The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

the hour and hoped that her intelligence and curiosity would win over her sense of propriety. Because, as his encounter this evening with Francis Austen had demonstrated, it was only a matter of time before he would be denounced as a fraud, or perhaps something worse.

“A matter of time!” Darcy spoke the words aloud and was struck by their full irony.

He had to find a way to return to his own time and Jane Austen held the key. Lovely Jane. He closed his eyes and envisioned her once again as he had watched her in the bedroom at Chawton Cottage, her dark eyes gleaming in the candlelight as she leaned over her writing. Something stirred within him as he recalled another, even more powerful image of her: naked behind the thin dressing screen, her slender, full-breasted figure limned in the dancing firelight.

Darcy felt a sharp, sudden pang of regret that he would never embrace that lovely body, nor stay to unlock the secrets hidden behind those brilliantly shining eyes.

Half a mile from Chawton Cottage Darcy guided Lord Nelson off the road and into a long, grassy meadow. Moving at a slow walk across the uneven ground, he rode cautiously toward the line of dark woods at the far end of the field. To his great surprise, as he neared the trees Jane stepped from the shadows and stood waiting for him to dismount.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he said when they stood face-to-face. He saw that the hood of a light cloak covered her hair; looking up at him in the cold moonlight, her unsmiling face was even lovelier than he had remembered.

Forcing from her mind the foolish romantic fantasies that she had allowed herself to entertain in Edward’s carriage, she replied abruptly, “Could you not at least have waited for daylight?”

“I’m very sorry but I couldn’t,” he apologized.

Darcy looked around at the empty meadow. “I know this must be very awkward for you—”

Defiantly she said, “The only awkwardness that I feel is for the inconvenience of the hour and the desolation of the place that you have chosen.”

He nodded, stung by her coldness. “I won’t keep you long,” he promised. “I just need to know how to get back to the spot where my horse threw me. Then I’ll be gone.”

“The place is nearby,” she said. “I will happily show you the way…after you have fully explained yourself and your exceedingly odd behavior.”

Darcy cringed, for he had been afraid of something like this. He had insulted Jane by forcing the inappropriate meeting on her and she was not going to cooperate without first saving face, and perhaps in the process satisfying her own curiosity. “Miss Austen, I really can’t explain,” he stammered. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Jane stared at him for a moment and he saw the anger flashing anew in her eyes. “And because you are a man,” she spat, “it is obvious that you think me too stupid to understand.”

She turned abruptly on her heel and walked away, calling back to him over her shoulder. “As you wish, Darcy! You may find the place you seek by riding about in the dark until you come to it.” There was mockery in her tone as she added, “The meadows hereabout can have no more than two score sections of stone wall overhung with trees.”

“Miss Austen…Jane, wait!” he called in near panic.

She turned back and regarded him fiercely.

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he said, running to catch up with her at the edge of the wood. “On the contrary, you’re by far the most intelligent woman I have ever met!”

She suspiciously scrutinized his face as he hurried to explain. “I know that you began writing your novels nearly twenty years ago, when you were still a young girl,” Darcy told her. “For years you believed they would never be published, but you were very wrong, Jane. Next year Sense and Sensibility will become one of the most popular books of the year. And even now you are reworking and editing the book you call First Impressions. Your sister is right about the title, though. And that isn’t the title you will ultimately give the book,” he continued breathlessly.

“Jane, one day your name will be known throughout the world and people will be reading your works two hundred years from now. Scholars in great universities will devote entire careers to studying them, to studying you.”

As he spoke those words Darcy saw her head slowly moving from side to side, her eyes darting nervously to the shadowed woods, calculating her chances of escaping from him. “You are mad, sir,” she exhorted, edging away from him. “I cannot account for your intimate knowledge of my past, but I am certain that no one can know the future!”

“You’re right,” he said quietly. “We can only ever know the past.”

Darcy hesitated, for she had left him with no alternative but to reveal the truth. “I have somehow fallen into the past, Jane. That’s my secret.”

Her momentary fear of him turned to outrage. “You insult my intelligence, sir. I will not listen to this nonsense one moment longer,” she cried. “Good night, Mr. Darcy!”

“If what I’ve said is nonsense, then you will have no trouble explaining this.” Left with little choice but to do something he had promised himself he would not do, Darcy raised his left arm to her. He saw the fear return to her eyes as she cringed, anticipating a blow.

Of course he had no intention of striking her—could never have done such a thing.

Instead, he touched the case of his gold watch and pressed a tiny button. The watch beeped. The crystal lighted, casting an eerie green glow onto the lower branches of the trees as a seductive female digital voice announced the time: “Twelve-zero-nine and six seconds, seven seconds, eight seconds…”

Jane stared at the electronic watch in awe. After several seconds of frozen silence, punctuated only by the sound of the tinny, synthetic voice counting off the seconds, she slowly backed away a few paces and sat down hard on a fallen log.

Darcy went to her side, tore the watch from his wrist and pressed it into her trembling hand. He showed her the tiny buttons, quietly explaining their functions.

After a few moments she experimentally pushed a button, making the watch light again and prompting more computerized beeps and voice messages.

“Sorcery!” she said.

Darcy shook his head. “No, Jane, it’s something called electronics. The watch is only a machine, a distant relative of that great clock in your brother’s house, but still just a machine. Nothing more, nothing less. Articles like this watch are as common in my time as horses and carriages are in yours.”

She looked up at him then. The anger had fled and now her shining eyes were filled with wonder.

“Phones, jets…those other things you mentioned in your fever,” she asked, “what are they?”

“More machines,” he replied. “Ways of communicating, of moving about faster—”

“Machines that go from England to Virginia in five hours?” she interrupted.

He nodded. “Yes, we have machines that fly now.”

“Good God!” she exclaimed, gazing into the glowing face of the watch. “And with such machines as this you are able to travel through time itself?”

“No,” Darcy said, “that we can’t do.”

“Yet you are here with this astonishing timepiece,” she said with perfect logic. “And I can think of no other explanation for your presence and the wonders you possess. How, then, is it possible?”

Darcy had been pondering that very question for days and he had come up with only one possible answer. Now he shook his head and wearily sat down beside her on the log. “I’m not a scientist,” he said, “but there is a popular theory that time is not what it appears to be.”

Darcy furrowed his brow, trying to remember details from an article he had recently read in Scientific American while waiting in his dentist’s office.

“The past and the future aren’t separate rooms we occupy only at this moment we call the present,” he explained. “Rather, past, present and future exist together as a winding path that we are constantly moving along, never turning back or running ahead.”

He paused, watching her face for some sign that he had lost her, but Jane was nodding eagerly, her shining eyes urging him to continue expounding the fascinating theory.

“According to some physicists,” he continued, “we could turn back down that path