From a character analysis of Jane Fairfax in Emma, from Schmoop dot com:

Maybe Jane keeps her cool so well because, well, she actually is pretty cool. She's the only self-made woman in the novel. Orphaned when she was young, Jane quickly learns that she's got to be good at taking care of herself. She sings, plays the piano, sews, and is about to start teaching—in other words, she does just about everything that a woman could do in her time. And she does them all really, really well. In fact, Emma hates her at first because she's just too…good!


Chapter 7

When Jane woke up the next morning, Frank was again in a deep sleep. She had come to the conclusion that due to all his travels, his internal clock was probably all messed up, so when he had the chance to sleep in, he took it.

She rose and went to the living room, where she found Sarah and Peter sitting on the sofa, talking. "Good morning," Sarah said. "Peter and I were just talking about going out to breakfast. Do you want to join us?"

Jane pointed her thumb toward her bedroom. "Frank is here, and he's still sleeping."

Peter raised his eyebrows as Sarah spoke again. "Well, we could leave you two..."

Jane laughed. "That's not necessary. Why don't I make breakfast? I think I have what I need for pancakes." Since she was a kid, pancakes had been something she had loved to make and eat.

They agreed, and Jane returned to her bedroom to try to rouse Frank. She lay down beside him, thinking again about how handsome she found him, and gently kissed his lips. After a few such kisses, he cracked open one eye and threw his arm around her to pull her closer. "Nice way to wake up," he said.

Jane smiled and kissed him again, this time more deeply. His morning breath was much better than it had been two weeks earlier, but that was understandable. This time, he had brought with him a small travel bag with a change of clothing and toiletries, including a toothbrush. When he removed the bag from his trunk the night before, he had assured Jane, "I didn't pack this with any expectations. I was just kinda, sorta hoping."

Frank began to slip his hands beneath her clothes, so she pulled back. "I need to go make breakfast."

"Why?" Frank asked, nuzzling her neck. "I have everything I need to eat right here."

Jane laughed but pulled away further. "Sarah and Peter are here, and I promised them."

Frank exhaled heavily and mumbled something under his breath.

"What was that?"

Frank wore a pout on his face, but his eyes twinkled. "Nothing. I'll get up." He sat up, stretched, and slowly rose to his feet. Finding his bag, he pulled out a T-shirt and pair of jeans. The T-shirt was black and fit snugly, emphasizing the muscles in his chest and arms and reminding her of what he had looked like the moment before he'd donned the shirt. Jane had to force herself to turn away before she decided to jump him back into bed.

He followed her out of the bedroom and stopped at the bathroom, while Jane walked on to the kitchen. She pulled a small jar of milled flax seeds from the refrigerator. She added 30 ml of the seeds along with 60 ml of water to a blender and ran it for a minute. She would let the mixture sit for a while until it became a gel about the consistency and thickness of two raw eggs. It was a good vegan replacement for eggs in pancake batter.

Once the blender stopped, she could hear Frank in the living room, talking to Sarah and Peter. She smiled. She loved hearing Frank's voice. They were laughing now, and then Sarah called out, "Jane! You need to come out here!"

"What is it?" she asked when she joined the other three.

"Frank is quite upset that we still don't have a coffee maker," Sarah told her.

Jane held out her arms. "I've told him we have plenty of tea! Some of it even contains caffeine."

Frank, sitting in a chair near the sofa, groaned. "I can't take this! How can you stand it, man?" he asked Peter.

"I'm fine with either coffee or tea," Peter replied.

"You're supposed to be on my side!"

Peter stood up. "Come on then. There's a café nearby. Let's get some."

Frank looked deeply relieved. "Thank you, thank you!"

Jane laughed again as she returned to the kitchen. Sarah followed her, and as soon as they heard the front door shut behind the two men, she said, "So?"

Jane didn't answer at first, taking a minute to measure out a few different types of flours into a large mixing bowl. Finally, she said, "Remember all your warnings?"

"Yes?"

"Totally shot to hell."

Sarah smiled. "You really like him, don't you?"

Jane stopped sprinkling cinnamon into the flour and nodded. "I haven't felt like this about someone in a very long time."

"So don't listen to me. What do I know?"

