Jane Austen Made Me Do It (35 page)

“To your room, Miss Catherine.” The woman gestured vaguely toward another dimly lit corridor.

“May I ask … Dorothy … why everyone else appears to be staying in the main part of the building? You know, the part with wallpaper and electricity.”
And the bar
, she added under her breath. “And I am, well, here.”

“Certainly ma'am.” Dorothy stopped in front of a heavy wooden door banded with iron and fumbled with a set of keys fastened at her waist that Catherine had not noticed as they were marching through the building. “You specifically reserved the Radcliffe Suite.”

“I did?” Cathy peered at the plaque on the door, which definitely had something inscribed on it. Possibly
Radcliffe
. She shrugged. It had been two months. Perhaps she had, although she couldn't remember anything on the website quite like this.

Dorothy produced a heavy iron key, completely unlike the plastic cards Cathy had seen other guests receiving at the front desk, and fitted it into the equally heavy iron lock in the door.

“Is that my key?” Cathy pictured lugging eight ounces of metal around with her in a bag already weighed down by books, makeup, and various electronic gadgets.

“Strictly speaking, ma'am, it's our key.” As Dorothy turned her back to unlock the door, Cathy rolled her eyes. This woman was straight out of
The Mysteries of Udolpho
or central casting. She was surprised there wasn't a raven perched on her shoulder. Dorothy turned the key, and Cathy winced as it grated against the tumblers.

“Well, yes, of course it's your key. What I meant is, will I need to carry that with me to get back into this room?” This holiday
was seeming like less and less of a good idea, although perhaps it was just the room.

And then Cathy was alone in the Radcliffe Suite, the big iron key clutched in her fist, Dorothy's warning that this part of the abbey was haunted ringing in her ears. Fantastic. Just what she needed to cheer her up. She hefted the key, gauging the weight, and then tossed it onto a low chest, where it landed with a loud clang. Before she left, Dorothy had opened the heavy damask draperies shielding the mullioned window and said that dinner would be served at five o'clock.

Cathy poked at the surprisingly dust-free bed hangings on the large tester bed, checked her watch, and decided that she had time for a nap before dinner. Kicking off her shoes, she crawled onto the gigantic bed without pulling down the covers and lay gazing up at the canopy, hoping that she could sleep despite the jet lag and the time zone change.

She closed her eyes and examined the incident that had sent her to this gloomy corner of England. Broken relationships were not new. Certainly not to her. In fact, at twenty-nine, they were becoming decidedly old. Jeremy had not been the love of her life. She was pretty sure he hadn't been any sort of love. But he was kind and comfortable and easy to be around, and it had come as something of a rude awakening when he had found the love of
his
life and come home to tell her about it. Suddenly, the effort of meeting a new man, starting a new relationship, had seemed exhausting. And the idea that any new relationship, like the ones that had gone before, would be a temporary stop on an endless loop was just more than she could manage. So she had taken her hoarded holiday time and booked a room in a (mostly) renovated abbey. Apparently in the only un-renovated part. Thinking of Jeremy, and life alone, and dreary abbeys, Cathy drifted off to sleep.

Thunder cracked and a flash of lightning illuminated the room, startling Cathy from a sound sleep. She bolted from the bed, trying to figure where she was and what was happening. A second lightning flare revealed—ah yes—the Radcliffe Suite. What time was it? Cathy fumbled for the bed table and turned the light switch. Nothing.

Well, how Gothic was this? Cathy tugged at the waistband of her jeans, moving carefully across the room to the bureau on which she thought she remembered seeing a candle. Shouldn't she be floating around in a filmy nightdress, shivering her way through the rain-shrouded night, to meet her demon lover? Yes. There it was: the candle, not the demon lover. And, beside it, a box of lucifer matches. Once the candle was lit, Cathy squinted at her watch. Two-forty. And obviously
A.M
. So, no dinner.

She sighed and carried the candle toward the tapestry on the far wall that appeared to be moving. A breeze? The demon lover? Mice? Placing the candle on a table, Cathy drew the dingy tapestry aside. What was this? Squinting, she barely made out the outline of a door nearly as old and massive as the door to her room. An ancient padlock hung on the hasp. Well, why not? Cathy reached out and gave it a tug. It clicked open, and she pulled it free. Now what?

