Chapter 21
Ivy
Even if the day was mild, the evening is chilly, and I’m grateful for the fire burning in the bloody enormous fireplace at one end of the sitting room—sorry, drawing room—where we’re assembling for drinks.
I’m almost as grateful for the fire as I am for the fact that the duchess has gone out to some horsey gathering, so it’s just the four of us tonight: Xavier, Benedict, Flora and me.
It feels kind of like we’re playing house—the kids home alone among the priceless treasures.
(Yes, the Constable and the Gainsborough are right there, which makes it even more surreal.)
Benedict has told us all that drinks are at six thirty sharp.
When I come down, having showered Xavier’s cum off my tits and dressed myself in Flora’s fancy black-and-red Rixo dress and still reeling a bit from having been put in that bedroom for the weekend, Benedict is already down here, mixing cocktails at the impressive cocktail trolley thingy—bar cart?
—in one corner. I jump on his suggestion of a champagne cocktail, telling myself to drink it slowly as I watch him make it.
From the looks of it, this guy is pretty lethal when it comes to his pours.
Flora is completely oblivious, of course, to the fact that Benedict and I have common ground.
(Just as she’s oblivious to the new common ground I have with her other brother.) So I quite enjoy my quick, illicit chat with him as we sip our drinks.
It feels naughty to be discussing Alchemy here, in this beautiful room with its dark green silk-covered walls and its incredible paintings and views through the French doors out to the lake, which is dimly lit in a purple dusk.
I bet it’s the kind of room that’s equally beautiful in every season. I’d love to see it in the summer months, when those doors are open and you can wander outside with a glass of wine.
‘So, you missing being a sinner every night?’ he enquires, beckoning me over to the fireplace. I follow his lead and plump my arse down on one side of the huge, leather-covered surround. It’s amazingly warm.
I glance over to the door to make sure his innocent little sister isn’t incoming. I’m still pissed off with both brothers for being such hypocritical cockblockers, but my orgasm has clearly softened the edges of my rage. I’ll keep working on Flora’s sexual liberation myself, no doubt about it.
Telling Benedict that I miss sinning a lot less than I did about four hours ago is not an option, so I give him a version of the truth.
‘I don’t really miss the sinning, but I do miss the place.
I miss my friends, and I miss the vibe, you know?
’ He doesn’t need to know how far removed the quiet luxury of Alchemy is from my daily grind, even if spending time with Flora—here and in London—makes up for it.
He makes a sympathetic face. ‘Yeah. It’s a good gang. The founders are top-notch.’
‘Have you been there recently?’ I ask slyly.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether you’d consider last night recent.’
I laugh, and he looks me over appraisingly.
‘You’re ravishing tonight. My brother is a stupid arsehole. What his problem is, I don’t fucking know.’
Your brother actually came to his senses in quite spectacular style this afternoon in your architecturally important orangery.
I give him a little smile. ‘He didn’t want to exploit me. Didn’t want you pimping me out. It’s kind of sweet.’
‘Yes, well, no good deed goes unpunished and all that. Still, I expect no one’s suffering more than him. Blue balls are the worst. Taking the high road is always very overrated.’
I grin to myself as I sip my yummy drink in its crystal flute. I suspect Benedict is a far more decent bloke than he lets on.
And he definitely doesn’t need to worry about his brother’s balls.
Not with me around.
XAVIER
In another, parallel existence, where I can enjoy the trappings of this gilded cage without any of the accompanying responsibilities, the svelte, stunning woman sitting by the fireplace with my brother belongs here.
She has a place in this world, a place in my life.
She’s not an outsider. She’s welcome here; she’s firmly within the fold.
In this existence, Ivy is none of those things.
But she’s here now.
She confided earlier, as we sat by the lake, that my sister had lent her a dress for tonight. She was worried, she said, about being ‘up to scratch’. As I look at her now, I know two things to be true.
One: she needn’t have worried, because she looks perfectly wonderful.
And two: no matter if Flora had foisted couture upon her for the evening, she would never, ever be accepted by most of the individuals in my world.
This afternoon was a perfect slice of heaven: almost as perfect, in an entirely different way, as our stolen moments in the orangery.
I watched Ivy sketch out the composition of our ancestral home with a skill, an assuredness, that was wondrous to behold as we chatted inconsequentially about the estate and its idiosyncrasies.
