Oxford, Present Day

SOPHIE 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 CHAPTER I; and finally, that first glorious paragraph, with a large initial I:

It 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.

“I’m working in Cecil Court,” she said, “at Boxhill’s. Stop in and see me.” And don’t discover that I just used my skills as a librarian to steal a book from an Oxford college, she thought.

A moment later she was back out in the summer sun. The day had turned warm, and she was tempted to sit in the shadows of the cloisters and examine her purloined treasure, but she thought it best to get away from St. John’s in case Jacob came upon her reading a library book that had not been checked out.

Of all her crimes, Sophie thought, this was the most appalling. It was one thing to steal a book that ought to have belonged to her from a dealer who had overpriced it, or even to steal a book from her own family library; but for a college librarian to steal from a college library—that was a violation of ethics that did not sit well with her. Not until she was safely back in her room and had a chance to examine the book more closely did she decide it had absolutely been worth it.

In most particulars, the book was identical to the one she had examined at the British Library. The binding was perhaps a bit less worn, the pages crisper—that probably meant the book hadn’t been read much. Having read the text herself, Sophie couldn’t really blame the readers of the past two centuries for neglecting this copy. She fanned the pages of the book and this cursory inspection showed a text unmarked in the margins, but when she turned to the front endpaper, she found an inscription in fading brown ink, in a slightly shaky hand: “To J.A. Judge not too harshly, but like me reserve First Impressions for second editions. Affectionately, R.M.” To anyone who wasn’t looking for a connection between Jane Austen and Richard Mansfield, it would have seemed innocent enough. It was easy to imagine how it might have been overlooked through all these years, especially in a book that people weren’t likely to open very often. But here, surely, was evidence that Richard Mansfield had known Jane Austen. To Sophie, that was good news; but the further implications of the inscription left her more worried than ever that if her stolen books were made public, the world would believe that Jane Austen had plagiarized Pride and Prejudice from Richard Mansfield.

If only he hadn’t included those two words: like me. As it was, the inscription certainly seemed to imply that Mansfield had written First Impressions. She closed the book gently and laid it on her dressing table. Staring at herself in the mirror, she wondered—is this the face of the woman who will destroy Jane Austen? What would those “fangirls” on whom Eric heaped so much disdain think of her? With the two books in her possession, Sophie had, perhaps, the ability to become the most reviled person in English literature fandom.

Of course, she had no intention of making the books public. She still wanted to do two things: find a way to prove Jane’s innocence, and find a way to prove Smedley’s guilt. Until she understood how both Smedley and Winston had come to discover Mansfield’s book in the library of a college neither one of them attended, she didn’t think she could make much progress with either goal. She certainly wasn’t going to ask Smedley about the book, so that left her with only one option—she had to trust Winston, at least for now.

“I thought I was the one who couldn’t stop thinking about you,” said Winston when Sophie called.

“Can you come up to Oxford tomorrow?” she asked.

“Is that little bed of yours cold?”

She had a flash of spending the whole day in bed. Fireworks or no fireworks, sex with Winston would definitely take her mind off her troubles. But, as appealing as the notion was, it would have to wait.

“I was thinking lunch. There’s a little café just outside the covered market.”

“Puccino’s. Sure, I know the place.”

“Because you were at St. John’s,” Sophie prompted.

“Right,” said Winston.

“So can you come? Say, noon?”

“I can come tonight if you like.”

“I need to sleep tonight,” said Sophie. “Come tomorrow and I’ll meet you at Puccino’s.”

“Well, I suppose if we have to meet in a public place, I’ll get by. At least I’ll get to see you.”

“It’ll be fun,” she said. “You can tell me all about your days at Oxford.” And with this veiled warning she rang off.

It was only five o’clock, but, having missed an entire night of sleep, Sophie was exhausted. She bought two sandwiches from the shop on the corner, wolfed them down with the remains of a bottle of wine she found on her bookshelf, and was sound asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.