Chapter 2

Two

THE PEARL ROOM

Lou took her first hit within moments of our arrival.

I’d swung the car around the drive made of carefully-edged and manicured blond gravel to come to a stop at the bottom of the wide front steps. We’d both gotten out of the car to see a tall, handsome young man wearing crisp, khaki pants, whiter-than-white trainers, and a light-blue, long-sleeved polo shirt bounding down toward us.

We’d also gotten out to be dwarfed into insignificance by the house and to be viciously bitten by the chill of a cloudless, autumnal, northern English afternoon.

The house had four wings in a cross shape, that being the Scottish cross, diagonal. It was said, the middle intersection was where the fortress had been and under which the bones of the pretender still lay.

It was four stories tall, a mix of red brick and Yorkstone, with two turrets at the ends of each leg of the cross, eight in total, all topped with green domes of tarnished copper. The rest of the roof was dark slate. There were parts of the structure on the ground floor covered in trailing wisteria. There were enumerable peaks and chimneys and gables. And in the center flew the Union Jack, underneath it, a light-blue flag with a golden shield on it.

It was sprawling, stately, handsome, but most of all, imposing.

It was not the genteel country seat of a long-standing aristocratic line.

It screamed wealth, importance…dominance.

It said, You don’t belong here.

The king himself could stand where I was standing and maybe hesitate before he approached those wide steps.

The young man made it to us, and I saw there was a logo stitched into his shirt over his left chest. A golden shield, the same as on the flag flying above us. It looked to be a profusion of sprigs of heather adorning the top edges, the requisite helmet from a suit of armor at the top middle, and in the shield was the full body of a clawing wolf in profile.

He looked between the two of us and delivered Lou’s first blow.

“Mrs. Ryan, welcome.” He then turned to me. “Miss Ryan.”

Lou couldn’t quite hide the flinch.

Then again, from ages seventeen through twenty-five, she’d subsisted on coffee and cigarettes to keep her curve-less frame. As she aged, this turned to restrictive dieting and obsessive exercise, but neither of these done with a mind to health and nutrition, but instead keeping her size 0.

Because of this, her youthful glow and tremendous genes had slowly morphed to the look of desperation. Now, her forehead seemed too wide, her eyes too far apart, the rest of the features of her face scrunched beneath both, and nothing moved due to regular Botox injections.

She was still beautiful, she’d never not be (at least in my eyes), but she no longer was the young, energetic, rail-thin model. Instead, she was the gaunt thirty-nine-year-old woman who looked thirty-nine and as if she was wondering if a life of living a maxim, “nothing tastes better than skinny feels,” might have been a life wasted.

I was thirty-four and apparently looked my age too, and I’d never met a treadmill I liked, so I avoided them, thus our relationship worked perfectly.

However, there’d been a time when people who didn’t pay attention thought I was Dad’s wife, and Lou was his daughter. It sickened me, and it never failed to irritate me that Lou would preen whenever it happened.

Things were different now, but I didn’t celebrate her pain. It made me sad for her that something so mundane meant so much to her.

Everyone aged, and unequivocally, the more you had of it, the more blessed you became.

The years we lived, people didn’t seem to understand, were the gift that kept giving.

Until they stopped.

“I’m here to show you into the house,” he announced. “The other Miss Ryan is being informed of your arrival and she’s to meet you in the Pearl Room for tea.”

“What about our suitcases?” Lou asked.

It was then I winced as the young man quickly hid his expression of revulsion.

One did not touch one’s own luggage in a setting like this.

Though, the distaste he was quick to hide was over the top, but perhaps not in a place like this.

Even so, I didn’t like it.

Needless to say, Lou had not grown up with money either. She’d lived the first sixteen years of her life on a council estate. For the last thirteen, Dad took care of everything, except, of course, for the eighteen months since he’d been gone. In the years in between, her life was a whirlwind of jet-setting between fashion shows and photo shoots, parties and dating Hollywood actors. Weekends in the country with the hoi polloi wasn’t on her agenda.

She didn’t know the rules because she didn’t have to bother to learn them.

I, on the other hand, had never been my father’s favorite, but I’d been adjacent to his money, and as such had learned to make my own way in these worlds long ago.

It was too late to cover her gaffe, so I forged around the car, hooked my arm in hers and turned to the man. “We’ve been driving a long time. Tea and Portia sound perfect.”

He nodded, threw an arm toward the steps, but preceded us, jogging up as we followed more sedately.

