“Yes you should.” I moved toward him, but he quickly put a chair between us, and I stopped, surprised and humiliated.
He covered his eyes with one hand as if to shut out the sight of me, his arousal still evident in his pants. “You’re vulnerable; you can’t consent. You’ve had too much to drink. You’ll hate me later. I’m not such an animal, to take advantage—”
I laughed—not because this was funny, though it was—but in confusion, and he winced. Grabbing my shoulders, he spun me around and pushed me gently yet decisively toward the door. “Off with you now. I’m not made of stone, you know. Sleep it off.” In the doorway, we paused; the hall was empty, dim with too few candles in sconces along the walls. I thought he might close the door behind me, but he continued to steer me toward the room I had been assigned. I put my hand on the doorknob, remembering I’d been given a key. And where was it now? Oh, yes, my spencer had a pocket. I fished it out and unlocked the bulky, old-fashioned mechanism on my first try, thinking I couldn’t be really drunk if I’d managed this complex task with such ease. And since I wasn’t really drunk, consent was not an issue. Opening the door, I turned to share this insight with Liam. Before I could speak, he shoved me into my room, using not just his hands but his whole body, an opportunity to kiss the nape of my neck and thrust a still-notable erection into the small of my back. Both at the same instant, and just for an instant; then the door clicked shut and I was alone, off balance and staggering in the darkness.
What the hell had just happened, did not seem an unreasonable question. I lurched toward where I correctly estimated the bed to be and fell onto it, my eyes growing accustomed to the dimness and starting to distinguish vague forms in the room. Then I heard footsteps in the hall, a knock followed by a door opening, a clatter of dishes, a murmur of male voices. Jencks! Taking away the dinner things. If this had gone on as I’d wanted, we’d have been caught for sure.
I’d dodged a bullet, but lucky was not how I felt. I rose to my feet and felt my way back to the door; when I heard Jencks emerge, I looked out and asked him to send North to me. By now I could see enough in the gloom to distinguish a candle on a table, which I lit from the nearest one in the hall before returning to my room and settling down to wait for North to come help prepare me for bed.
“LOOK,” LIAM SAID IN A LOW TONE. “UP AHEAD, THERE.”
Amazing and deceptively ordinary, Jane Austen’s house: squat, brick, close to the road, with a low wall around it. In our own time, it is the heart of a complex covering several thousand acres devoted to the author and her era, offering a surreal mix of the scholarly and the frothy. There is an unrivaled library of early women’s writing, thanks to Eva Farmer, and a re-creation of the Assembly Rooms at Bath, where dancing lessons take place daily. A guillotine donated by the French sits incongruously in the middle of the green in nearby Alton, a town entirely subsumed by Austenworld, where costumed visitors can pay to immerse themselves in the lives of a textile worker, a dairymaid, a member of the landed gentry. This hunger for all things Austen, however tenuously connected to her, was an aspect of my own world I’d taken for granted, but now it seemed both touching and demented. What was it that people wanted so badly from Jane Austen anyway? What did I myself want, for that matter?
It was midday as we neared Chawton. I’d slept uncharacteristically well, waking up refreshed, not at all hungover, and very puzzled. Why had I behaved so impulsively? And why had Liam rejected me like that, contradicting the evidence in his own trousers? His so-called explanation was absurd. No, something else was at work here, something murky, which made staying away from him a good idea. In truth, he had done me a favor last night. But when I remembered his body pressed against mine, our two hearts pounding, the smell of his skin, it did not feel like a favor. It felt like something I wanted to never think of again.
That morning, I had dawdled over my hair and fussed unnecessarily with my clothes but finally had to walk down the hallway to where breakfast was laid out for us in the same private parlor as dinner the previous night. This time, its door stood open, as if the room itself were insisting it had no secrets. Liam, sitting at the table, looked up and gave me a nod and a quiet good morning; he had the grace to blush. I sat down and poured myself some coffee.
“I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable last night. It wasn’t my intention.” I would have done well to stop there, but I took a sip and continued in a tone impossible to keep free of irony: “Clearly you are a man of honor. Your devotion to your principles—and your fiancée—is admirable. Let’s move on and pretend this never happened.”
Liam had sat with his chin propped on his fist throughout my little speech, staring at the table. He lifted his eyes to meet mine and looked away. “Let’s” was all he said, and in that moment I felt such a passionate hatred of him, such a wish to throw my coffee in his face and storm out, that it should have told me something. But I swallowed my anger, along with some toast, and we prepared to continue on to Chawton.
AFTER JANE AUSTEN’S HOUSE, PAST THE INTERSECTION WITH THE road to Winchester, there followed more cottages, smaller than hers and in worse repair. Beyond them, I saw sheep-dotted fields and, briefly, Chawton House, square and dark against the pale sky at the top of a hill, before we turned and it was hidden by trees. We passed barns and a stone church before the house came into view again: a long driveway leading up to a circular sweep, gables and chimney pots, a figure in black standing outside.