Sally O'Rourke: The Man Who Loved Jane Austen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All but one.

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

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

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

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

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

MESSAGE:

Was Darcy from Pride and Prejudice a real person?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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