Undressing Mr. Darcy

by Karen Doornebos

  Vanessa wanted to feel something, anything, other than anger, regret, and humiliation over this thing with Julian, whatever it was. Here she stood at her newfound idol author’s writing table, and she felt as empty as the glass inkwell before her.

  She stared at the simple but elegant Wedgwood china set on the dining table, white plates encircled with a green oak leaf and brown acorn pattern, as if they would provide her with an answer. The acorn reminded her of the sculpted acorns that adorned so many buildings in Bath, especially those she had seen atop the houses in the Circus.

  Two older women, also admiring the china, stood near Vanessa. “The acorn symbolizes strength and power in small things,” one of the women said to both her friend and Vanessa in a lively Australian accent. “It can also mean growth and good luck. Fitting that Jane, Cassandra, and their mother would choose this pattern.”

  Vanessa could use some acorns. Then again, did they help Jane and Cassandra?

  She went up to the bedroom where Jane Austen and her sister slept, but it wasn’t the actual bed, so she stared at the worn quilt on the bed instead.

  The whole tour seemed like some surreal, out-of-body experience. Why did she feel nothing?

  Across from the four-poster bed, though, a blue and white chamber pot housed in a white wooden cabinet on a shelf below the washbowl in the bedroom seemed to mesmerize her. The rest of the tour had all moved on to the next room while she stood staring at the chamber pot.

  That was where Jane Austen herself went to the bathroom, Vanessa thought to herself. And she smiled. There. She felt something. She felt that even Jane Austen might’ve laughed at the thought.

  She found the tour group downstairs, gathered around a silhouette scene hung on the wall that Vanessa had walked right by on her way in.

  She wedged her way into the group surrounding the silhouette to hear the tour guide. The guide looked suspiciously like a young Kate Beckinsale, who had played Emma in the 1990s, with gorgeous black hair, pale skin, and a slight smile that punctuated the end of every sentence.

  “This silhouette, cut in 1783, illustrates Jane’s brother Edward being presented to his wealthy distant relatives, the Knights,” she said. “They adopted him and raised him as their own.”

  The scene, black on a faded tea-colored background, had a staged but all-too-familiar feel to it. Two Georgian ladies, both in tall wigs and gowns, sat at a game table while Mr. Austen in his powdered wig and buckle shoes presented Edward by easing him, with a gentle push on the boy’s back, toward the adoptive parents, including Mr. Knight, who stood across the gaming table.

  Edward was so young, so tiny in his breeches and tailcoat. His stockinged legs looked very thin.

  Vanessa had to steady herself on a chair she shouldn’t have been touching. “How old was he when he was adopted?” she asked without thinking.

  “Twelve.” Smile.

  Twelve, a year younger than Vanessa was when her parents separated and before she moved in with Aunt Ella.

  “The Knights weren’t able to have children of their own, and as was common practice, they looked for and adopted an heir from the extended family. Edward left the Austens to live with the Knights, and in so doing, he became the richest of the seven Austen siblings. He inherited two massive properties, Godmersham in Kent and Chawton House, an Elizabethan manor just up the road from here.”

  Vanessa stepped in closer, to see little Edward reaching out with a hand toward his rich adoptive parents.

  “To be chosen marked him as lucky. They raised him as a gentleman, and he even went on his own Grand Tour of the Continent, something none of the other Austen men had done.”

  “Lucky,” Vanessa whispered to herself. She had always considered herself lucky to be taken in by Aunt Ella, but at the same time very unlucky to grow up away from her parents, flawed as they were. Seeing Edward in the same position, with two sets of parents, separated from his family, opened that hole in her heart.

  “If Edward hadn’t been adopted by the Knights, it’s very possible his sister Jane would’ve never finished, much less published her novels.”

  A hush came over the crowd.

  “I’ll tell you about that as we walk over to what was Edward’s inheritance, now called Chawton House Library and dedicated to early women writers. And a property very familiar to Jane.”

