Undressing Mr. Darcy (29 page)

“I know you felt you did. I saw that.”

They stood out on her stoop, and he rummaged through her bag to find her key. He looked awfully cute digging through her purse, and it made her smile.

“But you know,” he said, “love shouldn’t be that hard.”

He found the key, unlocked the door, and held it open for her. A slice of light came down on her from the hallway.

“What do you mean? Love is always hard.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s easy. You shouldn’t have to be playing games and hiding your feelings and guessing how he feels and trying not to text him until a certain amount of time has passed and all that.”

They climbed the stairs and he opened the door to her flat.

She looked at him and she couldn’t believe what he said. She’d been playing games with men her entire life. She prided herself on being one move ahead of them. She always left them first, before they could leave her. She had her own code, her own rules that she followed, and it worked.

Or maybe her code didn’t work—
at all
!

“When a man really loves you, he shows you how he feels. He won’t be running hot and cold. He won’t be keeping you guessing. We’re really quite simple creatures. When it comes from the heart, we’re not able to play games. You’ll know when a man truly loves you.”

“And when he doesn’t.”

She followed Chase into the kitchen, where he removed three of her animal-print thongs from the stovetop to fill the kettle. He began opening the cabinets with her bras dangling from the knobs, looking for tea or something.

“It’s usually very obvious when he doesn’t.”

He found a packet of hot chocolate and poured it into a mug.

“It’s obvious to you, maybe. You’re a man yourself.”

He sighed. “You deserve better. Every woman deserves better than some guy who tosses her feelings around, plays games with her, sleeps with her, but doesn’t want to date her or even text or call her.”

He put it all so bluntly she felt compelled to defend Julian. It was not that he never dated her or that he never called or texted her! Right? How could they date—living nearly five thousand miles apart? And, well, he never texted or called anyone.

She leaned against the doorjamb and pulled his jacket around her neck. “That’s it. I’m going to die a spinster just like Jane Austen.”

“You are not! Not you, my dear. You just need to find the right man.” He stroked her chin. Then he took and folded her bras and thongs from various points in the kitchen. “Here.” He handed her the tiny pile.

Maybe,
she thought,
love happens in between loads of laundry and making hot chocolate together. Maybe it’s not difficult and dramatic and cross-continental.

Why couldn’t Julian be more like Chase? Why hadn’t
he
run after her when she left the steam rooms?

“Much as I love seeing you in your swimsuit, I think you should change into something warmer, and I’ll treat you to dinner.”

She reached out and hugged him, crushing her neatly folded underwear against his back. “I’m treating you to dinner tonight, Chase. Thank you. For everything.”

As she changed in her room, she couldn’t help but wonder what exactly Julian had come to tell her, anyway. Why did she assume it was something she wouldn’t want to hear? A small, vulnerable part of her thought,
What if it was exactly what she
wanted
to hear?

She knew what she had to do. She had to visit his estate and get some answers. If she only knew the questions.

C
hapter 19

O
n her way to the train station the next morning she took the waters at the Pump Room, downing some cold meds with it. How did she come to a spa town completely healthy and manage to get sick?

Of course, running through Bath in a wet bathing suit on a September night probably didn’t help matters.

Against Lexi’s and Sherry’s unsolicited advice, Vanessa took a train to Alton, where she had only about a mile to walk to get to Julian’s estate. From there she would walk to Jane Austen’s cottage at Chawton and meet up with a festival group tour, where she would take the “barouche” (a bus) back to Bath, all in plenty of time to get ready for the ball.

Chase had set himself up in his hotel to work for the day, and she didn’t dare tell him about her plan anyway.

She figured rather than texting, e-mailing, or calling Julian, she would do things the old-fashioned way, the nineteenth-century way, and pay him a visit.

Lexi and Sherry, meanwhile, signed up for a festival tour of the Assembly Rooms, where Jane Austen would attend dances, and the Orchard Theatre, which she frequented, then the Fashion Museum and high tea at the Pump Room.

A couple of weeks earlier, seeing Jane Austen’s haunts wouldn’t have tempted Vanessa in the least. But tempting as it now was, she couldn’t imagine seeing Julian tonight at the ball without at least trying to figure things out. The visit seemed worth a shot. And something compelled her, before she left England, to see the estate that she had worked so hard for.

Sturdy walking shoes on, umbrella and raincoat in hand, once she’d walked the mile from the Alton station, she took her earbuds out as soon as she saw it in the distance. It proved impressive, made of hewn stone, and it stood tall, with three stories of windows, perfectly symmetrical with four columns and a pediment.

But iron scaffolding bookended it. It was a fixer-upper on the grandest of scales.

A blue Dumpster sat on one side of the curved driveway, filled to the brim with stone rubble. Construction truck tires had left tracks on the grass, gouged into the land. It seemed as if the construction crew had been there not too long ago, but abandoned it. A few of the windows on the second and third stories had been replaced with plywood. Cracks scissored through the front steps.

