Chapter 32
Selena
‘Isn’t this lovely?’ Mum says with a broad smile. ‘All the girls together.’
She means, of course, all the girls except for Ivy, who I’m sure will be NFI to my parents’ home for evermore.
It’s a Saturday, and my sister Octavia is home from school for the weekend.
Flora, as it happens, is also staying at Belvedere this weekend, so I’ve dragged her along to the lunch Mum has insisted on hosting for me, Octavia, and Charlotte.
According to Ivy, Flora’s been moping around London ever since her breakup with Harry, so I’m glad she’s come home for a couple of days.
Dad has gone for a round of golf with Ben and Xavier, who I’m gradually getting used to calling Xav.
(Funny how much more relaxed we’re becoming in each other’s company now that we don’t actually have to marry one another.) He thought it would be beneficial to take them out and see how they’re getting on.
Creepy, outdated marriage alliances aside, our families are less close than they were when we were little, but I know Dad wants to keep an eye on them in the wake of John’s death.
I suppose inheriting a dukedom and a fashion empire aren’t all that dissimilar in terms of pressure.
The dining room at Millbrook may as well be one of the showrooms at our Wentworth House concept store, dressed as it is to the gills with the brand’s green-and-white lily-of-the-valley china.
And table linen. And glassware. It’s full-on, but it’s lovely, even if it’s still a few weeks too early to enjoy actual lily of the valley.
We dine on sea trout, new potatoes, and new season asparagus with a nice, light Italian white, and it’s all very civilised—until, that is, the conversation turns to Xav and Ivy.
You’d better believe that Charlotte detests Ivy every bit as much as Mum does.
More likely, she’s threatened by her and what she represents.
Mum brings up the topic innocuously enough, even if it’s inevitable enough that it may as well have been debossed across the top of the floral-sprigged invitations she sent us in the post: WHAT SHALL WE DO ABOUT YOUR DISRESPECTFUL, CAVALIER ELDEST SON AND HIS VULGAR LITTLE GIRLFRIEND?
‘How are you finding life in Woodstock?’ Mum asks.
‘Very jolly indeed,’ Charlotte says, dabbing at the edges of her mouth with her lily-of-the-valley-embroidered napkin. ‘Although it is a bit of a trek to see the horses each morning, I must say.’
Mum hums sympathetically. ‘And I hear Xavier and that girl have taken up residence in the dower house?’ The way she says it suggests she’s equating their status with squatters, both legally and morally. ‘How do you bear it?’
Flora and I exchange a look across the table. She looks very pretty today in a blue-and-white striped cotton maxi dress, even if her general vibe feels as lacklustre as Ivy reported.
Who should intercept this one? her raised eyebrow says.
Give them enough rope to hang themselves with, I telegraph silently and grimly, smearing a touch of delicious sauce onto my trout.
It has exactly the right amount of fresh tarragon in it.
Usually, I’m deferential, but today, I’m spoiling for a fight.
John’s death notwithstanding, there’s been a low-key smugness about Mum and Charlotte since Arranged Marriage 2.
0 went through. I may have done their bidding, but I’m not above extracting my pound of flesh in return in any number of opaque ways.
‘Both of those women would still be licking their wounds of social annihilation if it weren’t for you and me, sweetheart,’ Ben reminded me cheerfully before kissing me (very slowly, deeply, and erotically) goodbye as he left for golf. ‘Don’t let them forget who’s boss today, you hear me?’
Loud and clear.
Charlotte purses her mouth until it’s as puckered as an arsehole.
She’s really not doing her wrinkles any favours.
(God, what is wrong with me today?) ‘It’s quite intolerable,’ she says.
‘That girl, of course, has no idea of how things are done. But Xavier should know better. I’m disgusted with him.
Disgusted. To just show up and rub your noses in it is quite inexcusable. ’
‘Please don’t worry, Charlotte,’ I say. ‘After all, it’s not your concern anymore, is it? Ben and I are perfectly capable of handling it. And, honestly, I’m enjoying having them so close. It’s all worked out for the best.’
