‘How am I supposed to—’ Brianna Jade started indignantly, though managing to get her voice down a few notches from soprano to mezzo. But Barb cut through her.
‘Don’t you wanna know why I’m calling?’ she asked.
‘No, I don’t,’ Brianna Jade snapped. ‘Knowing you, it won’t exactly be to congratulate me on my engagement.’
‘Well, it sorta is,’ Barb said, which put Brianna Jade even more on her guard. ‘’Cause if you weren’t engaged to marry an Earl, I wouldn’t be thinking that it made a real good opportunity for me to email CelebrityPics or the National Enquirer or some big magazine like that and tell them I’ve got a real good story about the girl who’s gonna marry the Earl of Whatever once being Pork Queen at Kewanee Hog Days! I bet they’d love that!’
Brianna Jade’s stomach sank like a stone. But she wasn’t an idiot. She had been half-expecting something like this ever since she’d seen Barb’s name in Mrs Hurley’s handwriting.
‘Big deal,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘I mean, come on, Barb, the National Enquirer? It’s not like you’ve got any photos of me with my clothes off! Why would they care that I won a beauty pageant years ago?’
‘OK, maybe not them,’ Barb said, undaunted. ‘Maybe some British paper. I see links to the Daily Mail on loads of my gossip sites. I could try them. They’d be real interested to see how the Countess of Whatever got her big break.’
‘Big break? Jeez, Barb, you sound crazy! It’s just a little country fair!’ Brianna Jade said unguardedly, yet another mistake.
‘Hey, fuck you! How dare you look down your nose at us!’ Barb snapped.
‘I mean, you won Corn Queen of Watseka that same year,’ Brianna Jade said quickly. ‘We each got a title, didn’t we? I don’t get why you’re so pissed at me—’
‘I want money,’ Barb said, finally getting to the point of her call. ‘I want you to send me a big old load of money or I’ll go to the Daily Mail or somewhere in Britain with my photos and a story about what a nasty back-stabbing bitch you were back in the day. I know, I know,’ she added before Brianna Jade could protest, ‘you were actually a stupid little suckup idiot, but they’ll like it better if I make you out all trashy and back-stabbing and slutty. Those papers always like that kinda dirt. And believe me, the photos I have are gold. It’s not just a couple from the Hog Days website, with you looking all smug in your sash and all. My mom took scads. There’s you making your Tater Tots casserole, dropping the Oreos for the pigs, nearly falling off the trailer like you were drunk in your pigskin jacket—’
‘Because you pushed me!’ Brianna Jade said indignantly.
‘Yeah? Well, I’ll tell the papers you had a couple Jack and Cokes before you got up there and that’s why you tripped!’ Barb said triumphantly. ‘I’ll give ’em every trailer-trash detail I can find. I’ll go over to the old Lutz place and take photos of that shack you and your mom lived in – believe me, it looks even more like shit now than it used to. I’ve been googling you guys, and all the stuff that comes up is fancy photos of you two in Florida after Tamra got married, or you posing in tons of pageants. No one’s got hold of this stuff at all.’
There was an audible smirk in her voice.
‘Think if they sent someone over here to snoop around!’ she added. ‘No one liked your mom, BJ. She was way too pretty. Can you imagine what they’ll say to a journalist who comes round asking about what she was like working at Hogs and Cobs back in the day? They’ll make up all kinds of shit just to get their own back on her for being all high and mighty now.’
Brianna Jade shivered. This was something they had never had to deal with before. Ken Maloney socialized with the owners of the local Florida papers: their writers wouldn’t have dreamt of digging up Tamra and Brianna Jade’s dirt-poor past. And in London, Veronica, Tamra’s PR, had been busy emphasizing Tamra’s investments in environmentally friendly fracking procedures and her large donations to charity. Besides, Tamra and Brianna Jade had always been known as Maloney over here; no British journalist had any idea that tracking down the Krantzes’ humble origins would yield a motherlode of embarrassment for them.
