Undressing Mr. Darcy

by Karen Doornebos

  “I needed work, too,” Vanessa said.

  “Not anymore.”

  “You’re right.”

  For the first time in a long while, she felt unbroken.

  “I’m so thrilled you had an opportunity to really get to know Jane Austen, her work, and . . . yourself. It happened at the right time for you.”

  Vanessa smiled. “I’m a late bloomer.”

  “It’s okay. Austen’s Anne Elliot was a late bloomer, too. And in some ways Austen herself never had a chance to bloom.”

  “She died so young, too. Just a few years older than I am. What happened?”

  “There are a few theories. She might have had Addison’s disease, an autoimmune disorder, something we could easily cure today. Lindsay Ashford, author of The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, has proposed she died of arsenic poisoning.”

  “Who would poison Jane Austen? I realize she wasn’t the prim-and-proper type I’d assumed she was, but I’m sure she didn’t say—or write—anything scathing enough to incite murder!”

  “It’s very likely the medicine she took for her illness contained arsenic, and over time, it poisoned her.”

  “Poor Jane!”

  “Poor Cassandra. Sometimes, when two people are so close, what’s worse is to be the one left behind.”

  Vanessa bit her bottom lip.

  “Cassandra lived to be seventy-two. Did you see the letter she wrote to their niece Fanny after Jane’s death? It’s hung on the wall upstairs at their cottage in Chawton.”

  “I saw a lot of things, Auntie E, but I didn’t see that, no.”

  Aunt Ella closed her eyes, and Vanessa braced herself for hearing a quote, but this time, she took it in, like nourishment.

  “‘I have lost a treasure,’ Cassandra wrote. ‘Such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed,—She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself.’”

  “They loved each other very much.”

  “They did.”

  Vanessa smoothed a lock of hair from her aunt’s face. “I’m going to read all of Jane Austen’s letters—Chase bought a volume of them for me when we were in Bath.”

  “Chase. Such a nice young—well, I’m done meddling. You’d think I’d have learned my lesson from Emma Woodhouse! You’re on your own, my dear.”

  “We’ll see how that goes!” Vanessa laughed.

  “But you must be jet-lagged and tired.”

  Vanessa looked at her watch. It was ten at night in England. She rolled her watch back six hours to Chicago time.

  “By the way, during my move, some of your books, including one of your old high school yearbooks, ended up in my library. They’re on the table there. Don’t forget to take them with you when you go.”

  “Of course. I’ll be back tomorrow to tell you all about the trip!” Vanessa said.

  “I look forward to it.”

  When she arrived at her condo, yearbook and suitcase in hand, she knew right away something was amiss because when she opened her door, the hall light was on.

  Her desk drawers had been pulled out and dumped on the couch. Her jewelry armoire stood open and empty. Her flat-screen had been ripped from the wall and even her old DVD player was gone.

  Julian had been right, damn it.

  She’d been too cavalier about her whereabouts on social media, and she’d been robbed.

  * * *

  While the police took photos of the scene and dusted for fingerprints, Vanessa stared at her photo albums, which, happily, were not stolen and remained intact. It turned out the only things she really cared about were her memories. Memories of a happy childhood, both with her parents and with her aunt; a happy young adulthood with Lexi and a wide circle of friends; a happy several years with various boyfriends and later a fiancé, all of whom had left their own indelible fingerprints on her.

  The jewelry didn’t matter; the TV didn’t matter; alerting all her credit cards to watch for potential suspicious activity and making a list of to-dos such as changing the locks and calling her bank to report possible stolen bank account numbers and checks—none of it mattered.

  Above all, she still had her aunt.

  After the cops questioned her, she absentmindedly picked up her high school yearbook from Aunt Ella’s and flipped through the pages. It happened to be from her senior year, and once she hit the back cover, there were the signatures and well-wishes from tertiary friends, the ones who weren’t so close, because they hadn’t signed it first, on the opening pages.

