Humphrey came up onstage and sat cross-legged with his face in his palms. “I don’t know. In a way I’m glad that C.J. wanted to get right up and try the new ending because, in fact, now that I’ve seen it on its feet, it diminishes the energy that we’ve been building up through the whole Jane/Tom confrontation. I thought the new way would be a more dramatic moment. But maybe it’s not.” He sighed theatrically. “I’m sorry if I wasted everyone’s time.”
“Don’t be ludicrous, Humphrey.” Beth ruffled the playwright’s hair and gave his shoulders a brief rub. “The upside about working with a living playwright is that it’s all a work in progress until the curtain falls on the final performance.”
Elsie made a production number out of clearing her throat. “Don’t you guys go all improvisational on me when we get into the run,” she warned, shooting the actors a threatening look. “You’ll be a stage manager’s nightmare.”
Humphrey and Beth bent their heads together for a brief conference.
“Okay,” Beth said, emerging from their tête-à-tête. “Humphrey doesn’t think that his suggestion worked after all. For the time being, at any rate. And at the moment I’m inclined to agree with him.”
C.J. raised her hand to offer a further contribution. “I’m figuring this out as I speak here. You don’t want the audience to view the retrenching as forcing Jane to give up her writing. Because she had no way of knowing that she was going to, in effect, suffer writer’s block once she got to Bath. So get this,” C.J. continued, her urgency to convince the playwright and director increasing with every word. “Tom leaves. I say my line alone onstage, realizing the magnitude of the change in my life as I know it. Then I survey the room, taking a last look at what I shall be leaving. Then it occurs to me that I need to pack, and the first things I would pack—because I am, after all, Jane Austen—are my writing implements, which are sitting right out there on the table. So I pick up a carpetbag and cross to the table, open the bag, and place my scribbling paraphernalia—the manuscript, the pens—and the tapestry I’m working on in the bag. I take my deep breath while I’m standing just above the table, say the lines about going to Bath softly instead of resolutely—as though I’ve made my peace with the retrenching—then cross upstage to the door, and exit.”
The writer and director exchanged looks. “Let’s try it,” Beth announced.
“Can we just run it now?” C.J. asked, trying to sound casual. “I want to make sure the timing is right.”
Elsie looked at her watch, then at the director. “Up to you, boss. It’s 10:45 and we’ve got an Equity break coming up in fifteen minutes.”
“Let’s do it,” Beth said. “All right, C.J., let’s see your idea in motion.”
C.J. checked her props, ensuring that all the medicine envelopes were tucked away into the carpetbag, then brought the bag onstage and placed it on the floor near Jane’s writing table. She reinventoried her costume accessories to make sure that she had everything she needed to travel to Bath. Having the last line of the act back was a blessing. Now if she could convince Beth and Humphrey to keep it that way, she might be home free, in a manner of speaking. This time it would be no strange twist of fate, no surreal accident. She was making a considered choice between her own world and 1801. De Montfort had closed; the portal from the other side was no longer open to her now. If C.J. did manage to return to Bath, she stayed there. No Broadway debut; no stage career; no rent-stabilized three-bedroom two-bath Manhattan apartment; no toilets, tampons, or television. No Internet, and a permanent farewell to her twenty-first-century friends and colleagues. She was effectively and irrevocably sacrificing everything she had ever known and strived for to try to save the life of the woman who had rescued hers. To remain in this century knowing there was something she might have done for Lady Dalrymple was unthinkable; she would feel guilty about it to her own grave.
C.J. was willingly choosing the waning Age of Enlightenment over the thriving Information Age. But back in 1801 were new friends, a new love, and someone who needed her more than any of them—and more than C.J. needed to be a Broadway star. For Lady Dalrymple, it was a matter of life and death—and because of that, C.J. was choosing life.
She delivered the act’s curtain line. And this time, as she exited the stage and passed through Ralph’s newly repaired doorway, C.J. found herself drowning in a pool of blackness. Finally, she thought, both trembling and relieved. It was working like a charm.
Chapter Twenty
Wherein our heroine returns to Bath in the nick of time and is reunited with an old friend, though spies abound in an enemy camp; Lady Dalrymple enjoys increasingly restored health, but a morning’s excursion is marred by a rumormonger.
LADY DALRYMPLE’S BEDCHAMBER was a somber sight. Good God . . . how long have I been gone?
C.J. elbowed past the dowager’s visitors in a highly unseemly fashion for a gently bred young lady. The countess, pale and weak, lay against a sea of white linen, her eyes half closed. But upon seeing C.J. again, she found a renewed energy. “Come here, Niece,” she beckoned.
C.J. approached the bedside and gave her “aunt” a warm hug. How much more frail
