The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner

Author:Natalie Jenner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Chapter Seventeen

Chawton, Hampshire

Three o’clock that same afternoon

Frances Knight was sitting in a small room, known as the reading alcove, that jutted out above the main entrance to the Great House as part of its imposing three-story porch. It was yet another perfect spot to watch out for visitors both expected and not, and family lore described it as one of Jane Austen’s favourite places in the house for that very reason. Even during the war, tourists could occasionally be seen venturing up the drive, not daring to open the low wooden gate a few hundred feet from the front steps, but just standing there, zooming in with their cameras, taking their one shot of the house that Jane Austen had almost lived in, but not quite.

After three months of persistence, and a burgeoning phone relationship with both Josephine and Evie, Yardley Sinclair had finally managed to get Miss Knight to at least entertain an offer on the steward’s cottage. She had not told her father yet, as he was in the final stages now, and she wondered if it might not be better just to wait. This was the absolute most calculating and manipulative idea Frances Knight had ever allowed herself to have, and some small strange sense of rebellion reared itself within her as she got a taste of what the future might feel like, once her father was gone.

Over time Yardley had explained to her, with all the patience of an archaeologist chipping away at an Egyptian ruin, that the rich American was willing to pay well above market value, several thousand pounds above, for the little cottage. That his plan was to immediately restore the cottage into a single-family residence again, ideally using the original layout from Jane Austen’s time.

Frances could tell that Mr. Sinclair was a huge fan of her ancestor, and during their series of calls it always took some doing to put off the visits from him that he would often suggest. To sweeten the deal, he kept mentioning that the American and his fiancée had acquired some of the Godmersham estate pieces, and having this cottage might thereby also enable the acquisitions to stay in England, right in their ancestral home.

Frances knew that neither the Knight estate nor the cottage’s rental income yielded sufficient funds to keep up the cottage in the way that it deserved. And with her sense of failure over being the end of the Knight family line, a sale seemed a possible chance to redeem herself, if sold to the right person.

Yardley had assured her that the buyer was indeed the right person—more specifically, that the woman affianced to the buyer was such a serious and successful Austen fan that he could vouch for the care and expense that she would put into the place.

Frances now sat alternately watching the front drive and the clock above the fireplace mantel in the larger second-floor room behind her. At three P.M. Mr. Jack Leonard and his fiancée were due to arrive,

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