Chapter 48
Xavier
Boxing Day: the day when, historically, families like ours bequeathed the remnants of our excess from the day before, boxing up leftovers to give to the poor. This year, I’m kicking off a new tradition:
Blowing two families apart in one fell swoop.
Excellent.
I’ve always been the dutiful eldest son, the one who stays out of trouble. But today, in abandoning the only duty that’s been required of me, I’ll be rebranding myself as a troublemaker on a scale that my brother couldn’t have pulled off in his wildest dreams.
I waste no time in requesting a post-breakfast meeting with the family by Pa’s bedside.
My brother and sister are already on board, of course.
It’s not quite cowardice that has me wanting them there; rather, the desire to know that some parties in this family have my back.
That, however much our parents try to gaslight me into believing that my future only knows one shape, there are people who understand what a crock of shit that is.
My main weapon, I’ve decided, will be the sense of authority I’ve intentionally honed over the past three decades. There’s an exquisite irony in knowing that the very self-assurance I’ve developed to fit the mould they chose for me will be the thing that allows me to dismantle that mould.
We gather, in our usual macabre, family-dining style, around Pa’s bed.
He’s barely John Edward Walter de Vere anymore, but a skin-and-bone pretender.
He can’t have more than a few weeks to live, and a genuine pang of guilt lashes through me at the godawful timing of it all.
If he and Ma hadn’t forced the wedding forward, I could have spared him this.
I clear my throat. ‘I have some news, and I’m afraid it’s not good news. Far from it.’ Ma sits up straighter at my tone. ‘I’m calling the wedding off. I won’t be marrying Selena.’
How funny the English language is, that I won’t be marrying Selena sounds more adult, less churlish, than the more succinct I won’t marry her. But make no mistake. That’s precisely what I’m saying.
Pa makes a kind of strangled grunt that has all of us jerking our heads towards him in alarm.
‘Xavier!’ Ma says. ‘What on earth do you mean? Of course you can’t call it off. Don’t be ridiculous.’
This family has traded for long enough in opinions and wishes masquerading as facts, and I won’t have it. While I’m aware my blunt delivery is far from ideal, especially given Pa’s weakened state, her reaction galvanises me into further candour.
‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, Ma. I can call it off. I realise the timing couldn’t be worse, and I’m truly sorry. But I meant what I said. I’m not prepared to marry Selena, so I’m doing the right thing, no matter how last-minute.’
Pa finds his voice. ‘That is absolutely not the right thing. You know as well as I do, boy, that the right thing is to honour the alliance that we’ve had with the Wentworths and marry the damn girl.’
Ma nods decisively as if he’s just scored a major point in a presidential debate.
‘Look,’ I say, ‘I know this comes as a shock. But marrying a woman I don’t love, who doesn’t love me, is categorically not the right call.
I can’t take this title through the twenty-first century if I insist on starting it with some anachronistic arranged marriage, for God’s sake.
’ That may not be the most tactful way to go, on second thoughts.
‘You two have forged a formidable partnership from your arrangement. There’s no doubt about that.
But it’s not for me, and it’s not for Selena, and I’m convinced, when she’s stopped hating me, that she’ll eventually thank me for it. ’
‘The wedding is in five days.’ This from Ma.
‘I know, and I truly am sorry. It’s a mess.’
‘Do you have any idea how much organisation it’s taken to pull this off? Catering? Logistics? Hundreds of guests flying in? Not to mention the flowers. You can’t call it off. It’s impossible. You’ll just have to go ahead with it.’
My brother lets slip a little laugh at quite how ridiculous this line of reasoning is, but I get it.
‘Ma. I’m not willing to embark on this marriage, so I can’t go ahead with the wedding. It will all have to be cancelled, and I’ll make myself available all week to help with whatever I can. I can only imagine the amount of work that’s gone into this.’
That’s not a lie. Although Ma, Constance, and Selena have shielded me from most of the admin, I know it’s been an organisational feat on an epic scale—made all the worse by Pa’s demand to move it all forward to the busiest night of the year, but I won’t volunteer that opinion.
‘The reputational hit to both families,’ Pa rasps now, ‘will be unqualified. I won’t have it.
But far more importantly, you’re leaving the line of succession in disarray.
I’m on my deathbed, and you’re sitting there and telling me that you would walk away from your duties?
That you’re willing to let me die in the knowledge that you won’t be siring an heir anytime soon? ’
Jesus. Sometimes this place feels more like a stud farm than a stately home.
‘I’m aware you don’t have long left,’ I say more softly.
‘But I’m the one who has to live with the consequences of my actions, not you.
I’m perfectly capable of producing an heir, but I’d have a lot more chance if I married someone I actually loved, let me tell you.
’ I clear my throat, which has gone dry.
