Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart Page 8

  “Colonel Fitzwilliam?” I looked up at Harriet in astonishment. “He’s Darcy’s rival for Elizabeth?”

  Harriet nodded, an impish smile on her face. “In this version, yes.”

  “But he’s barely mentioned at all in the real novel.” My protest only widened Harriet’s smile.

  “The real novel? But aren’t these pages real?”

  “You know what I mean.” Irritation pinched at my spine. “This isn’t what really happened. Jane Austen obviously changed her mind about a lot of things when she rewrote it.”

  “Obviously.”

  Harriet’s nodding agreement only spurred my irritation. “So this is just an early draft. It doesn’t change the outcome, does it?” I assumed Harriet had long since read the manuscript.

  “The outcome?” She paused.

  I bit my lip in frustration. “Whatever happens, Darcy and Elizabeth have to end up together.” I stopped then and remembered why I was seated on Harriet’s lumpy sofa in the first place. I needed to placate her, not fuss at her.

  Harriet eyed me with some interest. “Why should it bother you if Elizabeth fancies Colonel Fitzwilliam?”

  “Because it’s not the right ending. I mean, I know she and Mr. Darcy don’t hit it off at first, but he improves upon acquaintance.”

  “What of Mr. Wickham, though?” Harriet asked. “Doesn’t Elizabeth fall prey to his charms? He’s Darcy’s rival in the final version.”

  I shook my head. “But he’s a scoundrel, and Colonel Fitzwilliam isn’t. Elizabeth might have had her head turned a bit by Wickham, but…”

  “Perhaps in this version, the choice is not so simple, between a gentleman and a rogue. Perhaps Elizabeth must decide between two worthy men.”

  “Two worthy men?” I echoed, a note of despair in my voice. Trying to figure out one man was difficult enough.

  Harriet nodded. “That’s rather a more complicated task, isn’t it?”

  I opened my mouth to speak and realized I had no idea what to say.

  “Perhaps if you come back tomorrow,” Harriet said, “I’ll have found the next bit of manuscript.”

  “It’s not all in one spot?” That explained why she only handed me one section at a time.

  “It’s here somewhere.” She waved a hand at the chaos in the room. “It’s not as if it will grow feet and wander off, is it?” she asked with a smile.

  “But.” I wanted to tell her about Eleanor and confess that I was there against her daughter’s wishes, but I hesitated. Instead, I picked up the pages and handed them back to Harriet.

  “Thank you for letting me read this.” I leaned down to pick up my purse from the floor beside my feet.

  “Wait.” Harriet’s expression grew serious. “You can’t leave yet. Not until you tell me what you think.”

  Oh dear. “I’m just here to visit,” I said. “And I really ought to be going.”

  “But I need someone.” Her hands tightened on the manuscript pages. “I need you to help me decide what to do with the manuscript.”

  “Why don’t you just keep it here?”

  I hoped that might placate her, but Harriet rose from the sofa and walked to the window. She unearthed a handkerchief in her pocket and clutched it in her hands. “I can’t…” She broke off and then took a deep breath and seemed to collect herself. “I won’t be able to take care of it for much longer, so Mrs. Parrot thinks it’s best if I give it to her.”

  The grief and frustration etched in her face brought tears to my eyes, and I wished for a handkerchief of my own.

  “Mrs. Parrot? The head of the Formidables? She ’s pressuring you to give it to her?”

  “Yes, but Eleanor wants it too. She says it’s her birthright.”

  “So Eleanor knows about First Impressions?” Goosebumps rose on my arms. The Formidables might be fictional, but Eleanor was very real indeed. If she thought this manuscript was the real thing.

  Harriet nodded. “I only told her very recently. She was furious. Said I had no right to keep it from her. She didn’t understand, you see, about the Formidables. About keeping secrets.”

  “Oh.” What could I say? “Are there others, then, who know about it?”

  Harriet shook her head. “They suspect, but very few really know.”

