Chapter 16
Ivy
Ihave to admit, Xavier de Vere knows how to take the wind out of a girl’s sails.
Staring at an original Constable in a private home is one way to do it.
It’s not just the glory of his brushstrokes, which conjured up fluffy white clouds and delicate oak trees with such panache, that gives me the horn, but the backstory of all this art.
How each duke got hold of each painting must be a story in itself.
Oh, and he forgot to mention over lunch that there’s a Gainsborough sitting right next to the Constable, so there’s that.
Unfuckingbelievable.
I’m still in an art-porn haze when we head out. It’s mild enough not to need jackets, and Xavier swapped his wellies for loafers before lunch, which is a bit of a shame, really. The combo of the wellies and him was definitely giving Theo James in The Gentlemen.
To be fair, he’s still giving Theo James. The lightweight quilted gilet thingy he’s wearing over his shirt is the ponciest thing ever, so I don’t know why it’s so hot.
I’m still in Flora’s lovely cream sweater which, in a shocking plot twist, doesn’t have a single drop of tomato soup on it.
I nearly died when I saw the colour of that soup.
That pork pie was epic, though. Xavier kept pushing more of it on me.
And I was very relieved when Benedict started up a horsey conversation so his mother would stop grilling me.
The woman seems terrifying, though for someone whose husband is dying, she definitely has her shit together.
It’s all very sad. Flora told me he has months, if not weeks, left.
What’s even weirder is that she doesn’t seem too cut up about it.
My parents’ deaths are by far and away the two worst things that have ever happened to me in my life, but maybe these aristocrats still do actually have strange, formal relationships with their kids.
I’m hyper-conscious of Xavier beside me as we walk away from the house.
Well, as conscious as you can be when you’re having an out-of-body experience.
Here I am, exploring the grounds of the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life with the gorgeous and highly frustrating man who will one day inherit the entire place, for fuck’s sake, when I should be serving up all-day full English breakfasts at the caff and preparing to spend my evening with Dawn.
The guilt, the anxiety, flickers to life in my tummy and I tamp it back down. Don’t be stupid, Ivy, I tell myself. There’s no bloody point in bailing on her and being here if you’re going to ruin it all by guilting your way through the weekend.
‘So the aviary is just this way,’ Xavier says, steering us around to the left.
‘The entire house was knocked down and rebuilt from scratch by the eighth duke during the 1870s, and they set about building a whole range of features that would delight their guests and, of course, leave no visitor in any doubt as to their wealth and power.’ He grins sheepishly at me, and it’s annoyingly endearing.
‘His wife was the horticulturalist, but they were both very fond of their rare birds. It’s empty now, of course, but in its time it had an extraordinary collection of exotic species. ’
‘Nice place to be a horticulturalist,’ I muse, taking in the aviary.
It was eye-catching when I spotted it from the coach that day, but up close it’s breathtaking—a massive structure of trellised ironwork, all edged in gold and painted one of my absolute favourite shades of green, eau-de-nil.
It’s a similar colour to copper verdigris, but absolutely impeccable.
I wonder how often it gets painted. The entire thing is perfectly symmetrical and almost too gorgeous to bear. It makes my heart hurt, actually.
‘Indeed,’ Xavier says. ‘Alice de Vere, her name was.’
Huh. Alice was my mum’s name. I love that.
‘Her leather-bound gardening diaries are all in the library, in fact,’ he continues.
‘They’re beautiful. She was obsessed with ferns in particular, like many of her contemporaries, and her diaries are full of pencil sketches of a whole variety of species in the various stages of unfurling.
They’re exquisite. Makes you look at ferns in an entirely different light.
We have a conservatory full of them—I must show you later. ’
I know, from the crumbs I’ve picked up from Flora, that both Xavier and Benedict have jobs involving managing ‘the estate’ and the gazillions of pounds’ worth of land they own across the city of Oxford.
I’m sure it’s a lot of work. It sounds like it is.
But I’m struck as we stand here that this is his life.
This house, and its gardens, and its stories, and all these perfect fragments of it, from oil paintings by famous painters to this aviary, probably designed and built by some insanely impressive Victorian architect.
And I can tell how much he cares about it all. He doesn’t take it for granted. It’s clear from his rapt expression that he really, really cares—about every building, about every story, about every clue he possesses as to the history of this place.
His life involves sitting in a library, leafing through old diaries filled with beautiful drawings by the lady that made this estate what it was, and in this moment I don’t know if I envy him or Alice de Vere more.