  The guide led them out of the cottage and north on a path alongside the road that had been labeled THE JANE AUSTEN TRAIL with a sign. Vanessa had been on a Jane Austen Trail, all right.

  She walked next to the guide, wanting to hear more.

  “After Mr. Austen’s death in Bath in 1805, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother had no income. Women of their social status couldn’t work, yet they barely managed to scrape by, moving frequently and staying with various relatives. Without her brother’s offer of the cottage, Jane wouldn’t have had the settled lifestyle she needed to write.”

  Vanessa felt for Jane and how dependent they had to be on men. Their life, their happiness, their everything—depended on a man. Imagine!

  And there, at the end of the Jane Austen Trail, stood Julian in full Regency regalia.

  * * *

  Miss Roberts and friends, I presume,” Julian said as he took off his hat and bowed to her. He wore a green coat this time. No, no, the green one, she remembered Darcy saying in the 1995 film version as he chose which coat to wear to meet Elizabeth.

  “Pleasure to see you,” Julian said.

  As if there were no woman in his robe behind his house. As if there were no puppy frolicking on his grounds. As if there had been no steam-room incident.

  If he happened to be giving this tour, she’d rather sit on the tour bus. She managed to speak. “Hello, Mr. Darcy.”

  Did he feel the ice in her delivery? She didn’t like being passive-aggressive, but she couldn’t quite get hold of her feelings, much less figure out how to express them. But something inside felt broken and tossed aside. Why had this all been so damn complicated?

  Maybe Chase was right. Love wasn’t hard. Which would mean this wasn’t love or even the beginning of it.

  Within moments, women (and men) from the tour group surrounded him, and it became clear that, as luck would have it, they wouldn’t have a moment alone, thank goodness.

  Ironically she had been seeking exactly that just an hour and a half earlier.

  When she turned away from him and toward Chawton House, nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. A long, straight pea gravel road led uphill, past stone stables larger and more gorgeous than most American homes, and toward the largest Elizabethan manor she’d ever seen. It happened to be the only Elizabethan manor house she’d ever seen, but still. It looked straight out of one of her aunt’s BBC costume dramas, with three gables, a three-story entrance porch made of flint, and a grand red roof, all surrounded by meticulously kept green lawns and sculpted shrubs.

  All this for Edward Austen. All this now a library holding thousands of valued pieces of women’s writing from the long-ago eighteenth century.

  The crowd collectively gasped. Vanessa counted at least seven chimneys, and those were only the ones she could see. Trees framed the house and blocked quite a bit of the house itself from view.

  “Any of you could have your wedding here,” the tour guide said. “It’s for hire.”

  Julian shot her a glance. “What a lovely thought.”

  She looked away. The nerve!

  She stayed as far away from him as possible, sticking close to the tour guide but catching glimpses of him from a safe distance as they walked toward the house.

  Was he a gentleman or—a rake? If only there were an app for figuring that out! Did he have a girlfriend, or—shudder—a wife?

  Maybe he had a girlfriend and a wife.

  Just because he didn’t wear a wedding ring and never mentioned a significant other didn’t mean anything.

  The gravel crunched under her shoes until she found herself ushered through the entrance hall and inside
a Tudor-era wood-paneled dining room bigger than her entire condo, looking straight at a larger-than-life oil portrait of Edward Austen Knight. He wore a powdered wig, breeches, cravat, and tailcoat, and looked very debonair leaning up against a tree so casually, with his walking stick.

  He hadn’t been born into money, but he looked the part.

  Yet Vanessa harkened back to Cassandra’s unfinished watercolor sketch of Jane on display at the National Portrait Gallery. It would hardly fill a corner of this painting.

  She tried to concentrate on the Emma look-alike tour guide, but the stunning room, with the dining table set for twelve, the oriental carpet on the floor, the smaller but equally engaging oil paintings that hung about the room, and the ornate carvings above the fireplace dazzled her. What a contrast from Austen’s simple cottage with sparse furnishings.

  Across the room, Julian looked out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Before she looked away he caught her staring at him.

