The Austen Playbook

by Lucy Parker

  “Christ,” he muttered, pulling a photo album from one of the boxes. “Does that woman’s mouth ever stop moving? I’m surprised the butler hasn’t thrown her out of the turret.”

  “She’s lonely.” Freddy had realised it before they’d reached the first flower patch. “All her stories and anecdotes were about people who’ve been dead for decades. She didn’t mention any friends now. No relatives who visit. And I can’t imagine the butler is a great conversationalist. It takes him about a month and a half to finish enunciating one sentence. I feel very sorry for her. Her way with words probably puts people off.” She bit back a small spike of amusement. “I think she’s recognised a kindred spirit in you. Bet she sees the son she never had.”

  The tarnished trophy Griff was holding made a bang when he set it down too heavily on the table. “Thanks for that. As I wasn’t going to have enough trouble sleeping after the nightmare of the porcelain cat collection.”

  “For a man who grew up in a house with blowjob carvings on the library mantel, you’re very judgmental of other people’s décor.”

  Ignoring that, he said cuttingly, “And credit me with a little finesse.” She’d succeeded in cracking through the shield again. She preferred the pissy Griff to the blank-wall Griff. “There have been one or two occasions when I managed to handle people’s never-ending bullshit in a tactful way.”

  “Have there? Well, make sure you give me a nudge when it happens. I wouldn’t want to miss that.” She blew the dust from a framed photo. “Look, Henrietta’s in this one.” She handed it to Griff, who gave it a cursory glance. “Wanda’s perspective on Henrietta wasn’t quite what I’m used to hearing.”

  “Yeah, well, no two people will ever see or remember someone in the same way. We’re all the product of other people’s biases.” Griff reached around to grab a stack of cardboard folders, and Freddy caught her breath at just that brief, warm press of his body. “Wanda obviously didn’t like Henrietta, so she remembers all her less attractive qualities. Your father was brought up to see his mother as a role model for success, so he painted an overly rosy picture of her, and passed that view along to you. Neither is the sum total of the woman, just—pieces of her, depending on where you’re standing and what angle you’re seeing.”

  “Dad is her son. He ought to know more about her than a woman who met her a few times at house parties.”

  “He ought to, I agree.”

  “Henrietta was very talented.”

  “Undeniably.”

  “And family loyalty isn’t a bad thing. We all like to believe the best of the people we love.”

  “Except in your father’s case, I suspect there’s another angle involved. Money and influence. Thanks to Henrietta, Rupert has gained a lot of both, and I imagine he foresees continuing opportunities to build on that with you.”

  She stiffened at that voicing of her own private thoughts, and Griff shoved his hand through his hair. It was such an uncharacteristically ruffled gesture from the master of imperturbability that it cut short any defensive retort she might have made.

  “My claim of possessing tact was obviously premature.” His mouth compressed. “You’re such a...fundamentally positive person,” he said, as if he were accusing her of a mortal sin. “I seem to be the only person who can upset you without even trying.”

  Freddy considered that, playing with the brown tape on the box she was trying to open. “No,” she said after a moment. “There are a handful of people in my life with the power to upset me. But most of them have been in my life since I was born. You do seem to be an...anomaly in my experience, but it’s not because you can make me cry.”

  Rain was starting to patter against the windows, which were barred. In conjunction with the grey walls and iron fixtures, it wasn’t the jolliest nursery Freddy had ever seen, but it seemed to suit the sudden tension between them.

  When Griff said nothing, she took a deep breath and looked into the box she’d managed to wrestle open. It was full of old notebooks and playbills, which she would usually find interesting, but right now her mind was skittering over the surface of everything. She picked up a pile of letters, absently. They were neatly folded and tied together with a ribbon, which she undid. She could hear Griff’s breathing over the light pit pat of raindrops.

  Darling Vi... The writing was faded but unmistakably masculine—a hasty, barely legible scrawl.

