Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict (13 page)

“. . . Miss Mansfield, are you well?” she says again, and I am once again in the twenty-first century, in the little room at the end of the corridor in the club, not in the tent at the fair in my own time, and the lady has once again assumed the form of the young gentlewoman in the India muslin gown. Her golden-brown eyes regard me with kindness and concern.

I back away from her little table, my heart pounding in my chest. “What is this?”

“Do forgive me for frightening you,” she says. “You are quite safe, Miss Mansfield. There are no dark arts here.”

“You know my name—my real name.”

“Of course, my dear,” she says, and sips at her tea. “We have met before.”

“Then I am not imagining any of this. You are she—the very same fortune-teller from the fair—and also the young lady with the cards and the short dress—and—how can this be possible?”

“No less possible than your being in this body rather than the one in which I formerly had the pleasure of meeting you.”

“I cannot make out how such a thing has happened to me.”

“Did you not wish for a different life when first we met? Did you not wish to be someone else? Indeed, I remember well those words you spoke in my tent that day at the fair.”

“Are you saying that I wished my way here?”

“And did I not warn you against riding your horse in summer?”

“Yes of course, but—”

“And here we are,” she says smiling, her eyes glowing with warmth. “For are we not ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’?”

“But this is no dream. And I am not asleep.”

“True. But you are most certainly not awake.”

“I beg your pardon, but what sort of joke is this? One is either asleep or one is awake.”

“Just so.”

“Then if I am not asleep, how could I be anything but awake?”

“A very good question, my dear, and I shall do my best to answer it for you. But first, do please sit down again, and drink your tea before it gets cold.”

She indicates the untouched cup before me.

I take my seat, and my hand trembles as I raise the cup to my lips. The tea is still warm, strong and black and scented with the fragrance of roses. I drain the cup, and instantly I am steadier. All the fear drains away as well.

“There. You are in much better looks already,” she says, smiling at me. “Now, as to your question: Most of us walk through our daily lives as if we were asleep. We regard not what is before our eyes. We see not how we construct fantasies of our own and others’ intentions without having the smallest knowledge of what we, or they, are truly about. We are all imaginists, storytellers if you will, and the pity is that none of us recognizes his sorry state.”

“Imaginists? I must say that I am still very much in the dark.”

“Indeed. Well, then, I shall endeavor to explain. Let us consider, for example, this woman whom you have become. Courtney Stone.”

“I know nothing of her.”

“Exactly!” She laughs. “And yet you have constructed a story about her life. One that paints her as imprudent at best, and fallen at worst.”

“I have reason to think that she is not what a young lady ought to be.”

She arches an eyebrow. “Why? Because she has done what you so very nearly did yourself?”

“What do you mean?” I say, but my cheeks flame with the memory of being with Edgeworth in his woods, when I nearly gave up my innocence to him.

“It was he, not you, who said the two of you should wait.”

“You have no right to speak of such things.”

“Why, then, did you come to see me? To hear the truth, or to engage in polite conversation, the substance of which is nothing? Have you not had enough of such discourse in your life?”

She gazes at me kindly, and her eyes are those of the old woman at the fair, the fortune-teller who spoke of my parents, my friends, my life, as if she had access to my most intimate thoughts. The woman who frightened me so terribly with her knowledge of my life that I left her tent trembling and promised myself never to indulge in such silliness again. And so I determined to disregard everything she said, including her warning that I not ride Belle in summer.

I rub my arms against a chill that has overtaken me.

“You see, my dear,” says the fortune-teller, “this story you have constructed about Courtney has only one point of view: yours. You are entirely asleep to her point of view—her wishes, her feelings, her intentions. You know nothing of her, yet you presume to write her story as if you do. That is the very essence of arrogance, is it not?”

I feel my face grow hot. “How should I know her point of view? She is nothing to me.”

“Then I shall give you one more example, Miss Mansfield. Two persons with whom you are intimately connected and whom you believe you know very well. Your parents.”

