The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

singed toast before him. In fact, he was feeling better by the moment, for he couldn’t imagine any enterprise more hazardous than being forced to accompany the volatile Frank on a shooting expedition.

Now, he thought, if only Jane would contact him to report that the farmers had been found and the stone wall located, everything could still be fine.

Jane. Darcy’s pulse quickened as he recalled the touch of her lips on his the night before, felt the urgent trembling of her slender body pressed to his in the moonlit forest.

“Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose.”

Darcy looked up to see Edward gesturing at him with his knife again. “My brother Frank sends you his compliments and begs you to recall your conversation of last night,” Edward said convivially. “I am delighted that you two fellows became such fast friends.”

“Oh, thanks very much.” Darcy lowered his eyes and busied himself with the food. “Your brother is a fascinating man,” he said, hoping they could change the subject.

Edward laughed. “Yes, a fine, brave fellow is our Frank. Bit rough around the edges, though, what?” He swung his knife over his head in imitation of a vigorous sword fight. “Comes from his having seen too much blood and guts on the high seas, I daresay.”

Another servant entered the dining room carrying a small silver salver. The man bent over and whispered something in his ear. Edward smiled and pointed to Darcy.

“It seems our Jane has sent you a letter this morning, Darcy. I would say you made a good impression on her, as well as on our Frank.”

The letter was brought down the table to Darcy who clumsily broke the seal and read the few lines written in Jane’s neat, compact handwriting. He felt his heart thumping joyously at her message:

Sir,

I have after some study located the passage that you and I were discussing last evening. If you will call on me at home at 2:00 P.M. today, I shall be glad to point it out for you.

Beautiful, brilliant Jane! She had cleverly coded her note to make it sound as if she had located a passage from a book, when she was actually telling him that she had discovered the location of the stone wall, the passage back to his own time.

Glancing up at Edward, Darcy saw the expression of naked curiosity written on the other man’s face. And so he did the only thing he could think of to do. Smiling at her brother, Darcy passed Jane’s letter down the table to him. “Your sister is very thoughtful,” he explained. “We were discussing a book last night that we had both read, but neither of us could remember exactly where a certain passage was to be found. Now she has discovered it and invited me to call on her this afternoon so she can point it out for me.”

If he had expected Edward to be pleased by that revelation, Darcy was disappointed.

“Humph! That is bad news indeed,” the other man complained, barely glancing at the letter before laying it next to his plate.

“I beg your pardon?” Edward’s sour mood set off a new alarm bell in Darcy’s head, and he wondered what he had done wrong this time.

After a moment Edward laid his knife and fork aside. “Well, I suppose there is no possibility at all of us going shooting if you will be visiting my sister this afternoon.” he complained. “Damned bother, if you ask me!”

Darcy shrugged helplessly, barely able to contain the grin that was straining to spread across his features. Thanks to Jane it was just barely possible, he thought, that he might actually make it out of the nineteenth century alive.

Precisely at 2:00 P.M. that afternoon Darcy found himself in a downstairs sitting room at Chawton Cottage. From the lovingly polished piano in the corner to the small writing table placed under a north-facing window and the collection of French country prints that graced the walls, the room had Jane’s mark on it.

And, indeed, she had confided to him the night before that she preferred doing most of her writing here during the day, where the light was good. For the most part, she’d said, she worked at the vanity table in her bedroom only when felt compelled to continue writing late into the night, or when it was too cold to heat the entire house.

Like Jane’s bedroom, he also noted, the downstairs sitting room bore the faint, tantalizing scent of the rose water she loved so well and that she and Cassandra distilled from petals they collected all summer long from the gardens at Chawton Great House.

As befitted a proper afternoon visit, Jane and Darcy were seated stiffly on straight-backed chairs, facing one another with their knees a few feet apart. Cassandra sat beside a small table a little way across the room from the two, presiding over a china tea service decorated in an oriental-blue dragon motif. From time to time she cast disapproving looks at their guest.

“So Frank was recalled to Portsmouth this morning,” Darcy told them, repeating the news from Chawton Great House. “I’m afraid that Edward was quite disappointed, as he had hoped we would all go out for some shooting today.”

He saw a sparkle in Jane’s eyes as she absorbed this bit of information. “And you, sir?” she playfully inquired. “Were you also unhappy at being denied a vigorous tramp through the countryside with my brothers?”

“Naturally, the prospect of calling on the two lovely ladies who restored me to health was far more pleasant than the idea of spending the whole day walking about the fields with guns and dogs,” Darcy replied graciously, wondering how on earth he was going to manage to get her alone.

Cassandra looked pleased by his compliment and she actually rewarded him with a little smile.

Jane, however, pretended to be stricken by his flowery remarks. “Oh, that is too bad,” she said. “For now that you are recovered from your injury I had myself hoped to show you some of the countryside hereabout, if you were of a mind to walk. All the loveliest spring blossoms are just coming into bloom in the far meadows,” she added. “Or so I have been told.”

“That is true,” Cassandra said, jumping eagerly into the conversation. “And we have heard they are wonderfully colorful this year.”

“Well, of course, there is nothing that I’d like better than a pastoral walking tour with an agreeable guide,” Darcy quickly said, backtracking to cover his blunder and realizing at the same time from Jane’s self-satisfied smirk that she had led him straight into a verbal trap just to see how he would manage to extricate himself.

“Then it is settled.” Jane laughed, clapping her hands. “We shall go out to see the flowers of the fields.” Turning to Cassandra she put on a hopeful look. “Oh, Cass, please say that you will join us.”

“Jane, you know I cannot,” Cass replied testily, evidently not taken in for a moment by her sister’s transparent manipulations. “For I have promised the vicar to see after the altar cloths at the church today.”

Jane appeared to be devastated by her reply. “Oh, poor Cass! I completely forgot,” she cried.

But her dark eyes sparkled with shared mischief, and she shot Darcy a conspiratorial look, then turned back to Cassandra. “To make it up to you, dear sister, I shall gather for your bedroom the loveliest spring bouquet that has ever been seen,” she promised.

Having finished their tea and exchanged pleasantries with Cassandra about the extraordinarily fine spring weather and the healthful benefits to be gained from robust exercise in the clean country air, Jane and Darcy walked side by side down a quiet country lane.

“You are so bad,” Darcy told her, “deceiving your poor sister that way.”

Jane laughed and skipped on ahead of him to examine a patch of delicate pink wild flowers she spied growing alongside a crude stile set into a wooden fence. “You do not know my sister at all if you think she was deceived,” she laughed, waiting for him to catch up. “The two of us planned the whole intrigue together so that you and I could be alone.”

She placed a finger to her lips and said in a stage whisper, “You see, sir, my sister believes that we are lovers.”