Secret Schemes and Daring Dreams (23 page)

‘That's exactly what I intend to do,' Harriet exclaimed. ‘I've made a start. Theo Elton is dead meat
and to prove it, look!' She shoved her mobile phone under Emma's nose. ‘Every text deleted,' she said. ‘Well, there were only two . . . but I've got rid of the napkin from Mango Monkey's, and the twig he used to point out the stars . . .'

‘Well done,' Emma commented, struggling not to laugh. ‘And Harriet, you will find someone very soon, I'm sure of it.'

‘I already have.'

‘You mean – Dylan? Did I really get it right this time?'

‘Dylan? Oh please. Hardly.'

‘Then who?'

‘Someone who rescued me when I was really at my lowest ebb . . . someone so cool, so fit, so sexy . . .'

Emma had never heard Harriet waxing so lyrical.

‘I was feeling so low and scared and vulnerable and then he turned up right in front of me like that, and just reached out his hand and smiled and . . .'

Freddie. She was in love with Freddie. That was a total non-starter – Freddie Churchill, millionaire in the making, and Harriet Smith, daughter of a bankrupt? No way.

‘You're sure – I mean, you're not just feeling like that because he got you out of a difficult situation,' Emma urged, desperately trying to find a gentle way to let her down. ‘See, Freddie's family are really top drawer and . . .'

‘Freddie? You didn't honestly think I was talking about Freddie Churchill? Oh please – credit me with a little sense! I'm not that blind.'

‘But you said it was the guy who rescued you,' Emma pointed out.

‘Sure. Can't you guess? George, of course.'

Emma felt as though time had stopped still, as though everything in the universe was holding its breath.

‘
G-George?
' she stammered. ‘You're in love with . . .'

She couldn't say it. This was terrible, awful, unthinkable. Harriet and George! No, no, no.

‘At the party, he was just so cool, so sweet.' Harriet sighed. ‘He held me so close when we danced, and he said any guy who didn't want to spend time with me must be mad and that Theo didn't deserve me.'

Emma wanted to clamp her hands over her ears to blot out the words. Her chest was tight, her mouth had gone dry and she had a sudden urge to put her hands round Harriet's throat.

‘He can't, you can't . . .' Emma burst out.

Harriet's smile faded. ‘What? You don't think I'm good enough for him?'

Emma didn't reply. She was grappling with the overriding emotion that blanked out all rational thought.

Harriet wasn't good enough for George. No one was good enough for George. No one, she suddenly realised with a complete shock, except her – Emma Woodhouse.

‘Emma?' Harriet was peering at her anxiously. ‘You don't think I'm good enough for him, do you?' she repeated, not nervously as would have been usual for Harriet, but almost defiantly.

‘I didn't say that – I mean, does he . . .?' It was no good, she had to ask the question. ‘Do you think he feels the same?'

No, no, of course he doesn't. She's delusional, she's crazy, Emma thought desperately.

‘Actually, yes I do.' Harriet's cheeks were pink and her eyes sparkled. ‘Something he said to me this morning before he went away made it quite clear.'

Emma suddenly understood why people spoke about blood running cold. The image of George standing by his car swam before her eyes: ‘Thing is, something's happened – something big – and I need to get away and get my head around it before I take the plunge.'

‘What did he say?' The words came out as a strangled sob.

‘That's private,' Harriet simpered, and then suddenly became serious. ‘You don't think – I mean, he's not the kind of guy to flirt and not mean it, is he?'

Emma bit her lip so hard that she could taste the blood. ‘No,' she admitted. ‘If George says something, he means it. You can be sure of that.'

‘Oh great!' Harriet giggled. ‘So come on, let's go shopping – I've got loads to get for Mum and with the bonus that the Knightleys gave me I can afford a bit of a splurge.'

‘Actually, you go on your own,' Emma whispered. ‘I think I'd better go and lie down. I'm not feeling too good.'

‘I don't want Emma to hear about this, not till I've had a word.'

