Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  Tea had been refused, but if she suggested water, Barb would laugh in her face.

  ‘A pot of coffee,’ she decided. ‘This is my, uh, distant cousin, Barb Norkus.’

  ‘Coffee’d be good, and I gotta say, I’d kill for a beer!’ Barb grinned, displaying a mouthful of teeth that bore painful witness to her meth habit. ‘What you got?’

  Brianna Jade ignored this question, and so did Mrs Hurley: while rich Americans entertaining at home liked to show off their abundance of supplies, Brianna Jade had learnt that when visiting British aristocrats you simply accepted wine, or beer, or a cocktail when offered, without doing anything so vulgar as treating their home like a restaurant and asking for specific information on what you were about to receive. Mrs Hurley reluctantly withdrew, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Do you have any luggage, Barb?’ Brianna Jade asked as politely as she could manage.

  ‘Nah, travelling light.’ Barb grinned even wider. ‘I figured I could pick up whatever I needed here. Or borrow stuff from you.’

  ‘You won’t fit into most of my clothes now, Barb. You’re so slim,’ Brianna Jade said, hoping that Barb would take this as a compliment; she didn’t want to lend Barb anything, as she clearly wouldn’t get it back.

  Barb preened, running one hand through her bleached fringe: it was so crispy and fried with the harsh treatments that it looked as if it might snap off under her fingers. She sank into a deep leather armchair opposite Brianna Jade’s, one of a set arranged around a low inlaid circular table.

  ‘Wow, this is real cosy,’ she said admiringly, her arms splayed out along the wide, buttoned arms of the chair. ‘If it had a footrest, it’d be better than a La-Z-Boy.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Barb?’ Brianna Jade blurted out, as Barb reached for her bag and fished out a pack of Marlboro Reds and a plastic lighter. ‘This wasn’t the deal at all! You were supposed to stay in the States – I mean, we never even talked about you leaving, I totally assumed you wouldn’t come over here – it never ever entered my mind! I can’t believe you’d just turn up here without even being invited.’

  ‘Hey, if I waited for you to be nice and ask me to visit, I’d have gone old and grey first, amirite?’ Barb said, lighting up without even looking around to see if there was an ashtray near her. ‘So I figured I’d turn up and give you a real nice surprise. Bet you’re glad to see me! Finally you can let your hair down after having to suck up to all these British snots. Boy, that has to be the biggest pain in the ass!’

  Brianna Jade stared at her, dumbfounded by Barb’s shameless attitude. She had clearly decided to walk into Stanclere Hall as if she belonged here, brazening it out with barefaced cheek, and it was working: Brianna Jade was letting her make herself comfortable, had ordered her refreshment, was even now standing up to retrieve an ashtray from the console table by the wall so that Barb wouldn’t get ash all over the carpet . . .

  ‘So you’ve got somewhere I can bunk down here, right?’ Barb said, not even bothering to acknowledge Brianna Jade’s putting down the ashtray in front of her. ‘I mean, it’s the country and all, not much going on, but this place is totally cool. I can see myself crashing here for a nice long time. Hey, I bet you’ve got, like, a whole wing I could stay in!’

  ‘You can’t stay here, Barb,’ Brianna Jade managed to say, shaking her head in vigorous denial. ‘You just can’t. Sending you money was supposed to mean you’d stay away and wouldn’t bother me, not turn up here! This is, like, the opposite of the deal!’

  ‘Well, I guess the deal just got changed then, didn’t it?’ Barb blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Tough titty.’

  Brianna Jade bit her lip, hard.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You had to get out of town ’cause you owed money to someone. You thought you had some bottomless money pit with me, and you just spent like there was no tomorrow, and you got caught out and had to leave in a hurry. I bet it’s your dealer you owe, now I think about it.’

  She watched Barb’s eyes as she spoke, and could see that she was getting it right so far.

  ‘Whatever,’ Barb drawled, looking down at her cigarette. ‘I am all cleaned out, to tell the truth. The trains here cost, like, tons. They were all like, if you book in advance you save loads of money, but I was like, well, what the fuck, you know? I’m here now! So with that and the cab from the station, I’m totally broke.’

