Attempting Elizabeth (4 page)

I redid my ponytail and scrubbed my face with cool water before we went back out. I wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, but I felt significantly better than I had before.

As we walked back into the pub, I glanced over toward the pool table. I stopped in surprise. There was a blonde in a very short dress leaning against the pool table, her head tilted toward Mark. Her body language was pretty darn aggressive. While I watched, she reached out and put a hand on his bicep.

Charlie was standing off to the side looking uncomfortable—he seemed to be scanning the crowd as if he was looking for someone. He caught sight of us and seemed relieved. He shook his head slightly at us.

“What’s going on?” Tori asked me in a confused voice.

“I have no idea.” I felt my jaw drop as the blonde tossed her hair over one shoulder, her face turning in our direction. Time slowed down and the room seemed to tilt a bit.

“Oh my god,” I heard Tori breathe next to me.

Ashley Brandon. The bane of my college existence. I’d know her anywhere. Finding her sucking face with my ex two months ago (which is how he’d achieved the status of ex) had burned her annoyingly perfect features permanently into my brain.

I was pretty sure I was going to throw up. The potato skins and daiquiri were churning around in my stomach in an entirely unpleasant way.

Ashley looked directly at me, her hand still on Mark's arm. Mark glanced up too. I must have looked like a crazy person, standing there, rooted to the floor, turning an unbecoming shade of red. Maybe if I’d been feeling less sick I would have noticed that he looked slightly uncomfortable at being manhandled by Ashley.

But I wasn’t paying much attention to Mark's face. I was focused on Ashley and her perfectly manicured, bright red fingernails, caressing his bicep. I’d seen those same fingers running through Jerkface Jordan’s dark hair before he’d noticed me standing there in shock. The last I’d heard they were dating.

I had to get out of here. Before I did something dumb like cry.

“I’m going to the car,” I said in an admirably even voice to Tori.

“I’ll get Charlie’s keys and meet you there.” There was a grim determination in her voice that made me guess that she wasn’t heading in the direction of the pool table just to retrieve the keys.

I couldn’t bring myself to care. I turned on my heel and walked, slowly but steadily, out of the pub and to Charlie’s car. I stood quietly and waited for her to come out to the parking lot. I was silent the entire ride home. Tori eyed me uneasily as she pulled up in front of our apartment.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” I opened the door and climbed out. “I know you probably have to go back and get Charlie. It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” She didn’t look convinced.

“Yes. Fine. I’ll see you when you get home.” I made it all the way into the apartment and got the front door closed before I let myself cry.

“You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-h
ole goes.”

I felt slightly
better after my crying jag. I’m not even sure why I was crying. I wasn’t still crying over Jordan. I knew I was infinitely better off without him and his habit of subtly putting me down.

I wasn’t really crying because of Ashley. I hated her, she hated me. It was a mutual thing. I had no idea how she knew it would bother me for her to be draping herself all over Mark. It could have been completely coincidental. I mean, he was hot. She probably couldn’t help herself around someone that attractive. On the other hand, Charlie had been standing right there and she certainly knew who he was. Had she seen us all sitting at the table earlier and thought I liked Mark so she thought she’d make a move? Well, the joke was on her, because I didn’t like Mark.

Okay, perhaps I was
slightly
attracted to him. Slightly might be a bit of an understatement. I hadn’t been this attracted to a guy since Jerkface Jordan. And that certainly turned out well. But unlike Jordan, something about Mark annoyed me. I felt off-kilter and awkward around him. I’m not the smoothest person in the world, but so far, in my two days of knowing Mark, I’d yet to come across in anything approaching a good light.

“He’s not my type anyway. I prefer tall, dark, and handsome, not short, red-headed, and snarky.” I ignored the fact that tall, dark, and handsome obviously didn’t prefer me, and that calling Mark short was patently unfair. Yeah, he wasn’t towering over six feet, but there wasn’t anything...lacking...about him physically. I pulled my mind back sharply from where it was wandering—not even wandering really, more like running full speed —down a very dangerous path.

The point was, I didn’t like Mark.

There’s really only one course of action after a sob fest of that magnitude. I changed into my rattiest and most comfortable sweatpants, pulled out
Pride and Prejudice
, poured myself a glass of wine, and stretched out on our living room couch for a date with some of my favorite characters.

I fell asleep reading. I hadn’t started at the beginning of the book. I’d read it so many times that I knew the plot forward and backward. I could quote dialogue. I may or may not have read and written fan fiction. I admit nothing.

I do admit, however, that I’m not-so-secretly in love with Mr. Darcy. What’s not to love about a handsome and rich man (
“ten thousand pounds a year!”
) that falls so desperately in love with a woman that he is willing to examine his own prejudices and overcome his pride to be with her? Actually, it’s even better than that, because Darcy changes not knowing if it will result in Lizzy falling in love with him. And he does, I think, a truly amazing and dashing thing, when he helps rescue her sister from certain ruin and wants no recognition for it. He saved her younger sister, Lydia, at great trouble and expense, just because he loved Elizabeth and didn’t want to see her hurt. Sigh.

