Jane raised the paper in front of her person, the way Mama did when the candle burned low and her eyes were tired. Her eyes moved to the starting point of the demented scrawl. The first letter was T for certain. What was the next letter—a? Yes.
“Take,” read Jane aloud. The first word. The next was simpler. It was but two letters, each being different enough in shape to make them decipherable: “m-e. Me. Take me.”
Jane read on. The next word was to, and the word after, my. The following one was a gathering of splotches. Jane could not decipher the number of letters, let alone their meaning. The middle blob was her clue. It curved at the top. Her choices were thus r, q, o, p, n . . . It was n!
“One,” Jane read. She smiled. She was a fearsome knight, slaying the dragon of bad penmanship, one letter at a time. The next word began and ended as the first. It was true.
She identified the final word with ease. “Take me to my one true love,” Jane read aloud. She sat back and smiled, satisfied to have broken the code of blobs. She grimaced at the mawkish choice of words. Then the room grew dark and snow fell. Jane gasped; the flakes fell from the ceiling, from inside the cottage. Then the room whooshed and with a crack like thunder, Jane dissolved into particles and a breeze that entered the cottage blew her away.
Part Two
Chapter Nine
Sofia Wentworth stood in the wings of the Bath community hall and blew into a brown paper bag.
She looked down at her empire-line Regency costume and cringed. Blue and brown stripes bloomed from her body like a rancid flower. An ostrich feather protruded from her head so far it brushed the ceiling. Altogether, she resembled a vindictive peacock, one of those disheveled kinds who hides in the bushes, then attacks brunch revelers in a park and has to be put down.
She grabbed the brown paper bag once more and inhaled.
A runner jumped into the backstage area and opened a stage door. “Ms. Wentworth, are you in here? Rehearsal is due to start,” he called out in a panicked voice.
Sofia hid behind a theater drape. It might have been beneath the dignity of one of the world’s biggest movie stars to cower behind a pile of curtains, but it was the appropriate tactic for the moment.
The runner gave up looking and returned to the hall.
Sofia sucked more air from the bag. She blew out again. She cursed her therapist, who had suggested this in a soothing voice as a fix for any panic attacks that might rear their head. Unfortunately, a brown paper bag was not quite enough for the moment she was experiencing. A dram of absinthe and some tranquilizers might have hit closer to the mark.
She fetched her phone from the pocket of her period costume and dialed Max Milson. “Max, I’m afraid I can no longer do the movie,” she said when he answered.
“What’s wrong?” her agent replied.
“I’m unwell. I’m pregnant,” she said. She could only imagine his expression.
“Congratulations!” he said automatically. “When are you due?”
She’d not thought of that. “May seventh?” she said.
“That’s . . . eleven months away,” Max replied.
Damn. Forgot to carry the one.
“Sofia, what’s going on?” His weary, fatherly tone betrayed the effects of the twelve long years they’d worked together.
Sofia looked down and winced. “My outfit. It’s hideous.”
“In what way?”
“It does my figure no favors.”
“It’s a period film,” Max said. “Those are the costumes. What did you think they’d put you in, a bikini?”
“No. Merely, I didn’t expect the past to be so . . . comical.”
“You’re playing Mrs. Allen, Sofia. She’s supposed to be comical.”
He was right. The production designer had fulfilled her brief in good faith and designed a costume that made Sofia look ridiculous. Sofia had known the character was a silly woman going in and cursed herself now for thinking this would be okay. Indeed, saying those witty lines of Austen’s, dressed in this ludicrous way, she’d likely steal every scene she was in. To the uninitiated, this sounded great. But to Sofia, this posed a problem.
She was used to stealing the scene—she had built a career on doing just that—but she stole the scene by making every straight man in the audience (and, likely, a few of the women) want her. She did this with such ease it had become her calling card, the reason she was cast in films, the reason studios shifted production schedules to suit her. Her way put bottoms on seats, it drew crowds in, it turned turkeys into profit-makers. Now, she would be stealing the scene for all the wrong reasons. She would be the butt of the joke. Audiences had never seen this side of her, and they wouldn’t like it. They wanted her to arouse them, they wanted to sit down and live a fantasy for two hours, and she was about to dump a bucket of cold water on their dreams. Everyone else would tell her she was being silly, but Sofia knew that she was good for one thing only in this business—to look hot. Walking out there looking like this would be a mistake.
Fifteen years had passed since she