  “But what if it isn’t—” I stopped. I didn’t want to agitate Harriet any further.

  “If it isn’t real?” She gave me a watery smile. “Sometimes I wish that it weren’t. My life would certainly be more peaceful.”

  A knock sounded at the front door. Harriet pulled back the curtain and peered out the window.

  “Oh dear.” She dropped her handkerchief on the window-sill and then quickly drew the curtain.

  “Harriet? Is something wrong?” I wondered who she’d seen that caused her so much distress.

  “It’s Mrs. Parrot. She’s come back again to try and talk me out of the manuscript.” Harriet looked wildly around the room. “Here, quickly.” She grabbed the pages I’d been reading from the low table by the sofa and shoved them at me. “Hide these.” Then she bustled off, grabbing another stack of pages from the top of her writing desk and still another from the bookshelves.

  Mrs. Parrot knocked again at the door while I moved to follow Harriet around the room. She continued to stack the pages in my arms. I didn’t know what else to do, so I slipped them as carefully as possible into my oversized purse.

  “There’s more, but I can’t remember where I’ve put them.” Harriet cast me a desperate look.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of them,” I said, my heart racing. She was really going to let me walk out of there with one of the world’s greatest secrets in my bag. “But won’t she suspect I’ve taken them?”

  Harriet grimaced. “She might, but she won’t know for sure. You can hide them in your room at the college. They’ll be safe enough there.”

  I hoped so. I hoped so? That was the moment when I realized that Harriet had won me over. I believed her, and I was going to help her, no matter how much Eleanor berated me.

  “You can slip out the back,” Harriet said. She put a hand on my back and motioned toward the door to the sitting room. “Through the kitchen garden, then to the right on the path. It will take you back to the river.”

  “Okay.” I stopped and turned to look at her. “Will you be all right? I can stay. You don’t have to face her alone.”

  Harriet shook her head. “I’ll be fine. Much better now that I know the manuscript is in good hands.” She laughed. “I haven’t had this much excitement in years. It’s quite exhilarating, really.”

  I had to laugh too, although I was afraid that mine held a tinge of hysteria. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promised her.

  “Of course you will.” Harriet beamed at me.

  Her complete faith in me was almost my undoing. “Thank you, Harriet. For trusting me.”

  She waved both hands, shooing me toward the back door. “Of course I trust you. Now go.”

  I did as she told me and slipped through the kitchen and out the door. The latch on the back garden gate proved a bit tricky, but finally my fumbling fingers succeeded in getting it open. I set off down the small path at a brisk trot, hoping that I’d done the right thing. On this side of the Atlantic, the right thing seemed a whole lot harder to figure out than it had been back home.

  I clutched my purse close to me. It felt as if it were covered with a label that said “Secret Jane Austen Manuscript” in large neon letters. Blinking ones, in fact. The people I passed during my return walk along the river, though, didn’t seem to notice. I reached the King’s Walk and made a beeline for Christ Church. If I could only reach my room and stash the pages there. Then I could sit down and figure out what to do.

  As it turned out, I couldn’t even escape to my room. I was almost to the end of the graveled walk when I saw James sitting on the same large stump where I’d first met Harriet. He saw me too, and the taut lines of his face eased to something resembling pleasure. W
hat was he doing there? I bit back the panic that rose in my throat and pasted a smile on my face.

  “Hello,” I said with what I hoped sounded like the right amount of casual surprise and not simply abject terror. “Are you enjoying your afternoon?”

  He smiled. “I’m bored. I came looking for you. What are you up to?”

  “I…um…well, I just…” How had he known where to find me?

  He shot me a teasing look. “You sound like you’re up to no good.”

  “Me?” I tried not to squeak. “No, I was just…visiting a friend.”

  “You have friends in Oxford?” Now he was the one who looked surprised.

  “I just met her the other day.”

  “Her?” His face relaxed into lines of relief. At least I thought they were lines of relief. “Who is she?”

