Undressing Mr. Darcy (30 page)

Vanessa felt for Jane and how dependent they had to be on men. Their life, their happiness, their everything—depended on a man. Imagine!

And there, at the end of the Jane Austen Trail, stood Julian in full Regency regalia.

* * *

M
iss Roberts and friends, I presume,” Julian said as he took off his hat and bowed to her. He wore a green coat this time.
No, no, the green one,
she remembered Darcy saying in the 1995 film version as he chose which coat to wear to meet Elizabeth.

“Pleasure to see you,” Julian said.

As if there were no woman in his robe behind his house. As if there were no puppy frolicking on his grounds. As if there had been no steam-room incident.

If he happened to be giving this tour, she’d rather sit on the tour bus. She managed to speak. “Hello, Mr. Darcy.”

Did he feel the ice in her delivery? She didn’t like being passive-aggressive, but she couldn’t quite get hold of her feelings, much less figure out how to express them. But something inside felt broken and tossed aside. Why had this all been so damn complicated?

Maybe Chase was right. Love wasn’t hard. Which would mean this wasn’t love or even the beginning of it.

Within moments, women (and men) from the tour group surrounded him, and it became clear that, as luck would have it, they wouldn’t have a moment alone, thank goodness.

Ironically she had been seeking exactly that just an hour and a half earlier.

When she turned away from him and toward Chawton House, nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. A long, straight pea gravel road led uphill, past stone stables larger and more gorgeous than most American homes, and toward the largest Elizabethan manor she’d ever seen. It happened to be the only Elizabethan manor house she’d ever seen, but still. It looked straight out of one of her aunt’s BBC costume dramas, with three gables, a three-story entrance porch made of flint, and a grand red roof, all surrounded by meticulously kept green lawns and sculpted shrubs.

All this for Edward Austen. All this now a library holding thousands of valued pieces of women’s writing from the long-ago eighteenth century.

The crowd collectively gasped. Vanessa counted at least seven chimneys, and those were only the ones she could see. Trees framed the house and blocked quite a bit of the house itself from view.

“Any of you could have your wedding here,” the tour guide said. “It’s for hire.”

Julian shot her a glance. “What a lovely thought.”

She looked away. The nerve!

She stayed as far away from him as possible, sticking close to the tour guide but catching glimpses of him from a safe distance as they walked toward the house.

Was he a gentleman or—a rake? If only there were an app for figuring
that
out! Did he have a girlfriend, or—shudder—a wife?

Maybe he had a girlfriend
and
a wife.

Just because he didn’t wear a wedding ring and never mentioned a significant other didn’t mean anything.

The gravel crunched under her shoes until she found herself ushered through the entrance hall and inside a Tudor-era wood-paneled dining room bigger than her entire condo, looking straight at a larger-than-life oil portrait of Edward Austen Knight. He wore a powdered wig, breeches, cravat, and tailcoat, and looked very debonair leaning up against a tree so casually, with his walking stick.

He hadn’t been born into money, but he looked the part.

Yet Vanessa harkened back to Cassandra’s unfinished watercolor sketch of Jane on display at the National Portrait Gallery. It would hardly fill a corner of this painting.

She tried to concentrate on the Emma look-alike tour guide, but the stunning room, with the dining table set for twelve, the oriental carpet on the floor, the smaller but equally engaging oil paintings that hung about the room, and the ornate carvings above the fireplace dazzled her. What a contrast from Austen’s simple cottage with sparse furnishings.

Across the room, Julian looked out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Before she looked away he caught her staring at him.

“If I can draw your attention . . .” said the tour guide.

Vanessa instantly looked away from him.

“If you look at Edward’s shoes in this portrait, you can clearly see the artist has painted in a horseshoe nail pointed toward Edward’s feet.”

Vanessa moved closer to the painting and sure enough, you could see a nail on the ground, pointing to Edward.

“This possibly symbolizes Edward’s good luck at being adopted by the Knights.”

The luck thing again. Vanessa thought of her aunt and all that she’d done for her, including bringing Jane Austen into her life.

