“Go see, then come back and tell me. I still need to tell you something about MadriGals.”
Emma leaves the room, and I turn away from my laptop to start getting packed up again for school. I don’t want to be late for Movie Madness.
“Hey, Jess,” says a familiar voice. My heart skips a beat. I look up to see Darcy smiling and waving at me on my laptop screen. I wave back, hoping that my hair doesn’t look too dorky. I can’t remember if I brushed it today or not.
“How’s life?” he asks.
“Uh, okay.”
“What are you up to these days?”
We talk for a while, and I tell him about the meteor shower, and about my brothers’ trip to the Science Museum.
“I remember going there when I was a Cub Scout!” he says. “I’ll bet they had a blast.”
Darcy tells me about playing rugby, and some more about their trip to London, and I’m just starting to tell him about Movie Madness when he glances over at the door.
“I think I hear Emma,” he says. “I’ll say good-bye, I guess. Maybe we can talk again sometime.”
“Sure,” I reply, trying to sound casual. He leaves the room and a huge smile breaks out on my face. I sit there feeling stunned and happy. Was our conversation an accident, or did he plan it? Is it possible he likes me after all?
I think about the other Darcy, the Jane Austen one. He and Emma’s brother couldn’t be more different. Jane Austen’s Darcy is always saying the wrong thing, always insulting Elizabeth Bennet and her family. He’s a snob. My Darcy is the nicest guy in the world.
I’ll take my Darcy over Mr. Darcy any day of the week.
But why, oh, why does he have to be three thousand miles away? Three thousand, three hundred and twenty-five miles, to be exact. Five thousand, three hundred and twenty kilometers. Metric or U.S., the measurement doesn’t matter. Darcy Hawthorne might as well be in another galaxy with the Leonids.
“Young ladies of her age are sometimes a little difficult to manage. . . .”
—Pride and Prejudice
Emma
“Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of Nature had been but little assisted by education or society.”
—Pride and Prejudice
“Emma! Lucy and Rupert are here!”
“Be down in a minute, Mom!” I holler back.
I grab my backpack—regulation navy, of course, to match the regulation navy everything else of my Knightley-Martin School uniform—and sling it over my shoulder. I don’t even bother looking at myself in the mirror. What’s the point?
Clattering down the steep, narrow stairs, I’m careful not to bump my head on the low beam over the doorway at the bottom. People must have been midgets back in the 1600s, because I’m not all that tall and even I have to watch my head in a few places here at Ivy Cottage. Darcy’s taken the brunt of it. His forehead was black and blue for about a month when we first moved in. But he’s adjusted. We all have.
I poke my head into my dad’s study to say good-bye. He’s squinting at his laptop, absorbed, but waggles his fingers at me as I blow him a kiss.
My mother is sitting at the kitchen table with tea and toast and the morning paper. “Did you remember to feed Toby?” she asks.
“Oops.”
“Allow me to be of assistance,” says Rupert Loomis, startling me as he springs out of the alcove by the back door where he and my friend Lucy are waiting.
I protest, but it’s too late. Toby spots him lumbering across the kitchen and flaps his wings. “MOOO,” he squawks. “ROOOPERT!”
My mother shoots me a look.
Rupert, clueless as always, looks pleased. “He recognizes me! Good old Toby.”
“MOOO,” squawks Toby again.
“Don’t forget I’m picking you up after school today,” my mother tells me.
“I won’t.” I grab a piece of toast and lean down to kiss her good-bye.
“I cannot believe you taught that parrot to say that!” she whispers in my ear. “What were you thinking?”
I glance over at Rupert, who has finished feeding Toby and returned to his spot by the back door. The alcove ceiling is especially low, and he’s standing there stiffly with his head tilted awkwardly to one side, scratching himself. I look back at my mother and grin. She shakes her head wearily and makes a shooing motion at me with her hand.
