Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (15 page)

Twenty-five

O ver the next few days, Mary makes sure that she and I are out when Edgeworth calls, though she never once admits this is what she’s up to. But it’s not difficult to figure out why she just has to get to the Pump Room an hour and a half earlier than we usually do, or why she tells Mrs. Jenkins to have dinner ready for us an hour later than she usually does, or why she has an urge to worship in a different church on Sunday. I know it’s best that I keep my distance, but every time we enter the house I scan the table in the entrance hall for visiting cards. And every time Mrs. Jenkins tells her mistress that Mr. Edgeworth called I catch my breath. I wonder how long this can go on before we run into him—or before he leaves Bath. If only I could see him once more before that happens. No. I will not engage in such absurd behavior. I have had quite enough betrayal.

On the fourth morning after the ball, I’m getting ready for breakfast and can’t find my tortoiseshell comb. I rummage through a blue knit purse and pull out a crumpled piece of paper. It’s the handbill for the fair that I found on the ground the day I met James in Sydney Gardens. I’d completely forgotten about it. I look at the paper more closely: Good God, today is the day of the fair. I’ve been so caught up in retracing Jane’s past through James and Edgeworth that I forgot my original plan, which was to go to the fair. And now there’s no time for resorting to subterfuge; I’ll have to come right out and ask Mary to take me. That, I believe, would suit both of us.

But when I come to the breakfast table, my speech all prepared, Mary is sniffling and wiping her nose with a handkerchief.

“Are you all right?”

Before she can answer, a sneeze shakes her body, and she blows her nose.

“You poor girl.” I put my hand on her forehead, which is only slightly warm. “I don’t think you have a fever, or at least not much of one, but you should go back to bed immediately. Why don’t I have Mrs. Jenkins bring a tray to your room?”

Mary sniffs. “But what about our plan to find some new ribbon for your bonnet?” Her voice is raspier than ever. “I would hate to spoil the day over a silly little cold.”

“What would be sillier is if you went out like this. As for my bonnet, I doubt that one more day, or even twenty types of ribbon, would make much difference.”

Aided by Mrs. Smith, who is as set against Mary’s going out as I am, I persuade her to go to bed, and I extract a promise that she’ll stay there the rest of the day. I know that her strict sense of honor will not allow her to go back on her word, even after Mrs. Smith leaves the room and I break the news to Mary of my intended outing. I would rather keep it a secret, now that it’s clear she can’t possibly go with me, but quite frankly I need her carriage. The fair is outside of Bath, and I’m hardly prepared to start figuring out how to hire myself some transportation.

It takes some persuading to convince Mary that I have no intention of releasing her from her promise to stay in bed, as well as that I have no intention of wavering in my plans to go to the fair, with or without her.

“Very well. I shall send Mrs. Smith with you,” she says.

“You know as well as I that she’ll insist on staying here to take care of you.”

“Hortense, then. She is a good sort of girl, and I do trust her discretion.”

“I refuse to have Hortense glued to my side, especially if I have my fortune told.”

“Do be reasonable, Jane. This is not merely a question of propriety; it is dangerous for a lady to go to such a place alone.”

“But there will be people everywhere.”

“Exactly. I shall send Hortense, and that is the end of it.”

Mary launches into a fit of coughing, and I surrender to the inevitable. After I fuss around her a bit, plumping her pillows and tucking her in, she begins to look like she might even take a nap.

“You will be careful, Jane?”

I kiss her softly on the forehead. “I promise.”

Her face relaxes and she snuggles into her pillows, and I leave her room shaking my head at the absurdity of having to bring an entourage with me. It’s like being unable to go to the movies without a limo driver and personal assistant in tow.

A s the carriage rattles its way to the fair, I wonder how I’m going to ditch Hortense when we arrive. What I want is the freedom to wander around, look for the fortune-teller, and drink in the atmosphere as Jane might have experienced it, and I don’t want company.

Not an easy wish to fulfill. Turns out that not only has Mary saddled me with a limo driver and personal assistant, but a bodyguard as well. This one is in the form of a liveried footman who, at a nod from the coachman, follows us from the coach.

