The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

Eliza, Harv, Jenny and Artemis were clustered at one end of the huge table in the echoing dining room, eating a delcious meal of crab bisque and cold fried chicken. Faith, meanwhile, had once more appropriated Darcy for herself. She had moved him to the opposite end of the table, where she had been chattering nonstop for the past half hour about some arrangement or other.

“Admit it now, aren’t you glad you stayed?” Harv Harrington was pointing a partially consumed drumstick at Eliza.

She cast a deadly glance in Faith’s direction. “Let me get back to you on that one, Harv,” she replied, attacking the savory pink soup with an antique silver spoon, the bowl of which was cunningly formed to resemble a miniature seashell.

Harv’s handsome features contorted into an expression of mock concern at her reply. “Oh, my! I do hope my big sister hasn’t been bothering you,” he said.

“No more than your average case of bubonic plague,” Eliza assured him. “What is with her anyway? I mean, it’s not like she caught Fitz and me playing doctor behind the barn.”

“Artie, I told you I liked this girl,” Jenny piped up.

Artemis looked up thoughtfully from his bisque. “Playing doctor behind the barn? I must have missed that course in med school,” he commented dryly.

Jenny leaned over and kissed his neck. “I’ll fill you in on it later, dear,” she solemnly promised. Then she turned to Harv. “Harv, why don’t you be a darling and explain to Eliza about Fitz and your sister,” she said.

Delighted at actually being invited to speak for once, Harv quickly finished demolishing his chicken drumstick and washed down the last bite with a large swallow of scotch. “Fitz and Faith,” he said at length. “Well, that’s simple enough. You see, Eliza, Faith has dreamed of becoming the mistress of Pemberley Farms since she was old enough to read a Gucci label—”

“And she learned to read from the Neiman Marcus catalog,” Artemis interjected, reaching for the chicken platter.

Harv shot the handsome doctor a pained look, then turned and refocused his attention on Eliza. “As I was saying, Faith’s most ardent wish is that Fitz will marry her. A wish Fitz isn’t likely to grant. But I suppose I should start at the beginning. Although our family—mine and Faith’s—is old and aristocratic, our wealth isn’t what it once was. So, unless one of us should ever decide, God forbid, to go to work, our only track to genteel prosperity is for me or Faith to marry somebody rich enough to keep up with our spending habits.”

“Which together roughly rival those of Argentina,” interrupted Jenny.

Artemis threw Harv a pitying glance. “The man is in a tough position,” he told Eliza. “I’m talking about using his mansion’s swimming pool to raise catfish.” Artie managed to look suitably solemn. “It’s very sad to see a once-rich-and-powerful white family reduced to such a state,” he intoned.

“Thanks, Artie, I knew you’d understand,” Harv said gratefully. “And despite what you’ve heard from the AMA, catfish contains almost no fat. It’s the beer and cornmeal batter that really puts on the pounds.”

“Now that’s a true fact!” Jenny declared.

Harv turned back to Eliza. “At any rate, Eliza,” he continued, “I have tried my level best to secure a bride who would restore the family fortunes and, incidentally, put a new roof on the summer house, but alas the only suitable candidates all rejected me, including one who actually looked like a catfish…”

“She did, too!” Jenny giggled. “It was a match made in heaven.”

Harv ignored the remark and, clearing his throat, continued in a mournful tone, “I struck out in the marriage bowl. My sister hasn’t fared any better and continues to hope that Fitz will reconsider his stand and marry her. But the only way that might happen is to get him blind drunk so he forgets how obnoxious she is long enough for us to whisk him off to Juarez or someplace where they still perform fifteen-dollar weddings without a blood test.”

By this time Eliza had caught the giggles from Jenny. “Wow! I’m sorry I asked,” she told Harv, whose nose was back in his glass. “And Fitz doesn’t have any inclination to go along with this program?”

Snorting into his drink, Harv rolled his eyes but kept drinking so Jenny attempted to interpret for him, “Absolutely not.”

Finally coming up for air Harv added, “We couldn’t actually get him that drunk.”

Eliza queried, “Doesn’t he like her?” Wondering why the woman was there at all.

Artemis joined the conversation. “Well, he liked her enough to take her to England with him.”

“She was with him?” startling herself with the quick stab of jealousy she felt.

Jenny seemed to sense Eliza’s alarm and was pleased that things were moving in that direction. “The tabloids had a field day with it but it was Harv’s idea, to keep her out of trouble here alone.”

Harv added, “Yeah, turned out she wasn’t the one we had to worry about.”

Eliza questioned the meaning of his cryptic statement, so Jenny explained, “That was when Fitz pulled his vanishing act. The tabloids had a field day with that, too.”

“Well, the tabloids got it all wrong,” intoned Harv. “I’m convinced he disappeared because he’d had just about enough of my darling sister as any sane person could take. I considered running away myself, he just beat me to it.”

Being reminded now of Fitz’s own explanation, she remembered the look on his face when he was talking about his first meetings with Jane Austen, and another small stab of jealousy surprised her.

Still in her own thoughts she mumbled aloud, “No, but he had fallen in love…” She stopped short, the three other diners turned and looked at her. Glancing at each in turn she realized that she couldn’t explain why she’d said it, so she hastily got up and excused herself. Bidding a good night to everyone at the table she retreated to the Rose Bedroom.

Later, Eliza sat cross-legged on the floor of her room, reviewing the events of her peculiar first day at Pemberley Farms. Because she always did her clearest thinking while she was working, her sketch pad was in her lap. Why had she felt jealous over a man she’d known only a few hours? Jealous of a woman he didn’t like and another who’d been dead almost two hundred years. She had to laugh at herself for the absurdity of it all.

Glancing up from time to time at the lovely portrait of Rose Darcy, Eliza drew the first mistress of the Great House precisely as Jenny had described her, standing on the balcony of the Rose Bedroom dressed in her silken gown, watching the distant fields for the return of her man.

Trying to sort out the strange thoughts swirling around her head, Eliza mentally recapped as she sketched. Darcy’s ancestor had been ruled out as a candidate for the character in Jane Austen’s romantic classic. And Jenny and the others had all marked his trip to England three years before as the beginning of Fitz’s obsession with the writer.

Eliza tried to seriously consider the possibility that her host’s incredible story might actually be true. Closing her eyes, she envisioned once more Darcy’s trancelike expression as he had seemingly relived events for her that, in his mind at least, had taken place two centuries before. Could it all possibly have happened just as he said? Eliza struggled to come up with an alternate explanation, one that could be tested with logic and reason.

She was startled out of her musings by the sound of a light knock. Eliza got up, laid her sketch pad on the bed and went to the door. “Who is it?” she asked softly.

“It’s me, Fitz.”

She opened the door to find him standing in the dark hallway with a tall silver candlestick in his hand. “Nice candle,” she said, smiling. Then, sticking her head out into the corridor, she looked up and down, halfway expecting to see Faith Harrington lurking behind a potted palm. “Where’s Lady Macbeth?” she asked.

“Locked safely away in the dungeon,” Darcy replied with a good-natured smile. “Would you care to go for a walk?”

Eliza returned his smile, realizing that it was almost impossible not to like this man. “A walk!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t this the point in one of those Gothic Romance novels where the master of the house—that’s you —is supposed to force his way into the heroine’s room—I’m the heroine—and rip her bodice?” she asked, feigning disappointment.

Darcy laughed. “Maybe,” he replied, pretending to consider the possibility. “I just usually come by and ask if