It’s just me and Rupert and Lucy at the bus stop this morning. Darcy caught the early bus into town, because he’s got rugby practice before school. It only took about two seconds after we arrived for him to get snapped up by the team. I guess jocks have special radar for detecting other jocks or something. And even though he’s never played rugby before, he’s brilliant at it, of course. My brother’s a natural at every sport he’s ever tried. Which is really annoying when you’re not.
I’m not a natural at anything except reading books and writing. A couple of years ago, though, I decided not to let that stop me, and I started taking skating lessons with Mrs. Bergson. Once we determined that I probably wasn’t future Olympics material—which took all of about thirty seconds—we just focused on working hard and having fun. And I do. I haven’t been able to skate as much as I would have liked since we moved to Bath, because the rink is way on the other side of the city. Getting there means I have to change buses twice, so I’ve only been going once a week or so.
I’m still getting plenty of exercise, though, because we walk everywhere. Before it started getting dark so early—they don’t have daylight savings over here, and this time of year it’s dark out when we go to school and dark out when we come home—Lucy and Darcy and Rupert and some of the other village kids and I walked to school along the towpath by the canal. It’s a long walk, but a really pretty one.
Mom calls Lucy Woodhouse an “English rose” because she’s really fair-skinned, with rosy cheeks and a halo of strawberry blond curls. She lives across the street from Ivy Cottage in another super old house. Hers is a style called “half-timbered,” with dark beams embedded in its whitewashed walls. It has a thatched roof too, and is even older than the Berkeleys’ house.
I met Lucy the first day we got here. I guess Mrs. Berkeley told her about me, because she was on our doorstep before we were even unpacked. Lucy’s an only child, like Megan. There are other kids in the village, but no girls her age. It turns out our birthdays are exactly two days apart. She was really excited to meet me, and it was great to have a ready-made friend. I think school might have felt a bit overwhelming without Lucy to help me navigate everything.
“I can’t wait for Christmas, can you?” she says as we head to the bus stop.
“Nope,” I agree.
Christmas is my favorite holiday. I’m a little sad we won’t be spending it at home in Concord this year, but my parents are trying really hard to make it special for us anyway. We might even go back to London for New Year’s.
“I trust you both received invitations to my great-aunt’s holiday fete,” says Rupert in his deep, formal voice. It’s like he’s practicing to be a radio announcer or something. “It’s sure to be a festive event.”
“Yes, Rupert,” says Lucy, smiling at him. She’s incredibly patient with Rupert. In fact, if his odd mannerisms didn’t completely rule out the possibility, I’d say she actually liked him. “Ours came yesterday. I’m sure it will be a brilliant party, as always.”
Rupert smirks. Or maybe it’s just his normal smile. It’s hard to tell.
Apparently his great-aunt’s Christmas party is an annual tradition in the village. She has this huge old house—I mean like something-out-of-a-movie huge, open to the public for tours and everything—and Lucy told me that it’s always decorated to the hilt for the party, with live music and really good food. Our invitation came yesterday, in a thick cream-colored envelope.
“Fancy,” my mother said, fingering the card inside with its printed border of holly leaves and berries. She propped it on the mantel. “It’s not often you get an actual engraved invi
tation.”
“We got ours, too,” I assure Rupert, and one of his long arms suddenly shoots out toward me in an awkward high five.
“Uh, yeah,” I say, reluctantly high-fiving him back. His palm is clammy and I edge away, relieved to see the bus approaching.
“Greetings!” Rupert booms to the driver as the door opens, and I cringe in embarrassment. Embarrassed is how I generally feel around Rupert. I try not to let Lucy see, though. She’s kind of protective toward him. She probably feels a little sorry for him, being an orphan and everything. I guess anybody who was raised by his great-aunt would be a little south of normal, as my dad puts it.
My dad totally gets how I feel about Rupert. Maybe it’s because he’s a writer too. I’m always looking at people and thinking about how I could describe them, and I think he does the same thing. He calls Rupert Ichabod, after Ichabod Crane, the gangly schoolteacher in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” “ ‘With feet that might have served for shovels,’ ” he quoted to me under his breath the first time he met Rupert, who has enormous feet he’s always tripping over. He has enormous ears, too, just like Ichabod.
