Becky pirouetted for her friend.
‘Man.’ Sharon sighed. ‘You just look … awesome.’
Sharon was wearing a pretty dress she’d picked up at Peter Jones, a dark blue silk ballgown with little puffed sleeves and gold embroidery at the bodice, which emphasized her large breasts and did a creditable job of coveting her butt. She had felt gorgeous when she put it on, certain that Jack, her boyfriend from college, would come over all lightheaded when he saw her in it. But the problem with being friends with Becky was that you had to deal with how she looked. Most of the time, Sharon could handle it. But she was only human. Did Becky really have to look quite this … edible?
‘You like it, huh?’ Becky asked, examining herself.
Wow, Sharon thought. She really has no idea how good she looks. In that gown, Becky was a goddess. It swept down from her tiny breasts in a whisper of palest pink chiffon, ruched and gathered over a tight whalebone corset to push her cleavage together, so her breasts resembled tiny, tight little plums, pushed up for inspection, a suggestion of curves on her slender body. The Victorian corset cinched in her already minuscule waist; now a man could circle it with his hands. Maybe a hand and a half. Over creamy layers of silk and four stiff
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petticoats, her skirt ballooned out around her, the pink chiffon delicately layered with pale golden satin. Tiny roses of red lace were scattered across her gown, like poppies in a cornfield. Her platinum hair, usually draped freely around her face, was piled on top of her head. She looked stately, like a Victorian duchess, and yet so young, so sexy … the delicate dress matched only by the fresh bloom of her complexion and the sparkle of her eyes.
She might be a Yank, Sharon thought enviously, but tonight she was the perfect English rose. She could have walked straight out of Sharon’s set texts. She was the kind of girl that made you want to start reading a lot of John Donne sonnets.
No detail had been overlooked. Becky’s shoes were satin, dyed palest pink, like a blushing white rose. She was tall enough that she only had to wear flats. Tiny flaxen tendrils framed her aristocratic face, and she had just the smallest touch of make-up on - sheer foundation, a whisper of blusher and white liner under her eyes to make them sparkle. Becky looked as though she had stepped right out of a Gainsborough portrait. She had no evening bag - her room was right upstairs, and anything else would have been overkill - draped over the elegant wrist. But… and .only a real blue-blood would have done this, Sharon thought; her mate was a blue-blood, even though she sounded like Jacqueline Smith … Becky had a fan dangling from her left hand. A real fan, an antique thing made of feathers, with a white ivory handle patterned as intricately as lace. Becky had already fanned herself twice, ,and she flicked the handle sharply, without seeming to try, so that it spread out like a white peacock’s tail …
Sharon swallowed hard. She liked Becky, she reminded herself.
There was no point in acting bitchy just because she was so gorgeous. ‘What time do you think the first people will arrive?’
‘Well, invitations said seven, so I’d better bd down there five of.’ ‘No one’s gonna get here till half past at the earliest.’
‘But if somebody does… I can’t keep my guests waiting,’ Becky said firmly.
Sharon flopped onto a seventeenth-century embroidered chair. ‘The hostess with the mostest. I should have known this would happen. You can be ruthless, you know.’
Becky laughed. The? I’m not ruthless.’
Sharon looked at her levelly. ‘You are, hon. You might not realize it yet, but you are.’
‘What makes you say that? I’m a pushover.’
‘lKeally? 1Kupert’s coming, isn’t he?’
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That was true, and Becky felt the butterllles take mgn, seeum, around in her taut little stomach.
It had been her greatest triumph since coming to England. No, she corrected herself, her only triumph. As soon as Sharon had mentioned the possibility of bringing the family together.., with herself as mistress of Fairfield… Becky had thought about Rupert. Her cousin. Or, to be really accurate about it, her second cousin, once removed. Which wasn’t that close. But Rupert had one thing to recommend him that she didn’t - he was a man.