"You're getting married. You obviously know how to have a successful relationship. Will you please hand me some milk?"

Sarah opened the refrigerator. "It's only successful because I'm lucky. I'm nobody's relationship expert."

"So what do I do? Hope I'm lucky, too?"

"Enjoy it and see where it goes, I suppose." Sarah pulled out a carton of coconut milk, passing it to Jane.

By the time the men returned and entered the kitchen, Jane had just poured the last of the pancake batter into the skillet. When Peter gave his fiancée a pointed look, Sarah opened a cabinet and pulled out four plates, and then grabbed four place settings of utensils from a drawer. "Frank, will you help me set the table?" she asked.

After Frank and Sarah left the room, Peter whispered, "He really likes you and says he has no intentions of hurting you."

Jane gaped. "What did you say to him?"

"I just asked him how he feels about you, and told him I don't want to see you get hurt."

"Oh my God, Peter, I can't believe you did that!"

"Why? Jane, you're like a sister to me. Of course I'm going to look out for you."

She exhaled, trying to hold her temper. "First of all, I'm a grown woman. I don't need you interfering in my relationships. And second, he's your investor! The last thing I want is for anything that happens between Frank and me to affect anything that happens between Frank and you!"

She clapped her hand over her mouth, realizing she had been shouting. "Dammit," she muttered. Frank had probably heard her.

Peter placed his hands on Jane's shoulders. "It's all right," he said softly. "He's pretty good-natured. I don't think I upset him, and I don't think anything you just said will upset him either."

"Please promise me you won't interfere again."

"I won't. I promise."

At that instant, the smoke alarm went off. The forgotten pancake had burned. "Oh, great!" Jane cried, laughing to release her tension. Peter grabbed the spatula from Jane's hand, turned off the stove, tossed the blackened pancake into the sink, and then reached up to wave away the smoke with the spatula until the alarm went silent.

A short time later, Jane entered the living room carrying the plate of pancakes to the coffee table that Sarah and Frank had set. Peter followed behind her with a jar of maple syrup and a teapot for Sarah and Jane.

Sarah and Peter let Jane and Frank sit next to each other on the sofa, while they took chairs at opposite ends of the coffee table. No one mentioned the smoke alarm or Jane's outburst. Instead, Frank took Jane's hand and squeezed it, giving her a gentle smile. It reminded her again how much she liked him.

"So, oh brilliant one," Frank said to Sarah after everyone had started eating, "tell me about this PhD program you're doing."

Sarah smiled. She loved talking about her research. "Jane was the impetus for it."

"Really?" Frank said, smiling at Jane.

"Yes. When we were in our master's programme together, she would argue on occasion that one reason social welfare programs have had more acceptance in European countries than in the U.S. is due to the relative homogeneity of the populations. People have an easier time accepting that their tax supports other people if they feel a kinship with them. It made me wonder whether growing diversity here in Great Britain is affecting attitudes toward social welfare programmes, and if so, what can be done to mitigate that impact."

Sarah continued to answer Frank's questions, ending by expressing her wish to someday travel to the U.S. to conduct comparison studies. "Jane's aunt and grandmother have already promised me a place to stay whenever I come," she said with a grin.

After breakfast, Peter and Sarah left to visit his parents. Frank looked at Jane and said, "So, show me around your place."

She held out her hands. "This is it. You've seen it all except for Sarah's bedroom."

"No, I haven't. What's that scraggly looking jungle out there?" He pointed at the dead or dying plants on her balcony.

"That's my container garden," Jane told him. "I need to get around to clearing it out. It will look much better when springtime comes."

"How long have you been a gardener?"

"All my life. Both my grandparents grew up on farms, my grandfather in Georgia and my grandmother in the Caribbean. When they bought their house, they started growing stuff in their backyard. They taught my mom and aunt to garden, and my aunt taught me."

"You grow stuff, huh? What kinds of stuff?"

"Well, here, mostly leafy greens and herbs. But back in California, we grow everything: fruit trees, all types of vegetables, everything. We always produce more than we can use, so we end up giving or trading most of it to people in our neighbourhood." Jane laughed. "We can some of it, too. My aunt Maddy loves to can, especially jams. She comes up with some... interesting combinations."

