Chapter Twenty-Nine
I took Maggie’s advice, and for the next few days, I went to ground.
I stayed in my room, where thankfully nobody bothered me; it seemed that when I was out of sight, I was also out of mind.
For food, I crept to the kitchen and stole bits of bread and cold cuts of meat late at night when the servants were asleep, like some sort of carnivorous mouse with a larger-than-average appetite.
I knew that pretty soon the Bingleys and Darcy would leave Netherfield to go to London, at which point I’d be able to relax a little and return my attention to trying to read myself home.
In the meantime, I was determined not to do anything to risk interfering with Jane Austen’s story.
But while I may have been helping protect the plot, all that time alone with my own thoughts wasn’t helping protect my mental health.
I spent hours every day imagining how traumatic it must have been for Bianca to watch me disappear in agony, and how lonely Mrs. Atallah must be without me or Darcy in the house.
What would happen to Mr. Wickham without me there to feed him?
And then there was Nick. The poor man had lost his mother to Pride and Prejudice, and now he’d had to watch me being sucked into the story as well.
I tortured myself by repeatedly running over our interactions in my head, seeing them through fresh eyes now that I knew what Nick had been through.
No wonder he’d been so rude about romance novels, given one of them had literally stolen his mother.
And what I’d taken to be his obsession with destroying Darcy had actually been Nick trying to save the character from disappearing, and save Pride and Prejudice along with it.
All along, Nick had been trying to help me, and yet all I’d done was be rude to him and then run away and hide.
And now that I’d finally realized Nick wasn’t the bad guy—quite the opposite, in fact—I may never see him again…
may never see any of my friends and loved ones again.
Maggie and I had agreed to meet on Sunday morning at her cottage, so I snuck out of Netherfield House just after sunrise and set off toward Meryton.
It had rained heavily for the past few days, and the ground was boggy, making my progress slow, but eventually I made it to the village.
Maggie had told me she lived in a deserted cottage close to Longbourn, so I asked a tradesman for directions to the Bennet’s estate and then set off along the river toward it.
The rain had started up again, and by the time Longbourn came into view, I was soaked and shivering with cold, yet it took me another half an hour of exploring before I found the run-down cottage tucked away in some woods to the south of the house.
Smoke was coming out of the chimney, and as I approached, I heard the sound of a woman humming tunelessly inside.
I chuckled, remembering what Nick had said about his mum being a terrible singer.
I knocked on the front door, and a moment later Maggie appeared, wearing an apron over her dress and flour on her cheek. She smiled when she saw me, and my heart lurched; her eyes twinkled in exactly the same way as Nick’s.
“Come inside and dry off,” she said, ushering me in through the door. “I’ll make us some tea.”
Maggie insisted I take off my wet dress, which she hung in front of the fire to dry while she boiled water in a copper kettle.
Once I was wrapped up in a blanket and sitting at the table, I took in the cottage properly for the first time.
It appeared to be one small room, with a fireplace and old sideboard at one end, a wooden table and chair in the middle, and a neatly made single bed at the far side.
Still, Maggie had obviously gone to some effort to make the place homely, as there were fresh flowers in a jug on the table and a few hand-drawn sketches on the mantel above the fire.
“Have you lived here since you arrived in the book?” I asked as Maggie stoked the fire.
“No, I didn’t find it immediately,” she said.
“When I first got here, I stayed in a spare room at Longbourn, much as you’re doing at Netherfield.
I was in such a panic about being stuck here and had no idea what was going to happen when Jane Austen’s plot ended, so I wasn’t really thinking long-term.
But then the story reset after Elizabeth and Darcy got married, and I found myself back at the start, so I realized I needed to find somewhere I could live where I was out of the way.
I came across this place on a walk one day, discovered it was abandoned, and have been here ever since. ”
“How many times have you lived through the story now?”
“This is my seventh time, I think.”
I shivered at the thought. Was this what my life was going to be like from now on—hiding in the margins of the story, stuck in a never-ending loop I could never escape from? It was such a depressing idea that tears welled up in my eyes.
“It’s not as terrible as it sounds,” Maggie said, and I felt her hand rest gently on my shoulder.
“As long as you don’t interfere with the plot, you can survive here OK.
I do laundry for a seamstress in the village, so I earn enough money to buy food and candles, and I sneak into Longbourn to borrow books from Mr. Bennet’s library.
It’s a simple existence, but not an entirely unpleasant one. ”
“But what about friends? You said Elizabeth barely notices you, so who do you talk to?”
The kettle over the fire had started to whistle, and Maggie removed it and placed it on the table.
“My first full year here, I tried to make friends. Not the main characters—I already suspected that was too risky—but some of the villagers on the outskirts of the story. But people were always a bit funny with me; I think they knew I was different, even though they weren’t sure why, and so I found it hard to connect properly with anyone.
Then the story reset and everyone forgot they’d met me, so I was back to square one.
To be honest, I found it all a bit dispiriting, so these days I don’t really bother. ”
“So you’re all alone?” I said, hoping she didn’t hear the dread in my voice.
“I have people I converse with, like the lady I do laundry for and the man in the butcher’s, but that’s about it. It’s safer this way.”
Maggie started to pour hot water into the teapot, and I watched her mutely.
Over the past few years, I’d allowed my life to become a pretty solitary one: I didn’t date, and aside from my weekly night out with Bianca, I never went anywhere except work.