Silence fell. Brianna Jade knew that Barb was more than capable of carrying out her threat, and that British tabloids would salivate over her story – probably entering into a bidding war for it, and, more importantly, the photographs. Every detail of the Pork Queen competition would seem hilarious over here, with all its attendant details about pigskin jackets, Tater Tot casseroles and dropping Oreo cookies to make the pigs race. A skilled tabloid hack would wring every last embarrassing detail out of Barb and make hay out of it. It would be all over the Mail Online for weeks.
I don’t care about myself, Brianna Jade realized at that moment. I really don’t. I mean, it’d be embarrassing, sure. But here at Stanclere Hall, I barely even see a newspaper. I mean, Edmund gets them, but I don’t read them. And I can just make sure I don’t get any magazines either, the gossipy ones. Sometimes I pick one up in the village – well, I don’t have to do that any more. I’m not much of a reader at the best of times, and I’ve got no problem staying off the internet.
And I don’t think the County will care much either. I mean, the girls might snigger at me behind my back, but they do that anyway. People like Lord Uppingham might actually find it pretty funny if I make a good story out of it, pigskin jacket and all. If I show that it doesn’t bother me, people in Rutland won’t give a shit after a little while.
It never even occurred to her to worry about Edmund’s reaction, which was to his great credit. Even before his proposal, she had been very well aware that he wasn’t a snob in any way; he would hate the extra publicity, but he wouldn’t blame her for it. In fact, like old Lord Uppingham, he might even be tickled by the jacket and the Oreo-throwing.
No, it’s Mom I need to protect. She’s the one who’ll really get the fallout.
London society, Brianna Jade had already observed, was a very different beast from the small, cohesive county of Rutland. London had a level of snark and cattiness and competition, of scheming to get into the right parties and look down on people who settled for the wrong ones, which was infinitely more cut-throat than life in the countryside. The highest echelons even mocked people who got photographed too much: that last one utterly baffled Brianna Jade, as all the West Palm Beach social set cared about was having their picture in the papers every single day of the week. But Lady Margaret had counselled Tamra that quantity, over here, did not at all mean quality, and that Tamra should be very selective about what invitations she accepted if she wanted to be part of the highest echelons. Hence Tamra’s membership of Loulou’s, the nightclub below the private members’ club, 5 Hertford Street; the whole point about clubs like Loulou’s, Annabel’s and George’s, all in Mayfair, was that absolutely no cameras were allowed inside their hallowed precincts.
Like Las Vegas, what happened in those clubs stayed there. The very top of the gratin disliked being in the press at all; Edmund certainly would be much happier never doing one of those photo shoots again, though he knew what he had signed up to and was a very good sport about it. Lady Margaret was helping Tamra walk the line, work out what was ‘good’ publicity – i.e. could be passed off as charity work – and ‘bad’ – seeming to court it for one’s own ends.
But no way is this good publicity! It’ll just give everyone who dislikes Mom and me for being so rich a way to tear us down, and Mom will just hate it. It’ll mess up so many things she’s worked so hard for.
Oh my God! No way will I get Style Bride of the Year if this story breaks before the Style editors have made their decision and locked it all down!
And Mom will die, she’ll just die if I lose that because of some shit that Barb Norkus, of all people, is pulling.
Brianna Jade made a decision. She had no choice. If it were just for herself, she’d tell Barb to go take a running jump: she didn’t even care all that much about being Style Bride of the Year, but she knew that for Tamra
it was the cherry on the icing on the cake, the culmination of everything she’d hoped to win for her adored daughter when she’d brought the two of them to London. Even Lady Margaret had said that there couldn’t be any social objection to such a prestigious magazine cover, which had naturally made Tamra more determined than ever to snag it.
Brianna Jade had heard how Chloe Rose had been mocked by the upper classes when, as a commoner, she started to date Prince Hugo: Chloe had even been called ‘Dog Rose’, which had both insulted her looks and tagged her as a social climber. How easy would it be for Tamra to be nicknamed ‘Hog Mom’ by some jealous rival who envied Tamra’s beauty and riches? Or for Brianna Jade to be dubbed ‘Tater Tot’? Again, safe and happy in the country, Brianna Jade wouldn’t give a shit what the tabloids called her: but for Tamra, papped on a regular basis, to have names like that yelled at her to provoke a reaction would be intolerable.
