‘So fetch one, then.’
‘Therein lies the issue,’ Jane said. ‘I appear to have little talent for husband fetching.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘Because I am old and poor,’ Jane replied.
‘Bah,’ Mrs Sinclair replied. ‘The young speak of love like they invented it, and think it exists when we are at our prettiest. Love is revealed when we are at our ugliest. I have seen older and poorer than you marry. Uglier ones, too. There must be something else. Perhaps you do not want to marry.’
‘I have no aversion to marrying,’ Jane protested. ‘All the men have not wanted me. Are you a matchmaker or not? I have money. I will pay.’
‘Your one true love is not amongst these men. To find him, you must go on a journey,’ the woman said in a portentous tone.
Jane paused. ‘I have been on a journey. I came seven hours in a rickety carriage from Bath, my only companion a man who may or may not have been a pirate.’
‘You make a joke of everything. It does you no favours,’ Mrs Sinclair said.
Jane quietened.
‘It is not that kind of a journey.’ Mrs Sinclair put down a cabbage. ‘I can help you. But if you want no part in this, you are free to leave.’
Jane sighed at the price she had already paid to get there. ‘I suppose you want payment,’ she said. ‘For your magical matchmaking that will defy the efforts of the many women before you.’
‘I do. I want something of yours that is valuable.’
Jane placed four pounds and some shillings on the table, the balance of her assets after purchasing her fare to London. ‘This is all I have.’ It was no huge sum, the same as any matchmaker asked. Jane was glad she had no more; she felt sure the woman swindled her.
‘I do not want something that costs. I want something of value,’ Mrs Sinclair said.
Jane sighed again and shifted in the rocking chair. Tired with the idea already, she compiled an inventory of the items of potential wealth on her person. The crucifix around her neck, presented to her by her younger brother Frank, which he proudly and lovingly declared to be brass, though with the way the bronze flecks often dusted her collarbones, she felt more comfortable with its classification as painted tin. Her coat and gloves were of a sturdy fabric but old; in her efforts to darn them she demonstrated her happy talent of both closing the tear whilst destroying the garment. She wore no rings on her fingers or jewels in her hair. She truly possessed nothing of value to tempt this woman.
‘As I am sure you can see, madam, I am not a rich woman. The only thing of value I possess sits on the table.’ She pointed to the bank note. ‘Apart from money, I have nothing.’
‘You do not listen,’ Mrs Sinclair said, tucking a strand of white hair behind her ear. ‘I do not want something that costs. I want something dear to you.’
Jane threw up her hands in frustration, then dug them into her pockets. Her hand grasped something flaky and crisp. She turned the item over in her fingers, then pulled it from her pocket and placed it on the table.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was a scrap of burnt paper, not half a page in size. The heat of the fire had baked it to yellow and spattered it with brown spots. Black charred the corners in half and quarter moons, as though some black-lipped monster had taken bites. Every surface that remained was covered in the neat lines of Jane’s hand, words written sideways and in the margins. She always wrote small, for paper was a luxury. The words came from a chapter towards the middle of First Impressions. The item represented the sole remaining scrap of Jane’s life’s work.
‘This no doubt appears as nothing,’ Jane said with a nervous laugh, ‘but this is the most valuable thing I own.’
‘That will do perfectly,’ Mrs Sinclair said. She picked up the burnt page and stared at it.
A minute passed; Mrs Sinclair made no sound. Jane grew anxious. ‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.
‘Shush,’ said Mrs Sinclair. ‘I am reading.’
Jane sat back in the rocking chair.
‘This is rather good,’ Mrs Sinclair said at last.
‘You are too kind,’ Jane replied in a dead voice. She smiled to herself.
‘And you are willing to give this up, in the pursuit of love?’ She held the burnt paper towards Jane.
Jane shrugged. ‘It is but a scrap of paper. Of course.’ She had memorised the words written on it long ago.
‘How much do you want love?’ Mrs Sinclair asked.
