The Ingenious Edgar Jones

by Garner, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780307409003
• ISBN10: 0307409007
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-04-06
• Publisher: Broadway Books

Summary

The skies of Oxford are aflame with meteors the night Edgar Jones comes into the worldclearly this porter's son, born in a small cottage in 1847, is no ordinary boy. While his mother is apprehensive about her restless, inquisitive child, Edgar's father believes without a doubt that his son is destined for greatness. As the years pass, it becomes apparent that Edgar has a unique talent: He is a born inventor, and his gift for making is matched by a fierce will. Edgar turns his back on the scholarly life his father had intended for him and apprentices himself to a blacksmith. It is not long before his ingenuity and metalworking skills bring him to the attention of a maverick professor at Oxford University, a bone collector with plans for a museum of natural history. Finally, Edgar has the opportunity to showcase the singular gifts he's learned in the hazardous soot and heat of the forge. But his great ability also becomes a curse, and his prominence is fraught with dangerboth for him and for his family. Set at the dramatic midpoint of the nineteenth century, in a world on the cusp of change,The Ingenious Edgar Jonesis an unforgettable coming-of-age story about the complexities of family life and the journey of one young man as he finds his place in a rapidly shifting world. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

ELIZABETH GARNER was born in Cheshire, England, and now lives in Oxford. The Ingenious Edgar Jones is her American debut.


From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpts

9780307408990|excerpt

Gardner: THE INGENIOUS EDGAR JONES

1

Close to the Spine

Oxford, 1847

The night that William Jones’s world changed began like any other.

At six o’clock he rose from his bed, made his prayers and his ablutions. At quarter past six he took tea and toast with his wife, Eleanor, in their front parlor. And at half past six, to the beat of the bell of the grandfather clock, he buttoned up his coat, pulled his hat down upon his head, kissed his wife, and lifted the latch of his front door. The steady pace of his footsteps marked out the half-hour walk across Oxford. It was a cold February night. The sky was clear and pinpricked with stars. The moon was nothing but a splinter, the curl of a stray feather stuck to the velvet dark of the sky. William pulled up his collar and watched the mists of his breath rope through the air before him.

He always loved the turning from the lanes of Jericho village out onto St Giles—the road that took him into the heart of the city. It was an invisible boundary between the quiet domestic world where he was a loving husband, and the University, where he was a watchman at the college gates. Every time he trod this path he would reflect how the change in the streets echoed the differences between his worlds. The roads of Jericho twisted in upon themselves, and a man could get easily lost. It was sometimes thus when he was sitting by the fireside with his wife. The conversation would ebb and flow between them, full of affection, and talk of the daughter that was blossoming in her belly. But there were times when there were shadowed corners in their speech, when a thing might not mean to Eleanor what it meant to him, and he would feel that he had taken a wrong turn down a dark alley, and was sitting in a room that seemed in outward appearance to be his home, but was not. Whereas when he emerged on the University streets, there stood the broad walls of the colleges, set shoulder to shoulder, their domes, spires, and battlements pointing magnificently toward the heavens. And here William knew exactly who he was: he was Porter Jones, warden of the nights, the man who watched over great minds as they slumbered. Here William had a place and a function, and no one could shift him from it.

But on this particular evening, the University was retreating from him as he walked through it. It was often thus when the moon waned. The college walls were swallowed by the night; the lamps that hung over the entrances illuminated them in piecemeal: the mouth of a doorway, say, or the curve of a window. As the scholars slept, it was as if the University simply dissolved itself, brick by brick, stone by stone, and drifted off into the night, leaving only a cornice here, a buttress there, and a few curious gargoyles peering down at the shattered world below.

But if William Jones understood one thing in life it was the ways of Oxford. He had been at the college his whole life. He had worked his way up from kitchen boy to scout to watchman. He had walked the streets at dawn, dusk, and all the hours in between. He knew every whim of the city, and nothing could break his stride. He marched past the expanse of shadow that was St John’s College and turned left down Broad Street. There was Balliol at his shoulder, and its companion, Trinity, with its vaulted roof and gated garden. And huddled next to Trinity, the White Horse tavern, with its belly of a window pushing out upon the street. Every night it framed the same tableau: roaring men, jostling against one another, their backs bent by the beams. It was still remarkable to William that it was here, two years previously, that he had found the woman who had made him a husband. But that was the truth, and all he could really conclude from it was that there was opportunity in any corner of this world if only one had the wits and the will to look for it.

William was by the c

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Excerpted from The Ingenious Edgar Jones: A Novel by Elizabeth Garner
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