Jane in Love

by Rachel Givney

  One of the photographers said something to her as she walked inside, something she would never forget as long as she lived. And Sofia did something she normally never did. She reacted.

  ‘Just let me eat my shepherd’s pie in peace!’ she screamed at the man with his camera.

  For days afterwards, every gossip rag and entertainment news show replayed those immortal words. Sofia had regretted it instantly, but the retort had flown from her mouth involuntarily; an act of self-defence. ‘What did that man say?’ her agent asked her later. Sofia refused to repeat it. She knew the photographer had said it to get a rise out of her, to get a picture he could sell. But the words stuck with her: ‘What a pity,’ the paparazzo had said, shaking his head and tutting with disappointment. ‘You were a poster on my bedroom wall. Now you’re no use to me.’

  ‘Done, Ms Wentworth,’ Derek announced.

  Sofia opened her eyes.

  ‘What do you think?’

  She checked her reflection in the mirror.

  Derek had worked magic. The crow’s-feet faded; the eye bags lifted. She still looked like herself, but she felt a little beautiful. He had erased all the evidence, too, like an evil genius at a crime scene.

  ‘Derek, you have a gift.’

  Derek smiled. ‘I just brought out your natural beauty,’ he said.

  Sofia grimaced and looked at the floor, fragility returning. ‘What if Jack still doesn’t . . .’ she said, not finishing the sentence. What if he still doesn’t want me?

  Derek bent down and smiled at her. ‘Impossible,’ he said. She smiled back and inhaled. He touched her arm. ‘Ready?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jane stood next to Fred on a raised platform forged from stone. The structure apparently housed some sort of station which received not post carriages, but a train. Two steel tracks sat below her on the ground and stretched to the horizon in either direction. The sight overwhelmed her. Jane looked westward, then east.

  ‘Is this where the train comes?’ Jane asked.

  Fred nodded, before rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbows; a custom in which Jane had only ever witnessed farmers partake. She glanced at his exposed forearms and blushed. The awkwardness remained from earlier; she still could not look him in the eye. He seemed to look over at her himself, then looked away. He bent down to tie his bootlace.

  ‘That’s the third time you’ve tied your bootlace this morning. Is there a problem with your shoe?’ she asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said, laughing incredulously. ‘I did not tie my laces three times.’

  ‘You did,’ Jane replied. ‘Once in the kitchen, once on the road here, and now.’ He coughed. ‘Are your laces broken?’

  ‘My shoes are one hundred per cent fine, thank you,’ he said. Jane eyed him curiously. He truly performed many acts which confused her. She could not tell if his oddness was due to him being a person from the twenty-first century, or whether it was simply his natural state. He took a small orange card from his pocket.

  ‘What is that?’ Jane asked him.

  ‘My ticket?’ he answered.

  ‘Does one need such a thing to ride the train?’

  ‘You don’t have a ticket?’

  Jane shook her head, and Fred led her inside a stone building by the middle of the platform.

  ‘One ticket to London, please,’ Fred said to a man who seemed to sit inside a glass box.

  ‘Fifty-six, please,’ the man replied. ‘Cash or card?’

  Jane smiled. ‘Fifty-six shillings? A little more expensive than the post carriage, which is only twenty, but never mind. I have the amount.’ She rummaged through her trouser pocket. She had retrieved 70 shillings from her white muslin dress earlier that morning in case she needed it in London. It would not go far at these prices, but she would have to make do.

  The ticket man scowled. ‘Fifty-six pounds.’

  Jane gripped the steel bars which lay across his window. ‘Fifty-six pounds,’ she repeated. ‘What madness is this?’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Fred asked.

  ‘This man wants fifty-six pounds for his train ride. I could pay the King of England to drag me to London in a golden carriage for fifty pounds. With him as the horse. I don’t have such money.’

  ‘No money, no ticket, love,’ the man in the glass box said to her.

  Jane looked at the floor, mortified.

  Fred shook his head. ‘You seriously don’t have any money?’

  ‘Not that kind of money,’ Jane said. She turned to the exit. ‘I guess I shall walk back to the house.’