  “If I can draw your attention . . .” said the tour guide.

  Vanessa instantly looked away from him.

  “If you look at Edward’s shoes in this portrait, you can clearly see the artist has painted in a horseshoe nail pointed toward Edward’s feet.”

  Vanessa moved closer to the painting and sure enough, you could see a nail on the ground, pointing to Edward.

  “This possibly symbolizes Edward’s good luck at being adopted by the Knights.”

  The luck thing again. Vanessa thought of her aunt and all that she’d done for her, including bringing Jane Austen into her life.

  But it was this trip, and Vanessa’s own ragtag journey around England, that had brought Jane Austen to life. And now her brother Edward had sprung to life before her, too—the little boy grown into the man lucky enough to provide his impoverished mother and two sisters with a home and, for one of those sisters, the comfort needed to create her masterpieces.

  Julian paced the floor across the room in front of the fireplace; she could see him out of the corner of her eye.

  He seemed to hover, too, as they went up the north staircase and through the Tapestry Gallery, the Great Gallery, and the Map Room to a bibliophile’s dream, the Reading Room, which housed the bulk of the library’s collection; from there they went to the Oak Room, where Jane Austen herself would sit in the alcove window, reading.

  She had come a long way from the prostitutes on Trim Street.

  The group descended the great staircase into the old kitchen, where the worktable itself was about three hundred years old.

  Julian leaned against the doorjamb. He hadn’t said a thing during the entire tour. She had to wonder why he was there.

  Once they were outside, for a quick tour of the grounds, he practically stalked her, standing behind her on the Arts and Crafts terraces, walking beside her on the serpentine gravel path to the upper terrace and fernery, and essentially blocking her at various turns in the walled kitchen garden between the tomatoes and the rosemary.

  In the rose garden he somehow corralled her away from the group, and, near a bed of pink cabbage roses, their flowers heavy, browning at the edges of the petals, and drooping in the early fall air, he bent down to pick one and then stood in front of her, holding it.

  “Vanessa, I would quite like to speak to you.”

  Just a few hours before, this gesture of his could’ve played out very differently.

  “What is there to say? We slept together. That’s all it was. Happens all the time, right?”

  He held out the rose to her.

  She didn’t take it.

  He twirled it in his fingers. “There’s more to it than that, at least for me. It’s complicated.”

  “Exactly. Too complicated.”

  “I should like to explain—” He leaned over and a small antique book fell from his frock coat pocket to the grass.

  Before he could reach for it, Vanessa picked it up and opened the inside cover. In very ornate type it read:

  Harris’s List

  of Covent Garden Ladies

  or,

  Man of Pleasure’s

  Kalender

  He tried to gently nudge the book away from her, but she turned her back on him, flipped open to a page, and read:

  Mrs. Griffin, Near Union Stairs, Wapping

  This comely woman, about forty, and boasts she can give more pleasure than a dozen raw girls. Indeed she has acquired great experience—

  He tried again to take the book away, but she hurried a few steps away from him and said, “What the hell is this, Julian?”

  People from the tour group looked and then looked away again.

  “Harris’s List, from the 1700s. It’s research for my next book—”

  “It’s a list of prostitutes!” She turned away again as he came closer. Prostitutes from the eighteenth century, yet it sullied his polite, gentlemanly reputation, didn’t it?

  Betsy Miles, Cabinet Maker’s Old Street

  Known in this quarter for her immense sized breasts . . . backwards and forewards, are all equal to her, posteriors not excepted, nay indeed, by her own account, she has the most pleasure in the latter. Entrance at the front door tolerably reasonable, but nothing less than two pounds for the back way . . . (1773)

  “Really?” She snapped the book shut and shoved it into his gut. “It’s the great-grandfather of online porn!”

  “I’m sure you meant to say it is the great-great-great-grandfather of—”

  “Julian!”

  “It’s a very common book,” he said. “Even that Jane Austen Books store in the States had a reproduction of it.”