  Some people she still happened to be in touch with—often thanks to social media. Others not. Most had led full lives with marriages, kids, divorces, cancer, coming out of the closet, striking it rich, losing it all; one had even become a celebrated opera singer while another had landed in jail for embezzlement. Someone in the class had even committed suicide, and there was her name with a smiley face after her signature.

  The very last thing she read was written in the bottom right corner, and clearly, the person had been pressed for space and wrote in a cramped, slanted hand.

  Dear Vanessa,

  Will miss you now that you’re graduating. Without you as president, why go to student council meetings? Wish you much happiness & success in college & life. I wrote you in as Sexiest Senior, but who listens to juniors? I’ll be looking for you in your bikini on the beach! Wink wink . . .

  Love,

  Chase (MacClane)

  Wow.

  Here was a seventeen-year-old boy reaching beyond the pages of a yearbook, and across the decades, to make a thirty-five-year-old woman who had just been robbed crack a smile.

  Then she laughed at the thought of it. If he only knew.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” asked one of the cops.

  “Yes. Yes.”

  It was a simple formula, too. He praised her for brains and lusted for her openly, but in a fun, teasing way. What more could a girl want? Or, at least, a girl of eighteen?

  So he had gone to her high school. She paged to the junior class, and there he was, Chase MacClane, adorable as hell, but she still didn’t remember him.

  A sad commentary on her lack of awareness.

  Maybe she should answer the texts he kept sending her since she’d left England.

  * * *

  But busyness set in and, after being tossed together for her aunt and Paul’s wedding, she didn’t text him back anything beyond a few polite answers to his questions and kind rejections to his offers to meet for dinner. Weeks later, Lexi roped Vanessa into going to a Halloween costume party hosted by a friend at some Scottish-themed place in the city.

  Vanessa resisted at first. “I don’t want to have women in halter tops, mini-kilts, and kneesocks serve me drinks.”

  But she’d already decided she would go, with the vague hope that Chase would be there in his kilt.

  “Just promise me you’ll wear a costume,” said Lexi.

  She decided to dress as a pirate girl and went to the party.

  Lexi was soon going to be leaving the States and moving in with David. They’d set a date for their wedding already. But that was Lexi; she moved fast in every facet of her life. “Look, he’s the One. It took one-fifth of a second for me to realize I wanted to sleep with him—because that’s how long it takes to decide that, it’s been documented—and about twenty-four hours for me to decide I not only wanted to sleep with him every night but wake up with him every morning. Why waste any more time?”

  Indeed.

  David the journalist had turned out to be quite the English gentleman, and Vanessa was really happy for Lexi.

  “Visit us?”

  “I will.”

  “Be my maid of honor?”

  “Of course. You’re not going to put me in a hideous dress, are you?”

  “You wouldn’t expect any less of me, would you? It’s the bridesmaids’ job to make their bride look good.”


  Lexi had even thought to bring home the torn gown that Vanessa had left in the shower stall in England, and now it hung in Vanessa’s closet, dry-cleaned and repaired.

  Vanessa had moved on from the whole Julian thing. Like a wave, it receded as quickly as it came in. What remained, like glistening gems on the shore, was nothing but fond memories of England and an interest in all things Austen.

  Sherry, too, had just gotten a promotion and was now happily dating a local philanthropist. She had bought him a T-shirt that said, I am Mr. Darcy. It had been determined that she would inherit plastic Colin Firth, and all seemed right with the world once Colin had been installed in her apartment as the centerpiece of her shrine to Darcy.

  Aunt Ella had a gorgeous little wedding, and she and Paul lived happily and quietly up north while he drove her around on little day trips and they made memories visiting and enjoying as many places as they could.

  Julian’s book had broken into the bestseller lists, and yes, they all had their fifteen minutes of fame when the BBC picked up the footage of the duel at the ball. Newspaper headlines read: DUEL AND FISTICUFFS MAKE FOR GREAT JANE AUSTEN FAYRE and THIS BALLROOM BELLE HAS . . . BALLS!and BALLROOM BABES BRANDISHING BLADES. The video went viral.

