Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  Milly would have been much happier, however, to know that Brianna Jade was in almost as miserable a mood as she was at that moment. It wasn’t just that the Countess-to-be was in a high state of nerves about the upcoming party, though that was certainly the case; understandably so, as it was shaping up to be one of the high points in the autumn high-society calendar. Royalty was coming, in the person of Princess Sophie, who was Lady Margaret’s goddaughter and particularly close to her, as Princess Sophie’s mother had died tragically young and Lady Margaret had been the nearest thing to a substitute. The presence of a royal princess naturally elevated the entire event to a whole other level, including security precautions. The footman stationed at the entrance checking the guest list was actually part of Sophie’s protection detail, and the grounds of the Hall were full of lurking, black-clad men talking to each other on Bluetooth earpieces, as Brianna Jade had found out when she fled the Hall for refuge as her mother and fiancé engaged in a shouting match earlier that day.

  It had been Edmund who started the fight, though quite inadvertently. He had simply been reassuring his fiancée that she didn’t need to worry, that the party would not only go smoothly with her mother and Lady Margaret and Mrs Hurley all supervising it, but that Brianna Jade would not be called on to host many events like this in the future.

  ‘We really don’t go in for this kind of thing that much,’ he’d said, sitting next to her on one of the new smart outdoor sofas on the terrace; they were trying to keep away from the inside of the Hall, as it was in such a bustle that you fell over someone as soon as you tried to take two steps. ‘Honestly, my parents barely threw parties at all. We’d have people over to dinner, but that’s more like the sort of thing you’ve been to already around the County, twenty people for drinks and dinner, and most of them ones you’ve known for donkey’s years. Noting remotely on this scale, I promise!’

  Brianna Jade and Edmund had been apart for several weeks now, and their reunion two days ago had been very welcome for both of them; they realized that they had missed each other, their growing companionship, Brianna Jade’s increasing interest in the Hall’s farmland and piggeries, and their physical connection, which they were both definitely enjoying. Edmund, who had not had a girlfriend for a long time, had thrown himself into the joys of regular sex with gusto, and there was a sense with both of them that they were very happily making up for lost time; the weeks apart had been frustrating, and they had had sex both nights and again before breakfast today, as Edmund had woken up with what, to his fiancée’s great amusement, he called a ‘morning glory’.

  So everything was going very well on the engagement front. It was the social side of things that was giving Brianna Jade what Mrs Hurley picturesquely called the collywobbles, and all Edmund had meant to do was to try to reassure her that he certainly didn’t expect her to organize huge house parties as an essential part of her duty as a Countess.

  ‘Excuse me?’ however, had been the biting response from someone who definitely did expect that from Brianna Jade. Tamra, who had been supervising the setting up of the bar in the morning room that led onto the terrace, stormed outside with a clicking of her high heels and a jingling of jewellery, placing her hands on the smooth curves of her hips and snapping that she hadn’t spent all this money on doing up Stanclere Hall for the benefit of a few old farts from Rutland who wouldn’t appreciate the taste levels she’d brought to the task if you buried them alive in a pile of Architectural Digests and Style Interiors.

  ‘Tamra, I do appreciate everything you’ve done, and are doing,’ Edmund had said, manfully standing up and confronting the gloriously angry virago before him. ‘But you do need to realize that Brianna Jade and I may have a different way of doing things—’

  ‘A different way?’ Tamra had positively screeched. ‘No no no! There is no damn different way! I didn’t cross the Atlantic and work my way into high society and then throw millions at this place so you and BJ could cut yourselves off here! No way! This place is a showpiece now, or it will be when I get finished, and showpieces get shown off! I want to see BJ in Tatler every other month, throwing some party or some charity benefit here! Definitely hunt balls – Lady Margaret says people love those, and BJ wants to go hunting now—’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind that,’ Brianna Jade had said quickly, eager to appease her mother; Tamra rarely went into full screaming mode, but when she did, she flattened everyone around her to the ground as if she were a tornado. ‘I can’t wait to get good enough at jumps to start drag hunting.’

