A Good Name: A Modern Pride and Prejudice Variation Read online

  A Good Name

  A modern pride and prejudice variation

  Sarah Courtney

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Courtney

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover design: pro_ebookcovers

  Written by: Sarah Courtney

  Published by: Sarah Courtney

  Edited by: Lopt & Cropt

  To my husband Steve,

  my children Charlie, Livy, Maggie, Cecilia, Jocelyn,

  and especially Elisabeth,

  who has been instrumental in her encouragement and ideas for this story

  Contents

  Preface

  Part I

  1. Hungry

  2. Charity

  3. Change of Seasons

  4. New Beginnings

  5. Fitting In

  6. Georgiana

  Part II

  7. First Impressions

  8. Escape

  9. Wrong-footed

  10. Adventures

  11. Disaster

  12. Damage Control

  13. Wedding

  14. Making Plans

  15. Proving a Negative

  16. Collecting Evidence

  17. Calculated Risk

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Beauty and Mr. Darcy

  Excerpt from Headstrong

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preface

  If you aren't familiar with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

  (or the last time you read it was in high school)

  here's what you should know.

  Pride and Prejudice is the story of Elizabeth Bennet, a gentleman's daughter of limited means, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy gentleman, living in England at the start of the 19th century. When Elizabeth first meets Darcy, who accompanies his friend Charles Bingley to the area, Darcy insults her. Her grudge over his insult and arrogance leads her to believe the lies of George Wickham, a youthful acquaintance of Darcy's and protégé of Darcy's late father. Elizabeth refuses Darcy's unexpected proposal, citing both Wickham's lies and Darcy's deliberate separation of her sister Jane from his friend Bingley.

  Ultimately, both Elizabeth and Darcy are forced to recognize their own pride and prejudice. By the time they meet again, they are better able to appreciate each other.

  Why do people write variations of Pride and Prejudice?

  The world Austen painted has captivated generations of readers and is unforgettable. The plot mostly focuses on the characters and their growth and change, and Jane Austen's light hand with descriptions and setting means that it's easy to imagine the story taking a different turn.

  Furthermore, much of Pride and Prejudice relies on coincidence. What if Elizabeth had never visited Pemberley or seen Darcy again after his proposal? What if Darcy had not heard about her family tragedy and been in a position to help? Or even, going back, what if her cousin's patroness had not been Darcy's aunt and she had never been put in a position to receive Darcy's first proposal? All of these points lead to a ripe opportunity for writing variations that answer "what if?"

  Modern retellings or variations of Pride and Prejudice often have a Fitzwilliam Darcy who is rich, well-connected, and a subject of great interest to the press in order to strike a modern parallel to his stature in society and relevance to the scandal sheets and gossip columns of the time.

  A modern Elizabeth Bennet, like her Regency counterpart, is a character of modest means. Like the original, though, she is lively, clever, unafraid to speak her own mind, and well-liked by her peers. Part of the appeal of Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's most beloved heroine, a strong and intriguing young woman who is more than a product of her time.

  Part I

  Hungry

  June 2000

  It was Saturday, and George Wickham was hungry again.

  He was always hungry, really. Okay, maybe not starving like those children he sometimes saw in pictures, those hollow-eyed children in other parts of the world. But hungry.

  He knew should be grateful that he got a free breakfast and lunch at school every weekday. It might not be great food, but it was food, and since his mother was usually too out of it in the evenings to make him dinner, it was nice to have two meals he could be sure of. At least on school days. Even when school was out, like it would be soon, kids could go by the school for breakfast and lunch, and nobody asked any particular questions.

  He’d long since stopped being embarrassed about getting free meals. Hunger would do that to you.

  Sometimes his mom’s boyfriend, Mark, bought groceries. George was allowed to share, but it always went fast, and there were too many days between grocery trips. When that happened, it was always weekends that were the worst. He’d have no food but what he could scrounge up until Monday, unless Mom or Mark sobered up enough to get something. Sometimes George got so hungry that he’d sneak into a fast-food restaurant to take a ketchup package or two. He hoped that didn’t count as stealing since they gave them away for free.

  His walks didn’t help his hunger, but he couldn’t resist. He hated Mark’s apartment complex. The kids there thought they were so tough, and they were always threatening him. There was a little playground, but the teenagers had taken it over and painted nasty stuff on the slide, and no younger kids ever played there anymore.

  But if he could handle a mile of walking, he could hang out in a park with a pond. He liked to sit on a bench near the playground and watch the kids play. Or sometimes he would walk down the short path through the trees to the pond and watch the ducks. It was worth the long walk to be somewhere quiet and peaceful.

