The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

with catgut and leeches actually represented the cutting edge of early nineteenth-century medical technology. However, Darcy had no confidence that he could even survive another round of bleeding, much less wasps and applications of mercury.

While he was having these thoughts and wondering where to begin looking for his clothes, Darcy heard the bedroom door opening behind him. He turned to see Jane Austen angrily regarding him.

“Just as I suspected!” she said, pointing at the bed. “Get back in that bed, sir!”

“Now just a minute…” Darcy blustered, managing to feel both guilty and foolish at the same instant.

“Immediately!” she commanded. “You may be an artful deceiver but you are still a sick man.”

With her dark eyes flashing dangerously she watched as Darcy sheepishly climbed into the bed and covered his naked legs with a quilt. “Now, sir,” she demanded, “tell me without delay who you are and how you came to be here in Hampshire.”

“My name is Fitzwilliam Darcy and I am from Virginia,” he began, reciting the carefully rehearsed story he had put together over the past three days of listening to his hosts discussing him. “I was visiting friends nearby when I—”

Jane cut him off with a disgusted look. “You have no friends in this neighborhood, sir,” she coldly informed him. “Nor is there any large house such as you described closer than twenty miles to the west of this village.”

Darcy felt his cover story disintegrating before he could get it all out. “I, uh, perhaps it was to the east, then…” he stammered, relying on his head injury to account for his seeming confusion. “Look, you’ve been very kind, but I think I should just get dressed and leave now. May I have my clothes?”

At first he thought Jane was going to let him go, for she immediately stomped over to the same tall cupboard in the far corner of the room where she kept her nightgown and flung open the door. “Yes,” she said, “let us begin with your clothes.” She turned to face him in a swirl of skirts and held up his gray knit boxer shorts. “How do you explain this!”

Confused, Darcy stared at her. “My underwear?”

As if she was handling a deadly reptile, Jane held the shorts out in front of her with two hands and stretched the elastic waistband, releasing it with a loud snap.

“Not the garment!” she said, stretching and snapping the elastic band again. “This fabric that springs and stretches like gum arabic! Never has such a thing been seen or heard of, even in London. Poor Maggie nearly fainted in the laundry.”

Darcy’s mind raced. “Oh, the elastic,” he said smiling. “Elastic, it…” the smile faded as he realized that if she was holding his underwear, then he wasn’t wearing them. He looked down at the nightshirt he’d had on since his first night in her house, her bed.

Darcy looked up at Jane, a deep blush coloring his face and more than likely his entire body. “Who undressed me?”

Jane, still holding the boxer shorts, dropped her hand to her side. Taken aback by the question she could only respond, “I beg your pardon?”

The blush receding Darcy asked again, “Undressed me, who did it?”

Jane looked at him, unable to say anything.

“Miss Austen?” he nudged.

Still not sure how to respond, she said, “I have six brothers.”

“And none of them lives here.”

She stood looking into the depths of his green eyes; she saw embarrassment and anger. He’d been brought into her house bleeding; it had seemed perfectly natural to get him out of his dirty clothes. How many times had she helped her mother do the same with one of her brothers? But now she questioned the propriety of having done so to a perfect stranger. She wasn’t prepared to admit it. But he wasn’t going to let her escape so easily.

“You did it, didn’t you?” he challenged.

Now she felt the heat rise in her own face as her cheeks went crimson. No longer able to withstand his penetrating stare she looked away, but couldn’t hide a small smile at the memory of his strong, athletic body.

For what seemed many minutes but was actually only a few seconds an embarrassed silence fell on the room. In the hope of changing the subject Jane turned to anger. “I demand that you tell me who you are and where you come from.”

“I’m not sure you’re in any position to be making demands,” was his own angry reply.

Her tone turned serious. “You must explain yourself to me now, sir, else I must think you a spy.”

Darcy stared at her. “A spy? Who would I be spying on?”

Jane’s expression did not change. “It is no secret that our two countries have many quarrels and have often been at war,” she said. “Even now American ships continue the illegal trade in slaves and supply our French enemies with cannon and munitions…”

Again Darcy felt like slapping his head at his own stupidity. This was 1810, the era of the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France. Wars in which the new, maverick American nation had sided firmly with France.

“I am not a spy,” he said weakly. “Okay?”

A flash of anger shone in Jane’s dark eyes. “Okay!” she mimicked the strange new word. “What does that mean? I speak several languages and the word okay is not included in the vocabularies of any of them.”

Darcy suddenly swung his feet out of the bed, realizing that he was on increasingly shaky ground with this lovely but dangerous woman. He stood and held out his hand to her. “First let me have my clothes,” he demanded with as much dignity as he could muster.

Still holding his undergarment in her hand, Jane stood her ground for a moment. She wanted to know about the brass contraption that opened and closed his trousers, the buttons that looked like bone but were not, as well as the fabric he called elastic. She watched him and found that she was unwilling to revisit the uncomfortable scene regarding how she came to know about those things. Heaving a sigh she turned to the cupboard and retrieved his pants. Turning back to him, she wordlessly handed the items to him, then turned away as he slipped them on.

He sat on the bed and began pulling on his boots. “Okay is an American slang word,” he told her. “You are familiar with slang…made-up words from the people in the streets?”

“Yes, I understand your meaning,” she said, as he strode over to the cupboard and found his freshly laundered shirt folded neatly inside.

With his shirt in his hand he looked over at Jane who was still standing by the cupboard. She looked up into his haunting green eyes. He saw in her face a jumble of emotions. Although she was embarrassed by what had just passed between them, what he saw behind the anger was excitement, passion. He was enchanted once again by this wonderfully complex woman.

Finally finding his voice, he said, “Okay means all right, or fine,” he explained, pulling on more clothes and walking over to the window to look down at the empty village road junction.

“If you are a spy they could hang you.” It was a flat statement.

“I am not a spy!” he again insisted, turning back to her. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know how I got here. As a matter of fact I’m not even sure where here is, though I’m pretty certain I’m a very long way from my own…home.”

He paused then, watching her eyes for some sign, realizing as he did how extraordinarily attractive she was, bearing not the slightest resemblance to the poorly done sketch of a frumpy sixteen-year-old that was the only known portrait of Jane Austen to have survived into his time.

“I’m very sorry that I deceived you,” he apologized again. “I was hoping to leave here quietly, recover my horse, and then try to find my way back—”

“Back to Virginia in—five hours?” Despite the obvious tone of her cynical question, Jane’s dark eyes were filled with evident curiosity.

“Oh God! Did I say that?”

She nodded slowly. “Along with many other strange and unexplainable things. Things you called phones and jets and some sort of telling vision.”

Darcy was shocked and disturbed to learn that he had managed to reveal so much in his brief unconscious