First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (19 page)

“Give me some time to get things sorted,” said Sophie, “and I’ll give you a call.”

“I’ll be waiting by the phone,” said Winston.

“You carry your phone in your pocket,” she teased.

“Yes, well, that proves it, then.”

—

SOPHIE CLOSED
Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale
and returned it to her bag. Winston had seemed genuinely surprised when she had said it might be valuable. And he hadn’t seemed too concerned about getting it from her right away. It was hard to believe it was a coincidence that he had come to her, but it was harder to believe that he was that good an actor. She would tell him the whole story when the time was right, but what was the whole story? Had Jane Austen really stolen her plot and much of her text from Richard Mansfield? Maybe she was naive to feel this way, but Sophie just couldn’t believe it. The problem was, in the absence of other evidence, most people
would
believe it. She thought back over everything she knew about Mansfield (which wasn’t much) and Jane Austen (which was quite a bit) but could imagine no connection between the two.

Unsure what to do next, she did know one thing: She couldn’t keep her discovery entirely to herself. It was too fantastic a story not to share. She had to ring Victoria.

“Holy shit,” said her sister when Sophie had explained about
First Impressions
. “Do you really think Jane Austen was a plagiarist?”

“No,” said Sophie. “There has to be some sort of explanation and I have to figure out what it is. And I don’t give a toss how much that book is worth or how many people want it—I’m not about to start showing it around until I can prove that Jane was innocent.”

“So she’s Jane to you now,” said Victoria.

“I feel like I know her,” said Sophie. “I feel like her fate is in my hands.”

“Why don’t you just burn the damn thing?”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” said Sophie. “But I couldn’t. It’s just too . . . too . . . remarkable.”

“The first draft of
Pride and Prejudice
,” said Victoria wistfully.

“Yeah,” replied Sophie with a sigh. She still couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the momentousness of her find.

“There’s something I’ve been wondering,” said Victoria. “If this second edition is so damn rare, how did two different people know that it even existed?”

“Good question,” said Sophie. “I never really thought about that.”

“There must have been some other clue, something that made them believe there was a second edition.”

“Tori, you’re brilliant,” said Sophie, jumping out of her chair.

“I am?”

“You’re right. There has to be a clue and it has to be something they both saw. It’s the sword on the wall.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Victoria.

“Winston and Smedley must have crossed paths somewhere and wherever they crossed paths, that’s where they found the clue. Where they crossed paths is the sword on the wall.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Oh God,” said Sophie, her voice almost breathless. “I know what it is. There’s one thing Smedley and Winston have in common.”

“What’s that?” said Victoria, still sounding confused.

“They both went to St. John’s,” said Sophie. “St. John’s is the sword on the wall.” And with these cryptic words, she rang off.

G
ILBERT MONKHOUSE STOOD
in his printing-office in Leeds and inhaled the aroma of ink. It was a smell that had surrounded him since he was twelve years old and first went to work for Griffith Wright, printer of the
Leeds Intelligencer
. Griffith’s son Thomas had taken over the business in 1784, and for eleven years Gilbert had worked in the shop, living in the embrace of that wonderful smell. Gilbert had learned how to read at an early age—it came naturally to him—and it was his ability to read that had led him to Wright’s printing-office. From there, every night, he would take home the proofs of some book to read in his bed. Since he did not hold the position of reader in the printing-office, he never made marks on the pages, but he would remember any errors he noticed and point them out to the reader the next morning.

Gilbert had started out sweeping floors and carrying boxes of type and reams of paper. When he was fifteen Mr. Wright had set him to work casting off copy—calculating the number of words in a manuscript so that an estimate of printing costs could be made. From there he graduated to the job of distributing type into letter cases. Taking a handful of some ten or twenty lines of type from a previously printed book, Gilbert sorted the metal letters into the boxes within the letter cases. At first he was allowed to sort only a few pages of type each day, for his unskilled fingers slowed the pace of work in the shop, but soon he found he could read the lines of type (which meant reading in mirror image), memorize the words, and distribute the letters with his thumb and forefinger with lightening speed and perfect accuracy. Experienced compositors in the shop bragged of being able to distribute forty thousand letters in a day; by the time he was eighteen, Gilbert could match that; at twenty he could sort nearly fifty thousand.

