“Hmm. The weather is quite lovely today. Beautiful day for a walk." I reached for the marmalade and slathered a roll with it.
“Did you meet anyone?” There was something about the light in her eye that made me wonder if there was something more to the question.
“No, it was a quiet, solitary sort of walk. Why do you ask?” I took a bite of my roll and pasted an innocent look onto my face.
“Oh, Mr. Collins was out earlier and noted Mr. Darcy walking in the park, so I had wondered if perhaps you ran into him at all.”
I nearly choked on my roll. “Why, no, I did not have the, um, honor, of coming across Mr. Darcy in my walk.”
Charlotte smiled at my sarcastic tone. “Pity, I did hope to hear if he was recovered from the other night. However, if he is out walking the grounds we must assume that he is indeed fully recovered.”
“Yes, we must. Well, perhaps we shall see him on the morrow with his cousin,” I replied sweetly. God, I hoped we'd see him, or more specifically that
I'd
see him, stiff and formal and mucking up his proposal. And none the worse for having been inhabited by Mark Barnes of all people.
I waited up late again to see if anything would happen as Mark was writing himself out of the novel. I wasn’t exactly sure what I thought would occur. Perhaps once he was gone the scene would reset back to the evening at Rosings and the real Mr. Darcy would be able to play out the last few days correctly. But time just kept chugging on like normal.
The fact that days were moving ahead when scenes hadn’t been played right was stressing me out. I wondered how long that could keep happening before the storyline was so muddled and messed up that it would be visible from the outside. Were readers all around the world suddenly noticing that Mr. Darcy was no longer visiting Hunsford between Easter and the proposal? The "what ifs" were keeping me up, my mind racing with possibilities. I finally resorted to sneaking a glass of Mr. Collins’s inferior brandy in hopes that it would help me sleep.
~
In the clear light of morning I was a little bit more level-headed. I supposed even if the days weren’t going to repeat, we could still get the story back on track once Mr. Darcy had full control over his own body. I’m pretty sure he’d already decided to propose to Lizzy by the time Mark had made his jump—or been pulled into the story by me. Not that I wanted to examine any of implications surrounding my newly revealed ability to pull people into works of literature, or the fact that the person whom I chose to exert this bizarre superpower on was Mark Barnes. Mr. Collins most definitely did not have enough brandy to cover that.
The important thing is that Mark was gone. He’d written himself out of the novel and we could now attempt to restore order and proceed as if nothing had occurred.
I knew something was wrong the minute Mr. Darcy and his cousin walked through the doorway of the sitting room. Not only was Mr. Darcy still walking completely wrong—way too relaxed and casual—but his hair was red!
It wasn’t quite the red-blond of Mark's unruly locks, but his hair was most definitely not dark brown anymore, it was somewhere between the two colors. And it was curly. And significantly longer than it had been the night before. I gaped at him. Mark—because it had to be Mark and not Mr. Darcy—took the opportunity to wink at me slyly. I glanced around the room wildly, wondering why no one else was reacting to the fact that Darcy’s hair was quite obviously the wrong color. The three others in the room—Charlotte, Maria, and Colonel Fitzwilliam—were consumed with the ritual greetings of the Regency era, and apparently not at all concerned that Mr. Darcy’s hair had changed overnight.
Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed to be in his usual good mood. After asking after my and Charlotte’s health he launched into a light-hearted teasing of Maria Lucas, who blushed under his attentions. Charlotte, laughing, came to her sister’s defense, and while they were thus occupied, Mr. Darcy took the opportunity to sit near me.
“Miss Bennet, I hope you are well today,” he said as he settled into the seat near mine.
I stared at him. Oh my god, were his hazel eyes starting to turn dark brown? There was now just as much of Mark's deep brown as Darcy's olive green. I swear to heaven above, if I saw Mark's eyes looking out of Fitzwilliam Darcy’s face I could not be held liable for my actions.
I tried to smile politely, although it was more of a grimace. “Sit up straight,” I hissed at him through my teeth.
Mark straightened. It was nowhere near Darcy’s exacting posture, but I suppose if no one was commenting on the red hair, the likelihood of anyone outing him because of a slight slouch was slim to none.
“Yes, thank you, I am well,” I answered his original question, my fake smile still in place. “Why are you still here?” I hissed again.
“Not sure, Kels. Your little writing tip didn’t seem to do the trick.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug and I resisted the urge to slap his shoulder back down.
“Don’t call me that where people can hear you,” I shot back quietly. “We need to talk.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t we talking now?”