Hit number two landed on us both as we entered Duncroft.

Particularly me.

I felt a jolt of electricity hit the second I stepped over the threshold.

I’d traveled widely, and I honestly couldn’t say I’d ever experienced something as audaciously beautiful, with the razor’s edge of exquisite taste, as the enormous entry of Duncroft House.

It was the joint of the cross, the entirety of it, and the ceiling rose all four stories and was topped with a glass dome. The sweep of the elegant staircase spiraled round and round to the top floor, making the space seem cavernous.

And embedded that feeling that we were insignificant.

The floor was a sea of pristine-white marble, the walls a shade of lilac gray so pale, if the crown molding wasn’t an immaculate white, I would have thought it too was that color.

In front of us, opposite the front door, beyond the sweeping staircase (also all white with a thick, dove-gray carpet runner clamped at the top edges of the treads by a thin rod of burnished silver, the color of that carpet having to be insanely difficult to keep clean), all you could see were windows that framed a massive conservatory. And well beyond that, barely discernable through the jungle of plants, were manicured lawns and gardens, and beyond that, heathered moors.

Four wide hallways led off of the foyer.

And at the foot of the stairs, atop the broad newel post, stood a figure carved in white marble.

I didn’t know who she was, Aphrodite, Hera, Persephone, some other goddess. She was walking tall atop grass and flowers, the flowers rising up to mingle with the graceful folds of the shift that closely skimmed her feminine curves. Flowers also mingled in her flowing hair.

Her head was tipped back, and a serene expression was on her face.

Serene and…replete.

There was something sexual about her. It was nuanced, yet still managed to be overt. As if she was caught walking over the grass through the flowers while orgasming.

She was also tall. If she were on the ground, she’d be as tall as me.

She would seem curious and even wrong anywhere else but in that vast, bleached space, and if the person who sculpted her did it in that exact spot to make her proportions and impact as flawless as it could be, I wouldn’t be surprised.

“Your keys?” the young man requested.

I turned to him.

“I’ll get your luggage and park your car,” he explained.

I nodded, took my car fob off the ring and handed it to him.

He dipped his chin and said, “This way.”

I noticed that Lou tore her gaze off the statue when we followed him left, down the hall that led along the front southwestern leg of the house.

We walked to the very first door, and he stood outside it, again with arm extended, inviting us in. “The Pearl Room,” he stated. “Miss Ryan, I’m sure, will join you shortly.”

He did not enter the room, but we did.

The name of the room was apt. There were more colors here than in the entry, but they were all in the same theme, oyster, and the shimmering golds and pinks and silvers and greens of mother of pearl. The massive chandelier that fell from the ceiling rose in the center of the room looked made of swags of actual pearls.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.

“Agreed,” Lou muttered in return, moving her attention from the chandelier, toward the door.

I looked that way too, to see the young man was no longer there.

“Am I wrong?” she asked under her breath. “Should he have introduced himself?”

It wasn’t the first time I wished my father had been less…my father.

It was his narcissistic, alpha tendencies that not only made his first wife bitter, twisted and angry, and his second wife banished and forgotten, it had also dispatched his last wife and youngest child as incapable of dealing with the world he’d left them in.

“Yes, he should have,” I told her. “I can’t even imagine how big the staff is in this place, but if he was sent to greet us, and he’s taking care of our bags and my car, we’ll probably see him around while we’re here, and I should know who to ask for by name if, say, I want my car fob back.”

“Okay,” Lou replied, drifting further into the room while taking it in.

I stayed where I was, trying to put my finger on why all of this rubbed me the wrong way.

The room was spotless, as was the entry. There not only wasn’t a speck of dust, but also nothing was out of place. And the two porcelain-white sofas looked like no ass had sat in them since they’d been laid facing each other. They were set perpendicular to the white marble fireplace with its veins of gray and lilac and gold. The same unused look with the two armchairs covered in pearlescent leather that sat at angles at the apex of the couches, facing the fireplace.

I knew the living quarters of houses like this tended to be a lot homier than the formal areas.

Daniel and Portia had been seeing each other just over six months. We were to be there for ten days. It wasn’t lost on anyone what this week was about.

We’d barely stepped into the house, and the choice of this room to be our landing spot for tea upon arrival spoke volumes.

And every word was an insult.

“This room is…scarily beautiful,” Lou noted.

She wasn’t wrong.

“All the white is…a lot,” she continued.

She wasn’t wrong about that either.

