The Girl from Summer Hill (37 page)

The first scene of act three was when Lydia found out she was to go to Brighton with the Forsters. As Casey watched Lori laughing and talking about the clothes she was to take, she marveled at how the girl actually seemed to
be
Lydia.

Casey had few lines in the scene, so she stood aside and watched Olivia beside Lori. How had she not seen the resemblance? Lori was taller and had that wonderful agility of youth, but the two women looked alike. Their pale blondeness and their blue eyes—which could instantly go from laughter to cutting a person to size—were the same. When Lori moved her hand to dismiss her sister Kitty, Casey knew she'd seen the same movement from Olivia.

Kit sat to one side of the stage, his face hidden from the audience by a newspaper, but Casey could see that he was watching Olivia and Lori. There was so much regret in his eyes that Casey could almost read his mind. He had missed out on the life that had produced this beautiful girl. Olivia, their daughter, Portia, and Lori had all eluded him.

Offstage, Rowan came to stand behind the curtain. He looked like an angrier version of his father, but he too watched Lori's happy performance. They were closely related, but they had missed out on knowing each other.

Kit kept his paper up until only he and Casey were left on the stage. Lizzy was to say that Mr. Bennet could
not
allow Lydia to go to Brighton. To get in the mood, Casey thought of what Lori had told them in the dressing room. Devlin stretching out on the bed beside her! How quick-witted she'd been to say what she did. And how well she'd analyzed his personality to know that he'd be repulsed by her statement.

When Lizzy asked Mr. Bennet to say that Lydia couldn't go, her voice was pleading, desperate. It was as though Casey was trying to stop what had already happened. As for Kit, he delivered Mr. Bennet's words of permission, but his eyes were full of angst.

There was a break while Josh and his men did their magic to turn the set into a beautiful parlor at Pemberley. When Tate came into the scene, Casey was glad she no longer had to pretend to hate him. But then, he was utterly charming. When he smiled at Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner in a way that made the outdoor audience go “Ooooooh” in a chorus of female voices, it was hard for the players not to laugh.

In the next scene there was a change. The high school girl playing Darcy's sister, Georgiana, had been replaced by Nina. A quick glance at Rowan, standing offstage and glowering, answered Casey's question of why. It looked as if Tate had told Lori's story of the bullying high school girls. Maybe after they were questioned by the FBI, those girls would think twice about attacking someone else in a jealous fit.

With Nina there—a person Casey genuinely liked—it was easy to play the role of Lizzy. They left the stage arm in arm.

Casey didn't hurry down to her dressing room but stayed behind to watch Tate with the woman playing her rival, Miss Bingley. After the woman tauntingly said hateful things about Lizzy Bennet, Darcy put her down with so much contempt in his voice that the poor girl almost started crying. She worked in a local shop, and Tate's size and his professional anger directed at her were almost too much for her to withstand. When the curtain came down, she ran offstage.

Smiling, Casey grabbed her long skirt and ran down the stairs. She had to change while Josh made the set into an inn.

Back onstage, when Lizzy delivered her lines about Lydia having run off with Wickham, there was real fear in Casey's voice and tears in her eyes. She knew she was to tell Darcy that it wasn't his problem, and she said the lines, but her eyes begged him for help.

Tate understood what she was saying. This was about what Lori had been through and what she would face in the coming months. His ex-brother-in-law would be arrested, and later there would be a trial. It was going to be hard on the girl.

Tate said his lines perfectly, but at one point he reached out to touch Casey in reassurance. It was an inappropriate gesture for the time period, and he dropped his hand before it connected.

The scene changed to the Bennet parlor, and Mrs. Bennet was coming apart in worry. In rehearsals, Olivia's frantic fluttering—her “nerves”—had been almost laughable. But not tonight. Not in this version. They felt as real as they actually were.

Olivia was to say that her husband was away, looking for their daughter, but Kit threw them off balance by striding onto the stage. His bearing showed his military background. He was Christopher Montgomery, not the wimpy Mr. Bennet, and he put his hands on her shoulders. “I will find her. I will bring her back and we will protect her forever,” he said, his eyes on hers.

Olivia, tears blocking her voice, nodded.

“This is all my fault,” he said. “I am the one who caused this. I alone allowed it to happen, and I will work until my last breath to make it up to you.”

By this time, their heads were almost touching, and again all Olivia could do was nod.

Kit let go of her shoulders, stepped back from her, then turned.

Everyone onstage was confused by this interruption. Olivia stood in silence, her eyes on Kit as he walked away.

He reached the edge of the stage, then halted and turned back to look to Olivia. In a few long strides, he went to her, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her.

It wasn't a stage kiss of closed mouths, meant to imply more than it showed. It was a deep kiss. Porno, X-rated, watch-it-after-the-kids-go-to-bed kiss.

Audiences inside and out stopped. The people onstage opened their eyes wide in shock as they watched The Kiss.

When Olivia nearly fainted, Kit held her in his arms, not letting her fall—and kept kissing her.

After minutes, he pulled away and stood her upright. He kept his hands on her shoulders until she was self-supporting. Then he gave a curt nod, as though to say, “There! Think about that while I'm gone,” and strode off the stage, leaving behind a silent audience, crew, and players.

