“I really don’t need you to accompany me, you know,” she said.
“You needn’t worry that I shall try to come inside with you or something,” said Byron. “I shan’t.”
“No, that is not why I protest,” she said. It wasn’t. She wanted a little space and time to herself, though. When she got home, she would be pestered by Cassandra and, to a lesser extent, her mother. Pestered wasn’t really the right word, Jane supposed. It wasn’t fair to call it that. Cassandra wouldbe rightly concerned about why Jane had disappeared after claiming a short turn around the grounds and then sent a letter back saying she’d be gone for dinner. Cassandra would also be understandably curious.
So, once Jane was inside the door of her house, she’d be answering questions.
She wanted this short ride back home to be one of silence, wherein she could gather her thoughts and put herself back together. Most especially, she wanted to come up with an answer as to why she had done this.
What had possessed her to go gallivanting all over with Lord Byron of all people?
“So,” Byron was saying, “there is some other reason you protest?”
“I suppose I should simply like a bit of time to myself to get my thoughts in order,” she said.
“You can’t expect we’re going to be speaking to each other while riding horseback,” he said.
No, she knew they wouldn’t, but he would be there, and she suspected, somehow, that Byron’s presence would mean that she wouldn’t be able to think clearly.
But that was ridiculous. She wasn’t doing all of this because of Byron, at least she didn’t think so.
“I can’t let a woman ride home alone in the dark,” said Byron. “It wouldn’t be chivalrous of me.”
“Do you care much about chivalry?” she said pointedly.
“I’ll see you home,” he insisted. “But if you like, I’ll ride behind you several paces and give you a bit of space. Would that suffice?”
With anyone else, she would assure them that it wasn’t necessary, but she only nodded at Byron, grateful that he would offer a small solution. “Thank you.”
On the ride home, Jane thought about the question that Byron had put to her yesterday. Which sister fromSense and Sensibilitywas she? Marianne or Elinor Dashwood?
The truth was, of course, that she was both of them. They were both her characters, and she had written them herself.
The story asked the reader to identify with Elinor over Marianne, Jane thought, and she supposed that Elinor, the sister with more sense, was the one she hoped she was more like.
But if you looked at her and Cassandra, it was easy to graft Jane onto Marianne.
Jane had never taken up with a man like the Mr. Willoughby in her book, but she had witnessed it often enough. There had been precious little of what passed for romance in Jane’s life. A short little flirtation when she was much younger, a marriage proposal she thought better of, dances, things of that nature.
She had never been in love.
No one had ever been in love with her.
And she now knew that wasn’t going to happen to her. She would sometimes say this aloud to people, and people would always say positively cruel things back to her about it, things that Jane knew these people didn’t mean as cruel at all, but thought were reassuring. They would say that Jane didn’t know what the future held in store and that she might hold out hope. They would tell some story about a spinster in her thirties who made a love match. They would trot out trite sayings about how it was never too late and things of that nature.
Jane would be forced to smile and agree with them, and say, “Oh, yes, perhaps my fortunes will change.” But she knew they would not. So, she had mostly stopped saying this aloud to people.
Because what she really needed was not for people to tell her to keep hope alive, but for people to explain to her how it was that she came to terms, really came to terms, with being awoman whose identity wasn’t formed by her attachment to some man or other.
How did Jane really accept the fact that she was just Jane Austen?
For so much of Jane’s life, she hadn’t been that, anyway, she’d been Cassandra’s little sister. As a small girl, she had adored Cassandra, worshiped her like a goddess, her older sister, who was kind and pretty and perfect. Jane had kicked up such a fuss, in fact, that she’d been sent off to school with Cassandra, even though Jane was too young for such a thing.
And Cassandra, the eldest, the prettiest, was the one who had been in love, who had been engaged to be married to Tom Fowle, who had done everything right, but had been scorned by fortune.
Is that what I think of myself?Jane wondered as she rode home in front of Byron.Do I think that I did something wrong and that’s why I haven’t got a husband?
She knew that wasn’t the case. She had not. Life was just this way sometimes. Indifferent. Brutal. Painful.
