Chapter 17
Benedict
When we next return to Christchurch Cathedral, my bride is wearing black, and funeral bells are tolling.
My father is given a rousing send-off, heavy on Victorian hymns and stirring eulogies by a couple of senior members of the British aristocracy, before we adjourn to Belvedere.
We bury Pa by the small fourteenth-century chapel on the estate, according to his wishes.
Not for him a tomb in Christchurch: he wanted to be buried in the place he deemed the centre of his world.
The Duke of Kent is in attendance. The Percys travel down for the event from the family seat in Alnwick on the Scottish Borders, which is decent of them, and the Grosvenors, the Howards, and the Seymours all attend, too.
If anyone finds the whole de Vere succession issue distasteful or my succession a horrifying prospect, no one is impolite enough to say so.
Ivy, of course, stays away. Not only would it blow our cover story wide open to have Xav rock up with a hot blonde on his arm so soon after I ‘begged’ him to stand down from his engagement, but, by the sounds of it, her poor stepmum isn’t well at all.
Apparently, she has a horrific cough and persistent fever, which, in her state, doesn’t sound good at all.
Xav is distracted, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t stop him from greeting all the dignitaries at the post-funeral reception with far more patience than I can muster.
It reminds me that Ma and Pa prepared him for this role from his earliest years.
This title was his birthright, not mine, and I’ve felt extra shitty about assuming it since Pa died and it’s become a reality.
In typical Xav style, as it turns out, he opted to formally disclaim the peerage rather than forcing our dying father to issue a formal deed.
He—Xav—hammered it out with the estate’s lawyers in those crazy few days before the wedding, and it turned out to be not only a generous gesture but a practical one, clearing the way for me to inherit by default.
What a heavy price for him to pay for his own happiness.
And now all that duty weighs equally heavily on my shoulders.
‘We should get away for a few days,’ I tell Slinky a week after the funeral. ‘It’ll do us good.’
In theory, I have a big job awaiting me, but none of that is as important as investing in my marriage.
The start we’ve had to our sex life aside, it’s been a rocky first few weeks, with the prospect of Pa’s death and then funeral clouding every day, not to mention that Slinks probably has serious trauma from the speed with which we catapulted ourselves into this union.
I know I do.
A few days alone together will do us good, especially as we’re now fucking almost every night.
No longer do we have to worry about an awkwardly non-dirty weekend away with pillows stuffed down the middle of the bed.
Not to mention, she’s been crazy busy with this Wentworth House launch.
From my visit there on press day, and what I’ve read in the papers, and what little I’ve heard from her, it’s been an unqualified success.
I’m ridiculously proud of my overachieving wife, even if she seems intent on rationing the amount of time she spends talking about it when we’re together.
So many times, I’ve tried to coax details out of her over dinner.
She’ll start off apologetic in tone, almost as if she’s worried about boring me, before her passion for this project gets the better of her and she hits her stride.
Then she’ll basically info-dump on me at an incredible pace until she catches herself, goes bright red, and apologises again for boring me.
What she’s definitely failing to appreciate is just how much I adore seeing her like this: lit up and animated, her ice-queen armour melted and the warm, passionate woman I now know her to be unleashed.
Whatever. We’ll get there. I’ll keep asking her about her job, keep encouraging her and showing (genuine) interest until she feels comfortable enough to show me her real self.
She nods. ‘Can you get the time off?’
‘I’ll make sure of it. Can you?’
‘Given the circumstances, yes. Where should we go?’
I ponder. ‘I dunno. Don’t really care. Do you want to rebook Paris?’
‘Possibly,’ she says in a carefully noncommittal tone that means not really.
I’m musing on our options when she says, ‘You know, the snow’s supposed to be great at the moment.’
I perk up immediately. ‘You want to go skiing?’ I fucking love skiing.
She gives me a slow smile I know is genuine. ‘I mean, I haven’t been this season.’
‘Me neither. Let’s do it. As long as you promise not to cry when I whip your lovely little arse off-piste.’
She makes a sound that’s a more polite take on a snort. ‘I’d like to see you try.’
It’s a fair comment. We went skiing with the Wentworths a couple of times when we were teens, and Slinks was fucking fantastic.
