Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart (23 page)

Other than that I love you
.

“All right.” He paused. “We can still be friends, right? I mean, just because you and I didn’t work out—”

“Sure.” I stood up too and pasted the biggest fake smile in the history of womankind on my face. “Friends. Absolutely. Always.”

“Great. That’s great, then.” But he didn’t look that pleased, really. He stood there for a long time. Looking at me. Not saying anything. And then, finally, he spoke. “We’ll go to a Royals game or something. When you get back.”

“Okay.”

I knew what that meant. It meant that I was never going to see him again.

“Good-bye, Claire.” He leaned over and pressed a kiss against my cheek. I resisted the ferocious need to throw my arms around him and keep him from leaving.

“Bye, Neil.” Breathe, I reminded myself. Just keep breathing.

He hesitated, and then he reached into his pocket and pulled out that blue velvet box. “I want you to keep this.”

“No, I couldn’t—”

He pressed the box into my hand. “I can’t return it. And I couldn’t give it to anyone else. Maybe you can have it made into a necklace or something.”

“Or something.” I bit my lip so I wouldn’t burst into tears.

“Good-bye, Claire.” He turned and walked away across the beautifully manicured lawn. My last sight of him was as he disappeared through the gate, and I was left alone in the Master’s Garden, as if he’d never been there at all.

A
fter Neil left me alone in the garden, I cried for a long time. But something about those tears cleansed me. By the time I finished, I only had a few minutes to get to the last seminar. Although I was heartsick and exhausted, I decided I didn’t want to miss the final session.

Martin was the last to present. I took a seat next to him and avoided looking at James. Eleanor called the group to order, and we began.

“What I have admired about Jane Austen’s work,” Martin said, speaking without any notes, “is the quiet courage of her characters. They are not prime ministers or princesses but ordinary people. Her heroines, in particular, must be strong because they are so often at a disadvantage, either because of their financial situation or because of their families.”

I found myself nodding in agreement. Although the occasional character might be wealthy—Darcy and Bingley being the prime examples—most of the people in Austen’s work were
reflections of the gentry and working classes she had known in her life.

“The word
courage
, of course, comes from the French word
coeur
, or heart in English,” Martin continued. “Austen shows us that it is in knowing one’s heart that one may find the courage to overcome obstacles. One of Elizabeth Bennet’s obstacles is her prejudice against Mr. Darcy, but another is the belief that she is somewhat better than her neighbors or her sisters. In her own way, she is as proud as Mr. Darcy. But over the course of the novel, she must learn that she is as human—and as subject to errors in judgment—as anyone else.”

Even Eleanor was nodding in agreement.

“Real courage, Austen shows us, is not in overcoming external threats or forces. No, the most difficult kind of courage is the kind we must find to know and understand our own hearts.” Martin paused and looked around the circle, but his gaze stopped when it came to me.

I nodded with understanding.

So many of the circumstances of my life were beyond my control. I couldn’t bring back my parents. I couldn’t even get back my job or my boyfriend. But Martin was telling me that somewhere inside of me was everything I needed to face the ruins of my life and start to rebuild it.

Honestly. Imperfectly. So that my life would be mine, and not an accommodation of other people ’s needs and wishes. No wonder I hadn’t been able to get my relationship with Neil right. How could he have truly known me when I hadn’t even known myself?

Martin crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s all I have to say.”

For a long moment, the room was quiet, and then Rosie and Louise burst into applause. The others followed, including me. Even Eleanor. I didn’t think that even Jane Austen herself could have said it any better.

Eleanor devoted the second half of the morning to another general discussion of Austen and what we ’d learned that week.

“I think you can see how complex any issue surrounding Jane Austen becomes,” Eleanor was saying, “especially given her popularity. Film and television adaptations tend to blur our understanding, enjoyable as they may be. No, it’s only when we go back to the page, to her very words, that we may find insight into her work.”

The week has seemed both eternal and fleeting, I thought, as we stood to exchange our good-byes. I hugged Martin as well as Rosie and Louise, shook hands with Olga and the cardiologist, and then found myself standing awkwardly in front of James. What in the world could I say to him in the midst of all those people?

“Claire.” He stood there, looking solemn.

“James.” I took a deep breath. “It’s been—” What? Nice to meet you? Tons of fun? Ultimate agony?

“Will you go outside with me?” he asked. “We need to talk.”

He had a strange look on his face, as if he’d eaten something
very wrong for breakfast. I glanced around. The others were caught up in conversation as they said their farewells and exchanged e-mail addresses.

“Um, sure. I guess.”

I followed him out of the seminar room and down the stairs until we emerged into Tom Quad. He walked a little way down the cloister and then stopped.

