Adventures with Jane and her Legacy 01 Jane Austen Ruined My Life (3 page)

"There's plenty of room for you," she'd blithely assured me over the phone. "Etienne and I spend most of our time in Paris anyway."

Etienne was the latest in a long line of male hearts that Anne-Elise had conquered. The fact that her mother was French had ensured her success in that department. The fact that my mother was a preacher's wife had ensured my lack thereof.

Adam reappeared in the hallway, this time clad in jeans and a polo shirt. His feet were still bare.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

Well, what did I expect? That he would be leaping for joy any more than I would?

"I was invited," I answered, gritting my teeth. "Where's Anne-Elise anyway?"

"In Paris. Otherwise I would have been wearing clothes," he said, a faint teasing light in his dark eyes. "She's due back in a few days."

"She told me I could use her place while I was here," I said, restating the obvious.

"I assumed so, since you had a key."

Suddenly I was at a loss. I was so tired that any semblance of clear thinking had completely deserted me. Why was Adam here? And why hadn't Anne-Elise told me that he would be?

"Hey, are you okay?" Adam moved toward me as I swayed
to the right. His hand came up to grab my arm and steady me. "You'd better sit down before you fall down." He tugged on my arm, pulling me down the hallway toward the kitchen. "There's a sofa in here. C'mon."

I followed unresisting, although I couldn't seem to uncurl my fingers from the handle of my carry-on. It rattled along behind me.

"Thanks," I said, but that one word cost me most of the energy I had left.

He led me to an overstuffed sofa upholstered in a sunny yellow linen. "Right here," Adam instructed. "Sit. Or better yet, collapse."

I did as instructed. The sofa caught me in its fluffy trap, and I succumbed.

"Do you want some tea?" Adam asked. "You look like you need it."

"When in Rome," I mumbled.

He smiled again, a flash of white against his olive skin, and moved away. Through bleary eyes, I followed his progress across the room, wondering if I was hallucinating.

Anne-Elise's kitchen was something out of an anglophile fantasy. Beamed ceilings, limestone walls that glowed richly in the morning light, an old-fashioned plate dresser filled with blue and white dinnerware. An Aga stove had been retrofitted into the enormous fireplace.

Adam stood there, his back to me, attending to the tea kettle. Between the kitchen area and the sofa where I lay, a well-scrubbed farmhouse table stretched almost the length of the
room. I could only be glad that Edward would never see it. The enormity of it would surely inspire him.

"I think I've died and gone to heaven," I said, although I hadn't really meant to give voice to the words inside my head.

"You haven't even tasted my Earl Grey yet," Adam answered.

"This is weird." I sank further into the couch.

Adam looked at me over his shoulder. "Ya think?" He laughed. "You weren't even the one who was caught with his pants down. So to speak."

In my exhaustion, this struck me as hysterically funny. I started to laugh so hard that soon I was shaking. And then, in an instant, the laughter and the shaking turned to full-on tears. I turned my face into the sofa pillows to try and hide my reaction from Adam.

"Hey." He was there, kneeling beside me, one hand on my shoulder. "Hey."

I thought I'd cried all the tears there were to cry in the months since I'd moved out of the home I'd shared with Edward. Clearly, I was wrong.

"I'm sorry," I said, my words muffled by the pillow.

"It's okay. It'll be okay." Adam rubbed his hand between my shoulder blades. I turned my head so that I could see him.

"I'm lying on a borrowed sofa, with no money to speak of, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I've just seen my former best friend in a towel. How in the world is that going to turn out okay?"

He really did have the nicest smile. His eyes lit with laughter.
"Well, number one, at least you have a sofa to collapse on, like a heroine out of some romance novel."

"True." I sniffed.

"Two, I'm something of an expert at living in London on the cheap. I'll show you the ropes. How does that sound?"

"Okay, I guess." I waited for him to address my third complaint. Now, though, he was the one who suddenly looked uncomfortable.

"Maybe we could just forget about that third thing," he said, turning slightly away from me.

"I'm sorry," I said, remorse surging inside me to swamp the self-pity. "I'm being a real pain." I pushed myself up to a sitting position. "I didn't mean to bother you."

"You didn't know I was here." He was looking at me again, this time with no discomfort. "Why don't you take a nap?" He glanced at his watch. "I'll wake you up in an hour or two."

"But I'm not supposed to ... The jet lag thing ..." By this point, I couldn't even complete my sentences.

"How long are you in London?" he asked.

I sighed. "Not long. A couple of weeks, maybe."

He nodded. "Plenty of time to get over jet lag. For now, just rest." He reached behind me and snagged an afghan draped across the top of the sofa. With a quick snap of his wrists, he unfolded it and spread it over me.

"But--"

He laid a finger across my lips. "Don't argue. Just do it."

All I could do was nod. The last thing I remembered, just
before I closed my eyes, was looking at Adam and wondering if his brown eyes had always been that warm and inviting. And why he kept looking at his watch.

When I awoke, the sun was streaming in through the west-facing windows of Anne-Elise 's kitchen. Adam was nowhere in sight. Obviously he'd left me to sleep for far longer than the promised hour or two.

I pushed back the afghan and stood up. My head was much clearer, thank goodness, and I no longer felt like I would burst into tears at any moment. A splash of white on the table caught my eye. A note. Adam hadn't completely abandoned me after all.

