Jane Austen Made Me Do It

by Laurel Ann Nattress

  Henry, her cobweb man, her ghost, the figment of her imagination, lay cocooned in the covers, looking up at her with a smile of gentle bemusement. “Come back to bed, Cathy.” He patted the spot she had just vacated.

  “Come back to bed? What are you doing here? Who are you?” Cathy looked around the room, trying to figure out what was going on. The tapestry was pulled back and the door to the walk-in closet stood ajar.

  “What do you mean, ‘who am I’? I’m Henry.”

  “You’re a dream,” she said, backing a little farther from the bed.

  “Thank you, darling.” Henry grinned. “I love you too.”

  She couldn’t help it. He made her smile and kindled a sudden warmth within her. It made no sense. Not only did she not know who this man was, she was pretty sure that he wasn’t even real. And yet, there he was in her bed, and there was that inviting niche right beside him.

  Cathy moved back and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down into the face that had become oddly familiar and incredibly dear within such a short time. Sighing, she rolled back onto her pillow and turned to face him. “What the heck. Promise to tell me who you are in the morning.”

  “I assure you that you will know everything about me by morning,” Henry said, gathering her close and just holding her.

  “Did I see you this morning outside the coach?” she asked, settling into Henry’s embrace.

  “Did you? I wonder.”

  “Really. I thought I did,” Cathy insisted.

  “Shouldn’t you have gotten off to find out?”

  “Oh, I wanted to, truly, but an awful man wouldn’t let me and then we were on the road.” She placed her hand over his heart. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Nothing to be sorry about, my dear. Here you are now. That’s all that matters.”

  “Is it really? Frankly, I don’t understand any of this and, if I thought you were real, I certainly wouldn’t be in this bed with you.”

  Henry laughed. “I’m as real as you want me to be,” he said.

  Oh, that voice. Cathy smiled to herself as the candle guttered.

  In the morning he was gone, although Cathy could have sworn she could smell a faint whiff of his citrusy scent when she buried her head in the pillow. Which she did for several seconds, trying to remember the night. Why did he seem so real after dark and so … nonexistent in broad daylight? She lay looking at the velvet canopy over the bed, weighing the possibilities. Vampire? She felt her neck. No. She didn’t believe in vampires. Ghost? Ditto. Visitor from another dimension? Nah. Visitor from another planet? Please! Figment of her fevered imagination? Bingo! Cathy rolled out of bed. One more day in the abbey and then on to Bath.

  Cathy loitered in the lobby, looking at ghost brochures, trying to avoid the group from yesterday’s dreadful trip to Clifton. She was almost successful.

  “There she is.” Sheila’s cheery voice rang out across the hall. Cathy’s heart sank as she slowly turned around to find herself facing the argyle-clad chest of Jack Whatever-his-name-was.

  “Um, hi,” she said, trying to step around the bulky form invading her personal space.

  “Wait,” he said, taking her arm. “We’re heading to Stonehenge today. You’ve got to see it.”

  Cathy was not about to be importuned twice by the same person. “No, thanks. Seen it,” she said, wresting her arm from his grasp. “I’ve got other plans. See you.” And she practically ran toward the door before anyone else could stop her. Once outside, she looked wildly around. Plans. She had plans. What were they and how could she get away before the Stonehenge contingent emerged? She looked down at the brochure still clutched in her hand. The Winchcombe Ghost Walk. Why not?

  Winchcombe was an unprepossessing little town, but did have some interesting ninth-century and Neolithic sites, all apparently haunted. Cathy wandered the purported route to a Neolithic burial chamber. The lane was lined with hawthorn and primrose, but an occasional break in the hedges afforded a glimpse of the homes along the lane.

  She came to a small gap and stopped, entranced by the sight: the back garden of a substantial stone house, alive with bloom and filled with the excited noise of a litter of puppies. She lingered to watch them play, wondering why they seemed so familiar, and fighting a strong urge to climb the fence and join them. The back door opened and the puppies tumbled over each other in a rush to enter the house. Cathy peered into the shadowy doorway, but couldn’t tell who held the door. Nor could she figure out why she wanted to know. The door clicked shut, and she moved on in her pursuit of Neolithic ghosts.

