The Austen Playbook

by Lucy Parker

“What’s the matter?” Griff asked under his breath, with foreboding. He’d had a nagging feeling that tonight’s challenges were not quite kicked to the curb.

  “Stay here,” Charlie whispered, checking the screen at the side of the room to make sure the camera trained on the audience wasn’t doing a reaction shot. He stood quickly. “I’ll check it out.”

  Griff stuck out his leg to prevent him vanishing and leaving it at that. “Check what out?”

  Charlie’s words were a quiet hiss before he hopped over Griff’s foot and made a dart for the door. “My alarm system’s gone off. Someone’s broken into the garage.”

  For God’s sake.

  Griff shook his head, but didn’t make a move after Charlie. His brother was experimenting with wireless apps and controls where his cars were concerned; he’d given Griff a rather diffident tour this afternoon in a transparent attempt to take his mind off the fight with Freddy. Chances were it was a false alarm, but either way, the countryside wasn’t exactly rife with cases of grand theft auto, Charlie could handle himself, and Griff was where he needed to be.

  Freddy’s scene ended onstage. She was replaced with the actors playing Frederick Wentworth and Anne Elliot, and his gaze wandered to the polished carvings on the pillars around them. The camera crew had realised only this evening exactly what the carvings depicted, which had resulted in a flurry of last-minute adjustments to ensure there were no high-definition close-ups on them. One brief shot on the sculpture behind Anne’s head and the studio would be hit with at least a dozen letters from the country’s armchair complainers.

  The audience produced a collective “aww” noise as Wentworth overacted an affecting line.

  Griff had to admit, despite the weeks of upset, the endless string of problems—it was quite something to see The Henry finally coming alive.

  In the front row his parents appeared to be engrossed in the play, but their heads lowered and he saw the flash of a turning page as his mother scrawled something in her ever-present notebook. His chest moved with a sigh. God knew what they were planning now.

  If he woke up in a few months’ time and they’d constructed a miniature Pemberley on the north lawn, he was asking Freddy how she felt about travel and boarding the next plane to New Zealand.

  There was no sign of Rupert in the audience. His mouth tightened.

  The man was going to come out of this situation with a more spotless reputation than he deserved. He could at least make the effort to pretend he gave a shit about his daughter’s happiness.

  Onstage, George Knightley came in, still moping about his girlfriend being used for target practice, which was frankly the least convincing reaction in the entire play. Emma Woodhouse was a divisive character at the best of times; as played by Sadie, she was so astronomically irritating that even her lover ought to privately rejoice when she was turned into a kebab.

  Griff had no compunction about his satisfaction over Sadie’s early exit, but he hoped she wasn’t making things difficult for Freddy backstage.

  They had enough to worry about where she was concerned.

  As the set swung around on its oiled hinges, Freddy, Maya, and Waitely returned to the scene, and Freddy flung herself across a sofa with a sigh of dramatic exhaustion. Curling into a lethargic ball, she pitched her voice into an impressively grating whine of complaint, and Waitely’s Darcy responded with a very understandable eye-roll.

  Griff knew this scene. He’d listened to Freddy repeating her lines for this one for over an hour, and had occasionally unwillingly filled in the other parts for her. He could recite Maya’s next line with her.

  Unfortunately, as Maya froze, the camera directed at her face, beaming out live across the UK, she herself clearly couldn’t remember a word of it.

  * * *

  Maya had forgotten her line. Her face remained blank, but Freddy had been working with her so intensely that she could see, with crystal clarity, the panic in her eyes. She had been struggling all night, obviously finding it difficult to recover from the shock of the interview. She was a good person who’d made a bad mistake, and the guilt was transparently overwhelming her. She was such an experienced actor that she’d carried it through adequately despite her distraction—but heading into the final scenes, it had apparently become too much for her.

  Her fingers gripping the silk brocade beneath her, Freddy glanced at Dylan, and saw the tension come into his stance. Luckily, Darcy was still one for military posture even at this late stage in the plot.

