Jane Bites Back_ A Novel - Michael Thomas Ford [5]
The truth was she hadn’t written anything new since finishing the manuscript that had garnered 116 rejections. She had revised it slightly over the years, but for the most part it remained the novel she’d finished almost two centuries before. She’d had to abandon The Brothers—which her family had retitled Sanditon; she still wasn’t sure she was entirely happy about that—when she left Chawton cottage for the last time, but this manuscript she had kept a secret. She’d attempted to write new things since, of course, but the weight of the unpublished book on her thoughts had proved to be too great a block.
She suddenly felt very tired.
How long had she had the bookstore? She counted back. It was, what, eight years? No, nine. She’d moved to Brakeston after two decades spent in Phoenix, a city she’d chosen precisely because it was blessed with the polar opposite of the weather of her English childhood. But twenty years of unrelenting heat and sunlight had finally gotten to her, not for the reasons one might expect (the sun was not nearly as devastating to vampires as popular mythology would have the public believe) but because she was naturally fair. She turned pink after less than an hour in the sun, and never had been able to obtain even the semblance of a tan. The best she could manage was a kind of boiled puffiness, like a lobster or a cabbage. It was not a particularly attractive look.
For years she had tried to mimic the effects of time, dyeing her hair and simulating lines and liver spots. But there was only so much she could do, and besides, it was tiresome, so somewhere along the line (she vaguely remembered the year 1881, although it may have been 1900, which, being the start of the new century—and the year in which she had abandoned Europe for America—would have been a logical time to decide such a thing) she had given up trying and instead simply moved whenever her lack of aging began to be remarked upon. And so after many moves she had come to this town in upstate New York, choosing it more or less at random because she liked the sound of it.
Nine years, she thought. That gives me about ten or so more before I have to think about it. It was possible she could get even more time out of Brakeston. After all, wasn’t forty the new thirty? She’d heard that somewhere recently. Clearly, whoever had said it hadn’t been forty-one for the past two centuries. “It’s more like forty is the new one hundred and ninety-two,” she informed the cat, who was curled up on her stomach asleep.
She drank the rest of the wine and polished off the chocolate while flipping through the channels on the television, watching bits and pieces of different shows until finally the only things on were infomercials for vegetable peelers and fat-burning pills. Then, her head dulled by the wine, she felt her eyes close.
Not asleep yet not quite awake, she traveled back to a night long ago. She was standing on a veranda, looking out at a lake. It was twilight, and it was raining. A thunderstorm shook the world around her, and the waves on the lake were violent and angry. Thunder rent the air and lightning split the sky. She was afraid but also exhilarated.
Nobody knew where she was. She had told them she was visiting a friend, but in truth she had never met the man in whose house she now stood. Not in person, anyway. But they had exchanged many long letters, and through those she had come to know him. When he’d suggested she visit his house on Lake Geneva she had hesitated only a moment before agreeing.
She felt free. Away from her home and her family she could do as she liked. That she had come to the house of one of the most scandalous figures of her time only added to her excitement. And he was just as beautiful and stimulating as she had imagined him to be.
“What are you doing out here?”
She turned to see him watching her. His dark hair was swept back, and his eyes seemed to stare directly into her soul. When