Rosie Rushton lives in Northampton. She is a governor of the local Church of England secondary school, a licensed lay minister and passionate about all issues relating to young people. Her hobbies include learning Swahili, travelling, going to the theatre, reading, walking, being juvenile with her grandchildren and playing hopscotch when no one is looking. Her ambitions are to write the novel that has been pounding in her brain for years but never quite made it to the keyboard, to visit China and learn to sing in tune.
Other 21st Century Austens, by Rosie Rushton:
The Secrets of Love
Summer of Secrets
Secret Schemes and Daring Dreams
First published in Great Britain in 2009
by Piccadilly Press Ltd,
5 Castle Road, London NW1 8PR
www.piccadillypress.co.uk
Text © copyright Rosie Rushton, 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
copyright owner.
The right of Rosie Rushton to be identified as Author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library
ISBN: 978 1 85340 979 0 (paperback)
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Printed in the UK by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon, CR0 4TD
Cover illustration by Susan Hellard
Cover design by Simon Davis
Text design by Carolyn Griffiths, Cambridge
Set in Goudy and Caslon
It is a truth universally acknowledged that no author can
produce a book without a myriad host of supporters nagging,
cajoling, encouraging, and providing chocolate cake in the
background. Therefore my heartfelt thanks are due, yet again,
to Celia Rees for nagging this book into existence;
to Andrew, Eunice and Nicola Willis for their advice on
Figeac and head injuries; to Sarah and Ros Martin for
cake and literary comment; to the girls of Year 9LBY of
Northampton School for Girls for putting me straight
about the current teen scene; and to my wonderful,
patient editor, Ruth Williams, and my equally
wonderful, patient agent, Jane Judd.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
PART TWO
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
‘On first entering the neighbourhood . . .’
(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
‘SO YOU DUMPED HIM? JUST LIKE THAT? IN THE MIDDLE OF the school trip? Are you crazy?’
‘I’ve never been more sane,’ Lizzie asserted, trundling her suitcase across the school forecourt towards the car park. ‘We just don’t have anything in common any more.’
‘But Toby’s so lovely,’ her older sister Jane protested. ‘Really gentle and unassuming and —’
‘Boring!’ Lizzie concluded, heaving the case into the boot of their mother’s Polo and glancing with satisfaction at the ‘P’ plate tied to the back bumper. She had passed her test just two weeks earlier and still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘Lizzie, he’s crazy about you,’ Jane persisted, slipping into the driving seat and turning on the ignition.
‘Sure he is, in a sloppy, spaniel puppy sort of way.’ Lizzie shrugged, pulling the band off her ponytail and shaking her thick chestnut-brown hair free. ‘The thing is, I’m not like you, Janey. I’m not a hearts and flowers, soft-focus type of person.’
‘You can say that again,’ her sister teased.
‘I want more out of a relationship than a guy who agrees to do whatever I do, go wherever I say, constantly tells me he can’t live without me . . .’
Jane sighed and shook her head. ‘Most of us would cross continents to find a boyfriend like that,’ she stressed, flicking her ash-blond hair behind her ears and adjusting the driving mirror. ‘And you get one and chuck him away.’
‘Sorry.’ Lizzie guessed from the sudden flush of colour to Jane’s pale cheeks that she was thinking about Simon, the only real boyfriend she had had in nineteen years, the guy she’d been head over heels in love with – until six weeks earlier, when she found out that he was not only two-timing her while she was away at uni, but even posting jokey updates on MySpace. ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’
‘It’s OK, I’m so over it,’ Jane assured her, not very convincingly. ‘Hey, do you want to drive?’
Lizzie shook her head. ‘I’m shattered,’ she admitted. ‘And Friday rush hour isn’t quite the best time to start.’
‘No probs,’ her sister replied. ‘So when are you going to tell Mum?’
‘Tell her what?’
‘That you and Toby have split, silly,’ Jane replied, accelerating out of the school car park and down the hill towards the Meryton ring road, busy with traffic. ‘You know how she adores him.’
‘Adores the fact that he’s got a double-barrelled surname and a father who’s an MP more like,’ Lizzie pointed out with a wry smile. ‘You know what she’s like.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Jane said. ‘She’s been even worse since we moved house. You’ll never guess the latest.’
‘Go on,’ groaned Lizzie.
‘Well, two days after I got back from uni – the day you left on the trip, come to think of it – she started going round the whole village, knocking on people’s doors and introducing herself. Can you believe that? And there was me hoping she was going to keep a low profile.’
‘Mum?’ Lizzie laughed, relieved at the chance to change the subject. ‘Low profile? That’s like saying you expect Dad to turn into a party goer!’
The girls’ father was the kind of guy who, given half a chance, would have gone through life in a cloak of invisibility.
‘Yes, and talking of Dad . . . oh no, I’m in the wrong lane. I keep thinking we still live at the old house.’
‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ Lizzie sighed. ‘I still can’t get my head around everything that’s happened.’
