That was how I met Robert Dudley again. By the morning we had pledged our troth and the seeds of our mutual destruction were already sown.

3

Lizzie: Present Day

The call came through five minutes before Lizzie was due onstage. She was nervous which meant that she was also in a bad mood. She didn’t do literary events; they really weren’t her thing. Everyone knew that she hadn’t written the book herself—she’d been quite open about that from the start—and she couldn’t even remember much of what the story was about. What the hell was she going to talk about? What the hell were they going to ask her? She’d insisted on approval of all the interview questions and now she couldn’t remember a single one of them or the answers she’d prepared.

She stood up and paced across the tiny space that the festival organisers had imaginatively called the green room. It was green because it was a corner of a marquee that had been cordoned off for her use. The carpet was actual grass. Lizzie could even see a ladybird crawling towards her. There was one lopsided mirror, an extension lead was the only source of power, and there was no proper lighting, which had made doing her hair and make-up a nightmare. It was so hot under the canvas that once her make-up was done it had all slid off her face anyway. The fruit juice was warm and the sandwiches had curled. Kat had reminded her that she couldn’t expect the same VIP treatment at a literary event that she got at a film studio which had only made her more annoyed. It wasn’t as though she was a diva. Everyone said she was lovely. But the whole thing was hideous and she was within an inch of walking out.

The other authors speaking at the symposium on Young Adult fiction, the real ones, were accommodated in the historic environs of Gloucester College but perhaps they hadn’t thought that appropriate for her, the celebrity, the interloper. Here she was right next door to the main marquee where she would be doing her interview. She could hear the crowd arriving, hear the swell of sound and voices, and sense the pulse of excitement. Normally that would have excited her too with the buzz of a performance imminent, but that was when she was singing, or presenting, or performing on Stars of the Dance. She had spent most of her life in the spotlight. Tonight, though, was all about writing and she was so far beyond her comfort zone she couldn’t even see it over the horizon.

She’d turned down the invitation to the event as soon as it had arrived but Bill had overruled her for once. He’d called her into his office in Bloomsbury, which was also unusual as he normally came to her. As her agent, he did work for her after all. It wasn’t her job to go to him. And she was twenty-six now, not sixteen, as she had been when she had signed with him. She did not take well to being told off like a sulky child.