The Dashwood Sisters Tell All

by Beth Pattillo

  Once again, Mrs. Parrot was there with the van. I looked at it longingly. I could ride in pain-free comfort to the pub where we were scheduled to eat lunch. But then I made the mistake of glancing at Ethan. He had turned his charm on the gaggle of Austenites, and even the two married women were leaning in his direction. His magnetism was universal, it seemed.

  I should have known better. I did know better. Ten years ago I would have pegged him for what he was right away. But ten years ago I wasn't thirty-six and still single. Ten years ago I’d never even contemplated Botox or a brow lift. Ten years ago the world had been my oyster, and I had been its pearl.

  Jane and Cassandra Austen had never planned to be spinsters either. Cassandra had been engaged. Jane had been a flirt. Even with almost no money, they’d expected to marry one day. What if I turned out to be like the Austen sisters? Honestly, I’d never considered the possibility that I might end up permanently single.

  Ellen stood a little apart from the group, taking pictures of the sign for the Watercress Line and the bright flowers that surrounded the station. I’d always suspected Ellen would never marry. I knew she’d given her heart long ago to Daniel. But now here he was, clearly trying to win her back, and she was barely giving him a chance, while I had just struck out with perhaps the most eligible man I’d ever met. Our roles were well and truly reversed.

  I didn't like that realization very much either.

  When we set off from Alresford, Ethan wasn't with us. I hadn't seen him leave, but Tom said he’d gotten an urgent phone call and caught a taxi home. I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. He was unhappy with me, and he was letting me know.

  Tom herded us away from the station and along a steep path until we reached a road. Thankfully, this one had a wide sidewalk, and when it took a climb uphill, I dropped back, eager to be alone. I wasn't going to be allowed much solitude though. I could see Tom up ahead, talking intently to Ellen, gesturing and nodding down the road, and then he stood there as the group passed. He waited patiently while I climbed the hill with all the enthusiasm of a snail.

  “I can call Mrs. Parrot to bring the van,” he said, with no attempt to be subtle.

  His words were the straw that broke the camel's back. I burst into tears and turned away, leaning against the brick wall that separated the front garden of the houses from the pavement.

  “Mimi? What's wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine. Just a little…stressed.” Sweat poured from every possible outlet on my body. My feet ached, and I could feel the beginnings of a sunburn on my cheeks and nose. No wonder Ethan had fled.

  “You’re not fine.” A handkerchief appeared in my line of vision. “Do you have any water left?”

  “Yes.” I took the handkerchief, wiped my eyes, and then slid my daypack off my shoulders. I reached for the water bottle without looking at Tom. While getting dumped by Ethan was embarrassing, being tended to by a man whom I’d rejected was even more humbling.

  “Thanks.” I tried to hand Tom his handkerchief. At first he waved it away, but then he changed his mind and reached for it. He also took my water bottle from my hand, poured some of the contents on the handkerchief, and when it was good and wet, draped the cloth around my neck.

  Bliss. Instant, incredible bliss.

  “That feels…” I couldn't even think of the word.

  “We don't want any of our hikers to get heatstroke.”

  If I’d expected any sympathy, I wasn't getting it. “Oh no. Of course not. I’m slowing down the group enough as it is.”

  He wasn't being kind. Just professional. A flush rose in my cheeks, but I was already so red in the face that it wouldn't even show. Maybe the heat had some useful purpose after all.

  “Mimi—”

  I waved him toward the road where the others were disappearing over the top of the hill. “I’m okay. Go on and tend to the group.”

  “I can't leave you here alone.”

  “I’ll catch up.” But we both knew that was doubtful.

  He reached into his pocket for his cell phone. “I’m calling Mrs. Parrot.”

  “No. No, you’re not.”

  Determination welled up inside of me. I had no idea where it came from. I was and always had been a girlie girl, perfectly happy to be rescued by a variety of charming princes on any and every occasion. But this time was different. I was tired of waiting for men to do the right thing. This time I was going to rescue myself.