Emma was passing the door of her father's den on the way to her bedroom for a good howl when she heard the words that brought her to an abrupt halt.

‘This is going to devastate her,' Tarquin went on as Emma held her breath, her heart thumping. ‘You know how she feels about the guy.'

So it was true. Everyone knew about Harriet and George. And how come her dad realised how she felt even before she did?

She couldn't face him, not yet. But she had to talk to someone. And as usual, when she was in total meltdown, there was only one person to call.

‘I got here as fast as I could,' Lucy panted, flopping down beside Emma on her bed and putting an arm round her. ‘Your dad's worried about how you're taking all this.'

‘So it was you on the phone?'

Lucy nodded. ‘He'd just hung up when you called me. I'd been praying that he'd seen the article before you got hold of it,' she confessed. ‘But, by the look on your face, you've read it already.' She squeezed Emma's hand. ‘I'm so sorry, you must feel . . .'

‘What article?'

Lucy pulled the latest copy of
Cheerio!
magazine from her bag.

Make your mind up, Freddie C!
The headline on the centre page jumped out. Below it were two photographs. One of Freddie kissing Emma on the lips. Below it was the caption
Girl of my dreams??

Even in her angst over George, she couldn't help taking satisfaction from the fact that she looked very sophisticated and at least twenty-one.

And then her eye caught the picture on the opposite page. It was a picture of Freddie and Jake, obviously taken somewhere in the gardens of Donwell because the fairy lights in the trees were clearly visible. It wasn't, however, the fairy lights that caught her attention. It
was the fact that Freddie had Jake's face cupped in his hands and was, quite clearly, about to kiss him.

‘I don't get it,' Emma said for the third time in as many minutes. ‘He can't be gay. What about Judy?'

‘Not Judy, Jude,' Lucy told her. ‘Like Jude Law? You must have misheard it on the phone. Jude was in the same year as Freddie and Caroline Campbell . . .'

‘Caroline? Jake's ex-girlfriend? The one Lily kept going on about?'

‘That's her,' Lucy confirmed. ‘It's all very complicated. Apparently, Jude and Freddie were an item and Caroline was going out with Jake.'

‘But if Jake's gay too . . .'

‘According to Miranda, he was all confused about his sexuality and it wasn't till he met Freddie that he kind of knew for sure. Freddie broke it off with Jude and Jude got drunk and blurted it all out to Caroline, who chucked Jake.' She paused.

‘So Jude was threatening to tell everyone – that's what the text message meant?'

‘He'd already dropped big hints to Freddie's father,' Lucy explained. ‘That's what the huge row was about – the reason Freddie came down to Sussex in the first place.'

‘So if his dad already knew he was gay, what was Jude on about?'

Lucy sighed. ‘Freddie had denied it,' she admitted. ‘Apparently he was worried sick about not getting the shareholding due to him on his twenty-first birthday. That's why he . . .'

‘. . . came on strong to me?' Emma blurted out. ‘That's why he kissed me in front of Sir Douglas? And now my
photograph is all over the magazine and – this is awful!'

Lucy watched her anxiously. ‘It's a very good photo,' she observed weakly. ‘It's the reason Miranda did it that's so horrid.'

‘What do you mean?' Emma asked.

‘She told Theo that she wanted to do a piece on Jake and the band, but, when they got close, she said the real reason was to make Freddie Churchill pay for what he'd done to her great mate, Jude,' Lucy went on. ‘Theo contrived the invitation to the party because he knew you were mad about Freddie and . . .'

‘He wanted to get his own back,' Emma concluded. ‘And now I'm going to be a laughing stock with people like Serena and Chelsea. I only wanted to pull him to make them jealous. Freddie and Jake – who'd have thought it? Freddie must have sent that guitar to him – and there he was pretending not to know . . .'

Lucy burst out laughing, caught sight of Emma's thunderous expression and stopped.

‘So how come you know all this anyway?' Emma demanded.

‘The bit about Theo? He rang Adam and asked if we'd seen the magazine. He was really gloating.'

‘And the rest of it? The bit about Freddie and Jude and everything?'