Hortense is so childlike in her enthusiasm for the noisy groups of pleasure seekers and colorful booths, the jugglers and vendors and squawking of chickens, not to mention a couple of young men, one of whom winks at her as soon as he catches her eye, that I figure I could easily persuade her to enjoy herself on her own. However, the footman appears to be impervious to anything but his assigned task.

Unless…I turn around and look at him. “Would you be so kind as to see if I dropped a letter on the ground? Back there?” I point in the opposite direction of where we were walking. “It was in my pocket just a minute ago.”

The footman glances behind him, then back at me uncertainly.

I smile in an attempt to reassure him. “I’ll wait for you right here.”

He cuts his eyes at Hortense, then bows to me. “Very well, miss. I shall be back directly.”

Watching his retreating figure disappear into the thickening crowd, I pull coins from my purse and put them in Hortense’s hand. “Why don’t you buy us all some gingerbread from that nice old woman over there?”

Hortense looks toward the vendor, who is only about five yards away.

I point to another booth that’s about halfway between where I’m standing and the gingerbread lady. “I’ll be right there, looking at ribbon.”

“But what about…?” She gestures in the direction the servant went to hunt for my nonexistent letter.

“You’re right. I’ll wait here.”

“Yes, miss.” Hortense drops a curtsey and scurries off to buy gingerbread, and as soon as my view of her is blocked by the crowd I take off.

Oh, the comfort of being sometimes alone! I know how Jane Fairfax must have felt after ditching her companions and throwing off the oppression of social niceties, if only for an hour. I wander around the fair, trying to blend in with the crowd while keeping a watchful eye out for my entourage. It’s a mixed crowd of people, many of them from the working classes, but also a fair number of middle-class folks and some high-collared, carefully coiffed, spit-shine-booted young men who weave and stumble in the unmistakable manner of those who’ve had too much to drink.

Are the looks I’m getting from some of the men—the more refined-looking ones as well as the ones who look like farmers—more leering than they were when I had Hortense and the footman by my side? Or is that my imagination? No matter. It’s still nothing compared to what I became used to in my student days in New York, when I developed what I called my jungle stare-down. That look usually scared a couple of my friends much more than it did my targets, but I never got mugged or unduly hassled.

I pause for a moment to look at a puppet show, or rather to wonder how so many adults could possibly be as amused as they apparently are by the crude theatrics on the tiny stage. In the midst of the rough laughter and continual talking of the rowdy audience, I feel someone standing just behind my left shoulder. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I turn to see a man, his face hidden by shadows, bow deeply to me and say, “If you please, miss, my mistress is expecting you.”

His voice is barely a whisper, but I have no trouble hearing him. Before I can say anything in reply, he gently indicates the direction in which he wishes me to go, and I follow one step behind him, arguing with myself that I should be on my guard, that he could be some kind of lunatic or cutthroat, but unable to convince myself of being in any kind of danger.

He stops at a small tent and turns to me. “My mistress will be with you directly.” Then he bows again and disappears into the crowd.

The man must have recognized me. Could I possibly be so blessed as to meet up with the same fortune-teller that Jane saw? But nothing outside the tent indicates who or what is inside. No sign or decoration, just plain, mud-brown cloth that is patched in a couple of places.

As I wait outside the dingy tent, a red-faced, grimy-looking man of indeterminate age emerges, reeking of alcohol. All gap-toothed smiles, he waves at another man, evidently a friend, who’s waiting for him a few feet from the tent. The red-faced one triumphantly holds up a little drawstring bag and shows it to his companion, loudly proclaiming how he “got the goods” and “just wait till ol’ Martin gets a bit o’ this lot in ’is porter. That’ll teach ’im.”

Oh great. I’ve gone to all this trouble to see a quack who pushes love potions for the lonely or laxatives for the vengeful. Maybe I should just turn around and get the hell out of here. Suddenly I feel heavy and tired. Despite my skepticism, I didn’t realize till now how much hope I’d been hanging on this event.