Jane shifted again, startled by the question, and considered it. It made no difference now, for he married another, but she and Mr Withers had shared a moment when they walked under a tree in Sydney Gardens. He had stopped to fix his cuff button, then turned his head to Jane. Their eyes met, and he smiled at her and she returned the smile. It was the smallest of interactions, and they had known each other only minutes, but in that moment, she did not stand alone in the world. She could not recall a warmer feeling.
Jane nodded to Mrs Sinclair. ‘I wish for love more than anything,’ she said.
Mrs Sinclair stared at Jane, then nodded. ‘As you are certain,’ Mrs Sinclair replied, ‘you shall have it.’ She sharpened a quill. ‘Let us write your wish down.’ She turned over the scrap of manuscript and wrote something on the underside. ‘This will work but once. It is reversible. Again, but once. Give me your finger,’ she said when she was done. Jane presented her left index, which Mrs Sinclair nicked with the nib.
‘Ow!’ Jane protested. A bead of red dripped onto the page. ‘What is this madness?’ She was quickly reaching the limit of her patience.
Mrs Sinclair shut her eyes and a chant passed her lips. Jane scowled and sucked her finger. ‘Say those words,’ Mrs Sinclair said, then turned once more to her cabbages.
Jane laughed. ‘Beg pardon. That is all?’
‘Did you want more?’ Mrs Sinclair asked.
‘Where am I to go? To which man shall you introduce me? Which men have I paid for with my blood drops? I don’t understand.’
‘I introduce you to no one. You will meet him on your own.’
‘Who?’ Jane said. ‘Who will I meet?’
‘Him,’ Mrs Sinclair replied. She handed Jane back the scrap of blackened manuscript and said nothing more.
Jane took the paper and stood there, impotent. It became apparent that Mrs Sinclair was finished with her. She began cutting a cabbage. Jane turned in a circle and sighed. ‘I guess I shall be going, then?’ she said. Mrs Sinclair nodded but again said nothing. Jane let out a grand sigh, frustration boiling within her. Finally, she left. She exited the house, stepping out into the cobblestoned lane. A devil creature strolled down the road towards her, a supernatural beast blackened with soot from head to toe. It smiled at Jane and a set of bright white teeth gleamed from within a pitch-black face. Jane gasped and leapt backwards in fright.
‘Evening, Miss,’ it said, tipping its grimy cap at her. The figure was no hellish ghost; it was a chimneysweep, his shoulders laden with long-armed brushes, blackened with soot, walking home from the day’s trade.
Another man wheeled past with a stinking barrow of eels laid out in a slimy heap. ‘Move it, silly tart!’ the man yelled at Jane. The glistening sleeves of scales slipped and slithered as the cart bounced over the cobblestones.
‘I have business here, sir,’ said Jane.
‘You do not.’ The man laughed as he bustled past her. ‘You are another lovesick girl. They come day and night to that door,’ he said.
‘What for?’ said Jane.
‘To be taken in,’ he said. ‘She’s a charlatan. She preys on the soft-heads and hysterics.’ He chuckled again and shook his head, then rolled his reeking vehicle down the lane.
Jane shut her eyes. What a fool she was. The hilarity and strangeness of the day evaporated into the soot-laden Cheapside air and reality returned. Her desperation and humiliation had transformed her into a gullible woman, willing to travel by herself to London, and now she stood alone in one of its filthiest,
seamiest sections. She commanded her silly heart to stop beating, to stop making a spectacle of itself.
She turned for St Paul’s and trudged back along Embankment, not bothering to cover her nose at the Thames. She boarded her post at Piccadilly, the only passenger this time, and began the journey home.
Jane returned to an assembly gathered in Sydney Place. The entire population of Sydney House, most of Sutton Street and even some of Great Pulteney Street were standing about the front of the building. From the concerned looks and nods, there appeared to be some great scandal taking place which everyone was happy to delay their supper to enjoy. Jane proceeded towards the group to inquire as to what unfortunate event had befallen some unlucky family, but then froze and hid behind a hedge on the corner when her own mother emerged from the building, her cheeks stained with tears. A constable stood beside her, who nodded as she spoke and jotted notes in his pocketbook. Her mother’s hair, usually pulled back in an elegant cultivation of curls, hung limp and wet under her riding bonnet. Her favourite blue gown, always pristine and starched, was muddied and blackened, with the right sleeve torn. A thin line of red ran down her soft cheek, the type of scratch a branch might make. Jane furrowed her brow. Why was her mama dressed so? She never saw her with wet hair.
