Happy Birthday, Mr Darcy

by Victoria Connelly

  Robyn nodded. Dame Pamela was going to wheel her great wardrobe of Regency costumes out for guests to rummage through and she’d had at least two dozen new ones made especially for the occasion in the hope that everybody would join in. Yes, Dame Pamela was quite determined that Purley Hall was going to be awash with muslin, bonnets and cravats come the day of the wedding.

  Chapter 3

  Warwick Lawton had lost his pen and was bent double with his head upside down when the telephone rang. He ignored it for a moment because the pen was his favourite and he simply had to find it. It was a fountain pen which Katherine had bought him and he used it for signing contracts and letters to his readers and for writing the very first outline of a new novel which he’d been in the middle of doing when the pen had gone missing. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing it.

  Fountain pens were a bit of a private joke between the two of them because he had bought her one for her birthday engraved with the words ‘So much in love’ from Pride and Prejudice and she had had his fountain pen engraved with the words ‘A great proficient’ also from Pride and Prejudice. Warwick had erupted with laughter when he’d read it.

  ‘You didn’t go for “so much in love”, then?’ he’d asked with a naughty grin.

  ‘No,’ Katherine had said. ‘I like to be original.’

  The phone stopped ringing and blissful silence filled the study once more. Warwick picked up some loose pages of A4 paper on his desk but the pen wasn’t there.

  For a moment, he looked at the silver-framed photograph of him and Katherine which he kept on his desk. It had been taken by a passing rambler up in the Peak District when Warwick had taken Katherine rock climbing. They had their arms wrapped around each other and their smiles couldn’t have been bigger if they’d fallen into the plot of their favourite novel like in the TV drama Lost in Austen.

  He smiled as he remembered the day. They’d driven up to Derbyshire from Katherine’s cottage in Oxfordshire. Warwick had bought an enormous hamper filled with gourmet food and they’d spread a tartan rug out on the ground overlooking the glorious countryside of the White Peak. Then he had introduced her to his world of ropes, harnesses and carabiners. Katherine had been uncharacteristically quiet.

  ‘Nervous?’ he’d asked her.

  ‘Of course not,’ she’d said. ‘I’m just concentrating.’

  He smiled at her sun-filled face in the photograph now. The soon-to-be Mrs Lawton.

  ‘Mrs Katherine Lawton,’ he said, the name sounding luxurious on his tongue. Although she was still to be Dr Katherine Roberts at St Bridget’s and would publish her books and papers under her old name too. But this beautiful, intelligent, funny woman was going to become his wife and he couldn’t quite believe his luck.

  The phone started ringing again and he picked it up. ‘Yes?’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Darling! Whatever is the matter?’

  ‘Nadia,’ he said with a weary sigh. ‘You’ve caught me at a bad time.’

  ‘And when is a good time? You were meant to be calling me about this new idea of yours.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m trying to get it down right now only I’ve lost my pen,’ Warwick said, pulling the extension lead of the phone as far as it would go so he could inspect the rest of the room. Honestly, his agent had the most uncanny knack of catching him at the worst possible moment as well as being able to stick her foot in it like nobody else he’d ever met.

  Warwick had come pretty close to parting with Nadia Sparks after the stunt she’d pulled at Purley Hall during that first fateful Jane Austen conference he’d attended. His agent had had one too many drinks and had then gone and told Katherine about Warwick’s secret identity before he’d got a chance to tell her himself.

  ‘You’d still be waiting to tell her if it hadn’t been for me!’ she’d said in defence of herself.

  Anyway, that was all ancient history and Katherine had forgiven him. Eventually.

  ‘I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to this weekend,’ Nadia went on. ‘How’s the groom holding up?’

  ‘The groom is holding up fine,’ Warwick said, raking a hand through his dark hair. Why did everybody keep asking him that? Were they expecting him to do a runner or something?

  ‘No cold feet?’ Nadia pressed.

  ‘No,’ Warwick said.

  ‘No last-minute regrets about losing your bachelor lifestyle?’

  ‘Nadia – are you trying to put me off marriage?’

