Chapter 5 #2
“Maybe I do,” she said with faux defensiveness.
“Maybe I haven’t figured everything out yet.
” The way she boldly met his gaze… It seemed like another challenge.
Only, he wasn’t sure what the challenge was, and whether she was issuing it to him or herself.
“Does anyone, ever?” she added, fanning herself.
“Are you feeling hot, all of a sudden? I’m feeling hot.
” Her cheeks were looking a lot rosier. “Jane Austen must have had a lot figured out, the way she wrote.”
“Ah, and she never married, yeah? So maybe that’s a clue.”
“She was proposed to once, long before she was published.” Amelia stripped off her coat with a speed that suggested an urgency of an entirely different sort.
And now Tom realized that lying down while she sat cross-legged, looking down at him with her hair falling over her cheeks, was as intimate as eyeballing her face to face.
Like he was lying in bed and she was leaning over him, which wasn’t a terrible thought. If he reached up and pulled her down…
“She said yes, straightaway,” Amelia continued, and Tom had to mentally shake himself to focus on her words and not her lips, which seemed to have reddened along with the rest of her.
Jane Austen’s proposal. She was talking about Jane Austen’s marriage proposal.
“But the next morning she changed her mind. No one knows why. She was twenty-six, so it was a bold call for a woman of her era. The guy went on to have ten kids with the next woman he asked, so it was just as well for the rest of us that she didn’t. ”
“Good for her. I think back to the girlfriends I had in my twenties, and I shudder to think how miserable we’d have been if we’d jumped in and got married. I know plenty of people do it happily enough, but…”
“‘It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life,’” Amelia quoted in an endearing faux English accent. “Pride and Prejudice.”
“Ha! You see? Who says that?”
“Charlotte, Elizabeth’s best friend. ‘Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.’ That’s another one of hers.
Even in Austen, the truly happy relationships are the exceptions.
Oh man, I’ve turned into a Charlotte!” She playfully swiped at him.
“Stop destroying my Austen fantasies, you heartless rogue.”
“I do believe you’re shattering your own illusions.
” Oh, the irony of them whining about the impossibility of love while he was fighting an urge to carry her back to the four-poster Chippendale in the guest room that she’d sprawled so magnificently over…
Abruptly, he sat up, pulled the cork out of the open bottle and went to refill her glass.
“Wait, don’t!” she said, suddenly panicked. “Sorry, I just…”
“Are you … feeling all right?”
“Fine.” She removed her jumper with the same urgency of her earlier strip, leaving her in a thin, fitting top that revealed curves he’d until now only been able to guess at.
And his guesswork hadn’t come near to doing justice to the reality.
She wasn’t about to make her apologies and leave, was she?
It turned out he rather desperately wanted her to stay.
When was the last time he’d had a conversation that wasn’t about chattels, boxwood hedging, or plumbing?
She could play Elizabeth to his Darcy any day.
A high-pitched wail shot through the room, and Amelia gasped. Tom touched her knee. “Just the wind.”
“That was the wind?”
“It must have turned northwest. Miss Havisham likes to play tunes sometimes. In a gale, the whole place turns into an off-key pipe organ. Some days, you can have entire conversations with the chimneys. They hum and moan and whistle. Oh God, I’m starting to sound mad.”
Amelia hugged herself, looking around. “You can almost feel her sadness.”
“Amelia, just so you know, I can get Duncan to drop you into town whenever you like, and I can pick you up tomorrow and bring you back to get your car. It’s completely up to you how long you would like to stay.”
“I’d like to stay,” she blurted. “Uh, for a while longer. At least until I finish this drink.”
“Good. I’m glad,” he said, dropping the playful vibe and letting the sincerity show in his voice. “This is nice.”
“It is,” she said, with a genuine smile. “Please, go on.”
“Was I speaking?”
“Weren’t you? Something about Austen?”
Something about Austen. He could talk about Austen all night, if it made Amelia stay. And the thought of her staying the night…
“The thing I don’t get about the Austen fandom—no offense—is the glorification of the past,” he began, making it up as he went along.
