‘Yes, miss! I made a note of the name, but she said she’d ring back in half an hour, and it must be around that by now. You’ve been at your running longer than usual,
haven’t you? Let me see . . .’
Mrs Hurley rummaged in the pocket of her apron and fished out a piece of paper.
‘Very odd name it was. I had to get her to spell it out to me. Here you go—’
Brianna Jade took the paper from Mrs Hurley’s hand, and caught her breath at the sight of the name.
‘
Norkus?
Did I get that right? She said you’d know it, but I must say, it seemed funny to me . . .’ Mrs Hurley was saying, but just then the sound of the house phone
could be heard ringing, and Brianna Jade, muttering a ‘Thank you,’ dashed back to the side door and down the hall to Edmund’s office, which was the closest extension where she
could take the call in privacy; the phone in the main hall was nearer, but there everyone wandering by – builders, newly hired maids and kitchen staff – would be able to overhear the
conversation she was about to have.
God, I wish Mom were here!
she thought, sprinting into the office, shutting the heavy door and lunging across the desk to grab the receiver.
Why on earth is Barb getting in touch
after all these years? No way is she making a pricy international call just to congratulate me on being engaged. Jeez, no
way
can she come to the wedding, if that’s what she’s
after! Mom’d bust a gut at the mere idea!
‘Hello?’ she said cautiously into the receiver, settling herself into the huge, ancient leather wing chair that had probably been in the Respers family for generations, and which
Edmund really should replace with a posturally supportive desk chair. ‘This is Brianna Jade Maloney speaking.’
‘Well, get
you
with your fancy accent!’ snapped the unmistakable tones of Barb Norkus, who had been runner-up to Brianna Jade in the Kewanee Pork Queen pageant and had never
forgiven her rival; in fact, Barb had surreptitiously tried to push Brianna Jade off the tractor trailer as it carried her and the two runners-up on their triumphal procession down Main Street.
‘I bet you think you’re
way
better than all of us now, Brianna Jade Krantz! Marrying an Earl, like something out of a movie!’
Brianna Jade was actually relieved, sort of, that Barb was being all snarky and mean from the get-go. Barb on the attack was something Brianna Jade recognized and was used to: Barb pretending to
be nice and friendly, sucking up to her ex-rival, would have made Brianna Jade even more nervous.
‘Not exactly
better
,’ she answered warily. ‘But, uh, different, I suppose.’
‘You sound all British and stuck up!’ Barb said angrily, her Kewanee accent so strong and familiar to Brianna Jade that the nostalgia washed over her again, even in these very
unpleasant circumstances.
‘Well I was doing pageants for years, Barb,’ Brianna Jade said carefully. ‘I had to smooth out my accent for those too.’
‘I’m sitting here looking at you on the CelebrityPics site!’ Barb broke in, her voice as nasal as ever.
Brianna Jade had forgotten how some American girls’ voices sounded, as if they had had clothes pegs clipped onto the bridges of their noses at birth to train them to speak in the highest
register possible; there was a babylike inflection that went along with the squeaky voice, as if they were trying to sound like nine-year-olds. She had realized, almost as soon as she and Tamra
moved to London, that she was going to have to work on her vocal range, lower it considerably, and she’d been surprised how easy it had been. Just because she’d got used to speaking in
a certain way that people in the States liked to hear women talk, it didn’t mean that it was her natural voice; she’d been taken aback to find out that she’d been, as it were,
faking it for all those years.
‘You’re posing in this stone thing with pillars in a pink frilly dress by Versayce,’ Barb said even more angrily, as if Brianna Jade had set up the photo shoot as a deliberate
insult aimed directly at Barb. ‘With your fiancé next to you, all lovey-dovey, and your hand on his shoulder showing off your gigantic ring to make the rest of us feel like
shit.’
Brianna Jade couldn’t really argue with that. Naturally, she hadn’t posed with Edmund to make Barb specifically, or anyone in general, feel awful, but she did know what Barb meant;
when you weren’t feeling great about your own life, those perfect, airbrushed, Photoshopped images of people with more money and beauty and fame than you would ever possess could make you
want to go shove your head in a septic tank.
‘I’m sorry it made you feel bad, Barb,’ she said empathetically. ‘That sucks.’
‘Fuck you!’ Barb screeched: clearly, empathy had not been the best tack to take. ‘Fuck you, Blow Job! That’s how you got that Earl, I bet! Down on your knees sucking
cock! As well as the money your mom got on her knees sucking nasty old-man cock!’
Brianna Jade promptly hung up. She didn’t have to sit there and listen to Barb insult her and, much more importantly, her mother; Brianna Jade could have cared less what Barb said about
her, but Tamra was totally out of bounds. Plus, Barb had dragged in Ken Maloney, who was also out of bounds; he’d been nothing but lovely to his young wife and her daughter. And, frankly,
Brianna Jade had spent a great deal of time during Tamra’s marriage trying very hard not to think about what Tamra was doing with Ken in return for his money and social position. It had
utterly and completely grossed her out, and even now she was feeling a bit like throwing up in her mouth at Barb’s unpleasantly vivid image . . .
The phone rang again. Brianna Jade snatched up the handset, and without thinking that it might be a tradesperson, said furiously: ‘Barb Norkus, I’m telling you right now that if you
say one word about my mom I’m hanging up on you and blocking this number and reporting you to the British police, and since I’m engaged to be married to an Earl, I just
bet
that they’ll take it seriously and tell the Kewanee cops that you’re making harassing phone calls to me!’