  A tap on the door signalled the arrival of the food and drink. Brianna Jade called ‘Come!’, prompting a derisive snigger from Barb, and a footman entered carrying a big silver tray, which he placed on the inlaid table between the two women. Brianna Jade noticed that Mrs Hurley had provided two water glasses and two coffee cups in case the Earl’s fiancée wanted some refreshment too, but only one frosted glass for the bottle of Belgian beer; as always, Mrs Hurley had judged things perfectly.

  ‘I’ll pour, thank you,’ Brianna Jade said to the footman, who duly withdrew, not a flicker on his well-trained face as he got a good look at the unexpected arrival who claimed to be Brianna Jade’s cousin.

  ‘All these servants need to take major chill pills,’ Barb said, reaching for the beer and swigging it straight from the bottle. ‘They’ve got sticks up their asses so far they’re practically coming out of their mouths.’

  ‘Barb, shut up!’ Brianna Jade snapped. ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Barb said again, shrugging. ‘Your accent’s showing, by the way. I can hear all that posey Brit crap slipping away the more you talk to me.’

  Brianna Jade set her jaw, determined not to be distracted: the only thing that mattered was getting Barb out of here as quickly as possible.

  ‘You can’t just walk in here and dump yourself down and be rude like that and expect to stay!’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ Barb put the empty bottle down on the tray with a slam of glass against metal. ‘You’re kidding, right? ’Cause I was under the impression that I can do whatever the hell I want, just as long as I don’t spill about you being Pork Queen and show those photos of you standing in the back of that pickup in your blue satin dress and pigskin jacket, dropping the Oreos for the pigs to race, you know?’

  She snuffled with laughter as she stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘Wanna see? I’ve got them right here in my bag. Oh, and I made copies – don’t think you can just throw them into the fire or something. Seriously, take a look.’

  She pulled out a cheap plastic Walgreens photo folder from her bag and tossed it over at Brianna Jade.

  ‘Hey, who do I have to blow around here to get another beer?’ she added. ‘All this travelling’s made me real thirsty!’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Brianna Jade simply didn’t know what to do. She was at her wits’ end. She wanted to handle the situation herself, and if it had been just her and Edmund at risk of being laughed at in the media, she would have told Barb to shove her photos up her ass, get out of Stanclere Hall and never come back. Edmund, as she had known he would, utterly backed her up in this when she finally escaped from Barb, leaving her ‘cousin’ ensconced in the library working her way through a six-pack of beer and her Duty Free stash of Marlboro Reds. She found Edmund on the farm, picking her way towards him in her new Le Chameau wellies over the ruts his equally new John Deere tractor was ploughing in even lines across a wide, muddy field.

  It was unprecedented for her to interrupt Edmund while he was hard at work. So, as soon as he spotted her, he switched off the machine, pulled off the earmuffs he was wearing for hearing protection, and jumped down to meet her as she came stumping towards him. The expression on her face told him at once that it was serious: he strode towards her, enfolding her in his arms, and hugged her so tightly that the buttons on the flap pockets of his waxed Barbour jacket dug into her.

  Brianna Jade burst into tears, the cold air making them tingle on her cheeks as she sobbed against his shoulder. Eventually she wiped them away with the handkerchief Edmund gravely handed her and managed to tell h
im the entire story in a stuttering flow of words, interrupted by frequent pauses to blow her nose and blot the tears away. It all came out, every single detail about the Pork Queen title, the details of what was in the photographs that Barb possessed.

  ‘I’m not at all ashamed of it!’ she said passionately, looking directly into his clear grey eyes. ‘I was proud to win that title – it’s pretty much the only one I ever did win.’

  She couldn’t help a snuffle of amusement at those words.

  ‘You know, it’s my past, and I worked real – really hard to win that pageant,’ she continued. ‘I wouldn’t care at all if the photos were all over the papers.’

