First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen (15 page)

F
OR TWO DAYS
rain fell steadily outside the windows of the rectory. Unable to play in the garden or run in the fields, Anna kept her aunts busy with constant demands for games and stories. Jane did not write, and she did not read any more of
First Impressions
to her niece and sister, but she thought about the Bennets and the other inhabitants of the story nearly constantly. When Anna was finally asleep on the second night of rain, Jane and Cassandra stole a few minutes in the dressing room to talk.

“Father believes the weather will clear tomorrow,” said Cassandra. “I shall take Anna for a long walk so that you can work.”

“I should like to pay a visit to Mr. Mansfield, if it does clear,” said Jane. “After that I shall write.”

“Is your friend quite well?” said Cassandra. “You have seemed distracted these two days since you saw him last.”

“He is, I believe, as well as anyone of his age can rightfully expect to be. But it is not Busbury Park or Steventon or Deane that distracts me. My mind, I fear, has been dwelling at Longbourn, and Pemberley, and Meryton.”

“Jane, are you courted by some gentleman unknown to me? I have never heard of any of those places.”

“Courted?” said Jane with a laugh. “Indeed you might say I am courted, but not by a gentleman; rather by a story.”

“The book you have been working on? The one you refuse to give us more than a page of?”

“I read you three full pages,” said Jane. “And it is not a book yet. But it is well on its way.”

“And will you read us more soon?” asked Cassandra in an eager voice.

“Indeed I shall, sister. But for now I shall retire. Little Anna has quite exhausted me.”

“And will you not give me even a hint of how those few letters you read to us are to become a novel?” entreated Cassandra.

“There is one thing,” said Jane, pausing in the doorway. “I have spent the better part of the afternoon trying to form a single sentence that would encapsulate the essence of the story.”

“The opening line?”

“Precisely.”

“Oh, Jane, you must tell me. I shall not sleep if you don’t.”

Jane had tried a number of different openings before it occurred to her that her words to Mr. Mansfield when he had first confessed to being mystified by the importance Lady Mary placed on the appearance of a wealthy single man in her cousin’s neighborhood needed only slight alteration to provide the perfect beginning to her novel. “What do you think of this?” said Jane, assuming the air of a little girl giving a recitation. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

S
OPHIE WAS WORKING
the front of the shop Monday morning when the phone rang and she found herself again talking to Mr. Smedley.

“Still haven’t solved the mystery?” he said. “I’m afraid you’re making me angry.”

“You asked me to find a book for you,” said Sophie. “Sometimes that takes months or even years. Sometimes they never get found.” The weekend’s events had emboldened her. Why should she feel threatened by a strange man on the phone who wanted a worthless old book? She was going to find that elusive second edition, but not for this creep.

“But I am not your only customer for this particular book,” said Mr. Smedley.

“What makes you say that?”

“Don’t play games with me, Miss Collingwood,” he spat, and suddenly lowering his voice, he added, “I assure you, you won’t win.”

Sophie’s confidence suddenly evaporated. “How do you know my name?” she said, feeling cold.

“I know all about you . . . Sophie.” He said her name with a hiss. “Why do you think I came to Boxhill’s? Why do you think Winston Godfrey came there?”

Sophie began to shiver. “Mr. Smedley,” she said, “if you have something you want to tell me, why don’t you just tell me?”

“What I have to tell you is there’s a reason I told Gusty to get his new girl to ferret out this particular book. If you don’t find it soon, others will come to you, and they won’t be as friendly as your little boyfriend.”

“What do you know about my boyfriend?” said Sophie, finding the word distasteful. It seemed both too much and too little to describe what Winston was to her, but worse, the way Mr. Smedley used it, it sounded tawdry. And how the hell did he know about Winston anyway?

“The Chinese restaurant, Selfridges, these are public places. Did you really think you could keep your little dalliance a secret from me?” Sophie leaned against the counter, feeling dizzy. Her stomach jolted and she felt sweat begin to dampen her forehead. Had Smedley been tailing her? She had written him off as an eccentric collector, maybe a little aggressive, but basically harmless. But now it seemed he might pose a real threat to her safety, and perhaps to Winston’s, too.

“You’ve been following me?” said Sophie, almost unable to breathe.

“Find that book, Miss Collingwood. You’re the only one who can do it, now that your uncle is gone. And I’d hate to see you take your own tumble down the stairs.” He rang off, but Sophie didn’t know it. She had fallen to the floor in a faint.