Now she had an unlocked door that probably did not lead to a walk-in closet. As sound sleep was obviously not one of the options open to her tonight, Cathy picked up the candle, grabbed the iron ring on the door, and tugged. It swung open with surprising ease, and she crept across the threshold into a small vaulted room containing a dusty old chest and some metal contraption about whose use she thought it best not to inquire. In the far corner was a tapestry, almost identical to the one in her room, and beside it, an identical chair.

Cathy had always had a stout heart, but for some reason, this
duplicate tapestry and chair gave her goose bumps. The chair, though similar to the one in her room, looked as if it was shrouded in cobwebs. Edging closer, Cathy felt her heart give a thump as the mass of cobwebs seem to resolve itself into the shape of a man.

“Good morning.”

Cathy jumped back a step and grabbed at the unidentified iron machine to her right. The cobweb had quite solidified into a rather attractive fair-haired gentleman. “What?” she gasped.

“I said, ‘Good morning.' It is morning, isn't it? It's rather hard to tell in here.” The man cocked his head curiously.

Cathy automatically looked at her watch. “Yes. Well, sort of. It's 2:45
A.M.
”

The man nodded as if she had confirmed something he had known all along, then gestured toward a chair, which Cathy could have sworn was not there when she entered this chamber. “Join me.”

“Well, uh …” That voice: smooth, smoky, very English, very sexy. Nevertheless, Cathy continued to clutch a metal bar on the apparatus. He might sound like Patrick Stewart, but she'd never seen him before.

“Please, I insist.” The gentleman gestured yet again, but this time seemed a bit more imperious.

“Okay,” Cathy said. “All right. Um. Thanks.” And she sat.

The man across from her raised an inquiring eyebrow and inspected her. “I rather thought you'd be in your nightgown,” he said.

“What?” Cathy realized that her side of the conversation seemed to consist of one-syllable words. But, really, how did one react to this sort of thing?

“You are wearing—what are those called?—jeans?” the man observed.

Cathy looked down, strangely pleased to have her notion of
being in a filmy nightgown confirmed. She nodded. “Yes. These are called jeans.” Why didn't he know that?

“And you are called?” the man prompted.

“Er, Cathy,” Cathy responded.

“Ah, a lovely name. Are you Catherine, then?”

Cathy nodded.

“I once loved someone named Catherine,” the man said.

“And you are?” Cathy had decided that if she were to converse with someone who had appeared to come from cobwebs, the least he could do was tell her his name.

“Here I am Henry.”

“Here?” Cathy asked, emboldened by having something to call him. “Do you have other names in different places?”

Henry regarded her with a puzzled expression for several moments before answering. “Lately, I think I have only been here.”

“Not precisely an answer, is it?” Cathy glanced quickly toward the iron instrument, wondering how frank she could be before she was shackled to it. As this scene was so absurd that it could only be a figment of her imagination, she decided not to worry about it.

Henry, or whoever he was in other places, had not moved, but sat staring at her in a rather flattering manner. Had it come to this? Was she flattered to be ogled by a bunch of cobwebs? Things were worse than she thought.

“Are you quite comfortable?” Henry asked.

An odd question considering the circumstances. But if she was imagining this (dreaming perhaps?), she supposed that nothing was too odd. Cathy sat back in her chair and decided to go with the flow for a change. And why not? Look where not going with the flow had landed her. “Quite comfortable,” she said, wriggling into the cushions.

They sat in silence for a few moments, each examining the
other. Her host—Cathy decided that's what she would call him, as he had sort of been in the room when she got there—her host was quite appealing, if rather pale. But that could just have been the effect of candlelight or of his not being real. He had sandy hair and direct blue eyes fringed with thick lashes. Seated, he seemed tall and lean, but not soft. She imagined him on horseback or romping in a sunny garden with a litter of Newfoundland puppies. She felt a strange yearning to romp with them.

“Who are you, really,” Cathy finally asked, “and what are you doing here?”

