I decide I might as well get up and go for a run. Mom told me that back when she was working as a model and flying all over the world for photo shoots, the way she used to handle jet lag was just to force herself onto the same schedule as whatever country she was in.
So since the sun says it’s morning out, it’s morning out.
I change into shorts and a T-shirt and tiptoe out of the room, carrying my running shoes. Heading downstairs, I hear the clink of dishes and silverware in the hotel kitchen. Something smells good. I’ll definitely be hungry for breakfast by the time I get back.
I stretch a little on the terrace, then make my way down the hillside through the wet grass to the canal path, where I start jogging in the direction of Ivy Cottage. It’s nice out, with mist rising off the water and birds chirping in the trees and hedges that line the gravel path. There are only a few people out and about—I see one other jogger and a couple having coffee on the deck of one of the canal boats. They wave to me, and I wave back. Emma says that people live on the boats year-round, and that some of them are for rent, too, for visitors who want to explore the canals on vacation. Sounds like fun to me.
As I get closer to Emma’s village, I spot another jogger heading toward me. It’s Darcy Hawthorne.
“Hey!” he says, doing a U-turn so he can run beside me.
“Hey, yourself!”
“Where are you headed?”
I shrug. “Wherever. I just needed a stretch. We’re supposed to meet for breakfast soon.”
He laughs. “Wait until you see what my mother has planned.”
Mrs. Hawthorne and Mrs. Wong have been really mysterious about what we’re going to be doing for the next week. I guess they want to surprise us.
We run along side by side until we reach the village, then double back along the canal.
I slant a glance at Darcy. I don’t think anybody else noticed, but I saw him holding hands with Jess last night when we walked back to the hotel after dinner. I’m glad for Jess, but this whole boy/girl thing is still kind of a mystery to me. When I’m hanging out with my friends somewhere and they start drooling over a guy, I look at him and think one thing: I bet I could beat you at hockey.
What was Zach Norton thinking when he kissed me out of the blue a year ago? Why me? We managed to get it all straightened out eventually, and we’re good friends again, but still. And Tristan Berkeley inviting me to Spring Formal—what was that all about? I thought he hated me. Honestly, I just don’t get it.
I’ve gotten a few letters from my pen pal Winky Parker’s brother Sam this year too. He’s hilarious, and I had a lot of fun hanging out with him at his family’s ranch in Wyoming last summer. And maybe I liked him a little, too. Maybe I still like him. It’s confusing. Can you like only one person at a time? Do I even want to like anybody? If I think about it all too much, it makes me mad. I don’t want to things to change, including me.
“I got an e-mail from Tristan this morning,” Darcy says, jolting me out of my daydream. Or maybe further into it. My mixed-up feelings toward Tristan Berkeley are another whole subject.
“He and his family are flying to London tomorrow.”
Tristan and Annabelle’s ice dancing competition is later this week. It kind of slipped off my radar screen in all the excitement of getting ready for the trip. We’re supposed to go London to watch them, which is just about the last thing I want to do. If I never see Annabelle Fairfax again it will be too soon.
I say good-bye to Darcy at the turnoff, then scramble up the steep hillside path to the hotel. Back in our room, I find Becca and Megan and Jess up and showered and getting dressed.
“Where were you?” asks Megan.
“Out for a run.”
“Everybody else is at breakfast already,” Jess tells me. “We’ll see you there, okay?”
I shower quickly and get dressed, then go downstairs to join them. They’re sitting in a room off the dining area that the waitress tells me is called the conservatory. It looks sort of like a greenhouse. A very fancy greenhouse made of glass panels and white wrought iron.
“Homemade croissants,” my mother says, waving one in front of my nose as I take a seat.
“I thought croissants were French,” I reply. “We’re in England.”
“The cook is from Paris,” she says, licking her fingers. “Lucky us.”
“Darcy and Nick will be bringing the bus around in half an hour or so,” says Mrs. Hawthorne. “Please eat up. Meanwhile, Lily and I have a little something for each of you.”
