Writing Jane Austen (30 page)

“That’s not what I heard. Never mind, at least you’re here, and I’m sure you’re going to look wonderfully glamorous and sexy in your costume tomorrow.”

“Costume?”

“Didn’t you read the invitation, Henry?”

“Not from cover to cover, no.”

“Your bad, then. Because it said ‘Costume’ quite clearly on the invitation, which also, incidentally, was designed in a Regency style.”

Foxy drifted off to find other prey, leaving Henry saying rude things under his breath. “Costume! Fancy dress. Why the devil didn’t Charlie warn me? If I’d known, I certainly wouldn’t be here.”

Nor would I, Georgina said, but to herself, not wanting to fuel Henry’s temper.

“No good blaming me,” said Charles, when Henry buttonholed him a few moments later. “I didn’t spot that either, got a bit of a shock when Foxy mentioned it to me just now. Could have guessed she’d pull something like that, you know how she’s always loved to dress up, and she has a thing about the Regency. She’s going as Lady Caroline Lamb, whoever she was, sounds like a slut from what she told me.”

“What, we have to go as historical characters, isn’t it enough to blackmail us into pantaloons?”

“Silk stockings, to be correct. So Foxy informed me.”

The two men looked at one another, gloom written on their faces.

“What about you, Anna, what are you going to wear?” Georgina asked. “I’ve brought my sole evening dress, and it’s completely twenty-first-century.”

“I have a vintage dress I bought at a church sale, which is from the nineteen seventies.”

“Cheer up,” said Charles. “Meet me tomorrow morning at the dressing-up box.”

Henry sighed. “Has it come to that?”

“Dressing-up box?” Georgina said. “Tutus with fairy wings and cowboy outfits?”

“Not quite,” said Henry. “Pam’s family went in a lot for amateur theatricals, and so they’ve got quite a collection. What a waste of time, and what a sight we’ll look.”

A waiter came past, collecting their glasses. He was a tall young man, with very pale hair, and Anna gave a shriek of delight as she saw him, and broke into a flood of what Georgina supposed must be Polish.

Ill timing, since at that moment Lady Pamela came over to talk to Charles. “A friend of yours?” she asked Anna.

“A friend? No, he is my cousin, Stefan. What joy!”

Lady Pamela looked far from joyful. “I’m sure you can continue your conversation later on, but meanwhile perhaps he can continue with his duties.”

Charles, anxious to draw his mother’s attention away from Anna, whom she was looking at with narrowed eyes, asked if all the guests were there. “I’m feeling peckish.”

“Three more to come. The Palmers rang, James was held up at the House. Ah, I think I hear them now.”

“Palmers?” said Georgina apprehensively. Of course, it was a common enough name.

“James Palmer and his wife, Charlotte,” said Charles. “He’s an MP, strange chap, prone to look on the dark side of things, don’t know how he ever got elected.”

Well, her James Palmer was a critic and a dissolutionist, if there were such a thing; it couldn’t be the same man.

It was. With a pretty wife, who had a cloud of dark hair, a delighted laugh and was quite heavily pregnant. “James is so droll,” she was saying as they came into the hall.

The evening wasn’t going well for Georgina. The champagne
disagreed with her, she didn’t care for Foxy, she was hungry, the thought of the dressing-up box appalled her, Lady Pamela’s dislike of Anna annoyed her and now James Palmer had appeared. Oh well, things couldn’t get much worse.

“Thank God,” said Charles, as Rupert went to open the front door to admit the final arrival. “Now we can eat. Didn’t know the parents had invited him, but this chap will be company for you, Gina, a fellow American, and I believe he works in your biz.”

It had just turned into the dinner party from hell, as Dan Vesey removed his elegant cashmere coat and handed it to a hovering Pole.

Shades of Jane Austen gathered round Georgina as she went into the dining room. It was a perfect room and, as Henry told her, virtually unchanged for two centuries. The shining mahogany table was set with plain, heavy silver and austere glasses, all of which gleamed in the light from several candelabra. The floor was wooden, with yet another Oriental rug, and on the elegant sideboard was a silver rose bowl filled with dusky roses that matched the walls. The chairs had graceful Regency curves, and the portraits that hung around the walls were of men and women in the clothes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

“One can imagine Mr. and Mrs. Bennet presiding over the dinner party they gave for Mr. Bingley, and hoping Mr. Darcy appreciated the fat haunch of venison,” Henry said, as he pushed her chair in for her.