And yes, I know he is a fictional character; I’m still kind of in love with him. It’s a pity that my own attempts at finding my own Mr. Darcy had turned into such debacles.

I had started reading at the first proposal scene. There is something so heartbreaking about Darcy’s awkward attempt at a proposal. He so desperately doesn’t want to love Elizabeth, and he makes it abundantly clear. The verbal smackdown she gives him is one of my favorite scenes in all of literature. I figured I’d read from first proposal, through Lizzy coming to love Darcy, and all the way to the happy ending.

I didn’t make it to the end, though. I was so tired out from the ill-conceived hiking excursion and my crying jag that as soon as Darcy stormed out of Hunsford cottage after being soundly rejected, I felt my eyes getting heavier. I had barely made it through the letter Darcy gives Elizabeth the next day when I dropped off to sleep.

As my eyelids drifted shut, I felt like I was being pushed and pulled from all sides. There was a loud rushing sound in my ears. I opened my eyes, but I seemed to have trouble focusing. I could bring the scene in front of me into focus, briefly; then it got blurry again. It was bright, much brighter than my softly lit living room. After a moment or so of fighting to focus, my vision cleared. The strange sounds remained in my ears, like the sounds of waves pulling in and out.

I felt different. I looked down at my body. I was dressed in a pale muslin morning dress, holding a sampler as my hands—except they weren’t my hands; they were much smaller and more delicate than my hands—were busily setting a series of small precise stitches into the fabric. I have never sewn in my life.

I looked around the room. It was lovely—filled with early afternoon sunlight from large multi-paned windows, decorated in a soft feminine style, and stocked with the most gorgeous antiques I had ever seen.

I became aware that someone was talking to me. There was a woman sitting on a small couch to my left. She was dressed in a Regency era dress just like I seemed to be and had a small lace cap on her head. It appeared she’d been speaking to me for some time, but her voice was just beginning to filter through the rushing in my ears.

The woman was dark-haired and petite and looked to be in her late thirties or early forties. She also sat with a sewing project in her lap, but unlike my hands, which were still busily working away, hers were gesturing in the air as she punctuated whatever point she was making. As her voice became clearer I became even more confused.

“...and I must say, he was paying you particular attention yesterday during our stroll. Did you not notice it? Such charming manners, and so handsome. Georgiana, are you attending me? You have quite a blank look on your face.”

Georgiana? Who was she talking to? I turned my head slightly to each side, but there was no one in the room but the two of us. The woman looked at me in exasperation, but then laughed.

“I dare say you are daydreaming about a
certain
gentleman. You should do me the favor of attending when I am speaking of the very same gentleman,” she teased.

I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who you are talking about.” For some completely inexplicable reason my voice came out significantly higher and softer than my usual alto. And in an extremely refined sounding upper British class accent. I was so shocked I dropped my sewing sampler and it fell to the floor with a soft
whoosh
.

My companion looked surprised as well, but she recovered quickly with a patently fake-sounding laugh. “Oh my dear, what a dreadful tease you are turning into. Who else could we be speaking of? Do you have that many beaux that you are getting them confused?”

I continued to stare at her. The look on my face—I had a brief dumbfounded moment of realization that I had no idea what my face looked like; judging from the difference in the appearance of my hands and the tenor of my voice, it might look extremely different from my own—must have given her another moment’s pause, because she furrowed her brow and said, “Why, Mr. Wickham of course.”

If the surprise I felt at hearing my voice registered at about a nine out of ten on the shock scale, the mention of Wickham blew it right off the charts.

“Wickham?” My voice was now a frightfully high squeak, like a church mouse that inhaled helium and then was stomped on. I cleared my throat. My hands clutched at my skirts, frantically, as if by finding purchase on them I could somehow grab onto reality. My spine felt unnaturally straight. I don’t think I’d ever sat up so straight in my life. My normal reaction would have been to jump up and pace about the room. I was kind of a fidgety person in general, but for some reason, other than the spastic movement of my hands, my body refused to move from its extremely still state.

I took a deep breath and tried again.

“Wickham?
George
Wickham?” I asked. My companion, clearly discomfited by my strange behavior, nodded vigorously. My brain, which had been feeling sluggish—maybe a byproduct of the strange rushing sounds that had been echoing inside my cranium—began to fit pieces together. “And...you’re Mrs. Younge?”

She nodded again. “Miss Darcy, are you feeling quite well?”

Miss Darcy.
Georgiana Darcy.
Mr. Darcy’s little sister. Which meant one of two things. I was dreaming or I was crazy. I closed my eyes briefly and ordered myself to wake up. Nothing happened. I peeled my eyelids open again to find Miss Darcy’s paid companion, Mrs. Younge, still watching me.

Well, that still left crazy as an option.

