Austenland

  They’d been together for twenty-three months. She’d gone wedding-dress browsing on the sly. For a week, she curled up in a corner, crying and consuming ice cream by the pint. At last, Emma-esque, she burned Kevin mementos one by one in her wok lid.

  Frankly, it didn’t help much more than the ice cream.

  day 11

  “REALLY, YOU MUST COME RIDING with us. I insist,” Amelia said, glowing even more than usual out in the autumn sun.

  Mr. Nobley was wearing his pleasantly snug hunting breeches, and though that was incentive, spending an afternoon as the third wheel sounded beyond tiresome. But Jane was a tad curious to watch the pair. She couldn’t ask Amelia directly about Mr. Nobley (for some reason, it seemed to be forbidden in Austenland—but really, in Sense and Sensibility, couldn’t Elinor have asked her younger sister if she was engaged to Mr. Willoughby? That silence had seemed a touch extreme). So she spied for clues. Mr. Nobley never touched Amelia, didn’t so much as lean, step in closer, whisper in her ear (or just breathe!), any of the subtle, Regency-approved PD of A that Colonel Andrews gallantly drizzled over Miss Charming. Really, if Mr. Nobley had already declared his love for Amelia, then he was a pathetic lover.

  Or was he the kind of man who loved too much, who only left his crazy wife because he wanted that much to be a father? Wait, that wasn’t Mr. Nobley, that was Henry Jenkins. But were they the same? It was all getting very confusing.

  Jane tightened her bonnet ribbon, hoping it might help keep her thoughts snug in her head. She was certainly dressed for something rough in her pink morning dress (the bottom three inches stained from her surreptitious speed walks), with outdoorsy spencer jacket and her action bonnet, and had nothing to get her out of the ride, except maybe claiming a fake headache, but that was so cliché.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  Soon thereafter she was clambering into the ever-intimidating sidesaddle and whispering, “Easy, there, donkey friend,” when Captain East appeared.

  “Going for a ride, Miss Erstwhile?”

  “Yes, and I wish you would come.”

  He had agreed before Amelia walked her horse into view. Captain East flinched but couldn’t back out now.

  Jane was determined to keep distant from the couple and have a little alone time with prince charming. Captain East didn’t make her heart patter, but he was beyond high school quarterback cute, and being fake-courted by him would make for an interesting vacation at the very least. Then, like a bumbling fool, Mr. No-bley kept letting his horse trot forward, separating Jane and Captain East, and leaving Amelia riding alone. Jane would correct it, and Mr. Nobley would mess it all up again.

  She glared. And still he didn’t get it.

  Then he was glaring, and she glared back the why-are-you-glaring-at-me glare, and his eyes were exasperated, and she was about to call him ridiculous, when he said, “Miss Erstwhile, you look flushed. Will you not rest for a moment? Do not trouble yourself, Captain East, you go on with Miss Heartwright and we will follow straightaway.”

  When the other two were out of hearing range, Jane turned her glare into words. “What are you doing? I’m just fine.”

  “Pardon, Miss Erstwhile, but I was trying to allow Captain East and Miss Heartwright a few moments alone. She confided in me about their troubled past, and I hoped time to talk would help ease the strain between them.”

  “Okay,” Jane laughed, “so I’m a little slow.” She knew she didn’t sound the least bit Austen-y, but for some reason she just couldn’t make herself try to approximate the dead dialect around Mr. Nobley.

  After she swore herself to secrecy and did her best to seem trustworthy and closemouthed, Mr. Nobley revealed that those two had been more than fond acquaintances. In fact, last year he’d proposed and she’d accepted.

  “Her mother disapproved, as he was merely a sailor. Mr. Heartwright, her brother, informed East that he was dismissed from being her suitor, and Miss Heartwright never had an opportunity to explain that it hadn’t been her wish. She fears it is too late now, but I don’t believe her heart ever let go of the man.”

  “Ah,” Jane said, now fitting their story into the correct Austen novel context—Persuasion, more or less. And that was a real bummer. Captain East had offered Jane the best shot at curative love. Oh well. Two down . . . one to go? She studied Mr. No-bley and wondered why she had the impression that he was dangerous—or would be if he didn’t so often look tired or bored. Was he a sleeping tiger? Or a sack of potatoes?

