Chapter Five
I didn’t take the man to hospital. I know you’ll read this and wonder what the hell I was thinking, but in that moment, all I could focus on was that someone who looked and sounded exactly like Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy had apparently come to life, and his appearance seemed to have coincided with me reading Pride and Prejudice drunk on the bus.
I could hardly abandon him in twenty-first-century London, given his presence here might be my fault, so I decided to take him back to my flat while I worked out what the bloody hell was going on.
As we walked, I subtly quizzed him on details from the novel.
His knowledge of the events up to and including the dinner in chapter ten were impeccable, but when I asked him about a ball at Netherfield, he claimed to have no knowledge of such an event.
Whatever was going on here, the man clearly believed himself to have come from the precise moment in the story I’d been reading last night.
“And how exactly did you arrive here?” I asked as we reached the end of my road.
“As I described earlier, I had just asked Miss Elizabeth Bennet to dance a reel, and she had denied my request and said something along the lines of daring me to despise her. At which point I felt a most uncustomary pain in my stomach, as if I were being pulled by my own entrails, and then I believe I must have lost consciousness. When next I opened my eyes, I was prostrate on the floor of one of your omnibuses.”
“And you’re sure this was last night?”
“Absolutely. My pocket watch has stopped, but when I remonstrated with the lady driver of the bus, she informed me it was five minutes to eleven, before unjustly accusing me of being a drunkard and evicting me from the transportation.”
Five to eleven must have been around the time I fell asleep on the top deck of the bus, as it was about ten past when I was woken up by a female driver. Had Darcy appeared while I was asleep and been evicted from the bus before I woke up?
We’d reached my building, and I unlocked the front door quietly.
“Try to keep your voice down so we don’t disturb my—”
“Habibti, there you are!” My landlady burst out of her flat in a cloud of velour and Chanel No. 5. “I want a word about your damn cat, who’s been pissing all over my—”
She stopped when she saw the man—Darcy, as I was now begrudgingly thinking of him—standing behind me.
“Ohh, a gentleman caller!” she said, her heavily penciled eyebrows shooting up in excitement.
Shit, I’d really hoped to avoid this. Mrs. Atallah’s third-favorite topic of conversation, after her arthritis and reality TV, was my dismal dating life. She’d spent much of the past two years trying to set me up with her great-nephew, Bilal, a GP from Staines.
“And who do we have here?” she boomed. For a small woman—Mrs. Atallah was barely five-foot-two—she had an extremely powerful voice.
Mr. Darcy opened his mouth to answer, but I grabbed him by the arm and began to pull him toward the stairs.
“Sorry, Mrs. Atallah, we’re in a bit of a hurry.”
“You don’t want to go too quickly,” she yelled after me. “I know you’ve not done this for a while, but slower is usually better!”
I winced, hoping Darcy wouldn’t realize what she was referring to.
“What an impertinent maid you have,” he said as he came up the stairs behind me. “Do you routinely allow her to disrespect you in such a manner?”
“She’s not a maid, she’s my landlady.”
On the top floor, I unlocked my door and stood aside to allow Darcy in.
He surveyed the cramped room with a disdainful expression, and I saw him take in the small dining table with its solitary chair, the desk in the corner that I’d bought years ago to write my novels on but now just held my towering Tbr pile, and my knickers drying on the radiator.
I hurried past him and snatched them up, stuffing them into a drawer.
“Are these the servants’ quarters?” he asked.
“No, this is my flat.”
“And you reside here with whom, your husband or relatives?”
“I live here alone. My parents aren’t around anymore, and the only men I’m interested in are the ones in books.” It was only when the words were out of my mouth that I realized their irony, given who I was talking to.
Darcy’s eyebrows shot up. “But that is… An unmarried woman living alone? I must leave at once, were I to risk irreparably damaging your reputation.”
I swallowed, wondering if it was time to start explaining what was going on. “This is 2026, Mr. Darcy. The world is very different nowadays to what you’re used to.”
“Two thousand and twenty-six!” He staggered as if he’d been hit. “Then are you to tell me that I have somehow traveled forth in time? But that is surely against all known laws of science and religion!”
I paused again. Should I go further and explain that he was actually a character who’d somehow been ripped from the pages of an early-nineteenth-century novel?
But the Mr. Darcy I knew from Pride and Prejudice was so proud that I suspected he’d be furious if I even suggested he was fictional.
No, for now, it was safest if I stuck to the time-travel explanation, which, as shocking as it clearly was to him, was presumably more palatable than the fact that he wasn’t even real.