Olivia recovered first. She said her line about how Mr. Bennet would surely fight Wickham and be killed and they'd all be thrown out of their house. In the book it was meant to show the woman as self-centered and unloving, but Olivia's delivery was of a woman sending her beloved off to war. The anger and fear in her voice, following a kiss that could only have been between two people who had loved each other for a very long time, put tears in people's eyes.

When she'd finished, Olivia looked to Mr. Gardiner, Mrs. Bennet's brother. He was to tell her to calm down, but the actor, a local man, was still staring in silence.

Spontaneously, the audience came to their feet with applause and cheers and lots of whistles.

Olivia kept her place, as though she meant to stand still and wait for the applause to stop. But Casey wasn't going to allow that. She grabbed Olivia's hand and turned her around to face the audience.

For a moment Olivia just stood there in silence, then she took a well-deserved bow. She gave several of them before she stepped back into place and everyone grew quiet and the play continued.

What followed was a short scene that wasn't in the book, of Lydia and Wickham together. Casey was supposed to change for the next scene, but she stood behind the curtain and watched. She wasn't surprised when Tate came up behind her.

The rehearsals had been of Lydia giggling and teasing, flirting with Wickham, glad they'd run away together. But that wasn't the way Lori played it onstage. She seemed to mimic how she'd felt when Devlin kept her imprisoned in the motel room. Outwardly, she was nice to him, but she let the audience see the fear that was inside her. The reality of a fifteen-year-old girl being seduced by a thirty-something-year-old man was more than creepy.

The twist on the scene had the audience enthralled—and it made Devlin very angry.

When the scene ended, he stomped off the stage in a fury. “Did you see that?” he said to Casey and Tate. “After all I've done for that little bitch! Has she been telling people lies about me? I spent hours listening to her whining about how her grandmother was abusing her. Since I'm related to the kid, I felt it was my duty as a responsible adult to get her away from the old hag. I would have called the authorities, but I thought I'd better find out the truth first, so I took the kid away. Is there anything
bad
in that?” Devlin glared at the stage, where the men were changing the set. “She acted like
I
had seduced
her
! Look, Landers, if I lose this contest, it's
not
my fault. Got it?”

He stormed away, his rage making the whole stage vibrate.

Tate and Casey looked to the other side to see Rowan. He had heard it all. He didn't say anything, just walked down the stairs to the dressing rooms.

The next scenes dealt with the aftermath of Lydia and Wickham being married. When Mr. Bennet returned home, Mrs. Bennet greeted him with quiet relief, and Kit and Olivia walked away, arm in arm.

When Lydia and Wickham arrived at the Bennet house, Lori wasn't laughing in triumph, as Lydia was in the novel. She looked like a girl who'd learned her lesson—but was too late. Lori delivered the lines in the script, but not with the happiness that was in the novel. Instead, she put a modern twist, a politically correct slant, on the words. She was a fifteen-year-old girl and she was now
married.

Her words to her sisters weren't gloating but showed her knowledge of what she was going to be missing. No more giggling with them. No more flirting at parties. No more hope for her future.

When Lydia told Lizzy that Mr. Darcy had found them, it was said in the terms of a rescue, that Darcy had made the best of a very bad situation.

From the far side of the stage, Devlin—out of character as Wickham—sent glares of threat to Lori. She knew the audience had seen them, so she stepped almost behind Casey, who put her arm around Lori's shoulders and shot Devlin's looks of threat back at him.

At the end was a bit of dialogue between Elizabeth and Wickham, and Casey let the man—and the audience—see what she thought of him.

The next scene was much-needed happiness, as Jack as Mr. Bingley asked the beautiful Gizzy as Jane to marry him. After the sadness of Lydia and Wickham, the audience burst into happy applause.

In the next-to-last scene, Hildy, as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, came on and gave a marvelous over-the-top performance. She was so outrageously snobbish that the audience laughed. Encouraged by them and by all the disruption in previous scenes, Hildy put extra drama into telling Elizabeth how unworthy she was of a rich, aristocratic man like Mr. Darcy. She seemed to be talking of the cook and the movie star.

Casey replied that she agreed but that he wanted her, so what was she to do? Say no to him? Impossible!

Hildy delivered her long speech of shock with such conviction that Casey almost said she'd stay away from Tate. But she put her shoulders back and said that if he again asked her to marry him, she wouldn't say no.

At last came the final scene. It began with only Lizzy and Darcy. There was a bit of talk of blaming themselves, then Tate said he loved her.

“From the first moment, you have seen me as a man,” he said while holding her hands, his face close to hers. “Not as how the world sees me, with the riches I have acquired, but as I truly am. I have grown to love you with all my heart.”

His lines weren't as they were in the script, but by that time Casey was used to impromptu. She opened her mouth to reply, but Tate stepped back and held his hand up so the audience could see. On the little finger of his left hand was a staggeringly beautiful ring with a big diamond in the center.

He pulled it off, went down on one knee, and asked Casey to marry him.

The appearance of the ring and the look in Tate's eyes so jolted her that she couldn't remember her lines. All she could do was nod yes.

With a smile, he slipped the ring onto her finger, then stood up and drew her into a kiss. The curtain came down. The end.