‘Freddie sent this email to Adam.' Lucy handed Emma a couple of pages of A4. ‘It explains everything. Including the fact that he and Jake are moving in together as soon as those share certificates are safely in the bank strongroom.'

The whole thing sounded to Emma like the plot line of a prime-time soap.

‘But that's so mercenary, it's immoral,' she shouted. ‘And how dare he use me like that? How dare he be so callous, so thoughtless!'

Lucy touched her hand. ‘Emma, your heart must be breaking.'

‘It is.' Emma could hold back the tears no longer. ‘But it's not because of Freddie. I couldn't give a damn about Freddie. Jake's welcome to the two-faced, double-crossing waste of space!'

‘So what on earth is it then?' Lucy gasped in alarm.

‘It's George,' Emma cried. ‘I love him and he's going to go off with Harriet. And if he does, I'll die, I know I will.'

So, you really think that it's just Harriet's imagination?' Emma asked Lucy half an hour later. ‘Or are you saying that to cheer me up?'

‘Well, I can't be certain,' Lucy began.

‘So you
are
just saying it,' Emma said between sobs. ‘I knew it. And yet George said she was ditsy . . .'

‘Which she is,' Lucy encouraged.

‘But then perhaps he's discovered he likes ditsy girls,' Emma sniffed. ‘Harriet says that they talked and he said lovely things, only she won't tell me what, so it must have been dead romantic – oh, I want to throw up.'

‘Emma, stop it!' Lucy pleaded. ‘In two weeks, he'll be back and you can ask him yourself.'

‘Ask him? I can't do that. If he says he loves her, I'll die, and if he says he doesn't he'll want to know why I'm so bothered. I do have my pride.'

‘Tell me about it,' murmured Lucy. ‘But just think how much worse you'd be feeling if you really had been in love with Freddie. Then you would have had something to cry about.'

So this was what love felt like. Nausea, racing heart, tears one minute, laughter the next, panic all the time. Days that dragged so slowly each one felt like a week. A face that ached from putting on a bright smile at Charity Race Day, when the few friends still in Sussex were hooked up with guys and she and Harriet were forced to be together, Harriet chatting about George and how she'd been really worried that he was shooting birds but he wasn't, it was clay-pigeon shooting, and did Emma think he'd teach her one day. And, crazy though she knew it to be, Emma had an irresistible urge to check her mobile phone for text messages every five minutes, and then spent an hour in the depths of despair when there was nothing from George.

Keeping up appearances got harder by the day. Emma's father, initially relieved that she wasn't heartbroken over Freddie's duplicity, worried when she continued to pick at her food one moment and then stuff her face with anything the fridge had to offer the next; Thalia, wracked with guilt at not having voiced her suspicions about her grandson much sooner, refused to believe that she wasn't simply putting a brave face on things, and kept coming up with diversions to keep her occupied and then worrying when Emma meekly spent a whole morning cataloguing the gallery's contents without a single complaint; and Lily, convinced that
Emma's distracted manner and constant sighing was all her fault for overreacting at the party, produced a box of her home-made fudge and a large cake with the word ‘Friends?' iced on it.

At the end of the first week, she could bear it no longer. ‘Have you heard from George?' Emma tried to sound casual, as she helped Mrs Knightley restock the garden kiosk with postcards and gifts before the Open Gardens afternoon.

‘If I had, I'd be lying down in a darkened room to recover,' his mother said, laughing. ‘Communication is not my son's strongest point.'

‘Did he tell you what it was he needed to sort out?' Emma added, paying close attention to a calendar of Sussex beauty spots.

‘George plays his cards very close to his chest,' Mrs Knightley told her with an amused smile. ‘Something happened at Freddie's party, of that much I'm sure.' She patted Emma's shoulder. ‘But I made a vow some twenty years ago that I wouldn't be an interfering mother. So, until he deigns to let me know what's going on, all I can do is wait.'

You and me both, thought Emma with a sigh.

And checked her mobile once again.

CHAPTER 12