  It was like yelling into the wind: her mother didn’t hear a word she said. The extraordinary thing was that Edmund wasn’t just finding something Tamra was screaming about to agree with and apologizing profusely, as everyone else had always done in the past. Uniquely, he was standing there, his arms akimbo, his legs planted wide and solidly, shouting back at her. Brianna Jade had never seen anything like it in her life. Even Ken Maloney had ducked and begged for mercy on the few occasions Hurricane Tamra hit land.

  ‘I refuse to let you simply dictate what happens in my house!’ Edmund was barking, suddenly very much the Earl of Respers on his ancestral land. ‘I and my wife will make our own decisions—’

  ‘Please, this was not the deal!’ Tamra interrupted. ‘If I have to come down here every month and throw the parties myself, I will!’ She tossed back her mane of glowing hair, narrowed her dark eyes and stared at Edmund with absolute challenge, not remotely intimidated by his status. While Edmund, arms still folded, jaw set, seemed to have decided that this was the moment he put his foot down once and for all.

  ‘Actually that might not be such a bad idea, Edmund,’ Brianna Jade tried once more. ‘I mean, if Mom wants to do the organizing . . . that’s the bit I get worried about being able to do myself. I like parties, it’s just putting them together I’m not so hot at.’

  ‘I am very grateful to you, Tamra, but that does not confer a sense of automatic obligation!’ Edmund said, going into pompous-aristo mode and completely ignoring his fiancée. ‘If I need to put my foot down on this, I will!’

  ‘Your foot? You can shove your big old foot in that hole in the roof over the east wing any time you want, to stop it leaking!’ Tamra screamed back. ‘Or you can recall that we made a deal – I want to see my daughter as high up in society as she deserves to be, and you need to get that damn roof fixed!’

  ‘Your daughter is about to become my wife,’ Edmund snapped back, ‘and I think you’ll find that when she and I are married—’

  But Brianna Jade didn’t stay to find out how Edmund planned to finish that sentence. Impressed as she was that he was the only person who’d ever been able to take on her mom, she disliked conflict so much that she always avoided it if it was remotely possible. She would almost rather Edmund had buckled under pressure from Tamra, like everyone else. This unexpected side of him actually made her uncomfortable. She had been easing her way across the terrace, unnoticed by either of them, and as she turned to slip down the stone steps the battle royale raged on above her, not requiring her presence at all.

  Which was ironic, she reflected, because what they were fighting about was her; her wishes, her social status. However, neither of them was even bothering to ask her to contribute to the debate. Brianna Jade thought a compromise could easily be achieved, but, as she could tell, this wasn’t about finding a compromise. It was, as they’d put it in the States, Tamra and Edmund throwing down.

  She sighed. It was totally normal for Tamra to want to be in charge; she always did. Her daughter had imagined her married life with Edmund as being run, to some degree, by her mother, who would drop in regularly to tell the two of them how things should be done, and she’d thought that Edmund would be fine with that, because of the way he’d wholeheartedly approved of Tamra’s makeover of Stanclere Hall. The revelation that Edmund was prepared to push back as hard as Tamra came at him was a very unwelcome shock for his fiancée. Many women would have been very pleased that their fiancés
could stand up to their mothers. But Brianna Jade, who basically thought that all her mother’s decisions were correct, didn’t need a husband to fight her battles for her.

  Because I don’t have any battles. And I just hate fighting and quarrels and people yelling at each other. What if they go on like this for our whole lives? What a nightmare that would be!

  And, of course, she was freaking out about the Barb situation more and more as well. Because Brianna Jade was increasingly worried that her strategy for dealing with Barb – keep her sweet till the wedding and, hopefully, the Style Bride cover – was beginning to wear as threadbare as Edmund’s grandmother’s towel. Money once a month wasn’t enough: after being deluged with phone calls just two weeks after the initial Western Union transfer, Brianna Jade had had to make another payment on the clear understanding that Barb was never to ring the Hall phone again.

  Barb now had Brianna Jade’s mobile and her email, and she used both mercilessly to pressure her target into sending money every fortnight. Brianna Jade had managed to plead the difficulty of getting that big a sum without her mother knowing, to which Barb had responded instantly that she could give a shit about Tamra’s being aware of what was going on: in fact, Brianna Jade should tell Tamra straight away, in order to ensure access to the principal bank account, and not just the pocket money that Tamra gave her daughter.

