Hampshire, Present Day

THE SUMMER HEAT was already bearing down even though it was only midmorning. Sophie and Victoria headed up the overgrown drive, happy for the shelter of the trees that provided shade. After about ten minutes of walking they rounded a bend and a vista opened before them. On a knoll about a quarter mile away they could glimpse a corner of what was certainly the main house. In the valley below was a small lake, with a copse of trees on one side and open fields on the other. Despite the warm fresh air, the park felt as neglected as the gatehouse. Several fallen trees lay untouched; the grass, without sheep to keep it in check, had grown tall and tangled; and even from this distance the lake looked green and choked with algae. No breeze stirred the leaves overhead, and the whole park was draped in silence.

Yet in spite of all this, Sophie felt she could see the park as, perhaps, Jane Austen had first seen it, as Eliza Bennet had first seen Pemberley—the sun sparkling off the blue water of the lake, the breeze whispering in the trees, the whole park pulsing with life and potential.

“I guess it was nicer in 1796,” said Victoria.

“It must have been a beautiful estate,” said Sophie with a sigh. “It’s sad to see it so neglected.”

“Who knows,” said Victoria, forging ahead, “maybe one day it will be beautiful again.”

Another few minutes brought them in full view of the house. It had once been grand, certainly—the epitome of the eighteenth-century country house. More like Rosings than Pemberley, Sophie thought—that is, it seemed more intimidating than romantic. But as they drew closer she realized this was due more to its obvious state of disrepair than to any arrogance in the architecture. Weeds grew in the gutters and several of the windows were boarded up. The rest were tightly shuttered. Several large pieces of stone had fallen from the facade. Two wings protruded from the center section of the house, and when they had walked around one of these they saw, a short distance down the hill, the chapel. It looked much older than the house itself, and stood in the shadow of a vast yew tree. A low stone wall surrounded the structure, and Sophie could just see the tops of a few gravestones peeking out of the tall grass.

Without speaking, she trekked off across the field toward the chapel, and in another minute she was pulling the grass away from one of the more imposing gravestones.

“It’s hard to read,” said Victoria over Sophie’s shoulder.

“Nobody’s cleaned it for a couple of hundred years,” said Sophie, kneeling down and running her fingers along the inscription in the crumbling stone. “Edward Newcombe,” she read. “Third Earl of Wintringham, 1750 to . . . I think it says 1811.”

“And here’s his wife,” said Victoria, who was inspecting the adjacent stone.

“I doubt a visiting clergyman would get a stone this big or this close to the door,” said Sophie. “Let’s start at the edges.” She took one side of the graveyard and Victoria the other and they began examining the smaller stones that lay near the wall of the churchyard. Sophie was kneeling in deep grass, trying to decipher the inscription on a stone in the most remote corner, when her ankle hit something hard and she stifled a cry of pain. She moved to one side and brushed the dirt and dead grass off of a fallen marker a little more than a foot wide and perhaps twice that long. There was no inscription on the side facing up, so she pried the stone out of the earth and began brushing the damp dirt from the other side. By the time she could read the letters carved on the stone, her hands were coated in dirt.

The stone read, simply, “R. M. 1796.”

This was it. This was Richard Mansfield’s gravestone and it told her nothing, pointed her nowhere. Sophie sat down in the grass and felt empty. She expected to be overcome with emotion, to finally cry those tears she had held inside since Uncle Bertram’s death. But instead she felt nothing. Her world was a blank. The loss of her uncle, the loss of his books, the loss of the family library, and the loss of her literary idol weighed on her as one solid mass and seemed to press the breath out of her body. She might have sat there forever, she thought, but for the one bright thought that slipped into her mind like a shaft of light in the darkness. She had a sister, she thought, as she heard Victoria’s voice. She still had Victoria.

“Hey Soph, don’t you think we ought to look inside?”

Inside, thought Sophie. What if there was some further clue inside the chapel? It was a thread of hope—a thin, fragile thread, but she would follow it nonetheless. She hoisted herself up and walked to the west end of the chapel, where Victoria stood in front of a thick wooden door.

“Locked, I presume,” said Sophie, seeing her glimmer of hope dim.

“There is a lock,” said Victoria, “but it’s a rusty lock.” With one swift kick, she snapped the latch and the door flew open. “I knew those kickboxing classes would come in handy.” The echo of the door bursting open died down and they stepped into musty gloom.

“It smells like death,” said Sophie with a shiver.

“Come on,” said Victoria. “Let’s see what we can find.”