What Gilbert, as a boy and as a young man, wanted more than anything else was to be a full-fledged compositor. He wanted to create books and newspapers by setting the type into words and lines and paragraphs and pages. True, authors might slave for months or years with quill and paper, but in the end all they created were texts. Compositors and printers created books, and that was what Gilbert wanted to do. When he turned twenty-one, Mr. Wright promoted him to the job of his dreams.

With fingers trained for years as a type sorter, Gilbert now set about the process of taking the tiny pieces of type from the letter cases and arranging them in composing sticks, each of which held several lines of type. The type from these sticks he then arranged into galleys, which, when each contained a full page, he placed in the proper arrangement on the imposing stone for printing. He had spent his entire youth watching compositors—never was a young man so well prepared for his vocation. From his first day, Gilbert could match the fastest compositor in the office, and the readers were always happy to get proofs that Gilbert had set—they were nearly error-free. He loved to visit the local bookshop and pull from the shelf some book for which he had set the type. He felt like much more than a workman; he felt like a creator.

In 1795, Gilbert’s uncle, a solicitor in Manchester, had died, leaving Gilbert a modest inheritance. At the time, Thomas Wright’s printing-office was having to turn away jobs—there simply wasn’t enough space for another printing press, and Mr. Wright had no interest in expanding. Gilbert had gone to his employer with a proposal: If Wright would loan Gilbert the sum of two hundred pounds, he would take that money, together with his inheritance, and open his own printing-office. Leeds was growing rapidly, and Gilbert believed there was plenty of work for two printers. Thomas agreed. Though he was sorry to lose his best compositor, he felt the investment in Gilbert was a good one.

And so now, a year later, Gilbert stood in his own shop, blissfully happy. He had six employees, but he still worked as a compositor himself for several hours every day, and he still took proofs home every night. Tonight he had stayed at the shop late to finish printing the final pages of the proofs for a book unimaginatively titled
Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale
. It was the second edition of a book he had printed the previous year—a rather dull collection of moral tales by a Yorkshire clergyman. What had surprised him about this job was the addition of the “Cautionary Tale.” Though he would print anything he was paid to print, Gilbert was not above passing literary judgment on the works that came through his press. This long story was, he thought, one of the finest pieces he had ever set in type.

Gilbert was quite used to reading proofs in large, unfolded sheets, each containing, in this case, sixteen pages of the book. With a stack of these sheets draped over his arm, he locked up his office at half-past ten and walked the short distance to his lodgings—a small room above a milliner’s shop in the high street. Lighting a lamp by his bedside, he settled in to read the proofs. Outside of his employees and those of Mr. Wright, Gilbert had few friends. His family lived far away, in Peterborough, and of female admirers he had none. One might be forgiven for thinking that the man reading the printer’s sheets alone in his lodgings late at night was lonely or even unhappy, but nothing was further from the truth. Gilbert Monkhouse was the happiest man in Leeds—at least for a few more hours.

S
OPHIE DRAINED HER
coffee, took a two-minute shower, and pulled on some fresh clothes. Out of term time, the library at St. John’s would open at ten; it was quarter past by the time she walked out of the house onto the Woodstock Road and headed toward the center of town. It was a fifteen-minute walk to St. John’s, and Sophie felt the cool morning air clearing her head. She had focus now, and a mission. Somewhere in the St. John’s College Library was the precipitating clue—a book or a letter or a manuscript that had caused two very different men to go looking for the book that lay safely in her handbag. Whether that clue would exonerate Jane Austen, Sophie did not know, but finding it was her logical next step.

Having worked at the Christ Church Library for all of her five years at Oxford, Sophie knew librarians at just about every Oxford college. She was pleased to discover, on flashing her ID and gaining entry to St. John’s, a familiar face at the circulation desk—a tall, lanky graduate student with a mop of black hair, a suit that looked as if he had slept in it, and dark-rimmed glasses.

“Sophie Collingwood, good to see you.”

“Good morning, Jacob,” she said, smiling. Seeing an old friend—even if in reality he was little more than an acquaintance—who was not a part of all this intrigue was refreshing. Here, at least, was someone she could trust.

“I thought I’d see you at the end-of-term do over at Worcester,” said Jacob.

“Death in the family,” said Sophie.

“Sorry to hear it. Well, it’s good to see you anyway. Pretty quiet around here between terms, so always nice to see a friend.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Jacob,” she said, smiling.

“Now, what can I do for you on a morning so fine that you really shouldn’t be spending it in a library?”

“I’m doing some research on Jane Austen.”