  That tactic had backfired on Barb, however. Brianna Jade had become so hysterical that Barb had been forced to back off, at least temporarily. Tamra was not to know about this, Brianna Jade had screamed, and if Barb made any attempt to get in touch with her, Brianna Jade would have Barb killed – she wasn’t joking. Ken Maloney hadn’t become the Fracking King without breaking a lot of heads, and it wouldn’t be at all difficult to find the people at Maloney Drill who wouldn’t take at all well to someone trying to drag Ken’s adopted daughter through the mud . . .

  Brianna Jade honestly didn’t know where she’d got all this from: TV shows, maybe? Certainly she’d never heard a word about this kind of thing from Ken or her mom. But fracking didn’t exactly have the best reputation – even Ken had admitted occasionally that some people who’d been, as it were, fracked, had had a tad of a rough deal, what with their water supply being all messed up and the gas fires breaking out. When Tamra had taken over, she had determined to move Maloney Drill in a much more environmentally friendly direction. It was out of self-interest, of course, as well as moral principle: Tamra was very well aware that if she wanted to relocate to the UK, with the anti-fracking movement so strong there, she’d have to reframe herself as a force for good, the figurehead of an energy company that no longer drilled near people’s homes, dirtied their drinking water and set off gas explosions.

  No question, however, that when Ken Maloney had been in charge, Maloney Drill, like almost all other energy companies, had practised tactics so dirty they amounted to black ops. This threat, which had popped out of Brianna Jade’s mouth on hearing Barb trying to drag Tamra into her blackmail, did actually hold Barb for a while. Maybe it wasn’t the threat itself so much as Brianna Jade’s sheer fury. Barb might have decided that pushing her victim too far would mean that even if Barb wasn’t killed, the golden goose would be: after all, Barb’s revelation to the tabloids, her selling of the pictures of Brianna Jade in her pigskin jacket and Pork Queen sash, would be a big payday, but only a one-off. After that, nothing. Whereas if she kept milking Brianna Jade, and managed to keep her greed under control, she could maintain a steady income for the rest of her life . . .

  That was, at least, what Brianna Jade was hoping Barb had decided. But she was perpetually on edge nowadays, nervous about Barb changing her mind or deciding to contact Tamra through the offices of Maloney Drill, and the only time Brianna Jade could really relax, for some reason, was at the piggeries. Her footsteps had taken her automatically to her usual jogging route, or rather to the destination at the Hall in which she felt happiest and most secure. She crossed the bridge over the lake – the cracked stone had now been repaired, and Tamra had planned an elaborate set of photos on the bridge to be taken tomorrow for Tatler – vaguely noticing the rustles in the shrubbery as she passed, mutters and hisses as various protection officers communicated with each other to the effect that the Earl’s fiancée was heading out for a walk and to stand down full alert. Princess Sophie was due to arrive in four hours and the officers were on patrol, staking out what they called ‘areas of vulnerability’.

  Princess Sophie due to arrive! The mere idea gave Brianna Jade heart palpitations. She had seen the princess before, at a party in London, and once in Loulou’s, where Tamra had taken her before Brianna Jade went to the Cotswolds. Sophie looked intimidatingly thin, confident and haughty, though Lady Margaret had assured Brianna Jade that since Sophie’s older brother, Prince Hugo, had married Princess Chloe and settled down to happy married life, Sophie had become considerably more friendly and approachable, a much needed change from her wild-child past. Brianna Jade hadn’t quite understood how this alteration had been effected – something to do with Chloe’s calming influence, though it didn’t seem quite plausible that a new sister-in-law who had dated Sophie’s brother for donkey’s years should have had such an effect.

  But Lady Margaret, who was always not only truthful but as blunt as a sledgehammer to the head, wouldn’t sugarcoat anything for Brianna Jade; if she said that Sophie’s manners and temperament had improved considerably since the days that she taunted her brother’s then girlfriend for being a commoner, Brianna Jade could, as they said in the States, take that to the bank. It helped a little, but not a lot.

