The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

Chapter 1

New York City

Present day

“Oh, now I do like this!” Eliza Knight exclaimed, though there was no one within earshot.

She brushed a thick layer of dust from the mirror of the scarred little vanity table and peered into the silvery glass. The sudden appearance of her own reflection startled her and she paused for a moment to regard the hazy image. The familiar face looking back at her was, she thought, if not exactly beautiful, then slightly exotic, with its high cheekbones, straight if somewhat narrow nose and full lips. Her dark eyes were, she confirmed, still her best feature, though she also liked her glossy black hair, despite the longish, flyaway cut she’d let her hairdresser talk her into a couple of weeks before.

Grimacing at the hair, Eliza stepped back to take a better look at the old-fashioned rosewood dressing table. In the hour or so that she had been poking through the clutter of the shabby West Side antiques warehouse that was allegedly open only to the “Trade,” the vanity was the only thing that had caught her eye. She had spied it just moments earlier, crammed between an art deco floor lamp and a Jetsons pink 1950s Formica coffee table, and had immediately felt herself drawn to it.

Taking her eyes from the dulled mirror, Eliza scanned the rows of dusty merchandise stretching in every direction like a bad Cubist painting. She finally spotted Jerry Shelburn three aisles away. He appeared to be taking stock of an ancient gasoline pump with a cracked glass top.

“Jerry,” she called excitedly, “I want your opinion. Come over here and take a look at this!”

Jerry had gotten them admitted to the wholesaler’s warehouse through one of his clients, who ran a small freight-forwarding business. Now he smiled good-naturedly and waved back. He carefully replaced the brass nozzle on the gas pump before starting toward her, the round lenses of his wire-framed glasses glittering like little moons beneath the cold fluorescents of the overhead fixtures.

Eliza sighed inwardly as she watched him picking his way through the maze of old furniture, noting the extraordinary care he took not to soil his Old Navy khakis and spotless cotton pullover. They had met two years earlier, through an artist friend of hers, when Eliza had been looking for someone to manage the small investment portfolio her father had left her. Jerry had turned out to be an excellent manager, increasing the value of her stocks by nearly thirty percent in the first year and then shrewdly using the capital to secure the down payment on the condo that also served as her studio, thus eliminating more than half the taxes she’d been paying as a renter.

Somehow while all of that was going on they had started dating and then, occasionally, sleeping together. It was marginally comfortable and definitely low maintenance on both sides. There had been a few times in recent months when she had felt as though the relationship was either going to progress into something more serious or end altogether, and had to admit that it wouldn’t really bother her that much if it did end. Feeling slightly mercenary, she consoled herself with the thought that at least her net worth had never been higher.

Turning her attention back to the vanity table, Eliza dragged it out into the aisle and slowly ran her strong artist’s hands over the marred top. Despite its numerous scratches, the old wood felt comfortably warm to her touch. The slightly formal, squared-off design vaguely reminded her of a Georgian piece she’d seen in one of her antique guidebooks, and she wondered how old it really was.

“So, what rare treasure have you uncovered?”

Eliza raised her eyes to the mirror and saw Jerry adjusting his glasses to peer over her shoulder.

“Look,” she said, stepping away to afford him a clear view of the vanity, “isn’t it adorable?”

“I thought you were looking for a floor lamp,” he said, barely glancing at the table.

“I was,” Eliza replied peevishly, “but I really like this. It’s kind of charming, don’t you think?”

“Hmmm…” Frowning as if he’d just been served a piece of tainted fish, Jerry leaned over and examined a tiny pink sticker that Eliza hadn’t noticed adhering to the side of the vanity. “At six hundred dollars it’s not that charming,” he sniffed. “Besides, the mirror’s a mess.” Jerry straightened and gave her a patronizing wink. “As your investment counselor, I heartily recommend going with a lamp.”

Chapter 2

Fresh from a scalding shower, swaddled in her threadbare, old terry robe with her hair wrapped in a towel, Eliza stepped barefoot into her bedroom and regarded the prized vanity, which looked right at home among the mismatched collection of antique furniture filling the room.

“I really want your honest opinion now,” she said, turning to look at the figure sprawled carelessly across the colorful patchwork quilt covering her Victorian-era four-poster bed. “Do you think I made an awful mistake?”

Wickham, an overweight gray tabby with a severe personality disorder, spread his considerable jaws wide and yawned to demonstrate his complete indifference to her question.

Not to be so easily deterred, Eliza scooped up the cat in her arms and crossed to the corner by the window, where Jerry had somewhat sullenly deposited the antique dressing table two hours earlier. The hazed rectangular mirror stood on the floor beside the table, leaning against the wall. After admiring the newly acquired pieces for a moment Eliza sank cross-legged onto the carpet before them, cradling the squirming cat in her lap.

“I think the whole problem with Jerry and our relationship,” she explained to Wickham, “can be summed up in this table. Because when I look at it I see something warm and beautiful. But all Jerry sees is a piece of used furniture. You’re a creature of discerning taste. What do you see, Wickham?”

Eliza smiled and scratched the special spot between Wickham’s ears. The cat’s yellow eyes rolled back in his head and he stiffened and moaned in ecstasy.

“My point exactly!” Eliza gloated. “Because, unlike you and me, Jerry has no soul, just a bottom line.” She released her grip on Wickham, who leaped out of her lap and settled himself comfortably on the carpet.

“It really is a lovely piece,” she said, gently reaching to stroke the satiny finish of an unscarred table leg. It needed major cleaning and some linseed oil but she was pretty sure that it was very old.

As Eliza carefully removed the single drawer from the table, setting it on the floor before her, she noticed that it was lined with now-faded pink wallpaper that still retained a floral pattern. Ignoring the liner, she turned the drawer around and examined the outside corners, which had been fitted together without nails.

The slightly irregular dovetails holding the sides of the drawer together meant they were obviously cut by hand, reinforcing her belief that the table was old, crafted before the age of machine-made, mass-produced furniture.

Eliza smiled ruefully, for though she was entirely correct about the dovetails, she had also exhausted virtually the entire store of knowledge she remembered from the NYU evening extension class she’d taken two years earlier on appraising antique furniture.

Nevertheless, she turned the drawer over to inspect the bottom, vaguely recalling something about being sure the wood colors matched or didn’t match or something. The pink liner fluttered to the floor, coming to rest upside down on the carpet.

Interested at last, Wickham swatted at the crumbling paper. Eliza shooed him away and then stared in surprise at the liner. For adhering to its underside was another strip of yellowing paper densely covered in cramped black type.

“Look, Wickham, it’s a piece of…old newspaper!” she exclaimed, squinting to read the oddly shaped and embellished letters. “Listen to this,” she breathed, tracing with her index finger a heavier line of print bannered across the top of the sheet: “THE HAMPSHIRE CHRONICLE, 7 APRIL, 1810…My God, that was almost two hundred years ago!”

Her attention now riveted by the partial sheet of ancient newsprint, Eliza carefully lifted it onto the top of the vanity and spent the next few minutes curiously poring over several tightly packed columns of ads for “Gentlemen’s best quality silk cravats,” “beneficial beef extracts,” “drayage and forwarding” (whatever they might be), and a host of other mysterious products with names like Gerlich’s Female Potion, calibrated boiling thermometers and India rubber goods.

When finally her eyes tired of squinting at the strange, old-fashioned print she gave the sturdy little table another cursory inspection. Then she knelt beside the mirror and stood it upright, noticing again with some dismay that the silvered surface was, as Jerry had pointed out in the warehouse, badly worn.

Cheerfully dismissing the hazing as enhancing the overall charm of the piece, she experimentally tilted the mirror toward her and was distressed to see that the wood backing on one side was pulling away from the frame. “Oh, great! The backing seems to be warped,” she murmured to the cat. “Now give me some support here, Wickham, I’d hate to have to admit that Jerry might have been right after all.”

Wickham stretched and meowed.

“Thanks,” Eliza grinned. “I needed that.”

She pulled the mirror to her and turned it around to get a better look at the damaged backing. To her relief, though, the visible gap appeared to be no more than six inches long. “Well, it’s not as bad as I thought,” she said. “I think it only needs to be reglued.” With her fingernail she experimentally lifted the edge of the backing from the mirror frame in an attempt to determine how far the separation extended. As she did so, something fell out of the mirror and landed on the carpet with a soft plop.

Attracted by the sudden motion, Wickham leaped onto the fallen object and hissed menacingly. Eliza pushed him away and stared at the thing in surprise. She slowly leaned the mirror back against the wall, then reached down and lifted the fallen object into the light.

She remained frozen on her knees for several seconds, gazing at her hand while she tried to reconstruct what had just happened. For she was holding a slim packet of thick, sepia-toned paper tied together like a Christmas package with a crisscross of bright green ribbon.

“Good Lord,” she whispered, letting her eyes dart back to the mirror and glimpsing her own puzzled expression.

Something swatted against her hand and she looked down to see Wickham resolutely batting at the end of the bright ribbon. Snatching her hand away from him, she got to her feet and examined the packet more closely. Held together by the broad ribbon, she saw, were two rectangles of folded paper. The one on top was smaller than the other and had been written across in reddish brown ink, the words obscured by the ribbon covering them.

“Letters!” she exclaimed.

Eliza turned the packet over and saw that the larger of the two letters had been sealed with a blob of shiny red material that she guessed must be sealing wax, though it looked like no other wax she had ever seen, having more the consistency of brittle plastic. Intrigued, she carefully untied the ribbon securing the packet, so that she could read the address on the top envelope.

“‘Miss Jane Austen, Chawton Cottage’… Jane Austen!”

Stunned by the name of the famous nineteenth-century author, Eliza paused and took a deep breath before she could read the remainder of the address on the letter. Jane Austen! Again she had to pause as her eyes raced ahead of her trembling lips. “‘Jane Austen ~ Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, Chawton Great House,’” she squeaked.

Eliza stood there on her bedroom carpet for several more seconds, silently reading and rereading the words inscribed neatly across the front of the smaller envelope.

The thoughts racing through Eliza’s head at that moment were somewhat difficult to define. For although she would not have classified herself as a voracious reader, she was well-enough read, her tastes running largely to popular fiction with a smattering of respectable old favorites, ranging from the works of Agatha Christie and Damon Runyon to a few major poets and several classical novelists.

