Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library by Sarah Waters Page A
Authors: Sarah Waters
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rang the bell, signed in, climbed the uneven wooden steps and knocked on the library door. A simple room. Books, wooden desks, lamps. A concentrated silence that she longed to bottle and unleash in her own library.
She requested The Last Man.
It was an early edition bound in three volumes. Leather edged, with marbled covers and a matching box. She slid the books out, noting that in 1826 the name Mary Shelley still did not appear. By then Percy had been dead a few years and her married name might have helped sales, but the credit was to ‘The Author of Frankenstein’. She placed the top book on the foam reader. It opened on the first page.
‘Hear you not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonising groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings – all announcing the last days of man?’ *
Miss Campbell rose from her seat in alarm. What if this passage from the third volume had revealed itself to her as a warning? A sign. Yes, that was it. The signs were here, but no one could read them. No one wanted to read them.
She hurried to the window, searching for what? A thunderbolt, a quake, a tempest? She half expected to watch the lawn rip asunder, but still it stretched away from the house, green and sunny.
She stood at the window as others had stood before her, going back four centuries. Even before the house existed, local thanes had lived in this area; and before them, Romans, drawn by a warmth they missed from the south.
She breathed deeply.
These ancient words, which might have filled her with terror had she read them alone in her flat at night, were not ready to come true just yet.
Miss Campbell returned to her seat, and to her work. The day passed swiftly, the sun racing across the south lawn to disappear behind the trees. She looked back as she closed the gate; the last light bathed the house and filled the air around it.
On the walk to the station the magic of bygone centuries receded. People on the high street did the same kind of thing people in Balham did — bought naan bread or focaccia, fruit or meat, wine or beer, as they wended their way home. On the train back to the city the sky closed over, a lid slammed on the world.
Descending the steps into the Underground, Miss Campbell was hit by its rich dirty stink. Metallic yet animal. A smell she’d not noticed this morning, it was so long since she’d breathed clean air.
That night she settled in front of her 1973 typewriter and began to type. Earlier she had put off this task, because how can you reduce a person to a few pages, a life and its work to five thousand words? Somehow she felt less wary of her subject now. Spurred on by the noisy rattle of the Golfball, she wrote of Mary Shelley’s dark loneliness; her struggles as a single parent; her visions of the end of the world, penned a hundred and fifty years before this typewriter was manufactured, and set another century beyond that in 2073.
‘Like Frankenstein and horror,’ Miss Campbell wrote, ‘The Last Man was conceived before science fiction was a genre, before others trod accepted paths into these strange new worlds. Before leaps in time became pedestrian. Mary Shelley’s vision of the future was very different from the one we have today. It had no place for gadgets such as the sonic screwdriver or the improbability drive…’
She typed far into the night, aware and yet unaware of time passing, pausing, rewinding, forwarding.
The following day the computers arrived, and by eleven Miss Campbell was in HeadSpace with the man who had come to install them. Matt, too, was there to see his vision take shape.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘You don’t sound so sure.’
‘It’s just, we could fit thousands of
She requested The Last Man.
It was an early edition bound in three volumes. Leather edged, with marbled covers and a matching box. She slid the books out, noting that in 1826 the name Mary Shelley still did not appear. By then Percy had been dead a few years and her married name might have helped sales, but the credit was to ‘The Author of Frankenstein’. She placed the top book on the foam reader. It opened on the first page.
‘Hear you not the rushing sound of the coming tempest? Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonising groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings – all announcing the last days of man?’ *
Miss Campbell rose from her seat in alarm. What if this passage from the third volume had revealed itself to her as a warning? A sign. Yes, that was it. The signs were here, but no one could read them. No one wanted to read them.
She hurried to the window, searching for what? A thunderbolt, a quake, a tempest? She half expected to watch the lawn rip asunder, but still it stretched away from the house, green and sunny.
She stood at the window as others had stood before her, going back four centuries. Even before the house existed, local thanes had lived in this area; and before them, Romans, drawn by a warmth they missed from the south.
She breathed deeply.
These ancient words, which might have filled her with terror had she read them alone in her flat at night, were not ready to come true just yet.
Miss Campbell returned to her seat, and to her work. The day passed swiftly, the sun racing across the south lawn to disappear behind the trees. She looked back as she closed the gate; the last light bathed the house and filled the air around it.
On the walk to the station the magic of bygone centuries receded. People on the high street did the same kind of thing people in Balham did — bought naan bread or focaccia, fruit or meat, wine or beer, as they wended their way home. On the train back to the city the sky closed over, a lid slammed on the world.
Descending the steps into the Underground, Miss Campbell was hit by its rich dirty stink. Metallic yet animal. A smell she’d not noticed this morning, it was so long since she’d breathed clean air.
That night she settled in front of her 1973 typewriter and began to type. Earlier she had put off this task, because how can you reduce a person to a few pages, a life and its work to five thousand words? Somehow she felt less wary of her subject now. Spurred on by the noisy rattle of the Golfball, she wrote of Mary Shelley’s dark loneliness; her struggles as a single parent; her visions of the end of the world, penned a hundred and fifty years before this typewriter was manufactured, and set another century beyond that in 2073.
‘Like Frankenstein and horror,’ Miss Campbell wrote, ‘The Last Man was conceived before science fiction was a genre, before others trod accepted paths into these strange new worlds. Before leaps in time became pedestrian. Mary Shelley’s vision of the future was very different from the one we have today. It had no place for gadgets such as the sonic screwdriver or the improbability drive…’
She typed far into the night, aware and yet unaware of time passing, pausing, rewinding, forwarding.
The following day the computers arrived, and by eleven Miss Campbell was in HeadSpace with the man who had come to install them. Matt, too, was there to see his vision take shape.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘You don’t sound so sure.’
‘It’s just, we could fit thousands of
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