“And I know that’s precisely what we’ve been doing here to try to keep this place going, but I can’t help scratching my head over it all.
All these people come here searching for a fantasy that doesn’t exist—never existed… Bollocks. Did that make any sense?”
“All of it. But I’m just as smiffy as you.”
He frowned. “Squiffy?”
“That too. To be fair, Austen’s books were widely considered fantasies even in her time. People worried that romantic novels would give young girls outlandish ideas, like, you know, that they could expect to marry a man who would treat them with respect.”
“Good lord, the whole system would have collapsed!” Tom was gratified when Amelia laughed, her eyes shining.
“People have this idealized version of the past, but I guarantee you that the average person from back then would look at our indoor loos and jumbo jets, and antibiotics and robot vacuum cleaners, and say, ‘I wish I lived then.’ The future is scary because it’s unknown, and the past is comforting because it’s known, but it shouldn’t be that way around.
It’s not like in the TV show. It probably never was.
Do you know, they literally made the grass look greener?
Which cheesed Duncan off because he knows every blade of grass on the estate by name.
” Amelia toyed with her bottom lip again, and Tom forced himself to look away in case he lost his already precarious train of thought.
“And then we go and stage a tiny part of the house with our last remaining valuables for the tours, to create an illusion that the entire place is like that. People happily fill in the rest with their imaginations—so long as they don’t go wandering off the path… ”
Amelia gave a cheeky, guilty grin. “Maybe they want to believe.”
Her eyes were lit with the glow they got when she spotted an antique fabric.
Passion was such an attractive trait, no matter what it was for.
His own eyes must look dull in comparison.
He hadn’t realized how much he missed that inspiration, that drive.
Going to bed at night already fired up about getting up again, to get stuck into plans or funding applications, or just to sit in the folly with a coffee and watch the morning sun suck up the dew.
There was no peace in the world quite like the peace out here.
“There’s definitely an element of wanting to time-travel when you come to a place like this,” Amelia continued, “but I like that you can come here and occupy multiple dimensions at once.” She stretched out on the carpet, taking in the room, which gave him carte blanche to blatantly stare at her.
Her hair fanned out around her face like she was floating in water.
“You can feel the layers here. It’s not about going back to a particular era, but feeling them all at once.
Look at this room.” She flung her arms up, and he’d subconsciously hovered so close he had to lurch away to avoid getting whacked.
“You can appreciate the feeling of history, of multiple lives having been lived in this room, while still living in the right now.”
The house creaked again. “I think she agrees.”
“I can see why you talk to her. She puts new meaning into the term ‘character home.’ You can almost feel her cycling through her emotions—or maybe that’s just the wine. And I do love her taste in green velvet wall hangings with silk embroidery.”
“Fabric really fires you up, doesn’t it?” And seeing her fired up fired him up. Not just in the obvious places, but in his chest, in the warmth that spread through his limbs… Even his bloody fingertips felt alive.
She met his eyes, with a look of surprise. “I’m happy!”
“Is that unusual?”
“It didn’t used to be, but … I came here to get out of my head—to the UK, I mean.”
He was getting ever more curious about what she was escaping from, but every time he asked, she deflected. “And how has that worked out?” he said, trying again.
“Not so well, until this afternoon. Turns out that traveling solo is all about being in your head. That’s why wine caught on, I guess. Gets you out of your head. And I am so enjoying being out of my head!”
Tom didn’t have the heart to burst her bubble by digging further. “Glad I finally found a good use for the family wine collection.”
“You hadn’t thought about drinking it before?”
“It’s hard to justify drinking a bottle of something that could buy you a new car.
Though when my brother and I were teenagers, we did steal the odd dusty bottle and take it somewhere secret to consume it.
You think this stuff is wasted on you? Which it isn’t, by the way.
But I’ve always considered the wine cellar to be the most useless of my forebears’ various collections. ”
“Oh, I don’t know. I consider wine very useful.
Especially right now…” She gazed at him with a meaning he hoped like hell he was deciphering correctly.
She wasn’t the only one who was feeling happy for the first time in a long time.
If a genie popped up right now and gave him the option of living in this afternoon forever, he’d take it.