“It’s safest for now. Let’s meet in a few days to catch up, but in the meantime, don’t talk toanyone, and definitely don’t let Darcy see you. And then we just have to hope that the plot stays on track; otherwise, goodness knows what will happen toPride and Prejudice, and to us.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I took Maggie’s advice, and for the next few days, I went to ground. I stayed in my room, where thankfully nobody bothered me; it seemed that when I was out of sight, I was also out of mind. For food, I crept to the kitchen and stole bits of bread and cold cuts of meat late at night when the servants were asleep, like some sort of carnivorous mouse with a larger-than-average appetite. I knew that pretty soon the Bingleys and Darcy would leave Netherfield to go to London, at which point I’d be able to relax a little and return my attention to trying to read myself home. In the meantime, I was determined not to do anything to risk interfering with Jane Austen’s story.
But while I may have been helping protect the plot, all that time alone with my own thoughts wasn’t helping protect my mental health. I spent hours every day imagining how traumatic it must have been for Bianca to watch me disappear in agony, and how lonely Mrs. Atallah must be without me or Darcy in the house. What would happen to Mr. Wickham without me there to feed him? And then there was Nick. The poor man had lost his mother toPride and Prejudice, and now he’dhad to watch me being sucked into the story as well. I tortured myself by repeatedly running over our interactions in my head, seeing them through fresh eyes now that I knew what Nick had been through. No wonder he’d been so rude about romance novels, given one of them had literally stolen his mother. And what I’d taken to be his obsession with destroying Darcy had actually been Nick trying to save the character from disappearing, and savePride and Prejudicealong with it. All along, Nick had been trying to help me, and yet all I’d done was be rude to him and then run away and hide. And now that I’d finally realized Nick wasn’t the bad guy—quite the opposite, in fact—I may never see him again…may never see any of my friends and loved ones again.
Maggie and I had agreed to meet on Sunday morning at her cottage, so I snuck out of Netherfield House just after sunrise and set off toward Meryton. It had rained heavily for the past few days, and the ground was boggy, making my progress slow, but eventually I made it to the village. Maggie had told me she lived in a deserted cottage close to Longbourn, so I asked a tradesman for directions to the Bennet’s estate and then set off along the river toward it. The rain had started up again, and by the time Longbourn came into view, I was soaked and shivering with cold, yet it took me another half an hour of exploring before I found the run-down cottage tucked away in some woods to the south of the house. Smoke was coming out of the chimney, and as I approached, I heard the sound of a woman humming tunelessly inside. I chuckled, remembering what Nick had said about his mum being a terrible singer.
I knocked on the front door, and a moment later Maggie appeared, wearing an apron over her dress and flour on her cheek. She smiled when she saw me, and my heart lurched; her eyes twinkled in exactly the same way as Nick’s.
“Come inside and dry off,” she said, ushering me in through the door. “I’ll make us some tea.”
Maggie insisted I take off my wet dress, which she hung in front of the fire to dry while she boiled water in a copper kettle. Once I was wrapped up in a blanket and sitting at the table, I took in the cottage properly for the first time. It appeared to be one small room, with a fireplace and old sideboard at one end, a wooden table and chair in the middle, and a neatly made single bed at the far side. Still, Maggie had obviously gone to some effort to make the place homely, as there were fresh flowers in a jug on the table and a few hand-drawn sketches on the mantel above the fire.
“Have you lived here since you arrived in the book?” I asked as Maggie stoked the fire.
“No, I didn’t find it immediately,” she said. “When I first got here, I stayed in a spare room at Longbourn, much as you’re doing at Netherfield. I was in such a panic about being stuck here and had no idea what was going to happen when Jane Austen’s plot ended, so I wasn’t really thinking long-term. But then the story reset after Elizabeth and Darcy got married, and I found myself back at the start, so I realized I needed to find somewhere I could live where I was out of the way. I came across this place on a walk one day, discovered it was abandoned, and have been here ever since.”
“How many times have you lived through the story now?”
“This is my seventh time, I think.”
