Adventures with Jane and her Legacy 01 Jane Austen Ruined My Life (24 page)

The news of Jack's death, if I could even call it news, given that it was more than two hundred years old, ripped a low moan of grief from my throat. The loss was not unexpected. I knew that something had happened to end their relationship. And in a way, I was relieved that Jack hadn't turned out to be a Willoughby or a Wickham, or like my Edward, for that matter. Still ...

I dropped the pages into my lap, careful to keep a hand on them so they wouldn't be carried off by the wind. I sat there on the beach for a long time, contemplating the magnitude of the document. Even if it was only a copy, the information it contained was cataclysmic for any Austen scholar. Had Adam seen it yet? I wondered. And how would I hide my new knowledge from him when I returned to Hampstead?

Despite the warmth of the day, I started to shiver. I didn't want to think too much about the contents of the letter. Better to focus on the thing as an object in and of itself. If I thought about the emotional import, I might feel it too deeply. Jane Austen had loved a man but turned down his offer of marriage because she feared living a life of poverty. Later, she had regretted her decision and wrote to him to indicate her change of heart. He had been delighted and told her he would renew his proposal. They had planned to meet, to marry.

And then he had died. Just like that. She was left alone,
single, and as poor as she'd feared being if she had married imprudently.

I gave a half sigh, half hiccup and reached up to touch my cheek. I hadn't realized I was crying.

Later, after I was sure Edward had left, I made my way back toward the cottage Mrs. Parrot had rented for me. I bypassed its blue front door, though, in favor of heading for the landlady's office. Edward's appearance and this most recent letter had snapped something within me. I had held on to my antiquated notions of romance and true love for far too long. It was time now to be practical.

I stuck my head around the door where Mrs. Pierpont was working in her cluttered warren of an office.

"Do you have a photocopier?" I asked.

A guilty flush stained my cheeks, although why I was having that reaction now, when Mrs. Pierpont had no idea what I was up to, I didn't know. Then again, for all I knew, the older woman could have been one of
them
. An undercover Formidable. I didn't want to be paranoid, but I also wouldn't have put it past Mrs. Parrot. She had booked the cottage, after all.

"I think this new printer might do that," she said, nodding toward a monstrous piece of office equipment that occupied the corner of her large mahogany desk. "You're welcome to try."

Fortunately for me, the printer wasn't too different from the
one I had at home. I retrieved the envelope from my purse, took out and unfolded the letter, and laid the first page on the glass face of the scanner. I closed the lid, and with one touch of a button, I betrayed Mrs. Parrot. The machine hummed and whirled, and a few seconds later, it rolled out the evidence of my duplicity.

"Did it work?" Mrs. Pierpont asked. She seemed so vague, so uninterested despite her polite question, that I could only hope that meant she wasn't a Formidable, after all.

"Perfectly," I said, though I felt far from perfect inside.

But now that I had turned down Edward's plea to resurrect our marriage, as well as brushing aside his help in righting my career, I needed some kind of insurance, or at least some evidence that I hadn't completely lost my mind.

I copied the second page of the fateful letter, my pulse thrumming in my throat, but Mrs. Pierpont didn't seem to notice me at all.

"Thank you," I added as I put the pages in my purse and waved good-bye to her. She looked up from her account book, returned my wave with a vague smile, and resumed whatever she'd been doing when I entered the room.

Clearly, she wasn't aware that I had just turned myself into the very cheat that Edward had once accused me of being.

When I returned to Hampstead late in the day, it was all I could do to screw up my courage and walk through Anne-Elise's front door.

"Anyone home?" I called as I made my way through the center hallway toward the kitchen, hoping I would be greeted with silence.

"I'm in here," Adam answered. I stepped into the kitchen and willed myself to act with a nonchalance I couldn't feel.

"Hey," I said. He was sitting at the large farmhouse table, papers spread out from one end to the other. "More research?"

"Yes." He was polite but distant. "How have you been?"

Okay, he wasn't distant at all. He was angry. "Fine," I said and wished I had tiptoed upstairs instead of calling out.

"And Lyme Regis?"

I couldn't pretend anymore. "Why are you mad at me?"

He threw down the pen he'd been holding. "You take off yesterday without a word to anyone and don't come home last night, and you wonder why I'm angry?"

"But you knew I was--" I stopped. "Wait a minute. How did you know where I was? You sent Edward." But of course he was in league with Mrs. Parrot. He had to be, to have known where I'd gone.

