Jane Bites Back (2 page)

Jane sent Lucy a silent thank-you.
She gets it
, thought Jane.
It never was about Darcy
.

“All I know is that the more people there are who love Mr. Darcy, the bigger my royalty checks are,” Melodie said. “I could care less about the rest of it.”

You mean you
couldn’t
care less
, Jane resisted the urge to say out loud. Not only was Melodie Gladstone without dignity, she had appalling grammar.

“We have a few books left in the storage room,” said Lucy. “Would you mind signing them?”

Melodie rolled her eyes. “I suppose not,” she said. “I wish you’d had them out here for the reading, but someone is sure to snatch them up. I hear I’m one of the top five holiday sellers this year. I’d be number one if it wasn’t for that book about that stupid blind kid and her dog.”

Lucy retreated to the stockroom and returned with half a dozen copies of
Waiting for Mr. Darcy
, which she set on the table in front of the author. “When you’re done I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” she offered.

Jane, who had been counting the cash drawer, looked up. “Lucy, I can drive Miss Gladstone back to her hotel,” she said. “Why don’t you go home?”

Lucy glanced at Melodie, who was signing the last of the books. “You’re sure?” she asked Jane.

“I don’t care which one of you drives me,” said Melodie, snapping the cap back on the pen she’d used to sign the books. “But let’s get going. I’ve got to be on a plane for Columbus or Detroit or some other shit hole first thing in the morning.”

“I’m quite sure,” Jane told Lucy. “You go on. I’ll see you in the morning. Thank you for all of your work on the event.”

“No problem,” said Lucy. She turned to Melodie. “Thank you for coming,” she said. “It was nice to meet you.”

The woman nodded but said nothing. After a short pause during which it became obvious that Melodie had no intention of returning Lucy’s thanks, Lucy shot Jane a look. “See you tomorrow,” she said as she turned and walked to the front door.

“I’m ready to go,” said Melodie, standing and putting on her coat before Lucy had even shut the door behind her.

Jane looked at the woman and smiled. “Well then,” she said. “Let’s tarry no longer in the parlor of joy.”

Melodie stared at her.

“My car is out back,” said Jane. “I’ll just get my coat.”

A few minutes later they were sitting in Jane’s beat-up Volvo wagon, waiting for the heat to kick in. Melodie rubbed her hands together. “How old is this thing, anyway?” she asked dismissively

“You should never ask a lady her age,” Jane said primly, earning a peculiar look from Melodie.

She put the car into gear and pulled out of the lot. As they drove through the snowy streets of downtown Brakeston, Melodie looked out the window. “This place is so boring,” she said. “How can you stand living here?”

“I find its unassuming character charming,” Jane answered.

“If I had to live in a place like this, I would absolutely
die
,” Melodie continued. “When I saw my tour itinerary I was like, Brakeston? Where the hell is Brakeston?”

“Lucy went to a lot of trouble to get you here,” Jane informed her. “And I think the turnout was quite impressive, don’t you?”

Melodie shrugged. “It was nothing compared to the New York reading,” she said. “We had to turn people away from that one.”

“Oh, the horror,” said Jane sympathetically.

“Right,” Melodie agreed. “Anyway, I guess I’m probably the biggest thing to ever come through here, so at least I added a little excitement to those people’s lives.”

“We’re ever so thankful you agreed to grace us,” said Jane. “I’m sure we’ll be talking about it for months.”

“I just can’t wait to get back to civilization,” Melodie said, sighing.

That’s it
, Jane thought. She suddenly turned off the main street and headed down a quiet side lane.

“The hotel is that way,” Melodie protested.

“This is a shortcut,” said Jane curtly.

At the end of the street she pulled the car to the side and stopped in front of a house that blinked red and green with Christmas lights. On the lawn a life-size Mary and Joseph stared at the car. Behind them Santa, Frosty, and Rudolph gazed rapturously down at the baby Jesus asleep in his plastic manger. Giant candy canes provided a backdrop for three elves bearing gaily wrapped packages.