The family had a title, lupert had it and she didn’t. He was Lord Lancaster. Her great-grandfather, Gerard, the fourteenth baron, had had a younger brother. Much younger, some twenty years perhaps. The Hon. Herbert Lancaster had had issue, four sons, the eldest of which, John, was technically her grandfather’s first cousin. But with the age difference, he had grown up with Becky’s dad. And his son, Rupert, who was just two years older than her, was Dad’s second cousin, and her third cousin once removed.
But Becky, with no sisters or brothers, had never got to know the only relative she had of her own generation. And it was all because of sex.
She was the wrong one.
Dad had only had a sister, and his father had two sisters. So her brother had been the last hope for Gerard Lancaster’s line. Three only sons, the last one dying with his father, a toddler who couldn’t even pronounce his own name.
Herbert Lancaster had no such problems. He had four boys, and William, the youngest, was currently managing Lancaster Holdings, along with Uncle Henry. Becky didn’t know any of those brothers. She’d meet them tonight. But the one that had concerned her, growing up, was John.
Mr John Lancaster had noticed the lack of Y-chromosomes in the senior branch of the Lancasters. He had no expectations that his cousin Robert was going to die, or that his son would. But once he had teased him about making provision. What would happen to Rebecca if disaster struck?
Becky had only seen her father’s face in photographs, but she liked to imagine the scene. Her dad, looking coldly at his cousin. Saying, ‘Then Becky would inherit Fairfield.’
‘Oh, no,’ John said, ‘Robert. Fairfield is entailed. Then it would come to me. The house must go with the title. Of course you see that.’
But Daddy hadr’t seen that. Not at all. And he’d told his cousin so,
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and the argument got more and more heated, until John stormed out of
the house and never spoke to her father again.
John had died after Robert did. Too much steak-and-kidney pudding, too many helpings of cheese and biscuits. Nothing as dramatic as a car crash - more your bog-standard heart attack. Becky felt sorry that they had never reconciled. It was poignant to die angry, unreconciled. Had John regretted it, as he clutched at his chest? she wondered. Had Dad?
Rupert Lancaster had not taken the opportunity for any reconciliation. His father had succeeded to the title, but not the house. Furious at his dead cousin because, after all, the infant daughter wasn’t even in England, not even using Fairfield, John Lancaster filed suit. The house was entailed on the male line, with the title, and if the male line was dead in one branch, it was to go to the other. So what if the law was five centuries old? It was still the law.
Prove it, her father’s executors had said. Prove it.
And John tried to. He died trying.
But Rupert, now Lord Lancaster, the shadowy figure she had vaguely
heard of throughout her childhood, over there on the East Coast of the US, had not given up. He was still trying. For years, and with barely enough cash to pay the lawyers, Rupert had taken his case through the English courts, with no success.
And then there was last year.
Becky had been playing a round of tennis, her blonde hair streaming
out like a banner as she ran around the court, enjoying the sunshine and the gentle thwack of the balls on the warm tarmac, when Aunt Mindy ran out looking worried, waving a telegram. The courts had received notice of new evidence in the Fairfield case. Rupert Lancaster, the young Baron, had unearthed a seventeenth-century document in his grandfather’s papers.
It was a writ of entailment.
Issued and stamped by James l, the new Scottish King of England, at
the request of the then Baron, it stated that the land, manor and estate of Fairfield were to be forever indivisible from the title. And that would
mean one thing.
No women.
Rupert was quoted in issues of The Times that winged their way
across the Atlantic to an anxious, teenage Becky. ‘Ladies are looked after in my family,’ he’d said. ‘Excellent matches are made for them. They marry well. They receive dowries. But if you split the land from the title, you destroy hundreds of years of tradition. I’m fighting to preserve
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that. I’m sorry Miss Lancaster s representauve
After all, my cousin is really an American.’
Becky recalled that moment now with an icy splinter of anger deep in her heart. The reason she wasn’t in England was that the family, the wonderful family Rupert prated on about, had abandoned her.