‘Don’t,’ I groan, pressing my hand to my heart.
‘It’s too much. Fern drawings?’ At this point, I won’t mention that one of my favourite books of all time is The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert.
It’s literally a six-hundred-page book about a Victorian heiress’s obsession with plants, and it’s stunning.
Moss was her jam, but that book really made me appreciate how amazing plants are up close.
Like, seriously clever and seriously relaxing.
I may have had a shitty formal education, but when your stepmum’s a librarian, you basically become a reader whether you like it or not. I don’t want to freak him out with my weirdness, but I bet leafing—haha—through old pencil sketches of prettily unfurling ferns would feel like meditating.
I bet it would be even more calming than listening to my secret song before bed.
Xavier smiles, and it’s so sincere. He looks chuffed. My enthusiasm seems to please him. ‘I hope it inspires you,’ he says softly. ‘For your painting later, I mean.’
‘I am literally sweating inspiration right now,’ I tell him. It’s true. Everything around here is visual crack. I’m so glad I caved and treated myself to some new canvases for the weekend. They’re small, but I can’t wait to set them up on my easel.
He chuckles. ‘That’s good. In that case, let’s crack on. I’m sure you want to go and set up soon.’
We walk through the older parts of the garden, checking out a Georgian folly that’s every bit as pretty and pointless as follies were apparently intended to be.
An older ancestor built it when Romanticism was all the rage in garden design.
Xavier tells me that when the duke and duchess at the time tore down the Jacobean house, they spared the folly, and I can’t help but be glad.
‘My absolute favourite part of the grounds is coming up next,’ he confides as we leave the folly. ‘The orangery. It’s Georgian, too, but Walter—that’s the eighth duke—completely overhauled the heating system.’
My completely inappropriate thought as he says this is that there was a truly excellent sex scene in the duke’s orangery in Grosvenor.
Not helpful, Ivy. Not helpful at all.
Flustered, I turn back to look at the house behind us.
It’s glowing golden in the sunlight. I can’t process how beautiful it is.
I’m sure it’s lovely even on a cloudy day, with all those romantic turrets and dizzyingly steep roofs, but today it’s like the sun is a slimy estate agent, throwing every trick he has in his book at the place to make me fall hopelessly in love with it.
We pass another smaller but equally golden house in the distance, its front visible between two copses of trees. It’s a Jane Austen fantasy come to life: perfectly symmetrical, with a pillared porch and huge windows.
‘Ooh,’ I say. ‘What’s that? It’s so pretty.’ Pretty is an understatement. It makes my heart ache with longing.
‘That’s the dower house. It predates the main house by a good hundred and fifty years.’
‘It’s perfect.’
‘In theory,’ he says slowly, as if he’s choosing his words, ‘Ma will move in there when Pa passes and I inherit the title. Not that I’d ever move her on, of course, but I suspect she’ll insist when I’m married. It’s the done thing not to crowd the newlyweds.’
He finishes with an awkward little laugh, but I’m reeling.
Could he have packed any more downers into a couple of sentences?
Here I was, simply enjoying the sight of a pretty house, and he has to remind me that his dad is dying, his mum will be widowed just like Dawn, he’s fucking well getting married, and not only that but his mum will move out so he and his bride can fuck like rabbits all over Belvedere.
Oh, fucking hell.
The orangery comes into sight, hitting me like a football in the gut.
It’s aesthetically perfect, a long, low building in the same golden stone.
Across the front runs a line of identical full-length Georgian windows with domed tops.
There are stone urns along the flat roof—again, all identical.
The overall effect is simply gorgeous, and the great riot of ancient, gnarled wisteria branches between the windows makes me wonder how incredible they must look in spring when they bloom into every shade of purple.
It’s a far cry from the Harrow Road, and it makes me realise what an utter pleasure it is being here and being exposed to such relentless gorgeousness.
Nothing about my daily life is aesthetic in the slightest, and here I am, soaking up marvel after marvel.
It’s making me all dreamy. It’s so indulgent.
Instead of the usual shit, my mind is full of fern sketches, and sunlight turning stone to gold, and how colourful the plumes of the poor, trapped exotic birds of long ago must have been.
The creative overload has me turning into a whole different person.
Until Xavier brings me swiftly back to reality, that is.
‘So.’ He pulls one huge glass door open and gestures for me to step through. ‘You wanted to chat about Flora?’