Hampshire, 1796

“EVEN AS A CHILD, I had an unquenchable thirst for novels,” said Jane, ready now to confess to Mr. Mansfield what she had told no living soul. “It began in Oxford, when I discovered, on the bookshelves of Mrs. Crawley, to whom Cassandra and I had been dispatched for schooling, a copy of The History of Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson. I was seven years old, if you can believe it, yet I consumed it in a matter of days, and after that I never lost a chance to read any novel that came my way.”

“I confess,” said Mr. Mansfield, “that my history is not dissimilar, though you had a rather earlier start than I.”

“At ten,” said Jane, “I went with Cassandra to the Ladies Boarding School at the old abbey in Reading, and I suppose you could say that I was at the center of a somewhat illicit trade in novels that took place amongst several of the girls. You would have loved the abbey, Mr. Mansfield. It was an ancient building with winding staircases, dusty turret rooms, and a plethora of hiding places for those of us youngsters whose reading material was unlikely to meet with the approval of Mrs. Latournelle, who ran the school. And as long as I spent an hour or two with my tutor in his study each morning, no one seemed to take the slightest interest in where or how I filled my days. So they were filled with Pamela and Joseph Andrews, and the abbey was a paradise.

“There was another adult who lived at the abbey—a narrow, rangy young woman known to us only as Nurse. I suppose she earned that sobriquet because among her many duties was the care of children who had been taken ill. She moved slowly through the halls—tending fires, doing laundry, helping serve meals, and doing a thousand other tasks necessary to our daily life and comfort. She shut up the dormitory at night and woke those girls who slept through the bell in the morning. She saw to it that the younger girls were properly dressed. On nights when thunder crashed outside the abbey, Nurse would stay with us in the dormitory, and tell us stories. It didn’t take me long to realize that her stories came from Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders or Tristram Shandy, and that therefore Nurse must be a fellow reader of novels. I never saw her with a book in her hands, but I knew. Nurse was a reader like me, and therefore I felt that Nurse, in some small way, belonged uniquely to me. I never would have said such a thing out loud, least of all to Nurse herself, but it comforted me that she and I were linked by the worlds of Evelina, and Tom Jones, and Amelia.

“There was only one rule at the abbey that was enforced with threats of punishment: Once the girls were secure in their beds for the night we were to remain there until the bell rang the following morning. Oh, Mr. Mansfield, I cannot tell you the fear placed upon me on those two occasions when we were forced to watch as Mrs. Latournelle took a birch twig to the back of the legs of a girl who had snuck out at night. The screams of those girls and the blood running down their legs gave me nightmares for weeks.”

Jane shivered with the recollection and fell silent for a moment. Mr. Mansfield did not urge her on or offer her false comfort; he merely sat quietly and waited. Jane liked that—liked that he knew her well enough to know that the rest of the story would come, like all stories, in its own time.

“It was on a night in early December that I faced what seemed to me the greatest dilemma of my young life. In the long days of August I had been able to read in bed, but as I lay awake this night, darkness had fallen hours ago. A full moon had risen over the wall of the garden, but the shadow of the building opposite did not admit its beams into the dormitory. On most nights I would have returned my book to its hiding place in the mattress, but I was deeply engrossed in Miss Burney’s Cecilia.”

“And who can blame you?” said Mr. Mansfield. “It is one of my favorites.”

“Well, try though I did, I could not fall asleep. While the other girls slept around me, my sister Cassandra breathing heavily in the next bed, I finally crept to the window and gazed longingly at a corner of the garden, brightly illuminated by moonlight. I could not imagine that, at this deep hour of the night, Mrs. Latournelle would be anywhere other than sound asleep in her room, so, tucking the third volume of Cecilia under my nightshirt, I eased open the window and caught hold of the ivy that grew on the abbey’s stone wall. With little effort I was soon safe on the ground.

“Oh, the enchantment of midnight in that garden, Mr. Mansfield—no breeze stirred the trees, no nightingale sang; it was the perfect place to read. I made my way to that corner of moonlight, pulled out my book, and perched on a small stone ledge that protruded from the garden wall. To my delight, the moonlight was bright enough for me to read the words, in which I instantly lost myself. But hardly had I read a page when I heard the snap of a twig, a small enough sound in itself, but to me it seemed to rend the silence of the garden like a thunderclap.

“Only a few yards away, I saw the familiar figure of Nurse making her way swiftly toward a corner of the garden wall. I slipped into the nearby shadows, trembling with fear lest I be detected. I thought perhaps she was merely out for a late-night walk, suffering from the insomnia that a particularly exciting passage of a novel can produce. But as soon as I conceived this explanation, I was forced to discard it, for a cloaked figure suddenly appeared, climbing over the garden wall from the streets of town. I was just close enough to hear, as the two figures conversed, that the stranger was male, but their whispered voices were too low to understand. As you can well imagine, Mr. Mansfield, being only ten and having learned from a careful reading of literature that no other relationship is possible between two people who meet in a garden by moonlight than that of lovers, I immediately began filling in with my imagination the gaps that their unintelligible whispers left in the evidential record.

“Nurse had a secret lover, no doubt the son of a wealthy landowner whose father had forbidden him from consorting with a housemaid. That maid had been banished and had come to Reading, but her lover had followed, and on nights when the moon was full they met in the garden where he made love to her with poetry and pledges of undying fidelity. It was a doomed romance, but all the more beautiful for its hopelessness. So firmly had this story taken root in my imagination, that I continued to embellish it even after the man had slipped back over the wall and Nurse had returned inside. I was just on the verge of infecting the lover with some deadly disease or perhaps having him join the navy at the insistence of his father when the weighty hand of Mrs. Latournelle fell upon my shoulder.

“‘And what can you be doing in the garden at this time of night, Jane?’ she growled. I needn’t tell you that my blood ran cold with fear.

“Back in Mrs. Latournelle’s study I could think of only two things—protecting the backs of my legs and preventing Mrs. Latournelle from discovering my secret consumption of novels. The story my imagination had created was so real to me that I had no difficulty repeating it. I had heard a noise in the garden and feared for the safety of the children. When I went to fetch Nurse, I found her already headed for the garden, and so I followed to render assistance. There I saw the two lovers consorting.

“Secure in my bed a few minutes later, with the promise that I would suffer no punishment, I breathed a sigh of relief. I only hoped that Mrs. Latournelle would discover neither the book I had left in the garden nor the unlatched window of the dormitory.

“Having lost much of the night’s sleep, I was shaken awake after the bell had rung by my dear Cassandra. The dormitory was abuzz with the news that Nurse had not made her usual morning appearance. I thought only that she, too, had overslept after the excitement of the previous night. Not until we assembled for breakfast and morning prayers did Mrs. Latournelle reveal the sobering truth. Nurse had been sent away. Only I knew the reason, for the schoolmistress did not dwell on details. ‘Nurse’s behavior has forced me to dismiss her,’ was all she would say.

“That night, I sat on my bed surrounded by a frenzy of speculation. I had retrieved my book from the garden, where I had dropped it into a shrubbery, and had closed the latch on the window without detection. I was safe. But I did not participate in the conversation that consumed the dormitory. Even when Cassandra asked me, ‘What do you think Nurse did?’ I only rolled over and pulled my pillow close. Only I knew the depth of my betrayal of the only adult at the school with whom I felt true empathy. A week later Cassandra and I went home for Christmas and never returned to the abbey.

“And I didn’t see Nurse again,” said Jane, sinking back into her chair, “until yesterday, when she died in my arms.”