And, like many women, one of Eliza’s very favorite novels, numbered among half a dozen well-worn books occupying the small shelf beneath her bedside table, was Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen’s timeless story of Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s uncompromising quest for a perfect love.

Which is only to say that Eliza Knight knew precisely who Jane Austen was, and she certainly knew who Fitzwilliam Darcy, the purported recipient of the letter she now held in her hand, was, or at least who he was supposed to be.

With the letters in her hand she went to the bed and sat down. Gazing at the window, her reflection surrounded by a moonlit halo, Eliza’s imagination swirled with what ifs and could it bes. She smiled to herself. Jerry would be laughing and berating her for such romantic notions and, in truth, as wildly romantic as the idea was, it was ludicrous, patently absurd; because the relationship suggested by the enigmatic address on the letter was flatly impossible. Darcy was, after all, a fictitious character, wasn’t he?

Looking down at Wickham, who had followed her to the bed, she said, “Well, there’s only one way to find out: read the letters.”

In spite of her well-founded skepticism as to the authenticity of the letters, Eliza felt her heart trip-hammer in her chest and her hands tremble as she opened the larger of the two letters: the one that was addressed to Jane Austen from Fitzwilliam Darcy with the broad, scrawled pen strokes of a man’s hand. She read aloud:

12 May, 1810

Dearest Jane,

The Captain has found me out. I am being forced to go into hiding immediately. But if I am able, I shall still be waiting at the same spot tonight. Then you will know everything you wish to know.

F. Darcy

Eliza paused to consider the meaning of those few sparse sentences. And when she began to read it over again there was a slight quaver in her voice. For this was not at all what she had expected. Though, on momentary reflection, she was not quite sure exactly what she had expected to find in Darcy’s letter—some flowery romantic tribute, perhaps, or a poetic declaration of undying love to a lady fair. How odd… being found out, going into hiding. What did that mean? Maybe the other letter was Austen’s reply and so held the answers.

Slipping the first letter behind the other in her hand, she examined it with awe. The lovely feminine handwriting flowed across the page and, turning it over in her hands, she saw that the sealing wax was still intact, a fanciful letter A impressed into it. This one had never been read, maybe never sent. Why? Tracing the curves of the seal with the tip of her finger she curiously experienced a tingling sensation that shot like a jolt of electricity through her body.

“Wickham, can you imagine what it would mean if the letter really was written by Jane Austen?” She looked at the cat, who was unconcernedly applying his long pink tongue to one of his wickedly clawed front paws. Eliza sighed, “No, of course you can’t, you poor thing, you have no forehead.”

Looking at the letter she turned it over and over again in her hands. If it was genuine and she opened it, she would forever be known as the stupid artist who ruined a historic document.

Before she burned her bridges, Eliza decided she needed to try and find out something about the fictitious Mr. Darcy. Maybe the Internet would give her the answers she sought.

Chapter 3

In sharp contrast to Eliza’s bedroom—which, with its eclectic collection of old wooden furniture, framed prints and warm fabric accents, could only be described as cozy—the living room of her small condo (actually the workroom and studio where she created her art and operated her Internet gallery) was all twenty-first-century business.

In front of the large window that allowed her to look directly into the wheelhouses of passing freighters on the East River were arrayed her white IKEA computer desk and drawing board, and beside them the wide steel filing cabinets, air-brush, paints and other equipment necessary to her work.

Hanging on the otherwise bare walls were several meticulous illustrations of the idyllic, flower-filled country landscapes and other natural and whimsical subjects in which she specialized.

With the envelopes in her hand and her bare feet tucked into a pair of warm sheepskin moccasins, Eliza crossed the polished hardwood floor of her studio and seated herself on the tall chrome-and-leather stool at her drawing board. Taking care first to cover the painting of a woodland cottage to which she’d been adding a mistily airbrushed backdrop of thickly forested mountains, she laid the two envelopes on the board side by side and switched on her halogen work light.

Outside the moon caressed the surface of the river with a ribbon of silver light and while her rational mind believed firmly that the letters were some kind of elaborate hoax, she couldn’t stop the flights of fancy inspired by the implausible correspondence. Shaking off the romantic thoughts as silly schoolgirl fantasies, Eliza shooed Wickham out of the desk chair and sat down in front of her computer console. Signing onto the Internet, she called up a popular search engine and typed in “Jane Austen.”

The computer whirred softly for several seconds before the screen was filled with the information she requested. Eliza stared at her monitor in disbelief; there were over a million and a half Web sites. Looking over at the cat now perched on the high stool, she sighed, “I thought this was going to be easy.” Looking back at the monitor she found an array of Web sites pertaining to the author. Scrolling down through the list, Eliza discovered to her amazement that there were sites devoted to Jane Austen’s life, her birthplace, the times in which she lived, each of her books and all the movies and television shows that had ever been made from the books. There were even more Web sites devoted to the actors in the movies and television shows made from the books. In addition to those, there were hundreds of fan sites, history sites, sites for scholarly discussions of Jane Austen’s work, and sites devoted to the many sequels to Jane Austen books, written in the style of the author by latter-day imitators.

There were Japanese Jane Austen Web sites, Australian Web sites, Norwegian sites, discussion sites about Jane Austen’s letters, her family, her friends…the list went on and on.

Eliza scrolled until her finger ached and her eyes grew bleary, and yet she realized that she hadn’t even made a dent in the endless list. “Where do I start?” she groaned to Wickham.

After several more minutes of scrolling she sat back, rubbed her eyes and blinked at the screen again. The title and description of one Web site in particular suddenly caught her eye.

“Austenticity.com,” she read, liking the sound of it. “‘Everything you ever wanted to know about Jane Austen.’ Now that sounds promising,” she told the cat.

Wickham rubbed against Eliza’s arm as she clicked onto the site. A burst of romantic theme music suddenly poured from the computer’s speakers and a title popped up onto the screen:

The title faded away as a scene from the BBC/A&E television miniseries Pride and Prejudice began to play on the computer screen. In the scene, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy were alone in a sitting room.

Eliza found her lips moving in silent accompaniment to the actor playing Darcy as he recited one of her favorite lines from P&P: “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you…”

Her face reddening, Eliza abruptly broke off the monologue and turned down the sound, smiling at the casual ease with which she had been captivated.

“Darcy, you seductive devil!” She grinned at the now-silent actor still mouthing his lines. “I dearly love your first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet,” she told him. “But right now I need some hard information about the real you! If there was a real you.”

She stopped the film clip by clicking onto the information menu at the top of her computer screen. Another screen immediately popped up, featuring a rather dour portrait of the author herself beneath a new title:

CAN’T GET ENOUGH JANE AUSTEN?

Dying to know what she ate and wore, what books she read, songs she sang? Post your question on our message boards.

One of our Austen experts is sure to have the answer you seek.

“Austen experts! Now that’s more like it,” Eliza said, reading the message. She examined the several topics on the message boards, selected one titled “Jane’s Life & Times” and started to type.

POST MESSAGE:

Was Darcy from Pride and Prejudice a real person?

Please reply by e-mail to: SMARTIST@galleri.com

Smiling to herself, she sent the message.

“There!” she told Wickham. “With any luck, somebody will have the solution to our little mystery right at their fingertips.”

The cat rolled his yellow eyes up at her, as if to say, Don’t kid yourself.

Eliza shrugged and closed out the Austenticity Web site. “Okay,” she grudgingly conceded, peering once more at the daunting list of other Internet sites. “I’ll look at a few more, but I’m not going to keep doing this all night.”

More than an hour later a thoroughly exhausted Eliza sat propped among the pillows piled against the elaborately carved figurals decorating the headboard of her bed.

As she leafed idly through her copy of Pride and Prejudice her imagination was filled with the possibilities presented by the two mysterious letters. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the little vanity table by the window, she wondered who had placed the letters behind the mirror, and for what possible purpose.

Wickham was comfortably dozing on the pillows beside her as she finally put her book aside and switched off the bedside lamp. Moonlight filled the room, casting soft reflections in the hazed mirror of the vanity table. Eliza gazed sleepily at the golden orb outside her window and snuggled down next to the cat.

“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you…” she murmured dreamily. “Oh God, Wickham, that is so romantic! Could there have been a flesh-and-blood Darcy who actually spoke those words to Jane Austen before she wrote them?”

Wickham’s deep-throated purr rumbled up from somewhere inside, indicating that he was already fast asleep.

Eliza’s exploration of the Internet had provided her with no more clues to the existence of a real-life Fitzwilliam Darcy than the letters had. However, she had discovered that most scholars believed Jane Austen peopled her novels with characters from her own life. Sighing deeply she wondered about the man who had inspired one of the most romantic characters ever written.

If Darcy had been a real person, she wondered, were they in love, how did they meet, why didn’t they marry? Reminding herself that Darcy’s note was not a love letter, she questioned the identity of the captain and what he had found out about Darcy. Eliza sleepily entwined her fingers in the warm ruff of fur around Wickham’s neck.

She tried to imagine herself in the arms of a passionate, ardent lover. The fantasy was interrupted by an extremely unsatisfying image of Jerry, sitting across from her at a deli restaurant table, eating a naked green salad and reeling off stock quotations between mouthfuls.

The uneasy laugh that followed the image reminded her of the neatly constructed boundaries she had so carefully erected around her passions and as a consequence, her life; Jerry was most definitely one of the boundaries. Now she wondered why she put such limitations on herself. But, of course, that was easy; it was safe, no risks.

Drifting off, she dreamt of a man who would ardently admire and love her.

In a misty valley far from the city a great country estate lay basking peacefully in the light of the same moon that shone through Eliza Knight’s bedroom window.

Set in a gentle landscape of rolling hills and surrounded by deep, silent woods, the graceful architecture of the huge house that was both the jewel and the centerpiece of the estate was accentuated by the soft wash of moonlight that touched its soaring columns and silvered the slender balconies gracing its majestic facade.

At this late hour the idyllic old structure stood almost entirely dark from within, the mullioned panes of its many windows glittering silently beneath the glowing light of the heavens.

