Attempting Elizabeth by Jessica Grey Page B

the hilt, asking every few minutes if I was warm enough, complimenting me on the sparkle in my eye or the blush in my cheeks. I suppose if I was really a young, newly engaged girl, my head would have been turned by all of his nonsense, but to me it really did seem just like nonsense. He and Mrs. Younge still had to convince Georgiana that it was a brilliant plan to elope without informing her brother of her intentions and surprise Darcy with news of their marriage. I was actually very curious to find out how they were going to convince me. Even though she was young, parentless, and under the influence of an obviously unsuitable chaperone, with a handsome man paying attention to her as a woman for the first time, it still struck me as odd that she’d agree to run off with him. Elopements just did not happen in her class during this time period. And if they did they were severely looked down upon.
    Darcy was a proud man. I can’t believe he hadn’t instilled in Georgiana the worth of her fortune or family. It could be that he just didn’t believe her to be grown up enough to be the object of fortune hunters? That seemed like a huge lapse on his part. Fifteen is young, but nothing is off limits when the girl has a thirty thousand pound fortune. Even I knew that, and I was from a completely different century.
    But then maybe I’ve just read more novels than Fitzwilliam Darcy.
    We walked along with my only responses to Wickham’s overly solicitous attitude being a few modest laughs and my almost perfected mock-innocent eyelash flutter thrown in here and there for good measure. I was still wrestling with Georgiana’s naïveté. It was beginning to frustrate me. I realized I had no basis to guess how Wickham was going to manage to sway me to his will.
    Austen just sort of skates over that part of the story. Actually, everything I was experiencing now didn’t even happen as storyline in the novel. It’s more like a flashback sequence. It was technically before the main storyline. This whole episode is just related to Elizabeth by Darcy in a few paragraphs of a letter. He was trying to lay out for her Wickham’s true nature and felt that the only way was to tell the truth about what had happened to his young sister—trusting Elizabeth not to ruin Georgiana’s reputation by spreading the story around. I’d always thought it showed a great deal of respect on Darcy’s part for Lizzy’s character and discretion, even though in that disastrous first proposal he made it clear he thought her family had no such discretion.
    The letter. A light bulb went off in my head with a blinding flash. A very disconcerting, troubling, blinding flash.
    I had been reading Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth when I fell asleep last night. Or maybe it wasn’t last night, maybe it was only about an hour or so ago—I’d been here for about that long. Tori had dropped me off after we’d seen Ashley at the pub, I‘d cried myself silly, changed into my ratty sweats, had a glass of wine and started reading Pride and Prejudice at the first proposal scene and had drifted off during Darcy’s explanation of the events in Ramsgate.
    Which is where I now literally, physically was.
    Okay, perhaps not physically. There was still the possibility that I really was nuts. Does the time in hallucinations run quite so linear? I couldn’t speed it up by wishing. Having absolutely no previous experience with hallucinations, I had no idea if they were something that happened minute for actual minute or not.
    But why pick to hallucinate as Georgiana? Why wouldn’t my sad, scrambled little brain choose to be Lizzy, as she was reading the letter? Even insane I’d have to prefer to be Lizzy. If I was honest I’d have to admit I’d wanted to be her for most of my life, ever since reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time when I was twelve.
    And here was the kicker—the realization that I’d been reading Darcy’s explanation of the aborted elopement right