Jane Actually

entered, not moving quickly enough to find a seat and instead grasped a pole, her mind still wallowing in her failures.
    She thought several times a teacher would give her that talk and she would be released of having to follow a dream of which she no longer dreamed. But the talk never came and time and again, like right now, she realized ruefully, she would deny her doubts. She put herself out there precisely because she was afraid not to. Because if she didn’t try she’d hug herself right out of existence.
    Anyone watching her would have seen an actress registering determination, but privately it felt like resignation.
I will keep trying because not trying is too awful to contemplate.
And until then, she knew that she must find some work as her savings and scholarships were insufficient.
Besides, what better acting experience could there be than pretending to be someone who’s dead.
    1 WNYC is a public radio station in New York City and an affiliate of National Public Radio

Bath, England
Looking for traces of Jane
    C ourt smiled sweetly at the woman as she waited for him to don the gloves. The very young woman returned a blank stare. Clearly his charms were wasted on her so he concentrated on squirming his large hands into the small, latex gloves. They should be cotton archivist gloves, as the box packaging indicated, and he assumed they’d run out of those gloves and substituted medical supply gloves, size small.
    He could not jam his fingers completely into the gloves, leaving translucent appendages dangling from the end of each fingertip, but he held out his arms for the ledger anyway. The woman, not wearing gloves herself, put the ledger in his arms and told him he could sit at the desk behind him, and then left the counter.
    “Much obliged,” he said to the retreating back of the woman, who was quickly swallowed up by the stacks in the basement of the register office.
    He took the book over to the indicated desk and sat with his back to the counter. He tried opening the book, but it was an almost impossible task with the flubbery worms depending from his fingers and quickly pulled off the gloves. Then he looked inside his messenger bag, found one of the individually wrapped wet wipes he kept there, tore it open and cleansed his hands. The sharp smell of alcohol reached his nose, mingled briefly with the musty smell of the book and then evaporated.
    Finally he was able to open the book and feel the dry crinkle of the paper as he leafed through. He felt that little thrill that any but the most insensitive must feel when holding history. And that thrill was magnified when he reached the relevant dates in the record of births and deaths recorded in the book.
    Many of the records for the Bath and North East Somerset Council were already digitized, but the cutoff was 1837, and so he found himself actually leafing through the pages of this ledger for 1775, looking for a birth sometime in …
    And then he found the notice he’d sought on 23 February: the record of the birth of a son Robert to John and Mary Gorell.
    It has to be him, he thought, although he expected to find the name Gorrell spelled with two “Rs”, although he was hardly surprised at a minor discrepancy in spelling. He had to admit to a certain excitement. He hadn’t had time to follow up the rumour of the letter on his previous visit, but he hadn’t taken it seriously then. After all, precious few of Jane’s letters had survived Cassandra’s culling, 1 but this ledger entry actually provided an unbroken chain to Jane’s lifetime. Which made it all the more important he track down the letter.
    He used his camera to take a photo of the entry and reviewed it. Then he thought to take a larger photo that showed the entire ledger and then a photo of the counter with the words Bath and Somerset Council Records over it. After that, as the woman had not returned to the counter, he took the ledger from the desk, placed it on the counter and took another photo.
    Finally, he rang the bell on the counter and after a minute the woman returned, holding a meat pie in one hand, and asked him, “Wotcher want?” around a mouthful of pasty.
    “I need to make a copy—a certified copy—of this page. Is that possible?”
    The young woman swallowed and said, “We can print out a copy. It’ll take a few days and then we can mail it to you,” she said.
    He considered this and asked, “What will it look like. I mean will it look like a page from this