"Like what?"

"Like guava-peach-turnip."

"Uh..." Frank looked at her with a weird expression.

Jane laughed again. "They're actually not that bad. They just take some getting used to."

"No, thanks; I'll pass," Frank grinned. "So your Aunt Maddy sounds like an interesting person."

"She is! She's actually kind of like you."

"Like me? How?"

"She's very outgoing. Larger than life."

"Now I need to see a picture of Aunt Maddy. Do you have one?"

She stood up and motioned for him to follow her to the piano. On the wall above it and on a small shelf beside it were a number of framed photos. Jane picked up one of Maddy and herself at her graduation from Oxford.

"You look like her," he commented. "You have the same smile. What else do you have here?" He motioned to the other pictures.

She picked up a faded photo. "My grandparents on their wedding day."

"Your grandmother was hot!" Frank said. "That's who you really look like."

Jane smiled. "My mom, too," she said, showing him a similar wedding photo of her parents.

"Hey, is that you playing at Carnegie Hall?" he asked, spotting another picture.

Jane nodded. "I was sixteen, and was selected as one of three kids from California for a youth concert there. I was scared to death, but this was when Aunt Maddy was going through cancer treatment. I kept telling myself that if she could be so brave, so could I."

"You're very impressive, Ms. Fairfax," Frank said, bowing to her. She waved off the praise.

"Cute kids," he remarked about a picture in which Jane was surrounded by a half dozen children.

"That was taken at the United Together Children's Centre in Sierra Leone."

"That's where you went when you were at Oxford, right?"

She nodded. "It's one of the poorest countries in the world, and there are thousands of orphans. About eighty kids live right at the Centre, and a couple hundred more kids who still live with their families come to the Centre for schooling or medical care."

"That's where you learned all about power to the people?" he teased.

Jane rolled her eyes. "I already knew, but being there reinforced it. All the staff at the Centre are from Sierra Leone. They have offices in Oxford, the U.S., and U.A.E., but those offices exist mainly for fundraising and awareness. We knew before we left that as volunteers our job was to help and support, but the Sierra Leonans run the show."

Frank nodded. "Makes sense."

"Anyway, one day I'm going back to adopt one of the kids."

"Really?"

Jane nodded. "Really. That's one of my life goals."

Frank was quiet for a moment before noticing another picture. "Hey, you know the Woodhouses." He was looking at Jane's high school graduation photo, the only graduation pic she had that included her grandmother, who had been physically unable to attend her later graduations. In addition to Aunt Maddy and Grandma, Maddy's former boss Henry Woodhouse was in the picture, along with his daughters Isabella and Emma. Emma was also in a cap and gown.

"That's right, you know Mr. Woodhouse because you do business with the Highbury Group." She recalled reading about that during her Google search for information about Frank.

Frank nodded. "I vaguely remember Henry's older daughter, too. She was a freshman when I was a senior in high school. You must know them through his younger daughter."

"No, through Mr. Woodhouse. Aunt Maddy was his office assistant for many years, and now her company, Bates' Financial Services, is under their umbrella."

"That's your aunt's company? I've seen the name in Highbury Group reports. We have to stop doing this, Jane."

"What, finding connections?"

"Yeah. So you must have been good friends with the younger one, Emma."

Jane hesitated. "Not exactly."

Frank raised his eyebrows. "What's that?"

She shook her head. "Nothing." She wasn't going to badmouth the daughter of one of Frank's business partners.

"Oh, come on, I sense a story here."

Jane sighed. "Mr. Woodhouse arranged for me to transfer the Beverly Hills High, since it was a much better school than the one I was slated to attend. Emma was really excited to have me there at first, but she wanted me to become Emma 2.0. When she realized I wasn't interested, she dropped me as a friend."

Her freshman year in high school had been one of the hardest times imaginable for Jane. It wasn't that Emma was mean to her; she wasn't that type of person. But Emma was very popular and her opinion carried a lot of weight, so once she decided Jane wasn't her friend, a lot of other kids followed suit.

"Good for you," Frank said.

"What do you mean?"

"You stood up for being yourself in high school. That's not an easy thing to do."