“I feel, um, a little bit disoriented,” I said truthfully. I was finally able to will myself to stand up. I was tiny! My eye line was completely different; it made everything look strange. I usually stood at 5’9, but I’d bet good money that I was now at least seven to eight inches shorter than that. I probably hadn’t been this short since I was ten years old. I took a few steps, Mrs. Younge watching me the entire time. I would have said she looked concerned, but I had a poor opinion of her to start with. I knew she was complicit in trying to foist Wickham on poor, unsuspecting Georgiana, so I trusted her about as much as I’d trust a viper.

I glanced around the room. There wasn’t a mirror, which was too bad because I was dying to find out what Georgiana Darcy looked like. I think that was the moment when it occurred to me that I might actually be in
Pride and Prejudice
. My brain had somehow accepted that I was a different person—a character that I was familiar enough with to be curious about.

Likely I was a total nut case and had already been committed to a mental institution by concerned friends and family. My choice of hallucination seemed to be the pages of
Pride and Prejudice
, though why my poor, addled brain would pick Georgiana, I honestly had no idea.

I walked over to the window and looked out. We were on the first floor, and the sitting room window overlooked a cobblestone street, lined on either side with stately looking homes.

“We are in Ramsgate,” I said out loud. I was mentally orienting myself in the novel’s storyline. The seaside town of Ramsgate is where Georgiana Darcy had been seduced by Mr. Wickham into agreeing to elope with him. We were discussing Wickham, but Mrs. Younge hadn’t acted as if he had already proposed to Georgiana—to
me
—I corrected myself.

“Yes, of course. Do you think you might need to retire? Mayhap if you lay down for a few moments. Mr. Wickham did promise to call today. We do not want him to see you in such a confused state.”

“Don’t we? I mean, do we not?” I tried to imitate Mrs. Younge’s speaking pattern as I turned my head to look back at her. “And my brother, Mr. Darcy, we do not expect him?”

Mrs. Younge actually started at that and I smiled to myself.
Snake,
I thought.
It’d ruin all your plans if Darcy showed up right now. Although he manages to ruin them for you soon enough.
I wondered how long it would be until he did show up, wrecking Wickham’s and Mrs. Younge’s nefarious plans and swooping me off to London. Would it be possible to stay crazy that long? Being crazy might be worth it if I got to see Mr. Darcy in the flesh. Although, I’d be his sister, which was kind of awkward and lame, but at least I’d get to see him.

I must be an incredibly sick cookie to be hoping to remain in a complete state of mental breakdown in order to see a hot fictional guy. I’m obviously
not
in a healthy place. Could it be that seeing Ashley with her paws all over Mark upset me more than I’d realized?

Mrs. Younge was now watching me with narrowed eyes. If she could have heard my thoughts, she would likely have run screaming from the room, but I could tell by her calculating look she was trying to figure out how to best question me about my contact with Darcy. She must want to know if all her best laid plans were about to be dashed.

“Your brother?” she asked in a sickly sweet voice. “Why no, I do not expect Mr. Darcy to visit. Unless you have heard from him that he is coming? I haven’t noticed that you have received any letters from him in the last few days.”

“Oh no, I have not heard from him. I thought, perhaps, that you had.”

Mrs. Younge visibly relaxed. “Why no, my dear. I have not heard from him. As far as I know, he remains in London.”

I almost snorted. Luckily for Georgiana, Darcy didn’t feel the need to communicate his every move to Mrs. Younge. He would manage to take them all by surprise by showing up unannounced any day now.

“Do we expect Mr. Wickham soon?” I asked. I am not quite sure how I felt about meeting Wickham. I wondered if there was some way I could fast forward my hallucination and get to the Darcy part while conveniently skipping the agreeing to elope with Wickham part. I’d frankly had quite enough of skeezy weasel men. I didn’t need to deal with literature’s skeeziest of all weasels on top of dealing with my real life issues.

“Do sit down, Georgiana, you look quite pale. Mr. Wickham has been faithfully visiting us around two o’clock in the afternoon. I expect we shall see him then.”

“Hmm.” I resisted the urge to look at my wrist for the watch that I knew wasn’t there and instead glanced at the clock in the corner of the room. It was 1:30 now, which meant I had a half hour to kill with this woman before Wickham made his appearance.

I walked back over to the settee, sat down, and picked up my sampler once again. Mrs. Younge continued to look at me suspiciously, as if she was waiting for me to pop out another head or something, but after a few moments she made an attempt to return to her sewing as well.

I stared at the sampler. It was quite intricate. A verse surrounded by a floral motif. I concentrated on trying to place a few stitches, and was rewarded by crooked stitches and a bleeding finger. I cursed silently and wondered why before, when I hadn’t been thinking about it, my hands had seemed to move of their own volition.

Maybe that was the trick. I hadn’t been thinking about it. I deliberately made my mind as blank as I could, trying for that sort of spacey feel you get when you’re stuck on the freeway during a long drive and you let your mind wander and “come to” fifteen minutes later, only to realize you’ve driven yourself home without knowing it. You get home because it’s routine. Your mind and body know what they’re doing without you having to think too hard about it. I figured that Georgiana’s hands must have some sort of muscle memory of stitching. If I could stop thinking so much as
Kelsey
, they’d resume their normal activities.