Free Jane Austen Stole My Boyfriend by Cora Harrison Page B

attractiveness and I beamed encouragement at him as I curtsied.
    Jane held out her hand to him in her impulsive way. ‘Eliza, you know Harry Digweed, don’t you? You met him at the play.’
    ‘Oh, the play,’ broke in Phylly before Eliza could open her mouth. ‘I’ve heard all about that play. Your mother, Jane, wanted me to come and join in, but my principles
wouldn’t allow me. It’s a nuisance to have been brought up with such strong Christian principles, but there you are, we can’t change who we are, can we?’ The last phrase was
aimed at Harry, who – dear Harry! – immediately stammered that she was quite right.
    Jane gave him an annoyed glance, which disconcerted him, and he turned bright red and tapped the brim of his shiny new hat against a lamp post in his confusion.
    ‘Let’s walk up towards the Crescent,’ said Eliza soothingly. ‘Will you come with us, Mr Digweed?’
    He looked unsure for a moment, glancing from Philadelphia’s unwelcoming face to Jane’s annoyed one.
    ‘Do come, Harry,’ I said and earned myself a suspicious, head-to-one-side, bird-like look from Philadelphia.
    ‘Tell me about your school, Cousin Philadelphia,’ I said, moving up beside her and allowing Jane to fall behind and walk beside Harry. Eliza felt it her duty to keep Phylly and Jane
at a distance from each other. So she walked beside me, gamely putting extra questions to Phylly about her teaching methods (involving mainly, we understood, the use of a small sharp ruler which
stung the backs of the children’s fingers when they made a mistake in their reading) and then, once she ran out of stories about the village school, hearing about Phylly’s exciting ball
at a nearby town where a gentleman actually asked her to dance for the second time!!!
    Eliza, in her generous way, was very merry about Phylly’s beau and her teasing remarks almost relaxed her unpleasant cousin into an odd, bird-like giggle. She even went so far as to tease
Phylly about the impression that she had made on Harry, and Phylly graciously conceded that she thought he was a well-behaved young man.
    I loved my first view of the Crescent when we eventually got there. It was as if someone had taken one huge mansion, gently bent it into a semicircle and set it on top of the
hill to look down over the parkland. I couldn’t count how many houses there are because we stayed just at the edge of it. (But my uncle told me at supper that there are thirty.)
    Eliza was very interested in the quality of the luggage being taken into number 1, the Crescent, where a huge travelling coach was unloading an enormous amount of goods and smartly dressed
footmen were rushing in and out. Someone in the first rank of fashion must have hired the house, Eliza surmised.
    I asked her if she was going to the Assembly Rooms tomorrow night and she nodded vigorously and was delighted to hear that Uncle James approved of the idea.
    ‘And Jenny, you will wear your so beautiful white gown, n’est-ce pas ? And Jane?’ Eliza looked thoughtfully over at Jane, who was looking up at Harry, but then was forced
to reassure Phylly, who was making a fuss about whether or not she should go to a ball.
    Harry then decided that he should leave us. He is a sensitive young man and he felt that Phylly didn’t like him. Nothing that Jane or I could say made him change his mind. Jane went with
him to the top of the gravel walk, and I could see that she was giving him some directions. It was funny to watch them from a distance, he bending his fair head over Jane’s dark one, she
vehemently talking and gesturing and he nodding from time to time.
    And then we all went off to buy the new hat for Phylly. We went from shop to shop to shop until eventually the troublesome woman chose something in pink and green in Gregory’s shop, right
down at the bottom of the town in Bath Street, near to the Pump Room. After all that, on the way back to Queen’s Square she kept talking about remaking