“Yes, all my family is fine. In fact, I recently had a letter from my sister Jane,” I answered more loudly. Charlotte had looked at me questioningly. My hissing may have carried further than I’d intended.
“I am glad to hear it,” Mark pitched his voice at the same volume as mine. “Er, it’s always, uh, good to keep in contact with family.”
I rolled my eyes at him, knowing that the back of his head was effectively blocking my expression from Charlotte.
“Hey, I’m new at this, cut me some slack,” he said in an undertone.
“Thank you, Mr. Darcy. I am sure that you and your sister keep up a most faithful correspondence. I remember at Netherfield you were always writing the most charmingly long letters to her.”
Charlotte had returned her attention to Colonel Fitzwilliam and Maria’s conversation, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I leaned forward so Mark could hear me better as I lowered my voice to barely above a whisper “Tonight, I’ll plead a headache and stay home, which Lizzy is supposed to do anyway. You need to get out of dinner and come meet me here.”
Mark chuckled quietly. “Meet you here alone, Miss Bennet? Isn’t that scandalous?”
I gritted my teeth. “You are supposed to be coming here to propose anyway,” I muttered.
“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed.”
I sat waiting
nervously in the sitting room. Unfortunately, the nerves were not because I was waiting for the dashing Mr. Darcy to come propose (badly) to me, but instead because I was waiting to hear Mark's explanation of how he had managed to
not
write himself out of
Pride and Prejudice
.
Mr. Collins, Charlotte, and Maria had set off for Rosings over half an hour ago, so I was expecting Mark any moment. I was trying not to jump to any conclusions until I was able to ask him more specifically about what he’d written in his attempt to get back out of the novel. Hopefully there was something obvious that I’d be able to point out to him. Darcy had to be a pretty strong character: it had been hard enough for me to get out of Caroline. Maybe all Mark needed was a more detailed retelling of his life to get him out of Darcy and back home.
I was avoiding thinking about the fact that Mr. Darcy was starting to look like Mark. I’d never altered the appearance, purposely or accidentally, of any character I’d been in.
There was a slight knock at the sitting room door, and then it opened to reveal Mr. Darcy...or Mark masquerading as Mr. Darcy.
“Hey, Kels,” he grinned as he entered the room, closing the door firmly behind him. It was a pretty compromising position, but as no one had burst in on Lizzy and Darcy during that first awful proposal, I could only assume that nobody would now.
"Mark, what the hell is going on with Darcy’s hair?” I skipped straight past any pleasantries.
“I’m not sure. It seems to be turning a color closer to mine, doesn’t it? And his eyes too. Was like that this morning when I woke up.”
“Has anyone noticed? I mean, has anyone said anything?”
“Nope, no one has even looked at me twice. Of course, the first few days they must have thought this Darcy bloke had gone completely 'round the bend, but I’ve been attempting to act more like you do. Not one word from anyone over at that Rosings joint about the hair or eyes.”
“So what exactly happened, then? You just woke up—still here, obviously—and your hair was different? Did you write your story like I told you?”
“Yup. Put it all down on paper. Though let me tell you, getting the hang of the quill took me a good hour or so. It’s a bit scratchy, but it’s legible. Here, I’ve brought it for you. I figured you’d have more questions.” He tossed it to me. It was several pages folded together almost like a letter. It wasn’t in Darcy’s neat handwriting, but in what I recognized as Mark's more rangy scrawl.
I sighed as I smoothed the pages out and started reading. It was actually very interesting. I didn’t know much about Mark's early life, and he had apparently taken my instructions to heart and included a lot of detail: names, dates, random memories.
"Your sister's name is Kazza?" I asked in surprise. What kind of a name was Kazza?
"Yeah. Oh. It's actually Karen. But everyone calls her Kazza."
"Why?"
"Everyone named Karen gets called Kazza. Aussies will take the opportunity to turn any r into a zed."
"Weird."
"Thanks." He rolled his eyes at me.
I ignored him and kept reading. “There’s not a lot about you currently, maybe that could be a problem?” I wondered out loud as I reached the end of the letter.
“There’s about three paragraphs,” he pointed out. He’d stretched out on the small sofa, propping his feet up on one of the arm rests. If Charlotte could have seen him she likely would have had a coronary.
“Hmm.” I looked back over those paragraphs. “Yeah, they’re mostly just about where you live and what you do for work and what day of the week it was when you got sucked into the book. I don’t know...try adding some more personal stuff. It seems really fleshed out otherwise. This would have gotten me out of Caroline Bingley, and let me tell you, she turned out to be hard to get rid of.” I tapped the papers against my forehead as if hoping to divine from them why they hadn’t worked to my expectations.