  ‘Well, I am concerned that being an old married man might restrict your literary output,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not going to affect my writing,’ Warwick told her.

  ‘Well, maybe not now but what will happen when little Warwick junior makes an appearance?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Babies!’

  ‘Oh, Nadia! We’re only just about to become husband and wife. Give us a chance!’

  ‘It’s you who’s always telling me that “a lady’s imagination is very rapid” and mine is more rapid than most,’ Nadia said.

  ‘Indeed it is!’ Warwick said. ‘Look, you will be on your best behaviour at the wedding?’

  ‘I’m always on my best behaviour,’ Nadia said with a fruity chuckle.

  ‘Just stay clear of the cocktails.’

  ‘Warwick, darling. You know I never drink these days.’

  Warwick rolled his eyes at the blatant lie.

  ‘Anyway, enough about weddings,’ Nadia said, getting down to business, ‘I thought you were going to send me this synopsis you’ve been talking about before you swan off on your honeymoon.’

  ‘I am. I will,’ Warwick said, ‘as soon as I can find my pen.’

  ‘Pen?’ Nadia said. ‘You write it with a pen?’

  ‘I always write the synopsis with a pen and then type it up later.’

  ‘Good heavens! I didn’t know my best client was living in the dark ages.’

  ‘I like a nice pen,’ Warwick said. ‘It helps me think things through – the slow flow of ink onto the page-’

  ‘Just get it to me before all this wedding business takes over, okay?’

  ‘I’ll get it to you,’ Warwick said, hanging up. It was then that he spotted the pen. It had somehow rolled off his desk and onto the floor and had gone under a cabinet on the other side of the room. He bent down to retrieve it, his hair flopping over his eyes. He’d been going to get a nice short haircut but Katherine had asked him to keep it long for the wedding.

  ‘It looks cute,’ she’d said. ‘Like ‘Hugh Grant in Sense and Sensibility.’

  Warwick flicked it out of his eyes now and looked at the engraving on the pen again.

  ‘A great proficient,’ he read with a little laugh. ‘A great idiot more like. What on earth is someone like Katherine doing marrying a chump like me?’

  Chapter 4

  ‘2013 is a very special year. Can anybody tell me why?’

  ‘It’s the year you’re getting married, Dr Roberts,’ Bethany, a dark-haired student said, and everybody laughed.

  Katherine was taking her last tutorial of the summer term with twelve students and all of them had clocked the diamond engagement ring as soon as she’d started wearing it and had beaten her down with questions.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Katherine said, ‘I can’t deny it’s special because of that but why else? What are we celebrating?’

  ‘The year after the Olympics?’ another student offered.

  Katherine was in too good a mood to throw one of her Lady Catherine de Bourgh glares at her student.

  ‘Have a look at the frontispiece,’ Katherine said.

  A couple of her students looked blank.

  ‘The front page,’ Katherine elaborated. ‘This edition has a facsimile of the original frontispiece. What do you notice about it?’

  ‘It doesn’t have her name on it,’ a student called Laurie volunteered.

  ‘That’s true,’ Katherine said, thankful that somebody had made a half-decent observation, ‘but look at th
e date.’

  ‘1813,’ Bethany said. ‘It’s two hundred years old.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Katherine said. ‘2013 marks the two hundredth anniversary of Pride and Prejudice and what I thought we could discuss today is what makes a story live on centuries after it was written. Why are we still reading and studying Austen, the Brontës, Dickens and Hardy?’

  ‘Because they wrote good stories,’ Bethany said.

  ‘But what makes them good?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘The characters,’ Laurie said. ‘They feel - like - modern.’

  Katherine grimaced at Laurie’s use of the word ‘like’ but she, at least, was engaged in the discussion, unlike some of her students.

  ‘Rupert,’ she said, picking on a handsome boy who was staring out of the window watching as a pair of pretty girls waltzed by the grass in the quad.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, raising his sleepy eyes to her as if in surprise at seeing her there.

  ‘Do you have any thoughts about it?’

  He looked totally lost for a moment and Katherine kept him suspended in torment for a moment longer before releasing him.

