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After questions and explanations, the police sent Charlotte and Eddie back up to the big house. It was silent, most of its inhabitants asleep and clueless about the happenings at the cottage down the lane.
Soon Charlotte found herself once again in bed, in a room without a lock, awake long after midnight. But something was different tonight. Something was missing. She looked around her room, patted herself as if searching for lost keys, ran her fingers through her hair. Something large, something usually present, was just gone.
I’m not afraid, she realized. I don’t feel the least bit afraid.
She thought of the dead body in the secret room. Nothing. She imagined her brother in a mask chasing her through a dark house. Nada. She thought of Mallery trying to kill her, and Mary in her room with a gun, and murdered nuns and ghosts and a house that might eat corpses alive …
She sighed, rolled onto her side, and fell asleep.
Home, thirty-one years before
“Let’s play castle,” said Charlotte’s loud and bespectacled friend Olga. “I’ll be the princess, and you be the lady-in-waiting.”
“Okay,” said Charlotte.
She watched Olga traipse about with Charlotte’s plastic tiara on her head and felt a mild ache that her lot was to sit on the basement carpet and pretend to weave a tapestry. But Olga looked really happy, and being the lady-in-waiting wasn’t so bad. She still got to be a part of the story. Even if she wasn’t the heroine.
Austenland, day 13
Charlotte poured milk in her tea, dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin, and said, “Last night Eddie and I found Mallery hiding in Pembrook Cottage.”
The sounds of chewing, tinkling utensils on plates, and subdued breakfast conversations hushed at once. Even Neville, just entering the dining room from the kitchen with a plate of sausages, gaped openly.
“The police arrived,” said Eddie, “but not before Charlotte was nearly taken hostage.”
“What happened?” Miss Gardenside asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, waving her hand as if it were all so typical. “He was hiding behind a trick bookcase in a secret alcove. Or was it a nook? Anyway, he pulled me in. He apparently had been dying to apologize for almost killing me. Then he kissed me.”
Ed
die stood up, rattling the table and knocking over a glass of orange juice. “He what?!”
“He kissed me?” she said, more apprehensively this time. She hadn’t expected a table-rattling, juice-spilling reaction to that news.
“Did you let him?”
“Yeah. NO! It wasn’t … it was … well, he needed closure, I guess. He’s like those old heroes—or villains, maybe—those tragic princes and tortured Heathcliffs and Rochesters. At least, he sees himself that way. He wouldn’t have lasted long in that little cubbyhole, and I think he was waiting for a finale of sorts before he left this old world behind. He was still calling me ‘Mrs. Cordial.’ After everything that’s happened—Mrs. Cordial. He’s that far gone. But he wanted that final moment, right? He wanted to end it with a kiss. And now that he’s in jail, his last free action wasn’t trying to kill the lady, it was kissing the lady, and he can live with that. You know?”
Miss Charming rested her cheek on her hand. “What was the kiss like?” she asked.
“Well, it was very dark, I couldn’t see him, and suddenly—”
Miss Charming put her hands over her mouth and squealed with delight. Eddie slammed down the empty juice glass he’d just picked up. Colonel Andrews and Miss Gardenside were looking back and forth from Charlotte’s fumbling to Eddie’s fuming.
“Never mind,” said Charlotte. “It was just a kiss. It doesn’t matter. I just wanted to tell you all, so you knew that Mallery is no longer a threat.”
Charlotte gave Eddie a stern look, warning him to calm down. He sat and reached for a piece of bread, then tore it apart over a plate.
“I just don’t like that he took such a liberty. I should have been there to prevent it.”
“It’s really okay, Eddie. I’m okay. Mallery tried to kill me, but I still feel sorry for him. It’s not easy to be him in this world. He doesn’t deserve much, but maybe he did deserve his final moment.”
Eddie laughed, and Charlotte shrugged.
“I know,” she said. “But I’m nice. It’s what I do.”
It was the heroine’s prerogative to give the villain a final kiss, and she had decided to be the heroine after all. Jane Austen had created six heroines, each quite different, and that gave Charlotte courage. There wasn’t just one kind of woman to be. She wasn’t afraid anymore. She was feeling at home at last in Austenland, and she meant to enshroud herself with that boldness and take it home with her.