All but one.

From a single window on the lower floor at the front of the stately mansion—and no other name could adequately describe the Great House—there came a steady blue flicker of artificial illumination that was too strong to be confused with the external light of either the stars or moon.

The window was one of several that extended from the richly carpeted floor nearly to the high, elaborately decorated ceiling of a large and luxuriously appointed study, the darkly paneled walls of which were lined with shelves of priceless, leather-bound books and historic journals and hung with ancestral portraits and ancient battle flags.

The blue glow showing at the window came from a computer terminal set atop a massive desk that had been hewn at least a century earlier of native hardwoods harvested from the extensive forests surrounding the house.

Behind the desk in the darkened room a shadowy figure sat in a well-worn leather chair, gazing raptly at the screen of the computer.

He had been sitting there for some time, contemplating the simple question that Eliza Knight had placed on the Austenticity.com message board.

MESSAGE:

Was Darcy from Pride and Prejudice a real person?

Please reply by e-mail to: SMARTIST@galleri.com

He felt his pulse quickening as he read and reread those few lines of insubstantial type.

For perhaps a thousand nights he had scanned the Internet in search of messages precisely like this one. He searched because there were answers he had to find, truths he must discover. And the vast worldwide electronic web of the Internet was one of the many possible avenues he was compelled to explore.

Though his exhausting quest had seldom produced anything worthwhile, once, two years earlier, his vigilance on the Internet had been rewarded. And so he had expanded his nightly hunt to a dozen or more web sites in hopes of making another find.

For the most part he confined his on-line search to scholarly sites devoted to literature and history, and to a number of special-interest boards having to do with the buying and selling of rare documents. But he also kept a steady watch on popular entertainment web sites, including occasionally silly ones like Austenticity.com, whose fan members were generally more interested in film and television productions of Jane Austen’s books than in either the author or the books themselves.

Whether serious or frivolous, he visited his Internet listening posts with a singular sense of dedication that he feared at times bordered on the obsessive. But then, as he frequently reminded himself, he was obsessed, though perhaps enchanted was a better word.

He read the brief message again: Was Darcy from Pride and Prejudice a real person?

Though that very question had been debated for almost two hundred years by biographers and academics alike, experience told him it was not the sort of thing one would expect to find on a popular public web site. The phrasing was too precise, the writer neither speculating nor framing the question, as was typically seen on message boards about some passage from P&P, but rather making a very direct query…A query, he felt, that could have been prompted by some discovery.

Though he could not define his reasons beyond those vague feelings, the very strangeness of the message struck him as a potential clue to the answer that he himself was seeking. And any clue, no matter how vague or insubstantial, had to be tracked to its source.

He sat gazing at Eliza’s question on the screen for a while longer before he at last pulled his keyboard to him and began to type out a carefully worded reply.

Chapter 4

The following morning Eliza rose early. She quickly shooed Wickham out of the warm nest he’d created for himself among the pillows and made up the bed, looking forward to the day ahead.

Since she had no meetings scheduled for the day, she was planning on taking care of a few routine business matters and then seriously delving into the possible origins of the two mysterious letters. The prospect of discovering the truth about the old letters was exciting and she could hardly wait to get started.

Smiling at her reflection in the hazed mirror, which she had affixed to the top of the antique dressing table the night before, Eliza brushed her long black hair, allowing the loose curls to fall gracefully over her shoulders, then she dressed casually in slacks and a silk blouse and went out to the kitchen.

As she passed through the living room she glanced over at her computer console, noting with satisfaction that the powerful machine was already humming busily on its own as it performed an automatic upload of two replacement paintings to the online gallery that displayed and sold her work.

Eliza was particularly proud of the Internet art gallery she had created less than a year ago. Galleri.com had freed her almost entirely of the tedious and costly dealings with art dealers that had formerly consumed large percentages of both her time and her income.

With the new online gallery in operation, customers could now view her whimsical creations on their own computers and order their favorite prints, stationery or original paintings directly from her, via a secured credit card shopping cart. And whenever Eliza sold one of her original paintings—and she had just sold two the previous week—new pictures were uploaded into the gallery to replace them, which was what was happening now.

In the kitchen she attended to Wickham’s perpetually empty food bowl, then made herself a couple of pieces of whole wheat toast and brewed fresh coffee. She intended to breakfast while she checked the gallery web site, to be sure the replacement paintings had uploaded without a problem, and then to check her e-mail and shopping cart for any new orders or customer queries.

She was just walking back into the living room, balancing a small tray in her hand, when the computer chimed, indicating that the upload cycle was complete.

Before Eliza had reached her desk the computer chimed again and an electronic rendition of the 1950s pop hit “Please Mr. Postman” blasted from the speakers, signaling that her overnight e-mail was waiting to be read. Anxious to be done with the task so she could get started researching the old letters, she settled herself before the computer, buttered a wedge of toast and took a bite, then opened the e-mail folder.

Although she had not forgotten about her message board posting of late the night before, Eliza was anticipating only the usual list of morning mail and Internet updates. So the sender’s address on the first piece of e-mail on the overnight list caused her to catch her breath. She stared at it for several seconds before clicking her mouse.

The e-mail popped instantly onto her screen.

Dear SMARTIST,

A very strange question, “Was Darcy from Pride and Prejudice real?” I happen to be firmly of the opinion that he was. But then I am slightly prejudiced. Why are you interested?

FDARCY@PemberleyFarms.com

Eliza read the strange note with growing consternation. She had genuinely hoped to find someone on the Austenticity site who would take seriously her question about Darcy, thus perhaps providing some indication of the genuineness of her letters, or at least a direction in which she might pursue her planned research.

Now, she reflected, as she raised the cup of scalding coffee to her lips, posting the message had obviously been a big mistake. And she was convinced that she had unwittingly tapped into some previously unsuspected lunatic fringe of Jane Austen fandom.

Wickham suddenly jumped up into her lap, nearly upsetting her coffee and further aggravating her ill-tempered view of the ludicrous message. “Look, Wickham!” she said, grabbing the unruly feline by the scruff of his fat neck and directing his attention to the screen. “It’s a cute little e-mail from Darcy himself, at Pemberley, no less.”

Wickham meowed and struggled to free himself, but Eliza held him firmly in her grip.

“Pemberley was the name of the fictional Darcy’s fabulous estate in Pride and Prejudice,” she informed the wriggling cat. “Ridiculous, huh?” She looked down at the furry head in her lap and rubbed his ears, then released him. He leaped out of her lap and hit the floor with a heavy thump as she leaned over her keyboard and began to type.

Dear “Darcy,”

I posted my question for a reason, not to indulge your fantasy. Please keep your crackpot opinions to yourself.

SMARTIST@galleri.com

Grinning with satisfaction at having properly told the idiot off, Eliza stabbed the key to send the e-mail. Then she shut down the computer and leaned back to finish her toast and coffee in peace.

Wickham had found his way up onto the drawing board while she had been typing and was sprawled out enjoying the morning sunlight. Together they watched a rusting Japanese container ship navigating past the window.

“I can’t get over that weirdo on the Internet,” she said, exchanging waves with half a dozen grinning crewmen perched on the ship’s bridge railings. “But then I guess the world is full of weirdos.” She reached out to stroke Wickham’s fur and smiled as she shook her head.

“Darcy at Pemberley!” she sighed. “I’ll bet he wanders around with a walking stick and a top hat.”

Getting to her feet, Eliza cleared the breakfast tray and carried it back into the kitchen. “All I can say, Wickham,” she called back into the other room, “is that it’s a good thing you insisted I keep looking last night until I found a place where I could do some serious research.”

Chapter 5

When Eliza was twelve, her seventh-grade English teacher had brought her whole class into the city from their distant Long Island suburb to visit the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

She had not been back inside the wonderful old building since that day.

Now she alighted from a taxi and looked up at the famous stone lions guarding the main entrance. Above the huge doors a blue silk banner edged in gold fluttered gaily in the breeze. Across it, in elegant script letters a foot tall, was emblazoned the title: THE WORLD OF JANE AUSTEN, A WOMAN OF TWO CENTURIES.

Eliza smiled. For on the Web the night before she had accidentally discovered a notice for the special exhibit. And though she was not entirely certain that a display of the famed English author’s books would be all that helpful in her research, she had reasoned that the library exhibit would at least provide her with a good starting point.

So, clutching her shoulder bag to her side, she climbed the broad steps and entered the library, not exactly certain what she would find within.

From the echoing lobby she followed a series of neatly labeled blue-and-gold placards past the cathedral-like vault of the main reading room and down an echoing, marble-floored corridor that had not been on the seventh-grade tour.

To her great surprise, as she neared the far end of the corridor Eliza heard the sounds of lively music coming from the large, high-ceilinged exhibit room that turned out to be her destination. Her surprise was compounded as she peered into the huge space and saw that it was crowded with visitors.

In the fashion of latter-day museum extravaganzas, the library exhibit room had been converted into a multimedia entertainment setup that surrounded the Jane Austen books and other artifacts on display with moving kaleidoscopes of light, color and sound.

Stepping into the large, airy room, Eliza found herself nodding in artistic approval of a mood-setting wall-sized projection. The video appeared to have been filmed from a carriage rolling along a leafy drive toward the great English manor house the author had employed as the setting for her novel Mansfield Park. Adding to the charming pastoral effect created by the unfolding scenery on the wall, an accompanying surround sound soundtrack featured the music of a string quartet, backed by the sounds of hoofbeats, snorting horses and the crunch of steel-clad wheels on gravel.

Turning away from the thematic eye candy, Eliza saw that the room was alive with video, each display of rare or notable editions of Jane Austen novels accompanied by superb, digital-quality monitors playing scenes from film or television adaptations of the works.

Elsewhere, a few personal articles thought to have belonged to the famed author were enhanced by other video presentations that featured running commentaries by distinguished British authors and actors.

“I am all astonishment!” Eliza smilingly murmured to no one in particular.

She worked her way slowly through the exhibit hall, looking at everything, but noting with growing disappointment that none of it appeared to be particularly helpful in determining whether her letters were authentic.

Then, unexpectedly, she happened on a small display case containing an original letter written in 1801 by Jane Austen to her sister, Cassandra.

