“You mean ‘ladies,’” said Vanessa.
She had, after all, come to Bath in order to, in as ladylike a way as possible, hunt down Julian in the costumed crowd, knock him over the head with her parasol, and drag him into her slightly screwed-up modern life. Had she not?
She saw a lot of fantastic things during her first few hours in Bath on Friday night, but she didn’t see the one thing she was looking for—Julian.
Chapter 14
On Saturday morning, once she had her corset, gown, and white stockings on, she only had a few seconds to curl her stick-straight hair into a Regency updo, but when she went to use the mini curling iron she’d heated up, it was cold.
“Time to go, Vanessa; the promenade starts in ten minutes.” Lexi stood by the door that led into the hall, tapping her fan in her hand.
Sherry looked at the watch in her reticule.
“For some reason my curling iron isn’t working,” Vanessa said. “Even with your adapter, Sherry.”
Sherry came to investigate. “You’re supposed to turn on this switch next to the outlet.” She pressed a little switch and the curling iron light went on.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Vanessa cursed the fact that not only did the British have a completely different voltage system, rendering all her plug-ins useless without borrowing Sherry’s adapter, but evidently each individual outlet had its own on-off switch.
“Leaving now,” Lexi said as she opened the door. “Otherwise we’ll miss the start of the promenade.”
Vanessa unplugged her curling iron, switched off the outlet, and headed toward the door.
“Bonnetless? With straight hair?” Lexi looked disapprovingly at Vanessa.
“I don’t want Julian to see me in a bonnet. I wanted to do my hair up with a tiara or something with curls. If I had something like what you have on, I’d wear that.”
Lexi tossed her head. “This is a bandeau. And not only is it the only one I have, but it took me twenty minutes to do this—while you were sleeping.”
“I can’t help it if I’m a little jet-lagged. What is that you’re wearing, Sherry?”
“A Regency turban. Maybe you can buy one at the Festival Fayre. But that won’t be until after the promenade.”
Sherry held the door open while Lexi and then Vanessa stepped into the hall.
“It’s not cool, Vanessa, not cool to go with a modern hairstyle,” Lexi said as the door closed behind her. “It screams ‘American.’”
Bonnetless or not, they were off to Queen Square, and Vanessa thought that was pretty cool. She just liked the sound of it.
They’d passed by Queen Square the night before on their way to the Bath and County Club, with its black-iron fence, its grassy center punctuated with a jeu de boules patch or two, and a stone obelisk in the center.
As she trailed behind Lexi and Sherry among women and men in costume all streaming toward the square, she saw Julian everywhere—and nowhere. More than once she quickened at thinking she’d spotted him, but a turn of a head or a tip of a hat would prove her wrong. She almost wished she weren’t surrounded by hundreds of men in breeches and beaver hats, as it proved to be a sort of torturous game.
And yes, all the women she could see, even the ones pushing strollers with their babies in costume, had made some sort of an attempt at a Regency hairstyle or appropriate headgear.
Lexi was right. Her long straight hair exposed Vanessa for the American that she was. She would have to step it up for the ball.
She overheard a woman in a gown, a cropped jacket Vanessa now knew to be a “spencer” jacket, and Regency accessories to the hilt talking to a group of younger costumed girls who walked alongside of her.
“Look, girls,” she said in her English accent as she pointed with a gloved finger. “On the far south side of the square is Number 13. Jane Austen stayed in that house for just over a month in 1799 when she was twenty-three years old. Just a bit older than all of you.”
Vanessa squinted her eyes and craned her neck to see the last stone town house on the corner that looked just like, and just as elegant as, the other town houses abutting one another and surrounding the square.
Jane Austen stayed there? So close to her flat? She couldn’t wait to tell Aunt Ella she’d not only seen Number 13 Queen Square but was staying very near it.
People in costume were politely standing on the stoop of the town house, taking pictures beside its wrought iron fence and in front of its glossy blue wooden door.
