Karen Doornebos: Definitely Not Mr Darcy

“I’ll take whatever help I can get!” Chloe said into one of the cameras, but the cameraman didn’t crack a smile.

“You’ll have shorter stays, too, for your more athletic pursuits, but today, posture is everything and you’re wearing this longer one, with the busk.”

Chloe remembered reading about busks at some point, but never really understood what they were or how they worked.

Fiona wielded the busk, a smooth, flat piece of wood, kind of like a rounded ruler, and slid it into a sewn-in pocket down the front of Chloe’s stays, from the middle of her cleavage to her belly button.

“But how am I going to—”

“Bend at the waist? You won’t. You’ll have to bend at the hip.”

Chloe was thinking more about the logistics of, shall we say, bending to go to the bathroom with a ten-inch ruler down the middle of her chest.

Fiona continued the lacing, and Chloe grew impatient, thinking she’d have to go through this every morning and night. The numerous and tiny eyelet holes were just that: holes without reinforcements. What a pain! She looked longingly at her simple bra with the hooks, folded neatly and in a plastic storage bag on the chaise.

The lacing-up gave her time to dwell on things she didn’t want to think about, like the fact that she’d be in a dating show on international TV and no doubt the Internet, and, worse, that she’d have a stepmom competing for her daughter’s affections. That roiled her.

“I don’t understand,” she said out loud. “Why aren’t there reinforcements for these holes?”

“Reinforcements could only have been made of bone, and richer ladies would have them.”

The money thing, again.

“There!” Fiona tied off the laces. “Let me get the mirror.”

Fiona trotted back with an ornate, if slightly tarnished, floor-length mirror squeaking along on wheels.

“You don’t even feel the busk, do you? And see how it creates such straight posture and how it separates to create this lovely heaving effect?”

Chloe couldn’t believe what she saw. Granted, it took half an hour to lace up and she’d never be able to get the thing on or off by herself, but her boob size had gone from a 34C to a 36DD. And all because of a two-hundred-year-old bra . . . ?

The thirty-nine-year-old droobs became suddenly round, pert, and “boobilicious,” as her employee, Emma, would say.

“A nineteenth-century boob job,” Chloe said.

“Wait till you see how great it makes the gown look. But first, your pantalets.” Fiona held up two cotton half legs with ribbons that tied around the waist in the air. They were crotchless, bottomless, scandalous.

The cameramen zoomed in on her.

“They make a thong look uptight,” Chloe said. “I know Jane Austen wasn’t the prim and proper type some of her relatives made her out to be, but you can’t tell me she wore those.”

“They were considered a little risqué at the time, but she may have.” Fiona held the pantalets in front of Chloe in a “shall we?” kind of way. The ribbons danced and dangled.

Chloe figured women wore some kind of drawers under their gowns, not these things. Certainly, when she wore her Regency gown to a Jane Austen event, she wore her usual hose underneath. Austen never mentioned undergarments in her novels, and even though Chloe knew a lot about the Regency, her knowledge was by no means encyclopedic. “No drawers?”

“Drawers were newfangled, and not completely accepted until later in the Regency. Miss Austen may have done what many women did, especially in this summer heat, and you may choose to do as well.”

Color rose to Chloe’s cheeks. She’d never look at another period film the same way again. “I’ll go with the pantalets.”

With the utmost discretion, Fiona helped Chloe into the pantalets and then her white silk stockings.

“Stockings were white,” Fiona said. “A woman of your station wouldn’t wear pink, that would be vulgar.”

Chloe began to piece together that she wasn’t to be one of the “Ton,” but she wouldn’t be a “woman of the night” either, so maybe she’d shake out as a sort of middle-class Elizabeth Bennet?

With silk ribbon garters, Fiona tied off the stockings well above the knee, and Chloe felt suddenly sexy. Maybe, just maybe, this show could be fabulous—

Fiona plunked two lemon halves in Chloe’s hands.

“You need to rub these under your arms.”

Chloe cocked her head.

“Your deodorant. The staff was hard-pressed to find Regency recipes for deodorant, and most likely they rarely used it, so lemons will have to do, when they’re available.”

Wincing, Chloe did as she was told. Her mind drifted to thoughts of a lemon martini as she flapped her arms to dry off.

“Now for your gown. This is the best day gown you have, and even though it’s a bit impractical to wear for travel in a carriage, it’s important to wear your best, as you’re going to a grander home than the one you came from.”

Fiona lifted the gown over Chloe’s head, buttoned up the back, and Chloe morphed into a nineteenth-century version of herself, all in white. She spun before the mirror. Abigail would’ve loved this. The high Empire waist elongated her torso, the busk kept her back straight, the neckline showed off her racked-up rack, and she felt more convinced than ever that she belonged here, in 1812, although the gown was so sheer you could see her blue ribbon garters right through it.

After Fiona slid on the shoes that had no designated left or right and resembled ballet flats, Chloe floated to the vanity, where Fiona curled and pinned her boring brown hair into a seductive Regency updo that somehow camouflaged the few gray hairs she had. Brown tendrils of hair skimmed her face.

Fiona clasped an amethyst necklace around Chloe’s neck as Chloe pursed her lips in the mirror. She knew only prostitutes would wear lipstick, but getting anyone to woo her without it would be a challenge.

Fiona rubbed crushed strawberries on Chloe’s cheeks, but that didn’t seem to do much other than make her cheeks feel tight and sticky, kind of like her underarms with the lemon. The only suitors this might attract would be flies.

“When we have special occasions, I’ll do your eyes up with candle soot,” Fiona said.

“That is something to look forward to,” said Chloe.

“But for now we have elderberry stain for your brows.”

The elderberry just seemed to bring out the dark circles under her eyes. “I don’t know if I can face a world without undereye concealer and lipstick.”

She might’ve been better off in an eighteenth-century dating show, with her face painted white like Marie Antoinette, covering up the undereye circles and filling in the beginnings of crow’s-feet. Of course, that white face paint proved to be full of lead and poisonous, even fatal, to women of the time. Still. No makeup was a bit too revealing.

Chloe padded over to her vintage bag, cameramen behind her, in search of her concealer, and came across the foil-wrapped strip of condoms Emma had slipped her at the airport.

With all those hot Englishmen in tights you might need III these,” Emma had said.

“They won’t be wearing tights, Emma. That would be seventeenth century.”

“Bummer.”

“Anyway, I’m not going there for the men, and sex before marriage was a real taboo in Regency England. Have you not heard of Lydia Bennet?”

Emma dangled the condoms in front of her. “They’re strawberry-margarita flavored,” she singsonged.

She handed Chloe the condoms.

Chloe pushed them away. “What do you think? I’ll be having a quickie in the back of a chaise-and-four?”

“I hope so, for your sake!”

Chloe tossed her head back. Resistance was futile. Emma tucked the condoms into Chloe’s bag.