“Fabulous!” she exclaimed, feeling she was at last getting somewhere.

Opening the top of her shoulder bag a few inches, Eliza carefully compared the handwritten address on the sealed letter she had found in the vanity mirror to the Austen letter displayed behind half an inch of bulletproof plastic.

Although the library’s letter was larger than the one in Eliza’s purse and the paper entirely different, the neat, unremarkable handwriting on both appeared similar to her untrained eye. However, she also saw at a glance that even a clumsy forger could probably have achieved the superficial resemblance between the two documents.

At least to the extent needed to fool her.

Stymied.

At that moment Eliza was struck by the painfully obvious realization that only an expert was going to be able to authenticate the letters that she had found. And while it may seem odd that she had not immediately thought about the need for laboratory testing and forensic comparisons of the old documents when she first discovered them, the simple truth was that Eliza’s mind didn’t function that way.

She was a dreamer and a fantasizer, and so it was the romance of the letters, not their physical characteristics, that had caught hold of her imagination.

Still, she admitted, coming down to the library and actually seeing the carefully preserved letter in the exhibit had served its purpose. For she had been made suddenly aware that she was totally out of her depth in even attempting to seriously research the authenticity of her letters.

“Fine!” she exclaimed a little too loudly, even for the noisy exhibit room. “Where do I find an expert in this damn place?”

Eliza snapped her bag shut in frustration. The sharp sound of the metal clasp closing echoed through the big room like a gunshot and she looked up guiltily just in time to see a middle-aged security guard with a ponderous belly turning in her direction to look for the source of the sudden noise.

“Whoops!” Another mistake. Eliza immediately stepped away from the display case and made for the far end of the exhibit hall, forcing herself to maintain a leisurely pace, despite her racing pulse.

For it had also just occurred to her that bringing a letter from Jane Austen into a heavily guarded exhibit of priceless Jane Austen artifacts had probably not been the smartest move she had ever made.

“Stupid!” she berated herself under her breath. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

Reaching the far end of the long room, Eliza found temporary refuge amid a freestanding display of mannequins dressed in clothing representative of the fashions popular during the era when Jane Austen was published.

Safely concealed along a winding pathway peopled with costumed dummies, which had been artfully positioned among various props and pieces of painted scenery to suggest that they were in a park, a drawing room or some other location, she chanced a look around and was relieved to see that she had not been followed.

Her momentary fear of being caught in the ludicrous position of having smuggled her own property into the library quickly faded and she began to look with a designer’s interest at the clothing display, proceeding slowly along the path from item to item.

Grinning inwardly because she was almost certain she recognized some of the Regency-era costumes in the display from recent film versions of P&P and Emma, Eliza stepped closer to examine an elaborately embroidered and extremely low-cut gown of bright rust-colored velvet. A small metal stand beside the mannequin held a descriptive placard. Eliza read aloud from the card:

“A young woman of the Regency period would have felt both comfortable and fashionable wearing this exquisite gown to a grand winter ball.”

“Ha!” she snorted derisively. “Fashionable maybe… comfortable, no!”

“Really! And why is that?”

Startled, Eliza spun around to see a man in a well-cut dark suit regarding her with obvious curiosity. Narrowing her flashing dark eyes with the wariness of a born New Yorker, she quickly assessed the tall stranger. Athletic but not from working out at the gym. By the deeply tanned features she judged him to be an outdoor type, a cyclist maybe, or a mountain climber—and not bad-looking either, she thought. He was rather good-looking in fact.

The stranger arched his eyebrows, still waiting for her reply to his question.

“Well look at this ridiculous gown!” she said, covering her embarrassment at having been caught sizing him up by turning back to the hideous orangish dress.

“In the first place, it’s extremely ugly,” she declared. “And, secondly, it’s cut so low that the poor woman would have risked pneumonia every time she wore it, at least if what I’ve heard about English winters is true.”

Her handsome interrogator nodded agreeably. “It’s very true,” he said in a soft voice tinged with a slight Southern drawl. “And not only are English winters cold, there was no central heating in the early 1800s.”

He wrinkled his brow thoughtfully and moved around for another perspective on the terrible dress. “On the other hand,” he observed, gazing pointedly at the revealing bodice, “twenty years earlier, aristocratic French women wore gowns that exposed their breasts almost entirely.”

He grinned at her, then quickly added, “All in the name of dame fashion, of course.”

Eliza found herself grinning back at him, and at the same time she noticed his eyes were sea green in color and sparkled when he smiled.

“Well, the French!” she laughed. “What can I say?”

Her laugh reminded him of crystal glasses ringing together in a toast.

“However,” she continued, jerking an unladylike thumb at the offensive gown, “I can’t imagine Jane Austen having worn something like that.”

Eliza paused thoughtfully, searching for an apt comparison with which to illustrate her opinion. “That dress reminds me of those see-through designer numbers that celebrities are always showing up in at the Oscars,” she explained after a moment of contemplation. “You know the kind I mean, supposedly the height of fashion, but completely impractical and just plain silly.”

The stranger considered that and she saw in his eyes that he was conceding the point before he spoke. “I have to agree with you,” he finally admitted. “Jane was not a silly person. She’d never have worn a gown like that.”

He then turned to indicate a male mannequin just across the aisle from where they stood. This one was dressed in a splendid uniform of dark blue spangled with gold braid, and had a gleaming silver saber belted to its side.

“This naval officer’s uniform of the period is probably far more accurate in terms of clothing that someone who knew Jane might have worn,” he observed. “Her brother, Sir Francis Austen, became admiral of the British Fleet, you know.”

Eliza stepped across the narrow aisle to look at the uniform. “I didn’t know that,” she admitted. “In fact, I’d always had the impression that her family was relatively poor.”

“The Austens weren’t rich,” he explained, “but they were very well connected, with many wealthy and aristocratic friends. And, in time,” he continued, “the family did ultimately become rather prosperous. Another of Jane’s brothers was adopted by wealthy relatives and inherited a very large estate, and Henry, the youngest, became a prominent banker.”

The stranger paused while Eliza absorbed all of that, then he pointed toward the end of the winding path. “If you want a glimpse of how the Austens really lived,” he offered, “come down and look into the next exhibit room.”

Without waiting to see if she would follow, the tall man turned and walked off in the direction he had indicated. Eliza stood there for a moment, watching him go. She briefly considered remaining where she was, just so he wouldn’t think she was hanging on to him, then she shrugged and hurried to catch up.

Stepping out of the clothing display she found him standing by an open doorway that had been roped off so visitors could look through but not enter.

Eliza stepped up beside the stranger and looked into the dimly lit room beyond. “Oh,” she breathed, “it’s wonderful!” She was looking into a comfortable room in what she assumed was a Regency-period English country house. The furnishings and decorations were exquisitely inviting, right down to a richly colored needlepoint settee, a fine piano and a roaring fireplace.

“This is a reproduction of Jane’s music room at the house in Hampshire, as described in a biography written by one of her brothers,” Eliza’s anonymous guide informed her. “She is said to have written the final drafts of several of her novels there,” he continued.

Standing at the velvet rope, Eliza was only half-aware of the descriptive lecture she was receiving, her head tilted to one side as she gazed longingly into the cozy space. The tall man took a step back to allow her the privacy of the moment. He watched as her hair fell over her shoulder hiding her face, the flickering light of the artificial candles playing among the highlights of her dark hair. A raven-haired beauty; he blushed at the overly romantic thought and turned his eyes away.

Dreamily she sighed, “I feel as though I belong in there.” Only half-jokingly she queried, “You don’t suppose they’d let me move in?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “I seriously doubt that Dr. Klein would go along with that,” he replied. “I read somewhere that she borrowed most of these furnishings from the British Museum.”

Eliza tore her eyes from the delights of the room long enough to glance over at him. “Dr. Klein?” she asked.

He nodded. “Thelma Klein, head of the Rare Document section here at the city library. She’s the one who put this exhibit together. She’s also reputed to be a leading Austen authority,” he said somewhat sarcastically.

This new bit of information definitely piqued Eliza’s interest. Turning away from the charming exhibit, she fixed the stranger in her gaze and asked, “Do you happen to know this Dr. Klein?”

Strangely, she thought, the question seemed to make him uneasy. “No…not personally,” he confessed, abruptly raising his arm to consult a gold watch.

“Well you seem to know an awful lot about Jane,” she persisted. “You wouldn’t happen to be an authority on her yourself?” she asked hopefully.

“An authority?” The stranger frowned and glanced over Eliza’s shoulder into the music room, then he slowly shook his head. “No, just a confirmed fan,” he said. “But I have read several of Dr. Klein’s articles, so when I came into the City today I couldn’t resist dropping by to see her exhibit.”

He smiled again and gestured toward the busy hall behind them. “I must admit it’s very well done, don’t you think?”

Eliza smiled slyly. “Well,” she conceded, “except for the ball gown…”

“Yes,” he laughed, “except for that.”

He looked down at his watch again. “Well, I’m late for a meeting…” And without further ceremony he turned and walked away.

“It was nice talking with you,” Eliza called out.

Without looking back he raised a hand in farewell. “Yes. Enjoy the rest of the exhibit,” he said.

Eliza stood and watched as his straight, athletic figure was swallowed up in the crowd at the far end of the exhibit hall. She hadn’t wanted him to leave. Why hadn’t she said something to stop him? Sighing deeply, she scoffed at herself; she’d waited for him to ask for her phone number or something and when he hadn’t she did…nothing. No risk in nothing.

She shook her head, casting a final backward glance at Jane’s cozy little music room and set off in search of Thelma Klein.

Chapter 6

“I’d like to see Dr. Klein in Rare Documents.” Eliza stood at the circular information desk in the main lobby, addressing a long-haired, gum-chewing security guard who appeared to be hearing impaired. “Hello! I’m talking to you,” she called, though he was sitting not more than three feet away. “I said I want to see Dr. Thelma Klein.”

The guard finally glanced up from his Spawn comic book, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “I heard you,” he said. “But Dr. Klein doesn’t see anybody without an appointment.” He gave Eliza a taunting smirk. “You got one?”

“No, I don’t,” Eliza replied evenly. “So I’d like to make an appointment.”