She needed to learn more about Jane’s time in Bath, and then, when she finally did see Julian again, she could talk to him intelligently about it. She shook her head just remembering when she’d driven him from the airport into the city and tuned out an entire discussion about Jane Austen and Bath between him and her aunt. How snobby of her!
People in costume ebbed and flowed all around her, and she realized she’d lost Lexi and Sherry. She pulled her phone out of her reticule only to discover the battery was out and hadn’t charged during the night because she hadn’t flipped the outlet switch on. The soonest she’d be able to stop back at the flat and charge it would be after buying a much-needed turban at the Guildhall’s Festival Fayre.
Hundreds of people in their Regency best swarmed the square, all of them in couples or groups. Well, Vanessa would be promenading alone. Still, as pathetic as that might be, she wouldn’t think of skipping it.
Trying to locate an American accent, and maybe a group she could glom onto, she spotted a bunch who looked like they were Americans but turned out to be speaking German.
Jane Austen had attracted all kinds of people of all races from all over the world to Bath—no minor feat for a female author who had been dead for almost two hundred years. For the first time, Vanessa stood in awe of the sheer staying power of Austen. All these years, her aunt had been on to something, and all these years, Vanessa had done her best to avoid it.
Military drums sounded and about twenty or so “redcoats,” uniformed army men dressed in their smart red coats with gold and navy trim, white breeches, and black hats, and bearing muskets, gathered at the top of the square while the “Town Crier” welcomed and rallied the crowd, which clapped politely.
More than once, groups of happy, smiling women asked her to take their photos. Maybe this was Jane Austen’s way of getting even with her.
Maybe she had spent too much time behind her various screens and not enough of it with friends. She stood on her tippy-toes in her flats, the only appropriate shoe for Austen’s time, and hoped that Julian would be leading the promenade with the redcoats, but she didn’t see him.
She followed the promenade uphill, past the enticing Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street with its museum, tearoom, and gift shop with windows jammed full of Austen paraphernalia. An Elizabeth Bennet statue stood out front, and she wore a blue gown that only served to remind Vanessa of the night Julian wore that blue gown. Austen had lived up the street at Number 25 with her mother for several months in 1805. The stone buildings arching along the cobblestone roads were achingly beautiful in their aged patina and a far cry from the modern steel and glass of Chicago.
From the Circus—tall, elegant stone houses complete with columns and elaborate friezes built around a circular park—to the stunning Royal Crescent topping a curved hill like a shining crown, Vanessa took in the beauty of it all.
It felt like a restorative just walking around Bath.
The bright blue sky provided a contrasting backdrop to the golden buildings and the clouds piled up in the sky like so much whipped cream.
At Number 43 Milsom Street, the famed street that, as she overheard, Jane Austen herself used to shop on, she noticed quite a few people stopping to take pictures of worn, painted lettering on the Bath stone above one of the shop fronts. CIRCULATING LIBRARY AND READING ROOM, it read in cracked black type.
No doubt Jane Austen used to frequent the library. Vanessa used to like libraries, too, but since she’d gotten her e-reader, she’d stoppe
d going. Maybe she needed more library time in her life. More hushed time among rows of books waiting to be accidently discovered, rather than deliberately seeking one title or another, clicking to order, and moving on. Serendipity.
“There’s Number 2,” a woman with a white ostrich feather said to her friends who walked alongside of Vanessa. “That used to be the old sweetshop Molland’s.”
“Where Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth saw each other again.”
“Yes, yes,” they all agreed and smiled in recognition.
Fact and fiction intermingled freely in this group, and Vanessa had grown to like it. If only Jane Austen could know that two hundred years after Persuasion’s publication, people in Regency costume were pointing out where her characters had supposedly visited! It boggled the mind.
At the end of Milsom Street, when the promise of Parade Gardens and the River Avon comingled, a dinged-up black car slowed down alongside her. The driver broke all the rules by turning onto the street—they had closed it off to traffic for the promenade. Why was this guy singling her out?
