Page 47 of The Austen Affair

Everyone is in too much shock to move. Everyone but George, that is, who flings himself at the ruined machine and starts stamping on it. “Pay attention to me!” he screams up at Hugh, snot and tears dripping down his face and mixing together. “You just got here! You cannot leave again!”

Hugh picks George up by the waist, setting him down in the chair Aunt Fanny vacated.

His face is blooming a brilliant red, but Hugh struggles valiantly to maintain his composure.

My decidedly mixed feelings about going home aside, I feel that spike of anger, too.

George is just a kid, but goddamn it. “You do not,” Hugh tells George, kneeling in front of him and shaking a finger in his face, “break things that aren’t yours. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

But George is feral, unshamed and unchastened. “I don’t care,” he spits. “Promise you’re not going!”

Hugh wheels back onto his feet, burying his face in his large hands and letting out a painful howl of abject frustration. “I can’t promise that! I can’t promise that to any of you!”

I cross the carpet to him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

He’s in pain. I want to lessen it, even if I don’t know quite how.

“Darling,” I whisper. I put all the feeling I have for him into that endearment.

Even with other people around us, I drop my fake accent so he knows I mean business. “It’s going to be okay.”

“No, it isn’t!” he responds, eyes wild. He gulps for air. “No, it isn’t! We needed that, Tess. We needed it to go back. We waited weeks for it, and now it’s just gone!”

I tighten my grip on his shoulder, standing on tiptoes to lay a kiss on his cheek. And it slips out: the intrusive thought so overwhelming it pulsed like club music behind every action, every intention. “Well, maybe—maybe this is a sign.”

“A sign of what?” Hugh growls, lifting his wet eyes to meet mine.

“A sign that maybe we’re not meant to leave here yet,” I say, voice breaking with how much I want him to understand me in this moment. How much I need him to know that we will be okay. That our life together could be here, in this time and in this place.

“Hear, hear,” Aunt Fanny says, flatly.

Mr. Crawford crosses to Aunt Fanny, quietly inquiring as to what is happening, but no one shows him any notice.

My eyes are only for Hugh. He’s breathing heavily now, like he just ran a marathon. “Are you out of your mind?” he asks.

A cold hand grips my heart. It feels like the moment when you’re descending the stairs in the dark and there’s one more step than you think. The moment of the mistake. Of falling.

The moment of the bone crunch.

I give an awkward, perfunctory laugh, trying to walk it back. To soften my error. “No, I just think that maybe, the universe still wants us here. Somehow.”

“Don’t off-load this on the universe. You want to stay here?” His tone is heavy with repulsion. In all the ways that a furious Hugh Balfour has looked at me before, it has never been like this. Like I am a traitor.

I laugh again, an airy, false version of my normal laugh that even I can tell is unconvincing. I’m just trying to lighten the mood, but I am failing miserably, because my actual words come out harsh. “Well, not forever, perhaps. But maybe a little while longer…”

“Oh, a little while.” Hugh is losing it before my eyes. There is a cruel, mocking edge to his tone that I have never heard from him before. “And what if a little while turns to forever?”

“Then that would work out,” Mr. Crawford says, stepping boldly forward. “I’ll have you know I was just telling Mrs. Bright that she could have her home with me. You ought to marry Cecelia, and I would gladly marry Mrs. Bright. It is the only honorable path. We could make that arrangement, I—”

“You fucker !” Hugh launches at him, and soon he and Mr. Crawford are rolling on the floor.

And although Hugh probably has a good five inches on him, William Crawford does not seem to be quite so incompetent at fisticuffs as Mr. Armstrong.

He gets two good licks in against Hugh’s face, and I cry out as I see Hugh’s lip burst open.

“Stop it!” I shriek, pulling William off Hugh. “Just stop it!”

Aunt Fanny takes control of the situation, grabbing each man by the ear and sending them to opposite corners of the room like boxers between rounds.

But Hugh is not willing to stick around. He storms from the room, muttering about “traitors” and “ingrates” and “perfidy.”

