Bad Brides (13 page)

And yes, Tamra and Brianna Jade had swiftly imposed their dietary requirements on the rapidly expanding staff at Stanclere Hall. Or rather, Tamra’s dietary requirements; Brianna Jade would
really not have minded putting on a few pounds, now that her days of competing in pageants which had a swimwear section were well and truly behind her. Tamra had been too responsible a mother to
let her daughter live on yoghurts, cigarettes and Red Bull, like many of the other girls; she had always been very strict about Brianna Jade maintaining reasonably healthy eating habits and working
out, and – unlike most of the other mothers – she had led by example.

But sometimes I’d really kill for a sausage, instead of turkey slices that don’t really taste of anything,
Brianna Jade thought wistfully.
Mom says we can’t get
those low-fat chicken sausages over here that we used to live on back home. Which sucks, ’cause I loved those.

She was getting restless, her toes twitching. Time to get up. But the trouble with getting up was that then she’d have to decide what she was going to do all day, a problem that was
becoming increasingly acute. Normally, a bride-to-be would have been thoroughly absorbed in all of the many and various details of planning her wedding: Brianna Jade had known girls back in the US
who literally quit their jobs a year before the wedding date in order to devote themselves entirely to the process. However, Tamra had insisted on taking over all of the wedding organization so
that Brianna Jade wouldn’t be so distracted by it that she lost sight of what was much more important – bonding with her fiancé.

That had made sense on many levels: Tamra was a highly skilled organizer, whereas Brianna Jade’s skills most definitely didn’t extend in that direction. But the trouble was that it
left Brianna Jade with very little to occupy her time. She went up to London every now and then to look at flower-arrangement ideas, to Milan for initial fittings for her dress, but frankly, she
trusted her mother’s ability and taste much more than she did her own, and simply ended up agreeing with everything that Tamra had chosen.

Nor did Brianna Jade have much to do with the renovations of Stanclere Hall. They were being planned by a team of structural engineers and architects, with Tamra, again, serving as designer and
project manager. Brianna Jade was more than happy for her mother to take control, while duly consulting Edmund, of course. She herself wouldn’t have known where to start when it came to
building works. But again, it left her with barely any involvement, apart from picking out her favourites from the array of paint, wallpaper, carpet and tile samples pre-selected by her mother.

The depressing revelation slowly dawning on her was that, apart from the pageant requirements of keeping herself in optimal physical condition, maintaining perfect grooming, smiling beautifully
and walking up and down steps in ankle-length dresses, she actually had very few useful skills or interests. In West Palm Beach, the ready-made social life of young people her own age had swept her
along on a wave of shopping, morning-to-night parties, and dating. Here the nearest shops were miles away, the parties were only in the evening, and – well, she was engaged. She was no
intellectual, had never regretted not going to college, and wasn’t remotely tempted to take courses now, or even pick up anything more demanding than a magazine.

So the problem wasn’t settling into Stanclere Hall, becoming used to it being her home now, per se: the problem was that she didn’t have enough to do. She hadn’t had much in
common with the West Palm Beach crowd, but the social whirl had at least kept her busy. Here, for the first time in her life, Brianna Jade would have to generate her own entertainment, build her
own interests, and she had no experience in how to even start going about that.

‘You need to get involved in running the house,’ Tamra had said to her on the phone yesterday: the internet connection at Stanclere Hall wasn’t good enough for them to Skype
yet. ‘There’s nothing to stop you. It’s not like Edmund’s got a possessive mom living there who wants to run everything her own way, like Lady Lufton in
Framley
Parsonage
. Or a mean old housekeeper who’s obsessed with Edmund’s dead wife, like Mrs Danvers in
Rebecca
, with a huge bunch of keys she won’t give you, hanging on a
chatelaine from her waist. That’s why the mistress of a house is called a chatelaine, did you know? Because she has all the keys—’

‘Mom, do you do
anything
right now but read British novels about stately homes and Lords and Ladies?’ Brianna Jade asked impatiently.

Her mother had laughed, a long, dirty laugh that was very familiar to her daughter.

‘Oh honey, don’t you worry about me,’ she’d said happily. ‘I’m getting my oats.’

‘GreatMomgladtohearityoudeserveit
please
don’ttellmeanydeets, okay?’ Brianna Jade rattled off.