  “And how do you feel about this, Mr. Nobley?” she asked.

  “It does not matter how I feel about Miss Heartwright.” He nudged his horse forward, and hers followed.

  She hadn’t been talking about Miss Heartwright, but, okay. “Wait, are you heartbroken?” She knew Miss Erstwhile shouldn’t ask the question, but Jane couldn’t help it.

  “No, of course not.”

  “Not about Miss Heartwright, anyway.” Jane watched Mr.

  Nobley’s face closely for signs of Henry Jenkins. His mouth was still, unrevealing, but his eyes were sad. She’d never noticed before. “Maybe you’re not heartbroken anymore, maybe you’ve passed that part, and now you’re just lonely.”

  Mr. Nobley smiled, but with just half of his mouth. “You are very good at nettling me, Miss Erstwhile. As I said, it does not matter how I feel. We are speaking of Miss Heartwright and Captain East. I think it nonsense how they have kept silent about it these past days. They should speak their minds.”

  “You approve of speaking one’s mind? So, do you approve of me?”

  As it appeared Mr. Nobley had no intention of answering the question, and Jane was stumped at how to restart the conversation, they rode on in silence.

  Of course just at that moment, she would see Martin by a line of trees, looking her way. Why couldn’t she be chatting and laughing and having a wonderful time? She smiled generously at the world around her and hoped that Martin would think she was enthralled with Mr. Nobley’s company and perfectly happy.

  Mr. Nobley turned to ask her a question, but when he saw her grinning without apparent cause, the words hung in his mouth. His eyes widened. “What? You are laughing at me again. What have I done now?”

  Jane did laugh. “I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to help myself around you. You are so tease-able.” Which was precisely not true, and yet saying it somehow made it so.

  Mr. Nobley looked over his shoulder just as the line of trees hid Martin from view. Jane wasn’t sure if he saw him.

  “I’m sorry I annoy you so much,” said Jane. “I’ll stop. I really will.”

  “Hm,” said Mr. Nobley as if he doubted it. He looked at his hands thoughtfully, not speaking again for several moments. In the silence, Jane became aware of her heart beating. Why was that? When he spoke again, his tone had changed, innocuous, chitchatty.

  “How do you find Pembrook Park, Miss Erstwhile?”

  “Do you mean the house itself? Well, it’s beautiful, no question, friendly and yet too grand to be really comfortable. Like wearing a corset, I like how it looks and feels, but I can’t relax in it.” She shook her head. How did she keep slipping up? Saying things to this man that the Rules said she shouldn’t. She tried to think of something more innocent to say. “I love the paintings. The ones hanging in the gallery, they’re all in the grand style of portrait art, luminous with natural light. The artist isn’t just concerned with outer beauty but takes pains to express the virtue of soul in the subjects and catch that gleam of importance in their eyes. I don’t care how portly or drastically thin, how sickly or sad, all the people in those paintings know that they’re significant. You have to envy that kind of self-assurance.”

  Jane stopped herself, realizing that she’d gotten carried away in the subject and her audience probably wasn’t the least bit interested. A glance sideways at Mr. Nobley—he was watching her, intently.

  “You’re a painter.”

  Jane blinked. “I used to paint, but it’s been years. Now I .
. .” she paused, not knowing how to translate “graphic design” into Austen lingo. “It’s been a while since I’ve used that medium.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “You know, I do, just lately. Maybe it’s because my head’s all mixed up,” she nodded, acknowledging her awkward breakdown days ago, “but all the new things I’m seeing are bugging me, becoming images, and my hands twitch, wanting to work out those images on paper. I think drawing and painting used to be a way of thinking for me. Until I came here, I’d almost forgotten about it.”

  “Here I am!” Captain East was cantering his mount toward them. He rode beautifully, confidently. Molly’s family spent their summers in the country, and she used to say that the way a man rides a horse could give you a pretty good idea how he would do something else. Jane eyed Mr. Nobley on his mount, noted that he was a smooth, gentle rider. The surprise of thinking this while wearing a bonnet made Jane choke. Her breath snarled in her throat, and she laughed.

