The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

Chapter 25

The stately Edinburgh grandfather clock in the marble foyer of Chawton Great House was striking half past ten as Jane and Cassandra stood outside beneath the portico with several other guests, waiting for their carriages to arrive.

There was a chill in the night air and Jane was searching through her bag by the flickering light of the pitch torches affixed to wrought iron sconces at either side of the porch. The tension caused by Darcy’s earlier demands for a private meeting had been wearing on her and she had successfully avoided him only by remaining close to members of her family for the remainder of the evening.

Now the evening was at an end and Jane wished only to flee to the cozy safety of Chawton Cottage, there to reflect on what to do about the brash American. “My gloves, my green gloves,” she exclaimed, rummaging through her bag in frustration. “I am certain I put them in here…”

At that moment Darcy emerged from the house, a pair of ladies gloves in his hand. “Miss Austen, are these yours?” he politely inquired.

“Oh, yes,” Jane said, her eyes flashing with a fury that was not reflected in her voice. “I am grateful to you, Mr. Darcy,” she said for the benefit of Cassandra, “for these are my favorite pair. A gift from my brother Frank.”

Jane reached for the gloves. But as she did, Darcy stepped close and pressed them into her hand, along with something else. She looked down and saw a small square of paper lying in her upturned palm.

Before she could speak, Darcy stepped back and bowed. “I hope we will meet again very soon,” he said with a broad smile.

Across the portico Jane saw Edward and Frank engaged in conversation with one of her many cousins. Shooting Darcy a final hostile look she closed her fist over the scrap of paper and stiffly acknowledged his formal bow with an abrupt inclination of her chin.

A moment later Edward’s carriage rolled to a stop before the steps. Simmons, the groom, helped Jane and Cassandra into the closed landau and then climbed up to the driver’s seat. With a cluck to the horses the coach rumbled away. Jane looked back to see Darcy slowly waving to her from the portico.

“Obnoxious man!” she hissed under her breath. “I do not think I have ever known a more arrogant and disagreeable person than Mr. Darcy.”

“Do you not, Jane?”

Jane looked up to see Cassandra regarding her with a stony countenance. “Surely you cannot believe I was deceived by that pitiful charade of the gloves,” Cassandra said.

“I cannot imagine what you mean,” Jane replied, fidgeting with her bag.

Cassandra sighed tolerantly. “Jane, I saw Darcy put that note into your hand a moment ago.”

When no reply was forthcoming Cassandra pointed to her sister’s tightly closed fist. “Well,” she demanded, “are you going to read it?”

Defeated, Jane unfolded the note and held it up to the dim light of a carriage lamp to read the few hurriedly scrawled lines. “The insufferable Mr. Darcy writes that he wishes urgently to see me. At midnight,” she reported to her stunned sister. “Further, he specifies that he will be waiting in the small wood behind Chawton Cottage, and that I am to come to him alone.”

“The wood? Alone at midnight!” Cassandra’s utter disbelief at what she was hearing was reflected in her hoarse whisper. “Surely the man is demented.”

Jane considered her sister’s shocked statement for several seconds and it slowly dawned on her that Cass mistakenly believed that Darcy’s intentions toward her were of a romantic nature.

“Yes, he must be mad,” she replied with an enigmatic smile. “For the grass is certain to be damp at that hour of the night and I shall probably catch my death.”

The already scandalized Cass nearly choked. “Jane, have you, too, taken leave of your senses?” she gasped. “You cannot actually be thinking of going out to meet him.”

“I can and I must,” Jane declared, and wondering idly what Darcy’s lips would feel like pressed to her own, she felt her pulse beginning to race as Cass spluttered indignantly.

“But why, Jane? You have said yourself that you despise this man.”

Jane, who was by now playing to her sister’s obvious discomfort, waved her off with an angry flick of her gloves. “Oh, Cass,” she said irritably, “do not ask me any more about it. I shall explain everything to you later. Tonight, though, I must meet with the cocksure Mr. Darcy.”

Obviously injured by this abrupt rebuff, and certain that her younger sister was plotting a dangerous liaison with the handsome American, Cass herself turned irritable. “Well, I think you are behaving very stupidly indeed,” she proclaimed, sniffing loudly. “Such romantic foolhardiness as you intend may occasionally be overlooked in very young girls who are not yet sensible of the world, but you have long since passed that age.”

Jane nodded in acknowledgment of the harshly stated fact and turned her face to the shadowy landscape rolling past the window. For even in girlhood she had experienced precious few romantic adventures. “Of that you need not remind me, sister,” she said regretfully.

“And what of your reputation?” Cassandra pressed on, more intent now on pointing out the sheer folly of a clandestine tryst with Darcy than she was sympathetic to Jane’s emotional state.

Jane laughed bitterly. “Cass, an unmarried woman’s reputation is valued only by her prospective husbands,” she retorted bitterly. “And, as I have no such prospects, my reputation can be neither improved nor greatly damaged by meeting with Mr. Darcy.”

Looking out at the clear, star-filled sky, Jane gradually became aware of the small smile that was creeping across her scowling features. For, despite the circumstances under which the despicable Mr. Darcy had intimidated her into accepting the terms of his outrageous meeting, she suddenly realized that she was quite enjoying Cass’s mistaken conviction that she and the presumptuous American were about to become lovers.

“At least there’s a good moon out tonight,” she cheerfully observed, this last bold remark deliberately calculated to further her poor sister’s scandalous impression.

As the coach rolled on through the night Jane occupied herself by conjuring up a wicked vision of Darcy’s lean body lying in her bed and imagining the words he might speak if they were lovers in fact.

The moon was almost directly overhead by the time Simmons led Lord Nelson out of the stables and walked him over to Darcy. Pleading a headache, and anxious to avoid another confrontation with the irascible Captain Austen, Darcy had earlier declined Edward’s offer of a nightcap and had instead retired to his room upstairs immediately after the other guests had departed.

Fully clothed he had waited in the darkness until shortly before midnight, then crept through the silent house and down to the stables to get his horse. To his great surprise he had found Simmons awake and waiting for him.

“Do mind the ground now, sir,” the young groom cautioned as he placed Lord Nelson’s reins in Darcy’s hand. Simmons affectionately patted the black horse’s nose. “Easy for him to step in a hole in the dark.”

Darcy took the reins and placed them over Lord Nelson’s neck. “Thanks, I’ll be careful, Simmons.”

He paused, trying to read the groom’s expression in the dim light. “How did you know I would be going out tonight?”

Simmons grinned, exposing a row of even white teeth. “I guessed you might be off to meet a lady, sir,” the youngster tactfully ventured. “It’s what many gentlemen do of an evening.”

He gave Darcy a knowing wink. “Even my good master sometimes went out riding of a night, when Mrs. Austen was close to her confinement,” Simmons confided. “Master Edward says a gent must not impose too much on the ladies at such times, if you take my meaning, sir.”

Darcy nodded without commenting, amazed at how casually and openly the matter of marital infidelity was treated in this very early part of the nineteenth century. But then, he reminded himself, the sexually repressive Victorian age still lay several decades in the future.

“Your master seems a very good man,” Darcy finally offered by way of a noncommittal reply. For though he was anxious to be on his way, he did not wish to offend the talkative groom, who might easily report this midnight adventure to Edward.

Simmons’s head bobbed enthusiastically. “Oh, yes, sir,” he declared. “All that’s in his service will tell you there’s no kinder gentleman than Mr. Edward. For didn’t he let his two poor sisters have Chawton Cottage for themselves and their old mother,” Simmons went on, obviously reciting a well-worn tidbit of village gossip, “when most men in his position would’ve made the unmarried ones live up here in the Great House where they’d have nothing of their own and never a moment of privacy.”

Simmons hesitated. His canny eyes darted up to the darkened windows of the silent manor house and there was a note of warning in his next words. “Now Captain Austen, he’s a different sort of man altogether from his brothers Edward and Henry,” he continued. “The captain’s very protectful of his sisters, and he’s got a fearful temper, sir.”

Darcy acknowledged the groom’s well-intentioned counsel with a grateful smile. “You don’t miss very much that goes on around here, do you Simmons?”

Simmons winked. “You just leave the horse in his paddock when you return, sir,” he said. “I’ll see to him for you.” He watched Darcy mount Lord Nelson and ride slowly away into the moonlit night.

Keeping to the soft grass at the edge of the drive, Darcy rode silently past the lawns and gardens and out through the gates of Chawton Great House. When the tall chimneys of the mansion had disappeared behind the hedgerows he guided Lord Nelson onto the narrow dirt road and urged the black horse to a brisk canter. Though the ride to Chawton Cottage was a short one, he did not want to keep Jane waiting any longer than necessary.

Jane. Recalling the angry look she had given him when he had placed the note into her hand, Darcy grimaced. He was uneasy with himself for attempting to force her into a meeting that he knew would be distasteful and possibly even dangerous to her and wondered if she would be there. But he was growing more desperate by the hour and hoped that her intelligence and curiosity would win over her sense of propriety. Because, as his encounter this evening with Francis Austen had demonstrated, it was only a matter of time before he would be denounced as a fraud, or perhaps something worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She turned back and regarded him fiercely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorcery!” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” Darcy said, “that we can’t do.”

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

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

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

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

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

“According to some physicists,” he continued, “we could turn back down that path of time, if we only knew how. And these same scientists think that sometimes two parts of the path may curve and touch, and that such points may open portals to other times. I believe I accidentally entered into your time through just such a portal,” Darcy concluded, realizing how incredible his explanation must sound to someone from an era when the concept of human flight was still in the realm of fantasy.

Jane, however, did not disappoint him by discounting his theory out of hand. She considered his explanation for several seconds, and then frowned. “If you are a visitor from another time,” she asked, “who is this man Darcy in Virginia, the person my brother thinks you are?”

Darcy smiled. “My ancestor,” he replied, “the founder of Pemberley Farms, which is the estate I own in my time…two hundred years from now.”

“Your own time… two hundred years into the future…” Jane’s composure finally slipped and she buried her face in her hands. “I am sorry, it is too much to comprehend.”

He gently lifted her chin and looked into those beautiful eyes. “Jane, please,” he whispered, “I need you to tell me how to get back to the exact spot where I was thrown from my horse. Maybe the portal is still open and I can step back through to the world I know.”

“And if you cannot?” she asked.

He threw up his hands helplessly, for hers was a frightening question, and one that he had dared not ask himself. “I don’t know,” he said grimly. “I only know I can’t stay here. I beg you to help me.”

“Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “I shall, of course.”

Relief washed over him. “Then please tell me how to return to the place where I was found.”

“Tomorrow,” she said haltingly. “I will tell you then.”

Jane saw the sudden confusion in his eyes and felt hot blood rushing to her cheeks. “The men who brought you to me said only that you’d been found about a mile from Chawton, nothing more,” she timidly explained.

“What?” He was staring at her in shock. “But you said you knew the place.”

“I was angry,” she told him. “I wished to force you to reveal your secret to me.” She suddenly turned away, unable to bear his look of bitter disappointment.

She murmured, “Please forgive me. But you were so arrogant and deceitful—”

Darcy leaped to his feet and stared down at her. “Deceitful?” he snorted, cutting off her rationalization.

“You spied on me, eavesdropped on my most private conversations… And you lied to me first,” she accused in a tremulous voice. “Tomorrow I shall send for the men who brought you to me and discover from them the location of the place where you fell,” Jane promised.

“That’s just great!” Darcy groaned. “Let’s hope your brother doesn’t decide to put my head on a spike in the meantime. Or have you English given up that lovely practice yet?” he asked sarcastically.

“Has civilization advanced so much in your time that criminals are no longer executed?” she retorted.

“No, I guess not,” he reluctantly admitted. Then, unexpectedly, he found himself grinning. “But our executions are very much neater than yours,” he added lamely.

Realizing that he had made a joke, though a very poor one, Jane began to laugh. “Lord, what a fine dialogue this will make for a new novel,” she told him. “I must make a start on it right away.”

Suddenly mindful of the extreme jeopardy in which he had placed her, Darcy extended a hand to help her up from her seat. “I’m afraid I’ve kept you here far too long,” he apologized. “Please send word to me the moment you’ve located those men.”

“On that you may depend,” she assured him.

Jane reached out to take his hand, but his touch so electrified her that she remained sitting. “Will you not stay yet awhile?” she softly inquired, inviting him with a slight tug of her hand to sit again. “For there is much about your future world that I would like to know.”

Chapter 26

Darcy looked over at Eliza, who was curled up comfortably with her feet beneath her on the gray suede coach seat, listening intently to his every word.

“So she asked me to stay with her and tell her all about the place I came from, and to explain what the future would be like.”

He paused in his narrative to take a sip from his nearly full glass of champagne. Noticing that Eliza’s glass was empty, Darcy retrieved the bottle from its shelf and refilled it for her.

“I did as she asked,” he continued, replacing the bottle on the shelf, “but it wasn’t easy because, if you think about it, for all of its obvious shortcomings her time was still in many ways far more innocent than ours.”