The scaffolding, the Dumpster, none of this had been in the pictures he’d shown her. She walked up the steps to the front door, where building permits had been plastered on the windows flanking the doorway. Above the permits hung a sign that read:
ENGLISH HERITAGE SITE AT RISK
.

She’d made the right decision in coming. When she looked back over her shoulder and saw the tombs of Julian’s ancestors clustered on a nearby hilltop, they felt like long-lost family. It filled her with a great sense of purpose to know she’d had, and could still have, any part in saving this grand old home.

She almost forgot why she had come.

With a nervous hand she raised the brass knocker and knocked as loudly as she could, but nobody answered. The door was locked.

She decided to call him after all, but couldn’t get a signal. No Wi-Fi, either.

Her instinct to take pictures kicked in, thinking she might be able to do something more to help the cause once she got home, no matter what her relationship, or lack of, with Julian. As she stood here at last, she felt for the home as if it were a living, breathing thing. She shot as much as she could, a little daunted by the amount of work that needed to be done, but able to visualize how fantastic the place could be with a lot of time, effort, and—money.

As much as it would take to whip everything back into shape, it seemed the alternative—allowing it to be condemned and torn down—would be a great loss.

Still trying to get a signal on her phone, she walked around the back, awed by the vast, overrun gardens marked by crumbling gateposts. On a backyard terrace a cloth tarp covered some furniture, and it flapped in the wind with foreboding.

Vanessa hadn’t felt this cut off from civilization in a long time—if ever. It was so quiet she could hear herself think. She had forgotten how quiet the world was without her phone.

The house stood on acres of its own land, and the clouds in the sky parted, and sun and blue sky broke through, as if to mock her and her solitude.

Still no signal on her phone. It didn’t seem as if he was here, though. But then she saw something white in the distance bouncing along the edge of the pond in front of an old gazebo surrounded by overgrown grass. She spotted someone from the back—Julian? He wore a Chintz robe and Turkish slippers, the ones he had spoken of in his show! As he stepped out of the gazebo, her heart leapt, and she ran toward him, slowly at first, then quicker, and then, she slowed again.

It wasn’t Julian. It wasn’t a man at all. It was a woman in an oversized robe, picking up a white puppy. It was the same woman she’d seen in the Bath Abbey with Julian!

She couldn’t think, but began to walk backward in the overgrown grass; her cold meds seemed to fail her as her head began to pound, her eyes began to water, and her throat ached with soreness. A cool breeze made her shudder and she all but dropped her bag and umbrella to put on her raincoat.

She turned up her collar, turned around, and went against the wind, toward Jane Austen’s cottage, forgetting to put in her earbuds, not caring about getting a signal. According to her map, the cottage stood about a half-hour walk from here, and she couldn’t get there fast enough.

For a while, she sat in a tearoom called Cassandra’s Cup, across from Austen’s adorable cottage
.
Convinced that both Jane and her sister Cassandra would be shocked by all this—the tearoom, the tour buses, the inevitable gift shop—Vanessa stirred her tea and honey, and ordered another scone and jam, even though, with her stuffed-up nose, she barely tasted it. She could feel the butter, though, that crazy-good British butter.

The tearoom really exuded that English quaintness, too, even though she wanted nothing more now than to hate England, or at least be indifferent to it, rather than falling a little more in love with it at every turn. China teacups of all sizes, colors, and patterns hung from the ceiling, and from her table at the window, downing some more cold meds with her tea, Vanessa looked out at the picture-perfect redbrick cottage that Jane had moved into in 1809. The story went that Jane felt settled again and happy here at Chawton, where she revised, wrote, and published her novels.

While Chawton had brought Jane Austen so much happiness, it brought nothing but despair to Vanessa. A woman wearing his robe
and
frolicking with a puppy on his grounds. Well, that explained it. He had a significant other of some kind after all.

The cottage couldn’t be cuter, and this little intersection in Chawton, with the tearoom, the Greyfriar Pub next door, and even a thatched-roof cottage with flowers gushing from window boxes next to Austen’s cottage, only added to the atmosphere.

A steady stream of tourists flowed in, out, and around the house and garden. Vanessa wondered if she was really up to going inside. But then again, she had to get her mind off Julian.

Could Jane Austen save her from herself?

She pulled out her phone and got a signal here, so she texted Lexi:

Went 2 his place—he wasn’t there—was a woman on the grounds. #ampissed

She felt numb even as she walked through Austen’s lush garden and into, accidently, a portion of the cottage that housed the brick oven and where the Austen ladies’ donkey cart had been put on display. The women couldn’t afford a carriage, only a donkey cart, evidently. Donkeys. Asses.
He’s an ass,
Vanessa kept hearing over and over in her head in Lexi’s voice.