“Daphne!”

I turned at my name, then froze, because Portia was sailing through the door.

Though, the reason I froze was spying this version of Portia, a version I didn’t know, who was sailing through the door.

She was wearing an ivory sweater, the deep fold of the top made it off the shoulder, the matching skirt was a swish of falling ruffles of ivory tulle. It tumbled in an uneven hem to her ankles, exposing the ivory, velvet, Mary Jane ballet flats with a thin strap and delicate rhinestone buckle.

Her honeyed hair was pulled back at the crown, the rest toppled in waves and ringlets down her shoulders.

For a moment, I felt such an overwhelming sense of nausea, I was worried I’d throw up.

My sister did not wear tulle. Or ruffles. Or velvet ballet flats.

My sister was the cutting edge of Prada mixed with the nuanced macabre of McQueen.

Our citizenship and accent set us apart in this country, and Portia leaned into the rock and roll aspect to make sure no one forgot she was different, she was cool. She’d come over when she was young, but she carefully nurtured her accent so she’d never lose it.

And when it came to the American version of her that she wanted to convey, she was Miley Cyrus, not Taylor Swift.

She threw her arms around me and hugged me.

I was so surprised by her appearance, I had to force myself to return the gesture.

When she broke away, she grabbed both my hands, beamed up at me and said, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

I opened my mouth but didn’t have the time to say anything before she let me go, turned to Lou and greeted disinterestedly, “Hey, Lou.”

“Hello, lovey,” Lou replied, sounding choked.

At the note in her voice, I glanced in her direction to see she wasn’t injured by Portia’s attitude (she was very much used to it). Her eyes were wide and aimed at Portia’s outfit.

Yes, this version of Portia did not jibe.

“C’mon, they’re going to be bringing tea in soon, we need to talk before they get here.”

She dragged me to the porcelain-white sofas and completely ignored Lou.

I didn’t, capturing her gaze as we moved, holding my hand her way.

When Portia noticed Lou coming with us, she instructed, “You can sit over there,” and gestured to the couch across from us.

Lou was much better at hiding the hurt Portia’s behavior caused her, so she didn’t balk before she shifted her trajectory to the other couch.

“Okay, so, you have to be, like, really cool with Daniel and his folks, all right?” Portia demanded before I’d even settled into the sofa.

“Hey, thanks for taking off for a week and driving over four hours from London to meet my new boyfriend and his family in the middle of nowhere. And by the way, you both look lovely, but do you need anything? I know you’ve been in the car for a really long time, so would you rather stretch your legs or something?”

I spoke these words and they were an admonishment because Portia should have said them.

Portia’s eyes narrowed, and she stated, “Yes, things like that. Don’t say things like that in front of Daniel and his parents.”

She didn’t miss my point, so I didn’t belabor it.

“What are you wearing?” I asked instead.

She peered down at herself. “I’m trying a new look.”

“For Daniel?”

She didn’t quite catch my eyes. “He likes more feminine clothes.”

“What do you like?” I pressed, even though I knew what that was, and it wasn’t a ruffled, tulle skirt, as pretty as it was.

She caught my gaze.

“Daniel,” she stressed.

“Portia—” I began, but I got no further because she leaned into me.

But it wasn’t with anger or attitude, as it usually would be.

It felt like what had been filling the car from Lou on the way there.

Fear.

“I like him, okay? Don’t mess this up,” she begged. “I need you guys,”—she turned her head Lou’s way—“both of you guys, to be really cool and not mess this up.”

“How exactly would we mess this up?” I inquired.

“Portia.”

At her name intoned in a man’s cultured voice coming from the direction of the door, we all looked that way.

And I knew exactly what we might mess up.

Yes, Richard and Jane, the Earl and Countess Alcott, were the upper crust. Tall. Straight. He was ageing almost preternaturally well: his dark hair only touched with silver, his perfect bone structure offering the foundation for his continued good looks even though (I’d looked him up), he was nearly sixty-five. And she was a goddess. Cool and blonde. Ethereal didn’t describe her. The house didn’t need to be haunted, her beauty was haunting enough.

They walked into the room, and we all stood.

“Your family has arrived,” Richard stated like an accusation.

“Yes, I sent word,” Portia said.

“Which is why we’re here,” Richard replied frostily. He turned to Lou. “You must be Louella.”

You must be Louella?

I thought they’d met.

Lou didn’t remind him of that.

“Yes, yes. Hi. Hello.” She moved forward, holding up a hand.