  ‘Nor would I,’ Edmund assured her with a vigorous shake of the head. ‘No one who cares about you would give a damn, darling. You might get some good-natured teasing around here when we go out to dinner, but if you take it in the spirit that it’s meant, it’ll fade pretty quickly. I mean, we’ve all got embarrassing photographs of ourselves when we’re young, haven’t we? And if this so-called friend of yours takes money for selling photos of you – well, that’s the worst form imaginable. People will positively rally round you in support, I promise.’

  She’d known that Edmund would take this position, but the relief was still huge. Her body relaxed in his arms, and she hugged him back fiercely.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I was sure that’s what you’d say.’

  ‘But you weren’t,’ he said, frowning in concern. ‘Or you’d never have given this awful woman a penny.’

  ‘It’s Mom!’ Brianna Jade explained, her voice rising into a wail. ‘She’s loving her big social life, you know? And those people might not be as cool with this as you and people in Rutland are! I heard Minty and Sophie used to call Princess Chloe “Dog Rose” when she was Prince Hugo’s girlfriend, before they got married, because her surname’s Rose, and they were calling her a social climber, you know? Think what Minty and her group could do with all the Pork Queen stuff!’

  ‘“Friends” like that aren’t worth having,’ Edmund said with great contempt.

  ‘But this matters to Mom – she loves all the society side of things, and she’d hate to know people were sniggering at her and me,’ Brianna Jade said fervently, trying to make Edmund understand.

  ‘You know, the whole Eurotrash world is full of social climbers,’ he said gently. ‘I can’t imagine this making much difference to them. And your mother’s best friend is Lady Margaret, whose pedigree is absolutely impeccable. All Lady M would do on seeing photographs of you with a Pork Queen sash on is laugh her head off and then forget all about it.’

  Brianna Jade’s pretty forehead was corrugated with worry now.

  ‘I want to protect Mom,’ she explained. ‘Don’t you see? She’s protected me all my life, looked after me, kept me safe, worked her ass off to make money for us, married Ken so we’d never have to worry about that again. Now I want to take care of her.’

  ‘So you’re going to pay blackmail to this awful woman for the rest of your life?’

  Centuries of aristocratic breeding showed in the Earl of Respers’ voice and demeanour as he looked down his long nose at the mere thought of allowing oneself to be blackmailed. Like the Duke of Wellington when the famous courtesan Harriette Wilson threatened to name and shame him in her memoirs, Edmund’s response would instinctively be the same: ‘publish and be damned’. It was near impossible for him to imagine a situation where he would pay someone even once to keep silent about a secret of his, let alone for years and years.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Brianna Jade wailed feebly. ‘I need time to think about it.’

  ‘And in the meantime, Brianna, what happens?’ Edmund asked inexorably. ‘She can’t stay at the Hall with us. There’s simply no way in the world that I’m extending my hospitality to some piece of moral refuse! She can’t sleep under my roof – it’s utterly impossible.’

  ‘Not even one night?’ Brianna Jade said in horror.

  ‘No! Absolutely not! Brianna, you don’t know what you’re asking. You give this woman an inch and she’ll take a mile. You have to put your foot down now, and letting her stay when she’s turned up on our doorstep like this is completely the wrong thing to do,’ Edmund said with extreme seriousness. ‘I understand that you’re trying to protect Tamra, but this is not the way to do it. Do please listen to me.’

  Brianna Jade felt that she was being pulled in so many directions at once that she could barely breathe. She knew that Edmund was quite right: Barb shouldn’t be allowed to stay at the Hall, should never even have been let inside. Once Mrs Hurley had told her who her visitor was, Brianna Jade should have got up immediately, marched to the front door and told Barb to get out and stay out.

  That’s what Mom would have done, no question, she reflected sadly. But I’m not Mom. I wish I was as tough as she is – she’s so good at knowing the right thing to do, and she’s always brave enough to do it, too. I just blunder along, never taking the initiative, and now that means I’m totally stuck.

  ‘Shall I come back to the Hall now and we’ll throw her out together?’ Edmund asked. ‘Screw your courage to the sticking point, darling!’

  Brianna Jade didn’t recognize the Shakespeare reference, but she knew she wasn’t ready for the kind of terrible screeching throwdown with Barb which the announcement that she was no longer welcome at Stanclere Hall would inevitably provoke. She stared mutely at Edmund, silently begging for some reprieve, an agreement that Barb could stay for a night or two and postpone not only the awful confrontation, but the equally inevitable splash of the Pork Queen revelation all over whichever paper or magazine Barb chose as the buyer of her story.

