‘It’s hard to believe you’re brothers,’ Lizzy agreed, and grinned. ‘You’re much more fun.’
Her thoughts drifted, as they often did, to Hugh Darcy. Like his namesake, Hugh wasn’t an easy man to know. His aloof manner and reserve marked him – unfairly – as a snob. The fact that he was also a barrister, and in line to be the Twelfth Earl of Darcy, did little to mitigate the rather forbidding first impression he made.
Now, with the filming of Pride and Prejudice at Cleremont, and costumed actors bringing Elizabeth and Darcy’s story to life, Lizzy couldn’t help but get caught up in excitement.
Her fingers tightened on Harry’s arm. ‘Look… over there! Isn’t it… it is! It’s Ciaran Duncan.’
He followed her gaze to a man in breeches and boots who lounged back in a canvas chair, long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles before him, studying a script.
‘Yes.’ Disapproval was plain on Harry’s face. ‘He’s playing Wickham. Perfect casting, that.’
‘What do you mean?’
Before he could elaborate, his mother approached, a mobile phone in her hand.
‘Harry, darling, you’ll never guess the news I’ve just had.’
‘In that case,’ he said with a slight smile, ‘there’s no use my guessing, is there?’
‘None at all.’ She turned to Lizzy with a polite smile. ‘Hello, Elizabeth. How is your father getting on?’
‘Very well, thank you, Lady Darcy. I brought some scones he baked this morning. Blueberry,’ she added.
‘Lovely,’ Harry’s mother murmured. ‘The vicar’s baked goods are always such a welcome… surprise.’
Lizzy suppressed a smile. That was Lady D’s polite way of saying that the lumpy, misshapen creations her father termed ‘muffins’, ‘breads’, ‘scones’ and ‘cakes’ – well intentioned though they might be – were usually inedible.
She turned back to her youngest son. ‘I’ve just had a text. Your brother’s coming home next week for a visit.’
‘What? Hugh’s coming home?’ Surprise flickered on his face. ‘I thought he was stuck in Hare Court, locked away in chambers for the entire summer.’
‘Not this time,’ his mother said with satisfaction. ‘He says he’ll be home for at least a month, and…’ – she paused for effect – ‘… he has an announcement to make.’
Lizzy scarcely heard another word Lady Darcy said; her happiness was too great.
Hugh Darcy was coming home.
She remembered how kind he’d been in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Although Mrs Bennet’s demise was not unexpected, after the cancer claimed her it nevertheless left her husband and daughters desolate and all but inconsolable with grief.
‘You must always think of Cleremont as your home,’ Hugh had told Lizzy as he took her, numb and reeling with anguish, into his arms. ‘We’ll always be here for you.’
Her sixteen-year-old heart had been comforted by his arms around her and the knowledge that, so long as the Darcy family lived next door, she need never feel alone. And somehow, mixed up in his words of reassurance and comfort, Lizzy found something more than solace…
…she found a deep and abiding love for Hugh.
Like Elizabeth Bennet, Lizzy had lost her heart to the Darcy heir. She’d harboured a secret hope that her own life would follow the fiction, and that someday she might become Hugh’s wife.
Hard to believe eight years had gone by since then.
In that time, she’d finished school and gone on to university; lost her virginity to a boy she thought she loved who, unfortunately (or luckily, perhaps) didn’t return her feelings; and got herself a job as a slush pile reader with a publishing house in Clerkenwell.
And although Lizzy and Hugh kept in sporadic touch through email and texts, life too often got in the way. She loved her job at Aphrodite Books. The company was laughably small, publishing mostly out-of-print and forgotten material, but it acquired a certain bijoux cachet, and it became Lizzy’s job to sort through the unsolicited manuscripts to find the ‘jewels in the slush’.
That was how she had met Mark Knightley, whose novel landed in her reading pile. Lizzy was captivated by the story. Aphrodite’s owner, Willa Candlish, readily agreed, and acquired the book on Lizzy’s recommendation.
It was a heady time. There were editorial meetings, lunches with Willa and Mark, and, best of all, the friendship that had grown between Lizzy and Mark, her first (and, as it happened, only) literary discovery. More amazing still was discovering that Mark was the son of one of her father’s closest friends at seminary.
Soon the editorial lunches were shared à deux with Mark in out-of-the-way cafes or quiet hotel restaurants. And late one afternoon, as the rain pelted down outside, he and Lizzy finished their lunches at a hotel bar and ended in a room upstairs, where they’d spent the rest of the afternoon in bed…
‘Places, everyone. Places!’
Lizzy looked up with a guilty start. The director stood once again below the terrace, and the actors had drifted back, ready to resume filming.
‘I’d better get back home,’ she said, and touched Harry’s arm. ‘Will you come to Daddy’s garden party next Sunday? He’d love to see you; it’s been ages.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘He’s making strawberry scones especially for the occasion.’
Harry pretend-groaned. ‘Thanks for the warning. Your father’s scones are legendary here in South Devon.’
‘Yes, they are,’ Lizzy agreed, ‘and for all the wrong reasons. But I won’t tell him if you won’t.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘See you on Sunday, then? I’ll send an invitation so you don’t forget.’
‘Oh, I expect I’ll see you before that. I’ve asked Emma to the Longbourne regatta next Saturday.’
‘Oh? And did she say yes?’
‘She did. I may actually succeed in prying her away from your father for an entire day.’
Emma, the elder of Lizzy’s two sisters, managed the Bennet household and prepared most of the family’s meals.
Although Mr Bennet had no real need of a housekeeper, he had resigned himself to Emma’s superior will, hiding himself away at every opportunity in his study, and leaving his firstborn daughter to manage the day-to-day running of the household.
‘Good,’ Lizzy said. ‘Perhaps you’ll stay to dinner afterwards? And don’t worry,’ she hastened to add, ‘I’m cooking, not Daddy.’
‘In that case,’ Harry assured her with a grin, ‘I’ll be there.’
‘It’s like something out of a film,’ Holly James breathed as the hire car proceeded down a lengthy, tree-lined drive and emerged from the shade and into the sunshine.
Cleremont sprawled before them on a knoll overlooking gently rolling hills, lush now with early summer greenery. Holly lowered her window and thrust her head out to get a better look, breathing in the scent of roses and honeysuckle and listening to the sound of silence, and felt as if the heat and traffic of London they’d so recently left behind was nothing more than a bad memory.
Slightly below and to the left of the house she glimpsed a folly, and a lake with swans gliding serenely on the surface. Cleremont