“I'm Henry,” the pale gentleman repeated, looking a bit nonplussed. “And I think I'm here to meet you.”

Cathy frowned, a look she knew did not enhance her own pale skin and which tended to drive her rather dramatically dark eyebrows up into her brownish bangs. “Is this part of the service?”

“Does it make a difference?” Henry asked.

Did it? Cathy's desire to frolic in the garden with Henry and his puppies immediately went to war with the suspicion that the hotel provided this little extra intrigue to amuse the guests. In that case, would Henry be flirting with the next woman to be suckered into the Radcliffe Suite?

Finally, Cathy shook her head. “At two-thirty in the morning, nothing makes much of a difference.” Then she yawned. Darned jet lag. She had finally met someone interesting, if suspiciously nonexistent, and she was ready to fall asleep again.

“Come here.” Henry patted the seat next to him.

Cathy blinked and shook her head. The band holding her hair back came loose, and a shiny curl fell across her face. She brushed it aside. Come here? When she had entered this—What? Room? Vault? Walk-in closet?—she could have sworn that there was one chair. Now there were obviously two and the second
seemed to have expanded into a loveseat. Well, dreams were not to be questioned. She moved to the loveseat, beside Henry.

“You need to rest,” Henry said in a soft voice, and pulled her head down to his shoulder.

Cathy cuddled in, her eyes drifting shut. “Tell me about yourself,” she murmured.

“No one who had seen me in my infancy would have supposed me born to be a hero,” Henry began.

Cathy smiled. “And are you?”

“I might be,” Henry said. “Much of that depends upon you.”

When Cathy awoke, she was on her bed, still fully clothed and remarkably rested. After a quick shower and fresh clothes, she went immediately to the door behind the tapestry and pulled it open. The room was empty, except for the furniture: the chest, a medieval torture rack to which she had apparently clung, a chair, and a loveseat. An image arose in her mind of her head on Henry's shoulder, of the deep comfort she had felt as he put his arm around her, and she experienced an unexpected pang. It hardly seemed fair. She had met a man who made her feel completely comfortable and, more, cherished, and he was … a figment of her imagination. Didn't that just figure? How many times had she told her friends that the only man worth having was a fictional one?

Cathy ran a comb through her hair, pulled it back with a red ribbon, stuck a credit card and her half-pound key in her jeans pocket, and went in search of breakfast. After several false turns, she finally found the part of the abbey that had moved into the current century and made her way to the dining room.

The place seemed to be full of couples happily toasting each other with orange juice and ordering huge English breakfasts. Several groups took up the large tables in the center of the room. Cathy stood in the doorway and scanned the room for an empty table.

“Hey!” A woman at one of the tables was waving at her. “Looking for a seat? Over here.” She gestured to her right. Cathy smiled gratefully and joined the group.

“I'm Sheila,” her savior said, “and I'd introduce the rest of these rapscallions, but you won't remember their names, so just ask them when you want to know. English breakfast?” she added, pouring orange juice into Cathy's glass. Cathy nodded, aware that she now had an imaginary mother and a group of all-too-real American tourists as well as an imaginary boyfriend. How weird could a holiday get?

“Just get here?” Sheila asked, passing a plate of sausages.

“Last night,” Cathy said, “and it's been kind of, well, odd ever since.”

“Jet lag. Know what you mean. We all arrived from New York a few days ago.” Sheila speared a sausage onto Cathy's plate.

“Maybe it is jet lag.” Cathy hesitated before continuing. “Where are you staying?”

“Here,” Sheila said. “We're all staying here else we couldn't eat in the dining room.”

“No, I mean where are your rooms?” Cathy looked around the table, including the rest of the group in her question.

They all called out room numbers and floors.

“In the refurbished part of the abbey, then?” she asked.

“Well, of course,” one of the men across the table answered. “Where else?”

“Where are you staying?” Sheila asked.

Cathy colored for no reason she could identify. “I … I'm in the Radcliffe Suite.”

“What?” “Never heard of it.” “A suite? How'd you get a suite?” “Know someone in management?” The responses shot out from around the table.