  I pulled the handkerchief from my neck. “Here.” I thrust it back at Tom. “Let's go.” I grabbed my pack and took off up the hill.

  Every step was agony. My feet, my aching muscles, the sweat that beaded my forehead and rolled down my spine. I couldn't remember ever being in that much physical misery. I wasn't going to quit though. I would show Ethan. I’d show Ellen and Tom too, for that matter. I was more than just an accessory.

  I might not be able to pull anyone else's weight, but I could sure as shooting pull my own.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  After the pub lunch that I was coming to know and love, I opted out of the afternoon walk along the river. It was the perfect excuse to spend more time deciphering the riddles in Cassandra's diary. Mimi was determined to keep walking, and she seemed so fragile after Ethan disappeared that I didn't push her to return to the hotel with me. I ignored the pitying looks the others sent her way. It had been a long time since I’d had to witness one of her romantic dramas firsthand. That was the beauty of living three states apart. But to see her like this, to watch her scheme to catch Ethan unravel in front of God and everybody—it was more painful than I could have ever imagined.

  I tried to turn my thoughts to something else. I tried to focus on the novel experience of being driven on what was, to me, the wrong side of the road. I tried to pay attention to the wind blowing through the open passenger window of the van, the cottages clustered here and there so close to the edge of the road that it was a wonder we didn't sideswipe any of them. Mrs. Parrot drove the van as if she were Admiral Nelson bent on conquering the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar. I was sure she would settle for nothing less than total domination of the British roads.

  The heat had abated somewhat by the time we arrived at the hotel. I took a shower and sat on the bed, thinking about Cassandra's diary. The chintz skirt of the dressing table still provided protective cover to my secret. I leaned over, lifted the skirt, and reached for the diary.

  It wasn't there.

  I whirled around. The twenty-pound note was still on the bedside table. Nothing else appeared to have been touched. Just the diary.

  I flicked back the chintz again, my heart in my throat, but the diary definitely wasn't there.

  A random thief wouldn't have taken the time to find such an obscure and, on the surface, worthless object. He or she would have grabbed the money on my bedside table and made a dash for it.

  I sank down on the bed.

  The diary was gone.

  Mrs. Parrot hadn't been with us that morning. No, she’d only met up with us at the pub for lunch. She could have looted the entire hotel with all the time she’d had.

  Then I remembered that I hadn't been the last one at the van that morning. Daniel had come out of the hotel behind me.

  No, it had to be Mrs. Parrot. Of course it was her. Hadn't I suspected from the beginning that she knew about the diary?

  Anger lodged in my throat, a thick knot that burned. I could hardly confront her. She’d deny everything, and I would look like an idiot. Or a crazy person. I needed Mimi. For the first time in years, I felt a desperate longing for my sister. Well, that wasn't strictly true. I had felt that longing fairly recently. Every time I’d driven my mother to the hospital for her chemotherapy. Oh, I’d disguised my need for her as anger. Anger that she couldn't be bothered to fly in from Atlanta and shoulder her share of the burden. But what I’d really needed every time I’d made that drive from my mother's house to the hospital was my sister.

  I didn't know if Mrs. Par
rot wanted the diary for its monetary value or merely for its own sake. I suspected she wanted it simply for the thrill of possessing it, given her devotion to Jane Austen. If that was the case, I thought, rising from the bed in sudden agitation, then it might still be somewhere in the hotel. Most likely in her room.

  How was I going to get into her room though? I happened to know which one it was because she’d been in line in front of me when we checked in the night before. Her room was on the floor above mine, but at the back of the hotel. It would be locked, of course, and besides, she had driven me back to Langrish Hall. She was probably in there right now.

  I heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel drive outside my window. When I looked outside, I spied the familiar tweed jacket and Day-Glo orange hair heading toward a walking trail at the side of the hotel.

  Perhaps my luck wasn't completely disastrous.

