Chapter Four

Warwick Lawton picked up the last letter he’d received from Katherine Roberts and read it again. The smile didn’t leave his face until the very end when he gave a weary sigh and scratched his chin. She didn’t know, did she? She had absolutely no idea that Lorna Warwick was a man. But why should she? The biography in the front of his novels was as fictional as the novels themselves and nobody but his agent and publisher knew the truth because, as far as his professional life went, he was a recluse, shunning the media and turning his back on book signings. Even his close friends didn’t know the truth. They were only aware that Warwick wrote ‘some drivel or other’ and never pushed him for any more information and that was just the way that Warwick liked it. Not that he was ashamed of what he wrote -certainly not. He loved his books. After all, if he wasn’t passionate about his characters and their fates, how could he expect his readers to love them?

It was his late mother, Lara Lawton, who’d taught him the pleasure of reading and writing. She’d been an actress although she’d never risen to the great heights that her name and beauty had always suggested to the young Warwick. Lara Lawton. It should have been a name that had been emblazoned across a thousand theatres, a name that dominated the cinema screen and was splashed across magazine covers. Instead, she’d swum in the shallows of the world of film and television - taking bit roles here and background roles there.

And always a book in her hands, Warwick remembered. There was so much time hanging around sets and his mother had been a passionate reader, telling him the plots of all the novels she read and encouraging him when he sat down one day, determined to rewrite the story of Wuthering Heights and give it a happy ending that had more to do with Hollywood than Bronte. His mother had been delighted with the result and persuaded him to write some of his own stories. At first, he’d done it to please her but he’d soon found that it also pleased him and that had been the beginning of his writing career.

The fact that he’d chosen to write historical romances still amazed him and he often wondered if he should turn his attention to thrillers or crime or something a bit more masculine, but his mother’s early influence had been too powerful and all those evenings together spent watching Jane Austen and Daphne Du Maurier adaptations and films like Dragonwyck and Gone With the Wind had left their mark.

Now he was sailing high in the bestseller lists and leading a double life as a woman. For a moment, he wondered what his mother would make of it all. What would she say if she knew her little boy was now known by the majority of the population as Lorna? She’d probably laugh - that lovely silvery laugh of hers that had always made him laugh too.

His friends would laugh as well. He dreaded to think how much they’d laugh if they ever found out. Warwick Lawton writing as a woman! The same six foot two Warwick Lawton who went rock climbing and abseiling with his mates at weekends swapping his keyboard for the feel of a bit of Peak District gritstone under his fingers? Surely not! But, if he was honest, he rather liked the duality of his nature. It was like playing a game. One minute, he was Warwick, speeding up the motorway in his latest fast car with a tangle of ropes and harnesses in his boot; the next he was Lorna researching ladies’ undergarments in the early nineteenth century.

Of course, the charade would be even funnier if he could share it with somebody and he often wondered if the day would come when he could tell Katherine about it.

‘And therein lies the problem,’ he said to himself. What was he going to do about his little secret?

His bags were packed for Purley Hall and his agent had sorted out a last-minute room for him and he was leaving in less than an hour, but he still hadn’t made up his mind what to do about Katherine.

For a moment, he sat absolutely still, listening to the gentle tick of the grandfather clock in the hall. It was the heartbeat of the house and always made him feel calm and in control of things which wasn’t how he was feeling right now.

‘Oh, God!’ he suddenly exclaimed. Could it be that he was a little bit in love?

He let the thought somersault around his brain before dismissing it. How could he possibly be in love? He’d never even met the woman although he had to confess to having Googled her, discovering a photograph of her outside St Bridget’s College, Oxford with a bunch of very stuffy-looking men in tweeds. And she was beautiful. He closed his eyes for a moment as he remembered the long chocolate-coloured wavy hair, the dark eyes in a pale face, and a rosebud mouth that was smiling at the camera. Very heroine-like, he thought, instantly casting her as his next vibrant leading lady and saving the photograph to his hard drive.

