Sally O'Rourke - The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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