  But Edmund didn’t budge. Of course, he was right: how could she imagine eating meals with Barb, for instance? How could they be under the same roof and not exchange a word? But then, if they did speak, what could they say to each other?

  What kind of Countess of Respers will I make if I can’t handle a crisis properly? she thought in panic. Look at me, I’m going to pieces! How am I ever going to handle running the house and the estate and dealing with stuff that comes up when Edmund isn’t around?

  ‘I’m not ready yet,’ she managed. ‘I think I need to go for a walk.’

  Edmund nodded slowly, more in acknowledgement of his fiancée’s upset state than in agreement that her decision not to confront her blackmailer was the right one.

  ‘Come back and find me when you’re ready,’ he said quietly. ‘I won’t go back to the Hall until we’re together. We should deal with this as a couple, Brianna, don’t you think? I’ll be by your side when you tell her she needs to leave. She needs to see that I’m backing you up, that I don’t care a jot about whatever threats she might make.’

  Edmund was the perfect fiancé, which was wonderful: the trouble was that she wasn’t good enough for him. She wasn’t up to the pressure of being the Countess of Respers. She had been skating along, letting her mother arrange everything; she didn’t have one useful thing to do in the Hall, and she knew it. The only place she had ever felt truly at home was where her footsteps took her as she turned away from Edmund and plodded across the rutted field, over the stile and onto the dirt road that looped around the estate, down a path that led off it, knowing exactly where she was going by instinct, even though she had never taken that precise route before.

  She was headed to the piggeries.

  And watching the slim figure of his fiancée move across the newly ploughed field, not towards Stanclere Hall but away from it, avoiding Barb Norkus and the confrontation that awaited her, Edmund slipped his phone out of his pocket and dialled Tamra’s number.

  It had been months since Brianna Jade had visited the pigpens, and yearning and anticipation rose in her as she approached them. She could hear the familiar grunting noises, start to smell the warm, ripe scent of the pigs, which, to Brianna Jade, was wonderfully familiar. Memories of home, happiness, security instantly flooded back: running barefoot in the dusty earth of th
e Lutzes’ farm, helping to feed the pigs and the chickens, long sunny Illinois summers with the scent of fresh hay and blue skies above. Even though today was a chilly February day with a flat grey lid to the world, the cloud cover so low that it seemed as if you could almost reach up and touch it, the scents and sounds of the pigs still lifted her spirits, and as she rounded the turn in the path, her heart raced even faster at the sight of Abel’s huge figure leaning on the rail of the sty, forearms propped on it, his shoulders hunched as he stared disconsolately down at the Empress of Stanclere.

  It didn’t occur to her to turn back while she still could, while Abel hadn’t noticed her approach. Her need for comfort was too extreme, the company of both the pigs and Abel exactly the solace she needed. She wasn’t just escaping from the crisis at the Hall, from Barb’s unwelcome presence; she was heading towards the dead centre of the place where she felt most relaxed, most wanted and needed in the world. Putting that into words would have scared her to pieces, so she instinctively shied away from it, telling herself that she’d just stay for a few minutes, catch up with Abel and the Empress and then go back to the Hall and face the music . . .

  The thought of having to confront Barb, even with Edmund backing her up, made her walk even faster, almost breaking into a run, as much as she could manage in her wellington boots. Hearing the squelch of her rubber soles in the mud, Abel looked up, his expression changing from hangdog to joyous in a flash as he caught sight of her; his eyes lit up, he stood up straight, automatically reaching a hand up to push his thatch of hair out of his face. He was dressed in his denim dungarees, a big cable-knit sweater underneath them to ward off the February chill, the legs tucked into a pair of rubber boots so gigantic that they would have made almost every other man apart from a professional wrestler look as if he was wearing waders.

  ‘Brianna!’ he exclaimed unguardedly. ‘Oh, it’s nice to see you! Me and the pigs’ve really missed you.’