AT HANS PLACE THE FOLLOWING EVENING, IT WAS A SIZABLE PARTY: the Tilsons; Mr. Seymour; the Miss Jacksons with their father; a French émigré whose name I never got; a nautical friend of one of the sea captain Austen brothers. Jane, expression dutiful, was presiding over the tea table, and Liam stationed himself near her, holding cup and saucer with a negligent grace, giving her serious, sideways looks, and now and then saying something brief. They looked, from my perspective halfway across the room, awkward, at least at first. Then their upper bodies began to incline more toward each other; I saw her smile, and push a loose curl out of her face. Their remarks lengthened.
I was tempted to go over and join their conversation, but feared jinxing Liam; if he was flirting as openly as he had been the morning before, I might be in the way. Besides, there was Henry to think about. He had greeted me warmly on arrival, and though he circulated among all his guests, he returned to me, a favoritism that made Miss Jackson resolutely turn her back on us. I thought he looked improved from when I had last seen him, but still not well. His eyes had a worrisome glassiness, and the whites remained faintly yellow. He’d impressed me with his perfect tailoring, the night we first met; now his clothes hung on him as if he had lost weight. I tried to notice these things without being obvious, but visual survey is crucial in diagnosis. I could only hope that my discreet appraisal struck him as admiring, not odd. Yet it was admiring, too, I realized as my eyes lingered on him with pleasure as well as professional interest; a handsome and clever man who makes no effort to conceal his admiration is never a bad thing.
He’d picked up the thread of our conversation from a few days ago, about travel, and was full of ideas about where my brother and I needed to, or should not, go.
“No one visits Bath anymore except gouty retired admirals and entrenching dowagers. But Cheltenham—it is worth seeing, delightful, unspoiled. I have some thoughts of going there myself for a few days, if we can get a party together.”
“That seems an excellent plan.”
He moved a little closer and said in a lower tone, “Perhaps you and your brother will join us.”
A strangely intimate offer from someone I had not known long, but maybe polite people proposed this sort of thing without meaning it. “I should be delighted. It is a spa?”
“Its waters are famed for their restorative powers.”
“So perhaps it can help you.”
He frowned. “I am fully recovered. Cheltenham has many attractions beyond those for invalids.”
“To be sure—and none would call you an invalid, Mr. Austen.” He bowed. “Yet my brother and I both worry about your health. I hope you will allow him to continue to visit you often.”
“I am always pleased to see both of you. But not to fuss over me; I am fully recovered.”
“I hope. Yet there is something in your countenance that troubles me.” I dropped my gaze; I had been studying him too openly. “Forgive me for speaking so frankly. It is only out of concern.”
“Your kind concern does you honor. It is such as is seldom met with in this world, where I fear people think chiefly of themselves.”
“Are you a cynic, Mr. Austen?”
“Not if you mean by that one who does not acknowledge the reality of human goodness,” he murmured. “I have evidence of it before me.” His gaze took me in, warm, mild, and innocent. No, not innocent. I had a sudden idea of how he’d be in bed—playful, fearless, ready for anything—and blushed hotly at my own thoughts, at my suspicion of his. “Are you enjoying Pride and Prejudice?” He had sent over the other two volumes soon after our conversation.
“Perhaps even more than the previous times.”
“Yes, it bears up well under rereading. And do you still think a man wrote it?”
Our glances went toward Jane, who continued to talk with Liam, more animated now. “Your argument was so compelling. I find myself . . . swayed.”
He gave me a look full of meaning, and it struck me that maybe flirting was not so hard if you were doing it with the right person.
“WELL?” LIAM ASKED ON THE WAY HOME; WE WERE INSIDE THE carriage, Wilcox driving. “Henry Austen seemed quite glued to your side. That’s good. He asked all sorts of promising questions about you this morning when I saw him at the bank.” They’d met there to follow up on the Cornwall canal investment—five hundred pounds we could say goodbye to forever.
I was disconcerted by the notion of them discussing me, though I knew I shouldn’t be; this was how it was supposed to unfold. “Like what? What did he ask? What did you tell him?”
“You are virtuous and wealthy and unencumbered. Isn’t it all truth?”
Liam politely parried my efforts to learn more until I gave up. “And your conversation with her?”
“Not an utter disaster, thank god.” His tone was so serious that I laughed, and he looked at me in alarm. When I forget myself I have the laugh of a madwoman, a cackle that goes and goes. I’d worked on modulating it in 1815, but laughs are like sneezes, not entirely controllable. “What?”
“You are a shameless flirt. At least you were yesterday, so I’ll assume you were tonight, though I couldn’t actually hear you.”
He looked at me, thinking this over. “I did my best,” he said, and this time I did not let myself laugh.
“What did you talk about?” I asked instead.
“Books, mostly.”
“Hers?”
“Among others.”
“How did you dare do it?”
“I did not admit to knowing she wrote them, which made it easier to talk about how wonderful they are. It was a natural transition from Fanny Burney and Samuel Richardson. Realism, comedy, the marriage plot.”
I considered this, trying to decide how I felt about it. On one hand, his success was my success. On the other—why did this appear to be so easy for him? It did not seem fair.
“I guess you couldn’t get the conversation around to ‘The Watsons.’”
“And how would you—” he began, and then, realizing from my face that I was joking, smiled. “I’ll work on that next time.”
MOSTLY I AM NOT GIVEN TO REMEMBERING MY DREAMS, OR FINDING them very interesting when I do; usually I am stitching up an endless series of trauma patients or staging futile searches for important lost objects. But arriving in 1815, and meeting Jane Austen, had apparently done something to me. First there was the one about Isaac of York, who had urged me to try to blend in more, as he never could in 1194, and then, the night after that tea, one about Henry.
I am with him in his curricle, the two of us riding through Hyde Park on a strangely sunlit morning. I should be enjoying myself; instead I am puzzled, thinking, This can’t be right. I don’t belong here. And then the scene changes: we are no longer in the manicured environs of the park, but in a craggy landscape out of an Ann Radcliffe novel. A wooded hillside, a rushing waterfall. The road ahead curves out of sight, but the grade is alarmingly, cartoonishly steep. Henry seems unconcerned, holding the reins loosely and smiling sideways at me, dappled light of the sun through leaves flashing past us.
“Do you not think,” I say, “we should get out and walk? The road—the horses—”
We’re picking up speed. It’s too late; there’ll be no stopping until we reach the bottom, a long way down. I am filled with fear, or maybe it’s desire, and I think: Is it possible that I never met the right man because he died centuries before I was born? But I dismiss this as nonsense, even as he says in his pleasant, ironic voice: “An excess of caution, Miss Ravenswood, can be more fatal than its opposite.”