Sofia shook Jane’s shoulder and blew on her face. The woman roused. ‘The date on the paper. Last night,’ she said to Sofia.
‘What paper?’ said Sofia. She wondered if she should tell the woman to get up. But she was acting rather shaken by the news – understandably – and Sofia was loathe to interrupt her process.
Jane explained to Sofia about some piece of paper she was handed the night before.
‘The call sheet for rehearsal? That had the date, yes. It is 2020,’ Sofia replied.
The Jane Austen impersonator shuddered. Sofia was enjoying the performance now. She had underestimated this actress. Sofia had delivered the reveal with gravitas, and now the actress responded with a convincing display of disbelief and terror. Though it was behind-the-scenes footage, and likely shot on a grainy video camera, Sofia did not mind. An audience suspended their disbelief at any plot point when they saw genuine human feeling, and this tale of a person from two hundred years ago, trapped in the modern day, would move the hardest of hearts.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jane leant over her knees and inhaled. While the only food she’d consumed over the past day was the biscuits she’d packed for her journey to London, she suddenly felt inclined to deposit that paltry meal across the footpath. She attempted to curtail such a reaction until she was confirmed of the facts. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said to the woman who asked to be called Sofia. The evidence grew harder to ignore that something had happened to the Bath she knew. But still, she clung to hope that the absurd reality the woman had suggested was a mistake. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she tried.
Sofia hailed a passer-by, another man in his drawers. ‘Excuse me, sir. What year is it?’ she said to him.
‘Do I know you?’ said the man. He lifted his eyeglasses. ‘Are you from Wheel of Fortune?’
Sofia covered her face with her hand. ‘No. The year, sir?’ she insisted.
‘It’s twenty-twenty,’ he replied with a huff and a scowl, as though Jane’s companion had asked a foolish question. He replaced his glasses and walked off.
Sofia turned to Jane. ‘See?’ she said. Jane winced. This offered a less than ideal situation. Sofia retrieved a newspaper from a bin and showed it to Jane. ‘And see again.’ The front page bore a painting of a man making a speech. The painting shared the same lifelike quality of the one which had terrified Jane in the hall the night before. Sofia pointed to the date printed at the top of the page: 2020.
Jane shivered and considered bringing up her meal again. She stared at Sofia. Perhaps Lady Johnstone and her cavalry of gossips were playing some grand joke, hoping to milk the Austen misfortune for more scandal and fun. It proved an unusual tactic to go to such lengths as these for conversation fodder, to fabricate newspapers and pay actors, but the alternative – that this woman told the truth – was even more ludicrous.
Another steel carriage raced past them with terrific sound, again with no horses to drag it. Even if Jane was to entertain the idea that she had moved through time, how had she managed it? What mechanism had she employed to achieve this mind- and flesh-bending feat? Was it Mrs Sinclair’s doing? But that required a reality more ridiculous than the others combined. That a bedraggled person from Cheapside who smelled of cabbages was in fact a mighty sorceress? That the demented scribbles she’d left on Jane’s page were a . . . spell? That she had conjured from her cabbage-hearth an opening into time itself and sent Jane through it?
As they walked down the road, Jane studied the sights around her and searched for logical explanations. A third steel carriage sped past her. She could source a reason for this. She mistook a horseless post for what was simply a train, powered by steam. Jane and her father had ridden a Murdoch locomotive over fifty yards of track in London when she was twenty. The steam which billowed from the train’s chimney in meaty grey puffs astounded her and she had demanded the driver explain how it worked. The bemused man told Papa his daughter was impertinent and that was no question for a woman, so her father had borrowed a book about locomotion from the circulating library for Jane and she taught herself the concepts. This carriage’s mysterious animation could be put down to simple steam combustion. Indeed, no steam billowed from this carriage, but she supposed this was a French version or some alternative design.
She could explain Bath’s altered appearance, too. Perhaps some renovations with steel and glass had occurred, which she missed whilst she walked the woods and groves. They must have overhauled everything quickly since she was in Stall Street yesterday, but as Bath always strained to have everything first, she did not put it past the local gentry to throw up fashionable new edifices in a day.
