Page 29 of The Austen Affair

I am still livid when I arrive in the dining room for breakfast in the morning. It takes everything in me to sit down at the table and use basic manners instead of gripping full handfuls of sausage and whipping them into Hugh’s slutty, vegetarian face.

It’s not just me. The mood is, shall we say, distinctly off with everybody.

Mr. Balfour is quieter than usual, seeming poorly.

His arthritic hands struggle to grip the silverware, so Hugh takes quick action in cutting up the old man’s serving of eggs and bacon for him.

Mr. Balfour gives Hugh a wide, happy smile and mutters something about “the comforts of a good son” before quickly slumping back into silence for the remainder of the meal.

Meanwhile Hugh, whenever not assisting the family patriarch, is sullen.

Although we did not drink heavily the day before, with his pallor, bloodshot eyes, and disheveled hair, anyone might have been forgiven for assuming he was suffering from the world’s worst hangover.

I fantasize about grabbing a pair of cymbals, Looney Tunes style, and slamming them repeatedly together near his ears.

Then there are the Crawfords. Cecilia is stubbornly refusing to make eye contact with anyone, whereas William grips his utensils so tightly I almost worry he’ll bend the silver in half.

Finally, there’s the unfortunate state of young George.

I know that in this period, people assumed that standing in the rain could give you a cold.

I’ll confess to not being sure that holds up, scientifically speaking.

But looking at the kid, sniffling and coughing into his eggs like a Victorian chimney sweep, I can see how people might go ahead and connect those dots.

Aunt Fanny fusses over George, checking his forehead for a fever every two minutes.

I glance over to Hugh, who has his face buried in his hands.

Finally, I have to ask, and scoot my heavy chair a bit along down the table.

I wonder if he’ll take the opportunity to be honest with me about his nighttime activities, or he’ll just deflect and lie.

“What’s up?” I ask, batting my eyelashes innocently. “Do you have a migraine or something?”

Hugh looks at me like a panicked fox caught in a trap. His voice is hoarse as he whispers to me, “I’d like to say yes… but I’m fairly certain the standard treatments for headaches are leeches and opium, so I’m going to give an emphatic no. ”

I’d sure like to see someone apply leeches to Hugh Balfour right now. He got on my case about one conversation with Mr. Armstrong, and then what did he get up to with Cecelia at night? I’ll tell you what: hypocrisy!

I watch as his dark, broody eyes track to Cecelia, picking daintily at her plate. His gaze lingers there, and I see obvious, telegraphed guilt shadow his features.

The effect is immediate: my stomach plummets.

Heat rises in my cheeks. Is it just that she reminds him of Charlotte, the almost-fiancée he clearly still loves?

Why else should he hop into bed with Miss Crawford, whom he doesn’t even know…

when he could have done that with me instead ?

a little voice in the back of my head adds.

The voice in the back of my head obviously has no self-respect.

Scowling, I redirect my own eyeline away from pretty, pretty Cecelia.

In consequence, I end up staring straight into the face of William Crawford, who, oddly enough, is staring boldly right back.

A smile stretches across his face, revealing a charming, toothy smile, and he raises his eyebrows at me.

Eventually, Mr. Crawford takes pity on us all and breaks the dreadful silence.

“I thought perhaps that as Aunt Fanny has invited us to stay as guests until your approaching nuptials, that we all might find some rousing activity to pass the time. I have just come from the jolliest house party in which a spirited attempt at acting was made. What say we all pull out an old jape of Shakespeare’s and have a go at it? ”

“How can anyone think of having fun when I’m dying ?” George asks, his high-pitched wail made nasal from the cold.

Mr. Crawford sends a warm smile down the way toward George, who has now lain his head down directly on the tablecloth in stuffed-up misery.

I wonder if George might be in some small part imitating his “older brother” Hugh in this morning’s dramatics, or if he’s always been a somewhat odd child with a gift for broad comedy.

Either way, his quirkiness is only endearing him to me more—he might be Hugh’s ancestor, but the sins of the great-great-great-grandson shouldn’t be blamed on the great-great-great-great toddler grandfather.

Plus, I’ve always hoped that when I’m a mom, my kid will be this harmless brand of weird and loud and mouthy.

That’s the kind of kid I was, after all.

