Free Jane Actually by Jennifer Petkus

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 book?”
    “Naw, it’ll look like …” the young woman glanced around and from some recess under the counter she produced a sheet of paper. “It’ll look like this.”
    It was a sample of a birth record with the recorded names as John and Mary Smith and their son John, printed on council letterhead and a place for the register to sign. It was legal looking enough, but hardly had the impact of what he needed.
    “I would like to order that, but I was wondering …