  One last night in the abbey. Cathy bolted down a sandwich from a stand in town and headed back to her room, loath to miss any possible time with her cobwebby lover. Once at her door, she fished around in her backpack for her key and thought about what a shame it was that her real life could not hold a candle to her nervous breakdown.

  Having found the key settled at the very bottom of her pack, Cathy entered the Radcliffe Suite, flung her backpack onto the bed, and headed right for the closet.

  What an idiot she was. Cathy stared at the empty shelves for a full minute before returning to the bed and throwing herself down in a heap of confusion. A bout of weeping led to a nap and another middle-of-the-night awakening. But this time, there was electricity and she was alone. Alone and miserable, missing someone who did not exist, wondering about her sanity and trying to decide whether she should continue with her holiday or just pack up and go home.

  By morning, she had decided to continue on to Bath. Why waste those reservations at the B&B in Bathwick and why miss a chance to tread in Catherine Morland’s footsteps? She packed, made one last check of the closet, and went to the lobby to check out.

  It was early enough not to have to fend off the people she had come to think of as the Annoying Tourists, for which she thanked heaven as she stood on the sweep waiting for the man who was delivering the hired car. She shaded her eyes against the sun and watched an ancient Land Rover pull into the drive and swing toward the entrance. She stepped back as it pulled to a stop in front of her and the driver’s door opened.

  She stepped back again when she saw the driver. “Henry?”

  He grinned. “Well, here they call me Hal,” he said. “Hal Woodston.” He gave a little bow. “But you may call me anything you like.”

  “What … what are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to take you home. The puppies are anxious to meet you.” He picked up her suitcase and tossed it into the back of the car.

  “But …”

  Henry leaned over and kissed her. “Don’t ask questions, dearest. Everything is just as it’s meant to be.”

  “Why not?” Cathy climbed into the passenger seat and buckled her seatbelt. She would sort out all that identity and imagination stuff later. Now, why not, indeed?

  MYRETTA ROBENS is a writer of Regency Romance whose second novel, Just Say Yes, won the Holt Medallion and was a finalist for the Romance Writers of America RITA award. Myretta is a longtime Janeite who co-founded the Republic of Pemberley website in 1997 and still runs the site, which is now a major Jane Austen destination on the Web, drawing 150,000 unique visitors each month. A former technology director at Harvard University, when Myretta is not writing or working with her website, she blogs for Heroes and Heartbreakers.

  www.pemberley.com

  www.heroesandheartbreakers.com

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  “My present Elegancies have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a Cat if I see a Mouse.”

  The summer of 1813 opened on Chawton, rainy at first, but soon turning into a very properly sunny July, making the rose-red bricks of the cottage glow, and the laburnum blossom shine gold as Jane Austen looked out the open window into the garden. The white syringa made a handsome display, and the shrubbery was filled with Sweet William, pinks, and columbine. But Jane’s glance was unseeing, her thoughts turned inward. She was writing.

  Her mother and sister
were at the Great House for the afternoon, where her brother Edward, having successfully overseen the getting in of the hay, was now planning to lay out a new garden, to be enclosed by a brick wall. She could imagine, without having to hear it, the ongoing discussion with her brother James and her nephews, as to the relative merits of the garden being placed at the top of the lawn behind the House, or remaining near the Rectory. So she was in hopes of some continued quiet, a precious and rare commodity in this summer, for her brother Charles and his children had just left after a month’s visit, while Edward and his long string of children were in residence at the Great House at Chawton, and James and his family were spending some weeks at the small one. Often the house was boiling with people, and Jane appreciated the silence as she deliberately brought the final threads of Mansfield Park toward their completion.

  Both Cassandra and Henry had implored her to end the story differently, with Fanny marrying Henry Crawford and Edmund marrying Mary, but she wrote with calm and certain decision, making Mary’s views on her brother’s misconduct with Maria Bertram far too outrageous for her ever to become an acceptable wife to Edmund.

