Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library by Sarah Waters Page B

her wrapt withal. He wandered through or peeked into the small rooms alone, bending under the low door frames, inhaling the comforting smell of wood and ancient wallpaper. The floorboards creaked and squeezing himself down the narrow staircase he felt huge, like a bear, oversized and clumsy amongst all these dainty artefacts and impossibly tiny period clothes.
    He checked his watch. It was time. It felt like he’d just been whacked with a baseball bat in the back of the knees.
    So many unknowns: would she have seen his notice in those Jane Austen online newsletters? And if she had, would she come? And if she came – would she still be free? He hadn’t thought further than that.
    Back downstairs, he heard his mother back in the front entry room.
    ‘The thing is,’ she was saying, ‘my son has a deep, dark secret.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Yes – he loves Jane Austen! He was always a great reader. I think he read his first when he was about fourteen. We were on some camping trip in the rain and he’d read everything including the camping stove instruction manual – excuse me, it’s just a cough – anyway, he got so desperate he picked up my copy of Persuasion. He was so embarrassed to be found reading it, poor boy.’
    Persuasion. Where his story had started.
    Chris, aged seventeen, usually ran straight past the glass-fronted Starbucks on his way to the trail path through the woods, but that morning in late August, something – or rather someone – made him stop and stare inside.
    A person – no longer a girl but hardly old enough to be called a woman – sat curled in the big armchair in the corner, wearing a simple white summer dress – and reading Persuasion. She even looked like the writer – petite, intelligent, impish. Prettier, though – but didn’t everyone say that the one surviving likeness of Jane Austen didn’t do her justice? Maybe this was how she’d really looked.
    His heart rate spiked and he’d hardly started his run. Chris is rather timid, they said in his school reports, like it was a sin. He stared inside, wanted so much to go in, to go up and talk to her, maybe ask her about the book. He’d read it too, hadn’t he? And loved it. She wouldn’t find that odd. Surely.
    But he didn’t. He was too scared. He took one last look and pounded along the sidewalk towards the woods.
    By the time he started back at school the following month he must have wandered into Starbucks about twenty times in the hope of seeing the girl again. He carried Persuasion in his backpack and was all set with his master plan to sit himself near her and ‘coincidentally’ produce the same book as hers. But she never showed – he’d blown his chance.
    ‘We’d like you all to welcome our new English teacher,’ the principal announced at the first assembly in September. ‘Miss Anderson.’
    And there she was – the girl from the coffee shop. She looked 19, but she had to be 23 – minimum. And she was his English teacher.
    Obviously, he told himself to forget it.
    But never had he looked forward to a class so much – and never had he wanted more for time to slow down during it. Miss Jean Anderson was sweet and clever and funny and spoke with a soft English accent. Like Jane Austen – whom she adored. She wore summer dresses at first, and then in fall exchanged them for long wool skirts and lace-up boots, and a purple velvet cloak that was totally impractical in the Vancouver rain but he loved to see her in it. He feared others would mock her for her eccentricity but nobody did. She was English, after all, only been in Canada since college, so that seemed to explain it. Everybody loved her.
    As did he. But differently from the rest. She was six years his senior and his teacher, and to make any kind of approach to her seemed to him to be not just preposterous and out of the question, but to be a gross imposition on her sweetness, her sunny innocence.
    But he couldn’t hide his feelings altogether. He sought extra