they had never met before, she doubted his love was genuine. She hurried ahead of him and told him her father was a constable. This seemed to satisfy him, for he sat down in a pile of rotting cabbages and began to snore.
Jane walked three blocks more and arrived at the house in question, double-checking the address on the paper. This was it. Jane scratched her head. It was a two-story structure in the Tudor style, sandwiched between two large modern buildings. The black timber frame sagged at the center. Yellow stained the white clay walls and the thatched roof caved in. It was a structure suspended in midcollapse.
Jane tapped the oak door. No one answered. The lattice casement windows were blacked out and sealed shut. She knocked once more, louder this time, and called, “Hello?” She looked up to the roof. The chimney puffed no smoke.
“Who are you?” a voice said. Jane turned around. A woman limped toward her. Her white hair reached her navel; with no pins or ties holding it from her face, it roamed free around her in a great volume of fuzz, like spun sugar. She had patched up her black dress with swatches of mismatched material: a plaid square covered one shoulder; a brown rhombus attempted to repair a giant hole in her skirt. She bundled several cabbages under her bosom; the exact number was hard to tell.
“My name is Miss Austen,” Jane replied. “Are you Mrs. Sinclair?”
“That depends,” the woman replied. She unlocked the door, went inside, and closed it behind her.
“I come on the advice of Miss Harwood,” Jane called through the heavy oak door. The door inched open. Jane stepped inside, gingerly, wondering if she was walking toward her demise. The blacked-out windows encased the dwelling in virtual darkness.
“Are you going to help? These won’t light themselves,” Mrs. Sinclair said as she lit a candle. Jane fumbled around, found another, and did the same. “How is Emily?” the woman asked.
“She lacks for coal,” Jane replied, looking around, “but she investigates her prospects as a painter.” The women lit another few candles and the room was illuminated. Jane saw a dirt floor, a hearth, and two chairs. “A homely abode,” Jane offered with a nod. She wondered why the woman bothered with the candles; there was nothing to warrant illumination. She squinted at the woman in the candlelight. Her face resembled a raisin.
Mrs. Sinclair lit a fire. “There always has been, and always will be, someone like me in this place.”
Jane raised an eyebrow. “I don’t doubt it.” She looked around the dirty room. A thousand such decrepit buildings littered Cheapside.
“What do you want?” asked Mrs. Sinclair. She motioned for Jane to sit down.
“What is it you do?” asked Jane in reply, seating herself in a rocking chair so old it had ceased rocking.
“I am a matchmaker,” said Mrs. Sinclair.
Jane stood back up. “How wonderous!” she said. “I have travelled across half of England, ruining whatever shreds of my reputation remained, all to visit a matchmaker. At home there stand three on every corner.” Jane kicked herself for her gullibility and desperation. She had known not what to expect on her way to London and had given little thought to what she would find there, training her focus instead on escaping the house without suspicion. But whatever she had imagined, another stupid matchmaker did not make the list. She moved to the door, beyond annoyed.
“I am not that kind of matchmaker,” said Mrs. Sinclair. She shifted a log with a blackened poker and a flame bloomed.
“What kind are you, then? How are you different from the multitude who slither around Bath?”
“I deliver.”
Jane scoffed. The fire cracked and spat and devoured the kindling. She thought of her manuscript, nothing but black flakes now, and sat down once more. “You can deliver for me? I need a husband,” she said.
“So fetch one, then.”
“Therein lies the issue,” Jane said. “I appear to have little talent for husband fetching.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Because I am old and poor,” Jane replied.
“Bah,” Mrs. Sinclair replied. “The young speak of love like they invented it and think it exists when we are at our prettiest. Love is revealed when we are at our ugliest. I have seen older and poorer than you marry. Uglier ones, too. There must be something else. Perhaps you do not want to marry.”
“I have no aversion to marrying,” Jane protested. “All the men have not wanted me. Are you a matchmaker or not? I have money. I will pay.”
“Your one true love is not