Georgina was as glad to find Henry on one side of her, as she was alarmed to find James Palmer on the other, but at least Dan Vesey was as far away from her as it was possible to be. “What have you done to your arm?” James Palmer asked. “Had a fall? Thought not, you don’t look one of the horsey set. Tripped down the stairs, one too many, I dare say.”

“RSI,” said Georgina.

“They say once you get that it never goes away. Everyone will have it sooner or later, it’s computers that cause it. I don’t use one these days, I dictate to my secretary.”

“I gather you’re a member of Parliament.”

“Yes, I didn’t mention it when we met. Puts people off, fat cats, snouts in trough, all that kind of stuff. And don’t give me that look of moral disapproval, I told you no lies. I did review your book, I do detest Jane Austen and I am gathering material for a documentary on the dissolution of the monasteries. Can’t live on an MP’s salary, not these days, not now they’re keeping tabs on all one’s expenses. That’s my wife,” he added, nodding down the table to where Charlotte Palmer was laughing at some remark made by the tall balding man. “Don’t get married, take my advice, causes nothing but trouble. Of course, if you’re in my job and you don’t have a wife and preferably children, everyone assumes you’re gay.”

“Does that matter? Who cares, these days?”

“Some do, some don’t. I couldn’t give a damn, I went to an all-boys public school, nothing in the buggery line bothers me. But my constituents are a lot prissier than I am, and they like a family man.”

Georgina leaned back in her seat to allow a plate to be put in front of her.

“I warn you,” said Henry, “there will be at least five courses, and you’ll rise from the table feeling like a python. All perfectly delicious, but Pam has these rushes of blood to the head, and re-creates meals from some old recipe which belonged to an ancestor of hers. Good research for you, since it’s probably the kind of food they ate at Mansfield Park.”

Another nimble waiter had poured champagne into her glass. One of her glasses; she wondered how many wines were going to be served during the course of the meal. Lady Pamela’s voice came commandingly down from the foot of the table, “You won’t have any trouble with this, Georgina, because you can eat it with a fork. When you need to use a knife, I told one of the boys to cut your food up for you.”

Having thus drawn the attention of the entire table to Georgina’s sling, she turned back to the guests on her right, a dark middle-aged man with a five-o’clock shadow, wearing a soutane with a lavender sash.

“That’s Pam’s pet cleric,” Henry whispered informatively. “You didn’t meet him before dinner, because he only arrived about ten minutes ago. He’s just flown in from Rome, he’s one of your nomadic priests, always off somewhere for meetings and consultations.”

“Is Lady Pamela Catholic?” asked Georgina. She knew that the English didn’t consider religion a suitable topic for the dinner table, but she was curious.

“She is, Rupert isn’t. Charlie and the others were all brought up as Catholics, that was the deal when they got married.”

“So she can’t object to Anna on religious grounds.”

“True, but I think she’ll find plenty of other things that she doesn’t like about Anna.”

Lady Pamela might find a lot she didn’t like about Anna; Dan Vesey eyed Georgina as though she were Lucifer putting his head through the tent flaps.

“Holy shit, what are you doing here?” was his friendly greeting over coffee in the drawing room. It was an enchanting room of chintz and velvet; at least enchanting until Dan Vesey came over and joined her on a sofa. “You haven’t got time to hang around the English social circuit, you’ve got a book to write. I’ve got a lot riding on this book, and here you are, out in the sticks with your arm in a sling. What the hell do you think you’re up to?”

“Nice to see you, Dan.”

“Don’t give me that. Yolanda says she’s had nothing more from you, you don’t answer emails or the phone, all you do is go out for goddamn walks every couple of hours.”

So he was still spying on her. “Actually, I’m getting on fine. Don’t worry about my arm, I hurt it, but it doesn’t matter. Typing’s so last century; I use voice recognition.”

“Well, good for you, top marks, take a gold star, but where are the words?”

Georgina loved the kitchen at Motley Manor, where she found herself at midnight. It was old-fashioned, comfortable and functional, with dressers and wall cupboards with drawers and shelves and hooks, a beamed ceiling from which utensils, herbs
and a ham hung, a pantry with marble slabs, a utility called a
scullery, with a huge porcelain sink, and a large scrubbed wooden table in the centre of the room.