But it was this trip, and Vanessa’s own ragtag journey around England, that had brought Jane Austen
to
life. And now her brother Edward had sprung to life before her, too—the little boy grown into the man lucky enough to provide his impoverished mother and two sisters with a home and, for one of those sisters, the comfort needed to create her masterpieces.

Julian paced the floor across the room in front of the fireplace; she could see him out of the corner of her eye.

He seemed to hover, too, as they went up the north staircase and through the Tapestry Gallery, the Great Gallery, and the Map Room to a bibliophile’s dream, the Reading Room, which housed the bulk of the library’s collection; from there they went to the Oak Room, where Jane Austen herself would sit in the alcove window, reading.

She had come a long way from the prostitutes on Trim Street.

The group descended the great staircase into the old kitchen, where the worktable itself was about three hundred years old.

Julian leaned against the doorjamb. He hadn’t said a thing during the entire tour. She had to wonder why he was there.

Once they were outside, for a quick tour of the grounds, he practically stalked her, standing behind her on the Arts and Crafts terraces, walking beside her on the serpentine gravel path to the upper terrace and fernery, and essentially blocking her at various turns in the walled kitchen garden between the tomatoes and the rosemary.

In the rose garden he somehow corralled her away from the group, and, near a bed of pink cabbage roses, their flowers heavy, browning at the edges of the petals, and drooping in the early fall air, he bent down to pick one and then stood in front of her, holding it.

“Vanessa, I would quite like to speak to you.”

Just a few hours before, this gesture of his could’ve played out very differently.

“What is there to say? We slept together. That’s all it was. Happens all the time, right?”

He held out the rose to her.

She didn’t take it.

He twirled it in his fingers. “There’s more to it than that, at least for me. It’s complicated.”

“Exactly. Too complicated.”

“I should like to explain—” He leaned over and a small antique book fell from his frock coat pocket to the grass.

Before he could reach for it, Vanessa picked it up and opened the inside cover. In very ornate type it read:

Harris’s List

of Covent Garden Ladies

or,

Man of Pleasure’s

Kalender

He tried to gently nudge the book away from her, but she turned her back on him, flipped open to a page, and read:

Mrs. Griffin, Near Union Stairs, Wapping

This comely woman, about forty, and boasts she can give more pleasure than a dozen raw girls. Indeed she has acquired great experience—

He tried again to take the book away, but she hurried a few steps away from him and said, “What the hell is this, Julian?”

People from the tour group looked and then looked away again.

“
Harris’s List
, from the 1700s. It’s research for my next book—”

“It’s a list of prostitutes!” She turned away again as he came closer. Prostitutes from the eighteenth century, yet it sullied his polite, gentlemanly reputation, didn’t it?

Betsy Miles, Cabinet Maker’s Old Street

Known in this quarter for her immense sized breasts . . . backwards and forewards, are all equal to her, posteriors not excepted, nay indeed, by her own account, she has the most pleasure in the latter. Entrance at the front door tolerably reasonable, but nothing less than two pounds for the back way . . . (1773)

“Really?” She snapped the book shut and shoved it into his gut. “It’s the great-grandfather of online porn!”

“I’m sure you meant to say it is the great-great-great-grandfather of—”

“Julian!”

“It’s a very common book,” he said. “Even that Jane Austen Books store in the States had a reproduction of it.”

“Julian, it’s kind of creepy to be carrying something like that around, don’t you think? If it’s research, it belongs on your desk. As your former PR agent, I would advise you to keep it at home. It won’t score you any points with your target market.”

Maybe she didn’t know this man . . . at all. Maybe she had come all this way for nothing.

Her phone beeped with a text message and she dug in her bag to check it. Lexi had responded to her text saying
She could b his sister
. Vanessa laughed.

It never turned out to be a sister, or even a kissing cousin.

Then the tour guide raised her voice. “It’s time to head to our ‘barouche.’ It’s waiting for us at the end of the drive. Time to get back and get ready for the ball, everyone!”

Vanessa looked into Julian’s eyes and he seemed sincere—about something—and opened his mouth to speak. But she didn’t want to have this discussion in Edward Austen Knight’s rose garden with the specter of Jane Austen lurking in one of the windows!

She headed toward the front lawn and looked back at him, in his green coat and boots, standing in front of the gatepost of the garden, with the avenue of lime trees just beyond him and the rose in his hand at his side.