I shivered at the thought. Was this what my life was going to be like from now on—hiding in the margins of the story, stuck in a never-ending loop I could never escape from? It was such a depressing idea that tears welled up in my eyes.
“It’s not as terrible as it sounds,” Maggie said, and I felt her handrest gently on my shoulder. “As long as you don’t interfere with the plot, you can survive here OK. I do laundry for a seamstress in the village, so I earn enough money to buy food and candles, and I sneak into Longbourn to borrow books from Mr. Bennet’s library. It’s a simple existence, but not an entirely unpleasant one.”
“But what about friends? You said Elizabeth barely notices you, so who do you talk to?”
The kettle over the fire had started to whistle, and Maggie removed it and placed it on the table. “My first full year here, I tried to make friends. Not the main characters—I already suspected that was too risky—but some of the villagers on the outskirts of the story. But people were always a bit funny with me; I think they knew I was different, even though they weren’t sure why, and so I found it hard to connect properly with anyone. Then the story reset and everyone forgot they’d met me, so I was back to square one. To be honest, I found it all a bit dispiriting, so these days I don’t really bother.”
“So you’re all alone?” I said, hoping she didn’t hear the dread in my voice.
“I have people I converse with, like the lady I do laundry for and the man in the butcher’s, but that’s about it. It’s safer this way.”
Maggie started to pour hot water into the teapot, and I watched her mutely. Over the past few years, I’d allowed my life to become a pretty solitary one: I didn’t date, and aside from my weekly night out with Bianca, I never went anywhere except work. I’d been content with my quiet existence, but now I realized how much I loved and needed the people in my life. Because it wasn’t just Bianca: There were her relatives, who treated me as one of their own, and Mrs. Atallah, who may be eccentric but who I now realized was like family too. Enzo and the team at work were always there for me, and then there was Nick… The tearsreturned to my eyes, and I blinked them away. My life in London may have been small, but it had beenmine, and now I was stuck in someone else’s story—alone except for Maggie.
“Don’t you miss your old life?” I asked quietly.
Maggie looked at me sharply. “Of course I do. There’s not a day goes by where I don’t long to hug my son again, or set foot inside my beloved bookshop, or pick up the phone and call my best friend. But for my first few years here, I tormented myself with trying to get back to our world. It consumed my every waking moment; all I could think about was how I could fix what I’d done, and I made myself ill with my obsession about getting home. But eventually, I came to accept that it’s impossible. There is no way to reverse the book magic, and I’m stuck here—we’restuck here—until either we die or the story implodes.”
“What do you mean, the story implodes?” I asked.
“Well, we still don’t know what damage recent events have caused. I’ve been keeping an eye on the plot over the past five days, and while most of it seems to be carrying on as normal, some things still aren’t totally right.”
“Like what?”
Maggie turned away from me as she fetched two teacups and saucers from the sideboard. “On Wednesday, the day after we met in Meryton, the Bennet sisters and Mr. Collins always go to Mr. and Mrs. Phillips’ house for dinner in the evening.”
“That’s the scene where Wickham tells Elizabeth the lies about his and Mr. Darcy’s history, right?” I said.
“Exactly. I stood in the shadows outside the house to see Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty, Lydia, and Mr. Collins arrive in the carriage, but there was no sign of Mary, and I heard Jane tell their aunt that her middle sister had a chill and their mother had kept her home.”
I frowned. “But Mary missing one dinner doesn’t matter, does it? She’s pretty insignificant to the story.”
“But what worries me iswhyshe was ill. I’ve lived through the narrative many times now, and each time things are exactly the same: Mary is always at that dinner, even if she has no part to play in it, so why did she miss it this time? My guess is that something in the story has changed, either because Darcy spent too long in our world or because you’re here now. And maybe the change is small and insignificant, but what if it’s not?”
“OK, but you said yourself that the story will reset after Elizabeth and Darcy’s wedding,” I said. “Once we get to that point, we’ll go back to the beginning and Darcy will forget I ever existed, Mary won’t catch a chill, and then the plot will play out as it should forevermore.”
