Evie Stone sat alone in her tiny bedsitter at the north end of Castle Street, as far from the colleges as a student could live and still be keeping term at Cambridge. But Evie was no longer a student—she remained at the university on borrowed time. The next forty minutes would decide how much she had left.
The room’s solitary window was cracked open to the cool December air, which was about to vibrate with the sound of Great St Mary’s striking two o’clock from precisely three miles away. The interview with Senior Fellow Christenson was for twenty minutes past that—exactly as long as it would take her to arrive at Jesus College. Evie always had her walks perfectly timed.
Christenson scheduled his appointments for twenty minutes past the hour, one of many famous eccentricities for which he was known. The students jokingly referred to this arrangement as C.M.T. or Christenson Mean Time. Resounding bells of St Mary’s or not, Evie could have guessed the exact minute almost down to the second. She had honed this skill as a servant girl at the Chawton Great House, where for two years she had secretly catalogued the family library. Without the benefit of a clock, she had passed hours every night going through all 2,375 books, page by page. At a clear two-foot distance, Evie could now eyeball anything from a Gutenberg-era tome to a carbon-copy document and not only predict how long it would take her to summarize the contents but to quickly skim each page as well. These were skills that she kept to herself. She had long known the value in being underestimated.
The male faculty around her only knew Evelyn Stone as a quiet, unassuming, but startlingly forthright member of the first entry class of women to be permitted to earn a degree from Cambridge. After three years of punishing studies at the all-female Girton College, Evie had been awarded first-class honours for all of her efforts, including a lengthy paper on the Austen contemporary Madame de Staël, and become one of the first female graduates in the eight-hundred-year history of the university.
Christenson was the next hurdle.
He needed a research assistant for the upcoming Lent term, and Evie had applied before anyone else. She also needed the job more than anyone else. Since graduating with a First in English, she had been assisting Junior Fellow Kinross with his years-long annotation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel, Vanity Fair. With this project finally at an end, Evie’s current stipend was scheduled to dry up on the very last day of 1949. As Christenson’s newest research assistant, Evie could continue to spend countless days on her own, without supervision, methodically working her way through the over one hundred libraries at the university—a prospect that remained more exciting to her than anything else at this stage of her academic career.
The minute the bells started to ring out, Evie—already clad in her thick woollen coat for winter—stood up, grabbed her leather bag, and headed for the door. Twenty quick steps down to the street, five and a half minutes until she passed the Castle Inn, and then a clear ten before she saw the bend of the River Cam. There the Bridge of Sighs loomed above the river, Gothic and imperious, the stonework tracery in its open windows designed to keep students from clambering in. This was the type of campus foolery that Evie would never seek to join—or be invited to.
Jesus College, Evie’s immediate destination, was rich in history, having been founded in 1496 on the site of a former nunnery. The grass beneath Evie’s feet had been kept long for centuries, reflecting its historical use as fodder. During the Second World War concrete shelters had been situated under the gardens to offer protection from German air raids. In this way, the medieval university had begun to bear the scars of modern existence, as well as its fruits: only a few years later, the women of Cambridge were finally permitted to graduate.
Evie didn't think about any of this as she crossed the grounds. Instead, her brain kept time to the rhythmic crunch of frost-covered lawn beneath her lightly-booted feet. With every crisp, measured step, her weathered leather bag swung steadily against her hip, weighed down by the writing sample inside: nearly one hundred pages dissecting individuality and resistance in the works of de Staël on which Evie could not have done better, having received the highest mark possible. The bag also contained a letter of reference from Junior Fellow Kinross. This time Evie could have done better, but didn’t know she needed to.
Mimi Harrison had written to Evie earlier that fall in anticipation of her upcoming need for employment. Mimi had urged the young girl to accept a letter of referral from her husband, who had recently finished a three-year professorship at Jesus College and returned to Harvard along with his new wife.
“But I only ever met him once,” Evie had answered Mimi over the phone in the downstairs common room.
“Nonsense,” Mimi had replied with an indulgent lilt to her voice. “When I arrived in Hollywood twenty years ago, it was with a letter from my father’s former law partner, and I’d only met him one time more than that. Besides, Geoffrey desperately wants to help you.”
“But why? He don’t—I mean, he does…not…know me.” Evie often slipped back into Chawton vernacular when conversing with Mimi, whose friendship remained so rooted in their time together in the small farming village.
Mimi had laughed, always trying to keep things light with the serious young woman. “But he knows me, and he knows that I know a good egg when I see one.”
Still, Evie had refused. And still, Mimi had had the letter sent through, just as she often did with theatre tickets, and rail fare, and the many other things that she had tried to give the girl over the years. The generosity of Mimi Harrison, a famous film and stage actress, knew no bounds.
But neither did Evie’s pride. So today she carried the letter of referral from Professor Kinross instead. Kinross gave out many such letters each term, but poor Evie did not know that. She had been perfectly content when he had offered her one. She had done solid research work for him on his annotation of Vanity Fair, and he had called her capable and efficient. Surely that would be enough for Senior Fellow Christenson.
It was now 2:22 p.m. and Evie sat feeling smaller than ever in the large swivel chair that faced her entire future. Christenson put Kinross’s letter down, tapped the top of the one hundred pages on de Staël, and sighed.