  Finally, after a few seconds that felt an absolute age, Maya’s brain stumbled out of its frightened inertia and she blurted out her line. She was word-perfect.

  Unfortunately, she’d just cued them into the wrong scene variation.

  Freddy’s follow-up line to that piece of dialogue would reference the untimely stabbing of John Willoughby. Which, in this version of the play, had not happened.

  It was her turn to falter. She pushed up from the chaise longue, her ears buzzing, feeling slightly detached from her own body. She hadn’t been so aware of the cameras all night, and the compulsion to turn and look directly into the lens pulsed through her, a panicked reaction.

  She wondered if she was actually going to be sick. Just to put a revolting seal on the disastrous end to an otherwise successful show.

  And she’d thought it was bad when she’d started arbitrarily quoting The Boss during Masquerade.

  Mouth dry, she found her gaze going out to the audience. Usually, with the direction of the house lighting and the way her eyes and brain worked while she was onstage, she couldn’t see individual faces in the stalls. But The Henry was so much smaller than the West End theatres, and the lights were set up to illuminate the interior for the TV broadcast. Freddy knew where Griff was sitting, and she instinctively looked towards him—but her eyes locked onto the man who stood by the door to the foyer, leaning on his walking stick.

  His face calm, reassuring, the long-buried experienced actor coming to the fore, Rupert held her gaze and nodded. Just once.

  And Freddy took a steadying breath, turned, and lifted her nose at the unnaturally still Maya. Tossing her curls, she improvised a line for the second time in her recent stage history, this time with intention, and directed them back into the correct scene.

  Still feeling as if she were existing in a surreal bubble, she read the relief in Dylan’s body language and saw the flood of adrenaline return to Maya, and the energy underlying the dialogue surged.

  The last twenty minutes of the play seemed to pass in a blink, as Lydia was unmasked as the murderer, and Anne Elliot proved the hero of the day, and Elizabeth and Darcy locked themselves into a passionate embrace.

  They finished to a standing ovation that Freddy suspected was partly secondhand relief on the audience’s part. She didn’t see how anyone could have missed that momentary hitch, and it was agony to sit through the pause of an amnesiac actor.

  But with the exception of those few fraught seconds—

  “Overall,” Dylan murmured at her side under cover of the applause, “not bloody bad. Nicely done, comrade. You’re a trooper.”

  He kissed her hand, and in the audience she saw Griff lift a brow where he stood, on his feet near an inscrutable Fiona Gallagher, whom Freddy had been trying not to notice all night.

  When the curtain lowered for the final time, and the “live” sign flickered off, returning Highbrook to relative privacy, away from the scrutiny of the British public, Freddy looked at Maya in silence.

  Her co-star’s mouth quivered, and Freddy reached out and hugged her hard.

  Neither of them said anything.

  Dylan placed a hand on Maya’s shoulder as they walked into the wings, and for once, there wasn’t one iota of lechery or flirtation in the gesture.

  A lot of people really had grown a great deal in a few short weeks this summer.

  The H
ighbrook effect, apparently.

  In Freddy’s case, she’d arrived in turmoil over her career and her relationship with her father, and her personal life had been centred on a few casual hook-ups and some mug-painting. She was returning to London fathoms deep in love. With the overly perceptive dickhead from the pub.

  The dice was still rolling where her career and her dad were concerned.

  Still shaking from the build-up of adrenaline, Freddy rushed through the routine backstage—stripping off her bonnet and gown in her dressing room, and doing her last costume change of the night into a black dress and heels. She left her hair and makeup as they were. She wasn’t slathered with an inch-thick layer of greasepaint for once, and Leo had done a stellar job of giving her some cheekbones.

  She went outside by the back door to avoid getting crushed in the throngs, and around to join the crowd out front.

  Griff had agreed to let the production team hold the wrap party in the function room at the main house—for a large fee, she expected—and most people were heading for the path through the trees, which had been lit up with fairy lights tonight.