  A scuffling of feet was heard outside the door, and a little girl precipitated herself into the room, holding a large, squirming tortoise-shell tabby cat in her arms. This was Caroline, her brother James’s younger daughter of eight years old, and a favorite, though not particularly welcome at the moment. Caroline’s older half-sister Anna, a lovely girl just turned twenty, with hazel eyes and a clear complexion, followed.

  “Caroline! You must not disturb Aunt Jane when she is writing. I am so sorry, dear Aunt,” she said.

  Jane smiled, turned her paper over, put up her pen, and adjusted the white cap she wore over her dark hair, which had slipped a little while she was absorbedly composing at the small round table in the dining-parlour. “You are not disturbing me, my dears. I am come to a good stopping place. Tom will not die. But oh,” she said, regarding the cat.

  “Oh, Caroline, the cat. You know Aunt Jane can’t bear cats …”

  “Why do you not like cats, Aunt Jane? Tyger won’t scratch you, he wouldn’t.”

  “Cats are very well, Caroline, in the garden or in the kitchen; but when they venture too near, they make my eyes hurt, you know, and then I catch the head-ache.”

  “I will take Tyger away then,” said Caroline, disappointed.

  “No, do not, my love. Only do not let him get up on the table. As long as I do not touch him, I believe we will do very well.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite. And what have you been doing today, young ladies? Have you gone on with your story, Anna? Have you determined what sort of a novel it is to be?”

  “It will be a horrid novel, Aunt Jane,” said Anna enthusiastically. “I am having a murdered ancestress haunt the castle as a spectre!”

  Jane removed her spectacles and folded them away inside her writing-desk. “Anna, Anna,” she said in mock sorrow, “I knew how it would be. We will have your ‘Car of Falkenstein’ story all over again. I never laughed so much in my life.”

  On a previous visit, Jane and Anna had conspired on a ridiculous tale of a neighbor, whose rides in a carriage had given rise to extravagantly imagined, horrid plots.

  “A most ghastly vision, the result of reading too many novels from the circulating library. But seriously, Anna, I was half in hopes your next work would deal more in the probable.”

  “The horrid and the tragical are so much more striking, Aunt Jane,” Anna protested. “I know you are right, however, and I must improve my taste, if I am to be an author like you.”

  “What, like me, and not like our esteemed Mrs. Radcliffe, or Mrs. Hunter, who so delighted us last summer with Lady Maclairn, the Victim of Villainy? Nearly drowning in her own tears!”

  “Yes, how we did laugh at her! But I do know what you mean, Aunt Jane. It is harder to make characters who are truly lifelike, than skeletons and ghouls.”

  “I am glad you are so wise as to know it; but I confess a secret desire to see you work up something amusing about the excesses of your murderess. Only it might be too terrible for the public.”

  Caroline looked up from playing with the cat.

  “What have you been writing, Aunt Jane? Is it about Jane and Elizabeth again? That is what you were writing when we were here last summer.”

  “No, Caroline, you know Pride and Prejudice has been printed,” Anna told her. “Only remember, it is rather a great secret that Aunt Jane wrote it, so we are not to talk about it.”

  “That is very good of you, Anna. Your father has been so kind in not mentioning it everywhere; unlike your Uncle Henry. I believe he has told his entire acquaintance that the author is his sister. I do not doubt that he is now telling every one he meets in Scotland.”

  “Won’t he be here next week? You can scold him well, then,” said Anna.

  Jane shook her head. “No. I would not wish to give him even a moment’s pain, so soon after his loss of poor Eliza.” Henry’s wife had died only in April, and he had gone to Scotland for a change of scene. “And if it gives him pleasure to tell people about it, I must try to harden myself, though I dislike it being spoken of by every person one meets.”

  “I am sure, if I should ever be so happy as to publish a novel, I would go to London and meet all the famous!” exclaimed Anna.

