Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict Read Online Free Page B

utensils is only the beginning of the unpleasantness, however. The tooth powder, which when I add a little water becomes a salty, chalky paste, not only makes me gag, but makes my teeth feel like they’re being scoured with Comet. What I wouldn’t do for a minty paste with fluoride. But I think of the doctor’s brown and yellow smile and brush even harder.
    After Barnes leaves me, I check myself out in the mirror and again experience that shock of seeing someone else looking back at me.
    I arrive downstairs at the breakfast table, drawn by the aromas of freshly baked bread and hot chocolate, but I experience a brief, stomach-churning moment when the first thing I notice on the table is a giant ham glistening with fat. Mrs. Mansfield sees the look on my face and motions to a servant to take away the platter. “Your father,” she says and rolls her eyes. “He plans to spend the day in his atelier”—she draws out the word “atelier” with a sneer—“and you know he will not emerge till dinner. Now, what would you like?”
    I think of declining half of what Mrs. Mansfield presses on me to eat, but I decide it’s best not to give her any cause to suspect a relapse. Besides, I figure all that delicious bread and hot chocolate has imaginary calories, another advantage of eating while unconscious.
    While I eat, she talks. Mostly about someone named Mr. Edgeworth. “How refreshing,” she says, “to meet with a man whose manners and person are as agreeable as his fortune.” I gather from Mrs. Mansfield’s monologue that the man in question is a widower who inherited his nearby estate from his aunt several months ago. “As if that sour old prune’s death was not favor enough, it was very obliging of her to leave everything to him.”
    A young, broad-shouldered serving man briefly enters the dining room to deliver some dish or other, as if there isn’t already enough food here to feed the population of twenty dreams. I think I catch him looking at me for longer than is likely proper for a servant, but I am so conscious of wanting to run into my alleged lover that I’m probably just imagining things. Still, as he bustles at the sideboard I check him out. Long legs. Dark brown hair, somewhat unruly despite the ponytail. He glances my way again—intense brown eyes, almost black—and I smile. He spills a basket of rolls all over the sideboard, his eyes darting to Mrs. M, who is too engaged in her monologue to notice. Definitely clumsy enough to be Barnes’s brother.
    He leaves the room, and Mrs. Mansfield asks me what I think of Mr. Edgeworth. I amuse myself by telling her, in perfect ladylike fashion, that I am in perfect agreement with her opinion of him. She opens her mouth as if to speak, her hand, having just dabbed her mouth with a napkin, suspended in its aborted trip back to the table.
    She seems to recover and scrutinizes me, eyes narrowed. “It appears that knock on the head has done your mind some good.” Then she launches into an account of the latest news of my siblings and their apparent concern for my well-being. I manage to glean from her talk that I have one sister, recently married to some rich guy and living in another county—“At least one of my daughters does not live only to disoblige me,” she says while buttering her toast—and a single brother studying at Oxford, the mere mention of whom brings a softness to her voice and face that is almost maternal. I think I can guess who her favorite is.
    Finally Mrs. Mansfield has exhausted her scintillating supply of family news and encourages me to “take a turn in the shrubbery.”
    I’ll take anything I can get if it means getting away from her. This is also my first chance to be alone, other than in my bedroom, since I’ve found myself in this endless dream. Granted, I’ve had long dreams before, and one’s sense of time is always questionable while sleeping. But I’ve never had a dream with such vivid details before. I can smell the