  She saw him through the crowd, talking to Sabrina, who was pale but composed in the sparkle of moonlight and spotlight. Akiko and Elise were nearby, being chatted up by Dylan. There was still no sign of Ferren, the bloody rat.

  Griff looked up and saw her, and even from a distance, across the heads of several dozen people, she saw the look that came into his eyes. She pressed her hands to her stomach.

  “Freddy.” A very familiar voice, with a very unfamiliar note in it.

  Dragging her eyes from Griff’s, she turned to face her father. “Dad.” Rupert was standing at a slight angle, resting his weight on his hand, and purplish smudges cast shadows beneath his eyes. She had to stop herself from reaching out to offer a supporting arm; he wouldn’t appreciate the reminder of his physical limitations.

  “You did very well,” he said suddenly. “Tonight.”

  “I almost lost it up there.” It was habit to recount her own weaknesses. He’d always expected her to be a solid self-critic. However good she was, she could always be better.

  “But you didn’t.” He was holding himself very stiffly, but he didn’t look away from her. “I was very proud of you.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Were you?”

  A small smile moved his mouth, but an odd sadness flattened the expression in his eyes. “Very.”

  She did put out her hand then, hesitantly, her fingers fluttering in the night air, the moonlight glittering off the crystal ring on her pinky finger. It had been her mother’s. Her father had given it to her for her eighteenth birthday. With any of the other people she loved, she would take their hand, but—“You pulled me through that glitch.” She blinked away wetness from her lashes, and in her peripheral vision she saw Griff moving towards her. He’d obviously been trying to give them space, but apparently he’d reached his limit. He was firing off protective vibes now. “I felt like you were willing confidence back into me.”

  Rupert was looking down at her hand, where she’d reached for him and held herself back. “I was,” he said, almost harshly.

  She opened her mouth, but didn’t get the chance to say the words that bubbled up.

  What happened next was so quick and so surreal that Freddy experienced it in a series of fractured stills, like a montage of photographs in a film sequence. Even afterwards, bizarrely, her memories were all in black and white.

  She heard shouting and the roar of an engine, and then swerving headlights cut through the night, zigzagging back and forth so rapidly that they created a long line of light, like a child’s sparkler writing patterns in the air. The out-of-control car managed to turn, and then spun wildly again, and skidded straight towards them. It was as if she was watching a toy that someone had picked up and flung.

  She heard her name—bone-deep, innate terror—from a guttural voice that she didn’t initially recognise as Griff’s, and then instinct kicked in and she was flinging herself at her father, knocking him towards safety. His stick hit her shin, but she felt nothing.

  In a manoeuvre that was so hairline-close to hitting her it would have been too dangerous to film had this actually been a staged stunt, the brakes clamped down and the car stopped. Suddenly. Abruptly. And the night was so quiet and still it was almost more shocking than what had come before.

  Sprawled across her father’s legs, Freddy raised her head, feeling as if her neck couldn’t support it, and looked into his dead-white face. His lips moved, but no words emerged.

  She heard a rapid clicking sound, and realised vaguely that someone was taking photos.

  In that state of what-the-absolute-fuck and why-is-my-head-floating, she saw Charlie emerge from the crowd, equally pale, and hold up his phone. “Well,” he said, his voice shaking so badly he was barely comprehensible, “the remote brake system works.”

  Then, roughly, he yanked open the driver side door of the car, and hauled out Joe Ferren.

  Freddy didn’t see what happened next because Griff was down on the ground beside her, and her senses returned in a rush of sensation with the silky feel of his shirt and the warmth of his rapid breaths against her neck and the hard clutch of his hands. Inhaling in a gasp, she clung to his body, smelling the comforting, familiar scent of his hair, and felt how badly he was shaking. His palm held the back of her head, and his beautiful nose was smooshed into her throat. He was saying words there, but she heard only the timbre of his voice.