  Kai had gotten his first screenplay optioned.

  Vanessa had gone in for the third interview for an advertising account executive position, and it looked like she’d get it, too, at a great company, where she’d spend less time behind the computer and on social media and more time with people—and products like salad dressing—but hey.

  Could their success have been attributed to the restorative waters in Bath?

  Who knew?

  But some guy dressed as Satan at this party wouldn’t leave Vanessa alone. He gave a whole new meaning to “horny devil.”

  The sense of relief and the surge of joy she felt when she saw, across the room, Captain Jack Sparrow, she couldn’t begin to measure. She went right up to him and put her arm around him. But it wasn’t Chase of course, and with her heart sinking into the depths of disappointment, she found herself having to explain to the man—and his wife—that she thought he was someone else.

  When the one you wish for isn’t in the room, no matter how many other people are, you know it. You feel it. It can make a crowded room seem vacant. She missed him; she needed to see his goofy grin. That had to have been the moment she admitted, finally, that she felt more for Chase than she’d let on to even herself.

  She’d felt it happen to her several times before, like when he had left her on the beach to go amuse the kids at the birthday party, or when he’d turned his back on her and walked away in Trafalgar Square and then again in front of the British Library. Something deflated and dissipated once he’d gone. Everything deflated and dissipated once he’d gone.

  But it didn’t have to be this way. She could be near him, and she could make it happen! She didn’t have to be the one who left. She could choose to be the one who pursued—the one who . . . chased.

  Something Jane Austen could never do, but any modern woman could.

  And suddenly she couldn’t wait a minute more. As Lexi would say, why wait? How much time had she lost? How much time did she have left?

  Before the devil at the bar could track her down, she’d tracked down Chase, thanks to the locational social network. He was at a little amusement park just outside the city, called Haunted Hollow.

  She stuffed her tricorn pirate hat in her messenger bag and, on her way to the parking lot, she walked right past a white Chase Bank sign all lit up in the night. A CHASE sign. Maybe she did believe in signs after all.

  The amusement park happened to be packed, dark, and resounding with howling and screeching sound effects and machine-made blue fog. He could be anywhere—at the mini-golf course pulsing with bloodred water fountains, in the haunted house, on the go-cart track. She had no idea where in the park he could be, so she texted him.

  wassup? what cha doin?

  As she waited and hoped for his text back, she scoured the park looking for him for what seemed like forever, finding only zombies and Frankensteins and vampires and kids until, finally, a text from him pinged in:

  great 2 finally hear from u! u won’t believe it but i’m in line for bumper cars I’ll call u when I’m home

  No pirate girl had ever in her life run faster to a line for bumper cars. Tipping her hat down over her eyes, she climbed into one of the last available bumper cars in her little pirate skirt and buccaneer boots. She heard his voice across the way but couldn’t see him; he must’ve been behind one of the support poles. He was joking around with some kids, from what she could hear. Another birthday party, possibly.

  As soon as the bumper cars had been activated, she accelerated toward where she’d heard his voice. There had to have been at least fifty cars in the place, but at last she spotted him, and yes, he had his pirate costume on. This time, she made sure it was him, and then, as if out of nowhere, she floored it and rammed right into him head-on, with a smile.

  “Vanessa!”

  He was surprised. She could see it in his lopsided grin.

  “So glad you bumped into me like this,” he said.

  He looked better than she remembered, even in heavy kohl eyeliner.

  A few boys crashed into him, too, and he acted all goofy, trying to escape. Then an extremely gorgeous blonde, also dressed in a pirate outfit, crashed into him and Vanessa at the same time.

  Then wham! Kid after kid bumped into Vanessa’s car.

  Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it? He could be here on a Halloween date. With a girlfriend—or fiancée. It was a Saturday night, after all.

  “Vanessa,” Chase laughed, “you have to meet Caitlin.”

