Chapter 34
Selena
Idon’t have to wait long for this new monster to make itself known. Ben and I have instructed the Wentworth and De Vere Estate PR teams to keep their eyes peeled for any news alerts mentioning our wedding and to notify us immediately.
Another forty-eight hours, during which I keep my tightly held shit together and attend a big Marie Curie luncheon with Mum in Oxford, is all it takes for the Mirror to pick up the Reddit story—and to put the most devastating meat on its bones.
It seems patient confidentiality is a porous concept over at Ivy’s late stepmum’s care home, because the paper claims to have possession of invoices showing that Xav was paying her fees from the eighth of December onwards.
That was more than three weeks before our wedding.
The headline? THE HEIR AND THE AFFAIR: How Xavier de Vere led a double life in the months before the ‘Great Groom Swap’.
The Mirror’s article focuses mainly on Xav and Ivy, on the fact that Xav was forging a very different path from that of marriage to me while the wedding machine rolled on.
It spells out the known timeline, which consists only of the Venice pictures from that bloody Reddit poster and the care home fees.
Mortifyingly, it juxtaposes a photo of Xav snogging the face off Ivy in Piazza San Marco with one of him smiling stiffly next to me in all our finery for the Tatler cover.
It’s the strangest thing, looking at it.
While I’ve never had a romantic feeling for Xav, the humiliation of seeing those two images side by side is total.
Thank fuck Belvedere is a massive estate, because I’m never leaving these gates again.
It’s starting; I can feel it. Too many parties are picking at this giant ball of yarn, and there are far too many loose ends for it to withstand such scrutiny.
The post seems low-key sympathetic towards me—The beautiful Duchess was seen maintaining a dignified silence as she wowed in Dior at a charitable lunch yesterday—but the questions it raises are clear:
Was it really Xav who called off the engagement?
And when the fuck did Ben and I get on board with switching out the groom?
By the next morning, the Mail Online has another huge log to throw on the fire: proof that Xav is currently paying the twins’ school fees at Hartwell House. Their headline is a devastating blow: SPARE PART: Was Selena Wentworth the last to know her fairytale was a sham?
‘Heads at that place will roll for this,’ my mum promises, but no matter.
The damage is done. While this revelation doesn’t interfere with the timeline the press are so feverishly grappling with, it sure as hell underlines how serious Xav is about Ivy—and therefore how serious he presumably was about her in the run-up to the wedding.
My sister texts me to say that the headmistress of Hartwell House has basically threatened death to anybody who dares to speak to the press, but that loads of girls are Snapping about it and making their accounts public.
As I read these messages, I worry at nonexistent hangnails until three of my nails are bleeding.
Like a one-two jab, the Mail Online is back only hours later with an op-ed by one of their nastiest, pettiest journalists, a woman named Clare Humphries.
I have only one question, she writes. Benedict de Vere’s press release stated clearly that he begged his brother to stand down.
But if Xavier was smitten by this young woman, Ivy Cooper, to the extent that he was paying her stepmother’s nine-thousand-pound-a-month fees for the Good Vibes Care Home, why would Benedict need to beg?
It seems to me that, by early December, his brother already had one foot, if not two feet, out the door.
If the scandal of my showing up at Christchurch Cathedral with the brother of my supposed groom was delicious, then it appears that unravelling the truth behind said scandal is a whole other level of addiction for press and public alike.
I cancel my in-person meetings for the week, including a lunch and spring flower-arranging workshop with lifestyle influencers at Wentworth House, and I bury myself deep in the bowels of Belvedere.
Ewan forbids me from checking social media, and he texts Ben, asking him to delete the apps from my phone, which he does—but he can’t stop me from checking the press online.
Every article, every comment, feels to me like the mobilisation of an army.
I am Marie Antoinette, stuck behind the gates of my palace, and the crowd that is gathering has pitchforks.
It might sound ridiculous, but that’s how it feels. This terror is existential.