She looks at me now—really looks at me—and I know my message, polite and opaque and steeped in niceties as it is, has hit home as she goes perfectly still.
You’re not the boss anymore.
I am.
It’s as true as it is inconvenient. Ben and I are now the heads of this family, and while our hierarchy isn’t as stark as it would have been a century or two ago, the truth is that the baton has passed.
And, honestly, I’m not a monster. This woman has always been good to me.
She’s cultivated a relationship with her future daughter-in-law far more conscientiously, far more enthusiastically, over the years than her eldest son has.
Not to mention, she’s been recently bereaved.
I’m not about to start pulling rank on her just to satisfy my own ego.
But I do need her to understand that, if Xav and Ivy are living in the dower house, it’s with my and Ben’s explicit blessing. And I need her to accept that, even if she doesn’t like it.
I don’t miss Flora’s little smile as she hastily looks down at her plate.
The conversation moves on.
‘How is school, darling?’ Charlotte asks Octavia, who flicks her hair.
‘Fine. Boring. I thought I’d come home and revise for my mocks. It’s too distracting at school.’
I love my sister, obviously, but there are many times when I think that a good slap wouldn’t go amiss.
We’ve never been close. An eleven-year age gap will do that, but it’s more that our personalities are quite different.
I suspect that, had I not been plagued with the seemingly endless sensitivity and insecurity I’ve struggled with all my life, I would have fallen into the personality type that Octavia embraces, which is that of an entitled little bitch.
(According to the world, I’m a stuck-up little bitch—key difference.)
My sister hasn’t had many struggles. She’s unconditionally loved with none of the quid pro quo with which my relationship with my parents has been so rife.
I suspect they spent so much time and energy grooming me—for Xavier, for the brand—that, by the time she came along, they were content to let her be.
This was a parenting strategy shared by the de Veres for their youngest daughter, but whereas Flora turned out delightful, Octavia can be spoilt and shallow.
(Can be is my charitable concession here.) Hartwell House, unfortunately, caters to, humours, and even cultivates this particular type of girl.
‘Have you seen much of those girls—the twins?’ Charlotte continues. There’s a game plan here, and it’s a sound one: if Selena won’t play ball, then Octavia certainly will.
‘Oh, God,’ my mother scoffs, as if pained to be reminded of Ivy’s sisters’ mere existence. ‘I can’t believe they let them in so readily. And halfway through Year Ten, at that.’
I’m sorry; it’s simply too good an opportunity to let languish in unused darkness. ‘I’m sure the eye-watering donation the De Vere Estate made to the construction of their new music block helped grease the wheels,’ I say cheerfully.
Did Ben consult me when he made this donation on Xav’s account? About as much as he consulted me over Xav and Ivy moving into the dower house, which is to say not at all, but I’ve got over that now.
And my God, every second of feeling sidelined was worth it to see the look on Charlotte de Vere’s face now.
She didn’t know, nor did Mum, and the beauty of it all is that Mum, who is on the school’s board of governors, was powerless to do anything.
Because, as far as the world knows, Xav met Ivy after Ben ‘won me over’.
As far as the world knows, the Wentworths would have no reason on earth to begrudge the twins any chance of an excellent education in light of what they’ve been through.
‘How thoughtful of you all,’ Charlotte mutters through clenched teeth.
‘Like Selena said, they’ll be family soon enough,’ Flora says, looking just as cheery as I feel.
‘I’ve seen them around,’ says Octavia, who seems to sense that the focus is slipping away from her.
‘I have to say, they look like dreadful little sluts. They’re all fake tan and inch-thick foundation and false eyelashes—but, like, the cheapo stripper ones you get from Superdrug, not the good kind.