“Hey! Hey, you without a bonnet there!” the guy shouted from his car in an English accent that seemed to be the polar opposite of Julian’s smooth Oxbridge one.
What the hell? At first Vanessa pretended she didn’t know he was talking to her. As if it weren’t embarrassing enough to be bonnetless in this crowd, walking alone, and now to have some guy shouting out at her from a car that shouldn’t even be on this street? Now some people in the nice costumed crowd were glaring at her, as if he were her fault.
He wasn’t in any sort of nineteenth-century costume and he drove his old sports car with black racing gloves. Really? Racing gloves?
She always attracted the idiots. More than five hundred people in this parade and he chose her. Her blood boiled. She was like a magnet for jerks, or as Jane Austen would say, for rakes, for lotharios.
She looked the other way, toward a gorgeous shop that sold hats. A haberdashery. How nice it would be to shop in that haberdashery . . . He revved his car alongside her and it broke into her reverie. How could she ditch him and fast?
She couldn’t believe her luck, or lack of. She’d flown more than four thousand miles to track down a gentleman, and she ended up doing nothing but attracting the attention of the English version of a hundred guys she’d already encountered in her lifetime in the States.
“I know you can hear me, luv,” he shouted at her. “I’m parking my car now.”
She cut into the crowd, trying to mix in with the people in the middle of the promenade rather than on the fringe. Why couldn’t a nice gentleman-type in a coat, cravat, and breeches try to talk to her?
But sure enough, just as she turned toward the lush greenery of Parade Gardens where the promenade was to end, someone grabbed her shawled shoulder—with a black racing glove.
“Listen, luv, I need you for an interview. Let’s have a sit-down.”
She peeled the hand off her shoulder and found herself looking up at a tall, muscular guy who seemed to be at least five or maybe even ten years older than she was, wearing a wrinkled khaki trench coat, a tie that didn’t match his shirt, and a sneer on his otherwise attractive face, which at the moment was looking the other way, scanning, presumably, for a place they could “have a sit-down.” He squinted in the sunlight.
“There,” he said as his eyes landed on a bench.
She considered enlisting the help of a nearby redcoat.
“Excuse me, but I won’t be ‘having a sit-down’ with you. Thank you.”
Just beyond him, though, the gardens stretched out toward the River Avon glistening in the sun.
He flashed a press badge, but she knew those could be created on anyone’s printer—it wasn’t exactly a credential.
“I’m a journalist. David Mills. I can see you’re American and I need to interview you about the festival.”
It could be the real deal, or it could be the oldest pickup line in the book.
“No, thank you.”
She spun around to follow the crowd toward the curved frontage of the Guildhall, which she’d read had been built in 1775. In the same year in Chicago, Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable hadn’t even created the first wooden settlement yet. That would happen almost a decade later.
The three tiers of windows in the Guildhall reminded her, for some reason, of a tiered wedding cake. David stood in front of her, blocking her way to the Festival Fayre.
The Fayre in the Guildhall only went until four thirty in the afternoon, and she didn’t want to miss it. Not only could Julian be there, but she needed that Regency turban, plus something to eat, and hopefully she’d find Lexi and Sherry.
She smiled, stepped around him, and picked up her pace.
“You are exactly the right girl for this piece. You’re not really an Austen fanatic, I can tell.”
Just because she wasn’t wearing a bonnet?
“The economy’s killing hacks like me. You could make this piece sing, I’m sure of that, I am.”
She stopped for a moment.
“Come on now and help out a down-on-his-luck reporter. I need a fresh perspective. You think I just want to be interviewing the toffs with frilly bonnets, fancy pants, and walking sticks up their arses?”
She laughed. “Okay, David. You have ten minutes. Go.”