Eliza frowned at that. “It sounds like an awful time,” she said. “A time of wars, slavery, barbaric medical practices…”

He nodded slowly. “Yes, but in 1810,” he continued, “the skies and oceans of the world had not yet been polluted with industrial wastes. Great expanses of unbroken primeval forest still covered much of Europe and North America. There had been no world wars or nuclear bombs. No Hitlers had yet thought of constructing factories for the sole purpose of wiping out entire races of human beings…” Darcy’s voice trailed off.

“So was that how you described the future?” Eliza asked. “World wars and nuclear bombs?”

Darcy smiled and shook his head. “Fortunately, Jane wanted to know about other things, the kinds of things she wrote about. She asked me how society would change, customs, the role of women in the modern world…”

“And love?” Eliza inquired archly.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “love, too.”

Eliza slowly sipped her champagne and gazed thoughtfully into his eyes, wondering. “And what did you tell her, about love, Fitz?”

Darcy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Before I tell you that,” he said, “try to remember that I was speaking to a woman from a world where most women, especially women of her elevated class, were virtual prisoners of men. Generally they entered into loveless marriages based on property and money. Or they simply didn’t marry at all. In fact, something like sixty percent of women in Jane’s circumstances didn’t.”

Eliza’s eyes widened in surprise at the startling statistic, wondering where he had gotten it. But she said nothing.

“And even if an English Regency-era gentlewoman was lucky enough to find a suitable husband,” he continued, “her troubles were often just beginning. In that time and place, women were routinely kept pregnant, bound to their husbands, unable to inherit if there was a potential male heir anywhere in their family line—”

“I don’t think I understand where you’re going with this,” Eliza impatiently interrupted. “What about love? Jane Austen wrote constantly of love.”

Darcy nodded excitedly, thrilled by her evident interest in what he was saying. “Yes, but always she wrote about love as an ideal, an ideal that was only very rarely realized in life. Try to put yourself in her place. How old are you, Eliza?”

“Thirty-four,” she replied hesitantly.

“And how many lovers have you had in your life?”

Eliza felt her face reddening. “That is none of your damned business,” she snapped.

Darcy appeared to be genuinely startled by her hostile response. “Sorry,” he said, reaching for the champagne bottle again. “I was only trying to illustrate my point. By age thirty, an Englishwoman of Jane Austen’s time would generally have been considered unmarriageable… an old maid, a spinster.”

Darcy considered his next words for a moment, then went on speaking in a quieter tone. “She would never have had any lovers at all, Eliza. Because the risk of pregnancy was just too high, and giving birth out of wedlock may well have resulted in her being literally cast into the streets and abandoned by her family and friends. Remember Lydia, the younger sister from Pride and Prejudice who ran off with Wickham, who then had to be bribed into marrying her? Well, that was actually no joking matter. In real life, both the girl and her family might well have been ruined as the result of her indiscretion.”

Eliza nodded. She tried briefly to imagine what living such a life might have been like, and failed. “I think I get the point,” she said after a moment of further reflection. “In Jane Austen’s world love was truly a luxury. And sex was playing with fire…But is that really so different from the way things are today?”

“Oh, yes,” Darcy said emphatically. “In 1810, even sex in marriage was preposterously dangerous. More women died in childbirth than from any other single cause. And there was almost as much risk of contracting an incurable venereal disease from husbands who, more likely than not, frequently consorted with prostitutes in order to relieve their sexual urges.”

Eliza grimaced at the thought. “Lovely!”

“God knows our society today is far from perfect,” Darcy said, “but I was afraid that telling Jane how very different things would one day be might make her own world seem intolerable by comparison.”

He hesitated for a brief moment before continuing. “It would have been far easier for me to make up some safe, fictionalized future version of her own society,” he said.

“But you didn’t do that, make up a safe version of the future.” It was a statement, not a question.

Darcy shook his head. “In the end I told her everything, about birth control, women’s rights, female CEOs… In short, I told her the truth.”

Alarmed, Eliza suddenly reached out and gripped his hand. “Good God, why, Fitz?” she asked, her voice filled with genuine compassion for the long-dead English writer.

“Because she wanted to know,” he softly replied. “Because I didn’t want to leave her with a lie. And because…”

Darcy halted his narrative and looked down at Eliza’s hand. He slowly covered it with his own and leaned forward until their faces were almost touching. “Like you, Eliza, she was only thirty-four years old,” he whispered, “and though she didn’t know it, her life was almost over.”

His voice broke and he retreated, shaking his head. “I wanted her to know that the future held something better for women than what she knew.”

“And how did she react to your revelations?” Eliza was intensely aware of the pressure of Darcy’s hand squeezing hers. She squeezed back, encouraging him to go on.

He closed his eyes, savoring the feel of her touch. “Considering the fact that she had marked me as an arrogant, insufferable scoundrel, Jane reacted in the most unexpected way imaginable,” he told her.

“Then a woman in the society of your time may choose and discard her lovers at will, all without fear of censure?” Jane had listened in wonder to everything that Darcy had had to say about love and society in the twenty-first century, interrupting him frequently to ask pointed, intelligent questions, for which he had not always been able to supply ready answers, questions like that one, that were central to the freedom of all modern women.

“It’s not quite as simple as you make it sound,” he said, attempting to carefully qualify his answer, as he had several others before it. “But, essentially, yes, a woman of my time has that choice. Because for the most part lovemaking is no longer regulated by church or state, or even one’s relatives.”

He smiled then. “The individual’s right to privacy and personal choice in matters of love and sex theoretically applies to any activity that occurs between consenting adults.”

Jane silently considered the alien concept of a society filled with consenting men and women who were free to make love to one another whenever and however they liked.

“But what of morality?” she suddenly asked, following a long pause.

Darcy shrugged. “Oh, I suppose that morality is still around in my time,” he said thoughtfully. “God knows people still talk about it enough. But then, what we call morality is always only relative to the standards of a given society. In my world it’s a word that’s come to be applied more to corrupt politicians and bankers than to lovers.”

He saw her frowning at that and he knew that in her rigidly structured, class-conscious society morality and sexuality were mutually exclusive terms.

“Consider the plight of one of your own fictional heroines,” he said, hoping to draw for her a clearer distinction between the two words. “She is forced by mere circumstance and social custom to choose between love and fortune. Now where’s the morality in that?”

“Where indeed?” asked Jane, turning at last to smile at him. She sat there quietly for a moment longer, seemingly lost in thought. Then she abruptly stood.

Darcy immediately jumped to his feet, fearful that he had told her far too much. “I hope that I haven’t offended you with my frankness,” he said.

Still smiling, Jane shook her head. “No,” she replied, “you have been most delicate in your phrasing, sir. It is only that I find the swift and shining modern world that you’ve described nearly impossible to envision. It is like the telling of a dream.”

She paused, again seemingly lost in deep thought, then softly whispered to the cool breeze that had begun sighing through the trees. “Astonishing! The feminine spirit freed.”

“Jane…” Darcy was suddenly gripped with an overwhelming desire to pull her into his arms, as if he might somehow be able to protect her from the stark reality of her own rapidly approaching death in this age of primitive medicine and suffering, a reality that he alone in all that world knew awaited her.

“I should go now,” she said, interrupting his grim thoughts by looking up at the lowering moon. “It is very late and I must think on all that you have told me.”

Fighting his impulse to enfold her in a warm embrace, Darcy instead stepped forward and took her arm. She froze and gazed down at his hand on her. “Let me take you home,” he begged.

To his utter astonishment she raised her face to his and said, sounding for just an instant like a small girl, “Will you not kiss me good night first?”

He hesitated, then kissed her lightly on the lips. Jane pulled back from him and looked into his eyes, and for the first time he saw the woman that she truly was.

“Is that the manner in which you would kiss a lady if you were on a—what was it you called it—a date?”

Suddenly he was smiling, his tensions of a moment before running away like summer rain. “Well, maybe a first date,” he said.

Her voice was teasing, her face perfection in the moonlight. “And for a second date,” she teased, “or a third?”

Then Darcy did pull her to him, and kissed her more thoroughly. She responded eagerly.

For long seconds they remained locked together in the moonlight. When their lips finally parted, Jane leaned her head against his heaving chest and softly sighed. “Please forgive me. I only wished to taste a lover’s kiss in the moonlight.”

She raised her sparkling eyes to his and seemed embarrassed by her sudden abandonment of all propriety. “Henceforth you may regard me as a foolish old maid who had never before been properly kissed by a man,” she whispered.

“No, dear Jane,” he whispered, placing trembling fingers on her lips to stop the self-deprecating litany. “For the rest of my life I’ll remember only the beautiful and desirable woman that you are at this moment. And in my thoughts you will never grow old.”

“And I shall dream of a man who loved me once,” she vowed in return, “if only for a moment. And in my dreams, dear Darcy, you shall be ever strong and kind and most exceedingly noble.”

She misread his look of wonder at those last beautiful sentiments. “Oh, do not be alarmed, sir,” she said, smiling happily. “For I know that you do not really love me. How could you when I have so harshly misjudged and vilified you?”

Jane sighed again, sounding like a contented kitten, and again she raised her face to his. “I am merely building up a store of dreams,” she told him. “So may I have another, if you please, dear Darcy?”

Gently he took her chin in his hand caressing her lovely face, he grew giddy from the scent of roses in her hair as they kissed in the waning light of the moon.

Chapter 27

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

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

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

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

“It is true, isn’t it?” she demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You have been fairly warned, sir!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How do you know that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 28

At Jenny’s insistence, Darcy and Eliza had immediately rushed up from the lake with her and entered the darkened house. Sounds of shattering glass and shrill screams had brought a few sleepy servants out into the halls and they were standing about whispering worriedly to one another as Darcy and the others hurried past.

“You all go on back to bed,” Jenny ordered in a stern, no-nonsense tone that sent the help scurrying back to their respective rooms.

The crash of breaking glass was much louder as they reached the tall double doors of the grand Pemberley ballroom. Eliza shot Jenny a what-on-earth-is-going-on glance as Darcy halted before the ballroom doors, his gentle features set in a grim mask.

Taking Eliza’s elbow, Jenny held her back a few paces while Darcy swung the heavy doors open and peered into the huge, lavishly decorated chamber. In the center of the ballroom, which was eerily lit with only a few flickering candles, Faith Harrington stood hurling cut crystal punch cups against the nearest wall.

Wearing a diaphanous white nightgown that left few details of her spectacular figure to the imagination, Faith was carefully selecting the cups from a wheeled table that was covered in stacks of priceless crystal. She held each glittering piece to the light for a moment and carefully examined its sharply faceted surfaces before suddenly screaming, “Not that one!”

Then, winding up like a professional baseball pitcher, Faith sent the cup flying and picked up another.

“Nor that one!”

SMASH!

“Or that one!”

SMASH!

“Or this one!”

Harv and Artemis, who had been watching helplessly from the shadows near the doors, hurried over to the newcomers as Jenny quickly filled Darcy in on the sequence of events that had led her to come searching for him.

“She’s been at it for about ten minutes,” Jenny concluded in a hoarse whisper. “Said she wouldn’t stop till you came and personally asked her to, and then threatened to bean anybody who came close.”

Jenny flinched as another exquisite lead-crystal cup exploded against the wall. “I thought I’d better go find you while you still had some crystal left.”

Darcy silently nodded his understanding of the situation and stepped out onto the ballroom floor. “Faith!”

At the sound of his voice Faith turned, a fresh cup poised above her head ready to throw. With the piece of sparkling crystal dangling from one finger by its handle, she let her throwing arm fall limply to her side and smiled lopsidedly at Darcy.

“Fitz, darling, I thought I’d never get your attention,” she gushed. “Thank you so much for coming.”

Remaining back in the shadows with the others, Eliza was completely confused by the grotesque scene playing out on the ballroom floor. “What is going on?” she whispered to no one in particular.

Harv Harrington obligingly stepped up behind her and leaned disturbingly close, his vodka-tinged breath uncomfortable on her neck. “Nothing too unusual. My big sister is just pitching one of her infamous tantrums,” he informed Eliza in a hushed tone that made him sound like a sports announcer at a golf tournament.

“She’s also way drunk,” Artemis added analytically.

“That’s true, Artie.” Harv turned to address the big doctor. “But the really good tantrums only ever take off that way. Otherwise Faith sticks pretty much to biting sarcasm.”

Darcy, meanwhile, had moved closer to the blonde socialite and was regarding the mess of shattered crystal underfoot. “Okay, Faith,” he began softly, “what’s this all about? Those are very old family pieces you’re destroying.”

“I’m sorry, Fitz,” she said, as if they were discussing where to place another flower arrangement, “but if I can’t have these heirlooms, then nobody will.” Faith stuck out her lower lip and her casual, matter-of-fact tone turned suddenly poisonous. “Certainly not some uncultured, frizzle-haired Yankee upstart.”