“You’d do better at the Bodleian,” said Jacob. “Or even back at Christ Church. They both have better collections of Austen than we do.”

“I’ve been there already,” Sophie lied. “What I’m looking for could be anywhere. I’m trying to find a connection between Austen and an obscure northern clergyman.”

“Sounds intriguing.”

“It’s really not,” she said. “It’s utterly boring and probably a waste of time, but I’m working for this rare book dealer now and one of his clients seems to think I’m his private researcher.”

“As long as he’s paying you,” said Jacob.

“Would I be here if he weren’t?” said Sophie with a smile. “Anyway, I’m looking through any early editions of Austen I can find for . . . well, I don’t know what for—inscriptions, I guess, or marginalia. Anything that might show a connection.”

“I’ll go down to rare books and bring you anything we have with an Austen connection,” said Jacob. “In the meantime you can have a look through the stacks and see if there’s anything there. There won’t be any early Austen, but who knows, you might find something.”

Sophie spent the next hour paging through every book by or about Jane Austen in the stacks, beginning with the oldest ones, which were late-nineteenth-century editions of the novels. She didn’t expect to find anything, but what if some other scholar had made a marginal note somewhere? When Jacob returned she was almost invisible behind stacks of books, none of which contained anything more than the occasional underlining by a thoughtless undergraduate who didn’t understand the concept that library books were borrowed, not owned.

“Not a lot in rare books,” said Jacob, holding up a small stack of volumes and a flat gray box. “A few early editions of some of the novels and a box of papers from the 1920s from a don who did some research on Austen. Doesn’t look like he ever published anything, so it’s just notes and a few odd chapters of typescript.” He set the books and the box down on the table next to Sophie and returned to the circulation desk.

It took only a few minutes to discover that the books held no clues. There was an ownership inscription in the second edition of
Mansfield Park
and a date written on the endpaper of the first edition of
Persuasion
, which had been published posthumously in a set with
Northanger Abbey
, but no mention of Richard Mansfield. She was just about to turn to the box, which seemed much more promising, when it suddenly occurred to her what she had just held in her hand.

She laid the box down and picked up one of three nearly identical volumes. Turning past the title page, which identified the author only as
THE AUTHOR OF SENSE
AND SENSIBILITY
, she reached the beginning of the text. At the top of the page, in large outlined capital letters, was the title, PRIDE & PREJUDICE; below that, a decorative line; then in small bold capitals the words
CHAP
TER I
; and finally, that first glorious paragraph, with a large initial
I
:

I
t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

It took up four lines of text on the narrow paper, and seemed all the more important for taking up more than a third of the text space on the page. The words
acknowledged
and
possession
were both hyphenated. Those details—the narrowness of the book making the sentence cascade into nearly a third of a page, the initial capital, the hyphenated words—took that familiar sentence and made it look completely different.

Sophie had never held a first edition of
Pride and Prejudice
. She had never had the opportunity to run her fingers over those spectacular words as they had appeared in print for the first time. Somehow seeing them here in this volume from 1813 brought home to Sophie that Jane Austen had actually
written
these words. They had not simply appeared out of the ether. Sometimes, she thought, sentences like that become so famous that we cannot conceive a time when they did not exist. We can remember our own first encounters with those words, but that
mankind
should have had a first encounter with them seems almost impossible. But mankind did have a first encounter with Sophie’s favorite sentence in all of literature, and she now held that first encounter in her hand.

On the lower corner of the first page of the first edition of
Pride and Prejudice
housed at St. John’s College, Oxford, is a small circular water stain. It does not affect the text, nor is it significant enough to reduce the value of the book. But, like every mark in every book, it tells a story, and like so many marks in so many books, it is a story known to only one person and doomed to be lost forever when that person is no more. It is the mark of a single tear that dropped from the cheek of Sophie Collingwood as she stared at those words, and it is a testament to the power of literature.

Sophie wiped her cheek, but could not put the book down. Lost in the words, she read on, embracing both the familiar story and the unfamiliar way it appeared on the page. She felt herself somehow at one with the first men and women who read the novel; she felt especially connected to the person—she imagined her a lady of some wealth living in Bath—who first read this very copy.

Lunchtime came and went and she read on and not until she had reached the eleventh chapter did Miss Bingley startle her out of the world of Longbourn and Netherfield with the words: “
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library
.”