“Klein never makes appointments,” the guard gleefully reported. Then, pointedly dismissing her, he returned his gaze to a full-page illustration of an implausible buglike creature attempting to ravish an equally implausible Amazon babe in a strategically tattered bikini.

Moments later he noticed that Eliza was still standing at the counter, scanning the lobby. “Anything else I can do?” he asked over the top of the magazine.

Biting her tongue to prevent herself from telling the little creep precisely what he could do with his comic book, Eliza shook her head. “No thanks,” she said sweetly as she walked away. “You’ve been ever so helpful.”

Slowly circling the lobby, she stopped to consult a wall directory near the front entrance and learned that the Rare Document section was located on the third floor. She spotted a staircase nearby and casually walked over to it, only to discover that a velvet rope blocked the stairs. To one side of the steps a small plastic sign informed her that the stairway was reserved exclusively for library administration and research personnel.

Sneaking a quick look back at the information desk where the guard was once again wholly engrossed in his garishly illustrated tale of bug rape, Eliza unclipped the brass hook on the rope, stepped into the forbidden zone and vanished up the stairs.

A metal fire door on the third floor opened onto a darkly paneled corridor of offices with old-fashioned frosted-glass doors and tall overhead transoms. Each door had a department title and the name of an individual neatly lettered in bold black type on the glass.

Eliza walked down the deserted corridor, reading the signs on doors marked ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES, POETRY, LITERATURE-MEDIEVAL, LITERATURE-AMERICAN, ADMINISTRATION, PERSONNEL, FOREIGN LANGUAGE, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS and LITERATURE/POETRY-ANCIENT NEAR EAST. She was beginning to worry that she was going to run out of corridor before she found what she wanted when she spotted the words RARE DOCUMENTS/FORENSICS LAB—T. KLEIN, PHD, DIRECTOR stenciled onto a door set in a recessed alcove.

Taking a deep breath, Eliza raised her fist and knocked twice on the wooden frame with feigned confidence.

Nothing happened.

After waiting for several seconds she knocked again. When there was still no answer she looked around to be sure the corridor was still empty. Then she placed her ear against the door. From the other side she thought she could make out the low murmur of voices.

Straightening, Eliza placed her hand on the worn brass knob and turned it. The door was unlocked, so she pushed it open halfway and peeked into a long, narrow room cluttered with computers, benches filled with complex mazes of bubbling, horror-movie-type lab equipment and several large pieces of unrecognizable electronic machinery. At the far end of the room three or four white-coated techs were leaning over their equipment or peering into microscopes, oblivious to her presence.

After considering her options for a moment, Eliza decided that walking into the lab unannounced was probably not a good idea. Perhaps if she waited in the corridor someone would come along who could help her find Dr. Klein.

Her mind set on this new plan of action, she backed out into the corridor, stealthily pulling the door shut behind her. She squealed as her backside bumped into something unyielding and a booming voice oddly reminiscent of carriage wheels rolling over crushed gravel boomed in her ear.

“What the hell are you doing up here? This is a restricted area. No visitors!”

Her face reddening, Eliza whirled about and found herself face-to-face with an imposing, iron-haired, middle-aged woman built like an oil drum. The woman was blocking the entrance to the alcove with her thick body and glaring at her quarry like a hungry cat that’s just discovered a parakeet in its litter box. The corners of her razor-thin mouth were turned down almost to her jowls and she was in the process of raising a cell phone in one stubby hand, doubtless to call Security.

Realizing that she was trapped, Eliza quickly scrutinized the woman, assessing the chances of bowling her over and making a run for it. Then her eyes fell on the plastic library ID badge clipped to the lapel of the woman’s shapeless gray suit and Eliza breathed a sigh of relief.

“Dr. Klein,” she said, smiling as brightly as possible under the awkward circumstances. “My name is Eliza Knight and you’re just the person I wanted to see—”

Thelma Klein slowly lowered the cell phone and rolled her slightly bulging blue eyes ceilingward. “Oh God, not another one!” she groaned, stepping out of the alcove and pointing back toward the stairway. “You’ll have to make an appointment.”

“You don’t make appointments,” Eliza countered, standing her ground. “Which means you won’t actually see me.”

That prompted a thin smile from the portly researcher. “Very good!” she said grumpily. “You’re a regular genius! Good-bye now.” She started to move forward, intent on entering the lab, but now it was Eliza who blocked the way.

“I have some documents that I think you’ll find very interesting—” she began.

Thelma Klein raised a chubby hand to stop her explanation. “Wait! Don’t tell me,” she said sarcastically, “let me guess. You went to an estate sale and bought a genuine copy of the Declaration of Independence. Now you just want my lab to authenticate it so you can sell it for a million bucks. Is that it?”

“No! That is not it!” Eliza responded, injecting an equal measure of venom into her tone. She fumbled in her purse for the letters and thrust them at the other woman. “I discovered these letters last night and I thought they might be important. I learned about your Jane Austen exhibit and I came here hoping you could give me some advice.” Eliza softened her tone slightly as she added, “I’ve already tried researching the Internet.”

Thelma Klein grimaced and wagged her big head in disapproval. “The Internet,” she growled. “What made you think you could learn anything from that soulless monstrosity dedicated to reducing the power and majesty of the written word to moronic babbling? I hate the damn Internet!”

Leaning forward until their noses were almost touching, the big woman lowered her basso voice yet another octave. “You want some advice from me?” she rumbled. “Go home to your computer and smash it with a sledgehammer, while you still have some semblance of a brain left.”

Before Eliza could think of an adequate response to that, Thelma emitted a deep sigh of defeat and held out her hand. “Okay,” she said, “let me see the letters!”

Eliza silently handed them over. From a hidden recess somewhere in the massive bosom of her jacket the researcher produced a pair of dainty reading glasses with lobster-pink frames and squinted at the letters.

“At first I thought maybe they were some kind of joke,” Eliza explained breathlessly. “But then I couldn’t figure out why anyone would go to the trouble. There was a scrap of old newspaper with them, dated 1810…”

Without taking her eyes from the letters Klein swatted at the air in front of her, the way one wards off a pesky mosquito. “Newspapers,” she snorted. “That’s the oldest trick in the book, honey. Every two-bit junk dealer knows an old newspaper will make the suckers think the stuff with it is old. Now kindly shut up and let me read this.”

Eliza fell silent as the researcher, still reading, pushed past her and opened the door to the lab. The younger woman started to follow but Thelma suddenly turned and blocked the doorway. “Come back tomorrow afternoon, late,” she ordered.

A protest rose in Eliza’s throat but Thelma cut her off with a reassuring smile that completely transformed the older woman’s forbidding visage. “Don’t worry,” she said warmly, “your letters will be safe with me. I’m going to have to run a lot of tests,” she explained, “and it’s going to take time. But you have my word I won’t let these letters out of my sight.”

Thelma Klein’s smile broadened. “Now, if you’ll just wait here a minute,” she said, “I’ll have my secretary make color copies of the letters for you and I’ll sign a receipt confirming that they’re your property and that you’ve entrusted them to the library for authentication.”

“Th—thank you,” Eliza stammered, overwhelmed by this sudden turnabout in the other woman’s demeanor. “I really do appreciate this very much, Dr. Klein.”

“It’s Thelma,” Klein replied.

She held up the old letters like a sheaf of worthless junk bonds. “And don’t thank me yet,” she smiled. “If you went to Vegas the smart money would tell you these letters of yours are probably as phony as Madonna’s eyelashes.”

Chapter 7

“I think you should forget about this whole Jane Austenthing and stay focused on your work. You’ve been doing okay with the online gallery, but your property taxes are coming up pretty soon and I’d like to see you sock another few thousand into your IRA before the end of the year.”

Exactly as in her dream of the night before, Eliza was sitting at a scratched Formica table in a neighborhood deli and Jerry was occupying the seat on the other side of the table. Instead of a salad he was consuming a pallid chicken breast, but just as in the dream he was dispensing dry financial advice, completely unable to grasp the romance of the letters.

Following her trip to the library that morning Eliza had excitedly called Jerry and asked him to meet her for dinner this evening. She had been anxious to share with him the news of Thelma Klein’s unexpected decision to examine the letters.

Jerry’s response to her announcement, however, had been less than enthusiastic and for the past twenty minutes he had been taking every opportunity to pour cold water on her carefully nurtured hopes and dreams for what he was now derisively calling her “Jane Austen thing.”

“Jerry, researching the letters isn’t going to do anything to my business one way or the other,” Eliza interrupted defensively. “In fact, now that Thelma’s taken over, there’s not much else for me to do but wait, so I don’t see the problem.”

Jerry frowned his most serious accountant’s frown and squinted at her through the panes of his gleaming round lenses. “The problem as I see it,” he said, “isn’t the research time, but all the emotional energy you’re putting into this thing that you consider romantic. It’s all what-if stuff, not real.”

Eliza nodded sullenly. “Well what if the letters turn out to be genuine?” she replied, trying hard to keep the emotion out of her voice and failing miserably. “Oh, I know Dr. Klein said the letters are probably phony. But if you’d seen the look in her eyes, Jerry…I think she believes they are real. And if they are,” she concluded on a practical note, “I imagine that they could turn out to be quite valuable.”

Jerry started polishing his glasses with a paper napkin, a sure sign that he was about to deliver another lecture. “You don’t fool me, Eliza,” he said. “If those letters should prove to be real—although from what you’ve told me that seems highly unlikely—I’ll admit that they might actually be worth something.” He paused to fix her with his version of a piercing gaze. “But that’s not what you’re really interested in at all, is it?”

“Well, of course, I’m interested—” she began.

“What you’re really interested in,” he interrupted, waving away her denial, “is whether or not old whatshisname, the guy from that book—”

“Are you referring to Darcy?” Eliza intoned coldly.

Jerry nodded, stripping a piece of chicken from the undercooked breast and popping it into his mouth. “Darcy,” he repeated, swallowing. “All you’re really interested in is whether or not this Darcy character was sleeping with Jane Austen.”

“Who said anything about her sleeping with him?” Eliza angrily retorted. “I only said they may have written to one another.”

