She paused for effect.
‘Finding lasting love truly is a miracle,’ she went on. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, as Keats said . . .’
I see she’s been hitting the miracle of Google hard, Ludo thought, rolling his eyes.
‘. . . and with the amazing connection of Leonardo da Vinci to these surroundings, it feels like we’re just encircled by beauty and love!’ Milly read. ‘The Mona Lisa was painted for Lisa Gherardini’s husband, out of love, and that love has made it the most famous painting in the world. And her family came from right here, would have worshipped in this beautiful church, which was sketched by Leonardo. Every time I look at that drawing, so precious and unique, which shows this stunning landscape all around us at this very moment, I feel the wonder at the miracle that happened here and our love, which is just as precious and unique—’
‘But you haven’t really looked at it,’ Tarquin said very quietly, so quietly that only Eva and Lance, the closest to the bride and groom by virtue of the seating arrangements, could hear him. They exchanged brief, startled glances as a blissfully unaware Milly carried on:
‘ – and which, like great art, enfolds two people who’ve found each other, two real true minds and hearts as miraculously joined as I am with you, Tarquin darling—’
Abruptly, the groom took a step back.
‘Milly, I’m feeling really uncomfortable!’ he blurted out, interrupting his bride in mid-flow. ‘Something’s not right.’
Muffled gasps from some spectators greeted his words, but Tarquin was oblivious to anything but Milly’s shocked face.
‘Did you write your vows yourself?’ he continued, his voice trembling. ‘Because that’s what we said – what we agreed on. I wrote a song for you called “Turquoises in the Snow” that I was going to sing.’
Eva realized now why there was a guitar case propped beside Lance’s chair, when Lance himself was a drummer; clearly, Lance was going to pass the instrument to Tarquin so he could accompany himself while singing. A rush of envy raced through her, jealousy that Tarquin had written a song specially for Milly and their wedding day.
Dots of red had appeared on Milly’s cheeks, pinging out like little distress beacons.
‘Yes, I wrote them!’ she said quickly. ‘Of course I did, darling. Look, there isn’t much more.’
‘No, I meant—’ Tarquin pressed the back of one hand against his forehead. ‘You wrote the words, I suppose, but the thoughts, the ideas – are those yours? Or did you have help?’
By now, the spectators were frozen in their seats. The natural shifting and fiddling with programmes and re-crossing of legs that always happened at any kind of ceremony had completely ceased. The muslin curtains had been looped back around the top struts of the gazebo to give everyone a clear view of the wedding, so the drama that was playing out was as visible as if on stage.
Mobile phones had been banned from the wedding, because Style Bride insisted on an exclusive for the ceremony, but the magazine’s cameras were still clicking away, the video running. Eva was craning to try to see Tarquin’s face, but at the angle at which her chair was placed she could only see his profile. She did, however, have a perfect view of Milly. The bride’s spaghetti-strap dress left her collarbone bare, and it was very obvious that a red rash of embarrassment was breaking out on her pale chest.
‘Yes, of course I thought of them myself!’ Milly said, after a pause. ‘Look, Tark darling, just let me finish and we’ll talk about this later.’
She was very aware of the reaction from the guests, the stares that were swiftly becoming horrified as the situation dragged on, as Tarquin didn’t just kiss her and let her continue; she darted her eyes from side to side, taking in the scale of the problem.
‘But the thing is – you didn’t see the drawing,’ Tarquin said bluntly. ‘The Leonardo of the church. You’ve never been to see it.’
‘I saw it in the papers they gave us about the church!’ Milly’s voice rose frantically. ‘And online! I’ve looked at it lots, just like I said in the vows! Darling, please just—’
‘We’ve been back twice since we chose this place to get married in,’ Tarquin carried on, ‘and both times I really, really wanted to go to the Uffizi to show you the drawing – but you always had something better to do. And yesterday I said that Marco said there was a guide who could take us on a private viewing, and you said you were too busy with wedding stuff, and then you went shoe shopping in Florence instead.’
Milly swallowed hard. Leaning towards him, she put a hand on his arm.