A whiff of something in the air distracts me. Delicious, sweet. Could it be freesia? I move without thinking toward the fragrance, which appears to be coming from the tent. As I move closer, the flaps part gently, and I find myself walking inside.

Softly lit by candles, the inside of the tent glows invitingly. Though it’s made of thin fabric, the sounds and bustle of the fair outside are obliterated. The welcoming, citrus-sweetness of freesia makes me want to linger there forever. A thought lazily flits through my mind that I’m being enchanted somehow by its proprietress, but I don’t care. That’s when I notice her, though she could hardly have escaped my notice when I entered.

She’s old, with a kind, grandmotherly bearing. She smiles at me with perfect teeth, unusual for an old person here. Her dress is black and simply cut. Her shawl is richly embroidered silk, but not overdone. There’s no jewelry, bangles, big earrings, nothing fortune-teller–like about her appearance.

“You were expecting someone different?” she asks, and before I can protest she’s suddenly middle-aged, black-haired, gaudily dressed, and jeweled from head to toe.

I gasp, and she switches back to her grandmotherly self. “Either way suits me. You choose.” Her voice is silky smooth.

“How did you do that?”

“For the people who come to me, I am whoever they need me to be. Smells lovely in here, doesn’t it?”

“I love freesia. But I don’t see any flowers in here.”

She looks at me impishly and shrugs her shoulders as if to say, And your point would be…

I laugh.

She sits up straighter and indicates the chair opposite her for me to sit. “Now, what can I do for you today?”

“I just want you to know that I don’t want to put any spells or whatever on anyone else, like that man who was in here before.”

“Oh, him.” She rolls her eyes. “I gave the poor creature exactly what he wanted. A powder that will do no harm to the man he wishes to harm. So he can keep on blaming someone other than himself for how miserable he is. Those who want the truth, get truth. Those who want lies, get lies no matter what I say.”

She looks me over for a moment, and I feel the flesh rise on my arms. “Though you are getting bits of the other one’s memories, I do not see that your last visit to me is one of them. So I shall tell you what I told her.”

Liquid light floods my veins. To be talking to someone who knows! Who understands without my having to say a word. I start laughing with the pure joy of it, tears running down my cheeks.

She takes my hands in hers. “Jane was someone who did not want truth, though she needed it most urgently. She longed to have a different life; she found her own suffocating. I told her that wherever and whatever she placed her attention would manifest in her life. And that she had a destiny to fulfill. It’s no use fighting our destiny, you know.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know, dear. But I have faith you will.”

“But how could I just fall out of my life and end up here, in Jane’s? And in a different time? Can I leave here and return to my old life in the future? Will Jane come back to hers if I do?”

“What could I say that would make sense to you? You who believe time is as rigid as a straight line.”

She raises her cup of wine, lets a few drops fall out of the glass, swirls the liquid around inside for me to see. “Time is as fluid as the wine in this cup. You can be here, and you can be wherever you came from. What is real right now is where your attention lies. You have chosen to focus on where you believe you are right now.”

“Wait just a minute. I haven’t chosen anything. I went to sleep and woke up here. And haven’t been able to get back home since.”

“Choosing happens in many different ways. Our heart chooses for us, or a tiny whisper inside that is too faint for us to hear.”

“Whatever. I still want to know how this happened.”

“There are many possibilities. The night your attention left your home was a time of a rare planetary configuration, the likes of which had not been seen in hundreds of years. Such a formation takes the fluid quality of time and makes it like quicksilver, with little clusters forming, breaking apart, and re-forming. Then it becomes like the air, floating, escaping through the tiniest openings, before it becomes its usual liquid state. Anything is possible during such events. It is when the doors that are already there open wider than ever before, and time defies its usual boundaries, if boundaries they could ever be called.”

“But why me? Why Jane?”

“You are linked, as we all are. The idea that I am actually separate from you is just an idea, not the whole truth. Surely your desires and fantasies about this time, as you call it, are evidence of your connection to Jane. Both she and you must have done something that ripped apart the barriers of what we refer to as time and space.”

“Like what?”

“A dream, a wish made, an illness, a mishap…”