It’s, like, read the room, girls. Everyone’s giving them a wide berth, that’s for sure. ’
I wish I could say I’m shocked—by my sister’s bitchiness as much as the bitchiness of the rest of her schoolmates—but sadly I’m not.
I am, however, horrified. I’ve never done well with injustice.
I like rules: I like knowing them, like playing by them.
So when people break the rules of the game (hello, Xavier), I find it really hard to handle.
But the most important rule of all is that you don’t kick someone when they’re already down.
And those poor little twins are down.
I’ve met them a couple of times, in passing on the estate and more recently when we had Xav, Ivy, and the twins over for brunch one Saturday.
Octavia’s not wrong that their beauty routines could use a glow-up—their aesthetic is more Love Island than the sleek, clean-girl influencer look favoured by the posh girls of Hartwell House—but Jesus.
Take a look at their life over the past few years.
No money, no father, a seriously ill and now deceased mother, and a sister who was run ragged. Cut them some fucking slack.
What I manage not to say is, ‘Sounds like they’ll fit right in at Harlot House, then.’ (Let’s say the reputation of the girls at my sister’s school precedes them.) I’m too appalled for snark. Instead, I spit out, ‘Their mother has just died. What the hell is wrong with you?’
Octavia and Charlotte stare at me, while I feel my mother’s judgement radiating from where she’s sitting beside me. My sister’s far-too-pretty face turns mulish at having been called out.
‘Well?’ I insist. ‘You think it’s in any way acceptable to pile onto a couple of girls who’ve just lost their mum?
You have no idea what that family has been through.
None.’ An unwelcome memory snakes its way into my brain: Ben saying much the same thing to me and my claiming that Ivy’s problems weren’t mine.
But this is different, because I was hurting.
I was not in a place to extend empathy to the woman who’d just upended my lifelong engagement.
My sister, though? She and her stuck-up little cronies are in the business of blood sports—and you’d better believe Lily and Rose are their prey.
I press on. ‘Look, they may not be the usual Hartwell House demographic, but that doesn’t make them less than.
As soon as Xavier’s adoption of the twins goes through, they’ll be de Veres.
’ I glance over at Charlotte. ‘And if you think John and Charlotte, or any of their ancestors, have ever allowed anyone to mess with their family and get away with it, you’d be wrong. Isn’t that right, Charlotte?’
My mother-in-law’s expression has been growing almost as mulish as my sister’s at the reminder that she may soon be coming into some new granddaughters, but now she jerks guiltily.
If the bullseye is ramming home the message that the de Vere family will stand behind Rose and Lily to a person, then I’ve just hit the bullseye.
‘That is correct,’ she says stiffly, a wholly unwilling recruit to my cause.
‘Absolutely,’ Flora says. ‘Nobody messes with the de Veres.’ She turns to Octavia, the bright-eyed role model to my grim-faced elder sister, and all the more lethal for it where getting through to my sister is concerned.
‘Is Lottie Spencer still head girl? She was in my house. I’ll send her a Snap, see if she can support them better. ’
Octavia all but manages to avoid an eye roll. ‘Yeah.’ I’m sure she can smell the stench of defeat.
I flash her a smile, too, though I suspect it looks as phony as it is. ‘Whatever you can do to make them feel welcome would be much appreciated by the family.’
By the family. Ooh. It has a Mob-like feel, and it’s fucking excellent.
Don’t forget who you all made me get into bed with, sister dearest.
She cocks a perfectly laminated brow at me, like don’t give me that crap. ‘But they’re two years beneath me.’
‘I don’t care. You have sway at that place, and you know it.
’ I draw myself up to full height in my chair.
‘Everyone at this table knows the lengths I’ve gone to in order to unite these two families, and you’d better believe you’ll be benefiting for the rest of your life.
I’m a de Vere now, and I expect your loyalty to extend to us.
Those girls will be de Veres soon enough, and everyone had better start treating them as such. ’
My message is clear.
Call off your rabid little dogs, and do it now.