“I have never sought your good opinion, sir. And if you have loved me against your will, against your judgment, even against your character, then you must look to your own heart for the source of such treachery. It was not I that led you down the garden path.”
“Elizabeth.” He reached for her hand once more. “If I could, I would allow my actions to follow my heart. If I were to ask … If I were free to ask …” He shook his head. “But I am not.”
Elizabeth drew herself up to her full height. “You are free, sir. As free as any man in England. And my answer would be—”
“Wait! Where’s the last page?” I looked up at Harriet in panic and then back at the single sheet of paper in my lap. I flipped it over, hoping that the rest of the sentence might have been written on the back, but it was blank.
“Oh dear, did I misplace the ending?” Harriet rose from her chair beneath the window and looked around the sitting room as if she ’d never seen it before. “There might be a few more bits about somewhere. Let me think.”
I wanted to leap up from the sofa and start to rifle through the room myself, but I didn’t want to scare Harriet. Here I had reached the climactic moment in the novel, only to find that I had no way to discover Elizabeth’s answer. And I needed to know her answer. The crumbling manuscript pages that had started out for me as a mere curiosity had become vital—perhaps the key to my own convoluted situation.
“Please, Harriet. Are you sure you don’t have the last page here somewhere? Maybe it’s still in the garden shed.” I sprang up from the sofa. “I’ll go and check.”
“I suppose it might. Yes, have a look in the shed. I’ll see what I can find here.”
I didn’t waste any time on a reply but instead raced out of the room and out the blue door. In moments I was standing in the middle of the small shed at the bottom of Harriet’s garden.
I quickly scanned the shelves and stacks of odds and ends. A large window allowed me enough light to search, but ten minutes spent moving various implements and bits of detritus from one place to another yielded no results. I should have asked Harriet where in the shed she had found the last section of the manuscript. I had almost given up when I spied the corner of a yellowed piece of paper protruding from beneath a watering can. I squealed and reached for it, whisking away the watering pot lest it should drip upon the precious page. I held the paper carefully to the light.
“Yes!” I jumped in the air with delight. “There’s more.” I bent my head to make out the words.
Elizabeth knew she should have returned to Brighton to supervise Lydia’s flirtations with the parade of redcoats who took tea in Mrs. Bennet’s lodgings, but the inducement of a London respite with her beloved aunt and uncle Gardiner proved far too strong. She would have to rely upon her mother’s oversight of Lydia and Kitty. Surely a few weeks would not matter. And she would find it far easier to procure a new situation in town where she might visit the agencies directly, since Lady Catherine had turned her out without a reference.
“Elizabeth!” Jane waited at the door of her aunt and uncle’s home in Cheapside when the hackney deposited Elizabeth on the pavement.
The comfort of Jane’s arms around her proved her undoing. She allowed the balm of sisterly consolation to pour into her heart even as she cried in her sister’s embrace.
I looked up from the manuscript. “Sisterly consolation?” I turned through the yellowed page over as I had done earlier, but there was no further writing. “But what happened?” I asked the empty air around me. “Did she refuse Darcy? What about the colonel? How does it end?”
I needed to know. If I knew how Elizabeth found her happy ending, perhaps I might be able to figure out my own. Perhaps I might know what choice to make in my own life if I could just get a little guidance from a fictional character and from an author who had been dead for almost two hundred years.
Harriet insisted before I left that I must come back the next day to see if she could locate the final section of the manuscript. I returned to Christ Church discouraged and confused, and when I got to my room, there was yet another note taped to my door. I expected it to be from Eleanor, fussing at me for leaving the seminar early, or from Mrs. Parrot, demanding the return of the manuscript. But when I got close enough to read it, I saw that the handwriting was far too masculine for either possibility.
Meet me at the Bear, it said, and it was signed simply N.
I stood there on the small landing, awash with uncertainty. The truth was that at this point, I didn’t know which man I wanted, or whether either man truly wanted me. But Neil and I had unfinished business. Avoiding him wouldn’t change that.
I did take long enough to change out of my coffee-splattered clothing and into a light summer dress. A dab of makeup and some bracelets couldn’t hurt when it came to the self-esteem department. I emerged from the Meadow Building fifteen minutes and a slightly less bruised ego later.
The Bear was a landmark pub just around the corner from Christ Church. It dated back as far as some of the earliest colleges and was now famous for its collection of neckties hanging from the walls inside. It was early afternoon now, and the crowd spilled out the doors and onto the long wooden tables and benches outside. I approached slowly, looking for Neil among the eclectic collection of students, tourists, and townies.
“Claire.” I heard him call my name, but it was a moment before I could pick him out from the crowd. He sat alone at one of the long tables off to the side of the building, a pint glass in front of him. He looked as if he ’d been there awhile.
“Hey.” I sat down on the bench next to him rather than put the width of the table between us. Whatever we were going to say, I didn’t want us to be shouting it for all of Oxford to hear.
“Do you want something to drink?” He nodded toward the door of the pub.
“A Diet Coke?” Maybe the sugar-caffeine combo would help to clear my head. “But I can get it.”
