Day 7
After breakfast, the gentlemen went shooting, and Aunt Saffronia was busy helping Miss Heartwright move into Pembrook Park.
Apparently, whatever charms the Cottage had held were worn to tatters.
After the sausage-and-jellied-egg breakfast, Jane and Miss Charming sat alone in the morning room.
They stared at the brown-flecked wallpaper.
“I’m so bored. This isn’t what Mrs. Wattlesbrook promised me yesterday.”
“We could play whist,” said Jane. “Whist in the morning, whist in the evening, ain’t we got fun?”
The wallpaper hadn’t changed. Jane kept an eye on it all the same.
“I mean, is this what you expected?” asked Miss Charming. “What were you hoping for?”
The question was so sincere, Jane couldn’t help answering with equal sincerity.
“Everything. A new me. A better me. A better world. Love. A fantasy so perfect and yet unsustainable that it brought me firmly back into reality so I could get unstuck and claim the life I’ve wanted since I was a little girl. ”
Miss Charming squinted at her. “That was a lot of words.”
“Um, what were you hoping for?” asked Jane.
“Some smooching at least,” said Miss Charming. “And if I had my druthers, a little over-the-clothes action.”
Jane nodded. She had not remotely anticipated that answer and yet felt no surprise.
“Why did you choose to come here? Men exist everywhere, so why pick notoriously prudish 1816?”
Miss Charming reclined lower, her head against the back of the sofa, laying her legs out straight. “Basically, I wanted something different than before. As different from where I’d been as I could get.”
Jane leaned lower, too, letting the tops of their heads touch, and whispered, “Solitarily, Miss Charming.”
“So, was your ex slicker’n owl poop, too, and out cheating on you with every bendy straw that passed by his fatty eyeballs?”
Jane felt a jolt of warning and glanced around, wondering if Mrs. Wattlesbrook had the room bugged. “I am Jane Erstwhile, niece of Lady Templeton, visiting from America,” she said robotically.
Miss Charming sighed and scrambled to her feet. “I’ll start ripping off the wallpaper if I sit here another tick of that pissy little clock. I’m going to go find a gent before Heartwreck gets her claws into all of ’em.”
Jane’s gaze jumped from wall to window, and she watched for hints of the men outside, wondering if Captain East thought her pretty, if Colonel Andrews liked her as much as Miss Heartwright, if Mr. Nobley—
Stop it, she told herself.
But the events of the past night rose up unbidden—Mr. Nobley’s odd outburst, his insistence on dancing with her, the zingy touch of his hand, and then his abrupt withdrawal after one dance.
He truly was exasperating. But, she considered, he irritated in a very useful way.
The dream of Mr. Darcy was tangling in the all-too-human reality of Mr. Nobley.
As she gave herself pause to breathe in that idea, the truth felt as obliterating as her no-Santa-Claus discovery at age eight.
There is no Mr. Darcy. Or more likely, Mr. Darcy would actually be a boring, pompous pinhead.
Wait a minute, why was she always so worried about the Austen gentlemen, anyway?
What about the Austen heroine? Even poor Fanny Price held her ground and waited for her Edmund to come to her.
And Elizabeth Bennet—wonderful Elizabeth!
Remember how quickly she learned her lesson after Wickham and laughed it off?
Remember how easily she let the disappointment of Colonel Fitzwilliam slip off her shoulders?
Jane was shocked to recognize in her old self more of the anxious, marriage-obsessed Mrs. Bennet than the lively Elizabeth.
With her father’s estate entailed away, marriage was not a convenience for Elizabeth—it was quite nearly life-and-death.
And even so, she managed to laugh and spin and hold out for real love.
Jane now accepted that she couldn’t give up on love entirely.
And she was ready to live out the intensity of her fantasy before flinging it off forever, starting right . . . now !
The mantel clock ticked. Nothing moved outside the window. She scratched her neck and sighed.
Chased by restlessness and anxious for action of any kind, Jane ran up to her bedroom to see if Molly had replied.
Matilda came in to clean, so Jane tucked the phone into her bodice and stole down to the library.
From a seat near a window in the corner, she was hidden from the rest of the room and the sight line of the corridor.
Stealth was her name, contraband electronic messages her game.
Jane,
Couldn’t turn up a thing on Martin Jasper of Sheffield, at least of our generation.
Clean living, maybe? Did search on Henry Jenkins of Clapham.
No priors, no dependents. Studied theater and history at Cambridge.
I read through transcripts of his divorce proceedings from four years ago—whoa, baby!