  Her eyes focusing, Freddy unfolded the top piece of paper and turned it over to read the signature.

  All love, Billy.

  “I think these are the letters Wanda mentioned.” She felt as if she’d intruded on Violet’s privacy just reading that simple, affectionate sign-off. “Your Great-Aunt Violet and her mystery man.”

  It seemed to take a long time for him to appear at her side. He reached down for a letter, turned it over, and smoothed it out.

  “You can’t read it,” Freddy said, and it seemed to make him more comfortable to give her his usual impatience glance.

  “You’re the one who endorsed making Violet a fully fledged person rather than a symbol of pathetic pathos in the film. In order to depict a person with some degree of accuracy, I’m afraid you have to get into their personal space.”

  “I can’t see you ever letting anyone push their way into yours,” she muttered.

  Without looking up and with no inflection in his voice, he said, “Can’t you.”

  After a few seconds of fidgeting, nosiness won out over her conscience, and Freddy picked up another of the letters. This was one that Violet had written to Billy. Halfway down the page, she set the rest aside and felt for the small child-size chair nearby. It was built for baby backsides, but she perched gingerly, her fingers touching the ink as she read.

  And as she read, the walls of the room seemed to shrink in around her.

  When she reached the final words, she sat holding it. Then she reached for the next letter and started scanning through the sentences, her frown and an odd, buzzing sensation inside her growing. Pulling her phone from her bag, she found the website for her local library and searched through the catalogue until she found the classic texts in the e-docs section. She filtered to drama, and scrolled to the C section.

  She opened the script for The Velvet Room.

  “What’s the matter?” There was a rough undertone in Griff’s voice, and a hint of concern in his eyes, when she lifted her head some time later, jerked out of someone else’s past. He had cast aside the letter he’d been reading, and was back to going through dry-looking files.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been in a daze for almost twenty minutes. What, are they rife with the Wythburn Group’s so-called deviancy?”

  “No.” Freddy looked at him silently. Their recent conversation was repeating in her head like a faulty audio file. She hesitated, then, carefully, she refolded the letter she was holding and returned it to the pile. “They’re beautiful.”

  She pushed up from the chair and came back to his side, running the stack of letters through her fingers. “There was obviously a long separation, and then they met again, and they wrote to each other for months. They wrote beautiful things.”

  Slowly, she handed them to him. “She must have been a remarkable person. To have inspired that. And everyone seems to have written her off as a nonentity.”

  Griff’s eyes had narrowed. “That look isn’t because you’ve gone sentimental over someone else’s love letters.”

  She rallied enough to retort, “Some of us do find other people’s stories genuinely affecting. Isn’t that fortunate for you, Mr. Filmmaker.”

  “Freddy.”

  “He’s Robert.”

  “What?”

  Freddy nodded down at the letters in his hand. “Violet’s Billy. He’s Robert. In The Velvet Room. Billy’s life, his family, the things he says in these letters. They’ve been ripped apart and laid ba
re in the play. And the romantic plotline in the script between Robert and Anna—it’s Billy’s relationship with Violet. From what’s been written and the bits and pieces people have said, I don’t think the replication is quite as explicit as the characterisation of Robert, but Anna is Violet.”

  Griff didn’t question her judgment. He gave a silent whistle—and she didn’t miss the gleam that appeared in his eyes. Mr. Filmmaker coming swiftly to the surface. A new angle to play out onscreen, and one potentially rife with human interest possibilities. “Wanda wasn’t wrong, then. Henrietta wasn’t shy about making use of other people’s secrets.”

  “No. I guess not,” Freddy said, and Griff suddenly put down the letters and cupped her cheeks in his palms, stroking his thumbs over the delicate skin beneath her troubled eyes.

  “Freddy. Whatever you discover about Henrietta, whatever your father’s actions, whatever anyone else does, it doesn’t have any reflection on you. And it doesn’t have to have any effect on you unless you let it.”