He’d sat down to read through all her letters again last night and one thing had struck him: she was a remarkable woman and he wanted to get to know her better. The way she wrote about books, the way she spoke about - well, everything - stirred him. She was so passionate about things and wasn’t afraid to express those feelings, unlike so many of the women in his past who’d never really had much to say at all. Take Fiona, the shopaholic: all she ever talked about was her nails and her shoes. Or Lindsay the interior designer. Warwick had learned more about cushions and pelmets in the four months they’d been together than he’d had any desire to know.

No, Katherine wasn’t like any other woman he’d met. She was sweet and smart and had a rapier wit that tickled him pink, and they’d shared such secrets. She trusted him.

She trusted Lorna! Warwick thought. You aren’t the person she thinks you are. Would she tell you all these secrets if she knew you were a man? Would she divulge such feelings if she realized that you were a male with a string of hopeless relationships behind him?

And that was the problem he had with the weekend that lay ahead. What was he going to do about Katherine?

He sat down in his office chair and surveyed the letters before him.

‘I love getting your letters. It’s so wonderful to know that there’s somebody out there who understands,’ he read from one of them.

‘I really feel that I can trust you,’ he read from another. ‘You’re a really good friend, Lorna, and that’s just what I need at the moment.’

‘I can tell you everything and that’s a real comfort. That means so much to me’ she’d written in another.

Things had soon become intimate between the two of them and Warwick had spent mornings pacing up and down for the post to arrive when he should have been working.

‘My first big love was my next door neighbour - how clichéd is that?’ Katherine had written just over a month ago. ‘I let him kiss me on our first date and it was horrible. It nearly put me off for life! But I didn’t give in until I was at university. I fell madly in love with a third year student who seduced me in the library when he was meant to be locking up! I’ll never forget looking up at all those books and hoping that the spirits of Thomas Hardy and Emily Bronte weren’t glowering down at me. Gosh! I’ve never told anyone about that before!’

Warwick smiled as he remembered the confession - it had been the first of many.

He had to admit that the letters had had a strange effect on him. They’d gone from the letters of a fan to the letters of a friend in a very short space of time. But they were more than that now. Even though he’d never met her, he felt incredibly close to Katherine and he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that.

Warwick swallowed hard. This wasn’t going to be easy. However he played it, the fact remained that he’d been replying to Katherine’s letters under false pretences and had led her to believe that he was a woman. His string of terrible girlfriends had become boyfriends. Fiona’s obsession with fashion had morphed into Tony’s obsession with motorbikes, and Lindsay’s cushions had become Lennie’s cushions (Lorna had been horrified to discover that Lennie was gay). Katherine had been sympathetic and supportive of Lorna’s hapless love life, offering advice when appropriate. ‘Lennie’s cushions sound like the perfect Christmas present for that awkward aunt of yours,’ Katherine had written. She’d put her trust in him completely, hadn’t she?

Warwick let out a long, weary breath as he thought about the strange situation he’d managed to get himself into. It was like something from one of his books, he thought. Actually, the idea of a woman writing to a man but thinking she’s a woman was a pretty good idea for a book, he thought with a grin. But then he felt guilty for even thinking about using his dear friend for the basis of his art. Still, he jotted it down in a notepad before he forgot it. A writer should never turn a good idea away just because it might offend somebody.

To be stuck in a car with a loved one for over two hundred miles would be a challenge at the best of times but being stuck with the most impatient driver in the world when what you most wanted to do was break up with him was an impossible situation.

‘I told you I should’ve got the train!’ Robyn said, as Jace honked the driver in front of him for not moving away fast enough at a set of lights.

‘What are you complaining about? We’re making good time!’

Robyn sighed and did her best to relax. They’d left North Yorkshire just after ten in the morning and registration for the conference was at five o’clock followed by tea and an official welcome by Dame Pamela Harcourt which Robyn didn’t want to miss under any circumstances.

She was also hoping that they’d have time for a slight detour to Steventon so she could see the church where Jane Austen had been baptized and spent her former years, but she wasn’t sure how Jace would respond to such a proposal. Poking around churches with literary connections wasn’t his sort of thing at all. He’d much sooner check into his bed and breakfast and head for the nearest pub to sink a few pints, then have an evening belching in front of the TV.