My mother gets mad at us for talking about him behind his back.
“The boy just hasn’t grown into himself yet,” she protests, which is mom-code for “He’s a total dork.”
“Do you know yet what you’re going to wear to the party?” Lucy asks me, after we take our seats. The two of us always sit upstairs on the bus. I still get a thrill out of riding a double-decker bus to school. Sometimes, living over here, it feels like I’ve fallen into a storybook or something.
“My mother’s going to take me shopping this afternoon on Milsom Street.”
My mother is in heaven, living near Bath. I guess Jane Austen used to shop on Milsom Street when she lived here two hundred years ago.
“Oh, there are some fabulous shops on Milsom!” says Lucy. “They’re quite expensive, though. You might try that new mall down by the train station if you don’t find anything.”
Even though it doesn’t have skyscrapers like Boston, Bath is still a full-fledged city, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would have a mall. It does, though. Of course, it’s nothing like any mall I’ve ever seen before. For one thing, it’s built out of the same honey-colored limestone as the rest of the city, and for another, it looks like it’s ancient already, even though it’s brand-new. The builders had to design it to match the existing historic architecture. My mom says they would have wrecked the looks of the city if they hadn’t. Bath is something called a World Heritage Site, which is kind of like a National Park, only for cities and stuff too.
“Did you finish your maths assignment?” Lucy asks, and I nod.
It’s funny, both countries speak the same language, but there are so many words that are different. Math is “maths,” an elevator is a “lift,” a truck is a “lorry,” a flashlight is a “torch,” and “crisps” are what they call potato chips, while “chips” over here means French fries.
Just as riding the double-decker buses thrills me, I get a thrill out of hearing people talk. I love the differences in the language, and I adore the British accents. And I love how beautiful the countryside is too. Concord is beautiful, but not in the same way that England is. England is so green, and there are sheep in practically every field you see. Plus, just about everybody has a garden, and there are villages scattered all over that look like maybe Hobbits live in them. Or Shakespeare.
What I don’t get a thrill out of in England is Annabelle Fairfax.
Because as it turns out, they have queen bees in England, too.
As usual, Annabelle is already there when we get off the bus. She’s by the front door of the school with her posse, waiting to pounce on her hapless prey, which could be just about anybody who strikes her fancy.
I’ve managed to stay on her good side so far this fall, mostly because I’m living at Ivy Cottage. Maybe she’s hoping I’ll invite her over so she can admire Tristan’s trophies or something. She’s always going on about what a great skater he is, and how handsome he is. I think she has a crush on him. Which is kind of creepy, considering he’s her cousin and everything. Darcy just rolled his eyes when I mentioned this to him, though.
“Distant cousins, Emma,” he reminded me.
At any rate, Annabelle and Tristan have been figure skating together since they were practically babies. I’ve seen her practicing at the rink a few times with their coach, and she’s good. Really good. The problem is, she knows it. She swans around Knightley-Martin like she’s minor royalty or something.
Even though she’s been fairly neutral toward me so far, I smelled a rat the minute I met her. I’ve spent the last few years dealing with the likes of Becca Chadwick and Savannah Sinclair, plus I’ve also met some of the great queen bees of literature, as my mother and I call them, through my book club. Jenny Snow from Little Women. Josie Pye from Anne of Green Gables. Last year it was Julia Pendleton in Daddy-Long-Legs, and this year it’s Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice. I had Annabelle Fairfax’s number before she even opened her mouth.
This morning she and her wannabees have one of the girls from my class cornered, and are twitting her about her hijab. Khalida is Pakistani, and like a lot of the other Muslim girls at Knightley-Martin, she wears a head scarf. It’s part of their religion. At our school they’re navy blue, of course.
I don’t know Khalida all that well—she’s in a couple of my classes, but she’s quiet and reserved and we’ve only talked a couple of times. Seeing the miserable look on her face, though, I feel a hot spike of anger. I’ve been on the receiving end of Annabelle’s brand of withering scorn too many times in the past few years, and I know exactly how she feels.