  Fred grimaced. ‘Don’t be stupid. Here.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out two red bank notes, each marked £50.

  ‘Good God. Are you a sultan, sir? I cannot accept,’ she said, eyes wide. One hundred pounds exceeded the allowance given to her over an entire year.

  He shook his head. ‘Pay me back if you like.’

  ‘I don’t know how I could ever repay such a sum.’ She felt doubly mortified.

  ‘We’ll worry about it later,’ he said. ‘Train’s almost here.’ He passed the notes under the glass window. The man produced an orange card like Fred’s. Fred collected the ticket and the money and handed them both to Jane. ‘Keep the change.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ she said in a horrified voice.

  ‘Keep it,’ he insisted. ‘You might need it.’ He reached into his pocket again. ‘Here’s an oyster card too, in case you want to take the tube. You’ll have to top it up, though.’ Jane took the small blue card, which resembled in no way an oyster, nor any sea creature for that matter, and studied it from all angles. She knew not its use but did not want to sound like an imbecile, so she placed the object in her pocket with the banknotes, the coins and her ticket.

  ‘Thank you, Fred,’ said Jane, truly grateful. She felt flummoxed by his generosity. All their past interactions had been filled with aggravation, teasing and mocking; where had this kindness come from? Why had he given her £100 of his own money? He must still feel bad about the morning, she figured, and everything else.

  They returned to the platform. A great horn boomed, followed by a clacking rhythm of steel hitting steel. She turned to face the source of the sound. A giant green oblong moved down the track. Words on its side read Great Western Railway. Jane jumped backwards in fright on its approach, convinced no force in the world existed to bring such a thing to a halt. But halt it did, and the doors opened by magic. People streamed from the carriage, thirty or more, all dressed in the odd clothes of the day.

  Fred stepped onto the train. Jane followed him inside the carriage. It smelled of cut metal. Rows of seats lined the carriage, as though they stood inside a narrow theatre. Jane spotted a free seat and sat down next to a man in a grey coat. Fred shrugged and sat in the row behind her. The enchanted doors closed on their own.

  Somewhere below her, metal again screeched on metal and the green leviathan lurched from the station. Jane watched through the window as the landscape moved. The train picked up speed as it reached the edges of the city. Houses and roads and shops transitioned to trees and paddocks; the crumbling stone walls of the Norman invasion still divided the fields as they did in the year 1803, and the seven centuries before that.

  As they approached Windsor, they passed a magnificent oak tree. Jane gasped. It was the same tree she had encountered the last time she travelled to London, now likely 200 feet tall. She wondered of the things it had seen.

  Jane knew things worked differently in her own time to the years that came before it. Serfs, stake burnings, and blackbirds in pies littered the Middle Ages, for example, and a woman had sat on the English throne in earlier times. It bore consideration that the year 2020 also produced a similar degree of advancement upon 1803. But how exactly did human progress manifest? One thing stood for certain: twenty-first century humans had eradicated manual labour and replaced it with magic. A steel box washed the clothes. Another washed the crockery. Magic lit the candles and moved the steel carriages
.

  Jane looked around the carriage. A woman in the seat opposite, dressed in underclothes, gazed at a steel box she held in the palm of her hand. She pressed at it and smiled, fondled it and laughed warmly at it, as though it both entertained and comforted her. She seemed to treat the box as though it were as dear to her as a child.

  The box rang like a bell then; the woman scowled at it and lifted it to her ear. ‘I can’t talk now. I’m on the train,’ she said, speaking into the box. Jane shook her head at the sight, bewildered. Who did the woman talk to? After a moment, the woman removed the box from her ear and resumed poking and fondling it again.

  At first Jane believed that the twenty-first-century humans ruled over these steel boxes. Now she was unsure. The man who had sold Jane the train ticket obeyed the box in his ticket booth. When Fred gave him the money, he spoke to the box with his hands and then the box presented him with money and a ticket, which he passed on to Fred. The more of these boxes Jane witnessed, the more she decided the humans did not enslave the boxes, but the reverse.

  Jane felt so fascinated, she did not know which held more delights for her eyes, inside the carriage or out the window.