She pointed an accusing finger, tipped with a blood-red nail, toward the little group hovering in the shadows near the doors. “I want you to order her off the place this minute,” she demanded.

Harv grinned and affectionately squeezed Eliza’s shoulder. “It appears you’ve won a permanent place in her heart,” he said.

Darcy took another tentative step closer to the distraught woman. “Now you’re just being silly, Faith,” he said soothingly. “Eliza is my guest and you are embarrassing me in front of her.”

He reached for the cup in Faith’s hand but she swiftly eluded his grasp, raised her arm and flung it across the room. “It’s not fair, Fitz!” she cried as the crystal burst into a cloud of sparkling shards that clattered like diamonds to the polished hardwood floor. “You were supposed to marry me,” she declared. “Your mother and mine planned it when I was five.”

Before she could grab another piece of crystal, Darcy deftly stepped forward and wrapped his arms tightly around her, pinning both of her flailing arms to her sides. The fight suddenly gone out of her, Faith collapsed sobbing against him.

“Now we’ve discussed all of this before, Faith,” he told her in his soothing Southern accent. “You will always be my dear friend,” he assured her, “but we don’t love one other, either one of us. You know that.”

Faith stubbornly tossed her head from side to side, loosening her fine hair, which shone like spun gold as it swung free in the candlelight. “It’s just not fair!” she wailed.

With a nod Darcy signaled Jenny and Artemis. They both went out onto the ballroom floor and, each taking one of her arms, led Faith back toward the doors.

“Come on, honey,” Jenny crooned in a motherly tone. “Artie and I will tuck you in.”

Faith meekly allowed them to lead her off the floor, but she suddenly pulled free and jerked to a halt in front of Eliza. “I could kill you!” she hissed at the startled artist.

Artemis frowned. “Hush now,” he told her. “You know you don’t mean that nasty talk.”

Faith smiled up at him like a doting child and willingly took the arm he held out. “Oh, but I do, Artie,” she assured him as they walked away. “I really do.”

Darcy watched as Faith was escorted from the room. He supposed this was just one more of the ways he would pay for his indiscretions in England. Heaving a sigh of regret for the weakness of a moment, he returned to Eliza, who was still standing with Harv. “I’m terribly sorry,” Darcy told her. “I hate it when she gets this way. Are you all right?”

Eliza managed a weak smile. “Well, I guess so. Although except for my credit card companies and the occasional cab driver I don’t get that many death threats in New York.”

“Don’t be silly, Eliza, my sister wouldn’t really kill you,” Harv happily assured her. “Not without an ironclad alibi at any rate.”

Darcy shot him a withering glance. “Harv,” he suggested without much diplomacy, “perhaps you should go to bed now.”

Taking the hint, Harv stepped away from them and went toward the ballroom doors. “I think I will, Fitz.”

“Sweet dreams!” he said, grinning at Eliza.

“Thanks,” she said grimly. “You, too.”

“Come on,” Darcy said, taking her arm. “I’ll walk you to your room.”

Eliza was disappointed. “Does this mean I don’t get to hear the rest of your story tonight?”

He arched his eyebrows in surprise. “I didn’t think you’d want to after all of this. It’s very late. Sure you’re up for it?”

Eliza managed a nervous laugh. “Something tells me I’m not going to fall asleep that easily anyway, what with your homicidal guest roaming the corridors.”

Darcy shook his head ruefully, “I’m afraid poor Faith never knows when to stop, especially when she’s been drinking. But I guarantee you she won’t remember a thing in the morning.” He suddenly frowned and looked at Eliza with concern. “I do hope you didn’t take anything she said too seriously.”

“No, I guess not,” Eliza reluctantly admitted. “But I wouldn’t turn my back on her on a subway platform either.”

Darcy laughed. “I can assure you that for all her theatrics Faith is perfectly harmless,” he said. “It’s just that she was raised with the unfortunate belief that she should always get her own way. The rest of us have been watching her pitch these tantrums since she was a toddler.”

They walked holding hands up the spectacular main staircase.

“Did your mothers really plan on you two marrying?” Eliza asked.

Darcy nodded. “Yes, they did,” he said with a smile. “But they also figured on Harv becoming president.”

When they reached the Rose Bedroom Eliza paused before opening the door, unsure if he meant to come in or whether she should invite him. She considered for half a second how Jane Austen would have handled such a potentially awkward situation.

That was then, this is now, Eliza concluded. Grinning inwardly, she pushed open the door and stepped into the bedroom. Darcy followed her without hesitation, so she assumed she had made the right choice.

But to her surprise, instead of following her to the small suite of chairs and table near the bed, he walked over to examine the low-cut Regency ball gown that hung on the open wardrobe door. He pinched the heavy emerald green fabric between his thumb and forefinger, held it up to the light. “You’re wearing this tomorrow night?” he asked, turning to her.

“Yes,” she admitted. “Jenny more or less insisted. Do you think it’s too terribly…Oscarish? I seem to remember you saying at the library that Jane would never have worn anything like this.”

“You’re not Jane,” Darcy replied, dropping the fabric.

“Good point,” Eliza agreed, unwilling to follow that reasoning to its logical conclusion.

Crossing to the bed, Darcy picked up her sketch pad and carefully examined her drawing of Rose Darcy. “This is beautifully done,” he said, glancing up at the life-size matriarchal portrait in the alcove.

“Thank you.” Eliza followed his gaze to the painting of the enchantingly beautiful Rose in her silken gown. “Now that’s a dress I could picture Jane Austen having approved of,” she ventured. “Though it’s actually more revealing than the one that Jenny picked for me, it’s also very classy, don’t you think?”

Darcy nodded thoughtfully. Then he settled himself in an armchair covered with brocaded vines of wild rose.

Sensing that he was tired of conversation and anxious to resume his narrative, Eliza kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the bed to listen.

“I told you about my encounter with Captain Austen in the stables,” Darcy began. “Fortunately, he did not come looking for me again and I finally fell asleep.”

Chapter 29

Despite the extraordinary tensions of his first day outside the secure confines of Jane’s bedroom at Chawton Cottage and the unavailability of so much as an aspirin tablet to soothe his throbbing head, the exhausted Darcy had fallen almost immediately into a deep and dreamless sleep upon returning to his luxurious room at Chawton Great House.

He awoke seven hours later to the rumble of heavy wheels on the drive below his window.

As he had every morning since arriving in 1810 Hampshire, Darcy spent his first several minutes of wakefulness with his eyes tightly shut. When he opened them, he tried to convince himself he would discover that he was back in the Cliftons’s rented Edwardian mansion in his own time and his vivid memories of the last four days would turn out to have been nothing more than an interesting dream.

Listening closely to the morning sounds of the household, he strained to pick up the familiar whine of a vacuum cleaner and sniffed the air for the scent of exhaust fumes from the old green Range Rover his friend Clifton kept parked in the drive.

He heard instead the clop of hooves on the drive and the impatient snorting of a horse. The sounds were inconclusive, he told himself, for the horse might have been Lord Nelson out for a morning exercise with his trainer, or one of the handful of gentle saddle nags that the property owners kept on the place for their renters to ride.

Still, he did not have much hope that he had returned.

Opening his eyes at last, Darcy blinked at a bright shaft of sunshine pouring in through the open window. He clambered stiffly out of bed and walked over to peer down onto the drive. A heavy black traveling coach pulled by a team of four horses was just disappearing beyond the gates of Chawton Great House.

It was still 1810.

He had just spent half of the previous night with a beautiful woman named Jane Austen, and part of the remainder with her murderous brother.

Grimacing at the prospect of facing the hostile Captain Austen, whose temper would doubtless not be improved this morning by what must be a monumental hangover, Darcy splashed water on his face from a pitcher on his washstand and looked distastefully at the ivory-handled straight razor that had been laid out for his use.

Picking up the deadly implement, he grimly regarded his gaunt features in the mirror. “Perhaps I should just cut my own throat now and save Frank the trouble,” he murmured.

Twenty minutes later, dressed in yet another of Edward’s uncomfortable suits and badly shaved, Darcy entered the dining room. Edward and several of his guests from last night were nearly finished with breakfast as Darcy was escorted to a seat near the end of the table.

Darcy looked around nervously for some sign of Frank, and decided that the captain must still be recovering abed.

“Morning, Darcy!” Edward stopped chewing long enough to wave his knife in greeting to the guest.

“Good morning, sir.”

Darcy looked around, startled, as a servant leaned over his shoulder and dropped a slab of the same meat his host was enjoying onto Darcy’s plate.

“Got some bad news for you, I’m afraid,” Edward reported between mouthfuls.

Darcy’s stomach turned over as he stared down at the purple chunk of bloody flesh, momentarily forgetting that the modern practice of tinting meat a more appetizing shade of red had yet to be invented. He closed his eyes, waiting for the bad news, which he feared involved the missing captain.

“Frank has been recalled to his squadron at Portsmouth this morning,” Edward said. “I’m very sorry to say that you have just missed him.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” Darcy swallowed hard, feeling the tension in his stomach ease and glancing again at his plate. Actually, the slab of rare beef nested in a pool of its own juices didn’t look all that bad, he thought.

Edward, however, seemed to be quite upset by the development of Frank’s unanticipated departure. “Yes,” he grumbled, albeit with an unmistakable note of pride in his voice, “seems my younger brother is being given the temporary rank of admiral and sent out to the West Indies to put a stop to these troublesome arms smugglers.”

Picking up his fork and knife, Darcy cut off a small piece of meat and popped it into his mouth. To his surprise, it was quite good, though unlike any steak he had ever tasted. Of course, he reflected, it contained none of the preservatives, steroids, antibiotics or artificial coloring he was used to. He wondered if that made it safer or more dangerous than USDA-inspected beef and looked around, wondering where the thick slabs of toast that the others were eating had come from.

“It is a shame about Frank,” Edward was saying from the head of the table. “I had hoped to take the two of you out today for some shooting, though it’s not really the season at all.”

Darcy tried to adopt a regretful expression as the servant magically reappeared and placed a rack of fire-singed toast before him. In fact, he was feeling better by the moment, for he couldn’t imagine any enterprise more hazardous than being forced to accompany the volatile Frank on a shooting expedition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darcy wanted to reply to that, but when he caught up to Jane she immediately stepped onto the stile and, climbing to the top of the fence, pointed across the long, open meadow. “The place where you were found by the farmers should not be far. Just at the end of this field, I believe.”

He climbed over the fence and helped her down to the damp, grassy sod on the other side.

“Do you think you shall be able to return to your time as easily as you arrived?” she asked, holding onto his arm just a bit longer than necessary.

“I don’t know,” he said as they began to walk through the damp grass. Halfway across the meadow Darcy stopped and turned to face her. “Jane, about last night…”

Something like pain flickered behind her dark eyes and she suddenly broke away and ran ahead of him toward a low stone wall overhung with trees. “Oh, look!” she called. “This must be the very spot.”

Darcy followed her to the wall and looked up at the distinctive high arch formed by the branches. He gingerly placed his hand on the neatly stacked stones, noticing that the afternoon sun had warmed them. “Yes,” he said after a moment of silence, “this is it.”

Jane sat on the wall and turned her head to gaze through the arched overhang at the perfectly ordinary-appearing meadow on the other side. “How are you to return?” she asked, knitting her brows as if she were at her piano contemplating a difficult musical composition.

He looked over the wall into the adjoining meadow and his hopes for a simple return to his own world withered. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he admitted.

Stooping, he picked up a twig fallen from one of the trees and experimentally tossed it over the wall. It landed on the other side with a soft plop and lay there in the grass, exactly as one might expect a piece of thrown wood to lay. He could detect nothing at all out of the ordinary.

“Perhaps if you actually went across to the other side,” Jane suggested.

Darcy thought about that for a moment, and then he stepped up and across the wall. But once again nothing extraordinary happened. He was simply standing on the other side. He looked at her and shook his head. “Nope!”

“Nope!” Jane laughed. “I must remember that word. For it matches perfectly your expression at this moment.”

Feeling foolish, Darcy quickly clambered back over to her side. As he stood in the other field it occurred to him that if he had somehow managed to step back into his own time at that instant he would never have seen her again.

“Anyway, I can’t go back without Lord Nelson…my horse,” he added, anxious to cover his dismay at the near blunder.

“Sir, I did not think you were referring to Lord Nelson, the hero of Trafalgar,” Jane teased. She gave him a dazzling smile, obviously not at all displeased that he was safely back with her, for the moment at least. “I remember how shocked I was when you told me that your horse was named after my England’s greatest naval hero,” she said, “especially with poor Lord Nelson not long dead from a French soldier’s bullet.”

She paused then and her tone turned more serious. “I am sorry to say that was my first impression of you, Mr. Darcy. Such arrogance, I thought. But, then, what else was one to expect from an uncivilized American?”