  ‘Stories survive not just because of empathetic characters that we can still identify with but because the author has something to say to us and they have the ability to communicate that to the reader in a clear and often amusing way. Jane Austen knows how to hook a reader with her endearing and often infuriating characters but she also keeps us hooked by her wit, her observations, and her unique use of language. Lots of other writers had books published at the same time as Jane Austen and yet they’ve been lost to us. Austen has survived because she has a unique voice. But the themes she explores are also important.’

  Rupert was staring out of the window again.

  ‘What themes does she explore, Rupert?’

  His head snapped back to face Katherine, his skin a scary white. Katherine watched as the hopeless student flipped through the pages of Pride and Prejudice as if the answer to her question would leap out at him at any moment. If Rupert Browning-Danes read only the same number of chapters each day as the number of pints he drunk each night then he wouldn’t be floundering half as much, Katherine thought. Honestly, didn’t some of these students realise that she was feeding them the finest that English literature had to offer?

  She thought of her dear friends at Purley Hall and how they would gasp in horror if they knew that these students hadn’t even bothered to read half the books on their syllabus. She often wondered why students chose a subject like literature if they didn’t really like reading. But perhaps Rupert was one of those students who would come back to Austen later in life and think, hey – I missed out on a treat here. She could only live in hope.

  ‘Love,’ Rupert suddenly blurted out, startling Katherine.

  ‘Yes, love is a theme which Jane Austen explores in all her novels.’

  ‘Marriage,’ Rupert added, getting into his stride.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Love and marriage.’

  ‘Dr Roberts?’ a student called Clara said. ‘Do you think humour works for readers in different times?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, we’re reading Love’s Labours Lost with Mr Bradley and he keeps telling us it’s a comedy but I don’t find it very funny at all,’ Clara said. Clara was well-known for her straight face and Katherine doubted very much if anything would ever tickle her fancy.

  ‘Well, what do you think? Take a character like Mr Collins,’ she said. ‘Can’t any age find him amusing?’

  ‘I just think he’s rather annoying,’ Clara said with a little sneer.

  ‘Perhaps that’s something we can explore later but, going back to the themes of love and marriage – are they always linked in Pride and Prejudice? Do they always go hand in hand?’

  Bethany shook her head. ‘I don’t think Mr and Mrs Bennet are in love anymore and Charlotte Lucas doesn’t marry for love, does she?’

  Katherine shook her head. ‘That’s right. Marriage was often a matter of survival for women in Jane Austen’s time and Charlotte Lucas knew that Mr Collins’s proposal was probably the only one she’d get and that she’d have to take it. Love was a luxury.’

  Laurie giggled. ‘Thank God we don’t have to marry in order to survive now. Marriage is a matter of personal choice. Like yours.’ She said with a sweet smile. ‘You’re marrying for love, aren’t you?’

  Katherine smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m marrying for love.’

  At the end of the day, Katherine tidied her desk, handed out all the marked essays and the reading list for the holidays and left St Bridget’s College clutching a huge bouquet from the English department. She drove home, leaving Oxford behind her for the duration of the summer and, once she got home, she kicked off her shoes, poured herself a glass of white wine and sat in a pink and green striped deckchair in her garden with her two cats, Freddie and Fitz, for company. She then ran a hot bath, read three chapters of the latest Lorna Warwick novel which she’d been eking out so as not to finish it too quickly, and then she went to bed. Tomorrow was a very important day.

  Katherine caught a taxi from the train station in Bath, smiling at the golden-hued buildings of the Georgian town and the streets which Jane Austen would have known so well. Her mind spiralled into her favourite literary worlds and she thought of Catherine Morland and Isabella Thorpe discussing hats and ribbons, and of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth falling in love all over again.

  She wished with all her heart that her timetable allowed her more time for she longed to walk through the streets and squares, a copy of Persuasion in her handbag and copy of Northanger Abbey in her hands. But she promised herself enough time to pop into the Jane Austen Centre before she caught her train back to Oxford. But this wasn’t just any trip to Bath and now wasn’t the time to be a tourist.

