Jane excused herself from the drawing room and walked upstairs. The clock read eleven o’clock, but she climbed into bed. She did not come down for lunch. She told Margaret to go away when she knocked to tell Jane that Henry and Eliza were leaving. Jane did not come down to say goodbye; she heard Henry and Eliza leave through the front door in the midafternoon. She did not take supper. She lay awake all night until, eventually, she fell asleep at five o’clock the next morning.
JANE WOKE AN hour later and jumped from her bed. She buzzed with agitation: words filled her head. She threw back her bed pillow, looking for something. Yes, she had kept one there once, but no longer. Jane paced the room. An object glimmered on the floor. She ran over. A small pale rod nestled between two floorboards. She fished it out with a smile; her mother had found dozens in her sweep of the room but missed one. Others declared the buttery brown flesh of the oysters the best, but for Jane, this thin white stick represented the beautiful part of a goose. Jane took the spine between her thumb and forefinger, and her tendons moved it into the crook of her hand on instinct.
She flung open a pine chest at the end of her bed and burrowed through its contents. She found a glass pot the size of an apricot and held it up. It contained nothing, so she threw it into the corner of the room and mined through the chest once more. She found a second pot, but it too held only dust. She tossed it over her shoulder to join its twin. She dug down to a bolt of lace meant for a veil. She flipped it from its coffin and flung it to the floor. A third pot lay underneath, and this one held a tiny mound of powder comprised of tannin, vitriol, and acacia gum. Jane held the pot aloft like a trophy. She needed water.
A vase of brown, decaying roses sat on the windowsill. Jane upended the stinking flowers and squinted into the vase. A finger’s worth of putrid water lay at the bottom. Jane poured the filthy liquid into the pot, rushing but careful not to spill. The mottled sand crystals dissolved to liquid.
Now she needed paper. But the room contained none! She could fetch some from the drawing room, claiming she wanted to write to Cassandra again, but her mother would surely see her face and suspect her true intention. Panic redoubled its caresses of her mind, as phrases and words began to depart her head.
She stiffened; the room did contain paper. She dug her nails into the crack of one floorboard and pulled until a loose plank rose up. She reached into the floor cavity. Six hundred pages, double-sided, in Jane’s own hand lay inside. She had begun its composition on her fifteenth birthday. First Impressions, she called it. It had been to London and back, rejected by Cadell the publisher, and then Jane had kept it hidden for nine years, lest her mother find it and put it to the torch.
Jane lifted the pages and ran her fingers over the yellowed paper. It smelled of vanilla and wood. She turned over the last page and found a space, brushed an inch of dust off her desk and dipped her quill.
Chapter Six
Isobel Thornton now understood the feeling of wanting something she could not have.
Melbourne House grew intolerable. Isobel’s mother took to her room with the complaint that she had never been so wronged in her existence. When that action provoked insufficient attention from the others, she returned to the parlor to make the same noises. Isobel’s father was worse. Instead of joking with his daughter about this latest of romantic mishaps, he took to his study and avoided all conversation. Isobel sensed they all felt as she did: they entertained flattery to believe a man like John Wilson would interest himself in a woman of her station and age.
When the servant expressed a need for mending ribbon, Isobel demanded she undertake the mission herself, if only to exit the house. But when Isobel bade Mrs. Turner good morning in the ribbon shop, the reply came not from the shopkeeper but from a customer. “Good morning, Miss Thornton,” said John Wilson, the very man and source of her current pain, the man who had rejected her, a man she hoped never to set eyes on again. He swallowed and turned his head away as he spoke, then inspected a bureau of scarves with violent attention.
Isobel felt determined to remain calm, to show no sign his presence distressed her. She wondered if decorum permitted a minimum time she could remain in the shop before departing without rudeness. She allowed the clock to add three seconds and turned for the exit.
“You are not leaving?” said he.
Isobel sighed, resigned that some conversation was required. She offered polite opinions about the assemblies in town and remarked upon the recent storm. But when her thoughts on plays and rain were exhausted, she felt dismayed to find Mr. Wilson making no reciprocal efforts for conversation. There were several topics into which a gentleman could enter: the wetness of the roads, for example, or the speed of postage. But he said and did nothing, though it seemed words were not far from his lips. She despised him for his lack of gallantry and longed to be gone from the room. Mrs. Turner, who watched from the register, possessed little fame as a discreet woman, and Isobel imagined the report of this humbling interaction reaching Ramsgate by supper.
Isobel grew enraged. She shed her earlier pretensions to demureness and shifted her campaign to the offensive. “I wish you every happiness and joy, Mr.