  “Ah, your nature is more sociable than mine, Anna. To be lionized would make me feel wild indeed. No, no, I am much better off here, where I belong.”

  “Well, Caroline, I must say your cat is behaving very well. He quite deserves the honour of the poem your papa wrote on him, at Christmas.”

  Caroline beamed. “It does not show him off as a very good cat, however. Stealing the mutton steak meant for Papa’s supper.”

  “Can you say the poem for Aunt Jane?” Anna urged.

  “No, it is too long, but you know he said that if Tyger ever did such a thing again he would have him shot through the head and hung up with the stoats and weasels as a lesson to the tabby race. But poor Tyger, I won’t let that happen.” She hugged the cat, which wriggled violently.

  “James was always a fine versifier,” said Jane, “and it is natural that the talent has descended to his son.”

  For James-Edward, Caroline’s older brother, a schoolboy of fifteen, had lately written a humorous verse to his Aunt Jane expressing his surprise at discovering she was the authoress of two famous volumes.

  “Oh, I thought his verses were so inelegant,” said Anna disparagingly, “saying he was as surprised as a pig the butcher had stuck though with a knife!”

  “And to have a relation whose works were dispersed through the whole of the nation. No; they are fresh, and artless, and I appreciate his sentiment—that I do.”

  “But you write poems that are almost as good,” said Caroline critically. “The one you wrote about Anna was so fine, I wish you would write one about me.”

  Jane laughed. “I would call it a deliberately bad poem, Caroline, when I rhymed ‘Anna’ with ‘savannah,’ and said her wit descended like Niagara Falls. Dear me! How silly we are.”

  “ ‘Caroline’ would be easier to rhyme with than ‘Anna,’ ” persisted the little girl.

  “My poems are not my pride, though they are a family failing. A cat cannot steal meat without an Austen writing an ode on it. However, I will try.”

  She bent over her table, dipped her quill, wrote a few lines, and then handed the paper to Anna. Anna read, and laughed.

  Merits unnumbered, has dear Caroline,

  As good and as fair as a goddess

  The Patroness of creatures feline

  Of curious genius, the oddest.

  Oh, where can we find, a mind of pure pearl?

  A heart of such tenderness, that

  We might search through the world, and not find a girl

  Who took kinder care of a cat.

  “It is very nice,” said Caroline critically, “I like it being about me, but you do tell
stories and write novels much better than poems.”

  “Who are the characters you are writing about now, Aunt Jane?” asked Anna.

  “I am writing about Fanny.”

  “Oh, please tell about her. What does she do?”

  “Fanny is a very singular girl, for she refuses to act. She thinks acting quite wicked. I am afraid she is not my most amusing heroine; but I wanted a complete change, after my last. I do not wish it to be thought that wit should be more prized than goodness.”

  “But acting isn’t wicked—Papa says that you used to have plays, in Steventon barn,” said Anna. “I wish I could have seen them.”

  “Did you act too, Aunt Jane? Or did you refuse, like Fanny?”

  “I am sure you were the very best of the actresses! You do read so beautifully.”

  “Not quite,” said Jane modestly. “No; our best actress was your Aunt Eliza.”

  “Aunt Eliza?” asked Anna thoughtfully. “I can’t picture that. I only think of her as so sadly ill, and not able to leave her bed for so long.”

  “Yet there was a time when she was young and pretty, and quite the greatest flirt of the modern age.”

  Jane was silent for a moment, thinking of her sister-in-law. How the gayest spirit of all the Steventon theatricals had suffered, and been brought down to dust.

  “My father once told me he was in love with her,” said Anna, “and she could not decide between him and Uncle Henry. I can hardly believe it.”

  “Many men wanted to marry Eliza,” Jane admitted. “Sometimes I thought it was only a game to her. Yet she really had a warm heart. It was her living in France so long, that gave her the airs of the world.”

  “It is as well Uncle Henry got her,” said Anna. “He is much more fashionable than our papa.”

  “I admired her very much, as a girl. And she has been so much in my thoughts that one of my characters, Mary Crawford, has grown rather like her.”