  She placed her hands over his, tracing circles on the bones of his knuckles and down to his wrists. The light scattering of hairs there were pleasantly silky, a sensual prickle that she felt in her spine as well as her fingertips. Her touch was as gentle as his, but her words were serious. “That’s not how life works, though. Is it? The decisions you make always affect other people. And if it’s people you care about—”

  A small crease carved out between his brows. He ran his thumb over the curve of her own eyebrow, but whatever he was going to say was lost when the door opened and the butler, whom nobody had bothered to introduce yet, cleared his throat. “I did knock,” the man said, with heavy, ponderous disapproval. “I was unaware that you were...consorting.”

  Under his minatory gaze, Freddy felt as if they’d been caught with her bra unhooked and Griff’s trousers around his ankles. She was uncharacteristically embarrassed.

  She was yet to see Griff properly fazed by anything, but he’d recognised her discomfort. A new hardness came into the long lines of his body, and Freddy dropped her hands to rest on his chest, pressing there lightly to try to ward off the impending ice-blast.

  “A small demonstration of how you handle people’s bullshit in a tactful way,” she suggested, turning her head away from their critical audience to murmur, and Griff’s arm went around her waist.

  His hand moved, warm on her back. “For future reference, are you in the habit of remembering everything a person says and using it against them?”

  Even in the slightly dazed cloud she was in, even with his frequently irascible remarks, and the looming upsets on the horizon, he had become this little thread of constant light to fix upon. Freddy looked up at him through her lashes. “I never said we didn’t have anything in common.”

  A hint of an answering smile, that disappeared when he looked with cool politeness at the butler. “We lost track of time. In fact—” he turned the arm still holding Freddy to check his watch “—I have a couple more questions to ask Ms. Wanamaker, and then if she’d allow me to borrow some of her belongings here for a short time, we should be getting back.”

  “You may find that difficult,” the butler said without expression. “The Littlebourne Fog has descended.”

  Somehow, everything the man said gave Freddy the feeling that they ought to be enacting this scene in black-and-white, with a cello playing ominous notes in the background.

  “What’s that?” she asked. “It sounds like a war helicopter.”

  The butler was not amused. “The weather, miss. Several times a year, the fog comes from the direction of Littlebourne Copse and envelops this part of the country. It’s unusually thick, and driving conditions are always dangerous.”

  Griff stalked over to the barred window, bent to look out, and swore.

  “Is it heavy?” Freddy asked.

  “Like trying to see through a wall of smoke. There was no mention of fog on the weather forecast.”

  “Nobody ever predicts the Littlebourne Fog,” the butler said, with a hint of smugness.

  When he’d gone, Freddy said, “I hope we’re not going to be delayed too long. Because I think the next scene in the film is where you go out to the car and come back to find me chained to a table in the basement.”

  “Acting in a murder mystery is not having a good effect on you. I am going out to the car, to check exactly how dangerous these driving conditions are. If you’re not here when I come back, I’ll know where to look.”

  As she listened to his footsteps going down the stairs, Freddy picked up Violet and Billy’s letters again, and reread the passage that was sticking in her mind the most. She was reading something into it that wasn’t there. It wasn’t really possible.

  Was it?

  That worm of disquiet was still wriggling in her stomach.

  She jumped when Griff came back into the room a few minutes later, his face more thunderous than the summer storm outside.

  “We’re going to be delayed longer than expected. The car won’t start.”

  Freddy dragged her mind into the current problem. “Well—fix it, then.”

  “I’ll just pull out my toolbox and magically do that, shall I?”

  “You’ve been doing lots of DIY around the theatre.”

  “Does that automatically mean I know how to fix a car?”

  Oh. She’d trodden on the masculine ego. “Is there a mechanic around here?” She anticipated his response. “They wouldn’t be able to get here with the fog.” She blew out a breath. “Okay, so—we’ll have to wait it out?”