Mrs. Wong goes to stand next to her. “Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the one and only, first-time-ever, not-to-be-missed, Jane Austen Commemorative—”
“Tour Packet!” Mrs. Hawthorne finishes with a flourish, holding up a pink folder. On the front is a large sticker with a silhouette of Jane Austen on it, and a name written in calligraphy. “This one is for you, Gigi,” she says, handing it over. “There’s one for each of you.”
As Mrs. Wong starts passing them out, Emma groans. “Mo-om! Can’t we ever do anything without handouts?”
“Handouts?” cries her mother, pretending to be offended. “These are not mere handouts! We’re talking an informational extravaganza here, complete with postcards, historical and biographical sketches, background reading material—”
“Don’t forget maps,” adds Mrs. Wong, who has a thing about maps.
“Maps, too. In short, everything a budding Janeite could possibly want to understand a bit about what she’s going to be seeing and doing over the next week.”
“Um,” says Stewart Chadwick. “I’m not so sure I want to be a budding Janeite.”
“Me neither,” agrees my stepfather. “I carry around enough pink stuff as it is. Right, Chloe?”
My little sister gives him a jam-covered grin.
“You said it, monkey face,” I grumble, and my mother shoots me a look.
“Fear not,” says Mrs. Hawthorne, riffling through the stack and pulling out two blue folders. “Behold the Commemorative Tour Packet’s Manly Edition.” She hands them over, then asks us all to take a look at our itinerary.
“Our schedule,” she adds, seeing the puzzled look on my face. “We’re going to be taking a chronological tour of Jane’s life this week.”
I scan the page. Today and tomorrow—museums, tea shops, historic houses, gardens, walking tours. It’s not that I’m not interested, because actually I think Jane Austen is pretty cool, especially the way she wrote books back when most women didn’t do that sort of thing. It’s kind of like me playing hockey on the middle school boys’ team. In fact, I’ll bet Jane Austen would have made a great hockey player.
I look back at the schedule, wishing that they’d planned some other stuff too. Stuff that really interests me. Like maybe watch a cricket match or something.
My mother sees me frowning. She taps her finger on the word “Stonehenge,” listed as a side trip for this afternoon. “You’ll love it, I promise,” she whispers. “And check out page two.”
I do, and am relieved to see that things get better. Wednesday: Sea-bathing at Lyme Regis. Cool, we’re going swimming in the ocean. And then we’re heading to London that night to go hear—
“Led Zeppelin?” squeals Jess. “You got us tickets to hear them?”
I’m not a huge music freak, but even I’ve heard of them. Mostly because of the Delaneys’ horses, Led and Zep. Mr. Delaney is a huge fan.
“Yes!” crows Darcy, and he and Stewart slap each other a high five.
“It’s a one-night only reunion concert,” Mrs. Hawthorne says. “You can thank your father for this, Jess. He said our itinerary needed more than just petticoats and bonnets.”
“Hear, hear!” says Mr. Hawthorne, and my stepfather nods enthusiastically.
“Hyde Park is very historic, right?” asks Mrs. Chadwick, frowning at her itinerary. She always likes to make sure we’re getting educated, even if it’s at an outdoor rock concert. I notice Becca rolling her eyes at her brother,
who suppresses a grin.
“Really historic, Mom,” he replies. “Almost as historic as this band performing together again.”
After the excitement dies down, I look over the rest of the schedule. Thursday looks good—we’re going to the Tower of London, for one thing, and Emma says they have lots of cool suits of armor and dungeons and stuff—but Friday squats on the page like a toad. We’re meeting the Berkeleys for lunch, then spending the rest of the day with them at the Junior Ice Dancing Championship.
I am so not looking forward to that.
“What’s this?” asks Emma, pointing to the words “Chawton Surprise” on Saturday’s schedule.
“We-ell,” says her mother. “Do you think we should tell them, Lily?”
“I suppose we have no choice.” Mrs. Wong sighs.
They’re both grinning their heads off, so I figure it’s gotta be something amazing. Like maybe they’ve signed us up for private polo lessons. Or at the very least, we’re going to Buckingham Palace to meet the queen.
