Bespelling Jane Austen

by Mary Balogh

  “It is,” he agreed.

  “It has been a lovely summer.”

  “It has.”

  “I suppose,” she said desperately, “it does not compare favorably to India, though.”

  “If you refer merely to degree of temperature,” he said, “you are quite right. I love India, but there is nothing lovelier than a fine summer day in England. It is where my heart belongs, for this lifetime at least.”

  “You are expecting more than one lifetime, then?” she asked him, relieved to feel amusement.

  “Oh, certainly,” he said, sounding equally amused. “How else are we to learn all there is to learn from life? And how else can life be fair, as we all feel it ought to be but as it seems so often to be decidedly not?”

  “These are strange beliefs,” she said, “for a man whose brother is a clergyman.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “they can remain our secret.”

  They both laughed.

  She could feel the warmth of his arm through the sleeve of his coat. She could smell his cologne. She felt ever so slightly dizzy.

  Surely she knew him.

  But how could she?

  “This appears to be a lovely park,” he said as they proceeded along the wooded driveway.

  “It is,” she agreed.

  “I daresay,” he said, “it is at its loveliest now at the height of summer.”

  “It is,” she said and could think of nothing else to say to prolong the conversation.

  “It will be a long and tedious walk to the hall, Miss Everett,” he said, “if we maintain such a polite, lovely conversation.”

  “Is the walk too far for you?” she asked half chagrined, half hopeful. “Please do not feel obliged to accompany me all the way if you would rather return to the vicarage. I walk alone in the park all the time.”

  “I have neither the wish nor the need to return so soon,” he said. “It is, as we have agreed, both a lovely day and a lovely park. What is the very loveliest part of it?”

  “The lake,” she said. “But my favorite feature is the small summer pavilion. It has a wooden bench outside it overhung with roses. There I can sit and saturate my senses with beauty. Or simply dream.”

  “You enjoy solitude, then?” he asked her.

  “And company, too,” she said. “I like people who are genuinely cheerful and kind. I like them even better if they have interesting conversation and informed opinions on matters of general concern. But yes, I enjoy my own company, too.”

  “Because you are genuinely cheerful and kind and interesting and informed?” he said.

  She laughed.

  “Are you imagining,” she said, “that the pavilion and bench are close enough to the water that I can gaze admiringly down at my own reflection as I sit there?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you will take me there, Miss Everett, so that we may sit together on that bench, which you have made sound so idyllic. And perhaps I may be permitted to gaze upon you even if the water is not close enough to throw back your reflection.”

  She darted a startled glance at him.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “It may be raining tomorrow,” he said.

  “We would have to walk across the lawn,” she said, “or through these trees and then along a rough, narrow path around the far side of the lake.”

  “Is it too rough for you?” he asked her. “Should I carry you?”

  She answered his smile with one of her own.

  Louisa and Edna would wonder what had become of her. But no, of course they would not. They would not even miss her. Neither would her father. And if Amelia Mitford missed her, it would surely be with some gratification, as Jane’s absence with Captain Mitford would give her more time to spend at Goodrich with Louisa.

  Suddenly Jane wanted very much to take Captain Mitford to the summer pavilion, to prolong this time with him. She was…Oh, of course she was not falling in love with him. That would be more than absurd. But she was very much attracted to him. It was such an unfamiliar feeling that she felt quite dizzy again.

  “It is quicker to go through the trees,” she said. “But it is rougher.”

  He turned them off the driveway without further ado, and they were soon deep in the shade of tall, ancient trees. The silence and seclusion seemed deeper here than on the driveway.

  “Tell me about Miss Jane Everett,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, “there is no question better designed to tie my tongue. What can I tell you about myself? I am the middle sister of three—but you already know that. We are not close, alas, even though I believe we have a sisterly regard for one another. Louisa is interested more than anything else in rank and fortune and what is her due as the eldest daughter of a baronet. Edna is interested more than anything else in making a good marriage and achieving the sort of importance it will give her in society.”

  “And Miss Jane Everett?” he said as they drew clear of the trees and the lake water sparkled below them, at the foot of a sloping lawn. “What interests her more than anything else? Neither fortune nor marriage?”

  “Any sensible lady has a regard for both,” she said as she drew him in the direction of the south side of the lake. It was wooded to the bank and was scarcely used, despite the existence of the summer pavilion. “But either or both in themselves would not bring total satisfaction or happiness. Not to me, anyway.”

  “What would, then?” he asked, stopping for a moment to admire the view. “Love?”

  “It is a word that has so many uses and so many of them trivial,” she said, “that it has become largely meaningless. And it is a sentiment at which men tend to scoff, I know.”

  “I am to be lumped in with all men, then?” he said. “Are you sure you do not do me an injustice, Miss Everett?”

