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.”