“That, my dear daughter, is the best part of the whole week,” says Mrs. Hawthorne. “As Mrs. Bergson’s parting gift to us, we are all going to attend the Regency Ball at Chawton House!”
Everybody seems to think this is great except me. And my stepfather. While they’re all applauding and cheering, Stanley leans over and whispers in my ear, “Too bad they didn’t have Regency BASEball back in Jane Austen’s day.”
“No kidding,” I whisper back.
It turns out we’re expected to show up for this thing dressed the way they used to dress in Jane Austen’s day, so tomorrow afternoon we’re going to be fitted for costumes at some rental place.
“Me too?” asks Stewart, looking nervous.
“Yes, and Darcy, and Nicholas, and you too, Stanley,” Mrs. Hawthorne replies. “Our dance partners need to be as stylish as we are, right, ladies?”
I notice that Stewart Chadwick is carefully avoiding looking at Emma, whose face is a deep shade of pink. So is Jess’s, but for a completely different reason. It’s that stupid boy/girl stuff again. It just messes everything up! Life would be so much easier without it.
We get lost a few times on the way to Steventon, which is even tinier than Gopher Hole, Wyoming, where our pen pals all live. Our mini-coach barely fits on the narrow country roads, and I notice that all the moms close their eyes and grab the back of the seat ahead of them whenever a car approaches and Mr. Hawthorne squeezes over to let it pass.
The house where Jane Austen grew up doesn’t exist anymore, but the church where her father preached is still there, so that’s where we’re headed. When we finally find it—a small stone building stuck out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by fields of sheep—we pile out of the bus and crowd around Mrs. Hawthorne. Since she’s the Jane Austen expert, she’s our official tour guide.
“All right, gang, listen up,” she says. “This church is almost eight hundred years old.”
“Even older than me,” says Gigi, which gets a laugh.
“It was built at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The steeple was added later, during the Victorian era—”
“Same time period as our house,” my mother murmurs to me.
“—and I’d like you all to notice the weather vane.”
We crane our necks. “Cool!” I say, spotting it. The Delaneys have one shaped like a rooster on top of their barn, but I’ve never seen one that looks like a quill pen before.
“There are more tributes to Jane inside,” Mrs. Hawthorne continues. “See if you can spot them.”
We do. There are silhouettes of Jane on the needlework kneelers in the pews, and a plaque on the wall about her too. And by the guest book there are Jane Austen bookmarks and stationery for sale.
Emma rubs her arms and shivers. “It’s cold in here.”
“Let’s go back outside,” I suggest.
We wander around to the graveyard behind the church and find some Austen tombstones.
“Is Jane buried here?” I ask, figuring Emma will know.
She does, of course. “Nope. These are other relatives. She’s buried at Winchester Cathedral.”
Emma and I take pictures of each other with the church in the background, then get back on the bus to wait for our friends.
Stonehenge is on the way back to Bath, and my mother was right, it’s awesome—probably about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen before in my life. I brought my good camera, the one my father gave me a long time ago, and I take a ton of pictures so I can show Courtney. She really wanted to come with us on this trip, but she’s working as a camp counselor this summer up in Maine to help earn money for college, so she couldn’t.
Stonehenge is a big circle of gigantic standing stones stuck out in the middle of an empty plain. It has nothing to do with Jane Austen, but Mrs. Hawthorne said it’s one of the most famous landmarks in the world, and no way were we going to skip seeing it since it was so close by. No one really knows who built it or how or why, exactly, but it’s been around since, like, 3000 B.C. It’s like visiting the pyramids or something.
I see Darcy and Jess wandering around the path that circles it together. They’re not holding hands or anything—I guess they don’t want everybody to know about them yet—but they’re both sort of squinting at the stones, with their eyes half shut. Weird.
When we get back to the city, we go to this place called the Pump Room for tea. Bath is almost as amazing as Stonehenge, but in a different way. I don’t know a thing about architecture, and never thought it would interest me, but even I can tell that it’s pretty spectacular. There’s this cool bridge over the river with shops built right into it, and cobblestone streets everywhere, and Mrs. Hawthorne reminds us that all the buildings are made of that special kind of golden limestone that’s only found in this part of England. They were all built in the same style around the same time period too.