Darcy winced at his dimly recalled memory of their painful first encounter. “I must have been quite a shock to you,” he said. “Brought dirty and bleeding into your house with my strange clothes, demanding to use your phone…”

He slowly placed his hand on hers. “Jane, I do hope I’ve managed to undo at least some of the unfavorable impressions you formed of me those first days.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Darcy,” she replied, smiling. “You have managed quite well. In fact, I confess that I shall not be at all happy to see you go. For Chawton has never before been so exciting a place—”

Jane’s voice broke and she turned away to prevent him from seeing the tear glistening on her cheek.

He raised his hand to her shoulder and gently turned her until they were again facing. “Jane…I wish we had met under different circumstances,” he breathed. “Knowing you has been the most wonderful experience of my life.”

“And of mine.” She sniffled bravely, smiling and brushing away the tear with the back of her hand. “For now I know at least a little of those tender passions and emotions which I have so often and yet so poorly attempted to describe in prose.”

Touched by the depth of feeling in her words, Darcy slipped his arms around her and held her close to him. “Has it really meant that much to you?” he asked. “The few hours we spent together last night?”

Jane looked up at him with an enigmatic smile. “Last night and the three days and nights before that, as you lay in my bed, watching my every move and listening to me speaking my heart.”

He pulled back, surprised. “You knew?”

“I cannot say I knew absolutely that you were not always asleep or in the deep swoon you pretended,” she told him. “But there were many times when I imagined that I felt eyes upon me when no one else was present. And poor Mr. Hudson’s perplexity over your failure to awaken had at last led me to suspect that you might not be so grievously wounded as you seemed.”

At the mention of the bumbling old doctor’s name Darcy laughed. “Let’s not forget that it was poor old Mr. Hudson who finally convinced me I had better awaken soon, or be treated to a visit from his pack of stinging wasps. Is that really a standard medical treatment for people in coma?”

Jane broke into a grin. “Actually, no,” she laughed. “Mr. Hudson confided to me his suspicion that you were perhaps more alert than you pretended and the dear old man assured me that in his long experience the mere mention of stinging wasps often worked miracles in restoring disingenuous patients to health.”

Darcy’s face turned red. “So I even underestimated him,” he said with chagrin. “You were absolutely right when you called me arrogant. For I stupidly assumed that the changed social customs and advanced technology of my time somehow made me superior in yours. I forgot all about wisdom and intelligence. Can you ever forgive me, Jane?”

She replied by lifting her face to his and softly kissing his lips. “I have forgiven you, dear Mr. Darcy, for I do not know of another man in this world who would admit such imperfections in himself to a mere woman. Nor can I think of one who, knowing the terrible and dangerous secrets of the future as you must, would not be tempted to exploit them to his own advantage.”

She kissed him again, then stepped back and, glancing at the arch of trees above the wall, asked brightly, “When do you think you shall leave?”

Darcy shook his head, for although he was not ready to admit the possibility, even to himself, he was not at all certain that he could leave. “I’m not sure,” he replied evasively. “The portal, or whatever it is, doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.”

He closed his eyes, trying to remember every detail of the moments leading up to his leap through the arch. “I remember the sunrise was filling the space between the wall and the trees with blinding light,” he said, “so maybe that had something to do with it. I’ll try at dawn tomorrow.”

They sat on the wall in silence. Darcy fingered the medallion he’d worn since his mother had given it to him for his sixteenth birthday. He reached around and unhooked the clasp. Putting the medallion in the watch pocket of his waistcoat, he took Jane’s hand in his and turning it up placed the chain into her palm. Jane picked up the beautifully wrought necklace and looked at him questioningly.

“I heard you and Cassandra talking about the cross your brother sent and how you didn’t want to wear it on a ribbon,” he confessed.

Jane was overwhelmed, “Oh, Mr. Darcy, it is beautiful.”

He took the chain and draped it around her throat, bestowing small, gentle kisses to the back of her neck. Jane turned to face him again. She gently touched the necklace. “So near my heart, as you shall always be.”

Darcy leaned over and kissed her. They lingered on the wall in the warm afternoon sun of that long-ago year, exchanging secrets neither of them had ever revealed to another living soul. Exchanging kisses as well. For both were acutely aware that their miraculous but cruelly brief allotment of time together was nearly spent.

Chapter 30

The lengthening shadows of late afternoon were creeping across the narrow country lane as Jane and Darcy walked side by side to Chawton Cottage. They stopped by the front gate, where Lord Nelson had stood patiently plucking bits of greenery from around the gateposts while awaiting his master’s return.

“Will you stay another night at my brother’s house?” Jane was looking at him quizzically, though they had not again discussed his leaving during the entirety of the afternoon or the long walk back to the cottage.

“No, I think that’s unwise,” he replied. “I’ll thank Edward at supper for his hospitality and tell him I’m off to London. Then I’ll find a place to wait for the sunrise.”

Jane suddenly turned and scrutinized the cottage to be certain that Cassandra hadn’t come out, then she stepped closer and entreated him in a breathless whisper. “Let me wait with you.”

“Jane, are you sure you—”

“Know what I am doing?” she impatiently interrupted. “Yes, I know precisely what I am doing.” She smiled and he saw the familiar mischievous sparkle come into her eyes. “I am greedy for dreams, sir…If you will share a few more with me.”

Resisting the temptation to take her in his arms in full view of the entire sleepy village and her taciturn sister, whom he suspected was peeking out from behind the lace curtains that graced the cottage’s upper windows, Darcy bowed formally. “The same place as last night, then?” he intoned, his voice barely audible above the clucking of an unseen hen.

Returning his formal bow with a slight inclination of her head, “The same place,” she whispered. “Come again at twelve, so I do not have to explain to Cass.” A secret smile touched the corners of her mouth. “A little way into the wood there is a small summer house where we can go to be out of the damp. Perhaps there, in comfort, we shall play again at being lovers, and you may show me more of what I wish to know.”

“Jane,” he whispered, remembering what Frank had said to him the night before, about her fragile heart, “you do realize that we will likely never see one another again after tonight?”

“Tonight is all I ask,” she replied, her gaze unwavering.

“Until midnight, then.”

The sun was fast sinking toward the horizon as Darcy rode Lord Nelson back through the gates of Chawton Great House and down to the stables. He had scarcely dismounted and led the horse inside when a rough hand darted out of the shadows and unceremoniously jerked him into a stall. For a heart-stopping moment Darcy feared that Captain Francis Austen had heard of his visit to Jane and had returned to keep his murderous promise.

Then, as his eyes gradually adjusted to the dim light, Darcy saw the frightened face of Simmons anxiously regarding him. “Simmons! What the hell—” he exclaimed angrily.

The young groom’s nervous eyes darted to the open stable door at their backs. “Thank God I caught you, sir,” he said in a tremulous voice. “You mustn’t go up to the house again.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

“An express come for Master Edward this afternoon,” Simmons breathlessly reported, “from Mr. Henry, his brother, the banker in London,” he said by way of explanation. “He’d been making some inquiries about you and wrote back to say it’s a well known fact that the American horse breeder Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley Farms has never set foot in England.”

Simmons paused for breath and Darcy could see that the poor fellow was genuinely terrified by this unexpected turn of events. “They know you ain’t the gentleman from Virginia, sir,” he concluded.

“Damn!”

“That ain’t the worst of it,” Simmons continued. “Mr. Edward has sent word to the captain in Portsmouth, asking him to return here straightaway with a squad of his marines. I think they mean to arrest you for a spy, sir.”

Simmons’s eyes again darted anxiously to the open stable doors behind them. “You must leave here now,” he warned. “They could come for you at any moment.”

“Yes,” Darcy quickly agreed. “But there’s something I need first, Simmons. Do you have a pen and paper?”

Simmons stared at him and slowly shook his head, as if the American was mad to be requesting writing materials at a time like this. “Them things is kept mostly up at the big house, sir,” he answered. “You’d better go on now. Or it’ll be the worst for both of us if they catch you here.”

Darcy struggled with his conscience for a moment. Of course, he did not want to implicate the affable young groom in his now-dangerous troubles with the vengeful Captain Austen. But neither could he simply flee without sending some word to Jane, letting her know what had happened. Removing the gold medallion from his waistcoat pocket, Darcy pressed it into Simmons’s hand.

“You have my solemn word of honor that my name is Fitzwilliam Darcy and that I’m no spy,” he assured the frightened young man, “but I need your help.”

“This must be worth fifty pounds!” Simmons gasped, feeling the weight of the gold in his hand.

“It’s yours if you’ll help me,” Darcy said. “I only need to write a note. Then I want you to deliver it for me and hide me until nightfall.”

Simmons slowly nodded and pocketed the medallion. “This is a matter of the heart, then, is it, sir?” he asked in a tone that made it clear he believed that he understood completely what was going on. “I warned you that the captain had a fearful temper. He’s a dangerous man, sir. If he thinks you’ve been making free with his sister, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”

Darcy nodded, more than willing to let Simmons assume naively that the entire matter was simply a case of brotherly revenge and had nothing whatever to do with spying.

At Chawton Cottage Jane was sitting before the dressing table in her bedroom, gazing thoughtfully into the depths of the silvery mirror.

The moment after Darcy had left her at the gate, Cassandra, who had indeed been watching them from an upstairs window, had rushed out of the cottage, demanding to know what they had discussed and what had happened during their long trek through the fields. Jane had evaded her sister’s pointed questions and injured looks by pleading a headache and retiring immediately to her room. Though as she had watched the tall American riding out of sight it was her heart and not her head that ached, and she had sought solitude to analyze the unfamiliar sensation in private.

Her only consolation since parting from Darcy was his promise to share with her the night ahead. But when that was over, Jane wondered, what would then become of her and her poor aching heart?

At first she had allowed herself to indulge the wild fantasy of traveling forward into his time with him. It was in fact something they had jokingly discussed this very afternoon, after he had tried and failed to return by crossing the stone wall.

“Perhaps you should hold my hand and we’ll jump together,” he had said. “Then you can see for yourself what a terrible place the future will be.”

She had laughed along with him, not daring to voice the thought that had been in her heart at that moment, that no future could be so terrible with him in it.

But she was never quick enough to say the things that were in her heart at the most important moments. Instead she waited until minutes or even days later, when the moment was past and there was no longer anyone there to hear them.

“Then, when it is far too late,” she confided to her reflection in the mirror, “but loathe to waste my sage replies and witty repartee, I transfer them to the mouths of my always-brilliant Miss Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters.”

Even though Jane imagined herself making a speech from which Darcy would easily have divined that she would gladly travel with him into the future, she was not really certain that she could actually survive in the fast, exotic new world he had described.

For, although the concept of rocketing about the earth at indescribable speeds while being served microwaved dinners and cocktails—whatever those things might be—was endlessly thrilling to her, the idea that most romantic relationships were fleeting, that ordinary women often appeared naked, or nearly so, in public places, that they openly approached desirable men with invitations to intimate dinners, swore like sea cooks if they felt like it, demanded sexual satisfaction and prevented unwanted pregnancies by the simple expedient of swallowing tiny tablets were all anathema to Jane’s quiet, romantic spirit.

“I fear that I could never fully adapt myself to such a life,” she sadly confessed to her wan mirror image. “How much nicer it would be,” she mused, “if dear Darcy was unable to return to his own time and forced instead to remain here in mine with me.”

The moment she spoke those words, however, Jane realized what she was asking of the fates. “Oh, no,” she exclaimed, shocked at her own selfishness, “I did not mean that. For there is no more a place for him in this world—much of which I can see in his expressions he finds loathsome and barbaric—than there is for me in that jangling, noisy, electric place that he calls home.”

She sat and stared morosely at her reflection a while longer, concentrating on remembering the taste of Darcy’s kisses. Fingering the gold chain he’d draped around her neck only an hour earlier, she thought of the rare gentleness she had discovered in him, and worrying that by imposing her wishes upon him on this final night—a night during which she would dare to become his lover in the flesh as well as in spirit—she might be setting them both upon an emotional course from which there would be no turning back, a course that she knew he feared.

And because she could never speak the words that would let him know why she was willing to expose them both to that monumental risk, Jane turned, as she always had in times of strife, to her pen; for she had determined to send another message to Darcy at Chawton Great House before their midnight meeting. And she prayed that he would read it and understand.

Taking a pristine sheet of vellum from the drawer of her vanity table, she spread it on the polished wood and began to write.

My Dearest Darcy,

Though you agreed that I might wait with you tonight, your expression told me you feared I might be breaking my heart for a love that can never be…

At that very moment Darcy was in the saddle, leaning over Lord Nelson’s neck to duck under the low-hanging limbs of passing trees. He was following Simmons through a stand of thick forest, along an overgrown path that was just barely discernible among the weeds.

Presently the path opened into a small, sunny clearing. Simmons reined his horse to a halt before the ruins of a dilapidated thatched structure and jumped lightly to the ground.

“This is the old gamekeeper’s hut,” the groom told Darcy. “Nobody’s lived in it since Chawton Cottage was built, back in the times before I was born. You should be safe enough out here till night comes, sir.”

