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I didn’t have to stumble very long. About five minutes after leaving the old converted palazzo where I’d taken a room, I found the shop. It was near the Via di Città, a central street where many of the best antiques and pottery shops were clustered. When I pushed open the heavy door to the shop, the familiar dusty smell of old paper and leather greeted me like a welcoming friend.

My intention was to look for books on Siena’s history. I was particularly interested in learning more about the famous Palio, a savage horse race dating back to the 1600s that still takes place twice a year in Siena’s main square, Piazza del Campo. But I never made it to the history section; I was waylaid by Jane Eyre.

Miss Eyre lay primly on a table along with two other women I knew and loved: Elizabeth Bennet and Dorothea Brooke. I considered the three of them old friends. To me they were the grown-up versions of the three girls who’d helped me through my childhood and adolescence: Jo March and Nancy Drew and the orphaned Mary Lennox, whose secret garden still exists in my head as a real place.

I saw all of them as curious, independent girls and women who through necessity went out in search of their destinies. I also was not unaware that all—with the exception of Elizabeth Bennet—were bereft of one or both of their parents; through death, through absence, through sickness. Growing up—and well past that—they were my companions and sometimes my grief counselors. So even though I was on holiday in Italy I could not pass by Jane Eyre without stopping to say hello.

I stood at the table skimming the book’s pages, stopping to reread this passage and that, as though I had no hidden agenda. But a part of me, I knew, was searching for a specific passage; the one describing the rainy night when the orphaned, ten-year-old Jane is delivered by carriage, alone and frightened, to the austere Lowood School. It still sent chills through me, the thought of Jane’s abrupt introduction into yet another cruel reality of the unprotected, motherless child.

I found what I was looking for on page seventy-five. As I read the words, I relived young Jane’s first encounter with Lowood and the stern woman who approached the carriage:

“ ‘Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?’ she asked. I answered ‘Yes,’ and was then lifted out; my trunk was handed down, and the coach instantly drove away.”

By this time I was sniffling and fighting back the tears. I got out a Kleenex and was dabbing at my eyes when a male voice, a very proper-sounding British voice, said, “See here, if you get the pages wet, you’ll have to buy the book.”

Startled, I looked up. The owner of the voice was a big man, tall and muscular, with thick reddish hair and a strong face dominated by a hawklike nose and a quizzical expression. In his arms he carried several heavy books that kept getting tangled with the hornrimmed eyeglasses hanging from a cord around his neck.

“I was planning to buy the book anyway,” I said sheepishly, thinking he was the shop owner.

“Well then, you’re in the clear, aren’t you?”

Was he serious? Or making fun of me? I couldn’t tell. Either way I found him annoying and was about to tell him so when he interrupted.

“Alas, I wasn’t so lucky. A week or two past, I dropped a book I was looking through, broke the spine—the owner made me pay for it. Worse luck, it was a book I can’t abide.”

“What book was it?” I asked, unable to beat back my curiosity.

“The Decameron. Paid a pretty penny for it, too. But that’s water over the dam, isn’t it? What have you there?” he asked, looking at the open book I held.

I hesitated, slightly embarrassed. The Decameron vs. Jane Eyre? No contest, I thought. But then my deep affection for the Brontë book took over, chasing away the snob in me. “Jane Eyre,” I said, catching myself just as I was about to add the word “sir”—as Jane might have done when addressing Mr. Rochester.

“Ah, yes. Quite a good book, that. It’s held up rather well, don’t you think?”

I was about to answer when an avalanche of books