  ‘You seem so delighted,’ Fred said in a bemused voice. ‘It’s a train.’

  ‘I am!’ Jane replied. ‘We have invented such wonders. Do you not agree?’

  He chuckled. ‘I agree. But I’ve never seen anyone so enamoured with a battered old train.’

  ‘What is the purpose of your appointment in London?’ she asked.

  ‘Professional engagement day. And yes, it’s as boring as it sounds.’

  ‘Not at all. You have a profession? That does not sound boring to me.’

  Fred laughed. ‘I have a profession. I’m a schoolteacher. I teach history and English.’

  ‘How marvellous,’ Jane replied. ‘You must have the patience of a saint,’ she added. ‘I could never instruct children.’

  He shrugged. ‘Some days are better than others.’

  ‘Does your profession bring you joy, sir?’

  ‘Joy?’ he asked with a laugh. Then he seemed to think on it a little more. ‘Actually, it does.’

  ‘How wonderful,’ Jane replied, smiling. The awkwardness with Fred remained, and was now added to, with the mortification of receiving money from him and now being in his debt. But she had so many things at which to look and marvel that she found her first train journey to London only half as terrible as she expected. She looked out the window once more.

  The train ended its journey at Paddington, arriving at a gargantuan terminus hall. ‘Shall we?’ Fred said, interrupting her reverie. Jane looked around. The other passengers had left; the carriage lay empty. Jane’s brain still whirred. The steel beast had raced over 100 miles of country in little over an hour. Jane stepped from the green monster and joined Fred on the platform. A sign read Platform 8. Eight platforms! That meant at least eight of these gigantic serpents roamed the countryside. Jane looked skyward and her mouth dropped open. A vaulted steel and glass ceiling loomed above her. On either side, people rushed back and forth along the multiple stone platforms, and trains arrived and departed, lurching forwards and grinding to a halt. Everything moved at a tremendous speed. Jane’s mouth grew dry from falling open for so long.

  Fred guided her to the exit. They walked out of the station and onto Praed Street. She looked around, amazed at the changes, the new buildings of glass and steel, the people. ‘Right, I’m going that way,’ Fred said. He pointed west. ‘You’ll be right from here?’

  ‘Oh,’ Jane said, caught off guard.

  ‘Do you know where to go?’ he said to her, seeing her look. ‘I can stay with you.’

  Jane could think of no excuse to keep him there. It was unlikely he suspected she was secretly a time traveller from the year 1803 who might need assistance navigating a witch hunt through twenty-first-century London. ‘I know where to go,’ she lied. She pushed her shoulders back, hoping the move would imbue her with confidence. ‘Do not trouble yourself,’ she added. ‘You have your appointment. Please attend it. I will be well.’

  ‘I’ll see you back here at one,’ he said.

  ‘One o’clock? In the afternoon?’ Fred nodded. She hesitated then, feeling guilty. She hoped to arrive at Mrs Sinclair’s house, find the way to reverse the spell and return to 1803. She had no intention of returning to Paddington. ‘Yes, fine. Good. One o’clock,’ she lied again. She looked away. ‘Goodbye, Fred,’ she said solemnly. This was likely the last time she’d see him.

  ‘Bye,’ Fred replied. He went. She put him from her mind. She had made it to London; now it was time to return home. She looked at the grey sky, attempting to find her bearings.

  She had walked Praed Street once before, with Henry while visiting him in 1801. A few things had changed since then. Three red steel boxes the size of pantries stood to her left, serving what functions she knew not. Two buildings taller than she could fathom emerged from the earth to her right. People rushed past her in waves, more humans than she had seen in one place in her life. More colours and brightness bombarded her eyes than they could take in. A cacophony of sounds she did not comprehend assaulted her ears: beeps and buzzes and whistles. She prided herself on her education and mind, but every object and person moved faster and louder than she could predict. A wooden bench lay on the other side of the road. As she walked to it, a horn bellowed. Jane turned around. An immense steel carriage bore down on her. She jumped from its path just in time.

  The driver stuck his head out the carriage window. ‘Stupid cow!’ he shouted to her. Jane shrieked and sat down on the bench. Her fingers tingled with shock.