‘No worries, honey,’ Tamra said. ‘I’ve got Lady Margaret for that side of things. We’re pretty much BFFs at this point. She’s really cool. I didn’t know
Duke’s daughters had such dirty minds.’

Brianna Jade sighed. ‘I wish
I
had a BFF down here,’ she said wistfully. ‘Edmund takes me to lots of parties and dinners and stuff, but I haven’t really clicked
with anyone yet.’

‘Oh, hang on in there, honey,’ Tamra said easily. ‘It’ll come, I promise you. You just keep going to the parties and being your sweet self, and you’ll find some
nice girlfriends sooner or later. You know, you’re engaged now – you’re not a threat to any of them, and once they realize that you’re not going anywhere, they’ll
settle in and want to be friends with the new Countess-to-be. Then you can pick and choose the best ones. Like Mary Gresham in—’

‘Mom! No more people from novels!’ her daughter wailed. ‘
Please!
’

‘I’m going to send you a box of books,’ Tamra promised ominously. ‘I’ll put Post-Its on ’em so you can see which are the easiest to start with. That could be
something for you to do, you know? In between going round the Hall, making notes about everything that needs doing! I know we’ve got the roofers coming in next week, but honey, there’s
so
much you could get on with. What about planning your whole master suite? His and hers bathrooms? Go ahead, order a whole bunch of bathroom magazines and start picking stuff out! You can
run it past Edmund if you want, but honestly I think he’ll be pretty much Rhett Butler about it as long as you don’t go crazy with the marble and gold. They really don’t like that
over here. It’s like the opposite of West Palm Beach.’

‘Rhett Butler?’ Brianna Jade’s perfect nose crinkled up charmingly.

‘He won’t give a damn!’ Tamra said impatiently. ‘Jeez, BJ, we’ve seen
Gone With the Wind
tons of times!’

‘I don’t remember stuff like you do,’ Brianna Jade said, not at all daunted; she knew that Tamra’s brain was faster and retained more information than hers did. Brianna
Jade could never have taken over Ken’s Fracking Crown, nor would she have wanted to.
But Mom’s pretty much cleverer than anyone – it’s just that people don’t
realize it for a while because she’s so gorgeous.

‘I really miss you, Mom,’ she said wistfully. ‘Maybe we can watch
Gone With the Wind
again in your screening room when I come up to London next week?’

‘Sure thing, honey,’ Tamra said happily. ‘I’ll go order it now. Oh, I’m so looking forward to seeing you! I’ve found some great new boutiques to take you
to.’

‘I actually don’t need any more clothes, Mom,’ Brianna Jade said. ‘Things aren’t that dressy in the countryside. I’m mostly in my workout clothes and jeans
and wellington boots.’

‘Hush your mouth!’ Tamra said, laughing; clearly she thought her daughter was joking. ‘Oh, and I’ve joined this club called Loulou’s where
everyone
goes
– George Clooney and Mick Jagger
and
Princess Eugenie were in the other night! Mind you, it’s so damn dark in there you can’t tell who everyone is until you fall over
’em . . .’

‘Oh, that sounds fun,’ Brianna Jade said gamely, to which Tamra giggled more.

‘Oh please, you can’t fool me,’ she said. ‘I’m way more into that kind of thing than you are. You’d be happier in the screening room eating popcorn and
watching a movie. Now go off and take a stroll round your new home and figure out how many bedrooms you’re going to have to lose to make them all en suites, okay? I’ve got an
architectural consultant all booked in to make sure we’re not ripping down anything precious, but you should have a sense of what you want before this lady starts, so we know what we’re
working with . . . oh, and let me know how the new kitchen ranges are, will you? They were supposed to get delivered today. We got two and they cost, like, nine grand each,
plus
the tank,
so they’d better be perfect!’

The thing is,
Brianna Jade thought as she slipped out of bed,
Mom cares about all that stuff so much more than I do. Bedrooms, bathrooms, architects, roofs, kitchen ranges,
plumbing, pipes, guttering – or maybe it’s not that she cares about it more, it’s that anything she takes on, she gets real –
really
– thorough about.
I’ve got no idea how many bedrooms we should lose! I’m actually way more interested in the gardens than the house. And the farms. I want to explore the farms.