‘And, on that note, I’ve met someone I love very much, which is why I categorically can’t marry Selena.
So you’ll get your heir—you’ll get half a dozen of them, if I have my way. ’
‘Who is she?’ Ma asks from beside me. ‘Who’s this mysterious woman who’s made you throw every last ounce of your good sense aside?’
Here we go. I glance over at my siblings, who give me matching good luck, mate grimaces.
‘She’s a commoner. It’s Ivy. Flora’s friend. The one who came to stay? Anyway, I’m very much in love with her, and I fully intend to marry her at some point, if she’ll have me. So you see, I can’t marry Selena.’
I take advantage of the horrified silence to follow this thing through to its logical conclusion. I’ve come here to fall on my sword, to excuse myself from my responsibilities. It would be remiss of me not to volunteer myself for the ultimate sacrifice.
The thing is that, compared to the alternative, this sacrifice feels downright palatable. If that isn’t the biggest head-fuck of all.
‘I understand,’ I say with as much dignity as I can muster, ‘if my actions have rendered me unfit to succeed you, Pa.’
There’s a pregnant silence as my parents process this.
‘Give me a moment.’ My father closes his eyes and appears to sink deeper into his pillows as he tries me for crimes committed and considers his sentence.
Benedict raises his eyebrow in a what the fuck way.
Clearly, only one of us has thought this thing through: that, if I’m bumped for bad behaviour, the spare may inherit the whole bloody lot.
‘Family and duty,’ my father drones without opening his eyes, ‘are the same. Entirely the same. If you spurn your duty, you spurn your family. You knew what the role entailed.’ He breaks off with a hacking cough.
‘The Dukes of Oxford have fought with everything they have to protect our name. Blood has been shed. Unthinkable sacrifices made. And because you say your heart is too weak, too whimsical, to endure this minor thing we’ve asked of you, then you are correct. ’
We wait. Flora’s lips are pressed together tightly, as if she’s willing herself to stay silent. Benedict is bracing for impact, and Ma is looking at me as if she doesn’t want to miss a second of my reaction when Pa hands down my sentence.
‘You are unfit, in every way, to succeed me, and you are no heir of mine.’
I drive over to Millbrook a man stripped of all rights, and titles, and inheritance, and obligations, and every single other thing you can think of.
It’s a funny sort of circular effect, I muse, in that I’ve lost everything because I refused to marry Selena, and I’m now a man with nothing to offer her.
The heir to the multibillion pound dukedom of Oxford is a shadowy thing of the past.
Now I’m just a man she doesn’t love and never really knew.
Not that any of that will, for a second, make what I’m about to do any better.
I’ve blown up every last thing my family promised Selena, and, worst of all, I’m about to leave her with egg on her face in the most public way possible.
Her entire family is built on a particular image, and nothing about it is incidental.
In fact, it’s as beautifully crafted as their artisanal leather handbags: perfect, down to the last stitch.
While she won’t be heartbroken, not for a single second, I suspect that what I’m about to do may even be worse. I suspect a woman like Selena would rather have her heart broken than her image.
I vow to do whatever I can to smooth things over on that front, although I know that there’s nothing.
Being jilted five days before her wedding, when she’s invested so much of her social currency in this alliance—hello, Tatler cover—will be unbearable for her, no matter what excuse I give to the press.
I know this because I spent much of last night turning it over and over like a particularly vexing Rubik’s Cube.
The best thing for all of us to do will be to borrow a line from the royals:
Never complain. Never explain.
But there will be gossip. God, so much gossip and speculation, and she’ll be powerless to stop it or get in front of it.
I feel sick for her. I may be supremely confident that I’m doing the right thing by her long-term, but the casual cruelty of her being collateral damage sits ill with me. Very ill indeed.
The Selena issue aside, I feel disoriented by this morning’s events in a way that isn’t entirely unpleasant.
If I’m no longer an heir to a dukedom or the sum of my services in that field, then what the hell am I?
Who the hell am I? I’m a bloke whose entire identity has been pulled out from under him like a rug, and with such speed that I’m somehow—just about—still standing.
The chalice I’ve moulded myself into is morphing like gelatine under a torrent of boiling water. The weighty security blanket of duty that’s swaddled me for all these years lies in a tattered pile at my feet.
I may have no idea who the fuck I am, but I do know that there’s one person who fell in love with me and not my external identity.
Ivy didn’t fall for me because I was on track to inherit a title and a multibillion pound estate.
She fell for me despite all of that, and if she can see me clearly, then I have to believe there’s a man inside the Russian nesting dolls of money and dukedoms and stately homes who is worth loving.
If I can just get through this morning, and the next few days of firefighting, then I’ll be able to look myself in the mirror long enough to convince myself that I’m worthy of pursuing her the way I always should have: freely, openly, as a single man with nothing more to offer than himself.