  I fanned my face, grateful for the actual heat that disguised the elevated temperature of my emotions. “An older lady. I met her right here, actually. She was selling some greeting cards she ’d made.”

  “How was your visit?” He watched me intently, searching for something in my face.

  “Very nice.” I resisted the urge my pull my bag closer to me. “Shall we?” I gestured up the path, away from Harriet’s cottage.

  He stood up and came toward me. “I wanted to check out the university’s Botanic Garden. Would you like to come with me?”

  The manuscript made my purse feel as if it weighed a ton. I would dearly have loved to stash the pages in my room, but James was standing in front of me, making my pulse race again, and I couldn’t bring myself to turn down the opportunity to spend time with him.

  “Okay.”

  He stepped onto the path, and we started walking. My heart rate hadn’t slowed a bit.

  “So tell me more about your friend,” he said as we made our way back toward Christ Church and then alongside the meadow that separated it from the river. The cows stood somnolent amid the dry grass, inert in the heat.

  “My friend? Oh, you mean Harriet.” I couldn’t look at him when I answered. “She’s just a harmless old lady, I guess. She has the most amazing cottage, though. Full of knickknacks.”

  “Sounds like your average grandmother.”

  “If your average grandmother lived somewhere that looked like it was painted by Beatrix Potter.” I smiled and tried not to look as guilty as I felt.

  The Botanic Garden was ripe with the fragrances of summer—honeysuckle and newly mown grass. I wanted to stop and smell the roses, quite literally, but James sped down the path as if he were power walking instead of playing tourist.

  We were making our way through the famous walled garden, where large rectangles created by the footpaths housed different families of plants. Since it was a scientific garden, every bit of flora was clearly labeled. I’d read somewhere that there were more than eight thousand kinds of plants kept there, and I wondered who had the job of making all the labels. At my office, making the labels for all the medical files was a task nobody wanted and had been, consequently, one that I’d frequently wound up doing myself.

  The heat and the long walk from Harriet’s cottage and then to the Botanic Garden finally caught up to me. “I need to sit down. Just for a minute.”

  I moved toward a bench near the path under the shelter of some clearly labeled trees. I didn’t care what they were called, though, just that their ancient branches blocked out the sun for the time being.

  James agreed to stop with enough reluctance to let me know he wasn’t happy about it, but I was so hot, I didn’t care. Clearly he wasn’t a man used to dawdling, but I supposed if you had made it in the New York publishing world, you wouldn’t be known for your ability to relax. After a long pause, he sank down on the bench beside me.

  The cool shade provided welcome relief. “I want to take it all in,” I said, indicating the garden around me with one hand. The spire of Magdalen College towered in the foreground, and the drone of bees made me sleepy. Especially since I hadn’t slept much the night before. Insomnia was apparently one of the prices I was paying for my current sins.

  “It’s nice,” he said, glancing around.

  Nice? His foot tapped the ground in a nervous pattern. Sitting still was definitely not his forte.

  I had thought that an afternoon walk would give us a chance to get to know each other. Despite the kiss I’d spurned the night before, I still couldn’t accept that he was interested in me romantically. But the swarm of butterflies that invaded my stomach every time I saw him told me everything I needed to know about my own feelings.

  He glanced around. “Are you ready to keep going?”

  “In a moment.” It had occurred to me, while I was catching my breath, that James was the very person to answer a question that had arisen during my walk back from Harriet’s cottage.

  “You know, I was wondering, what would happen if a famous author, somebody who’s been dead a long time. I mean, what would happen if someone found a manuscript by a writer like that and it had never been published?”

  “A famous author?” The corners of his mouth turned up into a smile. “Someone like, oh, Jane Austen, perhaps?”

  I had to laugh. “Perhaps. But seriously, what would happen? If something like that turned up?”

  He shrugged and shot me an inquisitive look. “I don’t know what would happen in the academic world, but in the publishing business, well, it would be a feeding frenzy. Can you imagine the publicity?” He lifted a hand in the air. “Lost Austen Novel.” He punctuated each word with a thrust of his hand. “It wouldn’t even need to have a title to become an instant best seller.”