As she looked around for another item to logically explain her situation, a roaring rumble of wind screamed overhead. She looked to the sky. The sound came from a bird whose coat comprised not feathers, but gleaming white steel. Its length stretched as long as the 24-apartment block of Sydney House. The bird shot through the sky, thousands of feet in the air. It was the second of the species she had observed that morning. Yes, this was where the endeavour came a tad unstuck. No logical explanation existed for a gargantuan steel bird, one thousand times the height of an ostrich, to be hurtling through the sky.
And then Jane slapped her head as she realised a logical explanation did exist for everything. Of course! She herself was insane. Jane, in her humiliation and final condemnation to spinsterhood, had become senile. Like the woman who stood in Stall Street and composed love poems for a shilling, who wore a gravy-stained shawl and a saucepan for a bonnet, Jane too had retreated from the bleakness of her spinsterhood into the warm blanket of madness. She did not doubt that heartbreak was a force powerful enough to fling one into lunacy. She saw now that she had imagined the whole thing – the trip to London, Mrs Sinclair, dancing with the obnoxious man. It was all a ruse of her own mind to counter against loneliness.
Now she had identified her psychosis, what was she to do? How was she to behave? The fashionable treatment for hysterical ladies was to offer them a trip to the seaside, and then, after bundling them into a post carriage which locked on the outside, to deposit them not at Brighton or Lyme, but Bedlam instead. Jane felt happy to forgo such a glamorous fate for herself. She resolved instead to act as normal as possible and draw as little attention to her madness as she could. She would pretend all was well and go along with whatever her new friend Sofia said. Hopefully Sofia was not part of the hallucination, but just to be safe, Jane would politely decline any offers to visit Brighton.
‘I suppose you’ll be wanting to get back, then,’ Sofia said. ‘To your own time?’
‘Indeed,’ Jane said with a careful nod. ‘I did not consider that.’
‘You need to go back so you can write your books.’
Jane was still so preoccupied with navigating her recent descent into madness that she almost missed what Sofia said. She stopped walking. ‘My books?’ she said.
‘Yes, your books. The ones by Jane Austen?’
Jane opened her mouth but said nothing.
‘Come with me.’ Sofia continued along the path and Jane followed her. ‘Did you know I’m starring in an adaptation of one of them?’
‘One of what, I beg pardon?’ Jane asked.
‘One of your books. Northanger Abbey.’
Jane shook her head. ‘I do apologise. Again, I do not follow your meaning.’
They arrived at a white-stone cottage with a thatched roof. Sofia unlocked the door and showed Jane inside. It was a cosy, comfortable home that made Jane smile. It reminded her of the rectory in Hampshire where she grew up. She did not recognise some of the furniture pieces, made of glass and steel, but the parlour contained a cosy fireplace and a wonderfully large bookshelf, which took up an entire wall.
‘I’m not here by choice,’ Sofia said, flinging her giant reticule onto the windowsill. ‘This is my brother’s house. But it will do for now.’ She disappeared into another room, then returned carrying a stack of books under her arm. She laid t
he books out on the table one by one. ‘The producer gave them to me as a gift when I signed on to do the film. I’d prefer jewellery, but never mind. These are nice. First editions, I believe.’
A momentary silence filled the house as Jane stopped breathing. She stared at the six books which now lay on the table. She read each title in turn. They shared a common author.
‘Good God’ was all Jane could say. The room spun around her.
‘I know,’ Sofia said. ‘Cool, right?’
‘Might I sit down?’
‘Knock yourself out,’ Sofia said.
Jane did not understand the expression but pulled out a chair all the same. Her hand shook. Of all the tricks her mind played in its current insane reverie, this took pride of place as the cruellest. Jane felt happy to entertain the notion that she had descended into madness, but not if her hallucination included her achieving the status of published novelist, the dearest dream of her heart. It seemed too cruel. For her to see her name in print this way answered a question her soul had been asking for twenty years.