  The taxi left the bustle of the city centre behind and headed up into the hilly suburbs until it reached 6 Southville Terrace. It was a very pretty honey-coloured house with an enormous bay window overlooking a tiny garden. It was in a wonderful situation being within easy reach of the centre of Bath but also close to the countryside in a part of town which Jane and her sister Cassandra would have known well from their extensive walks. Katherine loved it.

  She paid the driver and got out of the taxi, walking up the little pathway and ringing the bell of number 6. A moment later, a young woman in her mid-twenties opened the door. She had a shock of Marilyn Monroe-blonde hair and a huge lip glossed smile.

  ‘Katherine! Katherine!’ she cried, her arms wide and embracing.

  ‘Shelley. How lovely to see you.’

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ Shelley said. She had a tendency to say everything twice when she was excited.

  It had been Dame Pamela’s idea to get in touch with Shelley Quantock. She was a friend of Mia Castle’s and Mia had told Dame Pamela all about Shelley's wonderful costumes at the Christmas conference and Dame Pamela had commissioned some new ones for the wedding from the talented seamstress in Bath.

  ‘How are you?’ Shelley asked as they entered the hallway. ‘Getting nervous?’

  ‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Everybody keeps asking me that but I’m not nervous at all about the wedding.’

  ‘Just about marriage in general, eh?’ Shelley said with a laugh.

  Katherine swallowed hard, not daring to tell Shelley that she was rather close to the mark with her last statement.

  ‘MIA!’ Shelley suddenly shouted. ‘Katherine’s here!’

  There was the thunderous sound of footsteps as Mia ran down the stairs, her dark hair flying out behind her and her eyes shining brightly. She was followed by a huge chestnut dog who hurtled into the hallway at top speed, skidding on the tiled floor and crashing into their visitor.

  ‘Oh, Bingley! Sorry, Katherine,’ Mia said as she pushed the bouncing dog out of the way and embraced Katherine.

  It was then that Katherine became aware of a strange smell that seemed to be coming from no room in
particular – a blend of ylang ylang oil and peppermint tea, Katherine thought, or maybe peppermint oil and ylang ylang tea – she couldn’t quite be sure.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Shelley asked.

  ‘Say no!’ Mia blurted. ‘Never drink a cup of tea in this house!’

  ‘It’s all right!’ Shelley said. ‘I wasn’t going to offer her Daddy’s latest. It’s absolutely foul and stains your teeth green. I must tell him before he starts to market it.’

  ‘Shelley’s dad runs Quantock Teas,’ Mia said, ‘and he tries out his new blends on Shelley. They’re usually lethal to the taste buds and deathly to the nose.’

  Katherine smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll just have a glass of water.’

  ‘Very wise,’ Mia said.

  Shelley opened a door from the hallway into the front room where a large man with long hair sat in a chair reading a book called Oils for Love and Life.

  ‘Katherine’s here for her final fitting, Pie,’ Shelley said. ‘We’ll be upstairs, okay?’

  Pie grunted something from out of the depths of the chair without looking up from his book and Shelley closed the door.

  ‘He doesn’t say very much, does he?’ Katherine said, frowning.

  ‘No,’ Shelley said, ‘but he has very talkative hands and your mind would boggle if you knew what he could do with a bottle of almond oil.’

  Katherine caught Mia’s eye and the two of them grinned.

  ‘Come on,’ Shelley said, ‘I can’t wait to see you in your dress.’

  Chapter 5

  The three of them went up the stairs followed by Bingley who was anxious not to miss out on anything.

  ‘I’ll shut him in your bedroom, Shelley,’ Mia said, catching hold of Bingley’s collar and marching him into one of the rooms off the landing before shutting the door firmly on him. ‘You do not want paw prints on your wedding dress!’

  They entered a tiny but perfect room that was full of fabric.

  ‘This used to be Pie’s room but – well – he’s in mine now,’ Shelley said with a naughty smile. ‘Don’t tell Daddy, though. I don’t think he’d approve. For one thing, he’d expect me to squeeze another tenant in here and this room’s too important for our business now, isn’t it?’