The cooking equipment was modern enough, but the kitchen was essentially the same as when he came to stay as a child, Henry told her. “I spent a lot of time in here, it was always my favourite place. Thank God Pam and Rupert have never gone in for granite work surfaces and all that stuff, this is how a kitchen should be.”

It was a merry crowd there, much better company than in the dining room and drawing room, and Georgina, still recovering from her bruising encounter with Dan Vesey, began to relax. Henry had rescued her from Dan’s cross-examination about her progress on the book, when he materialized like a guardian angel and smoothly took her away to the other side of the room. “You will excuse me if I borrow Georgina for a moment, the Monsignor wants to meet her.”

Anna’s cousin leapt to his feet and gave Georgina his chair. Anna and Charles were already sitting at the table, Anna talking a mixture of Polish and English, and Charles talking venison and wild boar
recipes with a lanky, dark Pole called Ladislaw, who was the chef.

“My mother thinks Ladislaw should open a restaurant,” said Charles. “She’s offered to back him.”

“Restaurants close faster than they open,” said Ladislaw. “I like doing it this way, going into people’s houses, cooking for them. No overheads, employ friends and relations for the night, no hassle. Even if I have to cook from strange recipes of two hundred years ago.”

Henry had discovered that Anna’s cousin, Stefan, the waiter, was doing a physics doctorate at Imperial College, and was enjoying an intense conversation about quarks.

Georgina sat in a happy haze. Dan Vesey must be off the premises now, as well as the Palmers, and she could put up with any amount of horse talk with any other guests still around. Tomorrow’s evil, the Regency dance, was sufficient unto the day, and as for Monday and her arm and the book, that was in another time. Besides, surely her arm was hurting less. A couple of days off, and she’d be fine.

A wail rent the air.

Charles knew at once what it was. “Someone at the gate, I suppose some guests just discovered they left something behind.” He got to his feet and went over to the door to look at the video screen.

Henry gave it a casual glance, then sprang to his feet. “That’s Maud!” He was out of the kitchen door two seconds later. Charles pressed the button to open the gates, and then followed Henry at a run.

Georgina stared at the bedraggled figure on the screen. What was Maud doing out there, soaking wet, at this time of night?

She and Anna flew to the front door, and opened it. Lady Pamela’s voice came out of the gloom of the gallery. “What’s going on?”

Georgina looked up. “Maud’s at the gate.”

“Where’s Charles? Henry?”

“They’re on their way to the gate.”

“On foot, I suppose, doing the hundred-yard dash.” Lady Pamela swept past them, and two minutes later, the headlights of a car showed in front of the house before it headed off down the drive.

In no time at all, the car was back in front of the house, and Henry was bundling Maud out of the back seat and into the hall, where she sat pale-faced and sodden, her eyes panda-like from streaked mascara. “I’m perfectly all right,” she said defiantly.

“How the hell did you get here? And why?” demanded Henry.

“I walked, okay? And I had to, because I was locked out. My phone and money and everything else were in the house. So I walked here.”

“But it’s five miles!”

“So?”

“On the road? In the dark?” said Henry furiously. “It’s a miracle you weren’t knocked down.”

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t exactly a main road, is it? Whenever I heard a car, I just jumped in the ditch or hid in the hedge. I thought of hitching, but it didn’t seem like a good idea. Besides, most of the cars were going the other way. Is there anything to eat?”

“Never mind that,” said Henry. “I want to get to the bottom of this. Where was Nadia, where were all your other friends? Why didn’t you just ring on the doorbell and get let in?”

“They weren’t there. Can I have something to eat, please? I haven’t had anything since lunch.”

Lady Pamela came in through the front door. She gave Maud one look, raised her eyebrows in exasperation and took charge.

Breakfast at Motley Manor was an informal affair, Georgina discovered when she came down the next morning. After the large dinner, she’d felt she would never be hungry again, but finding a sideboard laden with bacon, eggs, sausages, and various other goodies, she
decided that the cup of coffee which was all she’d planned she would have, was not enough.

Henry, Charles and Anna were already in the dining room. Maud, Henry informed her, was fast asleep.