Adam snorted. "Anne-Elise finally told me when I threatened to call your parents to see if they knew where you'd gone."

"And you sent Edward."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Would you rather I hadn't?"

I didn't know what to say to that. "I don't know," I answered honestly.

Adam craned his neck and looked past me toward the hallway. "Is he here?"

"What?"

"Didn't Edward come back with you?"

I was too shocked to be immediately insulted, although it didn't take long for my ire to follow. "Thanks a lot."

"He came crawling back on his knees, complete with papers reinstating you at the university. What more could you want?"

"Adam--"

"I have to admit, at first I thought of telling him you were in the Outer Hebrides, or whatever remote Scottish outpost I could think of."

My heart twisted in my chest at his words. Adam was most definitely jealous. That thought shouldn't have pleased me quite so much. After all, I was a modern woman who, in theory, believed in straightforward communication and honesty in relationships. But the look on Adam's face ... It was as if he didn't know whether to kiss me or shun me. I had to admit it was pretty thrilling.

"I don't know where Edward is," I said and leaned against the doorjamb.

"For real?"

"For real."

That silenced him for a long moment.

"So you came back."

"Well, all my stuff is here."

"Touche." He managed that self-deprecating smile I had always found so charming. "I guess I deserved that."

"Adam ..." I needed to ask him about Mrs. Parrot, but suddenly I was afraid, far more afraid than I'd been when Edward had shown up on the Cobb offering me everything I ever wanted on a platter.

"Yesterday ..." My courage failed me for a moment. I couldn't ask him about the letters. I tried again. "The other night, at the theater ..." No, that wasn't any better.

What would Jane Austen have done?

"This came with the mail today," Adam said, pulling an envelope from beneath the plethora of papers in front of him. "Sorry. Didn't mean for it to get lost in the shuffle."

I took the envelope--the dear, dratted, familiar Mrs. Parrot envelope--and held it at the edges like a photograph I was afraid to smudge.

"Today?" I said, echoing him.

"Who's it from?" Adam asked.

I looked up from the envelope into his carefully bland expression. And I knew, at that moment, that he was lying. Not with words, really. But with feigned innocence. I couldn't prove it empirically, but every fiber of my being told me that Adam knew exactly whom the letter was from.

I glanced back down, gave a small smile that was more of a grimace. "Old friend of my mother's, I think."

And then, when I lifted my gaze to his, I could see that he
knew I was lying as well. The deceit hung there between us, almost palpable. And when I couldn't bring myself to speak, it seemed to grow until it filled the room.

"I think I'll just go and ... read it," I finished lamely. I was still standing just inside the kitchen doorway, and we were only a few feet apart. But there might as well have been an ocean between us.

"Adam--"

"I have to finish this tonight," he said, dismissing me as effectively as if he'd had me bodily escorted from the room. We weren't going to discuss any of it. Not Mrs. Parrot. Not Jane Austen's letters. Not the kiss that had rocked my world.

"Okay, then," I said, stalling even as I knew that the moment for revelation had passed. "I'll just go read ..." I waved the envelope. "My letter," I finished lamely.

"See you," Adam said. He picked up his pen and shuffled some of his papers. "Anne-Elise and I are going to get some dinner when she gets back. You're welcome to come with us."

"Sure," I said, and I even managed not to let the sob that caught in my throat escape. "That would be great."

I spun on my heel and made as dignified an exit as I could. Even after I had mounted the stairs and sought the solace of my room, I couldn't believe the conversation--or the lack of it. Hadn't I learned anything in the debacle with Edward? Or from Jane Austen's procrastination? Or even, heaven help me, from Mrs. Parrot? Why couldn't I lay my heart on the line with Adam?

I threw myself on the bed and clutched the bolster, a hard, polelike pillow that some strange Europeans actually slept on. In my case, all it was good for was soaking up my tears.

I couldn't believe that after everything that had happened, I was still as big a wimp as the day I'd found Edward on my kitchen table. And suddenly I knew. It wasn't Jane Austen who had ruined my life.

It was me.

B
y now, I was utterly sick of the British railroad system. Still, after the previous days' events, I didn't dare ask Adam to drive me to Chawton, the site of my last task from Mrs. Parrot.

The station at Alton, just beyond Basingstoke, was tiny, but it was the nearest one to the cottage where Austen had spent the last years of her too-short life. There, settled with her mother and sister, she began to write again. Somehow, she found her pen and her voice once more. I could only hope that the letter in my purse would give me some clue as to how she had accomplished it, and how I could apply the lesson to my own life.