In truth, Emma's sister Isabella had helped Jane a lot. One day Izzy pulled Jane aside and said, "Don't let Emma get you down. She's jealous of you, you know."

"Me?!" Jane had exclaimed. "Why would she be jealous of me?"

"Because you do everything so well—schoolwork, music, running. Emma doesn't do anything that well. Plus, you don't adore her the way everyone else does, and she hates that."

Izzy's pep talk had worked, and Jane was able to return to school feeling stronger and more confident. Eventually, she had made friends and found her own niche.

"I have an Emma Woodhouse story," Frank said, interrupting Jane's recollection. "Remember when I told you about my ice-fishing trip to Norway?"

Jane nodded.

"Well, my brother got married last month, and the ice-fishing trip coincided with his wedding, so I had to miss it."

"You missed your brother's wedding?"

"That's what I just said. It conflicted with my trip. So Emma was coordinating the wedding, and somehow—"

Jane interrupted him. "You missed your brother's wedding to go ice-fishing?"

"It wasn't just an ice-fishing trip. It was a chance to meet with some important potential investors for one of my companies. That's where they were going to be, so that's where I needed to be."

"But your brother only gets married hopefully once in his life. How could you miss that?"

"He understood. Now, are you going to let me finish this story or not?"

"Go ahead."

"Emma Woodhouse planned the wedding, and when she learned I wouldn't be there, she somehow obtained my private number and left me a series of increasingly... strident messages, yelling at me for not coming. I kept thinking, This woman doesn't even know me, and she's totally off the hook!"

He stopped laughing when Jane said, "I don't blame her! This is one time when I agree with Emma."

"Hey!" Frank started to look annoyed. "I'm not the only one who missed the wedding. Ryan's parents didn't make it, either. They were busy, too."

Jane's eyes widened. "Ryan's parents didn't make it? Poor Ryan. How could you guys do that to him?"

"You don't know my family," Frank suddenly snapped. "We understand people making the decisions they need to make based on business. Remember Ryan and I at home as kids when our parents were out trying to build my stepmom's company?"

Jane exhaled. "I'm sorry," she said. "You're right, I don't know your family. I don't understand it, but if Ryan was okay with all of you not being there, then it's not my place to judge it. I do wonder whether Ryan's wife was okay with it."

Frank was quiet for a moment before saying, "Not really. That's why Emma was yelling at me."

His words hung in the air. Finally, Jane asked softly, "Are you going to get a chance to make it up to them?"

"I don't know. I was thinking about going home to L.A. for Christmas, and then maybe spending New Year's in Vegas, but now I have something else I'd rather do."

"What could be more important than seeing your brother and his new wife?"

"What are you doing for Christmas? Assuming you celebrate it."

"I do. I'm going to Scotland with Sarah and her family."

"So maybe I'm going to Scotland, too."

"Now you're just making stuff up. Is there some reason you don't want to see Ryan and his wife?"

Frank started grinning. "I have to be really direct with you, don't I?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I want to spend the holidays with you. That's if you want it, and Sarah and her family don't think it's too tacky of me to invite myself along. I'll pay my own way, stay at a hotel, all that."

"What about your brother?"

Frank placed his hands on Jane's face and gently stroked her cheeks with his thumbs. "Jane," he said, looking deeply into her eyes, "I want to spend the holidays with you."

She stared back at him for a while, and then a slow smiled spread across her face. "I'll talk to Sarah."


Author's note: The United Together Children's Centre is inspired by a real place, the All As One Children's Center in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Their U.S. offices are located in my community, and I have had the honor to meet several of the wonderful people working with this group. As with my fictional organization, the UK offices are located in Oxford. You can learn more about them at allasone dot org.

Emma Approved spoiler/note: If you watched the series, you may remember that when Frank didn't respond to Emma's messages (because he was busy ice-fishing), Emma gave Annie a gift "from Frank" and a letter welcoming Annie to the family. However, a week later, an actual gift and letter from Frank arrived—which Emma assumed was a response to her messages. However, it would have taken at least two weeks for a package to travel from Europe to the U.S., which meant that Frank sent his gift at least a week before Emma made her calls.

And one more author's note: I would love some comments!