Karen Doornebos: Definitely Not Mr Darcy

The cabbie interrupted. “I’m afraid you’re on the ticker, miss.”

“Don’t call me ‘miss’—please.”

He almost dropped his cigarette. She hadn’t seen a cigarette in weeks.

“Be there in a minute.” She turned back to Mrs. Crescent. “Did you know that Lady Anne is really Henry’s mother!”

“And she absolutely adores you. I didn’t know anything. None of us did. Only Lady Anne, Sebastian, Henry, and of course George. But, Chloe, you must realize that Henry’s world is full of phony people. Girls that just want his money. His title. With George’s help, he created this game to find a woman who could love him for who he is.”

Chloe got a lump in her throat. She headed into the cloud of cigarette smoke the cabbie just exhaled. She tried not to breathe in. “I have to go, Mrs. Crescent. I’ll e-mail you. I have your address.”

“But you hate e-mail.”

“Not anymore.” Chloe flashed the BlackBerry with a smile. “I can’t wait to buy one of these for myself! Here, you can give this back to my dad for me.”

The cabbie opened the door for her and the light went on inside the cab. The first electric light she’d seen in weeks. Electricity. It was like a miracle. No more drippy candles. The cabbie waited to close the door for her.

“I can close the door myself. Thank you.”

She looked up, beaming, at Bridesbridge Place, awash in floodlights, fluted columns under the portico. As she was about to close the door, a familiar hand stopped it from closing. It was Henry, dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt. He had a trench coat draped over his shoulders, and was wearing hip glasses. He looked amazing.

Chloe raised an eyebrow.

“I have a delivery for you, Miss Parker,” he said. “Excuse my reach.”

He set some sort of blanketed box on the other side of her.

“Thank you, Henry, but whatever it is, I really can’t accept it.”

“It’s yours, Miss Parker. It’s not mine. And please do me the honor of reading this.”

He handed her an envelope sealed with a red wax W . He looked at her as if he were about to say something important. “Safe journey.” He tapped the door shut and bowed. He bowed!

Chloe leaned forward so the driver could hear her over the radio he just turned on. “Please, hurry.”

The cabbie peeled out of the drive, leaving Henry, Bridesbridge, and Chloe’s English life in the dust. The radio newscaster rattled on in his British accent, a blur of bombings in the Middle East, a murder trial in London, a hurricane off the coast of Florida, the horrific state of the economy. It was like she never left. The pace of it dizzied her.

Still, she didn’t look back. She only looked forward, into the darkness.

“Heathrow, right?” the cabbie asked.

“Yes.” Chloe peeked under the blanket draped over the box. It wasn’t a box but a green plastic crate with holes on the side. She turned the thing around, but just as she was about to look under the blanket again, something exploded and flashed behind them. Henry’s letter slid out of her lap and onto the floor of the cab.

The cabbie braked. Chloe put her hand out in front of the crate, keeping it from rolling to the floor. The cabbie shifted the car into park and hopped out. There was another explosion. A bolt of fear seared through Chloe. She popped out of the cab. Bam! Still another explosion rumbled through her. She couldn’t see anything. With a shaking hand, she fumbled for her bag and pulled out the glasses Henry made for her and put them on askew. Just then, the biggest, reddest fireworks she’d ever seen lit up the sky and cast a silhouette of Dartworth Hall with its classic, symmetrical facade. Two more fireworks, blue and white, exploded in the darkness. She heard more fireworks launch, and the anticipation of their size and their colors made her giddy.

The cabbie turned to her. “Just fireworks. They had me going there for a minute, they did.” He got back into the cab and shut his door.

Chloe was transfixed. Henry did this for her. She bit her lip. Another round of fireworks melted in the sky. Then another and another. They were all red, white, and blue.

The cabbie rolled down the window. “Best be going now. The meter’s running.”

“You’re right. Let’s go.” Chloe took off the glasses, slid back into her seat, and shut the door. Flashes of colored light appeared in the cabbie’s rearview mirror, but she looked at the floor of the cab, where Henry’s letter had fallen.

“Meow.” The crate started meowing. Chloe sighed. “Meow.” She lifted the blanket and saw, now, that it was the tabby Sebastian had sent her. Wait a minute. It was Sebastian who sent the cat, right? Or was it really Henry? Anyway, how the hell was she going to take a cat on an overseas flight? “Meow.” She let the blanket drop. A cat?

She’d always liked cats, but there was something about a thirty-nine-year-old single woman with a cat. She’d be a cat lady. She’d end up eighty years old, in a dilapidated house with a thousand cats. She had to get this cat back to its home. Wait . That was exactly what Henry wanted. He wanted her to turn the cab around and bring the cat back. He wanted her to come back. To miss her flight.

The cat meowed again. Ha! Well that wasn’t going to happen. She’d just pay the cabbie to take the damn cat back. Chloe bent down to pick up Henry’s letter. For a long time she just held it and rubbed her thumb over the sealed wax W . Nobody had ever put on a fireworks show for her before.

Was Mr. Wrightman so wrong after all?

She broke the seal with her fingernails, freshly painted orange, a color she borrowed from Fiona. Outside the window, one quaint English village after another blurred by in the night.

“Can you turn on the light back here, please? I need to read something.”

The cabbie turned on the light and raised the volume on the radio. The rap music that was blaring out of it gave Chloe a headache. Certain words floated to the surface: ho and butt and bitch , and nasty . She sank down into the seat and held the cream-colored letter in front of her.

He had written it with ink and quill.

Dear Chloe,

I haven’t much time to write, as you’ve ordered a cab and it will soon be here, so this missive will not be as polished as I would like.

Do consider staying on a bit longer. If not for me, then for your friends, such as Mrs. Crescent. If not for Mrs. Crescent, then for yourself, to really see England. I can arrange for a private tour guide to show you the sights of London. How can you leave without seeing London Bridge? Buckingham Palace? Windsor Castle? I just can’t bear to have you leave our country in this manner. I can’t bear to have you leave at all.

I apologize for deceiving you. I don’t blame you for being upset. It was a damn ridiculous thing to do to a woman like you.

Still, I find it comforting to know that, even if you are half a world away, a woman like you exists. I had quite given up. You see, I, too, fell in love with you on paper, when I read your profile and all the transcripts of your interviews months ago. I asked for you to be the first chosen. But George didn’t want you on the show until the final weeks—for drama’s sake. He told me you had been contacted but were engaged to be married. I was taken by surprise when you arrived. Truly, I let Sebastian go a bit too far, and he, too, seemed to fall for you. But he’s not ready to settle down, as you well know.

What I do know is that my feelings for you are real, and always will be. When you get back to the real world, I hope you will think of me. And when that day comes, please contact me by e-mail, post, telephone, or smoke signals. I’ll have both you and your daughter flown over here in a heartbeat. I’d like to propose a secret correspondence and we can get to know each other better—the old-fashioned way.