Robyn opened her handbag and pulled out the information sheets about the conference. After the tea and welcome, there was a chance to mingle before dinner and then there was a choice of watching either Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility or Simon Burke’s version of Persuasion.

‘Ooooo!’ Robyn sighed.

‘What’s up?’ Jace asked. ‘You don’t need the loo again?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Just choices to be made for tonight.’ She didn’t bother to go into details. He wouldn’t understand. How could a woman choose between Hugh Grant’s bumbling Edward Ferrars and Rupert Penry-Jones’s smouldering Captain Wentworth? That was the trouble with Austen - there were too many wonderful heroes. It was hard enough deciding which book to read next and which hero to fall in love with again but it also made real life hard too for no man could live up to Austen’s heroes, could they? Where was a girl going to find a man as patient as Colonel Brandon or as witty as Henry Tilney? And could one ever truly hope to find that most elusive of all men - Mr Darcy?

Robyn smiled to herself. If the truth were known, she rather preferred Mr Bingley to Mr Darcy. He was - in Jane Austen’s own words - amiable; there was nothing complicated about him and Robyn liked that. You didn’t have to do any emotional wrestling with Bingley. He liked dancing. He smiled a lot. He didn’t go around insulting anyone and making a hash at proposing to a woman. In short, he was just the sort of man Robyn was looking for.

But you have a man, a little voice inside her suddenly said.

But I don’t want him, she replied.

Then you should tell him.

I’ve tried!

Then you haven’t made a very good job of it, have you?

Robyn took a sideways glance at Jace. His eyes were narrowed into angry slits as he focused on the road ahead and then gesticulated at a car that was overtaking them. Mr Bingley would never gesticulate, Robyn couldn’t help thinking. He was far more likely to articulate.

‘Upon my honour!’ he might declare. ‘I have never met with so many unpleasant drivers in my life.’ He would shake his head and think nothing more of it, probably declaring that a ball was in order and that he’d make the arrangements forthwith.

Yes, Robyn thought, Bingley was - as Jane Bennet had told Elizabeth - ‘just what a young man ought to be’.

Slowly coming out of a daydream in which she was wearing a white empire-line dress and dancing with Bingley, Robyn saw the sign announcing that they had crossed into Hampshire. At long last, she’d arrived in Jane Austen country.

Turning round to retrieve the road atlas from the backseat, she flipped to the right page and made a study of the area. Almost at once, she found Chawton - perhaps because she’d circled it in bright red pen. There was already a planned trip to Chawton from Purley Hall on Saturday and Robyn was so excited about it that she felt sure she’d burst with joy but she longed to see the church at Steventon too.

‘Jace?’ she said, her voice gentle.

‘What?’ he snapped back.

‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘What sort of an idea?’ he asked. ‘A naughty idea?’

‘No!’ Robyn said. ‘A detour idea.’

Jace frowned. ‘I don’t like detours. I like going from A to B, and A to B today has been one hell of a drive.’

‘I know it has,’ Robyn said sweetly, ‘and you’ve been brilliant but this is such a tiny detour, you’d never even notice it.’

Jace’s frown didn’t budge but he tutted and sighed. ‘All right, then. Where do you want me to go?’

Robyn was tempted to answer something rude to that particular question but said, ‘Take the next right,’ instead, and it wasn’t long before they were driving through the narrow lanes of Hampshire with tall hedgerows and sunny fields on either side of them. The landscape was far less dramatic than Robyn’s limestone valleys of the Yorkshire Dales but she loved its gentleness. With its pretty village pubs, cute cottages and stone churches, it was perfect and just what tourists thought of when they imagined Jane Austen’s England.

As they passed an old wooden stile to the side of the road, Robyn could easily imagine Elizabeth Bennet hopping over it on her way to visit her sister, Jane, at Netherfield. For a moment, she wondered whether she dared ask Jace to stop the car so that she could walk across a couple of fields until her eyes shone like her favourite heroine’s but one look at Jace changed her mind. He wouldn’t understand and she’d better not push her luck after getting him to agree to the detour to Steventon.

It only took ten minutes to reach the little church and Robyn gasped as Jace stopped the car.