Darcy dismounted and quickly surveyed the tumbledown hut. Half of the graying thatched roof had fallen in from neglect, and he could see through the open doorway that the interior was jumbled with piles of leaves and a few sticks of broken furniture scattered around a blackened stone hearth.

Glad that he would not be spending more than a few hours in the dismal place, he looked about the tiny yard for someplace to write. He spotted a huge silvered tree stump a few yards from the door, and on its flat surface he laid out the paper and other writing implements that Simmons had procured for him from Chawton Great House. He wrote:

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

He blew on the ink to dry it, then folded the hastily composed note and sealed it with a blob of hot wax dribbled from the end of a small red candle that the increasingly nervous groom had impatiently lit for him.

When he was finished, Darcy addressed the letter to Jane at Chawton Cottage and thrust it into Simmons’s hands. “Deliver this to Miss Austen,” he instructed the groom, “but under no circumstances are you to tell her where I am. I will not risk her being caught with me. If she wishes to write a reply you may bring it back here. But only if you consider the way to be safe.”

The younger man nodded his understanding and vaulted up into his saddle. He wheeled his horse about to go, then stopped, seeming to remember something. “Here’s a bit of bread and cheese I nicked off Cook as I passed through the kitchen,” he said, withdrawing a bulging linen napkin from his coat and passing it down to the American.

Darcy smiled gratefully and took the food. “Thank you, Simmons.” He reached up to clasp the groom’s strong, work-hardened hand in his own. “You’re a good man.”

Simmons grinned and looked at their clasped hands. “You be a good man yourself, sir, I’ll affirm,” he replied, “and the only proper gentleman what ever thought he wasn’t too high and mighty to shake with the likes of Harry Simmons.”

Withdrawing his hand from Darcy’s grip the youngster touched the brim of his tall hat in a jaunty salute. “Good luck to you, then, sir. I’ll be back with a message from the lady, soon as I can.”

With that, Simmons ducked low in the saddle and rode away at a fast trot, quickly disappearing beneath the drooping trees.

For a long time after the groom had departed Darcy sat on the stump before the hut, watching the deep green woods fill with shadows. Though food was the last thing on his mind, his grumbling stomach reminded him that he’d eaten nothing since breakfast but one of the tiny barley cakes that Cassandra had served with tea.

Now, mostly out of curiosity, he unfolded the napkin that Simmons had given him, discovering inside a large chunk of coarse dark bread and a palm-sized wedge of hard cheese the color of sunflower petals. Biting into the bread, which tasted something like Jewish rye, Darcy realized that he was ravenously hungry and he quickly devoured it, alternating with bites of the savory cheese.

Chapter 31

Jane had just sealed her letter when she heard the sounds of a rider ringing the bell at the gate below. Downstairs, she could hear Maggie muttering and then her clumping footsteps as the irritated housekeeper hurried, fussing, to the door.

“Letter for Miss Austen,” came the breathless voice of the rider.

“Which Miss Austen?” Maggie inquired imperiously. “There’s two of them here, you know.”

Laying down her letter, Jane went downstairs to the front door and saw the housekeeper glaring at the flushed face of young Harry Simmons, whom she recognized as a groom from her brother’s stables. “All right, Maggie,” she interjected. “Leave it to me.”

Huffing at the outlandish idea of a lady taking her own letter, much less engaging in conversation with a sweating stableman, Maggie shrugged and stomped away. Jane took the letter, tore it open and quickly read the short message. Alarmed at the news that Darcy had gone into hiding, she looked directly into Simmons’s honest blue eyes.

“Simmons, do you know where Mr. Darcy has gone?” she quietly asked him.

The nervous young servant lowered his gaze to the ground and shuffled his feet on the doorstep. “I’m, uh, not sure, miss,” he replied evasively. “That is, he made me promise I would not say, for he feared you would try to go there.”

Jane scrutinized the man’s face, searching for some sign of guile. But she succeeded only in making young Harry Simmons look even more uncomfortable than he already was. “Wait here!” she commanded, then turned without another word and went into the cottage. A moment later she was back with her newly written letter.

“Please see that Mr. Darcy gets this letter,” she said. “It is very important.”

“Yes, miss. I’ll try my best.” Simmons climbed up onto his horse and was on the point of leaving when a troop of a dozen mounted Royal Marines thundered by on the road to Chawton Great House. The dust of their passage had not yet settled when a heavy coach went past, traveling in the same direction. Inside, the two astonished watchers glimpsed the flushed face of Captain Francis Austen.

“Oh Lord!” Simmons breathed. “They’re coming for him.”

“Go to Mr. Darcy now and warn him that my brother has returned,” Jane ordered. “Hurry, Simmons! Please hurry. And tell him that I shall be waiting at midnight in the wood behind the cottage.”

Simmons dug his heels into the ribs of his horse and rode off at a fast gallop across the fields.

Still stunned by the unexpected and potentially deadly development of her brother’s return Jane stood trembling by the gate until Cass, who had heard the commotion of the passing troop, came out and touched her shoulder. “Jane, what is it?” she asked.

“Oh, Cass,” she cried, turning to look at her sister with tear-filled eyes, “I think I have killed him with my foolish meddling.”

Sitting in the lonely forest clearing with Lord Nelson grazing nearby, Darcy had nothing to do but anxiously wait for Simmons to return with a message from Jane. For there was little doubt in his mind that she would respond to his urgent note with one of her own.

Darcy pictured her reading his scrawled words, then dashing off a few hurried lines of her own, reaffirming her desire to meet him at midnight in the quiet wood. The only question in his mind was whether he should actually go to the appointed place, assuming, of course, that Frank and his squad of marines did not find him in the meantime.

In fact, Darcy actually believed that the possibility of his being captured by Jane’s brother was fairly remote. Instead, he guessed, that when he didn’t return to Chawton Great House by nightfall, Edward and Frank would simply assume that he had done the logical thing and fled to nearby London, where he could easily lose himself among the masses of the great teeming city that Jane had described in detail for him that afternoon.

Somehow the American doubted seriously that her two aristocratic brothers would waste very much time searching for him in the dark among the scattered fields and hedgerows surrounding the estate.

If all went well, then, he decided, and no sign of an organized pursuit had developed by midnight he would still go to Jane. Of course, he told himself, he would approach the appointed meeting place with the greatest possible caution. And only after he had ruled out the possibility that her brothers were lying in wait for him would he go to spend the few precious hours until dawn with her.

Though Darcy still worried about the possible physical dangers that their meeting posed to Jane, as well as the emotional effect that his leaving might have, especially should their relationship become more intimate than it already had, he was determined to carry out her wishes and go to her.

Far too often since he had entered her world, Darcy reminded himself, he had been guilty of making false and arrogant presumptions.

He was determined not to repeat that same error again. For Jane Austen had made it crystal clear that she wanted to be with him, if only for a little while. And God knew he wanted to be with her one last time as well.

He allowed himself a grim smile. Because, of course, he was assuming—had to assume—that, come the dawn, he would ride Lord Nelson to the arched tree limbs above the stone wall where, by the same unknown process that had brought him to the year 1810, he would magically leap back into his own time.

And if he could not return?

If his trip into the past had been a one-way ticket?

Darcy’s conscious mind refused to seriously contemplate the unthinkable answers to those questions. Although he realized that it was recklessly irresponsible of him not to have made some basic plan for the very real possibility that he might be permanently locked into this world, he could not in fact even bear to consider the reality of such a fate.

If he was doomed to remain here, he knew, he would not dare to approach Jane Austen again. For he would be an outlaw, a marked fugitive relentlessly hunted by her vengeful brothers, forced to run to the farthest outposts of civilization merely to survive.

Darcy could imagine only one fate worse than returning to his own chaotic and frenzied time without Jane Austen, and that was to be trapped in this one, where she still lived and breathed, unable to be with her.

He was shaken from his grim reverie as Lord Nelson abruptly stopped nibbling at the shoots of tender spring grass growing around the wall of the ruined hut and raised his magnificent head, snorting softly in the breeze.

Alarmed, Darcy looked up at the agitated horse. Then he, too, heard the sounds that had startled the animal. From somewhere in the distance came the faint drumming of hoofbeats and the cries of shouting men. Feeling his blood suddenly run cold, the American got to his feet and, pushing aside drooping branches and tangled brambles of undergrowth, he walked a little ways through the trees. At the edge of the wood he stopped and cautiously peered out into an open meadow.

To his horror Darcy saw a line abreast of perhaps a dozen armed-and-uniformed men riding directly toward his hideaway, their sabers extended, the polished blades flashing brightly in the orange rays of the setting sun.

Without a moment’s hesitation Darcy retreated back through the wood, making his way in seconds to the collapsed hut. Leaping onto Lord Nelson’s back, he shouted to the great black stallion, urging him into a full gallop.

Branches and small limbs lashed his face and arms as he drove the powerful horse crashing through the trees. Breaking out into the meadow, Darcy angled sharply away from the approaching horsemen, praying they would not see him in the dying light. Before he had gone ten yards, however, he heard a new shout raised behind him.

Turning in his saddle, Darcy recognized the flushed features of Frank Austen at the head of the military formation. The captain was pointing his saber directly at him, rallying his men to follow. The line of horsemen wheeled about, urging their mounts to the chase. From the corner of his eye the fleeing American saw two of the mounted soldiers unslinging long flintlock rifles from their shoulders.

Without waiting to see any more Darcy aimed Lord Nelson toward a low hedgerow and prepared to jump. A shot rang out, then another, as the horse leaped and landed awkwardly in the next field.

Crouching low in the saddle Darcy pushed the speeding stallion onward, pressing his face hard against the animal’s muscular neck. “Come on, Nelson, old boy,” he shouted into the wind, “give it everything you’ve got!”

The magnificent creature increased his stride, swiftly pulling away from their pursuers until he splashed through a muddy ditch and into another meadow and was suddenly slowed by the softer ground.

Looking ahead Darcy saw the fiery ball of the setting sun blazing through the distinctive arch formed by the pair of tall trees overhanging the low stone wall. “There it is, boy!” he shouted as a full volley of shots rang out behind them, tearing muddy gouts in the turf to either side. Turning back to look over his shoulder he saw Frank Austen at the head of the pack not fifty paces behind him and quickly closing the gap. The captain’s face was contorted with rage and he was screaming an epithet that was lost in the thunder of hooves.

Darcy raced across the emerald green turf to the very verge of the field bounded by the low stone wall, riding hell-bent into the sun. Though he assumed it was impossible to leap back into his own time before sunrise, he prayed that a jump through the narrow arch might at least intimidate and slow his pursuers, who would have to follow in single file.

The wall was approaching fast. At the last possible instant and with no more time to think, Darcy leaned forward, forced to squeeze his eyelids shut to avoid being blinded by the dazzling light.

He braced himself as he felt Lord Nelson’s hooves leave the ground.

They were airborne for several instants, during which he clearly heard the thumping of his own heart over Frank Austen’s screamed warning for him to stop or be shot dead.

The sound of Austen’s voice died away, as if someone had quickly dialed down the volume on a too-loud radio. Lord Nelson’s front feet hit the ground with a bone-jarring jolt and Darcy opened his eyes. Reining the huffing horse to a halt he turned and looked back over the wall that they had just cleared. In the final rays of the dying sun he saw nothing but dissolving shadows filling an empty meadow.

In the distance he heard the rumble of an engine and turned to see a yellow-painted farm tractor coming toward him, its lights turned on against the gathering gloom. He waved and waited until the vehicle reached him and a red-faced man yelled over the top of the black steering wheel.

“Here now! What’re you doing in my field? I haven’t spent all day planting this seed for you to be tramping on it with your bloody great horse.”

Barely trusting himself to reply, Darcy opened his mouth to ask for directions to his friends’ rented country house.

The shriek of a low-flying fighter jet from the nearby NATO base obliterated his eager words.

Chapter 32

“And so I had returned.”

Darcy was standing at the open French doors in the Rose Bedroom, looking out at the first golden rays of the sun rising over Pemberley Farms. Eliza got softly to her feet and went to stand beside him.

Almost whispering, she gently said, “So you lost her.”

Quizzically, “I beg your pardon?”

Her heart went out to him. “Your last meeting with Jane never took place?”

He shook his head, still looking into the distance. “No. I never saw her again. And, as far as I can tell, the entire incident was never spoken of by anyone in the Austen family. There’s no mention of Jane Austen having ever met anyone remotely resembling me, at least not that I’ve been able to find in any family archive or historical record.”

He paused, and then turned to Eliza. “The only hint that something might have happened is that, according to several of her biographers, Jane left Chawton for several months immediately after May 12, 1810. But until her first letter to me turned up in an estate sale two years ago I was unable to find any documentation that anything I have told you really happened.”

Smiling he added, “So now you see why I said that I spent a very long time doubting my own sanity. When that first letter turned up in London in a huge collection of unrelated documents it had already passed through several hands. So although it couldn’t be traced to a specific source, it gave me hope because it proved I had actually been there.”

