“You’re her,” he said. “From the rehearsal the other night.”
Jane appraised his face. He was right; they had danced together. Her heart thumped.
“What a shurprise,” he said. He stumbled. “This must be awkward for you.”
“I do not follow your meaning, sir,” Jane said. She reminded herself of how much she disliked him.
“You know, if you didn’t want to go out with me, you could have said up front. No skin off my nose. You didn’t need to stand me up!” He grabbed the doorknob for balance and almost toppled over.
“Jane, this is my brother, Fred,” Sofia said. “Fred, this is my . . . colleague, Jane.”
Jane and Fred stared at each other. Jane felt her cheeks heating once more. She grabbed the bedsheets and wrapped them around herself.
“Okay. Show’s over,” Sofia said. She grabbed Fred’s arm. “Fred, you can continue this party alone in your room.” She shovelled him out the door, then turned back to Jane. “Are you okay?”
Jane nodded.
“He didn’t really interfere with you, did he? He doesn’t seem the type.”
“Goodness, no. He merely surprised me. I am well, thank you.”
“Good. Sorry about that. Fred’s a civilian, not an actor. He won’t play along.”
Jane gave Sofia a confused look.
“Don’t do the whole ‘I’m Jane Austen’ thing with him,” Sofia said. “Just trust me on this one. He didn’t vomit on you, I hope?”
Jane shook her head and Sofia wished her good night. Jane lay back down in the bed and stared at the ceiling. The obnoxious man—the one who had refused to dance with her, the one who had annoyed and teased her—was Sofia’s brother. He lived in this house! She forced her mind to stop focusing on how much this aggravated her and tried to sleep.
JANE STOOD IN the bathroom the next morning in astonishment. Kensington Palace apparently had an indoor privy, but to see running water with her own two eyes was enough to make her admire the water closet for forty minutes. Sofia had departed for her profession earlier that morning and left her with some clean clothes and instructions for using the waterfall that spilled over the bathtub. She called it a “shower.”
“This is hot, and this is cold,” Sofia had said, pointing to the taps. She turned them on to demonstrate. Steaming water poured from above. Jane had stared at the marvel before her.
Now she attempted the feat herself. She turned the cold tap to the left and admired the icy stream that spouted down. She had seen taps before, in water pumps, but the water came out of them in blobs and drips of yellow, nothing compared to the elegant crystal stream that now poured forth from the silver head. Next, she turned the hot tap to the left, in increments, as Sofia had showed her. She placed her fingers in the stream and felt the water grow warm. She turned the tap more to the left and the room filled with steam.
In her house in Sydney Place, her family possessed a bathtub that Margaret filled every Sunday with water she boiled in a pot. Jane’s father, as head of the house, used it first, then her mother, then Cassandra. Jane, as the youngest, used the water last. By the time she stepped in, the water ran beige. Now Jane looked up at the steaming, pristine waterfall that she had all to herself. She tested the water once more. It felt warmer than anything she knew. She inhaled, then removed her pink nightgown and laid it over the chair. She stood in the room naked and imagined herself luxuriating like Cleopatra about to bathe under a goat-milk waterfall. She climbed into the bathtub and stood under the water. The hot water bubbled and rolled over her back. Her shoulder blades prickled. She placed her arm on the wall as the water tumbled over her. “Oh,” she gasped. “That is obscene.” She stepped back from the water and stood in the freezing air. She shivered but did not return to the water. If she went back, she might decide to stay there forever.
The doorknob shook. The bathroom door cracked open. “This room is occupied!” Jane shrieked in a blind panic. She covered herself in horror and turned to the back wall. She tried to reach for the towel Sofia had showed her, but it sat on the rail out of reach. She considered turning and lunging for it but that risked exposure of her front.
“Oh, yikes. Sorry,” said a man’s voice. Fred! Sofia’s brother backed out of the doorway almost as soon as he opened it, shutting the door. Jane leapt from the shower and inspected the doorknob. A brass dial sat underneath the handle, which she turned, and the lock clicked shut. She tested the door three times. It remained locked. She sat on the floor, mortified. No man had ever seen her shoulder, let alone anything else. Jane caught her breath and began to dress.
She allowed herself a momentary departure from the horrors of her embarrassment to ogle with confusion at the clothes Sofia had given her to wear: they were a man’s shirt and trousers. She pulled them on; they felt odd on her skin. Women wore trousers now, not for mumming in a play but as everyday garb. Did women act as men now? How would people treat her, dressed this way? She might own three estates by now, earning twenty thousand a year. The thought bewitched her until she heard a chair shift across the floor in the room outside, and the reality of her present, crushing embarrassment returned. Fred. The horrid man had managed to upend her comfort once again. She had hoped he would have absented himself from the house, if not the country, in preemptive chivalry, but instead he sat right there.
She opened the door and located him. He sat with his head slumped on the dining table. Jane crept through the doorway and