“Nope. Stay put.” He managed to free his long legs and get to his feet. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
He disappeared inside the pub, and I sat with my back to the table, watching the foot traffic on the cobbled street. I recognized a few faces, participants in other seminars at Christ Church, but I didn’t really know anyone. That is, I didn’t know anyone until I saw the dark-haired man lounging against the building wall opposite me.
James.
He was staring at me, his brooding gaze intent. I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. He realized that I’d seen him and shifted his stance slightly, crossing his arms in front of him. Had he been there all along, watching Neil? Or had he happened by, seen me, and stopped to see what was going on?
I didn’t really want to have my heart-to-heart with Neil while James watched us like a hawk, but I couldn’t get up and go over to talk with him either. Not when Neil might reappear at any moment. So we just stared at each other, and I tried to figure out what it all meant. If I really loved Neil, would I have ever been attracted to James in the first place? And if I truly had fallen for James, wouldn’t I be ready to give Neil the old “I hope we can be friends” speech? But the truth was that I wasn’t ready to do either of those things. No, I was well and truly stuck between two men whom I probably didn’t deserve.
“Here you go.” A glass of Diet Coke thunked down on the table in front of me.
“Oh. Thanks.” I quickly averted my gaze and prayed that Neil hadn’t seen James lounging against the wall across the way.
Neil took his seat beside me. Lines of weariness fanned out from the corners of his eyes. He was still jet-lagged, I realized with a jolt. The poor man was no doubt exhausted to begin with, and I certainly hadn’t made things any easier.
“Look, I’m sorry this has been such a disaster. It never occurred to me that you would—”
“Turn up and spoil your fun?” For the first time, he sounded truly bitter. He took a long drink from his pint and then grimaced. “Sorry. Sarcasm’s not going to help.”
“I
guess I’m just…stunned that you’re here.”
“I was going more for happy.”
Now it was my turn to grimace. “I know. And I am. Happy, I mean.”
He laughed. “Really? Could have fooled me.”
I couldn’t turn my head to look, but I would have sworn I still felt James’s gaze piercing me. This conversation with Neil would have been difficult enough under the best of circumstances. The last thing I needed was the romantic complication of a lifetime watching me while I tried to sort everything out. I swiveled on the bench so that my back was to James, but it meant I had to look at Neil out of the corner of my eye. Not ideal, but perhaps the best I could do at the moment.
“Neil, why did you come, really? Surprises aren’t really your cup of tea.”
He sat with one hand around his glass and the other on his knee. His jeans, polo shirt, and baseball cap gave him that all-American look I’d always liked, but it was a far cry from James’s expensive designer clothing.
Neil shrugged. “I guess I thought it would be romantic. I guess I thought.” He looked past me, his eyes hazy as if he were looking not at anything outside himself but rather at something within.
Finally his eyes turned to mine. “I guess I thought I would bring you this.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small blue velvet box. He opened it, and I gasped.
The diamond winked in the sun. It was a plain stone on a platinum band, neither too large nor too small. Not fancy, but respectable. Kind of like Neil himself.
“Oh, Neil.”
“Yeah, well, my mistake.” He flipped the lid of the box closed and stuffed it back in his pocket.
Tears sprang to my eyes, and I had to look away, but that meant looking at James, which only made things worse. I turned back to the man sitting next to me and saw that Neil had been watching me as closely as I had been watching James. I blushed and took a long drink from my glass of Diet Coke in an effort to appear disinterested, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. Not Neil, and certainly not myself.
“Are you in love with him?” Neil jerked his head in James’s direction.
This time I looked directly at James. Even at this distance, I could see his strong cheekbones and firm jaw. He was like a Michelangelo statue come to life. But he was also moody, restless, and more than a little arrogant.
“I don’t know.”
Neil finished the last of the dark amber liquid in his glass. “I think that ’s my cue.” He rose from the bench, and I did the same.
I reached up as if to stop him. “I’m sorry, Neil.”
“I’m not. If I hadn’t come over here, I would never have known.”
Guilt surged through me. “I never meant to deceive you. It never occurred to me that I could. Not until this week.”
Neil’s smile was slight but held a hint of humor. “Well, they say travel is broadening.”
“Neil—” Tears choked my throat, and I couldn’t get the rest of the words out.
“Don’t say it.” Now he had tears in his eyes too, which made me feel even worse. “If I head for the airport, I might be able to get a flight out tonight.”
“You’re leaving?”
“What do you want me to do, Claire? Hang around and watch you with Lover Boy over there?”
He had a point, but the idea of losing Neil sent waves of grief washing over me. I’d gotten so used to having him in my life. What would I do without him?
“No,” I said. “Of course I wouldn’t want that. But you’ve flown all this way. Don’t you want to… I don’t know…do some touristy things?”
He reached out and cupped my cheek with his hand. The warmth of his touch almost melted me. “Claire, I didn’t come all this way to go sightseeing.” He sighed. “I came to be with you.”
I closed my eyes and laid my hand against the back of his, holding it in place against my face. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“There’s intending and there’s allowing.”