  The thought of Princess Sophie, third in line to the British throne, arriving in the middle of an epic battle raging between Brianna Jade’s fiancé and her mother, was enough to make the poor Countess-to-be, stuck in the middle with nobody listening to her, want to run away and hide out with another titled female. Brianna Jade was going to visit the Empress of Stanclere for the second time that day, scratch her back just where she liked it best, and pretend that she’d never have to go back to the Hall, dress up in sapphire Balenciaga and act as if she truly had anything to do with hosting this house party . . .

  ‘Brianna!’ Abel, pushing an empty wheelbarrow which had until recently been full of slops, came round the corner of the pigshed and stopped dead at the sight of her. ‘What’re you doing here, then? You came by this morning already!’

  ‘You really need to get some WD-40 on that wheel,’ Brianna Jade said in a small voice.

  Abel took in her expression, dropped the handles of the barrow and strode over to her, two big paces of his long legs enough to bring him to her side.

  ‘You can’t be here all dressed up smart like that, Brianna,’ he said, shaking his head in emphasis. ‘You’ll get all mucky.’

  Brianna Jade, who was on the verge of tears – something about seeing Abel’s familiar, looming figure had made her want to cry – looked down at her outfit of pale blue silk-cashmere sweater, skinny jeans and pale gold suede Tremp loafers and huffed a laugh, instantly feeling a bit better. For her, this was everyday casual wear, stuff she pulled on after working out to hang around the Hall, but Abel was quite right about her looking smart, especially when she knew what the clothes had cost. The loafers alone, handmade for her and Tamra at the Tremp factory in Italy, were deceptively simple, their suede butter-soft, the label an in-the-know fashion secret: everyone knew about Tod’s, but Tremp was for true fashion insiders.

  ‘Your pretty little shoes!’ Abel said, almost in wonder. ‘They’re like slippers! You can’t walk through the muck to see the Empress in those. Here, come round to the cottage. Me and Gran’ll give you some cider, that’ll pick you up.’

  He led her down a path she had noticed before but never taken. It ran down the other side of the piggeries, alongside the orchards where the pigs were let loose to forage for windfalls: the blossoms were long fallen, the heady scent of ripe apples and pears was faded, but the trees were still beautiful, the gr
ass thick, and the sight of them calmed Brianna Jade further. By the time they reached the cottage, she was breathing regularly, no longer worried that she might burst into tears, and was able to exclaim in delight at how pretty it was. Wisteria climbed around its red-painted door and around the windows with their matching red shutters. It was like something from a fairy tale.

  ‘Oh wow, you have a thatched roof!’ she said, gazing up at it. ‘That’s so pretty! I feel like I’m in Hansel and Gretel or something.’

  ‘No nasty witches here,’ Abel said cheerfully, ‘and the thatch is a right bugger, I can tell you. Looks lovely, but it costs Mr Edmund a fortune to keep up. We’ve got a thatcher in the village who’s at it nonstop going round our cottages tightening all the roofs up – they need it once a year, and it’s not a small job. Got to be cleaned all by hand, as well, you can’t use rakes. The tourists love a thatched roof but that’s ’cause they don’t have to look after it. Backbreaking, it is.’

  He grinned at her as he pushed the door open and stood back, gesturing for her to enter the cottage as he knocked the mud off his boots on the scraper outside. Brianna Jade, built on queenly lines, had to duck as she went in, and she couldn’t help turning, once inside the tiny entrance hall, to watch Abel bending his entire head down to make his way into his home.

  ‘I grew up here,’ he said, knowing exactly what she was looking at, his grin deepening. ‘Used to it by now, I am. But I had a big growth spurt when I was fourteen, and for a whole year I had a bruise right over my forehead like a line, where I kept walking into the lintels—’

  Their bodies almost filled the hall, as if they were playing Sardines. Brianna Jade felt suddenly awkward, crammed in here with him; she smelt the light odour of pig on his clothes, a faint scent of his own fresh sweat, and found herself blushing and looking around for some space; her chest was nearly pressed into the big brass fasteners of his overalls.