  He passed the tattoo parlor, the auto shop where Mark worked, and the payday loan place that his mom sometimes dragged him to when she got desperate. She was sure that having a child along helped. He hated the next corner, where the cell phone store was. The men who liked to hang out there scared him.

  Once he passed that corner, though, the road was wider and the stores nicer. Traffic was heavier, but he didn’t have to cross for several blocks and there was a traffic light. After he’d crossed and turned the corner again, he was on a street that had a pretty church and even trees in front of some of the stores. He enjoyed the hint of greenery as he approached the park.

  The trees were full and provided plenty of shade once he’d crossed the parking lot and gone up the path to the playground. He took his usual seat at a bench overlooking the playground.

  It was hard, though, to forget his hunger, when there was a girl eating a sandwich at the next bench. He couldn’t keep from glancing repeatedly in her direction. He could smell the peanut butter from where he sat, and it was torture.

  She caught him looking at her, and he blushed and turned his head all the way to the side towards the kids on a set of monkey bars. He didn’t want her to think he was staring.

  He yelped with surprise when he turned back to see her sitting right next to him on his bench.

  “What are you, a ninja?” Up close, he could see every tiny freckle on her nose and cheek
s.

  She laughed and shook her head, brown braids flying. “What are you, deaf? I wasn’t even trying to be quiet. So, are you allergic to peanut butter?”

  “Allergic to... why?”

  She shrugged. “Well, I’ve got an extra sandwich. I don’t think I’ll eat it, and you looked like you forgot to bring lunch. You can have it if you want it. As long as you aren’t allergic.”

  “How would I know if I was allergic?” he asked to hide the fact that he didn’t know exactly what “allergic” meant. He’d heard the word, of course, from grown-ups at school during lunch and sometimes Mark muttering about pollen, but how would he know if he was?

  She flipped a braid behind her. “Have you ever eaten peanut stuff and stopped breathing and had to go to the hospital?”

  He widened his eyes. “No.”

  “Well, then.” She gave him a huge grin. “Here. Have a sandwich.”

  He took it gingerly, but once he’d taken a bite, it was all he could do not to make a fool out of himself by eating like an animal.

  “Thank you,” he gasped out between bites.

  She popped the last bite of her own sandwich in her mouth, then leaned back on the bench and pulled out a book, with apparently no intention of going back to her own bench.

  They sat quietly for a few minutes, her reading and him eating. Then she spoke again.

  “My dad says I read aloud really well—for a kid, at least. I even do, you know, voices and all. Want me to read to you while you eat?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. You can if you want, I guess.”

  “Okay!” she said brightly. She flipped back to the beginning of her book and started to read. “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.”

  He chuckled. “Is that supposed to be an English accent?”

  “Why yes, yes, it is,” the girl said in the same accent, shaking her head and letting her braids fly.

  “It’s awful,” he said. “Like, the worst ever. What are you, six?”

  “I’m eight! I just had my birthday,” she exclaimed, frowning at him. “And I have a perfectly good English accent.”

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t. Just read it like a normal person.”

  She sighed. “Nobody ever appreciates my accent.”

  “Because it’s bloody awful!” He was rather proud of himself for that, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what it meant. He’d heard the word on some show of Mark’s.

  She stuck her tongue out and continued to read, in her regular voice now. “Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.”

  George sat back in the bench and took another bite of his sandwich.

  So she was eight. She really did read well for an eight-year-old. To be honest, she read a lot better than he did, especially considering she was reading aloud.

  It took him several minutes to figure out that she was reading him Harry Potter. He’d heard of it, of course. Kids at school were always pretending to cast spells on each other or playing with sticks as wands. But without a library card or money for books, he’d never read it himself. He wasn’t really much of a reader, anyway. Slogging through the stories in his school reading book was enough for him. Reading was too hard to do it for fun.

  But this Harry Potter was good stuff. He finished his sandwich and kept listening. And the girl kept reading. She took drinks from a water bottle every so often and glanced at him to see his reaction sometimes when something particularly funny or interesting happened, but otherwise she read without comment.

  Finally she closed the book and looked at her watch. “I gotta get home, or Mom’ll get mad,” she said.

  He nodded, but he wished she didn’t have to go. It was like coming out of a dream somehow, to close the book and go back to real life. He felt let down. Going home, going to bed, lying there hungry—well, maybe he’d be a little less hungry tonight—while waiting for sleep to come . . . how could he go back to that now that he had been on a train to magic school? Maybe he could imagine he was Harry Potter still in his cupboard. Harry was probably hungry and lonely sometimes, too.

