Chapter 30 #2
“Anything you want.”
With a light touch on her elbow, Annabel helped Jane stand to rejoin their stroll. They were quiet as they walked, each having her own thoughts. It was enough to feel Jane’s arm threaded through hers, to share this space in time, this green, this sun, this air, this sky.
“I do have one regret,” Jane said after a while. “A very small one.” She looked at Annabel with a girlish twinkle in her eye. “I’ve never told anyone.”
Annabel stopped. “I’d be honored.”
“Well, I don’t mind telling you that, in my day, I was quite the dancer. But never did learn to waltz. And now have it on good authority that we may be waltzing in these parts come next year . . .”
Jane gazed into the distance, wistful. She had the look of a woman who suspected that her illness might overcome her and wished neither to deny nor yield to it. But melancholy has a mind of its own.
Annabel, who felt it too, sparked with an idea. “I know how. To waltz.” She put a hand on her heart. “Let me show you.”
Jane drew back and giggled. “Oh, I couldn’t. Why, I haven’t danced in years.”
“All the more reason!” Annabel faced her. “It’s easy, you’ll see. I’ll be the man.” She extended her right hand high in the air, palm facing upward, an invitation.
Jane hesitated, but only briefly. The idea seemed to revive her. “And what a lovely man you make.”
Jane rested her left hand on Annabel’s right, her posture perfect, shoulders relaxed.
“And now, if I may,” said Annabel, “I’ll put my other hand just below your shoulder blade, to gently guide you.”
“You may,” said Jane.
Annabel curved her arm gracefully around to touch Jane’s back. “Then you rest your free hand lightly on my shoulder.”
When Jane did so, Annabel drew her gently near, their bodices touching.
“Oh my,” said Jane.
“It’s a close hold, called the ‘waltz frame.’ But it’s a simple box step, three-quarter time, more gliding than stepping. We’ll take it slowly.”
“I’m atingle already.”
“Now, the man starts with right foot forward, the lady, with left foot back . . . one-two-three, two-two-three, three-two-three . . .”
Inside, Lady Gidding-Wedmore and Fanny had retired to their respective sofas, when suddenly they heard laughter and humming coming from the garden. Fanny got up first to look.
“Good Lord! Look at them now!”
Lady Gidding-Wedmore joined her and gasped. “Oh my! Is that . . . ? Are they . . . waltzing?”
“I believe that is precisely what they’re doing. Look how close they are!”
“Such an intimate and indecorous exhibition,” said Lady Gidding-Wedmore, with a kerchief to her mouth to hide her titillation. “We must not speak a word of this to anyone.”
“We shan’t,” said Fanny.
But they couldn’t take their eyes away, nor deny witnessing unbridled joy.
Outside, the dancers had progressed to a waltz turn, as Annabel hummed, da-da-da-dum-bum-bum-dum-bum-bum . . . “You’ve got it! You’re a natural!”
Jane tossed her head back and laughed. “This is how I learned to dance, with my sister, Cassandra!”
“I have a Cassandra too!” said Annabel.
“Ah, those were happy years!”
“They were!”
The two of them were giddy as young girls. Da-da-da-dum-bum-bum . . .
Annabel signaled an underarm turn, which Jane executed with poise, followed by a grand finish. They let go of each other and stepped apart. Jane curtsied; Annabel bowed. When Jane caught her breath, she looked at Annabel with a special gladness.
“Wow.”
Annabel was glad in return to have given her some small pleasure. Then she curtsied deeply. “‘Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward.’”
Jane closed her eyes and tipped her head. “You have cheered me a good deal this afternoon, Miss Blake.”
“I’m so happy I have. After all you’ve given me.”
“In fact,” said Jane, “I had begun to wonder if my own novel-writing days were behind me. But perhaps I do have yet one more within me.”
Chills down Annabel’s spine. “I know with certainty, you do.”
“And if you so choose, Annabel Blake, I know that you do as well.”
Annabel closed her eyes, letting her words land.
***
Annabel and Jane trailed Lady Gidding-Wedmore and Fanny to her waiting carriage. They were arm in arm, still inseparable.
Annabel stopped suddenly. “Oh! I never thanked you for the lovely desk.”
They were several feet from where Jane’s driver waited. She pressed Annabel’s hands in hers.
“My dear Miss Blake, if you choose to write, it is more than a desk you’ll need. For you must never underestimate the strength of your own desire to transport you wherever it is you wish to go.”
The strength of your own desire.
The words swirled in Annabel’s head, delivered straight from the source, the person who’d formed her more than any other.
She hadn’t seen it herself, but here was the crux of the matter.
It was the reason the writing desk hadn’t worked, she knew the second Jane said it.
She would have thought it enough that the desk had belonged to her, or that she’d found and answered the first invitation to the ball, written her missives there.
But even those things weren’t enough to make of it a portal that would carry her through time and carry time to Kidlington.
It was the strength of her own desire all along. The magic that was missing.
Annabel hadn’t wanted to leave.
Astonished one last time, she looked deep into Jane’s hazel eyes, trying to say thank you with her own. But how do you thank someone for animating your entire existence and now, in real time, putting the finest point on it?
Annabel didn’t want to let her go but knew she couldn’t keep her.
When Jane was handed up and settled in with a minimum of fuss and a light summer blanket across her lap, the soft click of the carriage door felt unsettlingly final.
Fanny and her mother started back inside, but Annabel was frozen in place, clutching the back of her neck.
She ought to be hurrying back to Kidlington to tell Cassie and Billy what she now knew, why the portal was closed to them. But how could they understand?
You can’t change what you wish for.
No, there was something else at the back of her mind, niggling its way to the front.
The driver was climbing up top, taking the reins, when suddenly she called to him: “Wait!”
Annabel reached for the carriage door, opened it, and leaned in.
“Miss Austen?”
“Yes, Miss Blake.”
“I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t ask—”
“What is it?”
“It’s just, do you ever wonder whether Elizabeth, in the end, will be happy at Pemberley, with Darcy?”
A curious look crossed Jane’s face, a subtle arch of one brow, the edge of a smile.
“I write endings, dear, not guarantees.”