Jane Actually

of his afterlife. He was somewhat more adventurous than Jane and told her stories of crossing the Himalayas and of being swept off peaks, his soul floating in the clouds for days before alighting near the Forbidden City of Peking. (She suspected some poetic license there.) He had also trekked the Amazon, hoping to catch sight of Maple White Land, a fictitious land created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 3 and populated with antediluvian monsters.
    After decades travelling, however, he again returned to Hampshire and found that his granddaughter had left for America, the bride of an American soldier. And so he had come to the United States in 1947 so that he might be near family, although he still travelled regularly.
    Jane told him of her wanderings as well, although hers was less of a
Boy’s Own
tale. She had been to India as well in 1891 and again shortly after Partition. And she had visited Hong Kong and Australia, although she had to admit that last story involved enough hardships to make it a suitable adventure tale. By the 1950s, however, she had returned to England and rarely left the British Isles until her trip to the US to meet Melody.
    She found Albert a charming correspondent. His background was more of the sod than of land but by his efforts he presented himself as a well-educated gentleman. They were both fond of Agatha Christie and exchanged tales of how infuriating it had been before the discovery of the afterlife to ever finish one of her stories. Albert was denied the ending of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by the not untimely death of the nonagenarian whose shoulder he peered over. He claimed, however, to have puzzled out the story, although it took him another year to find his logic proved correct.
    And they had both attended numerous performances of
The Mousetrap
, 4 and hampered by their inability to hear, it took many performances before they could understand how the killer could possibly be …
    A flicker of the interface notified her that she had another email. She found a message from Melody reminding her of their early meeting at the avatar agency the next day and a suggestion that she not take her customary late night stroll.
    She replied immediately, a little annoyed to be told she couldn’t go out. “If I wish to walk, I shall walk,” she wrote back, although her high dudgeon was tempered by the knowledge that she couldn’t open the door and must wait until Melody and Tamara returned.
    Eventually her indignation quieted and she was left to deal with the guilt she had tried to ignore:
I shall reply to Albert at my earliest opportunity and make a clean breast of it … tomorrow.
    1 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force
    2 The Second Great Fire of London, when the German air force dropped more than 24,000 high explosives and over 100,000 incendiary bombs on London. The iconic image is of St Paul’s Cathedral wrapped in smoke and flame, but which survived that night.
    3 In
The Lost World
    4 A murder-mystery play by Christie that has been performed continuously since 1952. Attendees are urged not to divulge that the killer is

Virtual Chawton
Jane Austen’s online home
    O n his iPad, Stephen pawed his way through the inventory, amazed again at the detail available at Virtual Chawton. He was now looking at the section detailing what the library at Chawton House no longer had in its collection or at the nearby Chawton Cottage. He knew, for instance, that Chawton Cottage 1 had for many years been used to house estate workers and even served as a village library and that most of the Regency era belongings had been lost, sold, or pilfered. The inventory attempted to catalogue what exactly had gone missing.
    The inventories of what remained and what had been lost were so extensive and so freely available, that Stephen marvelled at what information the Austen claimant could have provided that wasn’t public. The philanthropist who’d funded the project had inadvertently made it quite difficult for anyone to claim Austen’s identity.
    There was speculation that the curators of the library and/or the cottage had withheld some crucial piece of information or that the Austen claimant knew of some memento hitherto undiscovered. But examining the inventory was ultimately a dead, if fascinating end.
    He was sitting on the hallway floor, next to his advisor’s office door, when he heard Dr Davis’s heavy tread approaching, put his tablet to sleep and stood waiting for her. He watched with some appreciation his