‘I didn’t know it meant so much to you, darling,’ she said softly, controlling herself with a huge force of will. ‘We’ll go as soon as we’re back from honeymoon, I promise.’
Tarquin shook his head vehemently.
‘But you talked about it like you’d seen it,’ he said simply. ‘I know in my heart that you didn’t write those vows all by yourself.’ He tapped his chest with one hand. ‘Those aren’t your thoughts, your ideas. And when I asked you just now, you said they were.’
Tears brimmed in his eyes.
‘You lied to me at our wedding, Milly,’ he said. ‘At our wedding! If you’d admitted that you had help writing your vows, I could forgive that. I truly could. But lying about it . . .’
As Tarquin mentioned Milly having help with her vows, Milly’s glance slipped involuntarily to Eva for a second, and Tarquin, seeing this, turned to look at Eva too. Eva’s eyes met his, full of panic: would Tarquin blame her for what Father Liam called playing Cyrano? But as the tears started to fall down his cheeks, Eva saw no blame, nothing but misery and grief in his expression.
‘How can I ever trust you again if you’ve lied to me at our wedding?’ he asked Milly with terrible simplicity.
‘Tark – Tark, please.’ Milly, now in utter panic, grabbed onto his arm. ‘Tark, wait! We can work this out – you know how sensitive you are! When you calm down and think it over, you’ll realize this is a storm in a teacup. Please, please let’s just finish the wedding!’
Tarquin looked down at her tiny fingers grasping the pale grey sleeve of his jacket. You could have literally heard a pin drop on the stone floor of the gazebo as he very gently raised his own hand and detached her grasp, letting her nerveless, limp fingers fall by her side. He drew the back of his sleeve roughly over his eyes and the fabric came away wet with tears.
‘It’s over, Milly,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You can keep the ring.’
This prompted not only very audible exclamations from the people seated at the front but, even worse, urgent requests from people in the back rows to repeat what Tarquin had said. As guests swivelled round to pass on the shocking news, hissing, ‘He says it’s off! He says she can keep the ring!’ Tarquin turned away from his dumbfounded bride and walked slowly from the gazebo. He paused for a moment, standing just outside it, drawing in a deep breath, and seeming to Eva, who was gazing up at him in a kind of paralysed wonder, to be considering something very deep and serious.
Finally, he exhaled, slowly, steadily, and looked down at Eva. He was very pale, but his cornflower-blue eyes were no longer brimming with tears.
‘I need to go for a walk,’ he said softly. ‘Will you come with me?’
She couldn’t say a word. For a second, she couldn’t even move. But then Tarquin, very gravely, held out his hand, and she found herself rising to her feet, putting her fingers into his, and walking, by his side, away from his aborted wedding, down the slope that led to the road and to the woodland path beyond.
‘It’s a different kind of miracle!’ Ludo muttered to himself, shaking his head in amazement.
The red blotches on Milly’s slim chest had now spread up her neck in a flush of absolute mortification. She stared wildly after her departing groom.
‘I don’t understand!’ she wailed. ‘What just happened?’
She turned to a horrified Father Liam, who was coming forward to comfort her.
‘Did we get married?’ sh
e asked, clutching frantically onto the faintest of hopes. ‘Is it legal? Did we actually get married?’
Father Liam shook his head sombrely. And Milly’s shrieks of frustration and fury on hearing this news were so high and piercing that the white doves enclosed peacefully in the dovecote, waiting to be released at the end of the ceremony, became so agitated, flapping their wings and shuffling around, that a stream of bird poo started running down the side of the pretty wooden birdhouse.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Milly and Tarquin’s wedding ceremony had taken place mid-morning, to allow for lunch afterwards and then dancing until dusk on the outdoor dance floor, before the guests adjourned to the villa behind the church when the May evening became too chilly for comfort after sunset. However, Brianna Jade and Edmund’s wedding, scheduled for the same day so that Tamra could be sure that Princess Sophie would attend this one and not Milly and Tarquin’s, did not have to consider the same weather constraints as an outdoor marriage in Tuscany. Tamra and the planner had chosen an early afternoon timeslot, which allowed guests to arrive up till lunchtime on the day itself and gave plenty of time for the second Style Bride team to potter happily around through Stanclere Hall with their cameras and videocameras.