  “Hi, Caitlin.” Vanessa forced herself to lift a hand and wave. Someone bumped her car again.

  Caitlin looked like fun. She had on a sexy pirate blouse very similar to Vanessa’s, and she even had an eye patch. Her blond curls bounced as she laughed when the birthday party boys crashed into her. “Shove off, mateys! Or I’ll make ye walk the plank,” she said. In fact, she exuded playfulness and sexiness. Vanessa wouldn’t expect Chase to date anyone less than the perfect combination of fun, sexy, and smart. She did seem a little young, though.

  “Hi,” Caitlin said to Vanessa. “How cool to finally meet you! Chase has told me so much about you.”

  “He has?” Vanessa accelerated but had no idea where to turn. She wished she hadn’t come. It was so impulsive! This was what she got for forgoing the safety of a text! And why had he been telling his girlfriend about her?

  Chase took the opportunity to really gun it, and he hit Vanessa’s car on the side, spinning it around. “Caitlin’s great fun, isn’t she?” He smiled.

  “Yeah.” Vanessa flashed a smile.

  “I’m so glad you two have finally met.”

  “Yeah. Me, too!” Vanessa put the emphasis on the exclamation point.

  “Well, it’s really nice of my baby sister to help me out with the kids. It’s a party of twenty tonight!”

  “Caitlin’s your—your sister?”

  He bumped her car again, softer this time. “Of course she is! What did you think? If she were my girlfriend, I don’t think I’d be telling her about you!”

  “You’re not kidding about her being your sister, are you?”

  “No!” He laughed. “Why would I?”

  Vanessa couldn’t believe her luck. She couldn’t wait to tell Lexi.

  Then his sparkling brown eyes lasered right in on her cleavage. “You make a hot pirate, me beauty!”

  He turned to bash into Caitlin’s car, and she hadn’t been expecting it. “Chase Henry MacClane! You’re in for it!”

  “Your middle name is . . . Henry?” Vanessa asked.

  “Yes,” Chase said quite seriously. “After my father.”

  It brought to mind Henry Tilney from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the Austen hero with the best sense of humor. Now she knew his middle name. />
  Several boys crashed into their cars. Bumper cars buzzed around; sparks flew from the contact points on the ceiling; kids laughed and screamed.

  “Why did you show up here, Vanessa? Just to find out my middle name?”

  She laughed. “Yes. And because I missed you, okay? That’s all I’m going to say for now.”

  She felt exposed, revealed, undressed, even though she was fully clothed—or mostly clothed—in her pirate costume.

  He bumped her car. “That’s all you need to say. It’s a start.”

  It was more than a start.

  He smirked. “Do you want to do the go-carts? You can chase me all around the track. I really enjoy having you pursue me for once,” he said as he sped off.

  She accelerated and buzzed after him. “Haven’t I chased you around enough?”

  “It’ll never be enough for me.”

  She laughed.

  “I like to make you laugh,” he said over his shoulder, with bumper cars all around them. “To make you happy.”

  She found all this hard to resist.

  “You know what I like about us?” he asked as he turned his car around to face her. “We make each other better. We’re better together than we are alone.”

  The birthday party kids found them and cajoled them into going on the go-carts after all, where yes, she chased him and realized she hadn’t had this much fun in a long time.

  Chapter 22

  After weeks of dates: walking along the beach in the unusually warm month of November, evenings at the theater, the orchestra, and hot new restaurants, and even a night spent on a historic Chicago gangster ghost-hunting tour—and with a trip to San Francisco in the offing—Vanessa couldn’t get enough of Chase and his lust for life.

  These days, she had incorporated some new hobbies into her life and was now part of an acting troupe called Babes with Blades. And when she wasn’t wielding swords or saving cats, she could often be found in the park, on a bench, reading Jane Austen.

  Laughing and kissing, their hands all over each other, he hurried her onto his boat after the Swashbucklers’ Ball.