The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

easily and predictably trapped.

“Ah! Meeting with a lovely lady, no doubt!” Austen delivered a leering wink.

“Not at all,” Darcy lied, eyeing the path up to the main house, and judging that if he broke and made a run for it the drunken man would never be able to catch him in the dark.

Following Darcy’s gaze with crafty, red-rimmed predator’s eyes, Frank Austen slowly raised his curved saber and pointed the razor-edged tip menacingly at the other’s throat. “I noticed your keen interest in my younger sister this evening,” he said in a tone that was all the more menacing for its lack of inflection. Except for the slur, Austen’s voice was almost conversational as he added, “Others noticed as well.”

“Captain, I think perhaps you have had too much wine,” Darcy said, trying his best to ignore the wickedly sharpened sword point hovering unsteadily in the lamplight six inches from his throat. “Let’s walk up to the house together and I’ll help you get—”

“Our Jane is like an innocent child,” Austen interrupted, his tone suddenly tinged with melancholy, “ever dreaming of her lovers, poor lass, but with no hope of ever finding love.”

The captain shook his head sadly, and to Darcy’s amazement a glitter of a tear formed in the corner of the drunken officer’s eye.

“Poor Jane’s gentle heart is more easily breakable than most, I fear,” her brother blearily concluded.

Horrified that the man obviously believed that he was out to seduce his favorite sister, Darcy raised both hands in a gesture of denial. “Captain, I assure you—” he began.

“I have a warrior’s knowledge of the fragility of human hearts,” Frank Austen loudly proclaimed in a voice that was once more devoid of emotion. “Did you know, Darcy, that a well-placed thrust can cleave a man’s heart in two so cleanly that both halves will go on beating for many seconds, as though nothing at all had happened?”

“Captain Austen, I must insist—” Darcy’s feeble protest ended in a croaking gasp as Austen lunged forward without warning. Missing the American’s exposed neck by a fraction of an inch, the gleaming steel blade slid past him with surgical precision and was effortlessly buried to the hilt in a bale of hay.

Despite his drunken state the captain deftly retrieved the saber from the bale and raised it to his own chin in a mocking salute. “I don’t know who you are, Darcy,” he growled, “but know you that the killing of men is my main business and I have spent a lifetime at it. If I learn that you have meddled with my sister,” he vowed, “I shall track you down like a mad dog and take your guts for garters.”

His murderous declaration at an end, Frank Austen stood there, swaying drunkenly from side to side in the light of the glowing lantern.

Darcy stared at him for a long, breathless moment, then he slowly turned on his heel and walked away, fully expecting to feel at any instant the deadly kiss of cold steel sliding up between his shoulder blades.

But Frank Austen did not move. Instead, when Darcy was perhaps twenty paces from him, the other raised his sword high and screamed after him.

“You have been fairly warned, sir!”

Two miles away from Chawton Great House, Jane sat at the mirrored table in her bedroom; before her on the polished wooden surface lay a tall stack of manuscript pages.

By the light of the blazing fireplace she was furiously working on her novel, dipping her pen into the inkwell, impulsively scratching out entire passages, substituting new ones that had the unaffected ring of genuine experience to them, adding one name to the book, over and over again.

She looked up impatiently at the sound of a knock on the door and Cassandra’s worried voice entreating her. “Jane, please let me in. Why have you locked your door?”

Ignoring her sister’s pleading, Jane returned to her careful, crucial work, murmuring to herself as she wrote the thrilling words that she imagined her dream lover might speak when next they met: “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you…”

Lifting her eyes from the page, Jane regarded herself in the mirror. Though she still found it hard to believe, he had said that she was beautiful. Her cheeks flushed with a pleasure she had never before known, she closed her eyes and imagined she was still with him in the wood.

“Yes, dear Darcy,” she whispered with a contented smile, “do tell me that I am beautiful. Then kiss me once more, so I’ll have another dream to sleep on.”

Even as Jane was dreaming of being with him in the wood, Darcy was standing nervously behind the draperies at a second-story window in her brother’s manor house.

On the drive below, Captain Francis Austen was yelling and reeling about drunkenly as two frightened servants in nightclothes attempted to help him up the steps.

“I waited for the dawn, expecting him to come for me. And that whole time all I could think about was Jane and what her brother had said about her fragile heart.” Darcy raised his eyes to Eliza’s. “Because, even in his drunken state, I wondered if Frank hadn’t been right in wanting to protect her from me.”

They were sitting at the end of the small dock on the shore of the lake at Pemberley Farms, where he had earlier found her sketching. Turning away from Eliza, Darcy looked out over the black waters while she steadily continued to gaze at him.

“So are you saying that you didn’t really love her?” she asked in a tremulous voice.

“Oh I could have loved her with no effort.” He laughed bitterly. “Maybe I even did. Then. But to what end? I couldn’t stay and she couldn’t leave…”

“How do you know that?”

Darcy snapped out of his reverie and frowned at her. “What?”

“How did you know that Jane couldn’t leave?” Eliza asked. “Maybe you could have brought her back here with you.” She hesitated, then added, “Maybe you should have.”

“No,” he replied with absolute certainty. “I didn’t want to bring her to this world, to deprive her of her place in literature, her family and friends, everything familiar.”

He stared out over the glassy obsidianlike waters of the lake and his voice again grew distant. “I determined that the best thing I could do for her was to get out of her life as quickly as possible.”

Eliza laid a tentative hand against his cheek. “You really were in love with her, weren’t you?” she whispered.

He slowly shook his head, denying her assessment. Eliza got to her knees and turning his face to her, she kissed him softly on the lips. This time he kissed her back. They pulled apart and looked into each other’s eyes. The feeling of betrayal seized him again and he grasped her shoulders, holding her at arm’s length. “Eliza, I don’t…” he began.

Gently she placed her fingers over his lips to still his doubts. “Like Jane,” she added lightly, “I just wanted to see what it would be like to be kissed by you in the moonlight.”

A light breeze sprang up, whispering among the trees, riffling the smooth surface of the lake. Eliza rolled her shoulders and turned her neck, uncertain whether to feel relieved or upset by Darcy’s silence.

Getting to her feet and offering him her hand, she said, “Let’s go back up to the house. You can finish telling me about Jane there, where it’s more comfortable.”

Wordlessly he took her hand and stood, just as a beam of light lanced out from the shore and pinned them in a bright circle of illumination.

Eliza emitted a long-suffering sigh. “God, not again,” she groaned. For she had not yet heard the whole of Darcy’s tale and she knew she would not sleep that night until she had heard it all.

Shielding his eyes with his free hand, Darcy called brusquely to the dark figure hurrying down the wooden dock toward them. “Who’s there? Get that light out of my eyes!”

The powerful flashlight was immediately switched off and Jenny came up to them, looking embarrassed. “I’m really sorry to break in, Fitz, Eliza, but I’m afraid we got us a little problem up at the house.”

Chapter 28