A Weekend with Mr Darcy: The perfect summer read for Austen addicts!. Victoria Connelly

certainly have lots to tell her dear friend Lorna about once she was home. Her fingers were almost itching to start the letter right now. Lorna would laugh heartily when Katherine told her about Warwick and how cool she’d been in her response.

      ‘And quite right you were too!’ Lorna would surely tell her. ‘These men must be put in their place.’

      Katherine sighed. If only Lorna was here, she thought to herself. What fun they would have together.

      Just across the hall from Katherine’s room, Robyn was waking up, stretching full length under the warm duvet and staring up at the beautiful plasterwork above the light on the ceiling. It was a far cry from her own bedroom so many miles away in Yorkshire with the strange damp patch that glowered down at her each morning. How lovely it must be to live in such elegance, she thought. Getting out of bed the wrong side would be impossible when one had sash windows on one side and exquisite pieces of furniture on the other. Come to think of it, it would be hard to get out of bed at all when you owned one as beautiful as the one Robyn was occupying. Did she really want to leave its warm comfort when she could spend the day in bed with Mr Darcy? Or even a whole weekend with Mr Darcy? Now, there was a thought and, if a girl couldn’t get away with that at a Jane Austen weekend then where could she?

      Robyn sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. It was always a bit tangly and springy first thing in the morning and she’d need to tame it before breakfast.

      Getting out of bed and taking a shower, she tried not to think about the night before. After Jace’s appearance, she’d hidden herself away in her room for over an hour and then got angry that she was letting him ruin her weekend. So she’d ventured downstairs and quietly joined the film group, just in time to see Colonel Brandon carrying a broken Marianne in his arms. It was one of her favourite scenes and she always adored the moment when, after her fever has passed, Marianne notices Colonel Brandon in the doorway of her bedroom - seeing him as if for the first time, and thanks him.

      As ever, in times of trouble Jane Austen was - in the words her sister Cassandra used to describe her - ‘the soother of every sorrow’ and Robyn was able to put all non-heroes out of her mind.

      Having washed and dressed, Robyn swapped the beauty of her bedroom for the splendour of the dining room, shyly entering and noticing that she was one of the last down.

      ‘Oh, my dear!’ a voice suddenly accosted her. ‘We were all so worried about you.’