She struggled to overstate the bliss she felt in every fibre of her being. Even if wicked fantasy now engulfed her mind, she allowed herself one indulgent moment to enjoy it. She sat and immersed herself in the idea that she was not insane; she had indeed cast a spell and travelled through time. She now found herself in a future moment of human existence, in which her manuscripts were not rejected, but accepted and published, to the point where they now sat on a bookshelf in someone’s home. Jane felt glad she had sat down, for all the liquid drained from her head, and fainting felt likely. She blinked and picked up one of the books. The cover read:
Emma
A Novel
Jane Austen
Jane opened the book. A portrait rested on the inside cover, a watercolour of a woman around age thirty. The woman wore a bone-white gown and her curls poked out from under a lace bonnet. ‘My goodness,’ Jane said. ‘It’s me.’ The nose stretched too beaklike, and the eyes were too round, but the similarity of the portrait to her own face remained remarkable.
‘They’ve cast you well,’ Sofia muttered.
Once more Jane did not understand her meaning but she had larger things to distract her. ‘I’ve never posed for a portrait in a lace cap,’ she said, pointing at the picture. The detail seemed odd; the rules of society reserved lace caps for married women. Jane studied the painting of herself more closely and identified the unmistakable broad strokes of a familiar artist. ‘Cassandra painted this,’ declared Jane. She felt confused and intrigued; she never recalled sitting and posing for this portrait for Cassandra, yet it was for certain a painting done by her. How?
‘Who is Cassandra?’
‘My sister,’ Jane replied.
‘Of course, I knew that!’ Sofia said. She puffed out her chest. Her ample bosom bloomed into the room. She shrugged. ‘Shall we go?’
‘Go where?’ Jane asked. She closed the cover of the novel again.
‘Somewhere we might find clues.’
‘Clues?’ repeated Jane. She stared at the novel, still distracted by its strangeness.
‘Yes,’ replied Sofia with a nod. ‘To send you back to your own time.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘I believed I had arrived at my capacity for shock earlier,’ Jane said, ‘but it has now been exceeded.’
They arrived at a white modern terrace, in the style of King George, on Brown Street. From the greyish hue of the sun, Jane guessed the hour reached about three in the afternoon. She noted that the fantasy sun appeared as grey and disappointing as the English sun of reality. Jane stared at the building’s facade. A sign across the top read The Jane Austen Experience. Jane inhaled. ‘This building has my name on it,’ she declared. Her head still spun from seeing the novels she had supposedly written; now this.
‘Isn’t it great?’ Sofia said. ‘I thought we could gather some facts about your life. It will look great on camera.’
Jane shook her head, her mind whirring. How and why was there a building with her name on it? What could possibly be inside?
They entered through a blue front door. ‘That is my sitting room!’ Jane said with a gasp. The foyer contained the Austen’s battered old settee, their French armchairs and Mrs Austen’s armoire. Why was their furniture in this place? How did it get here? It felt entirely odd to see her family’s possessions transplanted whole into this foreign building, their sitting room recreated, as if on display. Jane felt the blood drain from her head once more and sat down on the settee to compose herself.
‘You there, in the pyjamas!’ a voice shrieked at Jane from the corner of the room. ‘Don’t sit on that.’ A woman bounded over with a furious look. She wore an ill-fitting purple gown and a white bonnet.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Sofia said. ‘They’re not pyjamas. That’s a safari suit! It’s vintage.’
‘So is that furniture,’ the bonneted woman cried. ‘Did you not see the sign? That is an artefact. It is priceless!’ She scowled. ‘Jane Austen sat on that very sofa!’
Jane looked at the sofa. The woman told no lies; in fairness, Jane always sat on that settee in the sitting room and had indeed sat on it the last time she was there. It bore the same crescent-shape burn on the arm where Jane once spilled a candle whilst reading in the small hours. A mixture of fascination and unease gripped her. The more real the details became, the more unsettling this dream grew. ‘Indeed. My apologies, madam,’ Jane said, still not enough gone into her nightmare to forget her manners. She stood up.
‘Two tickets, please,’ Sofia said to the woman with a smile.