  I tiptoed from the room—at least my version of tiptoeing—and made my way upstairs. As it turned out, it wasn't locked. It was, however, occupied by the maid, who was cleaning.

  “I’ll just be a moment,” she said with a smile and a glance at the old-fashioned room key I had clutched in my hand. “If you don't mind.”

  “Oh no. No trouble.” I wasn't about to correct her mistaken assumption that I was the occupant of the room. “I’ll just wait out here.”

  It was a dangerous game, I knew, because Mrs. Parrot could return at any moment, but I wasn't looking to steal anything. Just the opposite. I was only interested in getting back what belonged to me.

  Thankfully, the young woman finished almost immediately. She moved away with her small cart, and I slipped inside and closed the door behind me.

  I didn't know it was possible to shake quite so much. My hands trembled as I pulled open drawers, lifted bed pillows, and explored under the mattress. The bathroom offered no concealment whatsoever. I stood in the middle of the room and slowly surveyed its contents. Really, there was no other place to hide something like the diary, except…

  I disliked doing it, but I reached for Mrs. Parrot's suitcase. It looked like one that would have belonged to my mother, an ancient piece of hard-sided luggage that could probably withstand nuclear winter. I picked it up off the floor, set it on the bed, and pulled at the latches.

  Nothing happened. It was obviously locked. The old-fashioned way, with a key that no doubt hung at this very moment around Mrs. Parrot's neck.

  I noticed how heavy the suitcase was when I returned it to its place on the floor beside the bed. From the weight of it and the dull thuds it made, I guessed that it was full of books. Definitely more than one. But whether it contained Cassandra's diary…well, that was only conjecture on my part.

  I was ready to flee the scene of my near-crime when the door opened, and Mrs. Parrot stood there in the doorway.

  “Pardon?” She looked as flustered as I felt.

  “I’m sorry. I—” What? What could I possibly say? “I mean, I came to see you, and the maid was here, cleaning. She said I should just wait for you in here.” I resisted the urge to cross my fingers behind my back. That would have been childish. As if worming my way into someone's hotel room under false pretenses wasn’t.

  “How extraordinary.” Mrs. Parrot came into the room and shut the door behind her. Obviously she didn't believe me.

  “I know. Isn't it?” I decided to play dumb. “Your room has a much better view than mine.” I nodded toward the window. “Plus, you don't have to listen to people and cars crunching across the gravel at all hours of the day and night.”

  “If it's a problem, I could see about a different—”

  “Oh no. It's fine.”

  A long moment of silence reigned. Finally, Mrs. Parrot cleared her throat. “You said you wanted to speak to me?”

  “Oh, um, yes. That is…” What on earth was I going to say? “It's, um, well, it's about the Austens again.”

  “What about the Austens?”

  “I was asking you about them the other day, and I just wondered…that is…my mother mentioned something once called Elinor and Marianne. Is that a lost Jane Austen novel or something?”

  Mrs. Parrot frowned. “Actually, that was the first version of Sense and Sensibility. It was originally a novel in letters.”

  “I’ve never seen it in a bookstore.”

  “No, well, you wouldn’t, because there are no existing manuscripts. She wrote it first as a teenager, but later, after the Austen ladies settled at Chawton, she revised it into the novel that we know.”

  “Oh.” And because of the diary, I knew why she had gone back to rework that particular story.

  “Is that all you wanted to know?”

  “What? Oh, um, yes. Thank you.” I edged toward the door. “Sorry to have disturbed you. And sorry about…” I looked around at the room. “Sorry about being in here. Really, if the maid hadn't insisted…” Poor girl. But I doubted Mrs. Parrot would pursue the matter, because I was pretty sure she didn't believe me.

  “I shall see you at dinner then.”

  “Yes. I’ll see you then.”