G
ONE SHOPPING
, it said in block letters.
BACK SOON
.

Jane Austen would have said that Adam was sadly lacking as a correspondent. I could only hope he 'd gone out to get groceries. My stomach was growling so loud, it was probably what had woken me.

The kettle still sat on the Aga, but I had no idea how to use the enormous stove. A bit of searching located the refrigerator, a tiny thing that fit beneath the countertop. I retrieved a bottle of water and twisted off the cap. Before I knew it, I'd downed half the contents without stopping for breath. The water sloshed in my stomach, but at least it quieted the growling.

My carry-on suitcase sat in a corner of the kitchen. Adam must have stowed it there. I crossed to it, laid it on its side, and
knelt to retrieve a manila folder from a side pocket. It contained the only evidence to support my outlandish quest--a handful of letters I'd exchanged over the past few months with a Mrs. Gwendolyn Parrot, who claimed to have knowledge of Jane Austen's lost letters. She'd first written me not long after I discovered Edward's betrayal, and those letters had helped to keep my spirits up during the farce of an academic trial I endured. I'd asked Mrs. Parrot if she would be willing to send me photocopies of the letters. Instead, she invited me to visit her in South Kensington, a leafy part of London that was popular with young families and French expatriates.

A sane person, a person whose life hadn't just fallen apart, might have written off her invitation as the lure of a lonely old woman who merely wanted company. But there had been something in the wording of her letters. Again, a vagueness that provided no definite information but somehow called to me. I'd continued the correspondence, hoping for clarification, but I only received a renewal of the invitation to visit.

This last letter had arrived in my mailbox the same day my divorce became final. Somehow the two became intertwined in my mind. I'd gone to the computer and searched for the cheapest airfare to London I could find. An hour later, I'd booked a ticket and written an acceptance to Mrs. Parrot's invitation.

But what did I know for certain, really? I sank into a chair at the enormous pine table and looked, really looked, at Mrs. Parrot's letters. Everywhere hints, but never an outright
declaration, as Marianne had said of Willoughby in
Sense and Sensibility
.

The front door slammed.
Adam was back
. Before I could hide the letters, he came through the kitchen doorway heaped with carrier bags and smiling with satisfaction. "Did you get my note?"

"Just saw it." I tried to act nonchalant so as not to draw attention to the folder I was holding. "For an academic, you're remarkably terse." I forced a smile to accompany the words, but I sounded sharp.

He shot me a quizzical look. "Woke up on the wrong side of the sofa, huh?" He plopped the plastic bags on the table. "Sorry it took so long. I ended up taking the bus down to Finchley Road so I could go to Waitrose."

"Huh?" He might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

"Waitrose, the grocery store. A proper supermarket, as they say here." He reached into one of the bags and produced a can of Diet Coke. "Ta-da."

"Bless you," I breathed, restraining myself so I wouldn't dive for the soft drink headfirst.

"What's that?" He'd finally noticed the folder.

"Nothing." I tossed it on the table as if it were of no importance. I reached again for the can of Diet Coke, which he relinquished. "Just some notes."

I was probably being overly paranoid, but those letters were my only hope of restoring my reputation and landing
a teaching post again. Adam's kindness since I'd stumbled through the front door had almost made me forget a very important fact. Namely, that I could never confide in him about my outlandish quest. Because he was, in fact, Dr. Adam Clark, full professor of English literature at the University of Virginia, and while his focus was Sir Walter Scott, he was still a scholarly competitor who would also salivate at the prospect of discovering--and publishing--Jane Austen's lost letters.

N
umber 22 Stanhope Gardens was a Victorian terraced house not far from the Gloucester Road stop in South Kensington. There, elegant, white buildings lined the leafy green Victorian square, which was fenced in for the private use of the residents.

The next morning, as I made my way around the square, I dodged schoolgirls in pin-striped cotton dresses and straw boaters--a far cry from the jeans and T-shirts I'd worn in my childhood. Men were setting off to work in dark suits with monochromatic blue shirts and ties. Harried moms herded their kids with one eye on their watches and another on the traffic. In the midst of all the family bustle, I felt very alone.

I stepped off the pavement into the street to avoid a gaggle of children about to engulf me. This was what I had dreamed
of, I thought to myself, the jumble of family life that signified a truly happy ending. A dream that had never been further away than it was at that moment.

By the time I reached number 22, tears were stinging my eyes. I blinked them back and bit my lip, hoping that the pain would distract me from the other ache in the vicinity of my heart. It was one thing to come to terms with the idea of what I had lost. It was quite another to encounter it in the flesh.

With determination, I raised the door knocker, a heavy iron ring clenched in the mouth of a ferocious lion, and rapped three times. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. Maybe Mrs. Gwendolyn Parrot had forgotten our appointment. Or else the whole thing was a hoax, as I'd feared from the beginning.

Behind me, the wave of families on their way to school and work had passed. The muffled drone of traffic from nearby Cromwell Road underscored the peace of the square. Still, no one answered the door. With a sigh, I turned to walk back to the tube station. My adventure was over before it had even begun.

And then the door swung open behind me. I pivoted on one high-heeled pump--a poor choice in footwear, but my best attempt to appear professional--and came face-to-face with Mrs. Parrot.