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“The way you have some secret displeasure?”
“No, not displeasure,” he said, and she realized he was right. Sadness, or heartbreak, or grief that there was nothing to give him hope, perhaps. She was pretty sure now that he was Henry Jenkins, poor sop.
Captain East reined in beside Jane. “Miss Heartwright had a headache and went inside. So sorry to neglect you, Miss Erstwhile. You must tell me what I missed.”
“I’ve discovered that Miss Erstwhile is an artist,” Mr. Nobley said.
“Is that so?”
“It’s been years since I picked up a paintbrush.” She glared at Mr. Nobley, and zing, there was his smile again, brief, urgent. When his lips relaxed she wanted it to come back.
“That is a shame,” said Captain East.
That evening when Jane retired from the drawing room, she found a large package on her side table wrapped in brown paper. She ripped open the paper and out tumbled neat little tubes of oil paints and three paintbrushes. She saw now that an easel waited by the window with two small canvases. She felt very Jane Eyre as she smelled the paints and ticked her palm with the largest brush.
Who was her benefactor? It could be Captain East. Maybe he still liked her best, even after his tête-à-tête with Miss Heartwright. It could happen. Even so, she found herself hoping it was Mr. No-bley. Instinct urged her to stomp on the hope. She ignored it. She was firmly in Austenland now, she reminded herself, where hoping was allowed.
Did Austen herself feel this way? Was she hopeful? Jane wondered if the unmarried writer had lived inside Austenland with close to Jane’s own sensibility—amused, horrified, but in very real danger of being swept away.
Ten days to go.
Boyfriend #10
Peter Sosa, AGE TWENTY-NINE
They met in the elevator. He worked on an upper floor, an ad exec, young for the position so obviously a genius. Smartness had always attracted Jane, that and hands and jawline and butt. And eyes. Also, integrity of character—she wasn’t shallow. Peter fell for her at once, he said, because she was stunning. That’s the word he’d used—stunning. It’s a difficult word to dismiss. She longed to be that word to someone.
They went out every Friday night for five weeks, and she felt her heart plummeting a long way. Boyfriend #9 was still raw, a sore that wouldn’t heal because she kept picking at it, but wouldn’t Peter be such a way to come back from that catastrophe! She fantasized of the day she would casually bump into nasty ex-boyfriends with Peter on her arm. And then . . .
“What is it? You’re married, aren’t you?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” He paused, leaving Jane to imagine. “I have a girlfriend. I’m sorry. I’m not cheating, she’s right over there, at the table by the window. She made me a bet that I couldn’t make the first girl I asked out fall in love with me. Some movie she saw, thought it would be romantic, then it went too far . . .”
Jane’s language would have made Britney the longshoreman blush down to her boots.
days 12–13
THE NEXT MORNING, RAIN BLURRED the hard edges from the world, transforming things into forms, like Christo’s fabric-wrapped bridges, nudes, and trees. Jane had been painting since daybreak. Yellow, red, orange, blue. The colors made her hungry, but she was too infatuated with paint on canvas to dress for breakfast. When Matilda came, Jane shooed her away.
She had forgotten the thrill she used to feel when buying a new paintbrush, squeezing all those colors onto her palette, smelling the clean natural odor of the oils, the reckless unknown of first spoiling a white canvas. These past years, she had become comfortable with her mouse and computer screen, creating corporate art, lazy and dull. And now, smearing green and gray together, interrupting it with orange, she realized she had loved her last boyfriends as a graphic designer would. But she wanted to love someone the way she felt when painting—fearless, messy, vivid.
In honor of Miss Eyre, Jane did a self-portrait. When she caught just the right shading of a cheek, her heart bumped her ribs as though she were in love. What she was after was that self-assurance in the eyes that those old portraits in the gallery had, a knowing gleam that insisted she was worth looking at. It was tricky to achieve. She wanted to ask someone else’s opinion about her painting, but not the traitor Matilda. Aunt Saffronia? No, she was too eager to please. Martin? Oh, stop it. Mr. Nobley? Yes, but why him?
She made it downstairs late for lunch and a maid served her cold meats and well-cooked vegetables. The house echoed as though long deserted. She thought of returning to her easel, but she felt unsettled by the expression she’d left in her painting—she feared it was forced assurance, an actor’s eyes. She decided to give both pairs of eyes a break.
She sat in the library, staring at the streaks of water against the window, the book A Sentimental Journey half open before her. What do gardeners do in the rain? she wondered.
Mr. Nobley had entered the room before he noticed her. He groaned.
“And here you are. Miss Erstwhile. You are infuriating and irritating, and yet I find myself looking for you. I would be grateful if you would send me away and make me swear to never return.”
“You shouldn’t have told me that’s what you want, Mr. No-bley, because now you’re not going to get it.”
“Then I must stay?”
“Unless you want to risk me accusing you of ungentleman-like behavior at dinner, yes, I think you should stay. If I spend too much time alone today, I’m in real danger of doing a convincing impersonation of the madwoman in the attic.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And how would that be different from—”