“Georgian,” says Darcy. “That’s George the first, second, third, and fourth,” he rattles off, then grins. “I took English history this year at Knightley-Martin.”
“And who was on the throne in England when the Revolutionary War broke out back in Concord?” says his mom.
Emma starts to wave her hand, then pulls it down and mimes zipping her lip.
“I actually know the answer to that question,” says Becca, sounding shocked. “George the Third.”
“Good girl,” says Mrs. Hawthorne. “So while our own hometown was fighting the British, they were building this amazing city. Which, by the way, was a Roman resort thousands of years before that.”
The Pump Room is built over some ancient Roman ruins where a hot spring bubbles up. I guess people have been coming here forever to sit in the water, thinking it would cure them of all sorts of illnesses. It’s kind of like a hot tub. They drink the water too—well, not while they’re sitting in it. It’s pumped up here to the Pump Room, to an old stone fountain that’s been around since Jane Austen’s day.
“Just think—she drank this very water,” says Mrs. Hawthorne, passing us each a glass.
I take a sniff. “Nasty,” I say, passing it right back to her. No way am I drinking that.
Fortunately, tea is pretty great—those triple-tiered trays that my mother and Courtney go gaga for, piled with sandwiches and scones and cookies and cakes. And endless pots of tea, of course. We finally get to try clotted cream, too, which really is delicious, just as Emma said.
“This was where everyone came to see and be seen,” says Mrs. Hawthorne. “They’d promenade around the room—they called it ‘taking a turn about the room’—gossiping about who everybody was with and what they were wearing.”
I yawn. If that was what they did for fun back then, I’m glad I live now. I pick a currant out of my scone and toss it at Stanley. He’s looking as bored as I feel. He bats it back at me, and we get a little game of Ping-Pong going until my mother tells us to knock it off.
By the end of the day I’m exhausted, and so is everybody else. Jess and Meg
an and Becca and I were going to stay up and play cards, but we all fall into bed practically the minute we get back to the hotel room.
The next day is more of the same—wandering around Bath, taking pictures, trotting after Mrs. Chadwick as she wades into the gardens. Becca’s mother loves England. The only time she stops smiling is when she sees Mr. Hawthorne. She’s still ticked off about Hepzibah Plunkett.
We tour the Jane Austen Centre, which explains all about Jane’s life—the tour guide is surprised to find out how much we already know about it—and afterward, we stop in the gift shop. Stewart and Mr. Hawthorne and Darcy and my stepfather take one look at all the doilies and tea towels and bolt for the door. I want to go with them but my mother asks me to pick something out for Courtney. I can’t imagine my sister actually wanting any of this stuff, but I know she likes Jane Austen so I try to be a good sport and pick something halfway decent. I settle on a sterling silver locket that’s shaped like a book. Pride and Prejudice is engraved on the cover in tiny letters. I figure she can stick a picture of her boyfriend in there, or of Chloe and me, or Murphy or something.
Gigi buys everybody mugs with the opening line from Pride and Prejudice on them, and Mrs. Hawthorne spots some Elizabeth and Darcy paper dolls and holds them up.
“Remember when you sent the girls Little Women paper dolls, Shannon?”
Mrs. Delaney nods, and I groan. “Don’t remind me.”
My friends all laugh.
I see Jess buy an “I Darcy” keychain, and my mother buys a bunch of flowery bookmarks and a complete set of Jane Austen novels.
“In case you want to try a few more,” she tells me.
Our last stop of the day is the costume fitting.
“There is absolutely no way I am wearing this dress,” I tell my mother flatly, glowering at the mirror. “I look like Little Bo Peep.”
“You do not, sweetheart!” she says, adjusting one of the many frills. “You look lovely. Besides, how often in your life do you get to do something like this?”
“Never,” I tell her. “That’s the whole point.”
She tries a different tack. “This is a very, very exclusive ball. The tickets were enormously expensive.”