Mom’s done so much for me. Now it’s time for me to look after her.
A horribly vivid memory of Ken Maloney’s sagging old-man body by the pool, covered in white hairs, mostly where they shouldn’t be, was all Brianna Jade needed to confirm her resolve. Much as she hated to buckle under to a blackmailer, this was to protect Tamra, and not on her own behalf. That was what convinced her to open her mouth and say: ‘Do you have a bank account, Barb?’
As it turned out, Barb didn’t have a bank account, something that Brianna Jade had pretty much guessed already. And the maximum you could send via Western Union was four thousand pounds, which converted roughly into six thousand bucks, which was a fortune to Barb Norkus, even though she pretended that it wasn’t enough, not at all, and attempted to convince Brianna Jade to send that sum on a weekly basis. Brianna Jade countered with the very good point that the IRS would be all over Barb like white on rice if she sent that much money so regularly, and Barb had reluctantly agreed. Brianna Jade had said she’d make a transfer every month for that amount, at which Barb had whined and moaned, but Brianna Jade, sensing a weak point, had mentioned the IRS again, knowing that there was no way Barb was going to declare any of this to the tax people, and Barb had folded.
‘You’ll need to keep sending this every month,’ Barb warned firmly. ‘I can open my mouth just as fast as I can close it, you know?’
Just till the wedding, Brianna Jade had thought. After that, and after the Style Bride cover – she had no doubt that Tamra would secure that for her daughter: hadn’t Tamra got everything that she’d set her heart on in life? – Barb Norkus can eat my lily-white ass.
And, in the pull-behind Scamp camper in her stepmom Hailey’s front yard, which she was calling home for now, Barb Norkus stretched out her legs and lit another of the Marlboro Lights she’d boosted from her stepmom’s bag the other day. They were a rare luxury, and she had been saving them for special treats; now, however, she could smoke ’em as much as she wanted. And she could get the hell out of this nasty thir-teen-foot space, so cramped that, with the double bed down, you were sleeping right next to the kitchen unit, the stinking toilet just a couple of feet away, and washing yourself in the kitchen sink.
Gross, but free, as Barb’s dad wouldn’t let her stepmom charge her rent for living in the camper, even though Barb’s presence there meant that Hailey had to either lock her doors or put up with the knowledge that Barb was helping herself to sessions on her dad’s computer and to the household supplies every time Hailey’s back was turned. Hailey had insisted that Barb do something in return for free accommodation, and Barb had been tasked with watering the geraniums Hailey had cultivated in the tractor tyre planters around the camper’s parking area: of course she’d never done that once, complaining that she’d been way too busy working the recent state fair.
She looked down complacently at the hand holding the cigarette. She’d had her nails done for the fair, but that had been a while ago, and Barb had been hanging on to those overlays like grim death, trying to get another few weeks out of them. She’d got her hair coloured when her tax return came in, but now she must have at least four inches of roots: it had been a while. She’d boosted one of Hailey’s home dye kits to cover the roots, but it hadn’t been as good a match as she thought, so she actually had bi-colour hair now, and it was really bugging her.
She’d been waiting to pick up farm jobs mid-September for cash; they always needed people to be ‘management’ over the migrant workers. You got paid more if you knew some Spanish, but Barb didn’t see why she should have to learn another language in America, land of the free English speakers, and she’d never exerted herself to try. She preferred working the farm stands on weekends and evenings selling peaches, apples or strawberries, logging the baskets people brought from the You-pick-it.
That was where she’d got the phone which she’d used to call Brianna Jade. Some big-city idiot woman in designer jeans, thinking it was so cool to pick her own fruit – like that wasn’t a back-breaking job for wetbacks! Barb thought unpleasantly – had been so busy rattling onto her spoilt brats about how great it was to choose your own peaches – which you could do just as well at Fairway – that she’d left her phone on the counter and not realized. Dumb bitch, serves her right. And extra dumb for having left it with an international calling plan on it, too.
