Val McDermid - Northanger Abbey

I’d first like to thank Jane Austen, without whom this book could never have come into existence. She’s given me countless hours of pleasure, and I’d like to think there’s a quantum universe somewhere where she is getting her own back reimagining Tony Hill and Carol Jordan.

My eternal gratitude goes to Julia Wisdom, who had the chutzpah to offer this irresistible assignment to me and who has always believed in my ability to achieve the unlikely.

As usual, I tip my hat to the queen of copy editors, Anne O’Brien, to my agent Jane Gregory and to Kiri Gillespie, who never complains. Thanks also to the team at HarperCollins who have supported the Austen Project with such quiet efficiency.

And thanks finally to my family and friends who never let me down in spite of extreme provocation.

It was a source of constant disappointment to Catherine Morland that her life did not more closely resemble her books. Or rather, that the books in which she found its likeness were so unexciting. Plenty of novels were set in small country villages and towns like the Dorset hamlet where she lived. Admittedly, they didn’t all have such ridiculous names as the ones in the Piddle Valley where her father’s group of parishes was centred. It would have been hard to make credible a romantic fiction set in Farleigh Piddle, Middle Piddle, Nether Piddle and Piddle Dummer. But in every other respect, books about country life were just like home, only duller, if that were possible. The books that made her heart beat faster were never set anywhere she had ever been.

Cat, as she preferred to be known – on the basis that nobody should emerge from their teens with the name their parents had chosen – had been disappointed by her life for as long as she could remember. Her family were, in her eyes, deeply average and desperately dull. Her father ministered to five Church of England parishes with good-natured charm and a gift for sermons that were not quite entertaining but not quite boring either. Her mother had given up primary school teaching for the unpaid job of vicar’s wife, which she accomplished with few complaints and enough imagination to leaven its potential for dreariness. If she’d had an annual performance review, it would have read, ‘Annie Morland is a cheerful and hard-working team member who treats problems as challenges. Her hens are, for the third year in a row, the best layers in the Piddle Valley.’ Her parents seldom argued, never fought. Between the two of them, there wasn’t a single dark secret.

Even their home was a disappointment to Cat. Ten years before her birth, the Church of England had sold the draughty Victorian Gothic vicarage to an advertising executive from London and built a modern executive home with all the aesthetic appeal of a cornflakes packet for the vicar and his family. In spite of its relatively recent construction it had developed just as many draughts as its predecessor with none of the charm. It was not a backdrop that fuelled her imagination one whit.

Cat’s tomboy childhood had been a product of her desire to be the heroine of her own adventure. The stories she had first heard and later read for herself had fired her imagination and given her a fantasy world to play with. Her delight at having siblings – older brother James and younger sisters Sarah and Emily – was largely due to the roles she was able to assign them in her elaborate scenarios of battling monsters, rescuing the beleaguered and conquering distant planets.

For most children blessed – or cursed – with so vivid an imagination, the natural outlet is school. But Annie Morland had experienced what she called ‘the education factories’ at first hand and it had left her with a firm conviction that her children would best thrive under her own instruction. And so Cat and her siblings were denied exposure to a classroom and playground society that might have subjected them to life’s harsher realities. No one ever stole their dinner money or humiliated them in front of a roomful of their peers. Instead, they came under the constant scrutiny of a mother and father who wanted only the best for them.

James, blessed with natural wit and intelligence, would have succeeded whatever educational system had been imposed on him. And Cat, who cared more for narrative than knowledge, would probably have done no better wherever she’d been taught. They would certainly have become wiser in the ways of the world if they’d escaped their mother’s apron strings, but had that been the case, their story would be too commonplace to hold much interest for an ardent reader.

Their only significant contact with their peers happened in the small park that had been created from a water meadow donated to the village on the occasion of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The gift had been made by an international agribusiness keen to catch the eye of the Prince of Wales; and besides, the field had no significant agricultural potential since it lay within an oxbow of the Piddle and so could not be aggregated into one of the prairies so beloved by commercial farming. The park contained a football pitch, a tennis court, an adventure playground and, thanks to an American couple who had moved into the Old Schoolhouse, a rudimentary baseball diamond. Whenever school was out, the field acted as a child magnet. Little was formally organised, but there were always pick-up games of one sort or another into which the junior Morlands were readily absorbed. Cat particularly enjoyed any sort of ball game that included rolling or sliding in the dirt.

Cat progressed from tomboy to teenager without showing any academic or sporting distinction whatsoever. Her enthusiasm seldom lasted long enough to produce any solid results. Often her mother despaired of ever managing to shoehorn a French irregular verb or a simple algebraic equation into her daughter’s brain. After a nature walk, Cat would rather sit round the fire telling ghost stories than discussing the flora and fauna they’d seen in the woods and fields. She made notes when her mother insisted, then promptly mislaid them. Whenever she could drag their lesson off track, she did. In a history lesson, Annie would suddenly realise that instead of learning about Tudor foreign policy, her daughter was making the case for Henry VIII’s much-married state.

Faced with constant failure, Annie tried to find an explanation. Perhaps Cat was one of those individuals whose right brain dominated, making them creative, musical and imaginative. ‘Does that also include being utterly incapable of focusing on anything for more than two minutes at a time?’ her husband asked with mild exasperation when she outlined this theory to him one night as they retired to bed. ‘Who knows if she’s musical or creative? She says she loves music but she never practises the piano. She says she loves stories but she never finishes any of the ones she starts writing. She can’t be bothered earning pocket money because there’s nothing she wants to spend it on. All she wants are novels, and she can get as many of those as she wants from our bookshelves and the library bus. Honestly, Annie, as far as I can tell, she inhabits an entirely separate universe from the rest of us. She’s a completely dozy article.’

‘And what kind of future is she going to have?’ Annie tried not to admit pessimism into any area of her life, but where her eldest daughter was concerned, it was hard not to let it sneak in through the slightest crack in her defences.

‘One that requires no qualifications other than a good heart,’ Richard Morland said, rolling over and punching his pillow into submission. ‘Look how good she is with the little ones. Catherine will be fine,’ he added with more confidence than his wife thought he had any right to. That, she supposed, was where your faith came in.

Cat meanwhile was sleeping the sleep of the unconcerned, lost in happy dreams of adventure and romance. The details of her future never disturbed her interior life. She was serenely convinced that she would be a heroine. In her mind, all her life had been a preparation for that role. That wasn’t to say there wouldn’t be obstacles. Anybody who knew anything about adventures knew there would be stumbling blocks aplenty along the way to true love and happiness. Their families would be at war or her beloved would turn out to be a vampire or they would be separated by an ocean or an apparently terminal illness. But she would triumph and conquer every barrier to a satisfactory ending.

The only problem was how these exploits were going to get started. Years of ranging through the back gardens and living rooms of Piddle Wallop under cover of childish games and pastimes had convinced her she knew all there was to know of her neighbours. Of course, she was entirely mistaken in this assumption, but her blissful conviction was unlikely to be overturned while she paid more attention to the inside of her head than the secrets of those who surrounded her. As far as Cat was concerned, she knew nobody who was likely to provoke any sort of adventure. If she was going to embark on an escapade, she would first have to escape the narrow confines of the Piddle Valley. And she couldn’t see how she was ever going to manage that.

She was on the brink of despair when the impossible happened. In one brief moment, her prospects were transformed. Like Cinderella, it appeared that Cat was going to have her chance after all. If not at Prince Charming, then at least at the twenty-first century equivalent of the ball.