Chapter 26
Xavier
There’s a guy who works with us: one of the office managers at our headquarters in Oxford.
Stephen. Thoroughly good bloke, a few years older than me.
His father died of lung cancer earlier this year, and Stephen went home via the hospital every single evening after work for, oh, three or four months.
We had a coffee together when he’d returned to work after putting his father in the ground, and he confided that those evenings had meant more to him than he’d ever realised they could.
He started doing them out of obligation—his folks were divorced, and he couldn’t bear the idea of his dad slowly dying all alone in that palliative care ward—but they became incredibly meaningful.
They’d never been particularly close, apparently.
He’d lived with his mum after the divorce.
At the start, he read to his dad, because he never knew quite what to say.
But, as they grew more relaxed in their surreal situation, they shared memories from his childhood—things he remembered, and things he didn’t.
He gained new memories, his brain filling in the blanks and adding colour and texture and emotion to stories his father recalled fondly of occasions in Stephen’s childhood.
He’d actually lived those moments, but he may as well have been hearing about them for the first time.
When he told me that, it really struck me.
Here I was, on the cusp of inheriting one of the preeminent titles and great estates in this wonderful land of ours.
And yet I couldn’t help but feel that my colleague’s father, a normal middle-class bloke—a maths teacher, apparently—had given him a gift beyond compare.
He’d given his son the gift of new memories.
Stephen was losing a future with his father, but, because of his selflessness, because of the astonishing time investment he’d made those last few months, he’d gained a far more sumptuously embellished version of his past.
My own father is pretty much lying in state, if that’s something you can do when you’re still alive, in his palatial home, surrounded by the best staff and drugs and equipment that money can buy.
He’s a few hundred feet away from his children at most whenever we’re in residence at Belvedere, which is most of the time, yet I can guarantee that we will bury him without having gleaned a hundredth of the memories Stephen’s father bestowed upon him.
In our position, death is a changing of the guard, a legal transition, a name change to be marked in the history books. John Edward Walter de Vere, the thirteenth duke, will die, and he will pass the baton to Xavier John Edward de Vere, the fourteenth duke.
Thus it ever was and will be.
I can’t blame Pa. If the object of passing the baton in sport is to do so as speedily as possible, then the opposite is true in the world of aristocratic inheritance.
He’s still scarred by the financial turmoil surrounding his father’s death and is intent on lining his own ducks up in a row so neat they may as well be in the military.
His imminent death isn’t a time for reminiscing on the past, nor for reflecting on what may lie beyond that shadowy veil.
It’s a time for legalities and fine print, for extracting promises that we will never go the way so many of our peers have gone and commit the cardinal sin of opening our father’s beloved Belvedere to the public.
His room is a jarring juxtaposition, the white, plasticky hospital equipment and oxygen tanks sitting uneasily with the lustrous oak-panelled walls and their equestrian oils.
Most unsettling of all are the flattened discs on the huge rug, tiny, vivid crop circles whose sharp colours are in stark contrast with the sun-faded expanse of tufts around them.
They’re a reminder that they lay, for so long, preserved beneath the four posts of the enormous oak bed in which so many de Vere dukes slumbered.
The bed was removed and put into storage when Pa’s cancer metastasised earlier this year.
Like his bed, the man inside it has shrunk beyond all recognition. These days, he’s little more than a skeleton wrapped in white waxed paper.
We flank him in our hard chairs, Ben and I on one side, Mum and Flora on the other, the seating arrangement alarmingly evocative of a dinner table in which—you’ve guessed it—Pa, with all his tubes and stents, is the macabre meal.
I don’t know how my colleague Stephen bore this every evening; I really don’t.
‘Thank you all for coming,’ Pa croaks. ‘I understand you have a… houseguest.’ This last part in the same intonation that one might say yeast infection.
‘Flora’s little companion, Ivy,’ Ma says in the same voice she’s been known to use on recalcitrant ponies.
Women like Ma—stout and stoical and resolute—are what’s commonly known as towers of strength.
Towers of dissociation and an unwavering refusal to indulge in vulnerability, more like, but what do I know?
‘She’s quite happy, so you mustn’t concern yourself, darling. She’s talking to the ferns, I believe.’