“Whatever!” Jerry shrugged to show that in his mind it really made no difference whether Darcy and Jane Austen were platonic lovers or depraved sex fiends. “The point is,” he said with forced patience, “it all happened two hundred years ago, if it happened at all. So who cares?”

“I care,” Eliza said. “Yes, you’re absolutely right, Jerry. I care.”

“See,” he said, pointing his fork at her in triumph. “I can read you like a book, Eliza,” he added with maddening smugness. “And all I’m saying is that you need to be careful about how much time and emotional energy you invest in this sentimental stuff.” Jerry paused to stab another piece of chicken. “You need to manage your time wisely, give priority to the really important things that you need to be doing.”

Eliza abruptly placed her napkin on the table and got to her feet. “You know, Jerry, I think you’re absolutely right,” she agreed. “Now, I’d better be going.”

“Going? Where?” Jerry demanded. “You haven’t even finished your smoked-salmon platter yet.”

She smiled and picked up her bag. “You just reminded me of something important that I have to do,” she replied. “And, as you’ve just pointed out, the important things should get first priority.”

He squinted up at her in confusion. “But I, uh, thought we’d probably go back to your place after dinner and…You know, have a little ‘romantic evening,’” he whimpered like a whipped puppy.

Eliza actually heard the quotes around the romantic evening part and knew that romance was not what he had in mind. “Romance? No, no, no…That would be a terrible waste of time, don’t you think?”

His mouth fell open, revealing an unattractive view of half-chewed chicken.

“’Bye now,” Eliza said, leaning to deliver a quick kiss to his forehead. “Don’t forget to floss.”

Then, before he could reply, she was out the door and hurrying away down the sidewalk, her heels clicking sharply against the pavement.

Fuming, she had wanted to slap the silly grin off his face when he’d said he knew her like a book. Yeah, well it was evident that he’d never gotten around to reading this part of the book and he’d certainly skipped over the chapter on romantic evenings or he would have known that a deli sandwich and lecture on her overactive imagination were not the proper prelude to romance.

Why hadn’t she told him that? Because the perfect rebuke seemed to come to mind only later when she was alone and it didn’t matter anymore. Sighing, she supposed it was just another stake in the fence creating the boundary that was Jerry.

Chapter 8

At home alone an hour later, Eliza stood in the middle of her living room, attending to the important task she had assigned herself for the evening. The floor had been carpeted in a layer of newspapers and she was industriously applying a thick, messy “guaranteed” French furniture restorative to the top of the vanity table.

Wickham, who had been banished from the immediate area of the easily tracked brown gunk with threats of “no tuna, ever again,” sat sullenly in a chair watching her with resentful yellow eyes.

Eliza’s muscles grew tired and her hands began to tingle as she lovingly rubbed the cleansing polish deep into the wood. Before long her efforts were rewarded with the warm gleam of natural rosewood slowly emerging from beneath a two hundred year accumulation of grime.

“Oh, isn’t it lovely!” she exclaimed with satisfaction.

Looking up, she caught a glimpse of her comical smudged features in the hazed mirror. And she wondered again, as she had a dozen times since bringing the vanity home the night before, how many other faces before her had looked into those same misty depths.

“Just think, Wickham,” she whispered, pleased with the untouchable mystery of the idea, “this table might have belonged to Jane Austen. Perhaps she even wrote part of Pride and Prejudice right on this very spot that I’m cleaning now.”

If Wickham had any response in mind it was derailed by the sudden bright musical tones of “Mr. Postman” playing from across the room. Annoyed, Eliza wiped her hands on an old T-shirt and glared at the offending computer.

“I thought I’d turned that thing off,” she grumbled, angry with herself for her inability to resist walking over and peeking at the newly arrived message.

“I should have taken Dr. Klein’s advice and smashed this thing,” she complained as she opened her e-mail folder and looked at the new message, which popped onto the screen and sat there seeming to taunt her.

“Wonderful!” she told Wickham, who had interpreted her move to the computer desk as license to leave his chair and jump up on the drawing board. “It’s another e-mail from that weirdo who thinks he’s Mr. Darcy.”

Eliza sat pondering the twisted logic of the e-mail, trying to think of a suitably sarcastic response.

Dear SMARTIST,

Even if it were true, my being a crackpot would have no bearing on whether Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy was a real person.

FDARCY@PemberleyFarms.com

“Darcy, you are becoming a royal pain in the butt!” Eliza breathed. She took a deep breath, and then began to tap out a swift and angry reply that she hoped would rid her of this pest once and for all.

Much later, despite her bone weariness, her mood vastly improved by a hot shower and the removal of most of the French furniture restorative from her hair and fingernails, Eliza sat before the little vanity table. Smelling faintly of lemon oil it was now gleaming, basking in the moonlight beside her bedroom window.

Dinner with Jerry fleetingly crossed her mind; she shouldn’t really be angry with him, he was who he was and she knew it. The question, of course, was why she continued with anything but the business aspect of their relationship. Especially when there were men out there like… whoever he was at the library: a man who appreciated Jane Austen and the romance of her era. She wondered what such a man would be like to know and felt a touch of regret that she hadn’t even gotten his name.

For a long, silent moment she gazed deeply into the mirror. Then tentatively she touched the cool surface of the glass with her fingertips.

“Hello, Jane!” she whispered, smiling into the haze. “Are you still in there?”

Long after Eliza had retired to her bed to dream of Jane and her mysterious lover the glow of a computer screen once again lit the luxuriously appointed study of the great country house.

Sitting at the desk, the shadowy figure leaned back in the butter-soft leather chair and closed his eyes. Several times since his trip into the city he had found himself thinking of the raven-haired beauty he’d met there. He hadn’t actually met her, since he didn’t even know her name, but he smiled at the memory of the light dancing in her hair. The pleasant thoughts were rudely interrupted by the coarse electronic voice of his computer telling him he had mail.

And once more he found himself gazing at an angry and provocative message from his unknown e-mail correspondent.

Dear DARCY,

I am not interested in you or your silly games.

Please stop bothering me.

SMARTIST

For the briefest of moments the man’s normally placid features were filled with a rage born more of the frustration he was feeling than of any true hostility toward the sender of the e-mail. His fingers poised over the keyboard, prepared to type out an antagonistic reply. Then he realized what he was doing and leaned back with a sigh. For it seemed perfectly obvious that he had just hit another dead end in his quest to verify his own experience. And the unknown person with whom he had been corresponding—a woman, he suspected—had no idea what had prompted his interest.

If she had, he reflected, then surely she would have responded differently to his first message identifying himself as a Darcy. For he believed that she would have been too intrigued by the connection his family name suggested not to have queried him further.

Regretfully—for the schedule to which he was committed during the next week would preclude any further searching for at least that long—he reached forward and switched off his computer.

Chapter 9

Late the next afternoon, Eliza again presented herself at the library’s main information desk. The same gum-chewing guard was slouched behind the counter, lost in another violent, insectoid comic adventure, peopled, predictably, with more seminaked female victims.

“Excuse me,” Eliza said, “my name is Eliza Knight and I have an appointment with Dr. Klein in Rare Documents.”

Gum-chewer scowled at her and consulted a clipboard that lay on the counter. “I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed, looking up with sudden respect and pushing a laminated visitor’s badge across the marble. “Mind if I ask how you figured a way to get to the old bat?”

“A little trick I picked up from a dirty comic book,” Eliza grinned, pinning the badge to her purse and heading for the stairs.

The chastened guard glanced down at his book and flushed brightly. “This isn’t a dirty comic book,” he yelled after her. “It’s an illustrated novel.”

Up on the third floor, with far less confidence than she had exhibited to the security guard, a very anxious Eliza slipped quietly into the document research lab.

She found Thelma Klein sitting at a lab bench, peering into a microscope and scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. After a few seconds the big woman looked up and saw that she had a visitor. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and stood, stretching her arms wearily.

“Ah, you’re back,” she said to Eliza. “Good timing. I was just wrapping up the last few tests.” Thelma lowered her arms and swiveled her head around, scanning the lab for something or somebody. “Rudy,” she shouted over the hum of the electronic equipment, “where are my damn spectrograph results?”

Rudy, a nervous, bespectacled young man in a coffee-stained lab coat, waved back at her from across the room. “Almost done, Dr. Klein,” he called.

“Bring the printouts to my office,” Thelma ordered. Then she turned and jerked her triple chin in Eliza’s direction. “Come on,” she said.

Winding her way through a maze of lab benches, Eliza followed the older woman into a tiny office overflowing with books, piles of computer printouts and other papers. Squeezing past a bulging file cabinet, Thelma settled herself behind a desk. She pointed Eliza to a straight-backed wooden chair, indicating she should sit.

Eliza did as she was instructed, and when she was seated, Thelma held up her letters and waved them at her. “Where in the hell did you get these?” she demanded without preamble.

Eliza opened her mouth to explain about the antique warehouse and the vanity table. But before she could begin a knock sounded at the door. Thelma raised her hand for silence and bellowed at the intruder. “Come in, Rudy!”

The nervous young lab tech scurried into the office and leaned across Eliza to hand the researcher a thick manila folder. Frowning, Thelma opened the folder and scanned the top page of the test results and then grunted for Rudy to leave. The tech gave Eliza a strange look, then left the office quickly, closing the door behind him.

Eliza waited in silence while Thelma thumbed through the remainder of the printouts. When the older woman had finished reading, she dropped the lab report onto the desk.

She again picked up Eliza’s letters and stared at them. “Okay, talk,” she ordered.

“I found the letters behind a mirror in a piece of furniture I bought two days ago at an antique warehouse,” Eliza said. “It’s a rosewood vanity table.”

Thelma Klein slowly shook her close-cropped gray head and a grin creased her sullen features. “God help us!” she mused. “Old furniture.”

She thought about that for a minute or so, then again focused her attention on Eliza. “So, not only do you have letters from Jane Austen and her mysterious lover,” she said, “you’ve got her personal dressing table, too?”

Eliza, who had spent most of the day preparing herself for the letdown of discovering that her letters were forgeries, stared at the gruff document expert. “You’re saying the letters are genuine?” she uttered.