“I don’t know how it happened, but I think you have traveled forward in time,” I said.
“Good God!” Darcy gasped. “Do your people regularly pluck unsuspecting gentlemen out of their evening repose and transport them hither? Tell me, is this some heathen witchcraft that has been cast over me?”
“No! I swear, we don’t practice witchcraft, and I’ve never heard of anything like this happening before.”
“But then, how is this possible? And more pertinently, how can we reverse this fiendish devilry and return me whence I came?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea.” As I said this, the bookseller’s brooding face flashed into my mind.
If Darcy’s appearance was somehow connected to the stolen copy of Pride and Prejudice, then maybe he could explain what was going on?
Ugh, but that meant I was going to have to talk to that aggravating man again.
“Actually, there is one person I can think of who might be able to help.”
“Well then, what are you waiting for? Make haste and summon this gentleman so that I may be relieved of this existential agony.”
I glanced at my watch: It was past six, which meant Baskerville Books would already be closed. “I can’t talk to him tonight, but I’ll go and speak with him first thing tomorrow.”
Mr. Darcy let out an anguished sigh and collapsed onto my sofa, then promptly jumped up again when the cushion let out an angry howl.
“What in the devil’s name is that?” he cried.
“Don’t worry, it’s just Mr. Wickham. He likes to sleep under—” I stopped when I saw Darcy’s cheeks flush red.
“The scoundrel George Wickham is here too?” he roared.
“Oh no, no, no, it’s just my cat.”
“But for what reason is a feline named Mr. Wickham? What business have you with that man?”
Oh crap, how was I going to explain this without having to return to the whole “You’re a fictional character” thing?
“Uh…I named him after the town, High Wycombe. I love it there…very, uh, handy for the Chiltern valley.”
He frowned, but the answer seemed to have placated him a little. Mr. Wickham, for his part, was glaring up at the newcomer with undisguised hatred. I shooed him off the sofa so Darcy could sit down.
“Can I get you something to drink? Some water, perhaps?”
“Do you have anything stronger? I am in need of fortification.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
I hurried into the kitchenette and pulled a half-drunk bottle of wine out of the fridge, poured a generous measure into a glass, and carried it back to Darcy. He took it with a sharp nod and downed the drink in one. I refilled the glass, and he drank that too.
“Is there an inn nearby where I may rest until you are able to rendezvous with this acquaintance of yours?” he asked as he handed me back the glass.
“There’s a Premier Inn in Camden, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
” I could just imagine Mr. Darcy storming down to reception and demanding they send up a butler to run him a bath.
No, until I could speak to the bookseller, I was keeping this man safely in my flat so he wouldn’t get himself into trouble.
Besides, as utterly bizarre as this was, I couldn’t deny that I was curious to spend a little more time with my and Mum’s dream book boyfriend before I worked out how to return him to wherever he’d come from.
“You can sleep here tonight, if you’d like? ”
Darcy looked around the room. “But where? I see nothing except, oh—” His eyes fell on my bedroom door, but I leaped forward to block his way.
“No, that’s my bedroom. You can sleep out here; my sofa converts into a bed.”
He looked seriously disgruntled at the idea, and I thought he was going to kick off again, but he just muttered something about disrespect and social rank.
“I’ll get you some bedding and you can make yourself comfortable. I imagine you must be exhausted after your, uh—journey.”
He nodded assent and I went into my room to fetch a pillow and some clean sheets. I located them and then headed back out to the living room.
“Here you go, Mr.—”
I stopped when I saw him. The events of the past nineteen hours had clearly caught up with Darcy, as he’d fallen asleep right where he was sitting, his head lolling forward on his chest. He’d have a horrible stiff neck if he stayed like that, so I crept over and carefully lowered him sideways so he was lying down.
I expected him to wake up and protest, but he was already in a deep sleep and made no noise except a small sigh as his head hit the pillow.
He was still wearing his shoes, so I gently pulled them off and laid a blanket over the top of him.
And then I stood back and stared at Mr. Darcy.
The Mr. Darcy. Asleep on my sofa, his face soft and vulnerable now that he was no longer scowling.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
This had to be a dream, triggered in my lonely unconscious by last night’s alcohol consumption, and any moment now I’d wake up with a pounding headache and pledge never to drink again.
But for this brief moment, I allowed myself to revel in the fact that the character I had loved since I was fourteen—the gorgeous, honest, loyal man who had set the bar for all other men I’d ever met—was here, in my flat, as warm-blooded and real as I was.
And then I went into my bedroom and barricaded the door shut in case he tried to murder me in the night.