  “Julian, it’s kind of creepy to be carrying something like that around, don’t you think? If it’s research, it belongs on your desk. As your former PR agent, I would advise you to keep it at home. It won’t score you any points with your target market.”

  Maybe she didn’t know this man . . . at all. Maybe she had come all this way for nothing.

  Her phone beeped with a text message and she dug in her bag to check it. Lexi had responded to her text saying She could b his sister. Vanessa laughed.

  It never turned out to be a sister, or even a kissing cousin.

  Then the tour guide raised her voice. “It’s time to head to our ‘barouche.’ It’s waiting for us at the end of the drive. Time to get back and get ready for the ball, everyone!”

  Vanessa looked into Julian’s eyes and he seemed sincere—about something—and opened his mouth to speak. But she didn’t want to have this discussion in Edward Austen Knight’s rose garden with the specter of Jane Austen lurking in one of the windows!

  She headed toward the front lawn and looked back at him, in his green coat and boots, standing in front of the gatepost of the garden, with the avenue of lime trees just beyond him and the rose in his hand at his side.

  Every girl should have her BBC costume drama moment, and this was hers.

  But if you looked closely, the edges of the pink rose petals had gone brown. The little black book was exactly that—a little black book—from the 1700s, but still.

  She could handle this like a duchess, or she could rant like only a thirty-five-year-old single American woman could.

  Over her shoulder she said with a smile, “I have to go. My barouche awaits.”

  Chapter 20

  Plastic Colin Firth had become a hat rack for a bonnet and several turbans and a coatrack for shawls and stoles. Necklaces dangled around his neck. He stood in the corner of the flat while Vanessa, Lexi, and Sherry vied for the limited resources of one bathroom and one well-lit mirror as they readied for the ball. Curling iron, hair dryer, and clothing iron cords created a spaghetti-like heap on the floor near the bathroom.

  Lexi’s bottle of cabernet had been emptied and now they were on to oversized cans of lager from the convenience store. British pop music blasted out of the clock radio in one of the bedrooms.

  Lexi nudged Vanessa away from the mirror so she could put her lipstick on. She
rry fastened a simple, understated Regency-style topaz cross necklace on.

  One thing they weren’t willing to forgo for the costume ball was modern makeup.

  “I wish I could meet a nice gentleman at the ball tonight.” Sherry sighed as she tightened the ribbon under her bust.

  “Be careful of what you wish for. You might meet someone who plays a gentleman onstage but carries around a catalog of prostitutes.”

  “What?” Lexi asked.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard of Harris’s List.”

  The corners of Lexi’s lips curled up in a smile. “Mmm-hmm. But it’s not as if any of the Covent Garden ladies are available to service him.”

  Sherry gave Vanessa a pained look. “That just sucks.”

  “In more ways than one,” Vanessa said. “He claims it’s ‘research,’ but I think it’s just kind of creepy.”

  “Makes me curious what he’s working on,” Lexi said.

  Vanessa rolled her eyes. “I’m beginning to think he’s not what he seems to be.”

  Lexi puckered her lips in the mirror. “He’s not what you’ve made him out to be. I keep telling you he’s an ass. As for you, Sherry, I’m afraid Jane Austen events are the last place to meet eligible men. You will meet plenty of wonderful women and a lot of witty gay men, however. By the way, Vanessa, I invited Chase to the ball tonight—from all of us.”

  “Oh, thank you! I can’t believe I forgot all about him.”

  “Come on. Since when am I nicer than you? I’ll tell you why you forgot all about him: Julian. It’s like you’re on crack or something. Chase is here in Bath because of you. He is probably the best guy you’ll ever not date. You’re totally blowing it.” Lexi poured herself and Sherry each another wineglass full of lager. “Beer’s gone. You don’t deserve any more, anyway, Vanessa.”

  “I just took another dose of cold meds, so I probably shouldn’t drink.”

  Sherry looked at Vanessa’s meds on the counter. “No, you shouldn’t be drinking with this! Slow down, will you?”