Talk about melodrama. So, this Henry seems like a real rock, didn’t let himself get baited by the barrister, but the stuff he recounts—his wife slept with the neighbor, he forgave her, she sold his car to pay for an impetuous weekend in Monaco, he forgave her, but when she shish-kebabbed his pet fish because he said he’d like to have children, he finally called it quits.
Said stuff like he still loved the woman he married and always would.
Then her testimony—she’s the heartbroken, cast-off woman, but as soon as the other side starts in, she cracks, screaming like a banshee, and gets thrown out of court.
Who is this guy that he stayed married to her for five years? You’ll have to give me the scoop.
I miss you. I think it’s great that you’re there. I think you’re very brave. Let’s hit the coast after you get back. I’ll lose Phil and the twins for the weekend, girls only. And if you run into Mr. Darcy, tell him I want my black nightie back.
xxxo,
Molls
Jane was reading it for the fifth time when she heard voices on the other side of the bookcase. Her hands trembled as she turned off the phone, stashing it down her cleavage. When she calmed herself enough to listen, a man and woman’s conversation echoed dully off the books.
“Miss Charming, I . . . I . . . that is—”
“Yes, Colonel Andrews?”
“Miss Charming, forgive my impudence, but I must speak with you alone or go mad. I have been wrestling with my feelings for some time. Your beauty, your grace, your wit and whimsy, they befuddle my brain and set my heart to pounding straight through my waistcoat. Blimey, but I . . . I . . .”
Sounds of pacing.
“Yes, yes, go on.”
“It is not easy, being the son of an earl. So much is expected of me, of the way I behave. I am known in town as a rake, a rogue, a rascal . . .”
Jane shook her head. Austen, she was sure, would not have written such dialogue.
“Is that so, Colonel Andrews?”
“Well, perhaps I was once, but I’ve grown tired of the act. I feel—deeply. I long to have someone who knows the true me, who I can be alone with and share my thoughts. And I have come to feel, with no uncertainty of the heart, that you are that someone. That someone is you, Miss Charming.”
“Oh, Colonel Andrews!”
“My dear, dear Lizzy.”
Giggling, sounds of smooching and whispers.
“You must tell no one—please, Lizzy. I am sworn to another, an odious widowed countess, but there must be a way out of the arrangement. I will find a way. I must have you, Lizzy. You are enchanting.”
More giggling, some whispering, the sound of someone departing, and then Miss Charming’s voice singing to herself a self-satisfied little tune, “Ha ha-ha ha ha-ha,” before she left as well.
Jane rested her forehead against the bookshelf and breathed out a very slow laugh.
Well, she thought, overhearing that proposal should be about as good a tonic to her fantasy as any.
Was that her end goal? An actor’s hackneyed declarations of phony love?
If she had been the object of Colonel Andrews’s odes, it certainly wouldn’t be enough to crack her addiction.
She needed more, but what? To face a sincere declaration of love and reject that?
She certainly couldn’t expect herself to fall sincerely in love with one of the actors, any more than she could expect an actor to fall in love with her.
She walked out of the library in a daze, trying to imagine an ending, any ending, that would solve everything. And she couldn’t help wondering, if Ideal Client Miss Charming could get any gent she wanted, why hadn’t she chosen Mr. Nobley?
The day was sunny, an ultramarine sky that swore winter would never come, and the servants arranged teatime on the manicured lawn.
As Colonel Andrews set up a croquet course, Jane observed a blushing Miss Charming looking at him knowingly, coy and self-conscious.
Colonel Andrews shot her secretive smiles, confirmations of what had happened in the library.
Colonel Andrews really was delightful, and Jane was a little sorry he was off the market. Still, there were two gentlemen left, and Miss Heartwright couldn’t have them both. Well. She probably could. But Jane channeled some Great-Aunt Carolyn fierceness and determined not to let her.
Captain East was standing alone, his back to the group, and Miss Heartwright sat in a chair at the tea table, melancholy and seemingly unaware of Captain East’s nearness.
Strangely, Mr. Nobley (was he Henry Jenkins?) seemed in highest spirits.
For him, at least. He took up a croquet mallet with almost a smile and kept something of it around his mouth the whole game.
“Shall we play in pairs?” he proposed.
“Most excellent notion, Nobley,” said the colonel. “I say, Miss Charming, may I tempt you to accompany me once more into the breach?”
“Only if you show me how to use your mallet against the balls, Colonel Andrews,” said Miss Charming, her eyebrows raised so high they twitched.