“Personal stuff like what?” Mark asked as he studied the ceiling.
“I included a lot of relationship stuff. Like who broke my heart and who I had a crush on in the third grade. I added the whole Jordan debacle in there too. It’s a romantic novel after all, so I thought that love life information might be helpful.”
“Do you really think that whatever metaphysical force is holding me here cares about my third grade crush?” Mark asked. He didn’t sound like he was making fun of me, more like he was genuinely curious, but it still riled me.
“I don’t know. It’s just a suggestion. I’m just telling you what worked for me before. I thought it was important to set myself up in opposition to the character, to make my story on par with theirs, and something most of the characters in this novel are concerned with is love and marriage. They’re written that way.”
I tossed his letter back at him, frustrated. He caught it mid-air without moving from the couch.
“I have never,” he announced, half-laughing, “been more glad I was a History Major. Opposition to the character? I mean it makes sense, I suppose, but the fact that we are having this conversation at all is evidence that all you lit people think too much.”
“Is there such a thing as ‘thinking too much?’”
“Let me rephrase. Over-think things that in the grand scheme of life likely don’t matter."
Instead of addressing this little speech I crossed my arms and leaned back in my own chair. “You seem surprisingly unstressed for a man who finds himself trapped in a romance novel.”
“Yes, you mentioned yesterday that being laid back is a fault of mine. I could freak out and run around in circles waving Darcy’s arms wildly in the air if that would make you feel better.”
When I didn’t laugh he finally turned his head to fully look at me. “Kels, I’m just joking. Am I a little concerned that I didn’t wake up as myself? Yes. But you’ve been here before. This happened to you and, smart girl that you are, you managed to figure it out. So I’m hoping together we can pinpoint where I went wrong and fix it. I just don’t see any point in getting all worked up over something that didn’t work the first time. We’ll just try again, right?”
I was slightly mollified by this. At least I still had “smart girl” going for me, although how much that would outweigh “emotionally unstable” and “would rather be another person” in the balance of my non-relationship with Mark was up for debate.
“Well, there are a few things that concern me about the whole situation,” I finally said. “Speaking objectively as someone who has been here before and done this before.”
Mark raised an eyebrow at me and I added, “As objectively speaking as a lover of Austen and literature in general can be.”
“All right, and what is concerning you?”
“Two things. First of all, there are scenes that we’ve skipped. I’ve never been allowed to skip scenes, or really even to mess them up too much. If I did something that was out of character or would mess up the storyline, I was bumped back to earlier—either where I first entered the novel as a certain character, or kind of to the last place I’d done mostly everything right. Kind of like a video game; if you die you go back to your highest saved level.”
“I guess that makes sense. So you weren’t able to alter the storyline of the novel then. Whatever it was before you got here, it had to stay that way.”
“Yeah, but
you’ve
altered it. The fact that we’re sitting here talking about it at all proves that. You should have been bumped back until you got it right.”
“But if I would have been bumped back, what would happen to you? Would you have had to replay the scene too?”
I paused. “I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think it might have something to do with two of us being here at the same time? That we can’t both simultaneously be moved back earlier in a scene.”
“It’s a decent theory. Everything at this point is just theory, right? But you're right, I haven’t experienced that being put back to the starting point. That must have been disconcerting for you at first.”
“It was, but I figured it out pretty fast.” That may have been a slight exaggeration, but whatever, I didn’t need to go into detail with Mark about all my escapades as Georgiana. I remembered making out with Wickham and felt my face color hotly.
Mark noticed. He had to have, he was staring at my face, but he was nice enough not to ask any questions.
“It’s a bit weird for me to be talking to you like this,” he said. “You look and sound nothing like yourself, but yet you sound like you. Your speech patterns and phrasing I mean.”
“Lizzy’s pretty, isn’t she?” I agreed absently. I was back to studying his hair. He was right, it was weird to talk to someone, knowing they weren’t who they appeared to be. But yet, Darcy’s physical characteristics were changing. There had to be a clue there.
“Bloody hell, Kelsey, that isn’t what I meant. Yes, Lizzy is very pretty, but she isn’t any prettier than you. She’s just different looking.”
I was surprised out of my musings by the frustration in his voice.