Benedict snorts. Ivy is, in fact, attempting to match the sketches in Alice de Vere’s gardening diaries to those breeds still flourishing in the conservatory’s limestone beds, an activity I find utterly charming and delightfully quaint, especially given the delightfully un-quaint things she did to my dick with her lubed-up tits a couple of hours ago.
What a spectacular little walking, talking oxymoron that woman is.
‘I have an update, and I wanted you to hear it from me.’ Pa’s cheeks are so sunken now that whichever nurse is shaving him has failed to get into the recesses properly, meaning that they’re sprouting longer hairs.
They resemble grass-tufted hollows within an otherwise impeccable lawn, and this small indignity sends a pang through my chest on his behalf even as I chastise myself for my callousness in noticing it at all.
I make a mental note to get someone in to give him a good wet shave once a week.
‘Let’s have it, then,’ Ma says, all chipper. She truly is at her best in adversity.
‘My prognosis has been moved up.’ He may as well be discussing shipping forecasts. ‘I have three months, tops.’
‘Jesus, Pa—’ I begin, but he cuts me off.
‘So I would like to propose moving your wedding up, Xavier, to as early in the new year as possible. God knows, I no longer harbour any delusions of being able to attend, but I would very much like to depart this world knowing that I’ve crossed my t’s and dotted the i’s on my succession plan in the most thorough way possible. ’
The blow must feel similar to that of a man on death row who discovers his stay of execution has been reversed.
I thought I had another five months.
I thought—
My entire chest cavity contracts, a vice of bone squeezing my lungs.
The four of us who are seated look at each other, aghast, though I’m sure the other three are, rightly, focused on Pa’s latest prognosis and not on the gates of freedom clanking noisily closed right before their eyes.
It is a far larger effort than it should be to focus on what is most important in this moment.
‘I’m so very sorry,’ I murmur. A glance at Ma tells me she already knew about the prognosis—of course she did—but is presumably struggling to accept it. Benedict is silent, a reaction that’s telling in itself, and, across my father’s wizened frame, Flora’s big eyes shimmer with tears.
Of all of us, she should be the one most resentful of our parents’ lack of interest in her future, but perhaps I have it upside down.
Perhaps it’s precisely her lack of purpose in the succession plan that has allowed Ma and Pa to enjoy her purely for who she is.
In their eyes, she’s the lapdog, the pet, here to enchant and entertain and fuck all else.
Pa is looking right at her when he wheezes out his next words, every pipe he smoked, every cigar, audible in his rasps.
‘This should not come as a surprise. Look at me, for God’s sake.
Another three months like this is not living, but I consider it a blessing that I shall have time to get my affairs in order.
’ His head swivels, his gaze stopping on me again like a prison searchlight, and I feel just as exposed in its beam.
‘And my absolute priority is knowing that you have been safely married off to the Wentworth girl and that our financial and human succession plan is nicely underway.’
And there it is. Emotional blackmail, supercharged with imminent death. As manipulation techniques go, this one is deadly.
Pun—admittedly—intended.
Ma butts in before I can find my words. ‘Pa and I were thinking a New Year’s Eve wedding.
After all, everyone will make accommodations to come, no matter what date it is, and besides, it feels auspicious.
’ She takes a rousing breath in. ‘A fresh new year, and a fresh start for Xavier. New hope. Just what this family needs.’
‘I’m not sure Selena will be able to accommodate such a tight new deadline,’ I mutter, waving my hand around pointlessly. ‘The catering. The dress…’ I trail off.
That’s it.
That’s all I’ve got.
Blame ‘the Wentworth girl’. Make her my scapegoat. Pull whatever base tricks I have out of the bag.
Anything to loosen the noose around my neck. I can already feel the friction burns.
The look Ma casts me is one of deep disappointment. ‘Oh, please. They’ll all manage. Every supplier out there will bend over backwards to accommodate us, and Selena is desperate to tie the knot. You know she is, darling.’
‘Everyone loves a New Year’s Eve party,’ Flora blurts out.
‘People are often grateful for a wedding on that date, I think, because it takes matters out of their hands. Who wouldn’t want to ring the new year in at Belvedere, after all?
’ Her eyes are still wet, but I can see she’s grasping desperately at any shiny morsel that will distract from this bleak conversation.