* * *
His interview questions really didn’t elicit the kinds of snarky answers Vanessa knew he was looking for, either. He’d pegged her as some sort of a fan gone rogue, due to her lack of a bonnet, perhaps a modern prisoner held against her will here during Regency week with her fanatic friends, but he was disappointed to learn she’d come here intentionally, and worse, she’d paid an exorbitant plane fare at the last minute and was rooming with two other women to partake.
A few weeks before and her replies might have gotten her name in the paper.
He did answer the few questions she had for him, however. He was a freelancer originally from Lancashire, northern England, now relocated to Bath, and his article would be running in the Bath Chronicle, both the print and online versions. And yes, he would try to put in a plug in the article for her friend Julian Chancellor about Friday’s Undressing Mr. Darcy event.
She was still pumping for Julian.
After the interview, David followed her into the Guildhall, trying to get her attention by calling several men “spooners,” something derogatory, no doubt, and wondering out loud where he could get a pint. He called her a “cracker” as she ascended the wide staircase in front of him, and she interpreted that to mean something positive, but why did he follow her around? Why not—Julian?
At the top of the staircase, despite David’s ramblings and the buzz of hundreds of people all around her, the strains of a Regency trio plucked at her heartstrings, reminding her of dancing with Julian. Off to her right, a room with an elevated ceiling, sparkling chandeliers, and afternoon sunshine gleaming in on walls the color of pastel green pastilles prompted her to stand in awe gaping at the oil paintings and floral molding until some woman, with a very sweet English accent, said, “Excuse me, dear.”
As if she really had gone back in time, everyone in her immediate view (as long as she didn’t look to her left at David) wore Regency clothes. It felt like time travel.
Her mind flitted to Aunt Ella as she gravitated toward the shop “stalls,” as the English called them, surrounding the perimeter of the room, where she subscribed to the print version of a glossy little magazine produced there in Bath called Jane Austen’s Regency World. It was the first nonelectronic magazine she’d ordered in years, and she sent one to herself and one to Aunt Ella’s new address.
It would be nice, she thought, to get some real mail once in a while.
Across the room, beyond the haberdasher’s stall loaded with decorated hats, straw bonnets, masquerade masks, a smattering of multicolored ribbons, and exactly the turban she had been seeking, sat Julian, in a shaft of sunlight, signing books.
He wore
his Regency-era reading glasses and his head was bent toward the page. He sported the very coat she had stripped off him and a cravat tied in the same mathematical knot she had untied on their last night together.
Stacks of his books surrounded him on the table, and a line of mostly female fans stood in a—queue obscuring the walking stick stall next to him and snaking around into the middle of the hall.
She froze for a minute. She’d never been rendered so shy by any man.
She pretended to be engrossed in one of the vendors’ loose tea offerings next to a silhouette artist who cut miniature silhouettes in a matter of minutes for his customers in their bonnets and feathers.
How she could stare at jars of tea, and even physically read their names and descriptions, but comprehend none of it was beyond her. Her face flushed, and she took off her shawl in the sudden heat.
Here she’d been hunting him down this entire time, but now that she saw him, she had no idea what to say or do. She picked up sealed bags of loose tea as she racked her brain.
Hi, Julian. Fancy seeing you here.
Or . . .
Come here often?
She shot a glance at him, because with the horde of people around, he’d never see her from here. For the first time in her life, she considered buying a bonnet, if for no other reason than that it would conceal most of her face and she could spy on him without being detected.
He looked so good, so peaceful, so smart, so . . . sexy. Damn. Why did he have to look so good? And why did he have to be doing some good—good for the historical money pit he’d inherited? It really made him endearing. She knew he really hated all this public showmanship. But there he sat, signing and chatting and smiling . . .
“Would you like to purchase that tea, miss?” one of the women at the stall asked with a nice inflection at the end of the question.
Translation: Put. The. Tea. Down. Or buy it. The English were so polite.
“Oh,” Vanessa said as she set the tea down and stepped away. “Your tea sounds great. I have to think about it. Thank you.”
Undressing Mr. Darcy Page 21