  “I long for…meaning in my life,” she said. “For something that will make it worth living. Something like spending my life in search of a great pearl and knowing that there can be no true happiness until I have found it. Except that it is not a pearl for which I seek or indeed any material possession. I do not know what it is. Love, perhaps? But I do not really know what that means.”

  “The search,” he said softly, “is always about love.”

  It should have sounded absurd but did not. Somehow it sent shivers along her spine and made her feel weak at the knees. It caught at her breath.

  “We must go single file from here. Captain Mitford,” she said, sliding her hand free of his arm. “The path is narrow.”

  She walked ahead of him, and they no longer talked.

  The search is always about love.

  What did he mean? The words had not been trivially spoken—or flirtatiously.

  And yet she felt somehow caressed.

  What was happening to her?

  She turned her attention determinedly to her surroundings. She loved this place. She had come here a number of times with her mother, and had continued to come after her death, at first to remember her, and then mostly to sit and dream. This was almost the only place where she allowed her imagination to roam—that imagination that really had nothing to do with making up stories for her dolls in the nursery. Here she dreamed of two lovers—one of them herself—meeting and loving. And parting. It was the inevitable ending, try as she would to give the story a happy conclusion. But hope always brought her back to dream again of those lovers.

  Who always seemed very real.

  As did the ending of their story.

  Which needed to be changed.

  “This is lovely,” Captain Mitford said as they came up to the pavilion and stepped around to the front of it. He laughed. “That word again. There ought to be more words to describe extraordinary beauty. This scene is…well, it is lovely. And it is you.”

  “Me?” she said, her eyebrows raised.

  “Small and secluded and peaceful and mysterious and lovely beyond words,” he said.

  “Then it is certainly not me,” she said with a laugh, though the outrage
ous compliment pleased her.

  …lovely beyond words.

  “You do not see yourself through my eyes, it would seem, Miss Everett,” he said.

  She felt herself blushing and turned her back in order to sit on the wooden bench to one side of the door of the little house. The walls were covered with ivy. Pink roses grew in an arch over the lintel and over a trellis above the bench. Their fragrance filled the air.

  “In what way am I mysterious?” she asked as he seated himself beside her and propped his cane against the end of the bench.

  “Only in that you are quiet and reserved,” he said, “and I wonder who you are. I wonder if you are who I believe you very well might be.”

  She turned her head and looked at him for some time in silence. She was not sure she wanted to ask the obvious question. She felt a little afraid again. This was all quite beyond anything she had experienced before.

  She felt as if floodgates were about to be opened on her life, ones she had kept determinedly closed for a long time. Or perhaps it was merely that she had met a handsome man and was falling into a foolish infatuation.

  “You know who I am,” she said.

  He rubbed his leg absently and gazed out over the lake.

  “Was it very badly injured?” she asked him.

  “My leg?” He stopped rubbing. “Most of my injuries came from a sword and a dagger when two enemy soldiers attacked me in battle, one from the front and one from the rear. According to the army surgeon, any one of those wounds ought to have killed me. But I also had the misfortune to fall from my horse and land on my head. My horse crashed down on my leg and crushed it beneath his body until I was rescued an hour or two later. My concussion should have killed me. So should my leg, especially after I refused to have it off.”

  “The army surgeon must have been very skilled,” she said, “despite his gloomy predictions.”

  “The army had to move on,” he said. “I was far too badly hurt to go with it. I had to be left behind in the care of an Indian family who were related to my batman. It was they who nursed me back to health. I was with them for longer than a year. Despite all the fever and pain, it was in many ways the happiest year of my life.”

  “But you did not want to stay forever?” she asked.

  “I was not meant to remain there,” he said, “though I believe I could have been happy there. I was meant to return here.”

  “By your family?” she asked. “Your regiment?”

  “Those, too, I suppose,” he said. “But I meant by life. This is where I am intended to live my life.”

  “In England?” she asked. “But to what purpose? What is it you need to find here?”

  He hesitated a moment.

  “Do you believe,” he asked her, “in soul mates?”

  He turned on the bench to look directly into her face as he asked the question. His eyes looked very intense and very blue.

  Jane felt a sudden coldness in the head as though she were going to faint. The floodgates creaked.

  “Soul mates?” she asked, almost in a whisper. She had never heard the term, and yet she knew.

  “Two souls that were created to belong with each other from eternity to eternity,” he said. “Two souls that seek each other out lifetime after lifetime until the time is right for them and they can love each other totally and unconditionally and move onward together to the next phase of their eternal growth.”

  “From eternity to eternity?” she said. “Do our souls not begin with human birth and proceed to a permanent eternal home after human death? It is what our religion teaches.”

  “Do you really believe that?” he asked her. “Why should a human man and a human woman have the power to give birth to an eternal soul when they have a child? Is it not far more believable that the soul in a human body comes from eternity and returns to eternity at death?”

  “Is this,” she asked him, “what you learned in India?”

  “Part of what I learned there, yes,” he said.

  “That we all have a soul mate?” she asked him. “And you have come home from India to find yours?”

