Searching For Captain Wentworth

• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  
• Chapter Nineteen
  
• Chapter Twenty
  
• Chapter Twenty One
  
• Chapter Twenty Two
  
• Chapter Twenty Three
  
• Chapter Twenty Four
  
• Chapter Twenty Five
  
• Chapter Twenty Six
  
• Chapter Twenty Seven
  
• Chapter Twenty Eight
  
• Chapter Twenty Nine
  
• Chapter Thirty
  
• Chapter Thirty One
  
• Chapter Thirty Two
  
• Chapter Thirty Three
  
• Chapter Thirty Four
  
• Chapter Thirty Five
  
• Chapter Thirty Six
  
• Chapter Thirty Seven
  
• Chapter Thirty Eight
  
• Chapter Thirty Nine
  

F
or Olivia, with all my love

I’d like to
thank:

Jane Austen, for
her wonderful books and inspiration.

My family, you
know who you are, I love you all.

Anne Rice, for
many wonderful and inspirational days spent
together discussing all things Jane. I’ve always
loved the
Rice portrait of
Jane Austen,
so when I was invited to see the painting and hear
all about
its history, it
was a truly memorable experience. I am also grateful to Anne
for very kindly granting me permission to reproduce
her fabulous portrait
for the
cover of this book. Thank you so much!

Gaynor, Jenny,
Caroline, Penny, Elaine, May, Adalgisa and Jen, for
their constant love and support of my writing.

Fellow authors,
Sue Wilkes, Juliet Archer, Monica Fairview, Diana
Birchall, Kathryn Nelson, Amanda Grange, Laura
Boyle, and Victoria
Connelly, for
their support, friendship and many laughs.

Helen Porter,
for her lovely company and for giving me the
opportunity to talk to fellow Janeites on her
P&P tours
.
http://www.pandptours.co.uk

Laurel Ann
Nattress, Vic Sanborn, Julie Wakefield, Meredith
Esparza, Maria Grazia, Lori Hedgpeth, Alexa Adams,
Nancy Kelley,
Laura Hartness,
Deb Barnum, Laura Gerold, Margaret Sullivan,
Austen
Authors
,
Historical Romance UK Authors
, and
the
Romantic Novelist’s
Association
, for your friendship, kindness and entertaining
blogs.

Jackie Herring
and the Jane Austen Centre, for their kind invitation
to speak at the
Jane Austen Festival
.

The Pulteney Arms
, Bath,
for always providing wonderful food,
white wine, and a warm welcome.

The City of Bath
with all its attractions – my idea of Fairyland!

Last, but by no
means least, a huge thank you to:

Every single
reader of my books, for it is you who keep me going,
provide inspiration, and lift me up with your
wonderful letters and emails.

In the summer of
2009, a lifelong dream came true when I moved into a
flat in Bath with its views over Jane Austen’s
garden in Sydney Place, the
Holburne
museum and Sydney Gardens. The experiences that followed
and the consequent dreams that haunted me have been
my inspiration for
this book.

Anyone who
visits Bath today will be as entranced as I was when I
first visited the city and there’s much pleasure to
be had in walking in Jane
Austen’s
footsteps. The Assembly Rooms, the Pump Rooms, Sydney
Gardens, Milsom Street, Great Pulteney Street and
the Gravel Walk are all
visited
in her novels, especially in
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
, and
can still be seen much as they were in Jane’s day.
Her novels are
responsible for
a good portion of the tourists who come to see where
Austen was inspired to create many wonderful
characters. Janeites flock
to the
Jane Austen Centre and its annual festival every September, to
experience what it must have been like to live in
Regency Bath. Considering that she mentions Bath in all of her novels, and
that two
of them were
largely set in the town, I’ve always felt it was surprising that
so little correspondence relating to Bath remains.
But, between 1801 and
1804,
none of Jane’s letters have survived. Could it be that Bath held the key; that
something happened here which changed her life forever?