Thelma Klein’s grin widened. “Honey, trust me. We wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation if they weren’t genuine,” she assured the shocked Eliza.

“We ran a full battery of analytical tests on the sealed letter to Darcy,” she explained, the excitement in her voice growing, “and everything checks out.” Thelma patted the lab report she had just examined. “The paper is right, the ink is correct, the style and, of course, Jane Austen’s handwriting, have been compared to three different examples of original Austen letters from the library’s permanent collection.”

The enthusiasm in Klein’s voice moderated only slightly as she held up the second of Eliza’s letters. “I think we can safely assume that this letter from Darcy is also authentic, based on its connection to the first, as well as the age and likely origins of the paper and ink, even though we have no actual handwriting samples to compare it with.”

In a daze Eliza listened to the exhaustive technical details of the researcher’s report. And though she had dreamed of what it might mean if the letters could be proved genuine, she had been working hard since last night to adopt Jerry’s cynical world view that miracles didn’t happen and that such a thing was therefore virtually impossible.

Now a highly respected document expert and Jane Austen authority was telling her that her letters were real.

Eliza smiled, and then abruptly her bubble burst. For she had just remembered something that had been bothering her about the letters from the beginning.

“Excuse me, Dr. Klein,” she interrupted as Thelma was launching into an explanation of how the oxidization of iron particles in nineteenth-century ink turned it reddish with time. “I seem to have missed something here. You say these letters are real, but I thought Fitzwilliam Darcy was a fictitious character.”

Thelma Klein sighed like a third-grade teacher stuck with a particularly dull student, and leaned back in her chair. “Honey,” she asked kindly, “how much do you know about Jane Austen? Beyond the TV miniseries, I mean?”

Offended by the condescending tone of the question, Eliza dug into her bag and produced the thick reference book that she had checked out of the library the previous day and spent half of last night reading.

“Well, according to your book on Austen,” she replied defensively, “she’s the greatest Romantic novelist in English literature. And she never married or even had an actual lover. At least not that anyone knows about.”

Eliza’s dark eyes were flashing angrily as she continued. “And, for your information,” she declared, “I have read Pride and Prejudice at least half a dozen times, and all of her other novels as well. So I am not completely ignorant on the topic of Jane Austen.”

Thelma had listened to the pretty, dark-haired artist’s angry tirade without changing her expression. Now her lined features softened and she surprised Eliza by reaching across the desk to gently touch her hand.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Thelma apologized. “I know I sometimes come off like the old battle ax that I am…” Her voice trailed away and she swiveled around in her chair and gazed out through the window at the busy street three stories below.

“If you only knew the number of creeps who come in here trying to get me to authenticate papers that prove George Washington was an alien…” she muttered.

Thelma suddenly turned back to face Eliza and her voice was once again strong and businesslike. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll admit I was talking down to you. Feel free to kick me if you catch me doing it again.”

Eliza grinned. “I promise,” she said.

“What I’m about to tell you won’t be found in the standard biographies,” Thelma began. “Of course, Darcy’s identity is one of the great unknowns of Austen’s work. But every schoolgirl who’s ever gotten hooked on P&P secretly suspects that the character must have been drawn from the author’s personal experience.” Thelma shrugged theatrically and held out upturned palms in a no-brainer gesture. “I mean, how else could Austen have so perfectly described that unforgettable and passionate relationship between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, right?”

Eliza found herself nodding. “Right!” she agreed.

“The problem is,” Thelma continued, her voice rising with the vehemence of a scholarly argument that Eliza suddenly realized the older woman must have been following since her graduate-school days, “that no man even vaguely fitting Darcy’s description exists as a historical figure in Jane Austen’s life. Not in her letters, not in the journals of her contemporaries, not in any of the several biographies written by her family members.”

Eliza frowned, trying to recall some of what she had read about the author’s life. “Jane did have a male admirer or two, didn’t she? Wasn’t there a young law student? I think his name was LeFroy or something like that.”

Thelma waved off the suggestion with a swatting gesture. “Oh, there was a brief and well-documented flirtation with a penniless student—a family friend, actually—when Jane was a girl. And, later, even a couple of marriages of convenience were proposed.” The older woman leaned forward, her eyes sparkling with excitement.

“But I’m talking Fitzwilliam Darcy here, a young, handsome and fantastically wealthy man with a vast estate. Now if such a person had been a force in Jane Austen’s life, don’t you think there’d be at least one reference to him somewhere in all her papers or in the volumes that have been written about her?” Thelma shook her head and leaned back in her chair. “But there’s nothing at all in the official Jane Austen record. Not a single word.”

Eliza frowned, for she was by now thoroughly confused. “Then I guess I really don’t understand,” she admitted.

“Aha!” Thelma Klein’s eyes took on a mischievous sparkle and she lowered her deep voice to a confidential level. “Note that I said there’s nothing in the official record. However, for some time now a few Austen scholars, myself included, have been developing an entirely new theory about Darcy, which may explain his absence from the official record.

“Did you know, for instance, that after Jane’s death her sister, Cassandra, and several other Austen family members methodically destroyed virtually all of the letters she had written, valuable letters that they had been preserving for decades?”

Eliza shook her head in wonderment.

“It’s a recorded fact,” Thelma said. “Jane was already becoming recognized as a major literary figure by the time of her death. People were beginning to know her and to know of her, so why do you suppose her family started destroying their most precious reminders of her?”

“To hide something?” Eliza speculated.

Thelma slapped the desk with the flat of her hand. “Bingo! Maybe to hide something potentially scandalous!” she declared. “Like a love affair with a man who was totally unacceptable, married perhaps or even potentially dangerous to the family in a political sense.”

Eliza felt her pulse quickening as she formed her next question, anxious now to delve even deeper into Thelma’s intriguing theory. “Is there any proof of that?” she inquired eagerly. “I mean, besides the fact that the family destroyed her letters.”

The researcher shook her head regretfully. “Oh, there have been some tantalizing hints over the years,” she conceded, “a scrap of strangely altered manuscript, stories about another letter from Jane to Darcy—”

Eliza sat up straight in her chair. “She wrote another letter to him?”

Thelma smiled knowingly. “I have an absolutely reliable source in London—a rare-book dealer—who swears that a letter to Darcy was discovered in the library collection of an English estate two years ago.” The smile faded and the researcher threw up her hands in frustration. “Unfortunately,” she grumbled, “the damned letter was snatched up by a private collector before anyone in my field even got a look at it. According to my friend, the letter was sold for a price in the high six figures.”

“That’s incredible!” Eliza said.

“If you think that’s incredible, consider this,” Thelma continued, “the collector was an American named Darcy.”

Eliza stared at her in disbelief. “Darcy at Pemberley Farms,” she murmured aloud, thinking suddenly of her annoying Internet pen pal.

Thelma shot up out of her chair like she’d been stuck with a hat pin. “Right!” she exclaimed. “Pemberley Farms! The bastard breeds horses somewhere in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley…” She frowned at Eliza. “How in the hell did you hear about him?”

“He…uh, sent me some e-mail,” Eliza replied guiltily. She felt her ears reddening as she remembered what Darcy had said in his e-mails. And she grimaced as she thought of the despicable way she had responded to him.

“Fantastic!” exclaimed Thelma, completely oblivious to Eliza’s pained expression as well as the evasive quality of the younger woman’s answer. “I’ve been trying to get to this guy for two years, but he refuses to respond to my calls and returns all of my letters unopened.”

Thelma’s expression was positively gleeful as she leaned forward expectantly. “Eliza, what did he say when he e-mailed you?”

Eliza smiled weakly. “He said he believes Jane Austen’s Darcy was a real person,” she replied.

Thelma’s excitement reached a crescendo as she leaped to her feet again and paced the tiny space behind her desk. “And I’m willing to bet that person will be found lurking somewhere in this Darcy’s family tree,” she declared emphatically. “Which explains why no English researcher ever discovered him.”

Thelma stopped pacing and leaned over the desk. “And it could also explain why her family wanted to cover up Jane’s involvement with him, and why they were perhaps forced to correspond in secret.”

Eliza gave her a blank look.

“History!” the researcher said impatiently. “Jane Austen’s lifetime coincides almost precisely with the one period in history when England and America were perpetually at one another’s throats, beginning with the American Revolution, which began the year after she was born, and continuing right up to the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington, among other unfriendly gestures.”

Thelma reached for Darcy’s letter and waved it in front of Eliza’s face. “Look at the date on this: 1810! Then read what it says: ‘The Captain has found me out.’”

“You know who the captain was?” Eliza asked in astonishment.

“Well, two of Jane’s brothers were high-ranking British naval officers whose duty in 1810 was trying to stop American ships from running guns and munitions to the French,” Thelma replied. “I imagine that either of them would have been naturally suspicious of any American, much less one they suspected of dallying with their sister. And if news spread that Jane was carrying on a relationship with a man who would have been considered a potential enemy of Britain,” she theorized, “their careers would surely have been ruined.”

Thelma was positively dancing in place by this time. “Oh, this is positively delicious,” she laughed, holding up the sealed letter. “Just think what it will mean if one of Darcy’s descendants is present to confirm that his ancestor was Jane Austen’s lover, when this two hundred-year-old letter is finally opened.”

Eliza held up a hand to stop her, for she had completely lost Thelma’s trail of logic again. “When it’s finally opened?” she exclaimed. “Why can’t we just open it now?”

Thelma gave her a look she usually reserved for her UFO-conspiracy theorists. “Sweetie, as long as this letter remains unopened,” she patiently explained, “it’s a mystery to die for.”

The older woman closed her eyes, searching for words to adequately convey the true worth of the document in her hand. “Serious Austen collectors will pay a fortune at auction for the unique privilege of being the first to know what’s inside,” she said.

Eliza felt her stomach turning over as she absorbed the impact of the researcher’s words. “A fortune?” she whispered.

Thelma Klein nodded, encouraging her to think big. “A fortune!” she repeated. “But they’ll pay even more if we can positively link one of Darcy’s living descendants to Pride and Prejudice.”

She paused then and looked expectantly at Eliza. “When will you be contacting Darcy again?” she asked.

Eliza sat before her computer, grimacing at the single line she had thus far managed to compose in her intended message to Darcy. She had been at it for nearly half an hour and nothing she tried to say seemed to be coming out right.

