Midnight in Austenland (Austenland 2)

Lu: “I’m done with you.”

Justice: “Beckett called me ‘Mom’!”

Charlotte opened her eyes and welcomed the all-consuming mystery to take back her brain. It really wasn’t such a bad preoccupation when compared with others.

Home, eleven months before

“I’m worried about what this is doing to the kids,” Charlotte confessed to James when he stopped by the house to pick up Lu and Beckett for the weekend. She peered out the kitchen—the kids were in the living room watching television. She lowered her voice. “Beckett hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s anxious … about you. About us.”

It was weird talking to James about the kids after everything they’d been through. They’d spent thousands of hours speaking as partners in the past, bu

t now … well, it was like trying to eat amazingly realistic rubber food. But who else could she talk to?

“I don’t know,” said James. “They seem fine to me. And it’s not as if divorce is uncommon. Over fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce. I’m sure at school they’re just one of the crowd.”

Could that statistic really be true? Among Charlotte’s acquaintances, about 10 percent of the marrieds had divorced. Before James had left, divorce had seemed distant and improbable. Besides, statistics felt as irrelevant as a nice wool blanket in the vacuum of space. Let’s look at a mother who is standing in a hospital waiting room, a doctor telling her that her child has died from a rare disease. Is it a comfort for her to hear that only one in five million children contract it?

Some postdivorce statistics:

• James saw the children 75 percent less than before.

• He missed 85 percent of their afterschool woes.

• He was absent for 99 percent of their family dinners.

Screw statistics. One hundred percent of Charlotte’s marriage had ended in divorce, and for her, that was the only number that meant anything at all.

Austenland, day 6, cont.

Charlotte reached behind her and tried to do up twenty-seven buttons. This mad world. It had all been very real for Austen, for her characters. Their clothes, their manners, their marriages—all absolute survival. But for Charlotte, in the twenty-first century, it was like eating Alice’s mushroom and shrinking a couple of centuries.

She was playing dress-up, playing pretend, playing hide-and-seek and chase and kissing tag. Does play belong exclusively to children? How does one be an adult in a child’s world? Well, for one thing, she would dress in her fine pink silk. Her hair still looked decent, so she stuck in some pearl clips and called it good. She got up and headed to the hallway, but she saw Mr. Mallery rounding the stairs and hurried back into her room.

Why was it that just thinking of that man made her aware of every cell in her body? And the state of her lipstick. She wasn’t proud of this fact, but when Mr. Mallery was around, she became increasingly concerned with the general appearance of her lips.

There was a knock, and Mary entered with some towels. She curtsied when she saw Charlotte in the bathroom reapplying lipstick and then went about her business. Charlotte felt the lack of a “Do Not Disturb” sign. She forgot her lips and started downstairs.

Another maid passed her in the hall, pausing to curtsy. Another maid dusted in the morning room. Was there nowhere in the house she could be alone? Even the gazes of the portraits seemed to follow her.

She was early to the drawing room. Empty, it seemed as stiff and forbidden as a roped-off museum display.

Outside, the summer evening still burned, the sun getting in all the dazzle it could before English rain took over again. Violent wind belied the blue sky, tangling her hair and skirts, warning of coming changes. She meant to just stand on the steps, appreciate the wind and soak in some vitamin D, but her brain was in full mystery mode and skipped from Miss Gardenside’s disappearing mother to Mr. Wattlesbrook’s vehicle. Where did he park it last night? She would have noticed a car out front.

The wind pushed at her, nudging and restless, and she caught its mood. She left her perch and walked around the side of the house, looking for a likely garage. There were outbuildings—stables, a separate servants quarters—but none had a large door that looked like it would fit a car. Had he left it out in the open? Perhaps around the side.

There! A tire track. His tire must have dug into the mud underneath the gravel, now drying in the sun. Up ahead was another tire mark. Why had he driven this way? He hadn’t seemed concerned about hiding his modern clothing whenever he barged in, so it seemed unlikely he would park his car so far from the house entrance just to keep it out of sight of the guests. She knew from her phaeton trip with Mr. Mallery that there was no road outlet from that side of the estate, only dirt paths that would have been treacherous for a car during the heavy rain. He would have had to exit back through the main gate, and yet here were signs he’d driven in the opposite direction.

She spotted another tire mark and followed it, the wind encouraging her into the wooded area near the stables and the pond.

The countryside was molded for wind. Her hotel in London had overlooked a stone square. While sitting on her balcony, she’d noticed that the only sign the wind was blowing was the intemperate pieces of garbage tumbling about; the city itself was still, unmoved by the storm. The country, on the other hand, was teeming with breeze teasers—grass and shrubs, trees and pond, everything tossed and upset by the wind. The massive oaks boiled with it, shaking their tops, bending their branches to keep from breaking. The pond waters thrashed into white, mocking the idea that water is transparent. Wind made everything opaque—wind made everything move.

Charlotte moved too, as agitated as the pond. She approached it cautiously, the banks sloppy with mud. Did that look like another set of tire tracks over there? She tiptoed nearer to the shore, stepping on tangles of grass and dried crusts of mud.

Yes, right at the rim of the pond, almost as if a car had driven out of the water—those looked an awful lot like tire marks. But they stopped suddenly, as if stamped out and smoothed over. Seemed like an odd detail for Colonel Andrews to create, but then again, perhaps she was off track and this had nothing to do with the mystery. She took another step, caught her toes on her skirt, and stepped down hard.

“No …” She lifted her hem. Gray mud soaked through her silk dress.

Charlotte scolded herself right back into the house and upstairs to change, passing the drawing room quickly, before the gathered gentlemen could notice her dress.