“Oh, well, thanks. Sorry. I was just thinking. Here’s the second problem: I still look like Lizzy. No matter if I was Georgiana or Caroline I always looked just like them, nothing about their physical appearance changed at all. Yet here you are with red hair and darker eyes.”
“I really don’t have an explanation for it. Like I said, I just woke up like this.” Mark sat fully up on the couch, swinging his legs back down to the floor. “How long do you think that it’s safe for me to be here, before people start noticing that Darcy is gone?”
“Not sure, I’m guessing the proposal and subsequent rejection took no more than ten minutes or so. Then you go back to Rosings and sometime during the evening write Lizzy a really long explanation about all the stuff she accuses you of during the verbal smack down she gives Darcy.”
“I remember that part from the movie, something about the other dude, his name starts with a W.”
I gave him the evil eye. “Wickham.”
“That’s the bloke. I’m sorry I messed up your verbal smack down of Mr. Darcy. Do you have the whole thing memorized?”
“Yes," I muttered.
"That's impressive."
"And by impressive do you mean crazy?"
"I don't really think you’re crazy. I guess I can see the appeal of living out your favorite story. You do at least always come back."
I didn't bother to point out that I always came back because I was in the wrong character. I mean, I was planning to jump out of Lizzy. Eventually.
"I guess I'll go back to Rosings and try to write myself out again. See you when I see you?"
"Yup. It'll be like no time has passed."
"This must be a simply enormous wardrobe." He winked at me and left. I stared after him. Why did he have to throw a Narnia reference at me? Just to prove he was like two steps past perfect? It was a good thing he'd left, or I might have thrown myself at him right then.
~
I went to bed early, before the others even got home from Rosings, determined to get a good night of sleep and not stay up watching the clock and wondering if Mark had made it out of the book. My stress and worry were pointless. Either it was going to work or it wasn’t.
I got up at the crack of dawn again and headed out for a walk. I tried not think about the fact that this was the early morning walk on which I should be receiving Darcy’s explanation letter after the botched proposal. I was just hoping that sometime throughout the day I’d come across the real Mr. Darcy and we could get things back on track.
It was a beautiful morning. The air was cool but the soft morning light warmed me as I walked. I began to feel more upbeat than I had for the last few days. I really think that getting a full night’s sleep had been the best choice. I actually started whistling quietly as I walked. It felt like all was right in Austen’s little world.
The whistle died on my lips as I strolled into the stand of trees on the far side of the park and almost ran smack dab into Mark.
“Oh no!” I burst out before I could stop myself.
Mark looked up at the sound of my voice and grimaced. “I figured that’d be your reaction.”
I stared at him, my mouth agape. Not only was that most definitely Mark's voice and not Darcy's, he looked as if he’d been almost transformed overnight. If yesterday glimpses of Mark were beginning to show in Darcy’s appearance, now I had to search for glimpses of Darcy. He was several inches shorter. Darcy was probably about an inch or so above six feet, but Mark was closer to 5’11 or so.
He was also significantly broader across the chest and arms. Mr. Darcy wasn’t a slouch, you could always tell he was fit and trim, but it seemed more of a lean strength, while Mark was most definitely muscular. You could see the fabric of his coat straining against his biceps. The weird thing is that the coat didn’t look too tight or overly long, as you’d expect if Mark had put on clothes tailored for a taller, slimmer man. It looked like it had been made for him, he just filled it out…differently. Really, a Regency jacket did thinks for Mark's physique that no t-shirt could have accomplished. And I’d always been a big fan of Mark in a t-shirt.
I tore my eyes off his biceps, coloring slightly. His hair had made the complete transition to Mark's unruly mop of sandy-red curls. Those were most definitely Mark's dark chocolate eyes looking out of a face that was a mix of Mark's and Darcy’s features. Not even a true mix, the only thing that still even seemed to remain of Mr. Darcy was his long, straight nose. Mark's had a slight bump in it, like it had been broken when he was young.
Mark smiled at me, almost apologetically. “Kels, I’m sorry, it didn’t work. That look of horror you’ve got on your face is killing me.”
I narrowed my eyes. He certainly didn’t look as if his feelings were hurt. As he smiled, I noticed that Mark's dimple was missing too. So that’s it. A nose and a lack of a dimple were all that remained of the most dashing hero in all of literature.
I seriously considered fainting. I’m not really a fainting kind of girl. But it seemed like an appropriate reaction and a few minutes of unconsciousness sounded like a pleasant little break from the nightmare that
Pride and Prejudice
was quickly becoming for me. I’m not saying I actually fainted. I’m just saying I considered it. Seriously considered.