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A Jane Austen Encounter, An Elizabeth and Richard Literary Suspense #4

By Donna Fletcher Crow

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A Jane Austen Encounter
Chapter 1
“Ah, Bath!” Elizabeth sighed deeply and ran her fingers through her cap of mostly still-black hair. “Twenty years! Can you believe it took us so long to get here? Where did the time go?”
Richard’s eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled at her across the teacups, then held up one finger in a wait-a-minute gesture and pulled his calculator out of his pocket. After a moment of keypunching he said, “I make it 10,000 lectures and 8,000 students between the two of us. That’s approximate, of course.” He started to snap his calculator shut. “No, wait, I forgot summer school.”
“Richard!” Elizabeth grabbed his hand to halt his calculations. “Stop! The question was rhetorical. And you make it sound even worse than I thought. One thing’s clear, though— we’ve certainly earned this sabbatical.”
“Is everything all right?” The soft English voice of their period-costumed waitress in a white mob cap interrupted Elizabeth’s reminiscence. She looked at the floral china tier tray in the middle of their table. The scones were gone, but the tray still held an assortment of finger sandwiches and tiny cakes.
“Everything is perfect.” Elizabeth smiled and gazed around the Regency Tea room above the Jane Austen Centre. “Well, perhaps we might have another pot of tea,” she amended.
“And how many of those lectures were on the sublime Jane, would you say, my love?” She turned back to her companion.
Richard started to reach for his calculator again, but Elizabeth stopped him. “No, no. I was joking. You can’t reduce Jane to simple numbers. Anyone would think you were a math professor instead of the most popular English literature lecturer Rocky Mountain College has ever had.”
“Who had the good sense to marry his head of department.” Richard raised his tea cup to her. “Still, between the two of us, what with my class on the English Novel and your Austen seminar, we can hope to have produced our share of Janeites.”
Elizabeth looked at the pale blue walls surrounding the roomful of tiny round tables where people sat sipping cups of tea and spreading scones with jam and clotted cream. She smiled at the portrait of Mr. Darcy just beyond Richard’s head. “And for all those years we’ve dreamed of this trip.” She took a sip of her milky tea and leaned back in her chair. “I can’t believe we’re actually here.”
Richard bit into a salmon sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. “Twenty years. Any regrets?”
Elizabeth sat forward so sharply she almost sloshed her tea. “Oh, my dear. Not a one.” Then she paused. She had spoken quickly. And from the heart. And yet. . . “Not any more. Truly.”
She hid her contemplation under the activity of refilling her teacup from the fresh pot their waitress provided. Her words were true. There had been pain, but no regrets. Even the bad times were good because they had made both of them who they were today.
For the first years of their marriage there had been the grief of not having a child, once it became clear that it was not to be. That had been a sharp pain— fear, even, for Elizabeth. Knowing that Richard’s first wife and child had died in childbirth made her want so desperately to make all that up to him. And then she hadn’t been able to. And she was so afraid he would be disappointed. As was she.
And Richard? There had been that student who had set her cap at him. Richard had resisted, but the fact that he could be tempted had left scars. Scars that made them both stronger and wiser.
She gazed at the planes of his strong cheek bones, now softened a bit by time, and his still-rich brown hair, slightly less thick. But the thing that hadn’t changed at all was the burning intelligence behind his grey blue eyes. Or the way looking into them could make her heart leap.

Richard returned Elizabeth’s gaze. After all these years he still felt a jolt of surprise at times that this dynamic woman was his wife. He had fallen head-over-heels in love with her at their first interview when he had struggled so to answer her academic questions instead of blurting out an invitation for her to have dinner with him.
And then, that first year working together and his repeated proposals of marriage— always turned down with such gentle humor that he kept up the courage to ask again. And finally, that cold, wet night at a mountain top resort and the unveiling of an audaciously wily murderer when she said, “Yes!”
But as the years rolled on at their dizzying speed with their lives so full of students and friends and colleagues and family times as they played aunt and uncle to Elizabeth’s sister Tori’s brood, he had come more and more to value their quiet times together. And suddenly here they were— celebrating their twentieth anniversary with the sabbatical they had always dreamed of, touring all the sites where Jane Austen had lived.
Of course, for him it would be a bit of a busman’s honeymoon since Rocky Mountain required their faculty to produce works of scholarly research in order to justify granting a sabbatical. And coming up with an appropriately erudite subject was his most pressing mission at the moment. Lucky Elizabeth, she was free of all that now.
“Sure you don’t regret resigning your position as department head?” Richard cut in on her reverie.
“Especially not that! What a relief to be free of the administration work. No, I’m definitely ready for a change of pace. A new challenge.”
Richard raised an eyebrow. He looked almost worried, as if she had spoken the very words he had been thinking. “You weren’t bored were you?”

Elizabeth chuckled. Richard knew well her low tolerance for boredom. She had turned down his first proposals of marriage under the misapprehension that he would be boring. How wrong she had been to mistake thoughtfulness for dullness. In twenty years life with Richard had never been dull.
And she was determined to see to it that it not become dull now. Whatever new direction life took it must offer challenge.
She nibbled at a delicate cucumber sandwich and recalled those long-ago adventures to Richard. But they obviously weren’t lighthearted memories for her husband. He reached across the table and took her hand. “Don’t. When I think of you being in danger. . .”
Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t think I was ever in serious danger. Still, I wouldn’t want to be chasing murderers again.”
Richard gave her one of his wonderful, eye-crinkling smiles. “Little fear there, not with lovely, civilized Jane. No murder, no sex, no zombies.”
“Definitely no zombies! You’ll find us all purists here. Guaranteed.” Elizabeth started at the clipped, English voice of the newcomer and looked up at a woman with blunt-cut iron grey hair, her broad shoulders encased in a shocking purple blouse.
“Dr. Greystone?” Richard rose and took the hand the newcomer offered for a vigorous handshake. Elizabeth saw that she was almost as tall as Richard.
“Call me Muriel. Please, don’t get up. I didn’t mean to interrupt your tea.”
“No, not at all, won’t you join us? This is my wife Elizabeth.” Richard pulled out a vacant chair for their guest.
Muriel Greystone accepted the chair Richard offered and the cup of tea Elizabeth poured when the waitress brought another cup. “No milk. Two sugars,” Muriel Greystone directed and accepted a sandwich from the tray Richard held out to her. “Sorry to be late. Trains from Oxford always unreliable.”
The academic polished offer sandwich in a single bit and launched into a nonstop account of the itinerary she had set for the coming days, punctuated with Austen quotations and esoteric facts from the writer’s life that left Elizabeth blinking.
Richard had been delighted when the noted academic had offered to be their tour guide to the sites of Jane’s homes. Elizabeth readily saw the advantage that offered for Richard’s sabbatical study, even though Muriel Greystone might not have been quite the first person Elizabeth would have chosen to accompany them on what was intended to be something of a second honeymoon. But at least they weren’t likely to have this time interrupted by murder as their first honeymoon had been.

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