Darcy smiled again. “Then you turned up with more substantial proof that it was all completely true, just as I’d remembered it.”

“Well, at least you know that she got the letter you sent Simmons to deliver,” Eliza said.

“Yes, and the unopened letter must be her reply. Do you understand now why I said that letter was meant for me?”

Eliza walked out onto the balcony, considering all that he had told her. She slowly nodded her head and gazed into the sunrise. “So it is really possible to travel back in time.” Her voice sounded small and full of wonder.

Darcy joined her at the hand-carved railing and shrugged. “Theoretically, yes. As I explained to Jane, time travel is possible; at least if you’re willing to believe Einstein, Hawking and a few thousand other eminent thinkers. “How it’s done is still the big question,” Darcy said. “The only reported incidents I was able to discover in my research have been like mine—accidents.”

“Unbelievable!” Eliza yawned and felt her eyelids suddenly growing heavy, the cumulative result of her emotional turmoil and nearly twenty-four hours without sleep.

“I really do believe you, Fitz,” she explained dreamily. “But you have to admit it all seems so incredible. My mind is reeling.”

Darcy nodded, then unexpectedly leaned over and kissed the top of her head. “You must be exhausted,” he said quietly. “Try to get some sleep now. We can talk more about all of this tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is already here,” she reminded him, pointing to the glowing ball of the rising sun. “I think you’d better try to get some sleep yourself. Your big day is beginning.”

“God yes! I almost forgot the ball!” He reached down and touched her hand, then walked through the bedroom to the door and opened it to leave. She spun around.

“Fitz!”

Darcy stopped and looked back at her.

“Thank you for trusting me with this,” Eliza said, raising her fingers and blowing him a kiss.

He smiled and mimed catching it, pressing it to his lips. Then he closed the door and was gone.

Pausing only long enough to drop her clothes in an untidy heap on the floor, Eliza collapsed across the rose-colored satin coverlet and closed her eyes.

But sleep would not come. Seconds later, she opened her burning eyes again and gazed across the dimly lit room to the alcove. The haunting portrait of Rose Darcy seemed to be questioning her from the shadows.

“Yes, of course I’m falling in love with him,” Eliza said defiantly. “Who in their right mind wouldn’t? And, if it makes any difference, I’d gladly fill that stupid bathtub of yours with rose petals or whipped cream or whatever else turns him on and hurl myself naked into it this second. But do you really think that would be enough to make him fall in love with me?”

As she expected, the enigmatic beauty in the portrait offered no answers to that one.

Flopping angrily onto her stomach, Eliza buried her face in the soft, soft fabric and wondered miserably what she was supposed to do now.

How was she—or anyone, for that matter—supposed to compete with Jane Austen?

Alone for the first time that day, Darcy lay on the bed staring at the vaulted ceiling of his bedroom. When he had begun the story of his meeting with Jane Austen it had been for strictly mercenary reasons: he wanted the letters. He had anticipated that it would be very painful to reveal the details of his experience; but as he lay there trying to rest he was surprised that it was actually a relief to have shared it, and luckily with someone who had not dismissed it out of hand. Eliza believed.

Eliza. He saw her face behind his closed eyelids, remembering the way her hair fell softly to her shoulders. He chuckled to himself; she made him feel good. In fact he had been having sensations since they met that he had been sure would be reserved only for Jane. Sighing, he remembered the thrill and warmth of Eliza’s kiss. It had taken a great effort not to envelop her in his arms and smother her with kisses, burying his face in her beautiful hair.

What had stopped him? Was it the feeling of betrayal, as he was trying to convince himself, or was it the fear of loss? The fear of loving and losing again had made him keep his emotions in check for most of his adult life; Jane had been the only one to unlock his heart, until now. And as with Jane he seemed to have little or no control over his roiling emotions with Eliza and it scared him.

In spite of the tumultuous state of his mind, Darcy drifted into a contented sleep with thoughts of Eliza’s sweet kiss and gentle touch.

Chapter 33

Eliza awoke beneath the satin coverlet in the huge antique bed, with the sunlit portrait of Rose Darcy gazing down at her from its alcove above the copper tub. Glancing over at the small travel clock on her bedside table she discovered that she had slept through the entire morning and well into the afternoon. “Don’t look at me like that,” she told Rose Darcy. “I bet you never got up before noon in your life.”

Drawn by the sounds of voices and hurrying footsteps from the drive below, Eliza arose and went out onto the balcony. Looking down she saw dozens of workers and volunteers, many of them already attired in period costumes, scurrying in and out of the house with armloads of flowers, baskets and chairs.

Farther out on the lawn the luncheon tables and a buffet were set up as they had been the previous day. “Well, it looks like everything’s under control,” Eliza muttered. Feeling helpless and disconnected from reality she went off to the luxuriously appointed bathroom where she deliberately took her time showering and washing her hair.

An hour later Eliza passed through the busy house unnoticed by the small army of servants and helpers making last-minute preparations for the ball. Pausing at the closed doors to the grand ballroom, she pushed them open a crack, hoping to catch a glimpse of Darcy. Instead she saw men standing on tall ladders affixing hundreds of candles to sockets in the chandeliers and wall sconces while others polished the parquet floors or draped snowy linen on dozens of small tables set around the perimeter of the room.

When similar inquisitive forays—into the kitchens and the flower-bedecked gallery where arriving guests would be welcomed upon entering the house—turned up no sign of Darcy, Eliza found the front doors and stepped out into the bright summer sunshine.

She had already crossed the lawn to the buffet table when she realized that the only other diners still at lunch were Harv and Faith Harrington. Brother and sister were sitting together at a table, eating and chatting.

“Wonderful!” she murmured, looking frantically for some other direction to take.

Before Eliza could retreat, though, Harv spotted her and cheerfully waved her down. “Aha! Another of the undead has risen at last. Hi, Eliza.”

“Hi,” she replied, cautiously approaching the pair.

Looking like a cartoon vampire in a way-too-flouncy yellow sundress, Faith pushed her dark wraparound sunglasses up onto her pale forehead and squinted at Eliza through seriously bloodshot eyes.

“Oh, there you are, Eliza!” Faith exclaimed, managing to sound as if she’d just discovered a particularly beloved sorority sister. “Harv was telling me I threatened to murder you in your bed last night, you poor thing.”

“Well, you didn’t specify the exact place…” Letting her hunger overcome her sense of self-preservation, Eliza sidled over to the buffet table and began heaping a plate from a marvelous-looking platter of seafood salad and fresh fruit.

Faith rose stiffly from her seat and walked by, pausing to affectionately squeeze the arm of her archrival. “I don’t remember a thing about last night,” she said, smiling. “Isn’t that awful?”

Eliza made a sour face. “Positively tragic,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

“Well, I absolutely must run now,” Faith exclaimed, ignoring the caustic reply. “The caterer is having another nervous breakdown.”

“Why don’t you give him some of your Prozac?” Eliza suggested under her breath as the blonde flounced away across the lawn in a cloud of filmy petticoats.

Actually, Eliza had briefly considered yelling out the Prozac remark to the loathsome Faith. She was restrained by the ominous sight of a heavy carving knife sticking out of a plump Virginia ham on the table, and had a quick mental flash of the erratic Faith returning to slice up something besides ham.

Turning with her plate Eliza saw that Harv had gotten up and was gallantly pulling out a chair for her. She stomped over to where he stood, slammed her plate onto the table and flopped sullenly into the chair.

“Goodness, you seem a tad overwrought today, Eliza.” Harv’s big blue eyes were twinkling like a department-store Santa Claus.

“Don’t start with me today, Harv,” she warned.

“Let me get you some refreshing tea.” Harv smiled, backing slowly away from her with his hands in the air. He went over to the beverage table and returned with a tall, frosty glass of iced tea for her and a fresh Bloody Mary for himself.

“Where’s Fitz?” she asked, scanning the endless procession of people in and out of the house.

“Off running around somewhere.” Harv waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the stables and lowered himself into the chair beside hers. “I doubt if you’ll see much of him before this evening. He and his committee of helpers will be all over the place all day long, working like the proverbial pack of beavers.”

Eliza began consuming her salad, delicious chunks of cold lobster and avocado steeped in a wonderful vinaigrette dressing. “Should we be doing something to help them?” she asked, looking toward the busy workforce up at the house.

“Us?” Harv was aghast at the mere suggestion that they join in the work. “Good Lord, no! You are an honored guest and I a mere helpless bungler,” he explained. “Our job is to stay out of the way and admire the industry of the others, so they’ll all feel properly appreciated.”

“Harv, I like you.” Eliza found herself laughing in spite of her foul mood.

“Why, thank you, Eliza. I like me, too.”

At that moment a pretty young woman in a long blue gown came walking across the lawn toward them. She was carrying a matte-black high-tech portable phone in one hand.

Harv grinned at the newcomer. “Amanda, my love, you are the perfect vision of antebellum splendor,” he exclaimed. “However, I must tell you that the telephone spoils the effect entirely.”

Amanda, who had obviously weathered previous encounters with Harv, smiled tolerantly at him and addressed Eliza. “Are you Miss Knight?”

Eliza nodded and the pretty young woman handed her the phone. “You have an urgent call,” she said, “from your Aunt Ellen in New York.”

Harv and Amanda looked on with interest as Eliza frowned and put the phone to her ear, unable to imagine who might have tracked her down at Pemberley Farms. For she had deliberately left her mobile phone turned off in her luggage and, as far as she knew, nobody in New York had Darcy’s unlisted number. And she did not have an Aunt Ellen.

“Hello?”

Thelma Klein’s graveled voice rasped harshly in her ear. “Eliza, what the hell’s going on down there?” the gruff researcher demanded. “You said you were going to call me as soon as you’d talked to Darcy. What did he say?”

Eliza rolled her eyes and glanced over at Harv, who was busily engaged in examining Amanda’s rather ample cleavage. “Oh, hi, Aunt Ellen!” Eliza said brightly. “We’re still talking about…that business,” she told Thelma evasively. “Can I call you back on Monday?”

“Monday? Are you out of your mind?” Thelma’s screech was loud enough to make the couple look up from their foolishness. “We’re doing the press conference on Monday. Remember?” Thelma hollered. “The people from Sotheby’s will be there.”

“Right, Aunt Ellen! Okay. I’ll see you then,” Eliza said in the I-really-can’t-talk-now voice she reserved for ending inconvenient telephone conversations.

There was a brief silence on the line, followed by a plaintive meow. Thelma’s voice when she came back on was ominous. “Eliza, you’re forgetting that you left your damned cat in my apartment. If you hang up on me now I will put Wickham down the garbage disposal. Talk to me.”

“I can’t really talk now, Aunt Ellen,” Eliza said with a grin. “Be sure to give Wickham a big kiss for me. And don’t forget his tuna.”

Thelma Klein, a lifelong cat fancier, sighed, defeated. “All right, Eliza. I don’t know what’s going on down there, but I’m willing to guess the handsome Mr. Darcy has been working on your head. I just want you to think about one thing before you do anything too stupid,” Thelma continued. “Sotheby’s called late yesterday to say they’re estimating that your unopened Jane Austen letter could go for up to a million and a half dollars.”

There was a long pause on the line, then the cranky researcher added, “As long as it stays unopened.”

“One and a half?” Eliza’s voice was a mouselike squeak.

“Yes! And that’s straight from Aunt Ellen. So get your butt back up here by Monday,” Thelma ordered. “I’ll keep the cat alive until then, but that’s it.”

In her New York apartment Thelma Klein slammed down the phone and scowled at Wickham who was stretched comfortably across the end of her sofa. “What the hell are you looking at?” she asked the gray tabby.

When the cat did not immediately answer, Thelma resignedly got to her feet and padded barefoot to the kitchen. “Come on,” she said grumpily. “Let’s go get some damned tuna. Aunt Ellen’s buying.”

On the lawn at Pemberley Farms Eliza still sat holding the dead phone, looking slightly stunned.

“I once saw an expression like yours on a ballet dancer who had just wandered into a biker bar,” Harv wryly remarked over the salt-encrusted rim of his Bloody Mary.

“Your Aunt Ellen sounds like a real piece of work!” Amanda observed.

The rest of the afternoon Eliza spent alone at the end of the small dock on the lakeshore. Her pad was in her lap and she idly sketched as she considered the astounding news that Thelma had imparted.

A million and a half dollars! A lot of money, she thought. No. Correction: a whole lot of money! More money in fact than Eliza Knight or anyone in her family had ever made, or even seen at one time in their entire lives. Combined.

One and a half million dollars for a letter, Eliza marveled, the letter that was now tucked into a pocket of the portfolio she’d casually left lying on the blanket chest in the Rose Bedroom.

Looking down at the sketch she’d been making she studied Fitz Darcy’s sea green eyes. His eyes told her everything and nothing at the same time and she hoped by looking into the competent image she had crafted of him she might divine what she was to do next.

