Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen in the hands of queen of crime, Val McDermid. Get ready for a very different Northanger Abbey.Seventeen-year-old Catherine ‘Cat’ Morland has led a sheltered existence in rural Dorset, a life entirely bereft of the romance and excitement for which she yearns. So when Cat’s wealthy neighbours, the Allens, invite her to Edinburgh Festival, she is sure adventure beckons.Edinburgh initially offers no such thrills: Susie Allen is obsessed by shopping, Andrew Allen by the Fringe. A Highland Dance class, though, brings Cat a new acquaintance: Henry Tilney, a pale, dark-eyed gentleman whose family home, Northanger Abbey, sounds perfectly thrilling. And an introduction to Bella Thorpe, who shares her passion for supernatural novels, provides Cat with a like-minded friend. But with Bella comes her brother John, an obnoxious banker whose vulgar behaviour seems designed to thwart Cat’s growing fondness for Henry.Happily, rescue is at hand. The rigidly formal General Tilney invites her to stay at Northanger with son Henry and daughter Eleanor. Cat’s imagination runs riot: an ancient abbey, crumbling turrets, secret chambers, ghosts…and Henry! What could be more deliciously romantic?But Cat gets far more than she bargained for in this isolated corner of the Scottish Borders. The real world outside the pages of a novel proves to be altogether more disturbing than the imagined world within…
Читать Northanger Abbey онлайн беплатно
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
77–85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Copyright © Val McDermid 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Cover photographs © Sandra Cunningham/Arcangel Images (grass); Shutterstock.com (all other images)
Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN 9780007504299
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007504282
Version 2014-08-09
To Joanna Steven, constant reader, constant friend, who is indirectly responsible for introducing me to the delights of the Piddle Valley.
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.