Persuasion
is the most powerful and emotional of her novels,
and
my own particular favourite. It’s
always a pleasure to take a newcomer
around the town and show them the places that Jane wrote about. It’s
often
said that Jane
disliked Bath but I’ve always felt that if this were really the
case, she would not have set two of her most
romantic novels here. Letters
written
in her youth give quite a different picture, and I wonder if the
reason she became disillusioned with Bath was
because her father died in
the city.
Thereafter, her life became increasingly difficult as the family’s
circumstances became much reduced and they were
forced to move from
house to house.

It’s true that
Jane’s books are not only about the heroes and heroines
that fall in love. Bath provided a wonderful
backdrop for the characters
Jane must
have known in real life, as well as those that she invented.
Social climbing and husband hunting went hand in
hand in Regency Bath,
and it’s
easy to imagine that characters like Sir Walter Elliot and Lady
Dalrymple were based on some of the people she
observed.

Finally, we may
never know for sure who inspired Captain Frederick
Wentworth, Jane’s hero in
Persuasion
, but
that she loved and lost, I do not
think there can be a doubt.

Jane Odiwe

June 2012

“…The
quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every
page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly
any women at all — it
is very
tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for
a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches
that are put into the
heroes’mouths,
their thoughts and designs — the chief of all this must
be invention, and invention is what delights me in
other books.”

“Historians, you think,” said Miss
Tilney, “are not happy in their flights
of fancy. They display imagination
without raising interest. I am fond of
history — and am very well
contented to take the false with the true...” Jane Austen.

On the day that
the parcel arrived, I didn’t really take much notice
at first.

‘Now, that’s
what I call an interesting object,’ my father said,
putting the brown paper package before me on the
kitchen table
with a flourish.
‘It offers all sorts of possibilities from the exotic to
the mundane.’

‘Knowing my luck
it’s more likely to be the latter,’ I muttered
under my breath. Spearing the top of a boiled egg
with my spoon I
watched the
golden yolk trickle in a glutinous trail down over the
striped eggcup, until it congealed in a pool on the
blue plate. Aware
that he was
observing me closely I sensed his silent agitation, as he
waited for me to show some sign of interest.

‘Full of
mysterious promise is that parcel, I wonder what’s in
it,’ Dad persisted, watching me stab a toast
soldier into the yolk,
until
there was nothing left but porcelain egg white like the gleam
of a fragile teacup. In an effort to appear
uninterested, he went to
stand at
the sink pretending to be busy. I heard him fill a bowl with
steaming water, knowing that I was being watched
from the corner
of his eye.

‘Well, aren’t you
going to open it?’ he said at last, clearly
bursting with curiosity.

I wasn’t in the
mood. I couldn’t care less what was in the
parcel and I sighed before I could stop myself.

‘Is anything
wrong, love?’ He put down the teacloth and the
saucepan he was drying, before sitting down on the
chair next to
mine. ‘You’re
out of sorts, Sophie. Tell your old Dad. What’s the
matter?’

The teacloth
proved to be an object of fascination in that
moment as I avoided the answer and his eyes, taking
time to fold
the fabric into
a satisfying rectangle. Part of me was ashamed to be
behaving like a petulant teenager. I was far too
old for that but, I
didn’t want to
tell him everything because despite being truly sad
for me, I knew that he would also be completely
delighted and I
couldn’t stand
the thought of seeing that in his face. The truth was
that I’d had my heart irrevocably broken, smashed
up like the
brittle egg
shell lying shattered in pieces on my plate. Everything
I’d ever believed about Lucas, our relationship and
about our future
together, had
finally been proved to be false. If I’m truthful, I’d
always known that I would find myself sobbing into
my breakfast
one day, feeling
bruised and abandoned. But, that it would come at
such a spectacularly low point in my life, I hadn’t
fully considered.

Actually, there
were no more tears; I’d gone beyond the crying
stage. I just felt completely numb. Telling my Dad,
who I knew
would be pleased
to be proved right about my philandering
boyfriend, was out of the question, so I blamed my
mood on the
horribly
unsuccessful job interview of the day before. All I had to
do now was listen to murmurs of sympathy.