Every girl should have her BBC costume drama moment, and this was hers.

But if you looked closely, the edges of the pink rose petals had gone brown. The little black book was exactly that—a little black book—from the 1700s, but still.

She could handle this like a duchess, or she could rant like only a thirty-five-year-old single American woman could.

Over her shoulder she said with a smile, “I have to go. My barouche awaits.”

C
hapter 20

P
lastic Colin Firth had become a hat rack for a bonnet and several turbans and a coatrack for shawls and stoles. Necklaces dangled around his neck. He stood in the corner of the flat while Vanessa, Lexi, and Sherry vied for the limited resources of one bathroom and one well-lit mirror as they readied for the ball. Curling iron, hair dryer, and clothing iron cords created a spaghetti-like heap on the floor near the bathroom.

Lexi’s bottle of cabernet had been emptied and now they were on to oversized cans of lager from the convenience store. British pop music blasted out of the clock radio in one of the bedrooms.

Lexi nudged Vanessa away from the mirror so she could put her lipstick on. Sherry fastened a simple, understated Regency-style topaz cross necklace on.

One thing they weren’t willing to forgo for the costume ball was modern makeup.

“I wish I could meet a nice gentleman at the ball tonight.” Sherry sighed as she tightened the ribbon under her bust.

“Be careful of what you wish for. You might meet someone who plays a gentleman onstage but carries around a catalog of prostitutes.”

“What?” Lexi asked.

“I’m sure you’ve heard of
Harris’s List
.”

The corners of Lexi’s lips curled up in a smile. “Mmm-hmm. But it’s not as if any of the Covent Garden ladies are available to service him.”

Sherry gave Vanessa a pained look. “That just sucks.”

“In more ways than one,” Vanessa said. “He claims it’s ‘research,’ but I think it’s just kind of creepy.”

“Makes me curious what he’s working on,” Lexi said.

Vanessa rolled her eyes. “I’m beginning to think he’s not what he seems to be.”

Lexi puckered her lips in the mirror. “He’s not what you’ve made him out to be. I keep telling you he’s an ass. As for you, Sherry, I’m afraid Jane Austen events are the
last
place to meet eligible men. You will meet plenty of wonderful women and a lot of witty gay men, however. By the way, Vanessa, I invited Chase to the ball tonight—from all of us.”

“Oh, thank you! I can’t believe I forgot all about him.”

“Come on. Since when am
I
nicer than you? I’ll tell you why you forgot all about him: Julian. It’s like you’re on crack or something. Chase is here in Bath because of
you
. He is probably the best guy you’ll ever
not
date. You’re totally blowing it.” Lexi poured herself and Sherry each another wineglass full of lager. “Beer’s gone. You don’t deserve any more, anyway, Vanessa.”

“I just took another dose of cold meds, so I probably shouldn’t drink.”

Sherry looked at Vanessa’s meds on the counter. “No, you shouldn’t be drinking with this! Slow down, will you?”

Lexi took a sip of her beer. “Did you confront Julian about that other woman?”

“What other woman?” Sherry asked.

“There was a woman in Julian’s robe with a puppy in his backyard today.”

“Backyard.” Vanessa laughed. “You should see his ‘backyard.’”

“Ooooh,” said Sherry. “A puppy . . .”

“Why does the puppy matter?” Vanessa paced the hall outside the bathroom.

“A guy. A girl. A robe. A puppy. Nothing good is coming out of that,” Lexi said.

“I don’t want to jump to paranoid conclusions. After all, the woman—”

“Could be his sister,” they said in unison.

Lexi laughed so hard she almost sprayed her beer all over.

“I’ve left myself open to possibilities at the ball tonight.”

Lexi sighed. “Well, if that’s the case, then I certainly hope you’re not wearing a thong under that gown, because Regency women didn’t wear drawers. And you don’t want your panty lines to show. Turn around, let me see.” Lexi twirled her finger.

Vanessa acquiesced.

“Take ’em off.”

“You can’t see any panty lines!”

“Off.”

“Sherry, are you wearing anything under your gown?”

“A lady never tells, does she?”