‘The next tour leaves in ten minutes,’ she replied. She studied Jane as she took Sofia’s money. ‘Have we met?’ she asked Jane. She seemed to stare past Jane at the wall behind her.
‘I believe not, madam,’ Jane replied.
‘Jesus,’ Sofia said, also staring past Jane towards the wall. Jane winced at the blasphemy but found it warranted when she turned to look as well. On the wall behind Jane, looming over the back of her head, hung the same portrait of Jane which lay on the inside cover of her novel, reproduced now to life-size proportions. Besides the beaky nose and the different clothes, Jane’s own flesh matched the image with precision. The human Jane wore the identical expression of bemusement as her portrait. ‘Golly, they have cast you well,’ Sofia muttered once more.
‘I still do not know what that means,’ Jane said, ‘but I agree with the sentiment.’
While the portrait in the book was cropped at the shoulders, this larger reproduction showed more of Jane’s figure. Jane saw now she wore the bone-white muslin dress from Maison Du Bois: the one that made her eyes shine, the one Mr Withers never saw her in. A new detail drew Jane’s eye downward. In the portrait, she wore a ring. A band made of gold wrapped around her ring finger, and a turquoise stone sat upon it. The oval stone shone in a creamy blue. She inhaled. She felt the ring draw her closer, as though it had a soul. It confused her, too. She did not own, nor had she ever owned, such a piece of jewellery. It stood out on her finger in the painting; not out of place, but a new addition. She put it down to yet another bizarre detail of her hallucination, but she heard herself asking the woman in the purple bonnet, against her better judgement, about the stone’s origin. ‘Do you know whose ring that is?’ Jane asked her.
‘It is Austen’s ring. She always wore it,’ the woman said with a huff, as though it were obvious.
Jane scratched her head. ‘Where did she get it?’ she pressed her. ‘Who gave it to her?’
The woman shrugged. ‘No one knows where that ring came from, actually. No one knows how it came into her possession. Its origins remain a mystery.’
Jane shook her head and added it to the list of unsettling items she had encountered in her reverie of the insane. She stared at the ring and found herself unable to pry her gaze from it, even when Sofia tugged her arm and gently pulled her away. More pressing things existed to worry about, but the appearance of this ring, on her f
inger, in this watercolour portrait in the building with her name on the outside, was the one strange item in a cacophony of strange items her mind could not put away.
‘The Jane Austen Experience is about to begin,’ the bonneted woman announced. ‘Please form a queue at the double doors.’ Jane and Sofia walked over. They were the only people on the tour. ‘Welcome to the Jane Austen Experience,’ the woman said. She was apparently also the tour guide. ‘And welcome to Bath,’ she continued, ‘the home of Jane Austen.’
Jane snorted. ‘My favourite thing about Bath is the road out.’ The woman glared at Jane again.
‘Please be quiet,’ Sofia whispered to Jane, ‘or we’ll get kicked off the tour.’
The woman continued. ‘My name is Marjorie Martin and I shall be your guide as we travel on a journey back to the time of Regency England and the greatest writer that ever lived.’
‘I give you leave to like this woman,’ Jane said to Sofia. Marjorie turned to face the double doors. She threw them open with ceremony. A dark room greeted them. ‘I don’t see anything,’ Jane said.
‘Sit. Both of you,’ said Marjorie. She gestured towards a small train of open carriages. Jane and Sofia fumbled around in the dark and eventually found seats together in the third carriage. Marjorie sat in the front. She pressed a button and the train moved forward.
‘Heavens!’ Jane said at the sudden motion.
‘Indeed,’ said Marjorie. She pushed back her shoulders. ‘We are the only Jane Austen attraction in Bath with a built-in roller-coaster.’
‘Is the train going to jerk around the whole time?’ Sofia asked. ‘I feel bilious.’
‘If you vomit, there is a fifty-pound cleaning fee,’ Marjorie said.
‘Fifty pounds!’ Jane said. ‘That’s a year’s wages.’
‘Yeah, that’s unfair,’ Sofia said. ‘I can’t be held responsible for the security of my stomach contents! I only had a mimosa for breakfast.’
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