  “Yes,” He had not removed his eyes from hers, and she found it impossible to look away. There was a buzzing in her ears. This should all sound utterly alien to her. And surely it did.

  And bone-weakeningly familiar. Where had she heard it before? How did she know it?

  “And have you found her?” she asked. She forgot to breathe.

  “I believe so,” he said, still gazing directly at her.

  She opened her mouth to speak, found words impossible, licked her lips and turned her head jerkily to gaze sightlessly at the lake.

  “Me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I believe so, Jane.”

  She got abruptly to her feet, her hands grasping the sides of her dress.

  “May I ask you something?” he said. He did not wait for her permission. “When Gerald handed you down from the gig outside the vicarage earlier and introduced us, you paused before curtsying and speaking to me. Why did you pause?”

  “I…I thought I knew you,” she said.

  “You asked me as we were leaving the vicarage,” he said, “if we had met before. By then you must have known beyond all doubt that we had not. Why did you still believe that somehow you knew me?”

  “I do not know,” she said.

  “Jane,” he said softly, “are you afraid?”

  “I am not afraid,” she said quickly. “Why would I be?”

  “Jane,” he said again.

  He ought not to be calling her that. She had not granted him permission. He was a stranger. Three hours ago she had not even met him.

  But he had always known her by name. She had always known him.

  “Yes, I am afraid,” she said, whirling on him. “I am afraid because if you speak the truth, then the last time we met I was the daughter of your great-aunt and you were the son of a duke, who had come to visit with her son, my brother. And you left me because your rank would not permit you to marry the daughter of a mere country vicar. You left me brokenhearted. And then a mere two weeks later you died when you crashed your curricle and I died a few days afterward when I cast myself into the river in a despairing search for oblivion.”

  “Jane—” He reached out a hand toward her, his face pale and troubled.

  She took a step back from him. She had never spoken those details aloud until now. She had not even realized she remembered them.

  Remembered?

  He was on his feet now, too, supporting himself on his cane.

  “I have upset you,” he said. “I am so sorry. In India I saw a number of lives in which we loved and lost each other because we would not reach out across the barriers that held us apart. But I did not see that particular life, the last. It was not imagination, though, Jane. All that really did happen to my great-aunt’s daughter and the man who deserted her.”

  “I must have overheard the servants talk,” she said. “Servants do talk.”

  “Forgive me,” he said, reaching out a hand for hers. “I have upset you.”

  He had. She, who never suffered from the vapors, felt very close to fainting now.

  She looked at his hand and drew a few calming breaths before setting her own in it. She watched his fingers close about hers and felt his touch all the way down through her body to her toes.

  And it felt so very right, this stranger’s touch.

  “Was that you?” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Was it really you?”

  “I believe so,” he said, his voice low. “Miserable coward that I was.”

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. Oh, he was so handsome. And he was a stranger. Except for his eyes. If she kept gazing into his eyes, she could see all the way to…

  “And there were other times?” she asked him. “Other lives?”

  He nodded.

  “We have known each other for a long, long time, then?” she said. “Forever?”

  She did not know
whether she wanted him to say yes or no. Terror warred with exultation.

  He did not say, either. He looked at her with those fathomless, blue eyes.

  “And how will it end this time?” she asked.

  “That,” he said, “is up to us.”

  And he raised her hand and held it against his lips.

  She closed her eyes, and with a rush of sensation she felt an overwhelming sense of homecoming.

  And terror.

  And exultation.

  ROBERT TURNED HER HAND and rested it, palm in, against his heart. He rubbed his own hand over the back of it and gazed into her eyes.

  This really was she.

  She looked so very different from what he had expected, though he did not know what he had expected. Not this dainty, pretty lady, certainly, with her light muslin dress and straw bonnet. Yet here she was, known consciously for the first time in human form.

  His soul mate from eternity to eternity.

  He took her other hand in his, raised it briefly to his lips, and held it against the right side of his chest.

  He sought out her mouth with his own, touched his lips to hers, and gave himself to the kiss. For the moment there was no sexual passion, only a yearning gratitude that he had found her at last, that they had the rest of a lifetime to be together if they chose, the rest of a lifetime in which to love.

  Her lips trembled against his and then withdrew. She took half a step back, though her hands remained spread over his chest.

  “This is madness,” she said. “We are strangers. A few hours ago we had not even met.”

  “Yes, we had,” he said.

  “But that is absurd,” she said, her eyes searching his. “It has to be. This is England in the nineteenth century. The land of sanity. The age of reason. This talk of soul mates seeking each other out over centuries of lives is nothing more than insanity. A century or two ago we would have been burned at the stake for such talk.”

  “Perhaps that is why,” he said, “we were not allowed a glimpse beyond the veil until now. Why is it we have both been given that glimpse this time if it is not true? And why the coincidence of our both doing so and then meeting today if it was not meant to be, if we do not belong together?”