  Jane took a moment to assess the situation and evaluate her chances of succeeding in this mission. She sat alone in the middle of London, intending to navigate her way through a city that had moved two hundred years beyond her. She composed a list of ways she might be killed and arrived at a dozen methods. Forgetting the geographical challenges of her predicted journey east for a moment, she decided the bigger risk lay in her dying somewhere along the way. Attempting to leave the bench on which she sat posed a risky enough proposition, let alone forging a path to Cheapside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Across the street, a man in rumpled trousers struggled to open the front door of some sort of shop with one hand while balancing a pile of books in the other. He wore a red woollen coat and his grey hair protruded from his head in a bushy mop. Grasping the bundle under one arm, he turned the key. The books came loose and tumbled onto the street.

  Jane walked over. ‘Allow me to help,’ she said. She collected the books that had fallen to the ground and handed them to the shopkeeper. Paint peeled from an elegant old sign above him which read Clarke’s Books & Periodicals.

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied, reaching out to take the books from Jane. Another book came free from his arm and fell to the ground. Jane caught it in midair. ‘Good catch! Please, come inside.’ He ushered her into the shop. Inside was an astonishing sight. It was a tiny space, no larger than a bedroom, but the man had made the most of it. Shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Books burst from every shelf and spilled to the floor in glorious streams of red, blue and yellow. Greek columns of novels rose up from the floor and almost reached the ceiling. It resembled a cave, or a little underground chapel, consisting entirely of books. A warm mustiness filled the room, and it smelled of ink and wood.

  ‘A bookshop!’ Jane said. She had never beheld a store dedicated to the purpose.

  The old man laughed. ‘Indeed,’ he said, watching Jane look around the room in happy amazement. ‘Will you take one?’ he said.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Jane said. She ran her eyes over the shelves, envious. She had read no books in three days, when often she read one a day. She could devour some literature. But books were expensive, and she needed to conserve the money Fred had given her.

  ‘I meant for free,’ he said then, as if sensing her hesitation. ‘As a thankyou for helping me. I�
�m George.’ He held out his hand for her to shake. Jane was still adjusting to strangers calling themselves by their first names, but she smiled. The name belonged to her father.

  ‘Jane,’ she replied. She shook his hand. His skin bore an old man’s softness, like her papa’s. ‘Thank you for the kind gesture, but I cannot accept,’ Jane said.

  ‘You can accept, and you must, for you rescued a treasure from death by mud.’ He held up one of the books Jane had collected. The title read Tess of the d’Urbervilles. ‘A second edition,’ said George. ‘Do you like to read?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said. She scanned the nearest shelf’s contents and recognised fewer than one title in ten. The sight delighted her; usually she walked into a library and slumped at having already read its contents. She would need years to make her way through these books.

  ‘What do you like? Fiction? Thrillers, science fiction, romance?’

  Jane stiffened with curiosity. ‘Science fiction?’

  He showed her to a shelf by the window. The books bore thin, coloured covers in shades Jane did not recognise. ‘Have you read this one?’ He handed Jane a book titled Dune.

  Jane shook her head. ‘I have read little in this area.’

  ‘This is a classic,’ he said with a smile. A well-stuffed armchair squatted at the back of the shop; love-worn green leather covered the seat and arms. ‘You’re welcome to sit and read for as long as you like,’ said George. ‘You will be keeping me company.’

  Jane grew excited. Instead of sitting on a bench and wallowing in her failure, she could sit in this shop in the twenty-first century and read a book.

  ‘Do you . . . have anything by Jane Austen?’ she asked on a whim.

  ‘Of course. She’s not science fiction, though.’ He led Jane across to the opposite side of the shop where a hand-painted sign read Classics. Nervous anticipation suddenly filled her. George handed Jane a small book. Its red cloth cover had faded to orange and small gold letters embossed the cover. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Jane ran her hand across the title. ‘This is a seventh edition, I think. Printed in 1912.’ Jane nodded and said nothing, bewitched by the contents of her hand. She opened the book; the spine made a crackling sound and a glorious smell of almonds rose up. The pages felt crisp, like someone might have left them in the sun to dry.