Jane Austen Made Me Do It by Laurel Ann Nattress Page B

wished she had paid more attention in Intro to English Lit.
    Did watching that miniseries with Colin Firth in it count?
    â€œI’m Cate,” she blundered. “I mean Catherine. You can call me Catherine.”
    The apparition gave her a look, but dipped a tiny curtsy anyway. Oh, crap, they didn’t use first names back then, did they? Damn, damn, damn. She was so not prepared for this.
    Cate curtsied clumsily back, her jeans protesting against the movement. Her midriff felt very bare. She ought to have been freezing, but adrenaline pumped heat through her veins. Was this how deepwater divers felt or those crazy people who jumped off bridges on a bungee cord? Warm, with a desperate heat like a fever burning one up from the inside out? Or perhaps it was just because in real life, the real Cate was under the covers, burrowed in warmth, dreaming of an authoress she ought to have read.
    â€œForgive me,” said Cate. “I know I should know this … But do you write ghost stories?”
    â€œI write stories, yes,” said the ghost firmly, “but not what you call a
ghost story
. I leave those to Mrs. Radcliffe and the heirs of
Otranto
.”
    â€œOh?” Cate didn’t like to ask who Mrs. Radcliffe was.
    â€œI have no patience with such trumpery horrors—except in satire. I have,” she added blandly, “written just such a story about Northanger. You can find it here, in this chest. I’ve left it as a gift for my host in exchange for the fine entertainment he afforded me during my visit.”
    There was a lively gleam in the authoress’s dead eye that made Cate wonder just what sort of gift it was intended to be. And what sort of entertainment she had been afforded.
    Hell hath no fury like an authoress bored?
    â€œI think I may have heard of it.” Cate conjured up Mr. Tilney-Tilney’s ravings about aged housekeepers, secret passageways, and murdered wives. “What is it about? Your Northanger story, I mean.”
    The apparition gave the lacquer chest a fond pat. “My heroine, a great reader of Mrs. Radcliffe, visits Northanger. Overcome at staying under the roof of a genuine abbey—and one of such antiquity!—she imagines herself surrounded by every sort of ghost and ghoul. Naturally, she finds it to be nothing of the sort.”
    â€œWhy naturally?” asked Cate.
    â€œSilly Catherine,” said the ghost of Jane Austen indulgently. “There are no such things as ghosts.”
    L AUREN W ILLIG is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling Pink Carnation series, which follows the adventures of a series of Napoleonic-era spies in their attempts to thwart Bonaparte and avoid Almack’s AssemblyRooms. A graduate of Yale, Willig has a graduate degree in English history from Harvard and a JD from Harvard Law. After receiving her first book contract during her first month of law school, she juggled the legal life and Napoleonic spies for several years before deciding that doc review and book deadlines don’t mix. Now a full-time writer, she recently taught a class at Yale on “Reading the Historical Romance,” an examination of the Regency romance novel as literature from Jane Austen (especially
Northanger Abbey
!) through Julia Quinn.
    www.laurenwillig.com

Editor’s Note: The following journal entry, spanning a few days in the spring of 1805, was recently discovered tucked into Jane Austen’s 1813 diary.
    25 Gay Street, Bath

Wednesday, 17 April 1805
    â€œ B y the by, Jane,” my mother observed from her comfortable chair by the fire, “your disreputable Lord Harold has
again
brought disgrace upon all his noble family.”
    â€œIndeed, ma’am?”
    â€œFrom this account in the
Morning Gazette
, I conclude that he has met a man in a duel—and been wounded for his folly! It is conjectured that his lordship’s opponent is already fled to the Continent, in expectation of Lord