Okay, that’s something that’s actually got me excited!
She threw on a dressing gown and went to shower. Her mom’s bathroom improvements couldn’t come too soon;
the shower was three doors down the corridor, its tiles chipped, its fittings rusty, its water a trickle compared to what she was used to in the US –
and Mom’s house here. And every
single London hotel we’ve stayed in. It’s not a British thing, it’s a stately home thing. Poor Stanclere Hall, it won’t recognize itself after Mom gives it a
makeover!

Then she pulled on a sports bra, running shorts, a loose Stella McCartney pale pink tank and her running shoes, tied her thick strawberry-blonde hair back into a ponytail with one of the No-Snag
elastics she and Tamra shipped over in bulk from the States, and headed along the rickety corridor and down the creaking front stairs, leaving her bedroom door open to signal that one of the new
maids hired from Stanclere village would know to clean the room and bring down her breakfast tray.

It still made Brianna Jade feel weird, having staff around the house. Even though she’d lived for years in Ken Maloney’s Florida mansion, with its discreet fleet of Hispanic maids in
black dresses and white aprons slipping silently from one room to another, always smiling, doing their work so invisibly they almost seemed like magical elves, she had never quite got used to it.
And back in West Palm Beach, the staff had been employed by her stepdad and her mom; now they were her fiancé’s employees, soon to be hers, and that felt, honestly, even weirder.

The kitchen was bustling with activity. Mostly workmen, putting the final touches to the magnificent new pale yellow Smallbone kitchen that Tamra had ordered at vast expense. The two ranges,
Rayburn oil-fired, top of the line, anchored the huge room, enormous cast-iron mammoths in British racing green. Mrs Hurley, who had been the cook at Stanclere Hall for twenty-odd years, was
standing, arms folded, staring at them with her lips tightly pressed together, looking so grim that Brianna Jade, who usually found her very friendly, hesitated on the threshold, debating for a
long nervous moment whether she should just turn tail.

Don’t be a coward,
she told herself firmly.
Like Mom says, you don’t work for them, they work for you.

‘Is everything all right, Mrs Hurley?’ she said feebly. ‘I mean, with the stoves? My mom asked me to check.’

Mrs Hurley turned to look at the Earl’s fiancée, a ridiculously pretty and incongruous figure, her long tanned glossy limbs shown off by her pink and grey running gear, and it
became clear that the grimness of the cook’s expression had actually been an attempt to repress the strength of her emotions at seeing her kitchen so radically transformed for the better.

‘Oh, Miss Brianna,’ she said – there was absolutely no way Brianna Jade could induce her to drop the ‘Miss’ – ‘it’s just like a miracle, it really
is. Not just one, but two! After the old Aga – honestly, you should have been here to see them cart it out. The state it was in! It half fell apart when they were getting it on their fork
lift.’

‘All grease and rust, it were,’ came the muffled agreement from a young man wedged behind the second Rayburn, fitting the oil-supply pipe and fire valve. ‘You’re well rid
of that.’

‘I was having a bit of a moment. Silly of me to be sorry to see it go, when I know perfectly well it was only fit for the scrapheap,’ Mrs Hurley said, sniffing. ‘But I knew all
its quirks better than my own cooker at home. I could coax it to do anything I wanted. Well, almost anything. The last time I tried a soufflé was ten years ago, and oh dear, what a disaster
that was! The previous Earl didn’t let me forget it for years. Mr Edmund’s such a sweet-tempered man, he’s not fussy at all, but his father was
quite
another kettle of
fish. He was
very
particular about his food, just like your mother. Oh, don’t think I’m saying a word about
that
, Miss Brianna! Mrs Maloney has high standards and
knows exactly what she prefers, and a compliment from her really means something.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t have standards as high as my mom,’ Brianna Jade admitted.

‘Oh well.’ Mrs Hurley smiled at her tolerantly. ‘Hopefully it’ll come with time, and you have a very good example in Mrs Maloney. But goodness, there’ll be no
excuse for any mess-ups with my baking now, will there? I thought I’d do ham and cheese mini-soufflés for a starter tonight. I could leave the cheese out for you, Miss Brianna, and
make yours with non-fat milk?’

‘That’s fine, Mrs Hurley,’ Brianna Jade said quickly. ‘I’m not actually
that
fussed about dieting. I know my mom’s very careful about it, but
it’s not that huge an issue for me.’