He had offered to buy the unopened letter from her at whatever price she named. But would he pay one and a half million dollars? Would Jane’s last letter really mean that much to him? And if it did…If Fitzwilliam Darcy was willing to pay that much, what did that say about the depth of his attachment to a woman who had been dead for two centuries? More importantly, she wondered, what would it say about his feelings for a slightly addled Manhattan artist?

Putting aside her sketch pad, Eliza closed her eyes and tried to drive away the haunting image of Darcy’s face and the faraway, almost reverential quality of his voice as he had related to her the details of his journey into that other time, and of his romantic encounter with Jane Austen.

She opened her eyes and saw a small gray bird sitting on a wooden post beside her. The bird cocked its head to one side and trained a bright eye on her, as though anxiously awaiting her thoughts on the matter of Darcy.

Ignoring the inquisitive creature, Eliza again closed her eyes and was rewarded with a quick mental flash of Jerry encouraging her to be rational for a change, reminding her to think of her personal financial situation, her taxes…her own self-interest.

She opened her eyes to find the bird still regarding her. Eliza suddenly laughed aloud at the absolute absurdity of her predicament. The bird chirped and fluffed its wings as the sound of her laughter rolled across the still surface of the lake, echoing back to mock her for her silliness.

Because Eliza knew that Darcy wouldn’t fall in love with her, couldn’t love her, not any more than he loved or could have loved the beautiful but supremely irritating and neurotic Faith Harrington.

Maybe, Eliza miserably reflected, she might have had a chance with him if she hadn’t started their relationship by being so deliberately horrible on the Internet—an offense she since had compounded, first by deceit, when she had bluffed her way through the gates of Pemberley Farms, then by ridiculing Darcy’s first halting attempts to explain to her why he had to have her letters.

“He can’t fall in love with me because I have given him nothing to love,” she told the little gray bird, which cocked its head to the other side and appeared to be intensely interested in what she was saying. “And even if I had shown myself to be kind or understanding,” Eliza told the bird, “I doubt that it would have made any difference. Because Fitzwilliam Darcy is in love with Jane Austen, and he’ll probably always be in love with her.

“Let’s face it,” she told her small listener, “I don’t stand a chance with my Mr. Darcy.”

She scoffed at herself because of course he was still Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy and if he wanted her letter so badly there was nothing to stop him from going to the Sotheby’s auction and bidding for it, just like any other love-struck millionaire.

“Besides,” she rationalized bitterly, “even if he doesn’t buy the letter it’s not like the contents are going to stay a secret for very long. Ten minutes after the bidding ends, it will be opened and the whole world will know what it says anyway…maybe.”

Obviously dissatisfied with Eliza’s reasoning—reasoning that Jerry with his accountant’s soul would not have been able to fault—the small bird angrily chirped at her and then flew away into the trees.

Feeling a sudden chill Eliza hastily gathered up her sketch pad and started back toward the house, which in the deepening twilight was beginning to come alive with the glow of candles. As she walked she briefly considered packing up her things and leaving Pemberley Farms immediately. In the frenzy of activity surrounding the opening of the Rose Ball, her departure was hardly likely to be noticed.

It was the coward’s way. The easy out. But it would be quick and painless, for her at least.

But in her heart Eliza knew that she didn’t have the capacity to be that cruel. Darcy had bared his soul to her, trusted in her wit and imagination to listen and, against all odds and logic, to ultimately believe in his mad, impossible tale.

The very least she could do in return was to face him and inform him of her decision.

Chapter 34

Returning to the candlelit house Eliza slipped past the busy main rooms and made it back to the eerily dark second floor without seeing anyone she knew. When she was safe inside the Rose Bedroom she closed the door behind her and leaned heavily against it with the sinking realization that she had deliberately sneaked upstairs hoping to avoid Darcy.

Facing him was not going to be as easy as she had thought, and again she considered simply packing her things and leaving. It would be simple enough for her to hitch a ride down to the gates in one of the empty carriages that were constantly shuttling back and forth to pick up and deliver arriving guests.

Eliza stood by the door for a minute, thinking it over, forming a clear image of Darcy in her mind.

“No!” she said resolutely. “I will not run from this good and decent man. I will go to his damned ball and I will tell him face-to-face that he can’t have my letters. I’m awfully sorry but Jane Austen is his problem, not mine, and he will just have to deal with it.”

Her resolve set, Eliza walked to the wardrobe where the green Regency gown that Jenny had helped her choose for the evening had been hanging on the outside of the door.

To her surprise, the emerald gown was not there. She opened the tall wardrobe and looked inside. But, except for the few pairs of jeans and shirts she had brought with her, the wardrobe was empty.

Frowning, Eliza looked around the room. That was when she saw another gown lying across the bed, a flowing, lowcut gown of rose-colored silk so close to the shade of the satin bed coverlet that she had not noticed it before.

Eliza went to the bed and stared down at the exquisite garment. Then, slowly, her eyes lifted to the painting in the alcove. Though the portrait had not changed, Rose Darcy’s enigmatic smile now seemed to be directed exclusively at Eliza Knight.

“Oh my God!” she whispered as she continued to gaze at the life-sized likeness of the beautiful Rose in her silken rose-colored gown.

A gown identical to the one that now lay spread on the bed before her.

Eliza whirled about as the bedroom door suddenly opened and Jenny Brown stuck her head into the room. “May I come in?”

Eliza nodded dumbly, then pointed a trembling finger at the bed. “Jenny, look!”

“Yeah.” Jenny nodded, smiling. She stepped into the room wearing a spectacularly beaded dress of golden satin that lent a magical glow to her shining ebony skin. “Fitz said he’d like you to wear that one tonight,” she said, indicating the gown on the bed.

“Oh, I couldn’t!” Eliza gasped.

Jenny shrugged. “Well, then I guess you’re going to the ball in your blue jeans, ’cause I went ahead and gave that green dress to one of the hostesses.”

Still not understanding, Eliza cautiously lifted the yards of delicate rose-colored silk from the bed. Beneath the gown lay a pair of matching slippers and a petticoat embroidered with wild rose vines. Turning back to Jenny with the dress, she held it up in front of her.

Jenny glanced from Eliza to the painting of Rose Darcy in the alcove and nodded approvingly. “Isn’t that something?” she marveled. “I told Fitz it would probably need to be altered but he said he knew it would fit you.”

Eliza looked down and saw that the spectacular gown did indeed seem to have been tailor-made for the contours of her own slender body.

“Pretty amazing when you consider that dress hasn’t been worn for almost two hundred years,” Jenny continued.

Eliza, who had been only half-listening until that point, stared at her new friend in horror. “This is Rose Darcy’s actual dress, not a reproduction?”

“Yep, Fitz sent Artie and me up to the museum in Richmond this morning to get it.” She laughed at the memory. “I thought we were gonna have to arm wrestle ’em for it. Some stuffy old curator told us it was a priceless historical artifact and that it would be on our heads if anything happened to it.”

“Jenny, why would Fitz do a thing like this?” she asked, dropping the filmy gown back onto the bed as if her hands had been burned.

Jenny Brown placed her hands on her hips, closed one eye and focused appraisingly on the distraught artist with the other. “Now why do you think he did it, Eliza?”

Eliza shook her head helplessly, not daring to confront the only possible explanation that popped into her mind. She looked again at the delicate froth of precious silk and tentatively picked it up. It was so soft that the folds fluttered like feathers falling from her hands. “What if something happens to it?” she whispered.

“What if it does?” Jenny said matter-of-factly. “It’s just a dress.”

“But…you said the museum people told you it was priceless…” Eliza stammered.

“Sure,” Jenny snorted, “and they also had it draped on some damned dummy in a glass case, like one of their stuffed birds. It was a dead thing up there, Eliza.”

Jenny smiled then, her lovely features filling with warmth. “When you put on that gorgeous gown tonight it will be alive again for the first time in two hundred years.” Her eyes flicked up to the face of Rose Darcy silently watching them from the safety of her gilded frame. “Like it was meant to be,” Jenny added softly.

Wavering, Eliza continued to hold the nearly weightless gown in her hands, which she noticed were shaking. Her brain was reeling with doubts and all of her carefully reasoned logic had again turned topsy-turvy. The sheer enormity of Darcy’s gesture was so overwhelming that she could hardly breathe.

“Why?” she whispered for the second time. “I really don’t understand why he would do this, Jenny.” Eliza lowered her eyes and her voice fell to a barely audible whisper as she confessed, mostly to herself, “I’ve been pretty awful to him.” She held the shimmering gown before her. “So why would he…”

Eliza left the sentence hanging, afraid to give voice to the unreasonable surge of hope that she felt building within her heart.

The other woman simply shook her head and sighed. “Eliza,” she said, “let me tell you something about Fitz Darcy. He may be a cautious person when it comes to parceling out his goodness, regard and love, but when he does it’s not in small spoonfuls or halfheartedly. And you can believe me when I say that Fitz never does anything with ulterior motives, there is nothing devious about him, everything is open and aboveboard. And there’s no stingy little accountant standing by to keep tabs on what he does either. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Eliza nodded, a disturbing image of Jerry chastising her for her fiscally unsound impulsiveness and her unbridled flights of fancy surfacing in her mind for just a fraction of a moment.

Several seconds of silence ensued before Eliza could trust herself to speak again. “Jenny, are you saying that you think Fitz likes me?” she asked in a small, tremulous voice.

Jenny’s deep, rich laughter echoed off the richly decorated walls of the Rose Bedroom. “Likes you! Honey, you are the only woman the man has bothered to even look at for three whole years.” She lowered her voice an octave and gave Eliza a knowing wink. “And I have to tell you that I never saw him look at anyone the way he looks at you,” Jenny declared. “Hell, even dumb old Faith can see that. Why do you think she threw that incredible temper tantrum last night?”

Eliza stared at her newfound friend, wishing it could be true. But Jenny had no way of knowing that Fitz was deeply in love with someone else, someone who was dead and gone, but who would live forever in his heart.

“You’d better get dressed now,” Jenny said quietly. “I’ll be back in half an hour to see if you need any help.”

Eliza slowly nodded and watched her go out and close the door. Then she walked over to the floor-length mirror on the wardrobe and again pressed the magical gown to her body.

She returned to the bed, carefully laid out the dress and sat down. Fingering the delicate fabric, Eliza again questioned why Fitz had gone to the trouble of arranging for her to wear it. Jenny’s theory notwithstanding, was he simply trying to secure the letters for himself with a bribe? Thinking back over the two days she’d been here, he had done nothing sneaky or underhanded, which was more than she could say about herself. No, from what she could tell he was an honorable man. And in spite of his admission that Jane Austen had initially thought him arrogant, she had seen nothing of it. In fact he was very down-to-earth with no pretensions at all and except for a flare-up of temper, triggered by her own deception, he had been a perfect gentleman, in the truest sense of the word. Everything pointed to its being simply a gracious gesture on his part.

The clock in the hall chimed the quarter hour and roused her from her reverie. Glancing at the clock on the bedside table she went into the bathroom to get ready…for whatever the evening might bring.

Chapter 35

Dressed in the antique silk gown, her shining black hair arranged in a loose, flowing style that flattered her long neck and almost-bare shoulders, Eliza stood on the balcony of the Rose Bedroom, gazing down at the torch-lit drive.

From her vantage point she saw a stately procession of horse-drawn carriages, their side lamps glowing like moving jewels in the darkness, wending its way toward the front of the house where costumed attendants awaited.

Somewhere an orchestra was playing a lively tune she had never heard before, flutes and strings predominating.

As each carriage reached the steps of Pemberley House its occupants were assisted out by liveried footmen, and then guided to the entrance by a gowned hostess carrying a silver candelabrum before her.

“Pretty spectacular, wouldn’t you say?”

Eliza hadn’t heard the bedroom door opening. Now she turned to see Jenny standing at her shoulder.

“It’s breathtaking,” Eliza agreed, returning her attention to the scene below. “Do you think this was really what Pemberley looked like once upon a time?”

“Once upon a time,” Jenny replied, smiling at the timeworn phrase, “Pemberley House looked exactly like this. Thanks to Rose Darcy’s diary, which describes the very first Rose Ball down to the smallest detail, everything you see down there has been faithfully reconstructed according to her description, and then repeated every year since.”

Eliza stared at her. “They’ve been holding this ball at Pemberley Farms for more than two hundred years?”

“Except in wartime. During the Civil War the Union Army rode through here and during the Second World War they were rationing food and gas. Every other year there’s been a Rose Ball at Pemberley Farms. It’s only been a charity event since Fitz started hosting it; before that it was just a society party.” Turning back to the room, Jenny said, “We’d better get going now. Don’t want you to be late.”

Eliza laughed. “How can I be late, when I’m already here?”

Jenny flashed a mysterious smile. “As long as we went to all the trouble to get that dress out of the museum for you, Artie and I figured we ought to put it to good use. So we made a little suggestion to Fitz and he agreed. And now you have an important role to play at tonight’s ball.”