A journalist with a Dictaphone followed the photographer, dictating a near-constant stream of notes into the machine, trailed by an assistant to the wedding planner who was trying to answer her questions as fast as she could ask them. The Great Hall alone was enough to keep Style Bride occupied for days: it had been transformed into an entrance arbour, many of the sofas removed to make room for two rows of huge flowering white magnolia trees in china pots, towering above the guests, perfuming the air. Clusters of white Claire Austin roses, selected for their strong scent of meadowsweet, heliotrope and vanilla, were arranged in low silver vases on the polished tables and on the gleaming black piano. In the fireplace was a dark pink Gertude Jekyll rose bush, entirely filling the space where the grate had been: Tamra had specified that the dark rose colour of her dress and of the flowers the little bridesmaids would throw should come through in hints throughout the decorations, a subtle contrast to the main theme of white flowers and glossy green leaves.
‘Jekyll spelt like Jekyll and Hyde?’ the journalist was asking the assistant when a text came in for her.
‘Yes, I’ve got it all on a spreadsheet for you – I’ve emailed you the Excel document. And the roses in the chapel are Claire Austin too,’ the assistant was answering, only to be cut off as the journalist gasped, having just checked her phone.
It was from her counterpart at Milly and Tarquin’s wedding, who was dying to share the incredibly juicy news with as many people as she could: as a Style employee, she was almost the only person at the wedding to have a mobile phone to hand, the other guests having been relieved of theirs.
‘Oh my God!’ the journalist exclaimed, staring down at the screen. ‘Best gossip of the year!’
‘What?’
The wedding planner’s assistant eagerly leaned over and the journalist tilted the phone over to her. She gasped.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Because she didn’t write her own vows? That’s rough.’
‘It looks like he went off with the maid of honour!’ the journalist said, scrolling down. ‘This is crazy! And I can’t Tweet it – shit, I’d get so many RTs, but Jodie would kill me.’
She looked up to see that the assistant had disappeared: the latter, very well aware of which side her bread was buttered, had shot off to deliver the news to Tamra. Busy supervising the final touches being put to the flower arrangements in the chapel, Tamra initially greeted this information with unabashed joy. The collapse of Milly and Tarquin’s ceremony meant, of course, that there was no longer any competition for Brianna Jade to take the Style Bride cover. A few minutes later, however, when more details of the events in Tuscany were conveyed, Tamra was, like the journalist, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘She didn’t write her own vows, so he left her at the altar?’ she repeated, looking at Lady Margaret. ‘I don’t get it.’
‘He’s always been terribly sensitive,’ Lady Margaret said, pulling a grimace so exaggerated she looked like a gargoyle.
‘But Margaret – I mean, come on. Lord, I know I threw Milly out of the Hall for being a total bitch, but no one deserves that! You think she cheated on him or something?’
‘He went off with the maid of honour!’ the assistant said breathlessly.
Lady Margaret shrugged. ‘Nice girl. Can’t blame him.’
‘What a disaster,’ Tamra sighed. ‘Thank God Edmund’s not going to pull a stunt like that.’
‘No, he’s solid through and through,’ Lady Margaret said gruffly, looking at Tamra under lowered brows. ‘Stick by his word no matter what, that’s Edmund. Like all the Respers. Very responsible family. Knew that when I suggested him for Brianna Jade. Though I—’ She stopped. ‘Well, never mind that. You don’t need to worry about Edmund.’
‘Oh, I’m not,’ Tamra said quickly. ‘Not at all.’ She smiled distractedly at the assistant. ‘You did a great job coming to tell me,’ she said. ‘I’ll make sure you get a bonus for this.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Maloney,’ the assistant beamed, dashing out of the chapel to resume her normal duties.
‘Well, I guess I better go tell Brianna Jade that she’s Style Bride of the Year!’ Tamra said, her face flushed with excitement from the news, her dark eyes sparkling.
But Brianna Jade, when duly informed of the bizarre turn of events in Tuscany, was not as gleeful as her mother had expected.