  “Okay,” was all he said.

  “Wanna read some more tomorrow?” she asked. “I can come in the afternoon sometime.”

  Did he ever! “Yeah, okay,” he said. “Will you . . . will you bring the book?”

  “Yep.”

  He watched as she put her water bottle and the book into a backpack that appeared full of books. Awfully full, really, for a kid who had to be in, what, like, third grade? She had more schoolbooks than he did, and he was in fifth!

  “Oh,” she said, turning, “I never asked your name. I’m Elizabeth Bennet.”

  “George Wickham,” he said.

  He watched until she was out of sight.

  George’s mom and Mark didn’t come back to the apartment Saturday night. He was used to being left alone, but there was no food and no money, either.

  There was a food pantry at a church near their apartment building. George wished his mother would take him there to get food, but he knew she wouldn’t. It would be too much effort to walk there, for one, especially strung-out as she usually was. If she did make the effort, the food pantry people might ask questions, or they might even call CPS. She’d never risk it. George wouldn’t, either. He never wanted to have to go back to that place again.

  The group home where George had been for six months last year had been the worst place he’d lived yet. At least at Mark’s place, he was mostly just ignored. At the group home, the boys had never ignored him. He was always getting punched in the stomach or somewhere worse, or his school stuff taken away and ruined, or being teased for his height, or something. It never ended. If he told on them, it only got worse.

  The foster home before that had been decent, and there had only been three kids, but it had been temporary and he couldn’t stay there. And apparently there just weren’t enough foster homes for everybody. Group homes were hard for a kid who just wanted to be left alone.

  When his mom had officially “got her act together” and got him out of the group home, it had been a day of happiness. Being ignored was better than the alternative, and sometimes he was a help to his mom when she and Mark were too out of it to do anything but sleep. His mom liked to say that he was her “little alarm clock,” even though she swatted at him when he tried to get her up. Probably just like she would do to a real alarm clock. He knew she wasn’t really trying to hit him. She wasn’t like that.

  Whatever, so maybe she was pretty much crap as a mom, but at least he thought she probably loved him and she didn’t beat him up. Maybe that meant the food pantry was out, but he could live with that.

  On Sunday, he decided to walk over to the park early. Elizabeth had said she would be there in the afternoon. He’d learned better than to count on anybody doing what they said they would, but maybe she would be there. Maybe. Anyway, being outside and watching little kids play at the park might distract him from being hungry.

  George had almost convinced himself that there was no way Elizabeth would be at the park. She might want to come, but maybe she would have chores to do, or her parents wouldn’t let her. He didn’t want to think about never hearing any more of the Harry Potter book.

  He went to the park anyway, telling himself it was just to check.

  She wasn’t there. He tried very hard not to cry, because ten-year-olds didn’t, especially kids who had lived in foster homes and group homes and had a junkie for a mother. They had all the crying knocked out of them early. But for the first time in months, he’d been excited about something.

  He sat on the bench anyway, just in case. Because maybe she was just late.

  And she was. But she came.

  “Sorry,” she said, dropping onto the bench next to him. “Mom ins
isted on a ‘Sunday afternoon dinner’ thing. Dried-out roast and stuff. Give me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich any day!”

  He nodded, but he found himself thinking about roast. He wouldn’t care if it was dried out. His grandmother used to make roast, back when he was a little kid, but he could barely remember it.

  “Oh!” she said, opening her bag. “Didn’t mean to make you hungry. I wasn’t sure if you’d had lunch yet, so I brought you some.”

  When she pulled out a plastic storage container from her backpack clearly full of food, he almost hugged her. There was dried-out roast with tons of gravy poured all over it—“It’s the only way to get it down,” she assured him—along with mashed potatoes, green beans, and cooked-from-a-box macaroni and cheese. She’d even wrapped silverware in a napkin and tossed that in her backpack, too.

  “Thanks,” he managed before diving in.

  She grinned, put a water bottle on the bench beside him and another next to her, and opened Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

  He was in heaven. Actual heaven on earth. She hadn’t been exaggerating about the meat being dry, and the mashed potatoes seemed to stick in his mouth, but it was food, and definitely better than school lunch.

  The book was even better. Just like the last time, she read for what felt like ages, until she was drinking more and more water and had refilled her bottle from the playground’s water fountain twice.