Jane bit down on her bottom lip. Her father had been gone for seven years now, but sometimes the loss felt incredibly fresh.
“There is something in you,” said Cassandra, “some wild and fanciful spirit. It’s the thing that makes you capable of doing this at all. It craves a bit of adventure. You write the books because you can’t abide this, our life, the sameness of it, the normality of it. This thing with Lord Byron, it called to that part of you.”
Jane carefully extricated her hand from Cassandra’s. “I abide,” she said quietly.
Cassandra looked at her empty hands and got to her feet. “I am saying, you must not allow yourself to—”
“Cassandra, my own sweet sister,” said Jane softly, looking up at her, “it would be quite reasonable to turn it all off, yes. It would save me a great deal of discomfort if I could just be satisfied. But I think the way it has to be, instead, is that I simply live with the discomfort when the things I wish for do not come to pass.”
“And what did you wish for with that man?”
Jane flushed, thinking of whatever it was she’d thought of the night before.
“You see, I thought that you were feeling something for him, and he is—”
“No,” said Jane, shaking her head. “I don’t wishthat. I should never get into anything so sordid and appalling as that! Give me some credit.”
Cassandra eyed her, and then nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Well, good, then.”
“No, it was only, as you say, the bit of an adventure, I suppose. The change in the sameness of this. This perfectly comfortable, well settled life.”
Cassandra let out a breath. “It’s not a tragedy to be boring, Jane.”
“No, I know,” said Jane, giving her sister a smile.
Cassandra’s lips parted, and she looked as if she wished to say something more.
“Truly, I do know,” said Jane. “I don’t think he knows. I think he truly does think being boredisa tragedy. But he is very young, and he is more fanciful than I by a thousandfold.” She chuckled to herself.
“There,” said Cassandra. “What is that? Why are you that way when you speak of him?”
“It’s a kindredness, I suppose,” said Jane. “He and I both have it, that desire for something.”
“For what?”
“That’s just it. I don’t think either of us knows. But one does not sit down and write page after page about entirely pretend people doing entirely pretend things if one doesn’t think, somehow, it’s going to fulfill that desire. It’s as if, at the end of the novel or the play or one of Byron’s epic poems, we think we’ll get it, whatever it is, but it’s never there. It is hungry, but it is never sated.”
“That sounds dreadful,” said Cassandra.
“Perhaps,” said Jane with a little laugh. “Anyway, he’s gone. He’s off to ruin himself looking for adventure. I think he’ll likely ride directly off a cliff and break his own neck. I shall stay here, with you and our mother, and I shall just have… this.” She looked down at the pages of the book. “Just this. It’s enough.”
“You have just said it is never enough, that it is never sated.”
Jane chuckled wryly. “So I have.”
JANE DID NOTwrite the next day. She and Cassandra sat out in the sitting room and read bits of letters from their brother Henry aloud to each other, laughing about this or that he had said.
Cassandra spoke at length about whether or not she truly should reduce. “It is only that I don’t wish to have to have all of my dresses altered, you know.”
“I think it is just a fact of age,” said Jane. “One gets older, one’s middle expands. It seems to happen to positively everyone.”
“I do miss sweets,” said Cassandra ruefully.
Nellie entered the room. “Excuse me,” she said, “but Lord Byron is here.”
“What?” said Jane, getting to her feet.
Byron poked his head into the room, for he was apparently standing right behind Nellie. “Good morning!”