She didn’t want to believe it.

She finally met up with the festival tour group in the cottage. She looked at, but didn’t really see, and certainly didn’t feel—anything—even as she stared at Austen’s writing table at the very window that looked out on Cassandra’s Cup. The table, small and worn, nothing but a pedestal table really, had atop it a quill pen standing in an empty glass inkwell. Austen evidently sat here, on a simple cane chair at the window, to write, facing the door.

Vanessa wanted to feel something, anything, other than anger, regret, and humiliation over this thing with Julian, whatever it was. Here she stood at her newfound idol author’s writing table, and she felt as empty as the glass inkwell before her.

She stared at the simple but elegant Wedgwood china set on the dining table, white plates encircled with a green oak leaf and brown acorn pattern, as if they would provide her with an answer. The acorn reminded her of the sculpted acorns that adorned so many buildings in Bath, especially those she had seen atop the houses in the Circus.

Two older women, also admiring the china, stood near Vanessa. “The acorn symbolizes strength and power in small things,” one of the women said to both her friend and Vanessa in a lively Australian accent. “It can also mean growth and good luck. Fitting that Jane, Cassandra, and their mother would choose this pattern.”

Vanessa could use some acorns. Then again, did they help Jane and Cassandra?

She went up to the bedroom where Jane Austen and her sister slept, but it wasn’t the actual bed, so she stared at the worn quilt on the bed instead.

The whole tour seemed like some surreal, out-of-body experience. Why did she feel nothing?

Across from the four-poster bed, though, a blue and white chamber pot housed in a white wooden cabinet on a shelf below the washbowl in the bedroom seemed to mesmerize her. The rest of the tour had all moved on to the next room while she stood staring at the chamber pot.

That was where Jane Austen herself went to the bathroom, Vanessa thought to herself. And she smiled. There. She felt something. She felt that even Jane Austen might’ve laughed at the thought.

She found the tour group downstairs, gathered around a silhouette scene hung on the wall that Vanessa had walked right by on her way in.

She wedged her way into the group surrounding the silhouette to hear the tour guide. The guide looked suspiciously like a young Kate Beckinsale, who had played Emma in the 1990s, with gorgeous black hair, pale skin, and a slight smile that punctuated the end of every sentence.

“This silhouette, cut in 1783, illustrates Jane’s brother Edward being presented to his wealthy distant relatives, the Knights,” she said. “They adopted him and raised him as their own.”

The scene, black on a faded tea-colored background, had a staged but all-too-familiar feel to it. Two Georgian ladies, both in tall wigs and gowns, sat at a game table while Mr. Austen in his powdered wig and buckle shoes presented Edward by easing him, with a gentle push on the boy’s back, toward the adoptive parents, including Mr. Knight, who stood across the gaming table.

Edward was so young, so tiny in his breeches and tailcoat. His stockinged legs looked very thin.

Vanessa had to steady herself on a chair she shouldn’t have been touching. “How old was he when he was adopted?” she asked without thinking.

“Twelve.” Smile.

Twelve, a year younger than Vanessa was when her parents separated and before she moved in with Aunt Ella.

“The Knights weren’t able to have children of their own, and as was common practice, they looked for and adopted an heir from the extended family. Edward left the Austens to live with the Knights, and in so doing, he became the richest of the seven Austen siblings. He inherited two massive properties, Godmersham in Kent and Chawton House, an Elizabethan manor just up the road from here.”

Vanessa stepped in closer, to see little Edward reaching out with a hand toward his rich adoptive parents.

“To be chosen marked him as lucky. They raised him as a gentleman, and he even went on his own Grand Tour of the Continent, something none of the other Austen men had done.”

“Lucky,” Vanessa whispered to herself. She had always considered herself lucky to be taken in by Aunt Ella, but at the same time very unlucky to grow up away from her parents, flawed as they were. Seeing Edward in the same position, with two sets of parents, separated from his family, opened that hole in her heart.

“If Edward hadn’t been adopted by the Knights, it’s very possible his sister Jane would’ve never finished, much less published her novels.”

A hush came over the crowd.

“I’ll tell you about that as we walk over to what was Edward’s inheritance, now called Chawton House Library and dedicated to early women writers. And a property very familiar to Jane.”

The guide led them out of the cottage and north on a path alongside the road that had been labeled
THE JANE AUSTEN TRAIL
with a sign. Vanessa had been on a Jane Austen Trail, all right.

She walked next to the guide, wanting to hear more.

“After Mr. Austen’s death in Bath in 1805, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother had no income. Women of their social status couldn’t work, yet they barely managed to scrape by, moving frequently and staying with various relatives. Without her brother’s offer of the cottage, Jane wouldn’t have had the settled lifestyle she needed to write.”