I’d been content with my quiet existence, but now I realized how much I loved and needed the people in my life.
Because it wasn’t just Bianca: There were her relatives, who treated me as one of their own, and Mrs. Atallah, who may be eccentric but who I now realized was like family too.
Enzo and the team at work were always there for me, and then there was Nick…
The tears returned to my eyes, and I blinked them away.
My life in London may have been small, but it had been mine, and now I was stuck in someone else’s story—alone except for Maggie.
“Don’t you miss your old life?” I asked quietly.
Maggie looked at me sharply. “Of course I do. There’s not a day goes by where I don’t long to hug my son again, or set foot inside my beloved bookshop, or pick up the phone and call my best friend.
But for my first few years here, I tormented myself with trying to get back to our world.
It consumed my every waking moment; all I could think about was how I could fix what I’d done, and I made myself ill with my obsession about getting home.
But eventually, I came to accept that it’s impossible.
There is no way to reverse the book magic, and I’m stuck here—we’re stuck here—until either we die or the story implodes. ”
“What do you mean, the story implodes?” I asked.
“Well, we still don’t know what damage recent events have caused. I’ve been keeping an eye on the plot over the past five days, and while most of it seems to be carrying on as normal, some things still aren’t totally right.”
“Like what?”
Maggie turned away from me as she fetched two teacups and saucers from the sideboard. “On Wednesday, the day after we met in Meryton, the Bennet sisters and Mr. Collins always go to Mr. and Mrs. Phillips’ house for dinner in the evening.”
“That’s the scene where Wickham tells Elizabeth the lies about his and Mr. Darcy’s history, right?” I said.
“Exactly. I stood in the shadows outside the house to see Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty, Lydia, and Mr. Collins arrive in the carriage, but there was no sign of Mary, and I heard Jane tell their aunt that her middle sister had a chill and their mother had kept her home.”
I frowned. “But Mary missing one dinner doesn’t matter, does it? She’s pretty insignificant to the story.”
“But what worries me is why she was ill. I’ve lived through the narrative many times now, and each time things are exactly the same: Mary is always at that dinner, even if she has no part to play in it, so why did she miss it this time?
My guess is that something in the story has changed, either because Darcy spent too long in our world or because you’re here now.
And maybe the change is small and insignificant, but what if it’s not? ”
“OK, but you said yourself that the story will reset after Elizabeth and Darcy’s wedding,” I said. “Once we get to that point, we’ll go back to the beginning and Darcy will forget I ever existed, Mary won’t catch a chill, and then the plot will play out as it should forevermore.”
“That’s what normally happens, yes,” Maggie said.
“But what if your interference in the scene in Netherfield the other day means Darcy doesn’t fall in love with Elizabeth like he should?
If that happens, he might not be motivated to save Lydia when she elopes with Wickham; then Elizabeth will never change her mind about Darcy, they won’t get married, and the story won’t have its happy ending.
And if that happens, I have no idea if it will restart again or… ”
Maggie trailed off, but her meaning was clear: or the book would stop existing, and we’d stop existing with it.
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” she said with a sigh. “Anyway, would you like something to eat? I baked some rolls this morning and I have some damson—”
“No, I don’t want any food,” I interrupted. “Maggie, we can’t just sit here and calmly eat breakfast if you think we’re in danger of being destroyed. We have to get out of this book!”
She gave me a small, sad smile. “I told you, it’s impossible. I spent years trying to get home and nearly killed myself in the process. Trust me, the only thing we can do now is keep out the way and hope everything sorts itself out.”
“Maybe your attempts didn’t work before, but there are two of us now, so perhaps we can work out how to get back together?” I leaned across the table and grabbed Maggie’s hand. “Tell me everything you tried, please, because—”
She pulled her arm away, stopping me mid-sentence. “You’re wasting your time, Zoe. I’m sorry to sound defeatist, but without a copy of Pride and Prejudice, we can’t read ourselves out of here. And if we try any other way, we run the risk of damaging the story even more.”
“So you’re saying we just have to give up and accept our fate?”
Maggie looked at me, her eyes full of sorrow. “I’m really sorry, but that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I leaned back in the chair, pulling the blanket around my shoulders, and for several minutes we sat in miserable silence.
So this was it, then: We had to sit and wait for the next twelve months, or however long it took for the entire novel to play out, holding our breath in the hope that it stayed on course.
I hated the idea of being so helpless, but I also had to trust Maggie.
She knew how this book magic worked much better than I did; plus, I definitely didn’t want to risk causing any more problems in the story.
Maggie began to pour the tea, and my eyes moved over her shoulder to the fire roaring behind her.
On the mantel above it were the pencil drawings I’d spotted when I first arrived, but I’d not looked at them properly.
Now I saw that they were all sketches of the same thing: a young man with a chiseled jawline and slightly floppy hair, staring out at me with the same large, piercing eyes as his mother.
I jumped up from the table so quickly that tea spilled everywhere.
“Maggie, I can’t just give up! I’ve done that too many times in my life.
When things got hard, I told myself I wasn’t good enough, and allowed other people to convince me I was wasting my time and there was no point even trying.
But Nick was the one who told me I was wrong.
He said it’s better to keep trying and failing than to give up on something you love; and I know you love your son, Maggie.
So please, for Nick’s sake if not your own, let’s keep trying to get home. ”