The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

Chapter 19

“So I lay there in the darkness of that strange room,” Darcy said, “unable to move and afraid to speak to her…” He was still leaning on the fence, talking.

Eliza, who had listened silently to his story until now, could not resist interrupting. “Afraid…of her?”

Slowly Darcy turned at the sound of Eliza’s voice, as if he was emerging from a dream. “Yes,” he replied without evident embarrassment. “You see, I was wholly convinced that my head injury had triggered some sort of delusional state and that I would snap out of it at any moment and find myself in an ordinary hospital room, babbling to some poor bewildered nurse.”

“But you were really somewhere back in the nineteenth century…with Jane Austen.” Eliza could not keep the cynicism out of her voice.

“May of 1810, I soon discovered,” Darcy responded matter-of-factly. “But there were far too many other things concerning me at that moment to have immediately connected her with the Jane Austen. In fact, Jane’s first novel had not yet been published in the year 1810.”

Eliza was still dubiously shaking her head. “You’ll forgive me if I find all of this extremely hard to believe,” she said.

“Miss Knight, you insisted on knowing why I said that Jane’s letter was meant for me,” Darcy brusquely reminded her. “I had very little expectation that you would believe my explanation. Which is also why I’ve never told anyone else what happened.”

“Then why tell me?” Eliza countered argumentatively.

“Because,” Darcy responded with rising frustration, “you have something that I desperately want. And I am not ashamed to confess that I will do anything I can if there is even the slightest chance of convincing you to let me have that letter.”

“Ah, yes! I forgot,” she shot back. “A letter from a lover you abandoned two hundred years ago. Well, it is a wildly romantic concept.”

Darcy’s cheeks were flushed with anger. “You don’t understand at all!” he said vehemently.

“What doesn’t she understand, Fitz?”

They both turned to see Faith Harrington walking down the lane toward them. Darcy cast a warning glance at Eliza, then smiled at the new arrival. “Eliza doesn’t understand the many difficulties of breeding champion jumpers, Faith.”

Playing along with his deception, Eliza looked down at the ground and kicked at a clump of grass. “I guess I’m just a dumb old city girl,” she admitted. Then, raising her eyes to Darcy’s, she put on what she hoped was her dumbest expression. “Now it’s the mares that have the foals, right?”

“I’m terribly sorry to interrupt poor Eliza’s equestrian education, Fitz,” Faith abruptly cut in, “but the caterer from Richmond is in the ballroom, screaming about your ban on electricity for tomorrow. The poor man insists it’s not possible to serve hot guinea fowl to two hundred guests without his precious microwaves.”

Darcy sighed and pushed away from the fence. “I’ll take care of it,” he told the blonde.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, turning back to Eliza, “you’d like to go up and see your room now. I’ll ask Jenny to show you the way.” He paused and then added, “We can continue our discussion later, if you still want to continue…”

Eliza’s eyes sparkled mischievously and she gave him an enthusiastic nod. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

They all started walking back toward the house. But before they had proceeded ten paces Faith linked her arm possessively in Darcy’s and led him out ahead of Eliza, pointedly excluding the visitor from all further conversation.

“The florist is here looking for pots or something,” Faith rattled on to Darcy. “She says you promised they’d be ready.”

“I told that woman yesterday that Lucas would have the planters at the gatehouse.” Darcy sounded genuinely annoyed. “Will you point the florist down there while I see to the caterer?”

“Poor darling,” Faith crooned. “Of course I will. Anything I can do to help.”

After a few seconds of eavesdropping, Eliza tuned out the mundane discussion and followed silently behind them. As she walked she attempted to accord some level of credence to any part of Darcy’s bizarre tale. But aside from the seeming sincerity of his delivery and his own professions of bafflement over what had actually happened to him, she could think of nothing solid on which to ground a belief that he could have simply blundered into another century.

“Hope you like roses.”

At the end of a richly carpeted upstairs corridor hung with dark ancestral portraits Jenny Brown flung open a door and stepped aside. Looking into the large, antique-filled room beyond, Eliza saw that the decor was entirely themed around roses. From the rose-patterned wallpaper and carpet to the curtains at the windows and the intricately carved roses on the wooden bedposts, everything was roses.

Stepping into the Rose Bedroom Eliza saw that her bags had been placed on a blanket chest at the foot of the bed with its embroidered rose-colored satin coverlet. “Incredible!” she gasped, overwhelmed by the scene, which vaguely reminded her of the bedroom set from Gone With the Wind.

“Yeah, kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Jenny was grinning as she walked to a pair of tall French doors. She opened them to reveal a broad balcony overlooking the lawns and fields of Pemberley Farms. “You can see most of the estate from up here,” she reported.

“They say Fitz’s great-great-great-grandmother, Rose, used to sit here and watch for her man to come riding across those hills.” Turning back to the amazing bedroom Jenny switched on a small bronze lamp, illuminating a deep alcove that Eliza had not yet noticed.

Hanging on the wall of the alcove, above an ornate copper bathtub, was a lifelike painting of a slender, dark-haired woman, her full, sensuous lips seemingly on the verge of smiling.

Eliza thought that the subject of the portrait was the most exquisitely beautiful female she had ever seen, especially dressed as she was in a marvelously revealing gown of rose-colored silk. “Is that her?” she asked in awe.

“The grand lady herself,” Jenny confirmed. “They say when the master’s horse was sighted Rose would step into a bath filled with rose petals.” The handsome black woman smiled and pointed. “She’d be sitting naked right there in that tub, waiting for him when he reached her door.”

“Hmmm, sounds kinda kinky!” Eliza laughed.

Jenny joined in with her laughter. “I think that all depends on your point of view,” she said. “You see, my great-great-great-grandmother was the one who had to pick all those damn rose petals. But the times do change, don’t they?” Jenny continued. “Now Artie and I are guests here at Pemberley, and we stay in whatever room we choose.”

“Do you ever choose this room?” Eliza asked, smiling.

Jenny shuddered theatrically. “Honey, I get the hives when I walk into this room. You’re welcome to it.” She threw herself backwards onto the satin bed coverlet and crossed her ankles. “You’ll have to pick your own damn rose petals, though.”

“Point me to them gardens,” Eliza laughed, falling onto the bed beside her. “This is so bizarre,” she giggled, looking around at the roses that surrounded her on every side. “I came down here to talk about some old letters and I feel like I’ve fallen through the looking glass.”

“This room will do that to you, sure enough,” Jenny chuckled. “They say you should stop to smell the roses, but this bedroom is a definite case of overkill.”

“What do you recommend we do now?” Eliza asked between spasms of laughter.

“Well, Alice,” Jenny giggled, “if you’re up to it, this might be a good time for us to go find something for you to wear to the ball tomorrow night.”

“The ball,” Eliza gasped, choking on her own laughter. “Do you know I’ve never even been to a single ball in