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Prologue

Fliss Courtney stared up at the grand house in wonder. She was just fourteen years old, and Clarendon Hall wasn’t like anything she had seen before. She half expected Elizabeth Bennett to come storming down the stairs followed by a scowling Darcy. Fliss wouldn’t have believed that people lived like this, as though they were in a period drama – until she became friends with Tara Oliver, daughter of Lord and Lady Oliver.

‘This is going to be the best Christmas ever!’ Tara had declared as she gave Fliss the invitation for her to spend the Christmas holidays with her family near the end of Michaelmas term at Cranham School.

Fliss had been having a quiet moment in their shared bedroom, opening the decorated shoebox where she kept her special keepsakes. She’d carefully lifted out a photograph of her and her mother. In it, Fliss sat wrapped in her mother’s arms, both of them laughing at the camera. It was summer, and they were in the small garden of their terraced house, the sun dappling the rose bushes behind them and lightening her mother’s pale auburn hair to a shimmering golden halo. Her mother looked impossibly glamorous, her hair pinned in an up-do, tinted pink lipstick, bright, happy, blue eyes. She was so beautiful …

For a moment Fliss held the photo to her chest, trying hard to remember the moment in the picture. But instead, her head was crowded with the memory of her mother in her last days, painfully thin, eyes sunken in hollow cheeks …

Fliss pushed out that unwelcome memory and stared at the photo again. This was how she wanted to remember the mother she loved so, so much.

Tara broke through her sad reverie as she crashed into the bedroom and threw herself next to Fliss on her bed.

‘Guess what?’ she said, her eyes dancing with excitement.

Fliss tucked the photo back into the box. ‘Tell me!’

‘You, Fliss Courtney, are coming to Clarendon Hall!’

Now, two weeks later, here they were. Tara linked her arm through Fliss’s and led her into the house while their suitcases were brought through by Frank Matthew, the general handyman and driver who had collected them from Moreton-in-Marsh station in a large Range Rover. Fliss gawped as they walked through the imposing wood-panelled hall. She already knew that the house had umpteen bedrooms, stables, a boating lake, and its very own private cinema – Tara was always talking about it.

It was a far cry from her own modest home near the English seaside. In fact, Fliss barely understood how she had come to be here, or how she had ended up at her all-girls private boarding school. Fliss had struggled to fit in there, but Tara Oliver – the confident, generous, show-off, daughter of a lord – had, incredibly, taken her under her wing.

This year Tara had invited her to stay for the Christmas hols. Fliss had felt bad leaving her father alone, especially as it was only the second Christmas since her mother’s death, but her father had almost seemed relieved, insisting that she deserved to have fun.

Tara led the way through the hall, and Fliss’s eyes were out on stalks as she took in the beautiful pictures on the wall, the Chinese pottery tastefully displayed on mahogany furniture. All of it looked priceless. It seemed as though Tara lived in a different world, one that Fliss had now been invited into. She wanted to pinch herself.

‘Mummy!’ Tara exclaimed, as a tall, beautiful and elegant woman swept through to the entrance hall.

‘Tara, darling, welcome home! How were the last few weeks at school? Your housemistress wrote to me and said how wonderful you were in the Christmas panto.’

‘Well, I did my best to steal the show as Dick Whittington’s cat! It was a very memorable performance, Mummy.’

Lady Oliver kissed her daughter’s head affectionately. ‘Well done for keeping the side up, I’d expect no less of you, darling.’

‘Anyway, enough about that place!’ Tara pulled a face, then spun around towards Fliss, who was feeling shy and self-conscious. She felt overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, afraid to make a misstep in a world she didn’t yet fully understand or feel a part of.

‘Mummy, this is my best friend, Fliss.’

‘Fliss, it’s wonderful to meet you. Tara’s told us all about you. And now you are both here, Christmas can really get started.’ Lady Oliver swept Fliss up in a hug and for a moment it was almost painful. It was so long since she’d felt a maternal touch, the feminine scents of perfume and hairspray reminding her of her mother. She was unexpectedly assaulted by a pang of longing, sharp and bittersweet, and tried to gather herself, to hide her feelings. The ache for her mother was almost unbearable. ‘Do call me Elizabeth,’ Tara’s mother was saying, as Tara shouted:

‘Daddy! Come and meet Fliss.’

Fliss looked up and saw a middle-aged man with blue eyes and a full head of light hair which had once been blond walking towards them. He seemed to fill up space as he walked towards her, and she recognised his refined, handsome face from newspapers, television interviews and … and she had the strangest feeling that she had met him before, but she couldn’t imagine why. Perhaps she had seen him when he came to drop Fliss off at Cranham?

‘Hello, Felicity, how wonderful to meet you. I’m so pleased you could join us for Christmas. It’s the best present for Tara.’ Lord Oliver observed her carefully, looking into her face in an oddly intense way. No one ever called her Felicity now, and she was surprised, but supposed all theatre actors spoke in this formal way; she dropped her eyes, feeling strangely scrutinised.

‘Thank you for having me,’ Fliss replied politely, looking at her feet but careful to remember her manners.

‘We were very sorry to hear about your mother,’ he said, quietly. ‘It must have been a terrible loss for you.’

Fliss didn’t know what to say to this; she was used to people ignoring her bereavement or feeling too awkward to speak to her about it. She nodded shyly.

‘Whilst you’re here, treat the place as your own.’ He smiled at her. ‘Do let us know if there’s anything you need, anything at all. We want you to feel like family.’

‘Th-that’s so kind …’

‘Not at all. I know Tara thinks of you as a sister already, Felicity.’