For as long as the girls could remember, home had been a three-storey and somewhat dilapidated, turn-of-the-century semi on the eastern side of Meryton (which, as Lizzie’s mother kept reminding them, had quite the wrong postcode and got a whiff of the sewage works in neighbouring Eckford every time the wind was in a northerly direction). It had been the home of Lizzie’s paternal grandparents and to say it showed signs of wear and tear was an understatement. For years, Lizzie’s social-climbing mother had spent her weekends inspecting show homes on all the new village developments within a twenty-mile radius of the town, even assuring the rather bored-looking sales reps in the mobile site offices that she was definitely a genuine interested party and not a time-waster.
‘I don’t understand why you put yourself through all this,’ her long-suffering husband would protest every time she waxed lyrical about the conservatories on the new Georgian-style houses at Hunters Park, or the slate floors and oak units in the gigantic kitchens of the new riverside houses in Lower Grendon. ‘In case you’
ve forgotten, we have five daughters to clothe, feed and put through university. Stop wasting your time.’
‘You’ve got to have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?’ Lizzie’s mum would trill. (As well as being addicted to house-hunting, she was very into old musicals. However, while Lizzie had inherited her grandmother’s perfect pitch, Mrs Bennet had not.)
After each of his wife’s house-hunting afternoons, Mr Bennet would sigh, raise his eyebrows and retreat to his den (which was actually the converted garage) to immerse himself in his collection of poetry books, and play Wagner as loudly as he dared.
But then, two days after Easter, everything had changed. Totally out of the blue, Aloysius Hull had died and left Mrs Bennet his entire estate, just under two million pounds. Lizzie’s mother hadn’t a clue who Aloysius Hull was until the solicitor acting for his estate informed her that he happened, in fact, to be her second cousin, three times removed (or was it third cousin, twice removed?), a reclusive bachelor in his nineties who had lived in a rambling house in the wilds of Scotland, had no family and who remembered Alice Bennet when she was Alice Frognall, aged five, ‘a charming child,’ (according to his will) ‘who shared her bag of jelly babies with me when she visited with her family, the rest of whom were idiots’. (The solicitor apologised for including this last sentence in his letter, but as he explained, the law demanded complete and full disclosure of the deceased’s words and wishes. He need not have worried: Alice’s opinion of her relatives agreed with his wholeheartedly.)
‘We can do it, finally we can do it!’ Lizzie’s mother had cried, after she had stopped shrieking, dancing round the kitchen and waving the solicitor’s letter in everyone’s face. ‘Oh, Harry, we can, we really can!’
She had hurled herself into the arms of her bemused husband and hugged him.
‘Can do what?’ he had asked, a little pink around the mouth from all the excitement. ‘Change the car? Get surround sound? That new Sony system?’
‘Buy the house at Longbourn Oaks, of course!’ Alice had replied, her plump cheeks flushed with excitement. ‘It’s perfect – oh, this is meant to be, I know it is!’
‘Great!’ exclaimed fifteen-year-old Katie, who was at the stage of her verbal development that limited most of her conversation to one-liners – partly because she considered it far more cool than using complete sentences, and partly because her twin sister Lydia rarely allowed her to get more than a word in edgeways.
‘Great? Living in some poxy village in the middle of nowhere?’ Lydia had burst out at once. ‘God, Katie, you are so sad. No way am I moving from town – like, what would that do to my social life?’
‘Actually, it would be brilliant – we could grow vegetables, and keep bees, and go totally organic,’ seventeen-year-old Meredith had declared. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Yes, well you would,’ Lydia snapped. ‘Since you don’t have a life and think that recycling a paper bag is the height of excitement.’
‘For heaven’s sake, will you all just stop this nonsense?’ their father, Harry, had interrupted. ‘There is absolutely no way we are going to squander this windfall on some crumbling country cottage with woodworm and —’
‘I’m not talking about somewhere old, you silly man,’ his wife protested. ‘This one is on that new development – Priory Park – the one that backs on to the golf course. The moment I saw it I knew it was the house for us.’
‘Even worse,’ Harry retorted. ‘Overpriced, pretentious . . .’ He paused, eyeing his wife anxiously. ‘What do you mean – the moment you saw it you knew?’
Triumphantly, Alice had produced a glossy brochure from the kitchen drawer and thrust it under his nose.
‘Isn’t it beautiful? And it’s only nine hundred thousand, so we can afford it and still have plenty of money over.’
‘Nine hundred thous—! No way,’ Harry had blustered, glancing briefly at the array of coloured photographs. ‘This isn’t our type of place at all.’
‘It’s exactly our type of place,’ Alice retorted. ‘There are seven bedrooms, and four reception rooms.’
‘Who needs four?’
‘You do, darling,’ Lizzie’s mother said sweetly. ‘You could soundproof one and have it as a music room.’
The only time that Alice Bennet employed anything approaching subtlety was when attempting to manipulate her husband.