Dear DARCY,

I’d like to apologize for…

“I’d like to apologize,” she read aloud. “For what? For calling you a crackpot and telling you to get lost?”

She shook her head in disgust and then erased the line. From his perch on the drawing board Wickham appeared to be grinning at her.

“Why start out by reminding him of what I said?” Eliza challenged the cat. “I’m sure he remembers it all too well. And I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that he didn’t even bother replying to my last e-mail.”

Wickham yawned and stared out the window.

Eliza returned to the computer screen. Since leaving the library that afternoon she had been trying to think of some graceful way to reestablish communication with the enigmatic Darcy. But so far she had come up with nothing but a blank, on top of which she was embarrassed for having behaved so badly toward him in the first place.

After all, she reflected with chagrin, she had posted a question on the Internet and invited an e-mail response. But when somebody had responded—perhaps one of the few somebodys in all the world who might actually have the answer she was seeking—she had dismissed him out of hand, and in the most insulting manner possible.

Finally admitting to the cat, “Appears I blew it, Wickham.” Preoccupied as he was with the shadow of a pigeon that was stalking the ledge outside the window, Wickham did not deign to reply.

But the worst part of the entire e-mail affair, Eliza decided, was that only after she had discovered who this latter-day Darcy was had it become important to her to apologize to him. Which made her feel precisely like one of the slimier characters Austen had taken such merciless delight in skewering in her novels. Say, the despicable cad Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility.

“Oh, why didn’t I just tell Thelma what really happened?” she moaned. “That Darcy contacted me and I blew him off and now he probably wouldn’t speak to me if I was the last person on earth.”

Unable to face the empty electronic page any longer, Eliza got up and made herself a cup of tea, which she carried into her bedroom.

Sitting on the Victorian piano stool, which was temporarily taking the place of a chair at the vanity table, she regarded her unhappy reflection in the mirror.

“You’re not really a bad person,” she assured herself, “but you’ve got to face up to the fact that you have done an unkind thing. And, to make things worse, you lied to Thelma about it. Now you’ve got to think of some way to make it all right again.”

Eliza’s image regarded her doubtfully for a long time, then at last a rueful smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Well, it’s plain to see that there’s nothing you can do but eat a little humble pie,” she murmured.

Another hour passed before Eliza was able to compose an e-mail message that summed up both her apology and, she hoped, an acceptable explanation for her earlier behavior.

Dear Mr. DARCY,

My rudeness was unforgivable. I hope you will accept my apology and try to understand that I was reacting mainly to the shock of receiving e-mail from you at Pemberley.

SMARTIST

Staring at the MAIL SENT message for a few moments, she wanted to believe, but had no confidence, that it would do the trick. All she could do was hope that he was a tolerant and gracious man.

Chapter 10

The next several days flew by in a blur of activity as Thelma Klein completed her formal analysis of Eliza’s letters and began making discreet contacts within the small but elite community of rare-document collectors, dealers and Austen scholars. Though she disclosed the true nature of the astounding discovery of what she had now dubbed the “Darcy Letters” to only a few trusted associates, the researcher made it clear that she was subtly preparing academia and the world at large for an announcement so momentous that it would literally rewrite the book on Jane Austen.

Far from being shunted aside in the blur of activity that began swirling about the letters, Eliza suddenly found herself being consulted by Thelma at all hours of the day and night, regarding the timing of various announcements and the ultimate disposition of the documents. For they were, after all, still her exclusive property. And when she wasn’t on the phone with Thelma, she was meeting with the dynamic researcher and the representatives of various interested institutions that were expected to play important roles in the unveiling of the letters.

Timing, Thelma stressed at every available opportunity, was key. Timing and the acknowledgment of one Mr. Darcy of Virginia. Eliza had lost count of the number of times the researcher had quizzed her on whether contact had been reestablished with the elusive Darcy.

Unable to confess that she feared she had permanently blown the Darcy connection before even getting it started, the artist haunted her e-mail folder on an hourly basis, while putting Thelma off with a series of groundless speculations, the latest being that the reclusive horseman was probably just away from home for a few days.

Regarding Thelma’s interests in the matter, and the reason she had so readily assumed the complex and demanding task of managing the release of the Darcy Letters, it soon became clear to Eliza that Thelma Klein did not expect to go unrewarded. As an Austen expert with an intriguing, albeit unproved, hypothesis about the author, the abrasive Klein had for years been an unsettling force in the snug, predictable world of Jane Austen scholars.

Now, with hard proof in hand that seemed to support her theory about the origins of Darcy, who was arguably the greatest romantic character in English literature, the cantankerous researcher was relishing the prospect of blowing her stuffy colleagues right through the roof. Toward that end, Thelma had proposed, and Eliza had agreed, that she, Klein, would be given the exclusive rights to display Jane Austen’s vanity table and the Darcy Letters at the New York Public Library, until such time as the treasures were sold at auction. And, further feathering Thelma’s nest, Eliza had granted the researcher exclusive rights to coauthor a book about the discovery and meaning of the letters, a book that would be ready for press before anyone else even got a peek at the documents.

Of course, all of these arrangements took a great deal of time and required numerous discussions with attorneys, library staffers and others. As a result, Eliza’s online gallery business was beginning to be affected, as Jerry had so recently predicted would happen. Fortunately, Eliza had a fairly large stock of backup paintings that were easily uploaded to replace her diminishing stocks. And while she was unable to create any new paintings amid the frenzy of planning and contract signing, Eliza was able to keep up with her orders by working late at night.

The latter circumstance took its toll primarily on whatever was left of the relationship between Eliza and Jerry. Where once he had felt free to drop in for an evening, or call late for a last-minute dinner date, the investment counselor was now compelled to leave voice-mails or hurry through their occasional phone conversations. Conversations she purposely avoided the first couple of days after their disastrous dinner and then kept strictly to business when she did talk with him.

So it was that more than a week after he had openly chastised her for her foolishness in devoting so much time and emotional energy to the mysterious letters that Jerry finally got Eliza to agree to meet him for dinner.

Unlike the previous occasion when they had met for dinner at a booth in his favorite neighborhood deli, Jerry’s choice of a restaurant on this particular evening was elegant, candlelit and very French. As Eliza entered the expensive bistro wearing a positively smashing black cocktail dress, he rose from the small corner table he had reserved and ogled her though his shiny glasses.

“Eliza!” There was a nervous edge to his voice as he took her hand and actually planted a slightly damp kiss on her knuckles. “You look absolutely great tonight,” he said a little too loudly. Jerry gestured grandly as he pulled out a chair for her.

Retrieving her hand, Eliza allowed herself to be seated and flashed him a dazzling smile. “Why, Jerry, thank you,” she said, genuinely surprised by this sudden display of gallantry, a quality she had never even suspected he possessed.

“I’ve been missing you,” he said regretfully. “It seems like we’ve hardly had a chance to speak lately.”

Eliza looked at him carefully, wondering if their brief separation had at last uncovered some hidden reservoir of affection in the usually ultrareserved accountant. “I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch,” she apologized. “But the week has been completely crazy.”

Thrilled to have someone besides Wickham in whom she could confide, Eliza leaned forward and lowered her voice to a near-whisper. “It’s all very hush-hush at the moment,” she told him, “but the library plans to make my letters and the vanity the centerpiece of their Jane Austen exhibit, and Sotheby’s will be announcing a special auction in the fall.”

Jerry beamed with enthusiasm at the news. “That is exciting,” he agreed. “What about that reclusive collector you told me about—Darcy? Have you heard from him again?”

Eliza’s smile faded and she slowly shook her head, her guilty feelings from several days earlier returning in a rush. “No,” she replied, “I’m afraid I offended him too badly…” She thought about that for a moment and a wonderful new idea suddenly popped into her head.

“I’ve been thinking about going down to Virginia,” she said, her words giving further form to the idea.

“Maybe if I met this Darcy and had a chance to personally explain about the letters—without his knowing I was the one who insulted him on the Internet…” Her voice trailed off as the thought continued to develop. Actually, she decided, it was the best idea she had had yet.

Still considering the new plan, Eliza was surprised to feel Jerry taking her hand in his. She looked up to see him scrutinizing her closely, a slightly worried expression on his narrow features.

“Eliza,” he began huskily, “before you go running off in search of this romantic character…”

Jerry swallowed hard and his eyes darted nervously around the room. “Well,” he continued after taking a sip of water, “we’ve known each other for a very long time. And I want to ask you something important.”

She had no idea what his question might be and found his nervousness curious. “What is it, Jerry?”

He flushed and cleared his throat. He looked around the romantic little café again, then peered directly into her eyes.

“Eliza, would you…Will you…consider investing part of the money you get from the sale of the letters in an Internet start-up?”

She sat in stunned amazement. It took only seconds for her shock to turn to anger. The nerve! How many days had it been since his declaration that her interest in the letters was a silly waste of time? She couldn’t believe it, now he wanted to cash in on them. His nervousness was obviously because he recognized his own hypocrisy, but that hadn’t stopped him. She quivered with outrage; casting his hand aside as hard as she could, she rose.

Surprised, Jerry asked, “What are you doing?”

Trying desperately to stay in control and remain calm she spat out, “I’m leaving. Good night.”

“But what about dinner?”

Eliza took a deep breath, picked up her water glass and threw the liquid in his face. “Go to hell, Jerry.” She stormed out.

Outside the restaurant, she stopped and leaned against the wall. Still quivering with outrage, Eliza took several deep breaths. She wasn’t sure why it had upset her so, it was, after all, typical Jerry behavior, completely bottom-line motivated.

Watching a couple cuddling in the back of a hansom cab, she had to admit to herself that much of the anger was directed at herself. Constructing the boundaries that relegated her passions to a relationship with someone like Jerry had in fact brought her personal life to a screeching halt.

Her mother had often told her that you can’t stand still, you either move forward or you move backward. And she’d wasted the last two years in a relationship she had known wouldn’t go anywhere; so by her mother’s rule she had slipped back rather than moving on after her father’s death. Well, that ended right now. Pushing herself away from the building she headed home with a whole new direction for her life.