“Come on, Vanessa, we’re going to party like it’s 1799, okay?”

Vanessa laughed. “You’re dating yourself in more ways than one with that line. And none of us are going to party like it’s 1799, now that I’ve read the goings-on in
Harris’s List
.”

“You and Sherry should hit a pub after the ball. There are never eligible men at these Jane Austen things.”

“Exactly. She’d certainly appreciate the irony that us modern women sign up and pay dearly for the kind of torture she had to endure in her social life. And you
won’t
be going to the pub?”

“I have plans with David.”

Vanessa was beginning to believe Lexi had changed.

Lexi stuck a two-foot-long white ostrich feather in her headdress, as if she didn’t get enough attention everywhere she went.

“I’m up for the pub!” said Sherry.

Poor Sherry. She deserved to have some fun on her vacation, and not just by buying more Darcy paraphernalia.

Vanessa tossed her cold meds into her reticule. “They gave a lecture called ‘What’s in Your Reticule’ yesterday. Well, I’ve packed my cold meds, my drink money, and my phone. And . . .”

She slipped off her leopard-print thong, twirled it around on her index finger, and flung it across the room, where it landed on Colin’s head.

“Woot, woot!” Lexi shouted.

“Strumpet is in the house,” said Sherry.

“I’m no strumpet. I’m a duchess.”

“You’re not fooling anyone,” Lexi said. “You’re no duchess. And we can tell you’re
still
really hung up on him.”

Vanessa managed a wobbly smile.

“You’re going to need to attend my Break-It-Off boot camp, aren’t you?”

“I’m remaining optimistic.”

“Well, there’s nothing to break off anyway,” Lexi said.

“Enough!” Sherry said to Lexi as she handed Vanessa a masquerade eye mask done up in gold, white, and black.

“What’s this?”

Sherry and Lexi had both already put on their masks.

“It’s a masquerade ball,” Sherry said.

Vanessa gaped at her mask. “What? How the hell am I going to find him in a room full of seven hundred masked people? How’s he going to find me?”

“Relax,” Lexi said. “It’s a Jane Austen festival. Even in a mask he’ll stand out.”

* * *

I
t wasn’t easy navigating two-thousand-year-old pavers in ballet flats, a floor-length gown, and an ill-fitting mask, but Vanessa managed to get her glass of wine at the cocktail reception in the Roman Baths without incident.

Once again, she felt the crashing of eras as she gazed at the twelfth-century King’s Bath, built on top of a Roman foundation, its water lit and glowing an intoxicating emerald green, surrounded by a golden building created in the eighteenth century, and here they were, time travelers from the twenty-first century, costumed in early-nineteenth-century clothes.

The mind boggled, even without cold meds and wine.

Both the formality of the venue and the clothing led to a certain raising of the bar among Vanessa, Sherry, Lexi, and David. David cleaned up nicely in his rented red British army uniform, and they all managed to behave as elegantly as they looked.

Revelers in Regency gowns and formal Regency coats, all of them in masks, filled the pavements surrounding the green pool, and the laughing and talking echoed between the ancient columns, while flashes from cameras reminded everyone that it was actually the twenty-first century.

Vanessa didn’t see Julian anywhere, and the ratio of women to men did seem to be five to one.

“I hope Chase was able to get a costume,” Lexi said.

It took Vanessa a moment to respond, she’d been so preoccupied looking for Julian. “Didn’t he bring his pirate getup?”

“Well, he didn’t think that would meet with the strict criteria here,” said Lexi. “I’m going to text him and let him know where we are.”

Vanessa looked beyond her small circle, craning her bejeweled neck to see if she could spot Julian. Without thinking, she finished her entire glass of wine.

“He’s here,” Lexi said, reading from her phone.

“He is?” Vanessa asked excitedly. “Where?”

“You know I’m talking about Chase, right? He says he’s making his way toward the bar.”

“Oh, right.” Vanessa couldn’t just stand here anymore, waiting for Julian to appear. “Sherry, shall we take a turn about the room?”

Sherry smiled and locked her arm in Vanessa’s.

Oh, to be Sherry, open to the events of the evening and not overly invested in one enigma of a man.