  I couldn't have seemed any guiltier if I’d confessed on the spot. I scurried from the room in shame and frustration. If Mrs. Parrot did have the diary, we were never going to get it back. She would make sure of that.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ellen and Daniel looked very happy sitting together at dinner, and I tried to give them some space. My sister kept darting nervous glances at me, and I knew that she was worried that her happiness might be difficult for me to handle in light of Ethan's defection. No one had seen him since he’d disappeared in the taxi after the train ride.

  After dinner I wandered into the garden in front of the hotel with my copy of Sense and Sensibility. Now that I knew how closely the book was connected to the actual experience of the Austen sisters, I’d begun to find it more interesting. I’d been reading the book in odd spare moments and had, both to my delight and embarrassment, quickly become engrossed. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s similarity to Ellen and me was just short of eerie, but what intrigued me more was the similarity between the Austen sisters and the fictional Dashwood girls. Were all sisters the same?

  Enough daylight lingered in the English summer that I could get another chapter of the book in before darkness fell. If you discounted the occasional power line or cell tower in the dusky, surrounding hills, you could imagine that the house and the scenery looked very much like it might have in Jane Austen's time. In the quiet countryside, past and present blurred, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

  Part of me longed to go to Ellen's room, curl up on her bed, and have her tell me that everything was going to be okay. That had been our pattern for years. Or at least it had been our pattern until I moved to Atlanta. I thought of our house in Dallas, where Ellen still lived. I’d only ever seen it through jaded eyes. Too small, too plain, too ordinary. But after the day's events, I almost longed for its shelter and for the simplicity of the life I’d had when I lived there.

  I wondered if Jane Austen had felt that way, too, about her father's rectory at Steventon. Tom had told us she was never happy when she lived in Bath, and that it was only after several years of moving from place to place, when she, Cassandra, and their mother moved to the cottage at Chawton, that she found contentment again.

  I’d had that contentment in our little house in Dallas with my mother and my sister, only I’d been too young and foolish to realize it.

  I settled onto a wooden bench tucked into a corner of the garden. Whoever had cornered the market on these benches must have made a fortune. Everywhere you turned in England, there was a strategically placed bench like this. Usually they said something like “For Ethel, who loved this garden.” They gave you such a sense of place, those plaques. That was what I lacked, I realized. A sense of place. Of belonging.

  Footsteps crunched across the gravel on the other side of the hedge that separated my bench from a direct view of the hotel. I hoped it was someone headed to the p
arking lot and not into the little sanctuary I’d found.

  “Mimi?”

  It was Tom. I bit back a sigh of exasperation. I wasn't sure I was strong enough to bear being comforted at the moment.

  “Over here.” I could tell him, politely of course, that I wanted to be alone, and he would make himself scarce, but even I had a hard time being that rude.

  “Am I intruding?” I appreciated that he asked. Ethan, who should have been more courtly by nature and nurture, would simply have assumed it was his right to join me.

  That thought didn't make his defection any easier to bear.

  “It's okay.” I gestured to the bench beside me. “I’m just enjoying the evening.”

  “Much better now that the sun's gone down.” He sat beside me. Not too close, but not at the other end of the bench either. “I don't mean to bother you, but you were in rough shape this afternoon.”

  “Yes. I was.” To my exasperation, tears stung my eyes. Again. I was tired of springing a leak every time I turned around. “I’m okay though. Thanks for checking.”

  “I don't think you are okay.” Tom placed an arm along the back of the bench so that his hand was near, but not touching, my shoulder. He didn't look at me though. Instead, he gazed out into the dusk. “You can admit it.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  He chuckled, and we sat in silence for a long time. Tom Braddock was comfortable company, I’d give him that. With most men, I would feel the need to charm or entertain them. With Tom, I could just…be.

  “Are you happy with how the tour's going?” I asked him. Time to move the focus away from my man troubles. “I know you said it was your first time doing this walk.”

  “We’ve hit a few snags, but on the whole, I’m pleased.”

  “It's too bad that whoever thought up the tour couldn't participate. They must have been pretty special to get to choose everything.”