—

FOR A MOMENT,
Sophie thought it was Uncle Bertram’s voice calling to her. All she could see were books and the silhouette of a man leaning over her. She had fallen asleep in the corner of a bookshop, a copy of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
propped on her knee. Uncle Bertram had been talking and talking to the bookseller about things Sophie did not understand, and, just like when she was at his flat and he read to her in Latin at bedtime, their words had lulled her to sleep.

“Come, my little Sophie,” he said, slipping his arms around her and picking her up. “I’ve made you do too much walking round London for a nine-year-old. Let’s get you some tea.”

“I don’t mind walking,” she said when Uncle Bertram had set her down on the pavement outside the shop. “It was just that I was reading about a dream and your voices were like Alice’s sister in the book.”

“Well, it’s true,” said her uncle with a chuckle, “that we were talking about a book with no pictures or conversations in it.”

“Did you buy it?” asked Sophie.

“Not today,” he said. “I’m afraid it was too expensive for my budget.”

“What makes a book valuable, Uncle Bertram?”

“An excellent question,” he said, taking her hand and guiding her down the street toward the nearest café. “There are two kinds of valuable. A book might have special value to me that it wouldn’t have to anyone else. For instance, the old family prayer book at your father’s house. It’s not a rare edition and it’s got a loose cover and a lot of torn pages. Nobody would pay much for that at a bookshop. But to our family, it’s irreplaceable. It has our history in it—not just in the baptisms and marriages and burials listed in the front, but in every tear and every smudge. So that book is valuable.”

“But what about the book you wanted to buy today?”

“Ah, that’s a very different matter. That’s a book that is
expensive
, which is not quite the same as valuable.”

“What was it?”

“It was an early edition of a very important English translation of a book called
Plutarch’s Lives
. In other words, it’s a very old book about history.”

“That doesn’t sound very interesting,” said Sophie.

“Ah, but interesting and valuable and expensive are all different,” said Uncle Bertram. “A book can be interesting or valuable to one person and not to another, but an expensive book is expensive for all of us.”

“And why was the Pluto book so expensive?”

“Plutarch,” said her uncle, ushering her into the café and settling in at a table. “Well, it’s expensive for several reasons. First, it’s an important book. Plutarch was one of the great historians of the ancient world. And this particular translation is important, because it’s the one Shakespeare used to research some of his plays.”

“Shakespeare, like
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in the park last summer?” said Sophie.

“That’s right.”

“He’s funny,” she said.

Uncle Bertram dosed a cup of tea generously with milk and sugar and handed it to Sophie, who took a long drink.

“So, the book I was looking at today was historically important and it had an important literary connection to a famous author. Those things made it valuable. What made it expensive was that it was in very good condition, added to a simple equation.”

“Equations like math?” said Sophie. “I hate math.”

“This is simple math,” said her uncle. “It’s called supply and demand. If there are not very many copies of a book but there are lots of people who would like to have one, then the book will be expensive. A book can be valuable without being expensive, but it’s not likely to be expensive without being valuable.”

“So if there was a book that only had one copy,” said Sophie, “and everybody in the world wanted it, that book would be expensive!”

“It certainly would,” said Bertram.

—

“SOPHIE! SOPHIE, ARE YOU
all right?” She realized that this voice was not Uncle Bertram’s, that she was not nine years old, and that she had not fallen asleep.

“Is that you, Gusty?” she managed to say softly.

“What happened?” said Gusty, his voice tinged with panic. “I heard a bump and I found you passed out on the floor.”

Sophie hoisted herself up on an elbow, feeling dizzy and a little queasy. “I guess I didn’t get enough breakfast,” she said.

Gusty helped her into a sitting position and pulled a box of books behind her so she could lean against it. “You stay there, while I get you some water.” He disappeared downstairs and Sophie concentrated on breathing for a minute. She tried not to think about Smedley or anything he had said. There would be time for that later. For now she breathed in the aroma of old books and worn floorboards and it worked better than any smelling salts. By the time Gusty was back from the basement, Sophie had pulled herself up from the floor and was sitting in a chair behind the counter.

“I told you not to move,” he said, handing her a glass of water.

“I’m OK, really,” said Sophie. “It was just low blood sugar.” Smedley’s warning about not talking to Gusty had suddenly returned to her mind.