  Mr. Nobley’s eyes widened. “What’s funny? You often have some secret laugh, Miss Erstwhile.”

  “The way you have some secret displeasure?”

  “No, not displeasure,” he said, and she realized he was right. Sadness, or heartbreak, or grief that there was nothing to give him hope, perhaps. She was pretty sure now that he was Henry Jenkins, poor sop.

  Captain East reined in beside Jane. “Miss Heartwright had a headache and went inside. So sorry to neglect you, Miss Erstwhile. You must tell me what I missed.”

  “I’ve discovered that Miss Erstwhile is an artist,” Mr. Nobley said.

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s been years since I picked up a paintbrush.” She glared at Mr. Nobley, and zing, there was his smile again, brief, urgent. When his lips relaxed she wanted it to come back.

  “That is a shame,” said Captain East.

  That evening when Jane retired from the drawing room, she found a large package on her side table wrapped in brown paper. She ripped open the paper and out tumbled neat little tubes of oil paints and three paintbrushes. She saw now that an easel waited by the window with two small canvases. She felt very Jane Eyre as she smelled the paints and ticked her palm with the largest brush.

  Who was her benefactor? It could be Captain East. Maybe he still liked her best, even after his tête-à-tête with Miss Heartwright. It could happen. Even so, she found herself hoping it was Mr. No-bley. Instinct urged her to stomp on the hope. She ignored it. She was firmly in Austenland now, she reminded herself, where hoping was allowed.

  Did Austen herself feel this way? Was she hopeful? Jane wondered if the unmarried writer had lived inside Austenland with close to Jane’s own sensibility—amused, horrified, but in very real danger of being swept away.

  Ten days to go.

  Boyfriend #10

  Peter Sosa, AGE TWENTY-NINE

  They met in the elevator. He worked on an upper floor, an ad exec, young for the position so obviously a genius. Smartness had always attracted Jane, that and hands and jawline and butt. And eyes. Also, integrity of character—she wasn’t shallow. Peter fell for her at once, he said, because she was stunning. That’s the word he’d used—stunning. It’s a difficult word to dismiss. She longed to be that word to someone.

  They went out every Friday night for five weeks, and she felt her heart plummeting a long way. Boyfriend #9 was still raw, a sore that wouldn’t heal because she kept picking at it, but wouldn’t Peter be such a way to come back from that catastrophe! She fantasized of the day she would casually bump into nasty ex-boyfriends with Peter on her arm. And then . . .

  “What is it? You’re married, aren’t you?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.” He paused, leaving Jane to imagine. “I have a girlfriend. I’m sorry. I’m not cheating, she’s right over there, at the table by the window. She made me a bet that I couldn’t make the first girl I asked out fall in love with me. Some movie she saw, thought it would be romantic, then it went too far . . .”

  Jane’s language would have made Britney the longshoreman blush down to her boots.

  days 12–13

  THE NEXT MORNING, RAIN BLURRED the hard edges from the world, transforming things into forms, like Christo’s fabric-wrapped bridges, nudes, and trees. Jane had been painting since daybreak. Yellow, red, orange, blue. The colors made her hungry, but she was too infatuated with paint on canvas to dress for breakfast. When Matilda came, Jane shooed her away.

  She had forgotten the thrill she used to feel when buying a new paintbrush, squeezing all those colors onto her palette, smelling the clean natural odor of the oils, the reckless unknown of first spoiling a white canvas. These past years, she had become comfortable with her mouse and computer screen, creating corporate art, lazy and dull. And now, smearing green and gray together, interrupting it with orange, she realized she had loved her last boyfriends as a graphic designer would. But she wanted to love someone the way she felt when painting—fearless, messy, vivid.

  In honor of Miss Eyre, Jane did a self-portrait. When she caught just the right shading of a cheek, her heart bumped her ribs as though she were in love. What she was after was that self-assurance in the eyes that those old portraits in the gallery had, a knowing gleam that insisted she was worth looking at. It was tricky to achieve. She wanted to ask someone else’s opinion about her painting, but not the traitor Matilda. Aunt Saffronia? No, she was too eager to please. Martin? Oh, stop it. Mr. Nobley? Yes, but why him?