“Claire, I owe you an apology.”

I’d been studying the straps on my sandals, but his words made my gaze shoot back up to his face.

“You? Owe
me
an apology?” Even after everything that had happened, he still made me blush like a schoolgirl. “I don’t think so, James. I think it’s the other way around.”

He reached out and took my hand in his. That was the last thing I would have expected him to do. But even though I still found him incredibly handsome, I didn’t feel a single zing at his touch.

“Claire, I need to make a confession of my own.”

“Oh?” Whatever it was, he could hardly top me in the duplicity department.

“It’s about Jane Austen.”

“What?”

Now his cheeks were tinged with red, and he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

I understood then. Maybe he really was a Jane Austen fan after all, a big, goopy romantic, but he ’d been too ashamed, too worried about his reputation or his manliness to own up to the truth.

“It’s okay, James. A lot of guys like Jane Austen. I mean, look at Martin.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

Now I was confused. “What do you mean?”

I could hear the other seminar participants pounding down the staircase in the building behind us. Whatever James needed to say, I realized he ’d better say it fast if we were to have any privacy.

“I didn’t pursue you because I was romantically interested in you.” I could see the muscle in his jaw strained tight with tension.

“But you asked me out,” I said. “And that kiss—” His fingers tightened around mine. “I was using you.”

“What?”

His shoulders slumped. “I pursued you only after I found out about your friendship with Harriet.”

Whatever I had expected him to say, that certainly wasn’t it. “I don’t understand.”

The others were almost at the doorway. James pulled me a little farther along the walk.

“I thought you would be the easiest way to get to the manuscript.”

“The manuscript?” It was almost as if he were speaking to me in a foreign language.

He put his hand over his mouth and chin and then wiped downward as if he thought he could wipe away his words as well. “Harriet’s manuscript.” He said the last word as if it were poison.

And then I understood. “You want to publish it.”

“I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Eleanor went to school with an editor who works for me. He was visiting her here, and she had a little too much to drink and spilled the beans. Once Oliver told me about the manuscript, I knew we ’d struck gold. Eleanor tried to get it from her mother, but she wasn’t having any luck. I signed up for the seminar to see if I could get anywhere with Harriet. Then you waltzed in, and she was practically shoving it into your hands.”

“And I was an easy mark.” A strange tingling crept through my limbs, and humiliation poured in after it. I had been conned. Completely and utterly tricked. A handsome face, a little bit of attention, and I had been putty in his hands.

“It was you, wasn’t it, who broke into my room?” I had suspected Mrs. Parrot, but it had never occurred to me that the intruder might have been James.

“You should hate me,” he was saying. “I won’t blame you if you do.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” I wanted to sink through the paving stones beneath my feet. I was an even bigger idiot than I’d thought, not to have seen through him. I wanted to melt into the earth and never see the light of day again.

He dropped his grasp on my fingers. “I thought you deserved to know the truth. Especially after what happened with—what was his name?”

“Neil,” I supplied automatically.

“With Neil.” He paused. Now James looked even more serious than he had to begin with. His dark eyes had gone almost black.

“What?” I wasn’t sure I could stand any more revelations. I’d had too many shocks to my system already.

“Well, the other part of the truth is that”—he looked me squarely in the eye—“whatever my intentions were at the start, somewhere along the way, well_” He drew a deep breath. “The truth is that somewhere along the way, I fell for you.”

As little as forty-eight hours earlier, those words would have thrilled me beyond human comprehension. Now I simply found them depressing. Yes, I was flattered. But I was also aware of just what an idiot I had been over a man I barely knew, and I was also aware of just how much that idiocy had cost me.

“I just wanted you to know,” James said.

Was he trying to start something again? I couldn’t tell from the granitelike set of his jaw.

“Thank you,” I said, unsure of what else to say. “For telling me.”

“If you thought you could forgive me_” He trailed off, a hopeful expression in his eyes, but I shook my head. “It’s over, James.”

He shrugged. “Okay. I have to respect that.”

“Yes. You do.”

He reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “Take care. I hope you find the right person for you.”

“Yeah. You too,” I said.

I watched him walk away, but I felt none of the pain I’d experienced as I’d watched Neil leave. Amazing how twenty-four hours could change a person so completely, and how
completely a person’s feelings could change in that same amount of time.

“I hope I find someone too,” I said to the back of James’s head as he disappeared from sight.

I wanted to forget everything that had happened in the past week, but something Eleanor said that morning stuck in my head. To find insight into Austen’s work, she said, go back to the page. And I realized that if I ever wanted to know the truth about what might have changed between Austen’s first version of
Pride and Prejudice
and the final one, I was in the perfect place to find out.