  When he cupped her cheeks with hands that still shook, she had the stupid passing thought that at least her head was securely attached now, with him holding on to it, and then his mouth was on hers, and he was kissing her hard. She managed to lift arms that felt like weights, wrapping them around his neck, kissing him back just as desperately.

  He tore his mouth from hers. “Jesus Christ.” He kissed her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, her lips again. “Are you all right?” The question was forceful, demanding—and echoing with lingering horror.

  “Yes?” Still bewildered, her response was more of a question than an affirmation, but he closed his eyes.

  “God.” He buried his mouth against her temple. “Freddy. Darling.”

  More than anything, it was that rare, beautiful endearment that brought her back to herself. “What happened—Dad? Dad, are you all right?”

  As Griff helped her to her feet, she turned swiftly, but Sabrina and Akiko had already gone to Rupert, standing either side of him while he felt gingerly at his back. “I’m fine.” He looked as shocked as she felt. “Freddy—Christ. You could have been hit. You shouldn’t have—”

  Pieces of recollection came back to Freddy, the memory of him tensing against her, and she shuddered, holding tightly to Griff. “I could feel you about to push me out of the way,” she said, her breath hitching. “Again. I couldn’t let you be hurt again because of me.”

  Her father’s face changed, the shock of the near miss overtaken by realisation, and almost...shame. “Freddy. Baby girl. Whatever else I—I’ve done, surely you’ve never thought that I blamed you for what happened at the Majestic?”

  Before she could answer, Ferren came stumbling forward, rubbing at his ruffled hair. His beard was growing in, and he looked typically handsome and romantic—and, by the looks that surrounded him, he was a dead man walking. “What the fuck,” he muttered, “is wrong with that car?”

  “What’s wrong with that car,” Charlie snapped, “is that it’s completely wired for an experimental remote system. You can’t access half the controls right now without the app.”

  Ferren scowled. “Well, how was I supposed to know that?”

  “You were supposed to not fucking break into my garage and steal it, and almost mow down my brother’s girlfriend, you utter fucking twat.”

  Very belatedly, Ferren addressed Freddy and Rupert. “Sorr
y.” He scrubbed his hand over his head again. “You two all right?”

  Freddy felt Griff’s body tense in the instant before her cool, contained critic lunged at Ferren, and her past jaguar comparisons no longer seemed amusing. He looked absolutely livid.

  “You piece of shit.” Griff’s fist knotted in the front of Ferren’s shirt and he yanked him forward, and that was the impetus for Freddy to recover her wits completely.

  There were plenty of witnesses around and several journalists still avidly filming, and if he broke Ferren’s jaw, the biggest drama queen in British film would inevitably press charges.

  “Griff.” She jumped towards him, but Charlie was already there, dragging him off.

  “Mate, I get it, but you’re going to end up under arrest.” He spoke hastily, right in his brother’s ear, and when Griff tried to tug free, took a different tack. “Freddy needs you.”

  Breathing hard, Griff stilled and turned to look at her again. Freddy was actually feeling not too bad now, but she immediately tried to look in need of immense support. From the flash of reluctant amusement that crossed Griff’s face, it wasn’t convincing at all, but it succeeded in calming him down enough that he stepped away from Ferren.

  Coming back to her, he pulled her into his arms and pressed his mouth against her hair. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not going to hit him.”

  Ferren committed the last in a series of enormous errors of judgment then, and sneered.

  “But I am,” Sabrina said, and slammed her fist into his nose.

  The camera flashes accelerated.

  As her presumably ex-boyfriend went down to his knees, swearing and trying to stem the blood with his sleeve, she hissed and shook out her hand. “Fuck, that hurt.”

  When Ferren stumbled back to his feet, he looked like he’d just come out of makeup for the climactic scene of every film he’d ever made. He was sweaty and bloodstained, and swelling was already starting to appear, but in this instance he wasn’t the triumphing hero.

  He took a few steps towards Sabrina, extending a hand towards her. “Sabs. Please.”