I opened my eyes, startled by the intensity of his voice. “Neil, it just happened.”
He shook his head. “It does make me wonder, though.”
“Wonder what?”
“Whether all this”—he waved a hand toward James—“is really about him. Or if it’s about punishing me.”
I grasped his wrist and pulled his hand away from my face. “I can’t believe you would say that.”
He put his hands on his hips and eyed me as if I were a bug under a microscope. “Maybe it’s time to take a long hard look at yourself, Claire. Before you do an emotional body slam on some other poor guy.”
And then he turned and walked away. I watched him as he melted into the crowd, frozen in place by his parting words.
They say that the truth hurts. That would certainly have explained the agony that held me paralyzed as Neil’s head, the last part of him that I could see, disappeared around the corner. James, too, was gone from his spot by the wall, and I was left, once again, alone.
Emotionally and physically exhausted, I made my way back to my room at Christ Church and succumbed to the afternoon heat. I fell into bed and a deep, dreamless sleep. But at the sound of thick raindrops slapping against the window panes, I bolted upright. After so many days of unrelenting heat, the rain burst over the parched Oxford landscape. I needed to be outside in the elements, a part of this sudden release from the heat that had held me captive all week.
I hurried down the stairs and slipped outside the walls of the college. The wide gravel avenue that separated Christ Church from its meadow crunched beneath my feet. The cows that awakened me at an ungodly hour every morning were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the tall brown grass lay flattened by the weight of the rain. I waded into the grass, already soaked to the skin, and let the water fall on my head and my shoulders, and in rivulets down my back.
“What are you doing?”
I whirled around to find James standing a few feet away on the gravel avenue, safely sheltered by a large black umbrella.
“I’m getting soaked. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Why?” His mouth tightened, but I couldn’t tell if it was from amusement or exasperation.
I shrugged. “I have no idea.”
But that wasn’t the truth. I knew perfectly well why I had sought out the baptism of the rain. I needed a source for the forgiveness I needed, a fresh start, a clean slate. Because on my solitary walk back from the pub to my room, I’d realized that Neil was right.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it started. The ponderous clouds broke apart, as if dispersed by the hand of God. James lowered his umbrella and snapped it closed.
“You feel guilty.”
Since that was as obvious as the rain, I didn’t reply, just shifted my weight from one foot to the other like the liar I was.
James moved toward me, and even then, after everything that had happened, his nearness made my breath catch in my throat and my knees tremble. “I assume that since Neil left and you’re still here, things didn’t work out.”
I bit my lip, but then released it quickly so that he wouldn’t notice. Until I met James, I’d never lied to a man. Now I was lying to two of them. I had lost Neil. That much was clear. And now it was simply a matter of time—and some belated honesty—before I lost James too.
“I have to tell you something.” I forced my tongue and lips to utter the cliched words. They were cliched for good reason. Like the mournful tolling of bells, they gave the listener fair warning that doom was imminent.
He grimaced. “You should have told me about Neil in the beginning. But I’ve thought it over, and it doesn’t matter.” He let the umbrella fall to the ground and took my hands in his. “We can make a fresh start, Claire. Build a new life together.”
I started. “Really?” That was the last thing I had expected him to say.
“I know you have your practice to consider.”
Now my knees sagged instead of trembled, and I wished we were anywhere that had a
bench or a chair, because I wasn’t sure my legs would support me for much longer.
“Actually, I don’t,” I said through chattering teeth.
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t have a practice to consider.”
His face tightened in confusion. “But—”
“James, I’m not a pediatrician. I don’t have a medical license. I never even went to college.”
“But—”
What was the old expression? In for a penny, in for a pound?
“I’m an office manager for a group of pediatricians. Or I was. That part’s true, at least.” The heat of shame flooded my body, and I stopped shivering.
“You’re not a doctor?” He spoke with care, enunciated each syllable with precision.
“No.”
“Another lie.”
“Yes.”
“How many more are there?”
I dropped my gaze, unable to look him in the eye anymore.
“How many, Claire?”
“Just one.”
“And that is?”
“The one I’ve been telling myself. That you’re some kind of Mr. Darcy.”
“Mr. Darcy?” He laughed. “Claire—”
“I know. It’s all my little fantasy that I cooked up because—” I stopped, because even though Neil was right, I wasn’t ready to admit it out loud yet. “Well, that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I was with you for all the wrong reasons, and I’m sorry.”
His face had gone immobile, as if it were carved from stone.
“I’m sorry, James. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Claire—”
“I think I’d better go.” Maybe it was cowardice, but I’d undertaken all the honesty I could for one day. Dripping wet from head to toe, I sloshed back toward Christ Church and sought the sanctuary of my room. Tomorrow was Friday, the last day of the seminar. I would skip it, of course, and stay out of sight in my room. Or perhaps go see Harriet and tell her good-bye. A shame that I would never know how that first version of Pride and Prejudice ended, but maybe it was better not to know. Maybe it was better to bury my Mr. Darcy fantasy once and for all, here on its native soil.
Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart Page 15