Eliza felt her knees go suddenly weak. “What role?” she asked suspiciously.

Jenny’s smile broadened and she took Eliza by the arm. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she said, propelling her smoothly across the room and out into the candlelit corridor. “You don’t have any lines to remember. It’s what they call in the theater a walk-on part.”

“Jenny!” Eliza, suddenly very nervous, stopped dead in her tracks. “What are you talking about? Playing what part?”

“Relax, we’re doing it for Fitz.”

Terror gripping her, “Doing what? I don’t want to do anything but show up at the ball.”

Jenny’s disappointment was evident. “Didn’t you say that you treated him badly?”

Eliza dropped her head, saying grudgingly with some embarrassment, “Yeah.”

“Well, this is a chance for you to make it up to him,” Jenny said. “It’s just a small thing and it will make him happy.” Jenny’s tone softened and she looked into Eliza’s eyes. “Can’t you just trust me on this one and do it because Fitz would like it?”

“Jenny, I’m sorry,” Eliza replied, her heart suddenly filled with gratitude for this lovely and intelligent woman’s kindness to her, an outsider. With her voice trembling slightly, “What do I have to do?”

“Just do what I tell you,” Jenny said with a mysterious smile. “I promise you it will be completely painless.” She took Eliza’s arm and led her down the corridor and around a corner. They followed another, narrower, corridor—one that Eliza had not noticed before—to a brightly lit landing atop a staircase.

“Where does it go?” Eliza asked, squinting in the sudden glare at the ornate carved railings before her.

“See for yourself.” Jenny nudged her to the top of the landing.

Eliza moved forward and found herself looking down into the grand ballroom. The night before, the huge, high-ceilinged room had been lit by only a few flickering candles and so she had not noticed the staircase in the shadows at the far end. And today, when she had peeked briefly into the ballroom through a crack in the door, the stairs had been shielded from her view. Now she saw that they curved gracefully down to the end of the great chamber opposite the double doors.

Tonight Pemberley’s ballroom was illuminated by hundreds of candles glittering through the crystals of three large chandeliers that cast a magical glow on the glittering assembly below. As Eliza gazed down into the storybook scene an orchestra in a gallery at the opposite end of the room began to play and the shining floor was filled with the swirl of colorful gowns, elegant tailcoats and dazzling uniforms as the guests of the Rose Ball began to dance.

Enchanted by the marvelous spectacle Eliza could merely stand and watch, unable to imagine what role she could possibly be expected to play in this grand display. She turned and looked back to Jenny for reassurance, but the corridor behind her was empty.

Suddenly, someone down on the dance floor looked up and pointed at her. Following that cue, others began to look up, too. Eliza felt herself verging on panic as the dancing slowly came to a halt and an electric murmur ran through the crowded room. The orchestra fell silent.

Then a familiar figure dressed in gleaming boots and a coat of hunter green stepped out of the crowd and came to the bottom of the staircase.

Like a hero out of a dream, Fitzwilliam Darcy smiled up at Eliza and extended his hand to her.

At the same moment, Artemis Brown stepped onto a small balcony directly across from the landing where Eliza stood. The crowd fell silent as he began to speak in his deep, resonant baritone.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Artie announced, “it is our great honor to present to you Miss Eliza Knight, who this evening is portraying Rose Darcy, the inspiration for the first Rose Ball and the first mistress of Pemberley Farms.”

The guests began to applaud and the orchestra softly played a dramatic fanfare as Eliza tentatively placed one satin-slippered foot on the topmost step and slowly descended the stairs toward Darcy.

“In 1795 it was love at first sight for an adventurous Virginia horse breeder named Fitzwilliam Darcy when Miss Rose Elliot, the daughter of a socially prominent Baltimore banker, accompanied her father to the Shenandoah to bargain for several of Pemberley Farms’ renowned steeds,” Artemis continued. “But when the prosperous young Darcy proposed marriage the beautiful Rose rejected him, citing his rural farm as a poor substitute for the glittering pleasures of the Baltimore society she loved so well.”

Halfway down the stairs Eliza paused to gaze regally over the awestruck crowd, inclining her head and rewarding them with a smile. For, as she had begun her descent the turbulent emotions she had struggled with all day seemed to miraculously crystalize and she no longer feared what she must say to Darcy.

Artemis was still speaking as Eliza continued her slow, deliberate progress toward her waiting host. Nearing the foot of the staircase, she raised her hand in anticipation of receiving his touch.

“Determined to win her hand at any price,” Artemis read, “young Darcy immediately hired the most prominent architect in the United States and had him set about constructing this fine house. Other trusted individuals were sent off to scour the design salons and art galleries of Europe and the Americas, charged with furnishing the mansion with the finest of everything. And when next Miss Rose Elliot was scheduled to visit Pemberley Farms with her father, Darcy invited the cream of American society to attend a grand ball that he had named in her honor.

“So overwhelmed by her dashing swain’s gesture was the lovely Rose that she accepted his proposal of marriage that very evening. And ever after there has been a Rose Ball held at Pemberley Farms.”

Reaching the bottom of the stairs at the exact moment that Artie’s introduction concluded, Eliza looked directly into Darcy’s eyes and smiled. A thrill shot through him as he took her hand in his. As the assembly erupted into applause, he bent and kissed her hand, and then led her to the dance floor.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” she asked in a voice so soft that only he could hear.

Darcy grinned happily. “You might’ve said no.”

“I hope you’re not expecting me to perform some obscure nineteenth-century line dance now,” she replied, smiling for the benefit of his guests. “Because I don’t know any.”

“The one element of authenticity that we’ve let slide over the years at the Rose Ball is the dancing,” he said as the orchestra began to play. “Everybody seems to want to do the ones they already know, which is why the musicians are now playing a waltz that wasn’t even written until the mid-1800s.”

“Shocking!” Eliza relaxed and laughed as he took her into his arms and twirled her gracefully around the floor. Dozens of other smiling couples joined in, until the two of them were part of a large and joyous multitude of dancers.

“Fitz, why did you do this, the gown?” Eliza asked, looking up into his smiling eyes.

“You said you liked it,” he replied. She smiled to herself and her attempts to rationalize the gesture. She had said she liked it; it was as simple as that.

“Thank you for allowing me to wear it. I’m honored.”

“Eliza…” he began.

“Before you say anything,” she interrupted, “I want you to know that I’ve come to a decision, about the letters.” Eliza slowed and looked around the crowded floor. “I think I’d like you to hear what I have to say in private,” she told him.

Darcy nodded and led her off the floor and out through the ballroom doors. “We can go to my study,” he suggested.

Eliza shook her head, suddenly feeling slightly dizzy and overwhelmed by all that had happened. “No. I’d like to have some air. Please can we go outside, Fitz?”

Chapter 36

An open carriage was just depositing a quartet of late arrivals at the entrance as Darcy and Eliza stepped onto the torch-lit porch. Lucas, the elderly gatekeeper, stood next to the carriage. He was wearing a red coat and an elegant top hat. “Lovely evening, isn’t it Fitz?” Lucas greeted him.

Darcy nodded. “It is, Lucas. Have you got time to take us for a little drive around the property?”

“Why yes, I think we can arrange that,” Lucas replied, winking. Smiling at Darcy, he helped Eliza up into the soft leather seat. Darcy got into the carriage and sat opposite Eliza.

Lucas climbed into the driver’s seat and clucked softly to the horses, a beautiful pair of matched grays in a gleaming harness rig trimmed in silver, and started them moving down the drive.

Darcy leaned toward Eliza and took her hand, “You must allow me to tell you how lovely you look tonight,” he said. “Thanks for indulging Jenny and Artie and making that wonderful entrance to the ball. Rose Darcy herself couldn’t have made a better impression on our guests.”

Eliza flushed. “Somehow I doubt that,” she replied, “but I’ll be eternally grateful for the compliment.” Darcy released her hand and sat back in the seat, his eyes never leaving hers.

The carriage entered the green tunnel of trees beyond the house. Eliza took a deep breath. “I want you to know that I’ve thought this through very thoroughly,” she began, “and I won’t change my mind.”

Eliza searched Darcy’s face, unable to read his eyes in the dim glow of the carriage lamps. “Though we hardly know one another at all, I feel that I’ve come to understand you, Fitz,” she continued. “And I know that the reason you wanted my letters so desperately was to learn what Jane thought of you, what she was feeling and, perhaps, to confirm absolutely in your own mind that what happened to you in England three years ago was really true.”

Darcy nodded but said nothing.

“But those aren’t good enough reasons for me to give the letters to you,” Eliza hurried on with her explanation, “because the letters would probably become public anyway and you’d still have what you want.”

“Eliza…”

She saw the pain registering in Darcy’s face as the carriage moved out of the trees and into the light of the rising moon.

“Please,” she said gently, “let me finish.”

Darcy fell silent and they moved along through a rolling meadow filled with glimmering fireflies.

“Over the past two days I have gradually come to realize a very real truth about you. Sometimes it takes an outsider to see what you cannot see yourself.”

He turned his head toward her, his expression grim. “And what is the truth about me, Eliza?”

“Even if there were no letters,” she told him, “there would be no doubt in my mind that the story you told me actually happened.” She paused, watching his brow furrow in confusion. “And there should be no doubt in your mind as to how Jane Austen regarded you after you were gone,” she concluded.

“I don’t understand,” he murmured.

Eliza smiled. “Do not you, sir?” she asked, playfully mimicking the formal aristocratic language of Jane Austen’s Regency period. “Fitz, you are the essence of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy in every way. She wrote—or perhaps rewrote—Pride and Prejudice to make that character you. And in doing that she created the most romantic character in English literature—only you were real, and she made you real to anyone who’s ever read the book.”

Darcy fell back against his seat, speechless.

“Now,” said Eliza, “for my decision.”

“Your decision?” he breathed. “Didn’t you just tell me that it was your decision to keep the letters?”

“No, Fitz,” Eliza said, reaching into the silk bag she was carrying and removing the sealed letter from Jane Austen. “I only expressed the opinion that you didn’t need this,” displaying the unopened document, “to confirm anything.”

Smiling, she pressed the unopened letter into his hand. “But this is your letter. Jane wrote it to you, and whether it ever becomes public should be your decision alone, not mine.”

“Eliza, I… I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything,” she said with a smile. Eliza looked around, suddenly aware that the carriage had come to a halt at the far end of the moonlit lake. Lucas was standing up front with the horses, lighting his pipe and gazing off into the distance.

She looked up at the huge, glowing orb of the moon. “I think it’s bright enough out here and you’ve waited a long time, read it… now.”

Darcy looked up, as if noticing the moon for the first time. “Yes,” he said, “I believe it is light enough to read by. And I would like to read the letter now.”

He stepped out of the carriage. Then he reached in and took her hand. “We’ll read it together,” he said. “It belongs to both of us.”

Moments later, standing at a spot where a glittering path of moonlight across the water touched the shore, Darcy held up the letter and looked at Eliza. “You’re sure you want me to do this?” he asked.

She nodded and he broke the wax seal with a small snap, then unfolded the yellowing paper and began to silently read.

Something fell to the ground at Eliza’s feet and lay sparkling in the moonlight. Gathering up the folds of her gown, Eliza bent to retrieve the shiny object.

And then she began to laugh. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing I decided not to let Sotheby’s auction off this letter after all,” she said, holding up Darcy’s high-tech plastic business card.

Darcy stared at the holographic Darcy crest gleaming on the surface of the card, and then he, too, began to laugh. The sound of their voices melded, echoing merrily across the lake.

After a moment, Eliza grew serious again. Her mouth had suddenly gone dry and she felt the blood pounding in her temples as she lightly touched the fold of vellum in his hand. “What did Jane say, Fitz?”

“This letter was also written on the day I left,” he replied. Holding it up in the moonlight, he began to read aloud.

12 May, 1810

My Dearest Darcy,

Though you agreed that I should wait with you tonight, your expression told me you feared I might be breaking my heart for a love that can never be…

Darcy’s voice broke and he paused to clear his throat. He began again, his voice stronger now.

Oh how wrong you are to think like that. Do you not know that I of all women would gladly trade a single moment of love for a lifetime of wondering what such a moment might have been?

And though you have concerned yourself with my heart, let me now concern myself with yours. For somewhere in that faraway world of yours, I know there awaits your one true love. Find her, dearest! Find her whatever else you may do…

Darcy paused.

“Is that the end?” Eliza asked.

Darcy slowly shook his head. “No, she wrote one more thing,” he said.

And when she is found, you must tell her she is your dearest and loveliest desire. Be happy, my love.

Yours forever,

Jane

Eliza watched in stunned silence as Darcy carefully refolded the letter and slipped it into his coat pocket. Then he looked down at her and moved closer.

An eternity passed there in the moonlight as she waited for him to speak.

At length Darcy smiled and there were tears in his eyes as he lowered his face to hers and whispered, “Dearest, loveliest Eliza…”

Eliza smiled and closed her eyes, wondering if this was all just a marvelous dream.