“Have one of these,” said Gusty, holding out a packet of digestive biscuits. The last thing she wanted to do was eat, but he insisted, and she did feel a little steadier after a glass of water and a biscuit. “You need to go home and get some rest,” he said. “Take the rest of the day off.”

“That might be a good idea,” said Sophie. “I think I’ll go home and try to sleep, if that’s OK.”

He wouldn’t hear of her taking the tube home, so he closed the shop, walked her out to St. Martin’s Lane, hailed a taxi, and gave the cabbie a twenty-pound note and instructions to see Sophie safely to her door. Thirty minutes later, locked in her flat, sitting in a room of empty bookshelves, she finally allowed herself to relive Mr. Smedley’s phone call.

It seemed the suspicions about Uncle Bertram’s death that she’d fought so hard to shake may have been right after all, and that somehow that crime—if it was a crime—was tangled up in the mystery of
A Little Book of Allegorical Stories
. Smedley had used that word:
mystery
. Sophie had always wanted to find herself in the midst of a mystery and now she was—but this wasn’t like curling up in Uncle Bertram’s sitting room with a volume of Wilkie Collins or Agatha Christie on a cold winter night. This was real.

“There are two things you need to know about mysteries,” Uncle Bertram had said one night as they settled in for
Murder on the Orient Express
. “If there is a sword on the wall in the first chapter, someone is going to take it down and use it in the last chapter.”

“I don’t think there’s going to be a sword on a train,” said Sophie, who, at eleven, was starting to discover the joys of challenging adult authority.

“There isn’t always one,” said Uncle Bertram gently. “And it isn’t always a sword. It could be a hunting rifle or a cricket bat.”

“What’s the other thing?” asked Sophie.

“Beware of red herrings.”

“I don’t like herring.”

“Red herrings aren’t fish,” said her uncle. “They are false clues. A red herring will lead you down the wrong path every time.”

But now Sophie had no idea what were the swords on the wall and what were the red herrings. Did it matter that Winston was looking for the same book as Smedley, or was that just a coincidence? Winston had a perfectly good reason for wanting Mansfield’s second edition, so she could set him aside for now. He was a red herring. What did she know about Smedley? Almost nothing. There were no swords hanging on that wall. Why had she been chosen to find this particular book? That certainly wasn’t chance; Smedley had said as much. Was Sophie herself a sword on the wall?

She pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote down a series of questions:

Why me?

Why now?

Why this book?

Why two different collectors?

She paused for a moment, holding the pen over the paper, and finally allowed her mind to return to Mr. Smedley’s final, chilling proclamation: “I’d hate to see you take your own tumble down the stairs.” At the top of the list, in capital letters, she wrote:

WHAT HAPPENED TO UNCLE BERTRAM?

In the excitement of being courted by Winston, she had almost forgotten about the inquest report that still lay in her uncle’s desk drawer. Now she returned to those stark pages knowing that her suspicions about her uncle’s death were based on something more than paranoia and shock. On top of the neat stack of pages, where she had left it, was the inventory of personal items recovered from her uncle’s body.

Were there any clues in this generic list? The only thing that set Uncle Bertram apart from any other dead male body was the presence of a book—and for him it would have been more unusual if he hadn’t been carrying one. And that thought made Sophie pause to consider—what
didn’t
he have with him?

It was easy to think of things that weren’t on the list. Everything else he owned was not on the list. But she did her best to channel Hercule Poirot. How would he approach the problem? She had left Uncle Bertram’s apartment with him a thousand times. What did he take along?

—

“ARE YOU READY?”
called Sophie down the hall, eager to be on their way. Uncle Bertram had decided that, at thirteen, Sophie was old enough to go to a book auction, and she was worried they would be late.

“You realize the book I’m bidding on is lot 375,” said Bertram. “It won’t come up for at least three hours.”

“But I want to see it all,” said Sophie.

“You want to see it all,” he repeated. “Why am I not surprised? Well, just let me see that I have everything. Has it stopped raining?”

“The sun is out,” she said, bouncing with impatience.

“No umbrella, then. Do you have a book to read?”

“Don’t ask silly questions,” said Sophie. “Of course I do.”

“And of course I do, too. I have my hat, I have my auction catalog, I have my wallet, and I have my niece.”

“Let’s go, let’s go.”

“Right,” said Uncle Bertram. “Off we go.” He picked up his keys from the bowl by the front door, and they were on their way.

Sophie looked back at the list. His keys. If Uncle Bertram had been going out, why didn’t he have his keys?