  She made it downstairs late for lunch and a maid served her cold meats and well-cooked vegetables. The house echoed as though long deserted. She thought of returning to her easel, but she felt unsettled by the expression she’d left in her painting—she feared it was forced assurance, an actor’s eyes. She decided to give both pairs of eyes a break.

  She sat in the library, staring at the streaks of water against the window, the book A Sentimental Journey half open before her. What do gardeners do in the rain? she wondered.

  Mr. Nobley had entered the room before he noticed her. He groaned.

  “And here you are. Miss Erstwhile. You are infuriating and irritating, and yet I find myself looking for you. I would be grateful if you would send me away and make me swear to never return.”

  “You shouldn’t have told me that’s what you want, Mr. No-bley, because now you’re not going to get it.”

  “Then I must stay?”

  “Unless you want to risk me accusing you of ungentleman-like behavior at dinner, yes, I think you should stay. If I spend too much time alone today, I’m in real danger of doing a convincing impersonation of the madwoman in the attic.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “And how would that be different from—”

  “Sit down, Mr. Nobley,” she said.

  He sat in a chair on the opposite side of a small table. The chair creaked as he settled himself. She didn’t look at him, watching instead the rain on the window and the silvery shadows the wet light made of the room. She spent several moments in silence before she realized that it might be awkward, that conversation at such a time was obligatory. Now she could feel his gaze on her face and longed to crack the silence like the spine of a book, but she had nothing to say anymore. She’d lost all her thoughts in paint and rain.

  “You are reading Sterne,” he said at last. “May I?”

  He gestured to the book, and she handed it to him. Jane was remembering a scene from the film of Mansfield Park when suitor Henry Crawford read to Frances O’Connor’s character so sweetly, the sound created a passionate tension, the words themselves becoming his courtship. Jane glanced at Mr. Nobley’s somber face, and away again as his eyes flicked from the page to her.

  He began to read from the top. His voice was soft, melodious, strong, a man who could speak in a crowd and have people listen, but also a man who could persuade a child to sleep with a bedtime story.

  “The man who first transplanted the grape of Burgundy to the Cape of Good Hope (observe he was a Dutchman) never dreamt of drinking the s
ame wine at the Cape, the same grape produced upon the French mountains—he was too phlegmatic for that—but undoubtedly he expected to drink some sort of vinous liquor; but whether good, bad, or indifferent—he knew enough of this world to know, that it did not depend upon his choice . . .”

  Mr. Nobley was trying very hard not to smile. His lips were tight; his voice scraped a couple of times. Jane laughed at him, and then he did smile. It gave her a little thwack of pleasure as though someone had flicked a finger against her heart.

  “Not very, er . . .” he said.

  “Interesting?”

  “I imagine not.”

  “But you read it well,” she said.

  He raised his brows. “Did I? Well, that is something.”

  They sat in silence a few moments, chuckling intermittently.

  Mr. Nobley began to read again suddenly, “Mynheer might possibly overset both in his new vineyard,” having to stop to laugh again. Aunt Saffronia walked by and peered into the dim room as she passed, her presence reminding Jane that this tryst might be forbidden by the Rules. Mr. Nobley returned to himself.

  “Excuse me,” he said, rising. “I have trespassed on you long enough.”

  HE TRESPASSED ON HER AGAIN the following afternoon, and Jane found she did not mind whatsoever. Surprising twist, that. The rain had stopped, the sky bashful behind clouds, and at Mr. Nobley’s suggestion, the party went walking the paths, avoiding the sodden lawns.

  There was some fumbling of pairs, with Andrews and Charming at the lead, then the Nobley and Heartwright coupling turning into Erstwhile and Heartwright, which became Erstwhile and Nobley, and there the musical partners game ended. Jane glanced over her shoulder and wondered what thrills of pain and hope might be pricking Amelia as she walked with her erroneously jilted love. What fun.