Page 5 of Inventing Mr Darcy

“Anything for you, Elle.” He punctuates that assertion with a flip of his dark blond, shoulder-length hair, which makes it difficult to avoid his blue, blue eyes.

But I dutifully focus my attention on the center monitor, where the real work happens, as I make the formatting modifications that allow the document to appear a short while later on the monitor to my right, now as a blue hyperlinked title at the bottom of the long, indexed list of file names: the AUSTEN-C database as the world sees it.

“That’s bloody brilliant,” he says as he watches a manuscript he rescued from obscurity be transformed into something thousands of people can read and use. “Too bad it’s about embroidery. God, I’d love to find something marvelous the whole world’s forgotten.”

I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, Who wouldn’t?

I mean, besides the thrill of discovery, there’s also the potential for fame and glory, or at least the academic equivalent of it. Chances are, though, anything a grad student finds won’t be much good, objectively speaking. Great books don’t disappear, even after two hundred years.

But even if what we find is awful, absolutely hackery, it would still be new to us. And that’s what really matters. Because the crowning project for every doctoral student is a dissertation, a study that makes some original contribution to their field. A discovery like Geoff’s talking about would be a one-way ticket out and up.

Holding out for that kind of breakthrough, something I can really sink my teeth into, is partly why I’m still here.

I raise my finger to the screen to draw his attention to a line at the end of the published document. “For now, you’ll have to settle for this.”

He squints. “GW96. What’s that?”

“That’s you,” I say. “Pedersen wanted to make sure everything can be traced back to the person who located it, so we get credit for our work.” Using the finder’s initials and the last two digits of their birth year was my idea.

“Wait a minute. Does that mean the EB98 all over the database is—?”

“Me? Yeah. I suppose that’s why I’m a little possessive of this thing.”

“Perfectly understandable,” he says. “I’d feel the same if I were in your shoes.”

Which, of course, he will be soon enough.

“So,” I say a little tightly as I shift to the next task, “that process was relatively quick, but uploading Austen will be a different story. All of her work is in the public domain, of course, meaning it won’t be hard to find.” With a few clicks on the keyboard, I locate authoritative online versions of the texts of all six of Austen’s novels. “File format is another matter, however. The database requires certain specifications, so I start by downloading the files,” I explain, suiting my actions to my words, “and then converting them.” This part will take a while, because on average, each novel is well over 100,000 words.

As Geoff leans in closer to watch what I’m doing, he reaches out his hand, intending to rest his palm on the desktop for balance. His little finger catches the brim of my cup, still half full of wine. I hear his low, apologetic curse, watch the cup tilt as if in slow motion. Before either of us can scramble to right it, there’s a puddle of blood-red liquid spreading across the desk.

And that’s when the beeping starts.

I jerk my attention to the center monitor, which is now inexplicably blank, just the tiny vertical line of a flashing cursor in the lower left corner. My frown is reflected in the screen.

Suddenly lines of text begin to appear. But instead of Austen’s famously precise and elegant sentences, something else gradually fills the screen. Her words are now intermingled with … well, I’m not sure what to call it. Not Austen, at any rate.

“I think you should go,” I tell Geoff. After all, the database is still my responsibility.

Given the disaster unfolding both on and in front of the monitor, he’s not inclined to argue. I’m so busy mopping up wine with what used to be my favorite hoodie, I hardly hear the door close behind him.

For a long moment, all I can do is watch dumbfounded as these lines of text, a jumbled mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols, scroll slowly upward. Then, resigned to a serious tongue-lashing, I grab my phone to call for help.

No service—it happens sometimes in the basement. But there’s an office phone on the corner of the desk, mostly hidden behind the monitors because I never use it. Now I scramble for the receiver, dial five digits for an on-campus number, and wait for it to ring.

Beep-beep. A beat of silence follows, during which I drum my fingernails on the desk.

Beep-beep. Another beat.

Click.

“IT help desk; Fisher Davis speaking.”

Twice in one day? What fabulous luck.

Though I’m tempted to hang up and pretend this call never happened, a fresh stream of gibberish crawls across the center monitor, urging me to forge ahead. “Hey, Fisher. It’s, um, Elle.” I’m so determined to sound casual, I catch myself twining my index finger in the curled cord running from the handset to the base of the telephone, like a character in a movie from 1984. “Listen, I was trying to do an upload to AUSTEN-C—”

“Nothing better to do on a Friday night?”