Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler Read Free Book Online

more than embroider and keep house. I have to compose myself and get through this day. I have to believe that somehow it will all become clear. And that somehow I’ll find my way back to my real life. I have to believe this. Or else I can’t function. Right now I feel the familiar morning pressure on my bladder. And relieving that pressure is all the reality I can handle at present. That and getting dressed. And playing the role.

    W hen I enter the breakfast room, Mrs. Mansfield appraises me, eyes narrowed. “Your complexion has improved, but that color is most unbecoming to it. Have not I told you so at least three times? After you take a turn in the shrubbery, Jane, I want you upstairs and in your new blue gown. We cannot have Mr. Edgeworth seeing you in anything but your best looks, can we?”
    “Mr. Edgeworth?”
    “You know perfectly well he is expected for dinner today. If you would listen to your mother she would not have to repeat herself.”
    Oh God. She is now referring to herself in the third person. This is a particularly annoying habit my real-life mother also has, especially when she imagines herself as being poorly treated by someone, which is actually most of the time.
    I break off a piece of a warm roll. I stuff it in my mouth and reach for the jam. It’s apricot. Delicious. And that chocolate smells irresistible.
    “I must speak with Cook about the roast,” Mrs. Mansfield says, putting her napkin down. She gets up from the table and walks toward the door, mumbling something about soup and fish sauce and the timing of each course and that she would not have a moment to herself until dinner. “Not that you would know anything about the matter,” she says, addressing me for a parting blow before sweeping out of the dining room, her last words trailing behind. “You are incapable of household management.”
    When the door closes behind her I gulp down the rest of my chocolate and wrap another roll in a napkin. This is a perfect time to escape.

Eight
    A s I leave the breakfast room, that cute serving guy from yesterday is coming in. We do one of those awkward advance/retreat/advance dances in trying to avoid crashing into each other. He turns bright red and averts his eyes as we make it past each other. This has to be Barnes’s brother. I turn my head to take a last look, only to catch him doing the same. We both turn away. Oh, well. If this is the guy in question, then I’m sure there’s no reason to give him a second thought, not with things on such a junior high school level.
    The air outside is sweet, the birds are singing, and the flowers are resplendent, but I will not allow myself to get sidetracked by the scenery. Walking always did clear my head, and even if this isn’t my own head I am determined to clear it well enough to find a way out of this situation.
    Maybe the key to getting home lies in figuring out what I’m doing here. Could Jane and I have swapped lives? Could she be living my life right now, walking around in my body and talking in my voice? Talk about culture shock. At least I’m here with some knowledge of history, sparse though it may be. Jane, whoever she is, could not possibly know the future.
    I have a flash of some upper-class, nineteenth-century Englishwoman dealing with my twenty-first-century, left-coast life. If she could get past the aesthetic shock of my industrial-carpeted little apartment, which is slightly larger than the Mansfields’ drawing room, complete with wrought-iron security bars on the louvered windows and graffiti on the front gate, the noise alone might give her a breakdown. Between the LAPD helicopters making their nocturnal circles in the sky, the old deaf guy next door with his crowing rooster and blaring Latino talk radio, and the earsplitting conversational tones of my boss, it would be enough for any gently bred Regency girl to question her own sanity, just as I now question mine.
    Wait a minute. I don’t want some strange woman living my