  “Short of trying to walk home, and probably ending up in Birmingham, there don’t seem to be many other options.”

  Freddy checked the time on her phone. It was already after five. “Wanda probably wants to have her dinner soon. That’s a bit awkward.” She frowned. There was a text from Akiko. A delicately worded, horror-struck message about Sabrina and Ferren. She’d have to send through the latest update on that situation soon, since it looked like Ferren was about to enter from stage left. Like the villain in panto.

  Hiss, boo.

  “What’s wrong?” For someone she’d once thought had the sensitivity of a concrete block, Griff was rapidly becoming skilful at reading her.

  “My older sister is back with her ex, and her friends aren’t happy about it. Neither am I.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s Joe Ferren,” she said wryly, and Griff lifted his brows.

  “Hasn’t he—”

  “Just signed on to render Mr. Knightley completely unattractive to me forever more? Yes. Are we going to be living under the same roof? Yes. Is this summer turning out to be nothing like what I expected? Yes again.” Freddy shook her head. “Never mind. One problem at a time. I suppose we’d better go and update Wanda on—”

  “I’ve already told her. She was hovering in the driveway and pounced the moment I appeared.”

  “James tells me that your car won’t start.” Wanda sailed into the room then, and hopefully didn’t hear that derisive remark. For a second, Freddy had no idea who James was. She kept forgetting Griff’s real name. “The local man at the garage is a conman, but he can probably fix it. You won’t get him out here until the weather clears, though. Life comes to a standstill around here during the fog. You’ll have to stay the night.”

  Griff did a much better job at concealing his reaction than Freddy did.

  She wiped the dismay from her face when Wanda turned back in her direction.

  “I hope you’re not on one of these fad diets,” Wanda said with a beady look at Freddy’s midsection. Freddy immediately felt like she had a waistline the approximate circumference of the Gherkin. “Arthur is making a roast dinner.”

  Finally, their butler friend had a name, Freddy supposed, since the only other living body she’d seen in the house was the parrot in the c
onservatory. She doubted it was downstairs making gravy. “We’re so sorry about this. But we don’t want to put you out. We’ll just—”

  “If you were putting me out, I would say so,” Wanda said, and she probably would. She even favoured them with a smile before she bustled out “to check there were enough Brussels sprouts.”

  “I think she’s grateful for the company,” Freddy said, and Griff propped his hands on his waist and released an annoyed breath.

  “Yes. If the conman at the garage finds that the spark plugs have mysteriously disappeared, we’ll know what she was doing in the driveway.”

  Despite everything, Freddy couldn’t help smiling. “I hope you weren’t this rude to her face.”

  “She thinks I’m very personable.” He returned her stare. “What?”

  “Acting lessons with Freddy. I am now demonstrating ‘boggled.’ This is my boggled face.”

  By the time Arthur served them a very delicious roast dinner in a very scary dining room, the fog had grown even thicker.

  “Did you call Highbrook?” Freddy asked, trying not to keep making eye contact with the stone gargoyle head on the wall.

  Griff picked up his wineglass. “I spoke to Charlie. The weather’s packed up at home, too. The Littlebourne Fog has got ambitious reach today.”

  “Pity you weren’t getting some location shots. Very atmospheric.”

  “Indeed. Eventful things often happen during the fog. It descended the weekend of the house party in question,” Wanda said through a mouthful of potato, and added unexpectedly, “Many a love affair has begun under cover of the Littlebourne Fog.”

  Freddy’s eyes met Griff’s over a vase of poorly looking roses. He quirked a brow, and she was horrified to feel herself blush. She hadn’t blushed around men since she was sixteen, and now it was becoming a regular occurrence.

  Fortunately, Griff chose to exercise some tact and changed the subject, asking Wanda the question Freddy had been wondering all day. “Why did the affair between my grandfather and Henrietta Carlton end, do you know? Who broke it off?”