Sophie suddenly remembered that she was
in
an excellent library and with work to do. She was shocked to see from the clock on the wall that it was nearly two. Wistfully returning the first volume of
Pride and Prejudice
to its partners, Sophie removed the lid from the manuscript box and began looking through the contents.

She had some hope that these papers might provide the clue she was looking for, because they were unique to St. John’s. First editions of Austen’s novels, as moving as they might be, were in many libraries around Britain, but nowhere else could one examine these particular papers. The don’s name was Wilcox and his primary interest had been textual comparison. Sophie waded through two sheaves of notes on the variants between the first and second editions of
Pride and Prejudice
and
Sense and Sensibility
—page after page detailing changes in the locations of commas and in spelling. She was amazed that she could be both fascinated and bored at the same time. The typescript excerpts from a book apparently never published offered no more insight into Austen’s connection to Richard Mansfield than the notes had. It was nearly closing time when Sophie finished examining the contents of the box.

Was it possible that she had been mistaken? Was there no sword on the wall of St. John’s? Was it just another coincidence that both men had mentioned this was their college? Had Smedley even been telling the truth?

“Jacob,” said Sophie, putting on her best smile as she approached the circulation desk. “Do you have a record of all the students at St. John’s for, say . . . the past twenty years or so?”

“I’ve got a record of all the students here ever,” said Jacob. “In a database, I mean. It’s not much for browsing, but I can search specific names if you need.”

“Just two names,” she said. “The first is Smedley. George Smedley.”

“Smedley,” he said, typing away at his computer. “The last Smedley at St. John’s took his B.A. in 1921.”

“So that would make him . . .”

“About a hundred and twelve years old.”

So Smedley had been lying. Maybe he had somehow listened in on the phone conversation when Winston had said he was at St. John’s. But that couldn’t be, because Smedley had told her he was at St. John’s before Winston had mentioned it.

“What’s the other name?” said Jacob.

“Godfrey,” said Sophie. “Winston Godfrey.”

“Let’s see, Winston Godfrey. Nope. The closest I have is a Wallace Godfrey in 1946.”

She did her best to hide her shock, leaning against the counter with one hand. Winston had been lying, too? But why? There was only one conceivable reason. He had been trying to lead her to St. John’s. For some reason they both had. And since the one thing she knew they had in common was that they both wanted her copy of
Little Allegories and a Cautionary Tale
, there had to be something at St. John’s that had led them to believe that book was important. But what?

“We close in about thirty minutes,” said Jacob. “I need to take those Austen materials back to rare books.”

“Right,” said Sophie. “I’ll put the rest of the things back in the stacks for you.”

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, that’s research for you. Nine times out of ten you don’t find anything. That’s what makes the tenth time so much fun.”

Jacob gathered up the materials that had come from rare books and disappeared down a corridor. There had been a few other readers in the library during the afternoon, but they were all gone now and Sophie was left alone. She began to reshelve the books she had taken from the stacks, trying to think what she could have missed. What could be in this college that would make someone think that the second edition of a book by an unknown eighteenth-century clergyman was worth killing for? It had to be something that linked Mansfield and Austen, but it also had to be something that no one else, besides Winston and Smedley, had ever noticed.

She was putting the last of the books back into the stacks, accompanied only by the ticking of the clock, when the answer hit her with the force of a freight train. Of course, Jane Austen materials would have been ferreted out years ago, but what about Richard Mansfield materials? Who would go looking for those? No one. What if there was a Richard Mansfield item in the library that Winston and Smedley had somehow stumbled upon?

Jacob had still not returned and Sophie quickly scanned the theology section. It took her less than a minute to spot a slim unmarked volume, looking dusty and untouched, on the shelf between Herbert Luckock’s
After Death
and Frederick Maurice’s
Theological Essays
. She carefully slipped the volume out of its place and turned to the title page—identical to the one she had seen at the British Library:
A Little Book of Allegorical Stories
by Rev. Richard Mansfield. She heard footsteps approaching down the corridor from the rare books room and acted almost without thinking. She rushed back to her table, grabbed her bag, dashed to the circulation desk, reached over and swiped Mansfield’s book against the demagnetizer, and shoved it into her bag just before Jacob reappeared.

“Thanks again for your help, Jacob,” she called.

“Sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for,” he said.

“Well, he’s paying me by the hour, at least,” said Sophie, feeling sweat breaking out on her forehead. She shouldn’t be nervous, she thought. After all, she was becoming an experienced book thief.

“Maybe I’ll see you in London sometime,” said Jacob.