“Are you saying I do not know my own parents?”

“Indeed, you appear to know as little about them as you do Miss Courtney Stone.”

“Nonsense.”

“I know that you believe your mother to hold your father in contempt, and that she never loved him, despite his constancy and love for her.”

I feel that same chill which I felt that day in my own time, in the fortune-teller’s tent, when the lady saw so clearly into my most private thoughts.

“I would never speak of my mother in such a manner. And what has this to do with my situation here?”

“I am merely trying to illustrate, Miss Mansfield, that your so-called knowledge of your parents’ hearts is as much of an imag- inist’s fancy as your so-called knowledge of Courtney Stone.”

“I know what I see.”

“Yet it is not the whole story. Your father is scrupulously kind to your mother, but love her he does not. He still mourns the loss of a young lady of his youth named Miss Allcott, whom he was not permitted to marry. Your mother knows of his past, and though she did not love him when they married, she grew to have a strong affection for him. She could never reconcile herself, however, to being unloved by him, much as he tried to hide it behind his unfailing kindness. And so she turned bitter and feigns an indifference to him that she does not, indeed, feel. She is eaten up with jealousy and makes both of you suffer for it.”

My father in love with another woman? My mother suffering jealousy over my father, the man whose politenesses she scorns? Impossible.

Then why do I feel as if the world has turned upside down? I grip the edge of the table. “I do not believe it.”

“Of course you do not. You, after all, have written their stories. ‘True stories,’ we like to call them. What a ridiculous notion!” She laughs, high and clear like a bell.

Then she regards me with some concern. “My dear,” she says, “you look as if you need a cordial very badly. I am sorry to have laughed so heartily at what must be shocking to you indeed, but it had to be done. Not the laughing, but the telling. How else are you ever to awaken?”

“I am awake,” I say like a petulant child.

“No,” she says gently, “but I have hopes you will be.”

She produces a stoppered crystal decanter and pours some ruby liquid into a tiny glass, which she places before me, next to my cup of tea.

“You have not the opportunity to walk in your mother’s shoes, Miss Mansfield. But you do have the opportunity to walk in Courtney’s. You must own that there is nothing like it for understanding a different point of view.”

Indeed. For I see myself again, in the public house not one hour ago, tingling with desire for Frank, allowing him to kiss me, then pushing him away and running from my shame and from the pain in Wes’s countenance, and I shudder at the memory.

“I did not wish to walk in Courtney’s shoes, no matter what you might have thought I said.”

“One should choose one’s words most carefully, Miss Mansfield. Did you not ask for a different life when last we met? ‘A very different life,’ I recall you saying.”

I cannot deny that I spoke those words.

“And did you not also wish to do something important, to be part of a noble purpose?”

Indeed, though I said nothing of the kind to the fortune-teller that day in her tent.

“Well, this is your chance, for there is nothing nobler than to give up one’s self in service to another,” says the lady.

“I do not understand.”

“Surely you did not think your wish would come without a price. For there is much work to be done here. Look at the state of this life you have inherited. Courtney has banished two gentlemen from her life, both of whom keep turning up, despite the best efforts of her friends and, I might add, what she regards as her own better judgment.”

“What she regards . . . Are you saying it is
not
her better judgment?”

“That part of the story, my dear, is for you to determine.”

“But how am I, who know nothing of this world and all its ways, to be of any help at all?”

“You may have come here with a limited perspective, but it is certainly a fresh one. And I do believe that Courtney—and you—are in need of a fresh perspective.

“Drink,” she says, and her kindly tone impels me to obey. I lift the glass to my lips; the fumes of the ruby drink open up my breathing passages in a most pleasant manner; its fragrance is that of warm blackberries on a hot summer day. I consume the drink in one swallow; it is indeed a most agreeable restorative.