“The research here…all these obscure women authors. Even de Staël is no George Eliot.”
Evie found this comment interesting, given Christenson’s noted expertise on the latter.
“After all, the cream always rises to the top, hmm?” He leaned back in his chair. “And the joint paper…on Mr. Thackeray…”
Evie sat up. She was particularly proud of the research work for Professor Kinross which she had completed alongside Stuart Wesley, another recent graduate. Kinross had commended her on the note-taking and impressive indices she had assembled to support his annotation. He had encouraged her to spend as much time with the original sources as possible, often stressing how critical accurate research was to the entire project.
“Your colleague Mr. Wesley contributed a large part, I understand.”
Evie sat up even straighter. “We both did.”
Christenson paused, his eyes narrowing against both her lack of demurral and the all-too-familiar letter of reference before him. Kinross did none of his students any favours with these rote little missives.
“Yes, well, I understand that you carried out the research and such, but the writing…” Christenson smiled, so genially and unlike him, that Evie finally grew concerned. “As you know, what I need is a certain facility with text, with, ah, language.” He gave the last word an extra syllable in the middle, and Evie became even more conscious of her rural accent, which was apt to shorten everything instead.
“What you may not know is that I am assuming Vice-Master Bolt’s role in the New Year. Less time for my own writing, more’s the pity.” Christenson picked up the papers before him, tapped their bottom edges decisively against the blotter on his overflowing desk, then passed the entirety of a term’s work back to her.
“Thank you, Miss Stone, for your time.” He gave a cursory nod at his closed office door, which everyone knew to be his cue for dismissal, and Evie gave a quick nod back before hastily leaving.
On the walk home, it started to snow. The windows of the shops and pubs glowed from within, their golden electric lustre in soft contrast to the early-winter darkness making its descent. For Evie, however, the day was fully, and terrifyingly, at an end. She did not feel the tiny flakes of snow falling about her hatless head and shoulders—did not notice the figures scurrying home, the baskets full of rationed goods, the brown-paper packages hinting at the Christmas week just ahead. Instead, she pulled her coat tighter about her, wondering what had just happened, mulling it over again and again. She now knew she had missed something, not just in her time with Christenson, but with Wesley, and Kinross, all along. She felt a sense of distrust starting to form from her confusion, which bothered her by its sudden—and delayed—appearance.
Evie knew that she had worked harder than any other student these past three years. Her marks reflected that. Christenson would never find a better research assistant. And yet.
She stopped in front of the window of the Castle Inn. Inside she could see students laughing and drinking, piled about different tables, celebrating the last day of term and the Christmas festivities already in full swing. She stood there for a while and watched through the frosted glass, confident that no one would notice her small, indistinct form against the snow-speckled night.
When Evie returned to her bedsitter at the very north end of Castle Street, her mother’s weekly letter lay on the worn carpet a few feet from the threshold of the door. Evie put the leather satchel on its anointed hook on the coatstand which contained nothing else but her sturdy black umbrella, then stood aimlessly in the middle of the sitting room, looking about. She would need to start packing up soon. She had no idea for where.
Her brothers were all scattered far from home except for the youngest, Jimmy, who was only ten. Their father was dead these past two years from an infection in his gimp right leg which he had shown the local doctor one week too late. After that, the family farm had finally been sold, and her mother and Jimmy had moved to a small two-up, two-down terrace house on the main village road. But Evie had not worked this hard to go backwards.
She walked over to the upright dresser, the top drawers of which she had fashioned into a makeshift filing cabinet, having few clothes to keep inside. She pulled open the first drawer and started at A. She proceeded apace, going through each carbon copy, each sheet of notepaper, each trade card and pamphlet that she had retained over the years. She never threw anything out.
When she got to AL, she found the small trade card for a Mr. Frank Allen, Rare Books Acquirer, Bloomsbury Books & Maps, 40 Lamb’s Conduit, Bloomsbury, London. Mr. Allen had been introduced to Evie by their mutual contact, Yardley Sinclair, during the landmark dispersal of the Chawton Great House library by Sotheby’s in the fall of 1946. Along with Mimi Harrison, Yardley Sinclair and Evie had been founding members of the Jane Austen Society, which had acquired the library as part of its efforts to save the Chawton cottage where Austen once lived. During the auction, Allen had bid on and acquired a handful of nineteenth-century books for the London store that employed him. As assistant director of estate sales at Sotheby’s at the time, Yardley had proudly been showing Evie off to all the various dealers and agents in attendance at the sale. She recalled how Allen had briefly complimented her meticulously handwritten catalogue, which Yardley also often showed around.
Evie stared at the embossed silver lettering on the cool white card, running her stubby, ink-stained fingers over the raised name. She could hear the bells of Great St Mary’s strike half past three. Standing there in her woollen coat, she felt the cold draught entering the room from the window she had left open. The satchel dangled from its lonely perch; the letter from her mother remained unopened on the floor. She heard the word lan-gu-age still reverberating in her head, then took a deep breath with all the assurance and certainty she could muster.
She would not be going backwards; she would not be looking back.
