Sally O'Rourke - The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

“We’re doing the place cards now !” Jenny insisted, taking her firmly by the elbow and guiding her toward the house. Looking like a pup that’s just been plucked from its litter, Faith reluctantly allowed herself to be led away.

Darcy grinned as Jenny glanced back over her shoulder and winked at him.

He found Eliza sitting on a large flat rock with her jeans rolled up and her bare feet in the placid green water. She was holding a pad in her lap and intently drawing with pastels. He stood unnoticed, watching her work. The image of her on the balcony only a short time before flooded his memory. She was breathtaking; he wondered at the strong emotions this woman seemed to evoke in him. Once again raven-haired beauty came to mind, as the sunlight played among the highlights in her hair, much like the candlelight had at the library exhibit. Sighing deeply, he smiled at the pleasant warmth that permeated his body.

Stepping closer, Darcy asked, as he sat down beside her on the rock, “May I see your drawing?”

Eliza grimaced, then handed over the pad. He looked at it and raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

Without immediately answering he closely examined her brilliantly colored rendering of himself astride the black horse. To Darcy’s utter amazement this complete stranger had perfectly captured the precise moment when he and Lord Nelson had leaped over the stone wall into the blinding dazzle of sunlight.

“Very much,” he said after a long pause, “but not at all what I was expecting.” Darcy’s mind was working furiously in an attempt to derive some meaning from the fact that his visitor had composed this startling picture based on nothing more than his verbal description of an event that had taken place three years before.

Eliza took back her pad with a smile. “I told you,” she said before he could form the question he longed to ask, “my specialty is fantasy .”

Her reply sounded enough like a taunt to make Darcy’s face suddenly redden. “Meaning?” he asked defensively.

“Meaning,” she answered with no hint of mockery in her tone, “that I’d like to hear the rest of your story now.”

Sighing, Darcy gazed down at her reflection in the shimmering surface of the lake. On the one hand he felt like jumping to his feet and screaming at her to go back to New York and leave him in his misery. But there was something else that stopped him, some powerful message in the expectant way she scrunched her shoulders forward, waiting for him to begin, that told him Eliza Knight was willing to be convinced.

“I remained in Jane’s bedroom at Chawton Cottage for the next three days,” he said, “eavesdropping on her conversations and pretending to be asleep or unconscious.”

Darcy closed his eyes, remembering the smell and feel of the soft, rose-scented featherbed, the same intoxicating scent that he had come to associate with Jane herself.

“Very gradually I reached the impossible but inescapable conclusion that I was neither dreaming nor insane,” he continued, forming a new picture in his mind of Jane’s gentle countenance and lively, sparkling eyes. “By then, of course, I had also realized who she was.”

Darcy smiled. “God knows I had heard enough while I was growing up about Jane Austen, the great English novelist who had nearly ruined the distinguished Darcy family name. But where had she gotten the name in the first place? The family always naturally assumed that she had somehow heard of my ancestor and liked the sounds of his name and estate. But there I was, lying in her bed. The implications of that were maddening, especially since it seemed evident that she had never heard the name Darcy until my arrival at Chawton.

“Anyway,” he said, “for three days Jane and her sister, Cassandra, took turns sitting with me. And whenever they left me alone for a few minutes I would get up and take a few halting steps around the room, praying I would become strong enough to escape before the kindly Mr. Hudson subjected me to fresh medical horrors.”

As he had done morning and evening for the past three days, the bombastic Mr. Hudson stood over Darcy’s bed, thoughtfully examining the forehead of his apparently unconscious patient. “His wound is healing splendidly,” the physician pronounced, running his none-too-clean fingers over the tender, pink tissues of the wound on Darcy’s scalp.

Hudson turned to Jane who was standing apprehensively beside the fireplace, watching. “The scar will be completely hidden by his hair,” the old doctor happily predicted. Then, with a worried frown for what her august brother might think if a cure was not soon effectuated, he asked, “But you say he hasn’t spoken again?”

Jane shook her head. “He has said not a word since the first night,” she affirmed, this time having no need to lie. For it was true that the handsome American lying in her bed had uttered not a sound since she had heard him murmuring in his fever three nights earlier.

She did not mention to Hudson that late at night, when she was alone at her writing, she sometimes experienced an eerie sensation that the stranger’s eyes were upon her, watching and secretly scrutinizing her every move. Once or twice the feeling had grown so strong that she had actually whirled about to look at him.

But always she had found Darcy’s eyes tightly shut, his breathing deep and regular. Odd, she thought. So very odd.

Distracted as she was by those thoughts, it took a moment before Jane realized that Mr. Hudson was again speaking to her. She returned her attention to the old doctor and found him leaning over Darcy.

“Hmmm, an extraordinary case,” Hudson muttered, stroking the tuft of snowy whiskers on his chin. “Extraordinary.” He finally straightened and cocked his head. “Perhaps I should treat him with an injection of mercury or stinging wasps,” he ruminated aloud. “Well, we shall see how he looks this evening and then decide which treatment shall be better. For it is a sad fact that many patients cannot tolerate the effects of such strong systemic poisons, though they often have the beneficial effect of shocking the brain back to activity.”

Jane wisely said nothing, but waited until the doctor closed up his bag and then escorted him out of the room.

The instant the door closed behind them Darcy’s eyes popped open and he got out of bed, feeling both ridiculous and vulnerable in the long linen nightshirt he wore.

He shuffled barefoot to the window and pulled aside the lace curtains to peek outside. In the garden below he saw Cassandra standing at the gate, speaking with Hudson. Beyond them, a heavy post coach rumbled through the tiny village, scattering a cloud of squawking ducks and chickens in its wake. Then all was silent again.

“Mercury and stinging wasps!” Darcy whispered the frightening words in abject terror as his mind conjured up horrible visions of the bumbling Mr. Hudson working his medieval tortures.

Though the gash on his forehead was indeed healing nicely and hardly gave him any pain at all now, he was still unsteady on his feet. He had been hoping to become just a little stronger before seeking out his clothes and departing from Chawton Cottage under cover of darkness, hopefully to reclaim his horse and return to the spot where he had stepped into this nightmare.

But Hudson’s last pronouncement had convinced the unwilling patient that he must escape before the old doctor returned and managed to do him some lasting harm. Darcy had, over the past few days, come to understand that he had been incredibly lucky so far. Because it was clear that Mr. Hudson’s outrageous treatments with catgut and leeches actually represented the cutting edge of early nineteenth-century medical technology. However, Darcy had no confidence that he could even survive another round of bleeding, much less wasps and applications of mercury.