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One of the manservants opened the carriage door and held out his hand. Jane made a muted whine in her throat, then hoped he
hadn’t heard her.
Okay, okay, I can do this, Jane said to herself. Of course I can do this. I should be used to making a fool out of myself by now. This will be the last big one. Just three weeks and then I can leave this part of myself behind and get on with my life. And maybe it’ll be fun. It might even be fun.
She took the servant’s hand, stepped down from the carriage, breathed in a steadying breath, and caught an anachronistic whiff of Polo. Somehow that smell was reassuring.
“My dear Jane, you are very welcome!” A woman of perhaps fifty years approached the carriage on the arm of a red-cheeked, chubby man. Her blue dress and red umbrella were bright and inviting against the dreary backdrop of servants and rain.
“I am your aunt Saffronia, though of course you do not remember me as I haven’t kissed your cheeks since you were two and your widowed mother married that American and took you off to the New World,” she said neatly in one breath. “How we mourned your loss! My, but it is so good of you to come and visit at last. This is my husband, Sir John Templeton. He is near expiring in the anticipation of your arrival.”
Sir John blew up his cheeks and chewed on some invisible cud.
“Go on, Sir John, say hello,” Aunt Saffronia said.
Sir John at last fixed his wandering gaze on Jane. “Yes, well, hello,” he said.
He blinked lazily, and assuming he meant it as a nod of greeting, Jane curtsied as Mrs. Wattlesbrook had taught her.
“Hello, Uncle. How are you?”
“I had some ham for breakfast. I do not get ham much, what with pigs such dirty beasts and not on the property.” His gaze wandered.
Jane tried to think of some appropriate response to that. She came up with, “Hooray for ham!”
“Yes, lovely,” said Aunt Saffronia. “Lovely, indeed. You are lovely. It has been a long time since we have had lovely young people at Pembrook Park . . .” Her voice trailed off and she lifted a fingernail to her mouth, then pulled back abruptly. Jane thought it was a small error—the actress bit her nails, but Aunt Saffronia did not.
Sir John cleared his throat with a bit more phlegm involved than made Jane comfortable. “Young people? Lady Templeton, you forget Miss Charming.”
“Ah, yes, of course! How could I forget Miss Charming? She is the daughter of a dear friend and only arrived yesterday. What fortunate timing for you, I think. It is so nice for young people to share each other’s company.”
Aunt Saffronia took Jane’s arm and led her upstairs to a comfortable-sized room with a canopied bed, baby blue walls, sparsely furnished, not gothic enough to tempt her to look for “Catherine Heathcliff ” engravings on the windowsill. It was exactly the kind of room Jane would have imagined. She couldn’t think why this discovery was disappointing. It was slightly more disheartening to discover that the “kerosene” lamp by her bed had a flame-shaped lightbulb and was plugged into an outlet.
Jane dismissed her properly taciturn maid, Matilda, saying that she would rest until dinner, since the jet lag was making gravity feel alarmingly heavy. She spent a fidgety hour on a soft mattress, lifted up the sheets to spy out a DEVON brand tag, then poked around in the attached bathroom and found a flush toilet and bathtub with running water. It was a relief not to have to use a bedpan, but it also made her feel more guilty than ever. The less historical vigor observed, the more difficult it was for Jane to pretend that this whole exercise was anything beyond wish fulfillment. She felt too weird to rest.
The day continued to drizzle, so she ambled the burgundy corridors, peeking into open doors. The house was perfect. It even carried the old, clean smell of a museum. Her heart pounded a bit, and she felt as if she had sneaked away from a tour guide.
She walked a long gallery with north-facing windows and matched gazes with the portraits. Men and women in stiff costumes, old jewelry, their backgrounds faded countryside, their eyes imperious. They were marvelous. She wondered if those rich people had naturally looked on the world with such assurance of their own nobility or if the painter had created it for them. An itch inside her hand made her want to give it a try, but she scratched the desire away. She hadn’t picked up a paintbrush since college.
She ran out of upstairs, so down she went, only to be stopped fast by voices coming from a sitting room. Jane wasn’t ready to face real people yet, not as Miss Erstwhile. The portraits had been intimidating enough. Footsteps scared her out of the hall and into an open doorway. It was a large, square, empty room, wooden floors, no furniture. The grand hall. The place where balls happen. The walls were an impatient green, the crystals on the chandeliers winked in the window light. If she were the type of person who looked for signs, Jane would have thought the room was shivering in anticipation of something momentous. But she wasn’t.
She turned to leave, and from the far door saw the dark outline of a man enter. He stopped. She stopped. She couldn’t see his face.
“Pardon,” he said and turned back.
She stood staring at where he’d been for a few moments, relieved at first that she hadn’t been forced to make conversation yet, then soon, actually sorry that he’d gone. Just his presence had set her heart to pounding, and the feeling prickled in her the delightful expectation of things to come.
Goody, she thought.
As she ascended the main staircase on the way back to her room, she bumped into a woman bending over her own boots, the curve in her back declaring that she wasn’t wearing a corset.
“Dratted drawers,” said the woman, straightening.
She was unnaturally buxom, in her fifties, and sported short, bleached hair heavily sprayed and an attached fake bun of a slightly different shade. Her eyes widened when she saw Jane, and her surgery-tightened skin stretched to admit a wide smile.
“Well, hello, you’re new, aren’t you? My name’s Miss Elizabeth Charming, like Elizabeth Bennet, see? But don’t you like the last name? It was Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s idea. I’d thought just to go ahead and name myself Elizabeth Bennet, because I mean to bag a Mr. Darcy, but she thought Elizabeth Charming was more enchanting. Anyhoo, my friends call me Eliza.” She stuck out her left hand, the ring finger of which still bore the mark of a recently removed wedding band. Jane shook it awkwardly with her right hand, then bobbed a curtsy.
“Hello, I suppose I’m Jane Erstwhile.”