The lady smiles approvingly. “Think of it this way: What makes a story true is not that it really happened, for truly it is your word against mine, or your word against Courtney’s, or Courtney’s word against Frank’s, or Wes’s, and so on, and which one of us—or them—is really lying after all? What makes a story true is that there is the truth of human nature and self-reflection in it, the awareness and the awakening to the fact that we indeed know nothing and that nothing we think is true is really true, that indeed we have made it all up. Like Miss Elizabeth Bennet, who realized that much of what she had assumed about Mr. Darcy, and even about her most intimate friend in the world, was the product of her own imaginings. Yet the most memorable words she spoke, and the truest of them all, were this: ‘
Till this moment, I never knew myself
.’ Myself! You see? Myself. Not someone else.”

“
Pride and Prejudice
is my favorite book in the world. How wonderful that you know it well.”

The lady’s smile has a hint of mischief this time. “Nothing wonderful about it at all. I am pleased that these works are at your disposal; you won’t find a steadier friend or wiser counsel. Unless, that is, you come to see me again.”

“Am I to stay here forever, then, in Courtney’s life?”

“You mean shall you sit ‘
like patience on a monument, smiling at grief
’?”

“You speak in riddles, Miss—may I not know your name?”

“Would you not prefer the answer to the riddle?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, when at last you awaken, the answer shall be yours.”

“I do not—”

“Do call on me again,” she says, rising majestically from her chair, the candlelight no longer on her face, which is now obscured by shadows. “This was a most delightful reunion.” And with a curtsey, she withdraws into the shadows.

And as sure as I know she was here, I now know she is gone. If there is another door by which she has left, she has done so without a sound.

I sit there for a couple of minutes, and in that short space of time, the fire is dying down and the room growing cold. The candles are mere sputtering stubs. I rub my arms against the chill, and the room is swallowed in absolute darkness. I fumble my way to the door and open it.

Dim light from the corridor spills into the room, revealing a completely different setting! There is no chimneypiece or table or tea service or chairs, merely some shelves stacked with boxes and a bare floor.

With trembling hands I scramble out of the room, closing the door behind me, and lean against the wall. Have I imagined the entire encounter?

No. She is as real as the beating of my heart in this chest in this body that is mine but not mine at all. She is as real as the love I felt for Edgeworth, the love that still pierces my heart.

Why do I think of him now? But of course I would think of him, for when I went to the fair with Mary, her arm linked through mine as we strolled towards the fortune-teller’s tent and she said, “Shall we try our luck, Jane? Oh how delightful to have our fortunes told!” I acted as if it were a mere diversion. But it was Edgeworth who was foremost in my mind. It was Edgeworth I had seen betraying me. It was he whose very name was agony for me to hear. And so I entered the fortune-teller’s tent, leaving Mary outside. And I wished with all my heart for a different life. I wished with all my heart to be somewhere, anywhere else. To be someone else. If only that were possible, I thought.

And here I am.

Twelve

I
make my way through the crowds of dancers and throngs milling around the bar in search of Deepa. She is nowhere to be seen, but I trust she will return. I station myself before a railing on a sort of gallery which overlooks the bar, so that I might have a better view. I hope she returns shortly and will not mind taking me home, for I am feeling the effects of all I have experienced in this long day and would like nothing more than a quiet room and a comfortable bed.

The musicians are no longer on the stage, and while there is still music playing, no doubt from one of those clever little music-producing objects, it is not nearly as loud as the music played by the band. Much as I am relieved by the respite from noise and fascinated by the spectacle of dancers and revelers below, I cannot stop thinking about what the fortune-teller said. Which is that I have work to do. That there is a purpose to my being here.

But how might I, who knows nothing of Courtney or of this strange time in which she lives, bring order to her life? I who could not even resist the advances of a man who is but a stranger to me.

As if to emphasize that thought, I see below, near the bar, a couple locked in a kiss so ardent that they appear to be swallowing one another. No one seems to be shocked by the display; indeed, the ladies and gentlemen around them seem not to note them at all, or at most give them a passing glance and return to their own business.