Jane shuddered. She had been gone the whole day and had left no word of where she was going, no plan of visiting friends or travelling with an organised party. Her mother must have gone out looking for her.
Jane peered more closely at the neighbours gathered. Lady Johnstone stood at the front, corralling guests and chatting to everyone. She bounced around the crowd in celebration. They would remember this for years: the great Austen scandal. There was one reason a parson’s daughter might exit her home unannounced, and it was not a chaste one. Anticipation seemed to ripple through the crowd at what new crimes of Jane’s might soon be confirmed.
Jane looked at her mother. Mrs Austen did not seem to share the crowd’s happy emotions. She paid no attention to them, but turned to the constable with his notebook. In her hand was a portrait of Jane, one Cassandra had drawn. It was a poor likeness, too beaky, and in truth Cassandra had rushed it, but it was enough like Jane to do the trick. Her mother must have scoured the house for it. She had not realised her mother even knew of the portrait’s existence. It was a pitiable little picture, but her mother cradled it in her hands and brushed a drop of water off it which had fallen from the policeman’s hat. Jane had never seen her mother hold a picture of her. She contemplated walking to her mother then, perhaps touching her arm and smiling. They could say things they had never said before. But her mother’s act of novel incineration still burned in Jane’s mind, so she stood back and witnessed her mother’s suffering instead. How we delight in punishing those we love. Besides, she could muster no energy for the spectacle to follow as she reunited with her family before every matron, fishwife, parishioner and concerned citizen in town.
She ran instead to the Fairy Wood and took shelter in an abandoned woodsman’s cottage. She’d hide until nightfall, when the gathered townsfolk abandoned hope of Jane’s return, their hunger for supper overtaking their hunger for scandal. Jane would go home and deal with her parents then. She sat in the stone cottage and waited.
She removed the scrap of First Impressions from her pocket and turned it over in her hand. Mrs Sinclair had written a single line of text on the back. Jane scowled. Not only was Mrs Sinclair a swindler, her handwriting was impossible. Jane knew shocking penmanship. Her brother Henry’s, for example, with his excited, cheerful scribbles which looked more like drunken ants had beached themselves on the page, or her brother Frank, who, when writing to Jane from the sea to thank her for his new shirt, smeared most of the Atlantic Ocean on the page as if wanting to truly show her what sea life was like. But their crimes against handwriting were petty larceny compared to the high treason of Mrs Sinclair. It took Jane minutes just to conclude which was the page’s correct way up. It was not as though the writing was obscured by the elegance of a Germanic script, or calligraphy. It was not ornamented with circumflexes or long tails the way an ‘s’ was once written as an ‘f’, as one might have found on the bill for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. There was no glamour to its illegibility. It was a deranged spray of black globules, interspersed with a random assortment of angry black sticks. She’d achieve a neater display upending the ink pot and sneezing its contents onto the page.
Jane raised the paper in front of her person, the way Mama did when the candle burned low and her eyes were tired. Her eyes moved to the starting point of the demented scrawl. The first letter was ‘T’, for certain. What was the next letter – ‘a’? Yes.
‘Take,’ read Jane aloud. The first word. The next was simpler. It was but two letters, each being different enough in shape to make them decipherable. ‘m–e. Me. Take me.’
Jane read on. The next word was ‘to’, and the word after, ‘my’. The following one was a gathering of splotches. Jane could not decipher the number of letters, let alone their meaning. The middle blob was her clue. It curved at the top. Her choices were thus ‘r’, ‘q’, ‘o’, ‘p’ ‘n’ . . . It was ‘n’!
‘One,’ Jane read. She smiled. She was a fearsome knight, slaying the dragon of bad penmanship, one letter at a time. The next word began and ended as the first. It was ‘true’.