Both Richard and Jane stared at it for a scant moment as if trying to cypher some way to avoid touching it before Richard reached out and took it briefly and let her go.

Jane did not.

Richard also didn’t look Lou in the face.

Then again, Lou managed the whole encounter with her eyes pinned to some point beyond Richard’s shoulder.

Weird.

“Welcome to our home,’ Richard droned.

“And this is Daphne,” Portia declared, pushing me a bit toward them.

I, however, did not offer my hand.

“My Lord, my Lady,” I said aloofly, matching their welcome. “Thank you for having us.”

Richard’s attention was sharp on me. Jane remained expressionless.

Richard looked to Portia. “You’ll explain the rules?”

The rules?

And, hello, how do you do to you too.

Asshole.

“Of course,” Portia assured quickly.

“We’ll let you catch up,” Richard declared. “And we’ll see you at dinner.”

With that, breathing not another word nor gifting us with another look, they left the room, Richard closing the door like he didn’t want someone passing and seeing us in there.

Slowly, I turned my head to regard my sister.

She read my expression.

“It takes a while for them to melt,” she explained.

“Have they melted toward you?” I demanded to know.

She shrugged.

Meaning: No.

Right, we’d get into that later.

I pressed on. “Rules?”

“I told you they dress for dinner.” She suddenly appeared panicked. “Did you bring clothes to dress for dinner? They’re sticklers about it. Cocktails at six thirty sharp, seating at seven fifteen, also sharp. The men wear suits and ties, the women, cocktail dresses at least.”

I didn’t mention we weren’t on a cruise ship, and it was just plain weird that we’d be expected to dress up for dinner for ten days straight (for goodness’ sake, I’d had to pack two suitcases for this shindig). I didn’t do it now, and I didn’t do it when she’d asked me to come and told me what to pack.

I just said, “Yes.”

My sister showed immediate relief, the extent of which worried me.

“Portia—” I started again.

“You’ll get a tour,” she said. “Either from Daniel or Richard, not one of the staff. After tea, you’ll be shown to your rooms to rest and freshen up and prepare for dinner. You aren’t allowed to, um…wander the house until you’re shown what areas are accessible and what are off limits.”

“We’d hardly go poking around their home without permission,” I noted.

“They just wanted me to make sure you wouldn’t,” she returned.

“Please assure them we’re not going to ramble around the house looking for Instagram-worthy photo ops or filming video to splice into TikToks,” I told her.

“That’s another thing. No social media. At all,” she replied.

I pressed my lips together, because…obviously.

“Right, of course,” Portia mumbled, “I just…well, I promised them I’d make things clear.”

“When you speak to them, you can share you did just that.”

“For the most part you’ll be guided where you need to be by staff,” Portia stated. “Until, you know, you get the lay of the land.”

“We’ll be the perfect guests,” Lou promised.

Even though she gave a slight nod to note she’d heard the words, Portia barely looked at her.

I let that slide too and asked, “When are we going to meet Daniel?”

“He’s at work,” she told me.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I told her.

“He’ll be here by cocktails.”

I nodded, wondering how she was there on a Friday afternoon. She had a job too, and it was in London.

I let that go (for now) as well.

So no tour, unless Richard decided to endure our presence for the hours it would take to show us his house. Then again, if he did that, we wouldn’t have time to dress for dinner. Or, if it was as it seemed to be, for the few minutes it’d take to show us the small portions of his house we were allowed to inhabit.

“Daniel’s lovely,” Portia said softly.

He better be, I let my expression say for me.

The door opened and two women wearing dove-gray dresses with mandarin collars, white cuffs on the short sleeves and sensible black flats, came in bearing our tea on silver trays.

The tea service, I’d look up later and find was “Pearl” Nymphenburg, which was used exclusively by Bavarian royalty for a century.

But of course.

No scones and cream, instead, lifeless finger sandwiches and painstakingly decorated but completely tasteless petite fours that I could make better blindfolded.

During tea, I didn’t say the many things I wanted to say or ask any of the myriad questions on my mind, because both my sister and stepmother seemed on pins and needles. They both needed to calm down.

And then I’d get into it.

But it would seem the shiver that went down my spine when we passed the gate, not to mention that bolt of electricity when I walked in, were an indication of intuition I didn’t know I had until then.

And that same intuition was telling me it wasn’t going to get any better.

But it could get worse.

I just didn’t know at that time it was going to.

Or how bad it was going to be.