The Austen Playbook (London Celebrities #4)(96)

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.