Obviously, I’m no stranger to people gushing over Belvedere. It is widely considered to be one of the prettiest and most whimsical great estates in England, after all, its Gallic-style origins rendering it more fairytale in style than many of its stouter English peers.
There’s something about Ivy’s appreciation of my beloved home, however, that resonates deeply, that touches something inside me.
It’s less that she’s impressed by it as a status symbol and more that she feels its beauty viscerally.
Whenever my fiancée is here, I sense her lens of proprietorship.
It’s not greed; it’s more that sense of stewardship, of responsibility, for which I am grateful.
But Ivy seems enchanted by everything I’ve shown her.
The estate seems to garner in her some deep sense of joy.
It’s moved her to capture it on canvas, and I can’t help but suspect that Walter and Alice de Vere would have approved of her reaction, even if they’d been uniformly horrified by her on every other front.
I slosh some champagne into a flute and make my way across the room towards her and my dastardly brother. I’m freshly showered and dressed, as Ma would expect, in a burgundy smoking jacket and black trousers.
I just wish I hadn’t had to wash the scent of Ivy’s arousal off my face.
My plan is to get her to myself before my sister comes down and commandeers her. She’ll have her all through dinner, after all.
I clear my throat as I come to a stop before the fireplace. ‘Ivy, I wondered if you might like to see Alice de Vere’s gardening diaries before dinner?’
Before she can answer, my arsehole brother throws his head back and laughs. ‘Jesus Christ, you have precisely zero chat. No, poor old Ivy does not want to be subjected to some ghastly old diaries.’
Ivy shoots him daggers and stands up. ‘I’d love to. I’ve been looking forward to this since you mentioned them.’
I smirk at Ben and usher Ivy towards the library, a hand lightly at the small of her back. It’s a large room at the back of the house, and she halts right inside the double doors, gasping as she looks around her.
‘Holy fuck, Dawn would die if she could see this.’
‘Who’s Dawn?’
‘My stepmum.’ She looks up at me with a small, tight smile. ‘She used to be a librarian.’
This is the first kernel of information Ivy has shared with me regarding her family. She’s in my home, and yet I know next to nothing about her.
‘Retired, is she?’ I ask carefully.
She turns away from me, taking in the room. ‘Yeah. Exactly.’
I’m ashamed to say that, somewhere deep inside me, a new line item is recorded on the small mental ledger I keep regarding Ivy’s character and general respectability. Her stepmother is a retired librarian. That sounds fairly honourable. I shake myself. My brother is right: I’m a ghastly snob.
‘This is one of my favourite rooms in the house,’ I tell her now. ‘As a boy, I’d do my homework in here every day. Ben hates it. I remain unconvinced that he’s not a secret illiterate.’
‘I would have done a lot more homework if I’d had a place like this to do it,’ she murmurs, setting her drink down upon the large wooden table at which said homework was completed and drifting over to the glass-fronted bookshelves on the lower level.
I take her in as she does. Flora’s dress fits her like a glove, except around the chest area, which looks…
tight. It features red roses on black silk, with several panels of small white polka dots, also on black, the construction and placement of which I don’t pretend to understand, but they fucking work.
The neckline is edged with black lace, and her breasts are, as indeed they were earlier, magnificent.
‘You’re beautiful.’
It comes out louder than I intended, but it’s true, nevertheless.
‘Thank you.’ She falters, looking back at me over her shoulder, and there’s something about the arc of her body as she does that moves me, makes me want to fall at her feet and take her up against those bookshelves all at the same time.
‘The, um, diaries are over there.’ I point to the far side. ‘I don’t want to monopolise you, but we could take some through to the conservatory, if you like?’
The conservatory is, as I hoped, a tranquil oasis at this time of night.
Really, it’s a glass-heavy corner of the main house, but there’s something about the lack of light and the damp earthiness of its majestic ferns in one’s nostrils that grounds.
Soothes. Through the windows, the aviary is splendidly lit, glowing green and gold against the darkness.
I’m not really planning to steer Ivy through the painful and laborious process of matching Alice de Vere’s fern sketches to the species we have in situ.
I simply thought it would be more atmospheric to leaf through the diaries in here. I thought it might inspire her further.
Judging by the rapture on her face, I was correct.