Dancing With Mr. Darcy: Stories Inspired by Jane Austen and Chawton House Library Read Online Free PDF Page B

having remembered it all the way through.
    Back upstairs, clothes off again. The photographer leers at me, the fat bastard. I reckon I’ve only got a few years left in this. The market’s too competitive now. Magazines, websites, television channels—
    ‘Only so many punters in this game, only so many wallets,’ the photographer said, in a tone as close as the big ape got to philosophical.
    ‘There certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them,’ I said.
    He looked perplexed.
    ‘Mansfield Park,’ I told him. ‘Jane Austen.’
    The exam tomorrow. A drafty dusty hall, biros on the desk. I’ll do the rest of the modules, finish the course; pay the fees. Buy the flat, have financial security, spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do. I’ll be too old for it soon anyway, the age of some of the girls coming through. A career where a woman is worthless by the age of twenty-five. It’s a disgrace.
    I stretch an arm behind me, arch my back.
    ‘That’s beautiful,’ the photographer says. He sniggers behind snaggled, cracked teeth. ‘It’s tit-riffic.’
    Oh. Yuk. Lord, what fools these mortals be!

    My inspiration: Despite the fact that many of Jane Austen’s novels are considered love stories, I think there’s a hard, pragmatic edge in how her characters speak about class and money that is often overlooked. W. H. Auden said that it made him ‘uncomfortable’ to see her ‘describe the amorous effects of ‘“brass” Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety The economic basis of society’. Given this, I wanted to create a character who had this same pragmatic edge about money, in a very modern day context.

THE DELAFORD LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY
    Elizabeth Hopkinson
    This was going to be a most interesting case, thought Mrs Reverend Ferrars, as her sister, Mrs Colonel Brandon, poured tea for the lady sitting nervously in the small parlour of Delaford Parsonage. So far her talents as a detective had mainly been used to ascertain the true characters of potential suitors or to assure nervous mammas that their daughters were truly engaged (although there had been that unforgettable incident with Mrs Ellis’s chickens). She was looking forward to something a little more challenging.
    Of course, it had come as a surprise to her to find she was a detective at all. When she had first arrived in Delaford, she had naturally expected simply to support dear Edward, take baskets to the cottages and raise a handful of plump, well-behaved children. Sadly, the latter had not been forthcoming, and while Mrs Ferrars might envy her sister the third swelling beneath her day gown, she knew better than to brood on what might have been. Occupation was a great comforter, and Mrs Ferrars had found one well suited to her temperament. People had always confided in her (in the cases of Lucy Steele and Mr Willoughby, not always with her willing agreement) and she found she had the kind of sharp mind that relished a puzzle.
    ‘Pray, make yourself at ease, Mrs Worthing,’ she said, with the reassuring smile she generally used on such occasions. ‘Mysteries, I find, are rather like knots in one’s embroidery thread. They may look impossible, but they always unravel in the end.’
    It was important to say something like that, Mrs Ferrars found. Mystery, on the whole, was something she profoundly disliked. It had uncomfortable associations with Gothic ruins and over-emotional young ladies in white gowns. Being able to rid it from the neighbourhood was something that had encouraged her to keep going after the success of her initial case with Miss Morton’s coded Valentine. Detecting was a service to society, and therefore an occupation very worthy of a parson’s wife.
    ‘Oh, do not mention embroidery thread,’ sniffed Mrs Worthing, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief. Mrs Ferrars began to suspect her of sensibility or – worse still – sentimentality. ‘Not