‘Well, I . . .’ For an instant he hesitated, clearly entranced at the thought of The Ring Cycle playing at full volume and blotting out what he always referred to as the twittering of his teenage daughters.
‘And just think, we’d only be a couple of miles from the Lucases,’ she went on triumphantly. The Lucases and the Bennets had been friends for years, and Emily was Lizzie’s best mate. ‘Don’t forget, Geoff is a member of the Oaks golf club – he could get you in.’
If she had stopped there and then, she might have won her husband over a lot faster. Sadly, a measured conversation was not one of Alice’s talents.
‘And we’d have enough space for the girls to invite their friends to stay over without having to sleep on the floor,’ she concluded happily.
‘Ye gods, do you really think I can cope with any more adolescent hormones round the place?’ he groaned. ‘Alice, this is a crazy idea and it’s not going to happen. For one thing, the village is way over the other side of town, quite the wrong place for getting to my office.’
‘It’s in precisely the right place for people in our new position,’ Alice argued. ‘Longbourn Oaks was in the Sunday Times property supplement as one of the top ten desirable rural locations.’
‘And that’s supposed to impress me?’
‘And HomeHunter magazine called it “modern living with the elegance of a bygone age”, his wife stressed impatiently. ‘Residents can use all the facilities of Longbourn Country Club – pool and jacuzzi and everything, and the ruins of Longbourn Priory are still standing on the edge of the new golf course, you know . . . you’d like that, you like history . . .’
‘Hey, that’s very romantic,’ Lydia had exclaimed, momentarily forgetting her objections to shifting from town. ‘Do you reckon the whole place is haunted by the ghosts of frustrated nuns who died desperate for the sight of a man?’
‘Which is something you’re never likely to do,’ Meredith had muttered, glaring at her sister so fiercely that her bushy eyebrows met. ‘The way you were coming on to Jake Martin the other night!’
‘Just because I have sex appeal and you don’t.’
‘I’d rather have a few brain cells – not that you’d know anything about those!’
‘Your wonderful brain doesn’t actually teach you how to pull though, does it?’
‘Will you two stop it right now!’ Their mother, while not being exactly narrow-minded (a mother of five children has to admit to a vague knowledge of matters sexual), liked to pretend that her younger children were still mere innocents in the matter of human relations. While this was true of Meredith, who insisted that she had never met a guy worth a second glance, it could not be said of Lydia, whose first sentence at the age of fourteen months had been ‘Kiss me’ and who had seen no reason to change her priorities in the intervening years.
‘Yes, let’s stop this whole ridiculous discussion,’ their father added, ‘and start talking sense for a change. We could certainly paint the house, buy a few new bits and pieces, even have a holiday, maybe in Italy, visit a few opera houses . . .’
‘Considering,’ Lizzie’s mother had replied icily, ‘that it was my generosity with the jelly babies that brought this legacy about in the first place, and that the money was left specifically to me, I rather think it’s up to me to decide how it’s spent, don’t you, dear?’
Four months later, the paperwork was complete and the house was theirs. They had moved in the day that Lizzie’s A-levels finished.
‘So, how was the choir trip?’ Jane broke in on Lizzie’s thoughts a bit later as they headed for the village.
‘Aside from you breaking Toby’s heart, that is?’
‘It went OK,’ Lizzie replied, ignoring her sister’s last remark and desperately trying to blot the memory of the blazing row with her now ex-boyfriend the night before the tour ended. ‘Five concerts in seven days was a bit full on, though. I had three solos and now my voice is knackered.’
‘That’s a shame,’ teased Jane. ‘Mum’s already sucked up to the new vicar and said you’ll sing in the church choir.’
‘I wish she’d stop interfering with my life!’ Lizzie burst out. ‘She is such a control freak – like I’m really going to ditch St Peter’s for this new place.’
Lizzie was not only her school’s star soprano, but also the leading light in Voices Raised, a kids’ and teen choir she had got going when she was fifteen because, as she had pointed out to the vicar, not everyone wanted to hear ancient hymns sung by ancient people with wavering voices. As her mind darted back to her church in the centre of Meryton, the scheme that had been taking root in her mind all week exploded once more into the forefront of her brain.
‘Honestly, Jane, you are so lucky to be at uni and not have Mum breathing down your neck day and night.’
The instant the words were out she regretted them.
‘Well, you could have been going in October, if you hadn’t opted for a gap year,’ Jane commented, turning down the slip road into the village. ‘Have you decided what you’re going to do for the next twelve months?’
‘Um – not yet. You must admit, this is a pretty village, isn’t it?’ Lizzie murmured, gesturing towards the first row of thatched cottages on the approach to the duck pond.
‘You are changing the subject,’ Jane countered. ‘And your nose is twitching, which means you’re in a state. What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ Lizzie said, as brightly as she could, unwilling even to try to verbalise all her conflicting thoughts and emotions. ‘Just tired. And I guess . . . Hey! Isn’t that Lydia?’
Jane slowed down and peered through the windscreen.
Love, Lies and Lizzie Page 1