“Where are we?” Melodie asked. “What are we doing here?”

“I just need to take care of a little errand,” said Jane. She unfastened her seat belt and leaned toward her passenger, who was too busy looking at the bizarre Nativity scene to notice. As Jane opened her mouth the two fangs secreted in her upper jaw slipped from their bony sheaths and clicked into place. When her lips connected with Melodie’s neck, Melodie jumped and gave a little scream, which was cut short as Jane pushed the young woman’s face against her own coat and held it there as the blood began to flow past her lips.

Chapter 2

A
LONG HOT SHOWER HELPED REMOVE
M
ELODIE’S SMELL FROM
Jane’s body. Afterward she wrapped herself in a soft robe and went downstairs. Walking into the kitchen, she stepped on something soft and wet. When she turned the lights on she saw a small, dead bird lying on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Its light brown feathers were speckled with blood.

Tom, the black-and-white cat she’d adopted several years before, appeared and wound himself around her feet, purring as Jane bent to pick up the bird. She shuddered at the way the creature’s head lolled limply in her palm.

“Must you bring them inside?” she asked Tom as she deposited
the bird in the trash can and washed her hands in the sink. She poured some dry food into Tom’s bowl and set it on the floor.

The cat trotted over and ate hungrily, crunching the bits between his teeth and watching Jane out of the corner of his eye.

“Horrid beast,” said Jane, scratching him behind the ear. She then turned her attention to the mail, which she’d brought in from the hall. Mostly it was junk, but at the bottom of the pile was a letter. Reading the return address, Jane felt her heart speed up. She ran her finger beneath the flap and pulled out the enclosed sheet of paper.

Jane crumpled the letter and tossed it to the floor. Tom eyed it, as if considering whether or not to bat it under the table, but did not stop eating. Jane opened a bottle of merlot, took a glass from the cabinet and a chocolate bar from one of the drawers, and left both the paper and the cat in the kitchen as she went back upstairs to her bedroom. She poured a glass of wine and set it on the bedside table. Then she pulled open a drawer in the nightstand and removed from it a small notebook. Turning to a page somewhere
near the middle of the book, she added Jessica Abernathy’s name to the first unoccupied line, which in this case was almost exactly one-third of the way down, just below the name of Barlow McInerney of Accordion Press.

Beside Jessica’s name Jane wrote the number 116. “One hundred and sixteen rejection letters,” she muttered. “I’d say that makes the opinion unanimous.”

She flipped through the pages of the notebook until she came to the first one. She hadn’t been able to submit the manuscript to her usual publisher, John Murray, of course—that would have rather inconveniently given things away. So she’d been forced to seek elsewhere. At the top of the list of editors who had rejected her manuscript was one Geoffrey Martin Pomerantz of Pomerantz & Joygulb Publishers, London. Jane had no recollection of Mr. Pomerantz (or, for that matter, Mr. Joygulb). This lack of recognition, however, could be excused in light of the fact that her submission to them had taken place nearly two centuries before. Had the manuscript really been kicking around for that long? she wondered. She supposed it had, although that was difficult to imagine.

Tom, licking his chops, padded into the room and leapt onto the bed, where he settled himself on Jane’s lap and immediately went to sleep.

“Perhaps, Tom, it’s time to consider the possibility that I can no longer write,” said Jane.

Tom, opening one golden eye for only a second before closing it again, said nothing.

Jane closed the notebook and replaced it in the drawer. She told herself, as she had done many times before, that she should just throw the manuscript out. Having it around was depressing. But there was something masochistically satisfying about documenting
her rejection. She didn’t save the actual letters—they would take up too much space, and anyway they would eventually fall apart from age—but the names she kept. Most of the people whose rejections she’d logged were dead now, which gave Jane some small amount of satisfaction. Yet the sting of remaining unpublished never fully faded.

“I’m a writer,” she announced to Tom. “That’s what I
do
. I
‘write.”
She paused a moment, then sighed. “Well, I
used
to write,” she corrected herself.

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.