‘Oh, look!’ she said, her eyes wide with instant adoration.

‘It’s a church,’ Jace said.

Robyn did her best to ignore his sarcastic tone. She was determined that nothing was going to spoil this moment.

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ she asked as she opened her door.

‘Nah. I’ll wait here. Churches creep me out.’

Robyn sighed but she was secretly glad that he wasn’t coming with her. He’d only complain and spoil things.

Getting out of the car, Robyn stretched her arms and took in a great lungful of warm October air. Theirs was the only car in the dead-end lane and everything was perfectly still and quiet.

Entering the churchyard, she looked at the modest little building before her. St Nicholas’s didn’t shout about its presence in the landscape but it was very pretty with a tiny crenellated tower in a warm beige stone and a small silver spire. There were three arched windows above a fine wooden door either side of which were two carved faces gazing out over the pathway.

A great yew tree cast a cobwebby shadow across the front of the church and Robyn thought of how Jane Austen must have walked by it so many times and that made her smile.

Opening the church door and walking inside, she marvelled at the coolness of the building after the warm sunshine and gazed at the beautiful white arches under which delicate flowers had been painted.

A bright brass plaque on the wall to the left announced that Jane Austen had worshipped here. Robyn looked around at the neat wooden pews and walked up the aisle and sat down. Where would Jane have sat? she wondered, sitting in both the front row pews and sliding along them just to cover all the options. And would she have been paying attention to her father’s sermon or dreaming of handsome men on horseback? Was it in this very church that she’d created Elizabeth and Darcy, Elinor and Marianne and Catherine and Tilney? Were their adventures of the heart conceived in this hushed and humbling place?

Robyn let a few peaceful moments pass.

‘Only two hundred or so years separate us,’ she said with a smile. It felt strange to finally be sitting in a place that her idol had once inhabited. Other than reading the novels, this was as close as she was ever going to get, wasn’t it? To walk in the same steps and to sit in the same seats.

At last, Robyn got up and looked around the rest of the church, noting the memorial to Jane’s brother, James, who’d succeeded his father as rector. There was also a moving memorial to three young girls, Mary Agnes, Cecilia and Augusta, who had all died of scarlet fever in 1848.

‘Great-nieces of Jane’s,’ Robyn whispered into the silence. ‘Whom she never lived to see.’

And that was one of the great tragedies about the writer - that she’d led so short a life, dying at the age of forty-one. How many other wonderful novels might have been written if she’d lived longer? That was the question everyone asked. It was, truly, one of the greatest losses to literature and, although Robyn wasn’t particularly religious, she couldn’t help but send a little prayer up for Jane.

As she walked back down the aisle, she noticed four beautiful kneelers in sky blue featuring silhouettes of Regency ladies. Everyone, it seemed, was proud of the Austen connection.

Opening the great wooden door and stepping back outside, Robyn spotted a baby rabbit hopping amongst the graves. She walked around the back of the church which opened onto fields and then thought she’d better make her way back to Jace.

It was as she left the churchyard and entered the lane that she heard the sound of horse’s hooves on the road and, turning round, saw a great chestnut stallion trotting down the lane, its mane and tail streaming out behind him. But that wasn’t what had captivated Robyn for sitting astride the horse was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.

A handsome man on horseback, Robyn thought. Hadn’t she been thinking of just that inside the church? It was as if she’d conjured him from wishful thinking - as if the magical world of Jane Austen had come to life before her very eyes.

She gazed up at the man as he rode by. His hair was a dark coppery gold underneath his riding hat and his arms were bare and tanned. Robyn could tell he was tall and he sat proudly and confidently on the chestnut stallion. It really was a sight to behold and, as he passed her by, he turned, nodded and smiled and Robyn could feel the most wonderful blush colouring her face.

‘The man’s a lunatic!’ Jace yelled as the horse and rider picked up speed and shot across an adjacent field. ‘Did you see how close he was to my car?’

‘He wasn’t anywhere near your car.’

‘That horse could have kicked out and done all sorts of damage. He’s totally out of control.’

‘He’s totally beautiful,’ Robyn said, and then wondered if they were still talking about the horse.

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