The narrow windows admitted just enough light that they could read the memorials on the walls without the aid of the torch. On the north wall, wedged between elaborately carved memorials to various members of the Newcombe family, Sophie found a small marble plaque. She read it over several times in silence and then called softly to her sister. Victoria slipped an arm around Sophie’s waist and with her sister at her side, Sophie read the words on the plaque aloud:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

RICHARD MANSFIELD

1716–1796

RECTOR OF CROFT-ON-TEES, YORKSHIRE

TEACHER, WRITER, AND BELOVED FRIEND

ERECTED BY HIS STUDENTS

R.N., S.N., AND J.A.

“What does it mean?” said Victoria, after they had stood in silence for a moment.

“Well,” said Sophie, running her fingers across the text. “R.N. and S.N. must have been Newcombes. And J.A. has to be Jane Austen. It means she and Mansfield knew each other personally, not just through correspondence. And it means that she thought of him as a teacher and a friend, which is something. I mean, if she stole from him, would she have erected a memorial to him?”

“You’re right, but it doesn’t prove anything about First Impressions,” said Victoria.

“No,” said Sophie. “But I have a feeling that Jane Austen’s relationship with Richard Mansfield was deeper and less . . . I don’t know, less nefarious than what we’ve found so far makes it look.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Give me a minute,” said Sophie, squeezing her sister around the waist and then dropping her arm.

“Sure,” said Victoria. She gave Sophie a light kiss on the cheek and walked out into the sunshine, leaving her sister alone in the ancient chapel.

Sophie suddenly felt the weight of her knowledge like a stone around her neck. No matter what Winston did, no matter what happened with Smedley, First Impressions and the evidence in Sophie’s handbag would become public—and probably very soon. She knew she couldn’t keep the secret much longer. Right now, this forgotten place was so apart from the outside world she could almost believe that when she stepped out of the chapel it would be 1796, and she would see Jane Austen and Richard Mansfield walking arm in arm along the shore of the lake. But when First Impressions became public, this place would be peaceful no more. People would flock from around the world to see the memorial to the man whose work spawned Pride and Prejudice. Or, thought Sophie, the true believers would flock to scorn the grave of the man who ruined Jane Austen’s reputation. Sophie suddenly felt a great affinity for Richard Mansfield—after all, the two of them were in this together. If he ended up reviled by lovers of Austen, Sophie would be hated even more.

She reached out and ran her fingertips across the words on the memorial once more and whispered to Richard, “I’ll do my best.” As she touched the words RICHARD MANSFIELD she had a sudden inspiration. She took a moment to consider her idea and then walked briskly out of the chapel to where Victoria sat on the churchyard wall, gazing out toward the lake.

“I know what we need to do,” said Sophie confidently. “We need to break into that house.”

“OK, I’m all for action,” said Victoria. “But just out of curiosity, why would we break into an abandoned manor house?”

“If there’s one thing I know about estates,” said Sophie, “it’s that they keep records. Names of tenants, numbers of sheep, all that sort of thing. Some estate holders were obsessive about it.”

When she had touched Richard Mansfield’s name on the memorial, she had remembered a day when her father and uncle stood in her father’s private study. Uncle Bertram had asked to see some of the estate records so he could show them to Sophie.

“Why would anyone want to know how many sheep were at Bayfield in 1920?” asked Sophie, as her uncle showed her the neatly penned entries in a musty ledger.

“Well, that’s the thing about keeping records,” said Uncle Bertram. “You never know why someone might need them until someone does need them, and then you’re glad you kept them.”

“And what does the number of sheep have to do with Richard Mansfield?” said Victoria now.

“Nothing. But listen—Mansfield died here in 1796, the same time that Jane Austen was working on her original draft of Pride and Prejudice, the version she called First Impressions.”

“Or possibly the version Mansfield called First Impressions.”

“Possibly,” said Sophie. “But Mansfield died right after he arrived here, according to the obituary. Hardly enough time for Jane to come to think of him as a teacher. So he might have been here before. Who knows what the estate records will tell us—dates of his visits, parties or balls that took place while he was here; there could even be letters from Mansfield to the earl. I don’t know what we’ll find, but we might find something.” She could feel the excitement building inside her. She knew it was a long shot, that even if she could get into the house, even if the records survived, there would probably be nothing that would help her. But a slim chance was still a chance—one last chance to prove Jane’s innocence. Then it wouldn’t matter who presented First Impressions to the world—Sophie, Winston, or even that bastard Smedley. If Sophie could prove that it was Jane’s original version and not Mansfield’s story, Jane Austen’s reputation would be saved.

“Do you really think there’s anything left in there?” said Victoria, nodding toward the house. “It seems unlikely.”

“Unlikely is not the same as impossible,” said Sophie, repeating a favorite saying of her uncle’s. He had liked to say this whenever Sophie had objected to some remarkable coincidence in, say, a Dickens novel as being unlikely. Never had his words held more meaning.

“All right, then,” said Victoria, striding up the hill. “Let’s break into the house.”