‘Honey, this is it!’ Tamra crowed. ‘Don’t you get it – you’re guaranteed the cover! It was down to the two of you, and no way can Milly be Style Bride of the Year now that this has happened. Even if Milly and Tarquin patch things up, they’re selling happy weddings, not a walkout at the altar, you know?’
Brianna Jade, who was sitting on a stool in her lavish bathroom, her hair in curlers being put up by two stylists, her face already a perfect, eerily smooth mask of natural-looking make-up, couldn’t nod with four hands winding rollers onto her scalp. She managed to say: ‘Wow, Mom, I can’t help feeling sorry for Milly. I mean, being left at the altar – that’s as harsh as it gets.’
‘I know, hon. But hey, it’s still great news,’ Tamra said exultantly. ‘What can I say – you’re nicer than me. That’s not exactly a newsflash to anyone.’
‘Tamra, sweetie, leave the girl alone,’ Lady Margaret said, sweeping her friend away. ‘Let everyone do their work. She should be thinking about her own wedding, not someone else who made a total cock-up of theirs.’
The hairstylists, plus the make-up artist who was waiting to do final touch-ups on Brianna Jade, burst into excited babbling about this incredibly juicy piece of gossip: the make-up artist was already checking Twitter on her phone and posting what she’d just heard. But Brianna Jade, facing the mirror as the hot curlers were removed and the bouncy curls brushed out and pinned into place, wasn’t really absorbing the fact that her Style Bride title was assured. Her attention was entirely directed towards trying, as best she could, to reconstruct the conversation – or rather, the monologue – that Edmund had had with her last night.
She had only started to remember it halfway through the morning. She had debated taking her Valium, and decided not to: she surely ought not to be on anti-anxiety medication the day of her wedding. And she felt quite calm, because there was so much on her schedule today that she didn’t have any spare time to wander around wishing that she were down at the piggeries . . .
She dragged her thoughts away from that avenue, focusing instead on what Edmund could possibly have been talking about. She’d been racking her brains to try to remember a night where she and he had gone at it in a much kinkier way than usual, which seemed to be the gist of what he’d been saying.
But she couldn’t. She really couldn’t.
Edmund had said that she hadn’t seemed like herself,
which was gradually beginning to make her think that the woman he was talking about hadn’t been her at all, bizarre though that sounded. But how, and when, could a misunderstanding on that scale have happened? Who could the other woman have been?
Because Brianna Jade had been so zonked as she fell asleep last night, Edmund’s words were only coming back to her in fits and starts. There had been something about punching – no, that couldn’t be right.
‘Punch,’ she said out loud. ‘Not punching. Punch.’
‘You what, love?’ The hairstylist looked down at her. ‘What was that?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, used enough by now to having her hair and make-up done to know not to shake her head.
He returned to his work, and Brianna Jade to her thought process: punch, she repeated to herself. Punch had been served that night of the house party at the weekend of the photo shoot, Saturday night, after Milly had derailed Brianna Jade so completely with those nasty little side digs about her and Abel, which had turned out to be right on the money . . .
Anyway – she bit her lip hard, smearing the lip gloss – she had gone to bed early that night, hadn’t participated in the croquet or the Twister or the late-night partying. She hadn’t had any of the punch. And as she recalled, Edmund had said the woman he’d thought was her had seemed tipsy – that was right, he’d definitely said ‘tipsy’. Another little piece falling into place. So a drunk woman had – what? Staggered into Edmund’s room and got into bed with him for some random reason? Brianna Jade had been in her own bed, fast asleep, but how would some other woman know that Edmund’s fiancée wasn’t in bed with him already? And even if she did somehow know that Edmund was alone, why would she suddenly decide to have sex with him? It didn’t make sense.
Could the mystery woman have mistaken Edmund’s room for someone else’s? That seemed a lot more likely, but it was the master suite, so it would be hard to make that sort of error . . .
Wait. She took a breath. The fish. The horrible stinky fish that Dominic had put in Edmund’s bed that night, some sort of icky British posh custom that, to do him justice, Edmund hadn’t defended because of tradition or any bullshit like that. It had taken ages to air the room out, the mattress had been ruined, Edmund had slept in the guest room down the hall until the smell was—
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