The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

“We stood there in the chill night air and I kissed her again…”

Darcy’s voice slowly trailed off and he gazed down at his hands, flexing them helplessly before him. Eliza remained frozen in her seat, attempting to gain some sense of deeper understanding from the intensely private reverie that had entranced him so. But the combined effects of the champagne and his story had taken their toll on her as well, and she gradually became aware of the hot tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Dammit, Fitz, if you’re making all this up, I swear to God…” she sobbed.

Darcy looked up at her, and in his tortured green eyes she at last saw the naked truth. Impulsively she took his face in her hands and stared into his eyes.

“It is true, isn’t it?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he replied, his voice barely audible.

Certain that she was going to be ill, Eliza fumbled with the door of the stately antique coach. It popped open and she stumbled clumsily to the ground. “I need some air,” she gasped as she ran through the darkened carriage barn and out into the cool night.

Darcy caught up to her on the lane leading to the house. “Eliza…” he said.

“Just don’t say anything for a minute,” she begged him. I need to think about all of this.”

They walked along together in silence for several seconds. The cold breeze on her face began to dry her tears and the queasiness in her stomach slowly subsided. At length she cast a furtive glance at the tall, handsome man keeping pace at her side. His features were lost in shadow, his emotions unreadable.

Uncertain whether it was his strong, unyielding determination to convince her of its truth or the sheer pathos of his impossible story, Eliza understood that something had changed, something within herself. That small fragile part she had so vigilantly protected all these years. And fear grabbed her heart.

Stopping, she looked up at Darcy. “Did you make love to Jane that night?” she boldly inquired.

He considered her question for a long moment. “Why do you want to know?” he finally asked.

“I’m not sure,” Eliza said, shaking her head. And she wasn’t. “But I think it’s…important.”

“We were standing in the middle of a forest at three AM. The ground was wet with dew—”

“That’s not an answer!” Eliza snorted. “The first time I had sex it was in a sleeping bag in the Rockies. In January!”

“Really!” Darcy said, smiling and sounding more like the stranger she had met at the library exhibit in New York half a lifetime ago. “I’d like very much to hear that story.”

“Well, you won’t,” she snapped, suddenly furious with him, but without quite knowing why. “You must be making all of this up,” she went on, knowing that he wasn’t. “I mean,” she said, falling back on her inbred New Yorker’s tendency to view everything with cynicism, “it’s just not possible to fall into 1810 and end up in the woods with Jane Austen.”

Eliza trudged away up the lane as the anger she had used to cover her other emotions dissipated.

“We kissed a little longer and then Jane left me, promising to send a message as soon as she’d spoken with the men who found me.” Darcy had resumed walking beside Eliza, continuing quietly, resolutely, with his story.

As they reached the looming front of Pemberley House Eliza stopped again and turned to face him.

“I have another question for you,” she said, interrupting his narrative. “There’s a line in Pride and Prejudice—when Darcy asks Elizabeth Bennet to marry him the first time…”

Darcy nodded, smiling. “Yes, I know it very well,” he said, looking into her eyes. “‘You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you…’” As he spoke the words he realized, with some surprise, that there was a part of him that meant it, a part that he had been sure would never be touched again.

Averting her eyes from his hypnotic gaze, Eliza cleared her throat and continued. “As a longtime Jane Austen fan, I have never quite been able to bring myself to believe that those words were not written without some basis in reality,” she said. “Did you say them to her, Fitz?”

“Eliza, Jane wrote Pride and Prejudice before she was twenty,” Darcy replied. “When I knew her she was merely recopying the book, editing it.”

He shook his head, whether in amusement or regret Eliza could not tell. “I am not the man Jane Austen wrote about in Pride and Prejudice,” he said. “I don’t think that person ever really existed except in her imagination. As it is, I’m still amazed that she used my name and Pemberley in the book. Why she did it I still don’t know.”

Eliza was completely unconvinced by his denial. “Jenny says you’re the best man she’s ever known,” she told him.

Darcy laughed aloud. “Despite her irreverent façade, Jenny is a hopeless romantic.”

“Maybe. But those are the same words Jane used to describe Mr. Darcy in her book.”

“Most experts agree that Jane was the ultimate hopeless romantic,” he countered.

“No, I don’t think so,” Eliza replied, distracted by the thoughts that had created the conclusion. “I think maybe you are a truly kind, thoughtful and honorable man, Fitzwilliam Darcy.”

Before he could voice another protest and taking him by surprise, she impulsively reached up, took his face in her hands and swept his hair aside, revealing the jagged white scar just below the hairline. She stared at it for several seconds, quickly kissed his lips, and then instantly released him. She turned and walked across the lawn. He watched as she hurried away. Electricity shot through his body when she kissed him; he had wanted to put his arms around her and return it but there was a feeling of… betrayal, so he had restrained himself. But a betrayal of whom? A woman long dead? Recovering, Fitz started out after her, catching up quickly.

Less than forty feet away, in a darkened upstairs window, Faith Harrington stood looking down on Eliza and Darcy. With her arms folded tightly across her naked chest; her beautiful features set in a rictus of barely contained rage, the tall blonde woman in the window resembled nothing so much as a pale marble statue of a vengeful angel.

Faith continued to watch in silence as the unwitting couple below linked arms and strolled slowly across the broad lawn leading down to the lake.

Following their brief, passionless kiss Eliza had somehow managed to put her roiling emotions in check. Allowing Darcy to take her arm, she had followed his lead through the inky shadows covering the grounds of Pemberley Farms.

Whatever was happening in her heart, Eliza knew, would have to be dealt with, and soon. But she was convinced that the final consequence of her tumultuous feelings for Darcy would be largely determined by the outcome of his experience. Experience—the word surprised her. Did she believe? Was it possible? Needing to get past the turmoil and having finally collected herself, Eliza calmly brought him back to his story.

“Okay, so you left Jane that night and went back to her brother’s house to wait for a message from her.”

And so she walked and waited with trepidation for him to go on.

“There was nothing else I could do but wait for Jane’s message that she had found the men,” Darcy began. “But even as I rode back to Edward’s house I felt rather than knew it was getting very dangerous…How dangerous I had not imagined.”

Passing no one on the road to Chawton Great House, Darcy rode quietly past Edward’s tall brick mansion and down to the stables. Guided only by the light of a small lantern burning at the gate, he placed Lord Nelson in his paddock and turned for the house. He was silently congratulating himself on his good fortune in having returned undetected when Frank Austen startled him by suddenly stepping out of the shadows and blocking his way.

In contrast to the captain’s immaculately groomed and uniformed appearance at dinner the previous evening, Darcy saw in the dim light that Austen was noticeably disheveled at this late hour. His white shirtfront was open, exposing his bare chest, his face was flushed with drink and he carried an unsheathed saber in one hand and a sloshing wine bottle in the other.

“Been out riding quite late, have you, Darcy?” Darcy could not help but notice that the statement was tinged with sarcasm in spite of the drunken man’s slurred speech.

“Captain Austen! Yes, I was feeling a little restless,” Darcy, replied, cursing himself for having been so