  “But who would get to publish it? Theoretically speaking,” I added, trying to sound as casual as possible.

  “Who would own the copyright, you mean?” He paused. “Whoever had legal possession of it.”

  “But I thought all of her novels were—what do you call it?—in the public domain.”

  “Yes. Because they were published novels. The copyright has long expired. But a new work? The owner and the publisher would stand to make a great deal of money.” He laughed. “Theoretically speaking, of course. If a manuscript like that existed, someone would have come forward long before now. For financial reasons, if nothing else.”

  “Oh. I guess you’re right.” I let my gaze wander to a spire in the distance and thought about what James had said. I hadn’t thought about the money angle at all. I knew what was concealed in my purse was rare and important, from a historical point of view, but it was clearly worth its weight in gold as well.

  “I’m sorry. You want to keep moving, not talk about wild Jane Austen theories.” I took pity on him and rose from the bench. “Let’s go. I wouldn’t mind something cold to drink.”

  “Good luck with that in this country.” But he said it with a smile instead of a sneer. He was softening up a little bit.

  We left the Botanic Garden and wandered up the road to Magdalen College. It sat along the High Street, somewhat apart from the other buildings, but it boasted the same golden medieval glow, dotted with red geraniums and emerald green patches of lawn. Some of those patches were tinged with brown after baking in the unusual summer heat.

  Down the street toward the city center, we found a small shop, and I bought a room-temperature diet soda. We made our way back to the river near Christ Church and found a grassy spot underneath a sprawling tree. By then, the heat had finally taken a toll even on James’s restlessness. I sat, legs tucked to the side in my best ladylike position. He stretched out full length and put his hands behind his head, as if he had all the time in the world. I wondered if he was always like this—either anxious or blasé, with no middle ground.

  “Sorry about the garden,” he said to the sky.

  I took a swig of my Diet Coke. “It’s okay.” I paused. “Are you okay?”

  “I guess I’m not used to being without my BlackBerry.”

  I glanced over at him. “So that’s why you were twitching so much. CrackBerry withdrawal sym
ptoms.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Don’t know what I was thinking, leaving it in my room. I thought it would be good for me.”

  We sat in silence for a while, the stillness of late afternoon wafting over us. A few people strolled in leisurely fashion along the river, and the occasional punt glided by. I envied the young women who trailed their hands in the water while their male admirers did the heavy work of poling the craft down the river. The arch of the trees, the tangy scent of the grass, the occasional breeze that wafted across the water created a haven of peace.

  “We should do that,” James said, nodding toward a punt as it passed.

  “Looks like fun,” I replied in an attempt to sound noncommittal. Don’t make too much of what he says, I warned myself. I had never had an experience like this. I had never met a man and felt as if the earth were shifting position beneath my feet.

  What about Neil? a voice in my head asked, but I decided to ignore it. That voice was annoying, and really, my love life wasn’t any of its business.

  To my surprise, in a few moments James was asleep. He snored, I thought with some amusement. Not a lot, but enough for it to be an imperfection. I need to find some imperfections in him so that I wouldn’t feel quite so imperfect myself.

  My own eyelids had grown heavy, and I was drifting off myself when my cell phone started to ring. I scrambled to open my purse, careful not to open it too wide, and dug around until I found the phone. The name and number on the display made me groan.

  Neil.

  “Hello?” I answered in a soft voice.

  “Claire?”

  “Hi, Neil.” I pitched my voice low so that I wouldn’t disturb James.

  “Hey,” he said. I did the mental calculation. It must have been late morning back in Kansas City. He was probably calling from work. “How’s England?” he asked.

  How’s England? I had to bite my lip so I wouldn’t laugh. Was this the same man who barely looked up from his copy of Sports Illustrated when I’d told him I was leaving the country? The same man who couldn’t drive me to the airport because the Royals had a home stand?