Happily, my mom knew to embrace my weirdo tendencies, not to repress them.

That’s how we ended up each other’s best friends.

If I started a joke, Mom would always pick it up and run with it.

We were a beautiful, strange little team.

“Perhaps by the time we’ve finished rehearsals,” Mr. Crawford tells George, “you, my good lad, will be back to your old self and ready to be vastly entertained by our meager efforts.”

This is not the answer George wanted, it appears, because his little scowl only deepens.

But I think I know what he hopes to hear.

I reach my hand diagonally across the table to squeeze his little palm—it is a bit clammy—and assure him with mock solemnity, “And if you do not recover from this fearsome illness, we shall perform Shakespeare at your deathbed to give you some measure of comfort in your waning hours.”

Miss Crawford gives a prissy little cough of disturbed indignation, and Aunt Fanny looks at me, baffled, but George’s face lights up. His hand slips away from mine so that he can break into delighted applause at my suggestion.

Hugh, who’d still had his face buried in his hands, now lets them slip away so that he can regard me and George, bemused.

George stands up with some ceremony from his oversized chair and scrambles over to sit in my lap. “Will you come read me a story upstairs?”

I assure him I would.

“And will you do silly voices?”

“I will,” I promise, stroking the top of his dark, curly head.

“Good,” George says, settling happily against my chest, arms wrapped tight against me. I can feel my heart rate slow with contentment.

It’s nice to stow myself away from the adults of Highground today, at least for a little while.

I feel so unaccountably angry in Hugh and Cecelia’s presence, but sweet, oddball George hasn’t done anything wrong, so at least when I’m reading aloud to him, my resentment melts away.

I fetch a marbled hardback of Sense and Sensibility from the library and act it out for him while he reclines on a mountain of pillows—he pretends to be totally over a book about girls, but actually he not-so-secretly hangs on every word of Austen’s narration.

We’re left alone for a long while—I am given to understand that George’s nurse is napping after a long night looking after him while he coughed and sneezed—but eventually our time together is interrupted by a knock at the door.

“Come in!” I call out, expecting Aunt Fanny.

George quickly adds, “As long as you’re not an enemy spy! ”

The door swings open to reveal Hugh, a very grim look indeed on his face. But then he gives us a deep bow and looks George hard in the eye. He says, “Certainly not a French spy. General Wellington sent me.”

As mad as I am at him, seeing a tiny bit of whimsy peek through his serious exterior makes me smile. I lean over to confer with George in a stage whisper. “Should we trust him?”

George squints hard at Hugh, his red-raw nose wrinkled in scrutiny, before declaring with a very grand air, “We can trust him. For now.”

With permission granted, Hugh steps a few paces farther into the room, nodding at the book in my hand. “What are you reading him?”

“ Sense and Sensibility, ” I say. “But just the good parts.”

“There are no good parts,” George tells him, deadpan. “It’s a very boring book. It’s all about girls and kissing.”

Hugh shakes his head at him, a rare smile stretching across his face. “I don’t remember any kissing in that book.”

George groans, throwing himself backward onto his pillows. “It’s about wanting to kiss, then!”

I snap the book shut, shooting Hugh a knowing look as I tell George, “Well, if you don’t want to know what happens, then I’ll stop reading.”

“No,” George whines, wrapping his hand around my wrist. “I didn’t say that.”

I reopen my book, very smug, and resume reading aloud. I try not to show visible shock when Hugh carefully steps up to the edge of the bed and joins me on the mattress. He lies beside me so that now I’m part of a surreal Balfour sandwich: George on my left and Hugh on my right.

I don’t acknowledge Hugh, but the warm, musky scent of his cologne remains persistent and distracting. Still, I keep reading steadily until George’s head droops to the pillow and he drifts off to sleep.

I shut the book and glance over at Hugh for the first time in thirty minutes.

He’s less than an inch from me, but I take care not to close that gap.

He’s watching George sleep with a strange, melancholy expression on his face.

“You’re very good with him,” he tells me, voice soft and low.

“He’s a sort of odd, slightly macabre kid, isn’t he?

But you knew at once how to play his game. ”

I am not going to lap up this compliment and let my anger die. I acknowledge his statement with a simple “thank you” and say nothing more.

But Hugh doesn’t notice my uncharacteristic brevity.