But the panic subsided six months later when a High Court,judge, in session at the Old Bailey, threw out the case. The paper was determined to be ‘unreliable evidence’. They hadn’t gone so far as to say it was a forgery, Becky noted. That would accuse an English peer - young, dashing, seen at Annabel’s and Tramp - of perjury, of perverting the course of.justice, and that would never do. Besides, Becky knew from the English press that Rupert Lancaster was considered a hero - poor, gracious, noble and the underdog, fighting against her and her high priced team of Yank lawyers. The Court wouldn’t want to tarnish his reputation.
At least they had thrown out the case. Three months before her twenty-first birthday, when she would, finally, reach the maturity of her trust fund.
Becky had given ‘no comments’ to reporters until she was blue in the face, But she had been worried. Very worried. It was amazing, the amount of value she had attached to tainqeld before she had even laid eyes on it.
And now she knew why. The house was in her blood, baked into her genes. She made a note to send some flowers to the trust lawyers. They had done a good job for her. lupert might have the title, but he couldn’t take her house.
She was amazed he had acceded the invitation. But she was also glad. Rupert was her cousin, the only living family she had of her own generation, however distant. He bore her father’s title, and it wasn’t good that they should be enemies.
Well, he was coming tonight. Becky felt a distinct shiver of nerves at the thought.
She was finally going to meet him.
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Fairfield Court was ablaze.
Rebecca had had torches placed along the driveway, driven into the ground, sending sparks and smoke up into the early evening twilight. Across the front court, before the marquee, pillar candles had been placed in the close-cropped grass in clear glass bowls, lighting up the ground with a gentle, flickering glow, setting the shadows dancing across the mossy stone steps.
The marquee was a gorgeous fantasy, an Arabian Nights-style tent in soft cream silk, with the tables inside painted in gold, the chairs covered in pure linen and red satin cushions with gold embroidery heaped against the walls. There was a small dance floor and a space for the string quartet to set up, and later a DJ, with his booth hidden from the diners by an ornate wooden screen. Each person’s table was set with sprays of roses and white baby’s breath, beeswax candles scented with white musk, crystal and silverware.
Outside the tent, along the side of the house, she and Sharon had had the caterers range out tables, laden with hors d’oeuvres and large silver buckets crammed with ice to chill the PerrierJouet and Krug. There were tiny blinis heaped with glistening mounds of Beluga and Sevruga caviar, smoked salmon and cream cheese speckled with dill in rolls, tiny sandwiches of cucumber and cress with the bread thinned by a rolling pin, minute slices of a fresh truffle omelette, oysters, both fresh and smoked, and shellfish kebabs of king prawn and hen lobster cooked with ginger. As she walked past, lifting the skirt of her ballgown so the chiffon didn’t trail over the flagstones, Rebecca breathed in the delicious scent, but her nerves were so great she wasn’t even tempted to pick.
The place looked sensational. She looked Sensational. But she was still scared.
Sharon had gone home, despite her friend’s pleas.
‘I have to,’ she said. ‘Can’t stay here. You have to do the receiving. You’re the hostess. You don’t want some of these people thinking I’m Rebecca Lancaster. Besides, I need a gin and tonic. Be back around eight.’
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And she’d kissed her on the cheek and left, without even looKlng guilty about it.
1
What if nobody caine? What if the English side of the family decided to punish her by making her look like a total fool, a teenage reject, an upstart Yank with no idea? Maybe all it would be would be Aunt Victoria and Uncle Henry, who would patronize her and make her feel even worse than she did right now. Rebecca felt slightly sick. She had spent over twenty thousand pounds on this party. She didn’t even want to think what that was in dollars.
Suddenly there was a new sound in the twilight over the cellist tuning up. Rebecca lifted her head and saw two sets of headlights sweeping down her drive. A Rolls-Royce followed by a Jaguar. She took a deep sigh of relief and breathed out to steady herself.
Here we go, she thought.
‘This is great.’ Sharon grinned. ‘Fucking ‘ell. Look at this. It’s like something out of Pride and Prejudice.’
‘Hold on,’ Rebecca hissed. ‘Mr and Mrs Hope? How nice to see you. Yes, a lovely evening. Do have a glass of champagne … some caviar? And this is your son? Jocelyn, good to see you.’