The pivot of everyone’s attention to me is inevitable, of course. By the weekend, the papers are full of headlines like this:
DID SHE KNOW? Questions mount over Duchess’s role in groom swap cover-up
KEEP CALM AND MARRY ON: Was Selena Wentworth so desperate for a title she’d take any brother?
THE DUCHESS WHO SETTLED: Inside Selena’s calculated decision to marry the spare
They can never, will never, know how the dominoes fell in the run-up to the wedding, but they don’t need to.
The evidence the press has gathered about the seriousness of Xav’s feelings for Ivy is the Occam’s Razor of how the entire groom swap happened: Xav fell for someone else and dumped me, Ben stepped in, and I was desperate enough to jump at his offer.
The funny thing is, if you can call anything about this situation funny, that the way the public lashes out at me in the following days seems to be born less from a longstanding grudge against me and more from an acute disappointment that the four of us have robbed them of their fairytale.
They were willing to believe the dashing, romantic tale we spun them—more than willing; thrilled—and the emerging picture of what likely happened in reality feels even grubbier, more calculated, more soulless by comparison.
Which means, of course, that I’m no longer Helen of Troy but some conniving, Game of Thrones-esque shrew, so filled with the wrong values and so intent on securing the title I was promised that I’d wed and bed anyone with the right title.
Did I force Ben’s hand, they all wonder?
Did I stamp my Louboutin-clad foot and insist that one of the good-for-nothing de Vere brothers man up and honour the alliance?
And worst, was the title transfer part of the payoff?
Did my husband demand a dukedom for the sheer ball ache of marrying me?
Ben, irritatingly, fares better. He may no longer be the smitten suitor, but he’s noble as hell.
Imagine stepping up to liberate your brother from the outdated bonds that tie him so he’s free to pursue love.
Fuck, that’s hot (according to a commenter on Reddit, anyway).
Xavier is instantly painted as the lovelorn hero: nine hundred years of duty versus the love of a fair maiden.
But the outright—and shocking—winner in this PR shitshow is the fair maiden herself.
That’s right.
As early as the Sunday papers, Ivy Fever breaks out across Britain and beyond.
She’s the anti-me, the normal girl who’s had to endure the unendurable in her life, the Cinderella archetype who selflessly toiled for years on behalf of her late stepmother and her poor little sisters until Xav rode in on his white steed and swept her off into the sunset.
They don’t find out about Alchemy, thank fuck.
But they do find out infinite details about her father’s early death and her stepmother’s Lewy body dementia (I’m sure those helpful nurses over at the care home saw to it that they had all the information they needed), about the full guardianship she had of the twins on top of the years of being her stepmum’s primary caregiver and holding down multiple (non-hookerish) jobs: some greasy-spoon caff she worked at in London while also running an Etsy shop for her paintings and illustrations.
They’ve trawled public tags of her on social media, including the one that appears on most of the front pages.
It’s from the caff’s Instagram, apparently, and it shows her smiling behind the counter.
Her very pretty hair is piled on top of her head, she’s wearing a red bandana of all things, and she’s in dungarees and a tank top, a combination that should be outlawed but in fact just makes her look sexy and approachable.
The worst part? They’ve put that photo next to one of mine that they found at a charity gala from a few years back. I’m wearing Valentino and my unfortunate but frequent resting bitch face.
The pairing is devastating.
XAVIER BACKED THE RIGHT HORSE, the headline reads. Subheading: The ice queen vs the girl next door.
Within hours, the online editions of the other tabloids follow suit:
LOVE AGAINST THE ODDS: How a young carer won the heart of a duke—while his fiancée planned their wedding
She nursed her dying mum while Selena posed for Tatler: the real woman behind the Groom Swap
The public loves a false binary, an easy contrast, mainly because it’s too fucking stupid to hold nuance well.
But I get it, because the contrast between me and Ivy is so blatant as to make it delicious.
If Ivy is every plucky Disney heroine come to life, I’m the worst kind of Disney villain.
If she embodies authenticity, then I’m inauthentic to the core.
(Case in point: jumping between brothers to save face.)