I have no plan, but for once, it seems, neither does Hugh.

He’s letting his feet lead him wherever they like, and I follow with a desperate plea for him to stop and talk to me.

He ends up heading straight out the front door, moving to the edge of the hill Highground was built upon, where a glorious vista waits below.

I catch up with him only when we reach the cliffside and there is no farther for him to run. “Hugh, stop! It’s not like I was actually going to marry him!”

He whirls around, that familiar vein throbbing in his temple. By now, it ought to be an old friend, but instead it is a blaring alarm. “I never thought that for one second,” he spits.

“Then what are you angry about?” I demand. I haven’t been this disheveled since the moment we arrived. My long hair is falling out of its Regency updo, and I feel more like the girl he accused me of being than ever: Tess the Mess.

“You tell me right now,” Hugh says, fighting to keep his voice level and failing spectacularly. “Do you truly want us to stay here?”

“And what if I do?”

“And what if you do? Tess, that’s madness! We can’t just live here!”

“And why not ?” I ask, my vision blurred with unshed tears. “Hugh, why not? The universe brought us here for a reason. It gave you a family. It gave me friends. It gave us a home, and more than that, it gave us each other. Maybe we are meant to stay. Why is that so crazy?”

A storm of emotions crosses Hugh’s face. “Tess, it’s insanity because we must go home. We have lives waiting for us there.”

“Maybe you do.”

“What?”

“ You have a life waiting for you at home,” I say, alight with rage now.

It’s all coming out, bubbling to the surface, and I can’t hold it back.

“You have a family that loves you. You have a fulfilling artistic career. I don’t have anything.

I have a joke filmography, a ruined professional reputation, and an empty house where my mother used to live.

” My hand rises instinctively to press against my mouth, muffling the sound of my heaving, painful, undignified sobs.

“So what if I want to stay?” I ask. “What if I’m not ready to leave this miracle ?

This place where I can still hear her voice. The place that brought me you.”

Hugh moves to me, and for a second I think I’ve gotten through to him. Hope shoots through my veins like a drug. “Tess, you will still have me in the future.”

I make a skeptical sound. “ You will still have me, ” Hugh repeats. “I’m not leaving you. But I have to go home. I have to get home for my family.”

Sterile hospital rooms. Orange pill bottles. Beeping heart monitors. Sheets stiff with sweat. Mahogany caskets. The thick stench of funeral- home lilies, the pollen so noxious it makes you sick. Returning to a house with no lights on.

“Oh, what are you rushing home for?” I ask, my voice fracturing again.

The memories are throwing themselves at me.

For once in my life, I am not the battering ram.

I am the wall, and I am breaking down. “Don’t you get it, Hugh?

You’re racing full speed toward the worst moments of your entire life.

I know you love your dad, but just trust me.

If I could put it on pause… if I could just never lose her, I would.

I would do anything to never feel that.”

Hugh’s face isn’t red with anger anymore.

It’s bloodless. And that’s how I know I’ve lost him.

His voice does not waver. “If I never go home, Tess, I’ll have lost him just as much as if I bury him.

I’ll just be the man who was too cowardly to face it.

Now, it’s obvious you think this whole accident has brought you closer to your mum again, and I’m sorry, but that’s not sustainable.

You’re not healing, you’re hiding. You want a life worth living, Tess?

Then go and build one. But don’t waste your time and mine playing make-believe.

You can’t have a future with me if you insist on dwelling on the past. Everything around you is fake.

It’s dead. It’s been dead for two hundred years. Whether you like it or not.”

He gives a ragged breath, then turns his back on me.

I make a small, pathetic sound, like I’m choking.

He spins back, unfortunately ready and willing to deal the killing blow.

“If you want to stay here forever, be my guest. You want to go to Gretna Green with William Crawford? Go ahead. Lose your days in a delusional Austen fantasy. But I’m going home. ”

And he leaves me standing on the bluff, alone.