She identified the final word with ease. ‘Take me to my one true love,’ Jane read aloud. She sat back and smiled, satisfied to have broken the code of blobs. She grimaced at the mawkish choice of words. Then the room grew dark and snow fell. Jane gasped; the flakes fell from the ceiling, from inside the cottage. Then the room whooshed and with a crack like thunder, Jane dissolved into particles and a breeze which entered the cottage blew her away.
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINE
Sofia Wentworth stood in the wings of the Bath community hall and blew into a brown paper bag.
She looked down at her empire-line Regency costume and cringed. Blue and brown stripes bloomed from her body like a rancid flower. An ostrich feather protruded from her head so far it brushed the ceiling. Altogether, she resembled a vindictive peacock, one of those dishevelled ones who hides in the bushes, then attacks brunch revellers in a park and has to be put down.
She grabbed the brown paper bag once more and inhaled.
A runner jumped into the backstage area and opened a stage door. ‘Ms Wentworth, are you in here? Rehearsal is due to start,’ he called out in a panicked voice.
Sofia hid behind a theatre drape. It might have been beneath the dignity of one of the world’s biggest movie stars to cower behind a pile of curtains, but it was the appropriate tactic for the moment.
The runner gave up looking and returned to the hall.
Sofia sucked more air from the bag. She blew out again. She cursed her therapist, who had suggested this in a soothing voice as a fix for any panic attacks that might rear their head. Unfortunately, a brown paper bag was not quite enough for the moment she was experiencing. A dram of absinthe and some tranquilisers might’ve hit closer to the mark.
She fetched her phone from the pocket of her period costume and dialled Max Milson. ‘Max, I’m afraid I can no longer do the movie,’ she said when he answered.
‘What’s wrong?’ her agent replied down the line.
‘I’m unwell. I’m pregnant,’ she said. She could only imagine his expression.
‘Congratulations!’ he said automatically. ‘When are you due?’
She’d not thought of that. ‘May seventh?’ she said.
‘That’s . . . eleven months away,’ Max replied.
Damn. Forgot to carry the one.
‘Sofia, what’s going on?’ His weary, fatherly tone betrayed the twelve long years they’d worked together.
Sofia looked down and winced. ‘My outfit. It’s hideous.’
‘In what way?’
‘It does my figure no favours.’
‘It’s a period film,’ Max said. ‘Thos
e are the costumes. What did you think they’d put you in, a bikini?’
‘No. Merely, I didn’t expect the past to be so . . . comical.’
‘You’re playing Mrs Allen, Sofia. She’s supposed to be comical.’
He was right. The production designer had fulfilled her brief in good faith and designed a costume that made Sofia look ridiculous. Sofia had known the character was a silly woman going in and cursed herself now for thinking this would be okay. Indeed, saying those witty lines of Austen’s, dressed in this ludicrous way, she’d likely steal every scene she was in. To the uninitiated, this sounded great. But to Sofia, this posed a problem.
She was used to stealing the scene – she had built a career on doing just that – but she stole the scene by making every straight man in the audience (and likely, a few of the women) want her. She did this with such ease it had become her calling card, the reason she was cast in films, the reason studios shifted production schedules to suit her. Her way put bottoms on seats, it drew crowds in, it turned turkeys into profit-makers. Now, she would be stealing the scene for all the wrong reasons. She would be the butt of the joke. Audiences had never seen this side of her, and they wouldn’t like it. They wanted her to arouse them, they wanted to sit down and live a fantasy for two hours, and she was about to dump a bucket of cold water on their dreams. Everyone else would tell her she was being silly, but Sofia knew that she was good for one thing only in this business – to look hot. Walking out there looking like this would be a mistake.
Fifteen years had passed since she first rocked the acting world as Ophelia at the Old Vic, straight out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was ‘sex on legs’, as one critic had declared in frothing tones, and it had transformed her from actress to celebrity. She’d signed with a Hollywood agent, and in less than five years was playing Batgirl, the lusty sidekick to Batman, in the world’s most lucrative film franchise. It was the fastest ascendancy from theatre tights to leotard for a British actor to date. She married the director, Jack Travers, after they fell in love on set. Ten years of walking red carpets, holidaying on the Riviera and shooting action films in Slovenia passed like nothing.
Jane in Love Page 5