Sally O'Rourke - The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

“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.

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.