I hesitate, wishing Cassidy were here. She’d know exactly what to do. Taking a deep breath, and hoping that maybe I sound just a little bit like her, I go over to Khalida and put my arm around her shoulders. “Put a sock in it, Annabelle.”
Annabelle stares at me, shocked. “What did you say?”
“You heard me.”
Lucy is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind, and Rupert has faded into the shrubbery. They’re no more eager than I usually am to attract Annabelle’s attention.
Annabelle glances over at her friends. “I guess that’s American slang for ‘I’m a twit.’ ”
Her friends laugh obligingly. I ignore them.
A crowd is gathering. Nobody but nobody at Knightley-Martin goes up against Annabelle Fairfax. I’m not sure where the words are coming from, but somehow they’re welling up inside me and spilling from my lips. “You have no business picking on Khalida! And if you don’t quit it, I’m going to tell one of the teachers.”
She smirks at me. “Really? Go ahead. Miss Deane is right behind you.”
“What’s going on here, girls?”
I turn around to see the music teacher emerging from the door to the school. She’s young and pretty and soft-spoken, and putty in the hands of someone like Annabelle Fairfax.
“Nothing, miss,” chirps Annabelle, the picture of innocence. “We were just complimenting Khalida on her, uh, sense of style. Isn’t that right, Khalida?”
With a quick, apologetic glance toward me, Khalida nods.
Miss Deane looks at us uncertainly.
“Well, you should be getting along to class, then. It’s almost time for first period to start.”
“Yes, miss,” Annabelle replies meekly. She shoots me a You were saying? look.
Miss Deane heads back inside.
“Come on, Tink,” says one of Annabelle’s friends. “Tink” is short for “Tinkerbell,” which is what they call Annabelle. They all have these stupid little nicknames for one another. Jemima Duff is “Puff,” Sophie Miles is “Smiles,” and Victoria Wesley is “Buttercup,” for some unknown reason. Of course, nobody else is allowed to use these names. A new girl tried just last week and found herself locked in a stall in the boys’ room as punishment.
Annabelle lo
oks pointedly at Lucy, who is shaped like a straw, and Rupert, who is still trying to pretend he’s a shrub. “Fly away then, Dorothy. And take your scarecrow and cowardly lion with you. Just remember, though, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”
And with that final parting blow, Annabelle prepares to flounce off in triumph. Except I don’t let her.
“You must have forgotten what happened to the wicked witch at the end of that particular story,” I retort. “You’d better watch your back. Plus, I’d rather be friends with Lucy and Rupert any day of the week than be stuck following you around, Stinkerbelle.”
There’s an audible gasp from the students around us, followed by a ripple of laughter. It’s quickly stifled as Annabelle whips around. She opens her mouth, then snaps it shut again and turns haughtily to mount the steps behind us. Her friends quickly follow.
“You are dead,” says Lucy faintly as Annabelle’s rigid back retreats through the school’s front doors. “Completely and utterly dead.”
“Yeah, I know,” I reply, rubbing my sweaty palms against my skirt. My heart is pounding like crazy. I’m still not sure where I got the courage to do what I just did. One glance at the relief on Khalida’s face, though, tells me it was worth it.
“Thank you, Emma,” she says softly. “I’m so sorry I . . . I—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “I know the feeling, believe me.”
Rupert emerges from his hiding place in the bushes, wearing a worshipful expression. My heart sinks. This is not a good sign.
“I can’t believe how brave you were!” says Lucy, linking her arm through mine as the three of us head inside. “Wasn’t she amazing, Rupert?”
“A veritable knight in shining armor,” he agrees, stumbling over the doorsill.
Fabulous. I’m Rupert Loomis’s hero.
I manage to make it safely to the end of the day without running into Annabelle Fairfax again. My mother is waiting for me when school lets out, and I get into the car with a sigh of relief. The Christmas holidays stretch out ahead like a nice big buffer zone between me and Stinkerbelle. I won’t be seeing her for nearly three whole weeks.