Well, now Barb could chuck the phone and get a new one. Whatever she wanted. She could get her nails and her roots done, she could move out of this shitty camper with its cheap fibreglass walls and thin-as-paper fake wood panelling. She could rent somewhere real nice in the upscale trailer court: a forty-footer RV with central air, a home theatre, a dinette that seated four people, an electric fireplace and a tub/shower – her eyes positively sparkled at the prospect as she jumped down from the bed and headed out of the camper.
She’d hitch a ride to Wal-Mart, or to the Dollar General on the Illinois Highway: there were Western Unions in both places. Brianna Jade had looked on the website and said the transfer should happen straight away.
Six grand a month! That was seventy-two grand a year – unimaginable riches. Seriously, Barb had never thought she’d make that much in her entire life, let alone in one year! She could get Brianna Jade to make the transfers to Western Unions all over the States, travel around to collect the money from different locations, find some people to buy fake IDs from so the IRS wouldn’t catch up with her. Plus, that would mean that all the Kewanee folks wouldn’t figure out why she suddenly had so much money and try to ride the gravy train along with her; if Brianna Jade got a deluge of calls from back home, all threatening to sell their snaps of her up on that tractor trailer with the Hog Queen sash across her blue satin-covered boobs, she’d more than likely just throw in the towel and tell ’em to go ahead and do it.
No, this gold mine was all Barb’s: she wasn’t going to share it with a living soul. On her way to the main road she threw the butt of her Marlboro into the closest tractor tyre planter, kept going, then turned round, pulled the half-empty packet from her pocket, extracted a last cigarette and placed the packet in the centre of the planter, squashing down the geraniums. Hailey couldn’t fail to see it there when she came home from her shift at Walgreen’s pharmacy counter. It was the perfect fuck-you to her stepmom, acknowledging that Barb had stolen her cigarettes and didn’t give a shit that Hailey knew it. Plus, it said that Barb didn’t give a shit about Hailey’s damn trashy tractor tyre planters either.
Barb’s tri-colour hair flapped behind her in the breeze as she strode away from the family who had taken her in a couple of months ago when her boyfriend kicked her out. It wouldn’t have occurred to her for a moment to give a single cent of the six grand to her father and Hailey. In Barb’s world, you took care of yourself first, foremost and for ever. Even saying thank you was for suckers.
Chapter Thirteen
Stanclere Hall, November
‘God, look at the old place!’ Tarquin exclaimed as he turned the car into the drive that led up to Stanclere Hall and the occupants of the eco-friendly had their first glimpse of the new
ly done-up house. ‘It’s like a luxury hotel now!’
The Hall had undergone a titanic renovation process in order for it to be spruced up in time for the arrival of the party guests: repairs to the roof had been put on hold in order to focus on more cosmetic aspects. The stonework had been repointed where it most needed it, the window frames refitted, the moth-eaten carpets replaced only where necessary – now that there was staff to polish the mahogany floors every day, they could be shown off – and, in a heroic effort, several of the key bedrooms had been converted or extended into others to allow en-suite bathrooms to be installed.
This was work that had been planned for the wedding at the end of May, not an engagement party in late autumn, and the stampede to speed up the process had been horrendous for everyone involved; with no neighbours to complain about noise, shifts of workmen had toiled away on double pay from six a.m. to ten at night, every day of the week. Edmund had been banished to a tied cottage on the estate, Brianna Jade to Chewton Glen Spa Hotel in the Cotswolds, and Tamra, who cared much more about the revamp than either one of them – ironically, as she would never even live at the Hall – had camped out in a side wing, supervising the works with an iron hand in a velvet glove, and causing the project manager and architect, by the end, to regard her almost as a demi-goddess come to earth, beautiful, capricious, and probably capable of literally smiting them with a lightning strike from her perfectly manicured fingers if they failed to carry out any of her many and various orders.
Certainly, however, the Hall had been transformed: it was Cinderella at the ball. The lime trees lining the wide avenue that approached it had been freshly pruned, and the lawns were so green and lush, the shrubbery so immaculately shaped, that Tarquin’s comment was perfectly judged. The sheer amount of money that had been thrown at the seemingly magical transformation bespoke five-star hotel rather than private residence.
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