Vanessa’s phone vibrated in her reticule. Chase had sent her a text:

Save me? Cornered by a gaggle of German girls to the right of the bar.

Sure enough, once she and Sherry had crossed the length of the King’s Bath and veered toward the bar, Vanessa could see the back of Chase’s head, with his dark brown hair falling to just below the nape of his neck, and yes, he was surrounded by blond German women with angled faces, all angling for him.

She couldn’t tell what Chase had on, though, because another, shorter woman stood right behind him adjusting the feather in her hair as she looked in her compact mirror.

“Chase, darling!” Vanessa waved her fan at him and deliberately overacted as she and Sherry approached. “Sweetheart!”

The shorter woman stepped aside, Chase turned around, and Vanessa seemed incapable of moving for a moment.

He wore a black eye mask and a shirt so snug it more than hinted at his muscular build, and he had a sword sheathed at his side, but what Vanessa wasn’t anticipating was her visceral reaction to seeing him in a red and black Scottish—kilt.

Who knew a man could rock a kilt like that?

Of course, the inevitable question surfaced, within seconds:
was he wearing anything under that kilt?
Because traditionally, a Scotsman wouldn’t.

Vanessa dropped Sherry’s arm and cocked her hip. “Wow.”

“Vanessa, my love,” he said with that gleaming smile. “So fabulous to see you again, and looking so ravishing in that diaphanous gown.”

With that he left the German posse in the dust, sauntered right up to her, and pressed one hand on the back of her head. He guided her hand to his kilted ass, tilted her head back ever so slightly, and kissed her, Frenched her, long and passionately.

She grabbed his hair and tried to pull him away until, finally, he did. He whispered “thank you” to her, then turned to Sherry and lifted her gloved hand to kiss it as he looked to see if the German women had dispersed. And they had.

“Sherry, a pleasure to see you.”

Vanessa adjusted her gown, which only seemed to cling to her now. Had that been just a show to get rid of the German women? Because she’d never been kissed like that before! She’d kissed many a man in her time, too. What the hell! She’d been dating since she was, what, fourteen? She’d been missing
that
all her life?

She couldn’t take her eyes off his lips, his mouth, and his tongue, as it moved. Oh, he was saying something.

“Vanessa, I asked you, can I buy you a drink?”

What did he say? She heard it, but she couldn’t get past the fact that they were both wearing skirts, neither of them with anything underneath, and they were—just talking?

That tongue. That kiss. If it weren’t for Julian, that kiss could have catapulted him out of the friend zone!

“I’ll get you a glass of cabernet. I know you like your red. Sherry, you’d like a bitter, am I right?”

“Oooh, you’re good,” Sherry said. “Yes.”

Vanessa finally found something to say. “Those German women were gorgeous—and young. Why would you want to get rid of them?”

Chase looked at her askance. “I’ve done a lot of traveling. Why would I waste my time with German girls when I know that there’s nothing sexier than American women in general? Chicago women in particular, and PR women exclusively.”

Now he was laying it on thick.

Out of nowhere, Julian appeared and strode right up to Chase.

He wore his Regency best and a silver mask.

“Typical Scotsman, ignoring all manner of British protocol.”

Chase cracked a smile. “Hey, Julian. Can I buy you a drink? How’s it going?”

“It’s not
going
very well at the moment. You really must restrain yourself from such blatant displays of affection. Certainly that would never be tolerated in Regency times. An unmarried man and woman wouldn’t even be allowed to touch except with gloved hands, at arm’s length, on the dance floor. I must warn you the master of ceremonies and the dance caller are very strict here.”

“You do realize, Julian, that we don’t really live in the Regency era. Well, most of us don’t, anyway.” He laughed.

Julian sneered.

Vanessa had never seen him sneer.

He clenched his white-gloved fists. He had thrown down the gauntlet, but Chase didn’t bother picking it up.

“How about I buy you an old-fashioned, Mr. Darcy?” Chase joked. Without waiting for a reply, he went to the bar.

Julian stared at Vanessa.

She had no idea what he could possibly be thinking, but maybe this was more about possession than anything.

“Julian’s jealous,” Sherry whispered in Vanessa’s ear. “He was watching Chase kiss you and he stormed away from that group of people there as soon as he could.”