Not only does her family have a gorgeous chalet in Courchevel, but she went to school at Le Rosey, the flashy-as-fuck school in Geneva that boasts a secondary campus in Gstaad where its lucky students spend winter term.
If she was a decent skier before Le Rosey, you’d better believe she put in the hours during her time there.
This is excellent. Sod strolling around Paris—skiing together is a fantastic plan. It’s something we’re both passionate about. We can genuinely have a lark while spending some much-needed time alone together.
‘You’re on,’ I tell her. ‘Can we stay at your family’s place?’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ll ask Mum.’ She’s already pulling her phone out.
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I’ve always wanted to bone you in that hot tub.’
‘Seminal album from your teenage years,’ Slinks says, pointing the bottle of Whispering Angel at me before refilling our glasses.
We’re sitting on the sun-drenched south-facing terrace of Courchevel icon Le Cap Horn, enjoying a well-earned lunch after an energetic morning of skiing.
The atmosphere is raucous, as always, the people-watching epic.
The main difference from my previous visits is that I’m far less interested in perving over the many model-type ski bunnies dining with us and far more focused on my hot wife in her sexy AF gold-and-black Chanel ski gear.
The skiing version of Slinky is the bomb.
She’s skied like a fucking lunatic all morning, and the benefits of a few days of vigorous outdoor (and indoor) activity are showing.
Her face is flushed, the tip of her nose rosy with sunburn, and she has a lightness about her that I haven’t seen enough of since I marched her down the aisle.
I get the impression she isn’t monitoring herself as fully as she usually does.
She’s relaxed enough to just be, and I seriously dig it.
As we work our way through a variety of dishes, from oysters to the Cap Horn salad and lobster ravioli—ordering when ravenous is dangerous—we’re quizzing each other, getting to know the gaps that inevitably exist in our knowledge, no matter how long we’ve known each other.
I pick up my glass. ‘Easy. AM. No contest.’ At her blank look, I add, ‘AM? Arctic Monkeys?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know their music.’
‘Everyone went fucking apeshit for them at school for months and months.’ Eton was an Arctic Monkeys microcosm in 2013. They dropped the album at the beginning of the school year, and everyone went instantly nuts for it.
She shrugs. ‘Happy for you. I’m sure it was great.’
That makes me laugh. I settle back in my chair, revelling in the warmth of the sun on my face and the joie de vivre all around us.
Fuck, the sense of wellbeing you get from being in the mountains—there’s nothing like it.
This was the right call: skiing our socks off and then après-ing with the best of them, ringed by perfect, snowy mountains.
It’s the best feeling in the world. Way better than trudging around museums and churches together in freezing Paris.
‘It was,’ I tell her. ‘And you? What about you?’
‘Just as easy. 1989 by Taylor Swift.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Ahh. So predictable.’ I can see why Slinks would like Taylor. From what little I know of the latter, they both seem like Type A women who have their shit together. ‘And why is that? Was it big at school?’
‘Definitely.’ She thinks, rolling the stem of her glass between her long fingers. ‘It’s objectively a fantastic album. But it was more that some of the songs spoke to me. And, actually, I’ve been relistening a lot recently, and yeah. Let’s just say they have some relevance for us.’
I lean forward with a smirk. ‘Am I about to get some deep insight into your psyche, princess? Do tell.’
‘I’m not sure I want to. Well, “Blank Space” I was obsessed with at the time. The video is still my favourite music video of all time: old-money vibes and great fashion and a hot guy—oh, and it was all tongue in cheek, obviously. I loved it.’
I continue to grin at her. I don’t have a clue what song she’s referring to, but I love seeing her animated. I often get the feeling that I’m merely scratching the surface of Slinky’s amazing brain, and that feeling has only grown more acute since I married her.
‘But it was ‘Shake It Off’ that really got to me at the time,’ she continues.
‘It’s about all the criticism she was getting from the media and the public, and she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, basically.
And the song was about her shaking off that criticism, and I was like, how?
How the hell do you just shake this stuff off? ’
I frown. ‘What do you mean?’
She makes a face before she answers. ‘You’ll think it’s silly.’
‘Try me.’