He considered. “True enough. What woman is ever given a man who is truly worthy of her, though, I wonder?”
“So severe on your sex?” she said.
“Can you doubt it?” he said.
She looked up at him and he looked down at her and the lamp light flickered, patterns on his skin, patterns on his disheveled clothes, and she knew he was going, and she…
“Is this goodbye then, my lord?”
“It has to be, as I have no longer anywhere to sleep, thanks to you,” he said, with a wink. “But if you are asking if we shall see each other again, Miss Austen, well, I think we shall.”
She shook her head. “No, we shan’t. I shall be here. You shall be there. We do not travel in the same circles. It is hopeless and pointless.”
“I shall write to you.”
“Well, that’s scandalous, you, an unmarried man, writing to me, a spinster.”
“Yes, well, you’ll have to have all our correspondence destroyed upon your death so that no one knows how truly scandalous you were,” he said.
She snorted.
He grinned at her, his expression sunny.
Then, they simply regarded each other, him standing over the bed and her sitting up in it, for what seemed like a very long time.
Finally, she said, “I shall miss you, you know.”
“Yes,” he said. “I do know.”
She hurled the only other pillow she had at him.
He caught that one, too, laughing. “This is not the end of our story, Miss Jane. We shall see each other again.”
“ARE YOU ATwork onFirst Impressions?” asked Cassandra from the doorway of Jane’s writing room.
“No, no, I’m rereading something inSense and Sensibility,” said Jane. “Just a bit at the end about Marianne, about how she had thought she would fall into an irresistible passion, but how she does not, in the end, how she leaves all of that behind for something steady and reliable.”
“And sensible,” said Cassandra, the smile in her voice.
“And sensible,” said Jane. She looked up at her sister. “He is gone, you know.”
“I did not know, and I don’t see how you did. When did you see him?”
Jane felt her face heating up.
Cassandra came inside the room, alarmed, and shut the door. “Jane! What have you done?”
“Nothing,” cried Jane. “But he was in my room in the midst of the night.”
“Shocking!”
“No, nothing happened. We talked. He left. And now, it is all over. The excitement is gone from my life, and everything is settled and finished and done. And I’m quite glad of it.”
“You are a dreadful liar, Jane Austen. You are not the least bit glad and a part of you is dying inside.”
“Oh, this is what I get from the same person who lectures me about being fanciful?”
“Not lecture, simply… observation,” said Cassandra. “Anyway, no matter how it is you are feeling, you must know that you will be all right.”
