Attempting Elizabeth by Jessica Grey Read Free Book Online Page A

she was waiting for me to pop out another head or something, but after a few moments she made an attempt to return to her sewing as well.
    I stared at the sampler. It was quite intricate. A verse surrounded by a floral motif. I concentrated on trying to place a few stitches, and was rewarded by crooked stitches and a bleeding finger. I cursed silently and wondered why before, when I hadn’t been thinking about it, my hands had seemed to move of their own volition.
    Maybe that was the trick. I hadn’t been thinking about it. I deliberately made my mind as blank as I could, trying for that sort of spacey feel you get when you’re stuck on the freeway during a long drive and you let your mind wander and “come to” fifteen minutes later, only to realize you’ve driven yourself home without knowing it. You get home because it’s routine. Your mind and body know what they’re doing without you having to think too hard about it. I figured that Georgiana’s hands must have some sort of muscle memory of stitching. If I could stop thinking so much as Kelsey , they’d resume their normal activities.
    I stared off into space for a few moments. I’m sure I was making Mrs. Younge uncomfortable, but I really didn’t care. After what felt like an age, I felt my hands moving: placing tiny, perfect stitches into the sampler. It was an extremely odd feeling letting my body do something that my mind knew I didn’t know how to do. It took more effort to not concentrate on it than one would imagine.
    I kept wanting to freak out about the body that I was in. It was strange to feel like I was me, but inside an entirely different body. A body that could do things like embroider without a thought. Every time I felt my mind veering off into panic I would reassure myself that I’d had a severe mental break. While this doesn’t sound like it would be very reassuring, I found it oddly comforting to have an explanation. I figured that I was probably being taken care of by a crack team of specialists as well. I was just too fully involved in my hallucination to notice that I’d been strapped to a gurney in a nice hospital somewhere and, hopefully, fully medicated.
    While I comforted myself with thoughts of my lunacy, my fingers continued sewing at a fast pace. Eventually Mrs. Younge seemed assured enough of my return to normal to pick back up where she left off, extolling the virtues of George Wickham. She spent a great deal of time on what a fine figure of a gentleman he had made in a new coat he had recently purchased, and added several references to how he had known me as a child and how surprised he must have been to find me quite grown up into a lady.
    She didn’t really seem to require much response. The conversation was entirely one-sided and obviously designed to promote Wickham’s interests with Georgiana. I nodded a few times, and offered a “Yes, oh he did look quite fine,” here and there, but the entire thirty minutes could have passed without one more word from me.
    I was incredibly disappointed that the next half hour actually took a full thirty minutes to pass. I was really hopeful that, seeing as it was my hallucination after all, time would either speed up, or skip ahead, so I could get to the interesting parts. But, unfortunately, I was stuck there, the minutes ticking off at an annoyingly normal rate, for a full half hour before we heard a knock at the door.

~ Chapter Five ~
     
    “She was then but fifteen, which must be her excuse...”
     
    At the sound of the knock on the front door, Mrs. Younge, started up eagerly, pinching her cheeks to improve the color as she set her sewing aside. I glanced at her speculatively. That was a whole theory I had never considered before. Could Mrs. Younge have been so invested in getting Wickham a rich wife because she was interested in him herself? Maybe once Georgiana was Mrs. Wickham and safely stashed away at a country home, Mrs. Younge and Mr. Wickham could live it up on her