‘Ah, don’t get your panties in a twist,’ Barb said with an unpleasant sneer that Brianna Jade could visualize perfectly; she knew that look of Barb’s all too well, having
seen it very many times behind the backs of teachers or random adults when Barb, having finished kissing their asses, relieved her feelings by reverting to her true expression.
‘How am I supposed to—’ Brianna Jade started indignantly, though managing to get her voice down a few notches from soprano to mezzo. But Barb cut through her.
‘Don’t you wanna know why I’m calling?’ she asked.
‘No, I don’t,’ Brianna Jade snapped. ‘Knowing you, it won’t exactly be to congratulate me on my engagement.’
‘Well, it sorta
is
,’ Barb said, which put Brianna Jade even more on her guard. ‘’Cause if you weren’t engaged to marry an Earl, I wouldn’t be
thinking that it made a real good opportunity for me to email CelebrityPics or the
National Enquirer
or some big magazine like that and tell them I’ve got a real good story about the
girl who’s gonna marry the Earl of Whatever once being Pork Queen at Kewanee Hog Days! I bet they’d love that!’
Brianna Jade’s stomach sank like a stone. But she wasn’t an idiot. She had been half-expecting something like this ever since she’d seen Barb’s name in Mrs Hurley’s
handwriting.
‘Big deal,’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘I mean, come on, Barb, the
National Enquirer
? It’s not like you’ve got any photos of me with my clothes off!
Why would they care that I won a beauty pageant years ago?’
‘OK, maybe not them,’ Barb said, undaunted. ‘Maybe some British paper. I see links to the
Daily Mail
on loads of my gossip sites. I could try them. They’d be
real interested to see how the Countess of Whatever got her big break.’
‘
Big break?
Jeez, Barb, you sound crazy! It’s just a little country fair!’ Brianna Jade said unguardedly, yet another mistake.
‘Hey, fuck you! How dare you look down your nose at us!’ Barb snapped.
‘I mean, you won Corn Queen of Watseka that same year,’ Brianna Jade said quickly. ‘We each got a title, didn’t we? I don’t get why you’re so pissed at
me—’
‘I want money,’ Barb said, finally getting to the point of her call. ‘I want you to send me a big old load of money or I’ll go to the
Daily Mail
or somewhere in
Britain with my photos and a story about what a nasty back-stabbing bitch you were back in the day. I know, I know,’ she added before Brianna Jade could protest, ‘you were actually a
stupid little suckup idiot, but they’ll like it better if I make you out all trashy and back-stabbing and slutty. Those papers always like that kinda dirt. And believe me, the photos I have
are gold. It’s not just a couple from the Hog Days website, with you looking all smug in your sash and all. My mom took scads. There’s you making your Tater Tots casserole, dropping the
Oreos for the pigs, nearly falling off the trailer like you were drunk in your pigskin jacket—’
‘Because you pushed me!’ Brianna Jade said indignantly.
‘Yeah? Well, I’ll tell the papers you had a couple Jack and Cokes before you got up there and that’s why you tripped!’ Barb said triumphantly. ‘I’ll give
’em every trailer-trash detail I can find. I’ll go over to the old Lutz place and take photos of that shack you and your mom lived in – believe me, it looks even more like shit
now than it used to. I’ve been googling you guys, and all the stuff that comes up is fancy photos of you two in Florida after Tamra got married, or you posing in tons of pageants. No
one’s got hold of
this
stuff at all.’
There was an audible smirk in her voice.
‘Think if they sent someone over here to snoop around!’ she added. ‘No one liked your mom, BJ. She was way too pretty. Can you imagine what they’ll say to a journalist
who comes round asking about what she was like working at Hogs and Cobs back in the day? They’ll make up all kinds of shit just to get their own back on her for being all high and mighty
now.’
Brianna Jade shivered. This was something they had never had to deal with before. Ken Maloney socialized with the owners of the local Florida papers: their writers wouldn’t have dreamt of
digging up Tamra and Brianna Jade’s dirt-poor past. And in London, Veronica, Tamra’s PR, had been busy emphasizing Tamra’s investments in environmentally friendly fracking
procedures and her large donations to charity. Besides, Tamra and Brianna Jade had always been known as Maloney over here; no British journalist had any idea that tracking down the Krantzes’
humble origins would yield a motherlode of embarrassment for them.
Silence fell. Brianna Jade knew that Barb was more than capable of carrying out her threat, and that British tabloids would salivate over her story – probably entering into a bidding war
for it, and, more importantly, the photographs. Every detail of the Pork Queen competition would seem hilarious over here, with all its attendant details about pigskin jackets, Tater Tot casseroles
and dropping Oreo cookies to make the pigs race. A skilled tabloid hack would wring every last embarrassing detail out of Barb and make hay out of it. It would be all over the
Mail Online
for weeks.
I don’t care about myself,
Brianna Jade realized at that moment.
I really don’t. I mean, it’d be embarrassing, sure. But here at Stanclere Hall, I barely even see
a newspaper. I mean, Edmund gets them, but I don’t read them. And I can just make sure I don’t get any magazines either, the gossipy ones. Sometimes I pick one up in the village –
well, I don’t have to do that any more. I’m not much of a reader at the best of times, and I’ve got no problem staying off the internet.
And I don’t think the County will care much either. I mean, the girls might snigger at me behind my back, but they do that anyway. People like Lord Uppingham might actually find it
pretty funny if I make a good story out of it, pigskin jacket and all. If I show that it doesn’t bother me, people in Rutland won’t give a shit after a little while.
It never even occurred to her to worry about Edmund’s reaction, which was to his great credit. Even before his proposal, she had been very well aware that he wasn’t a snob in any
way; he would hate the extra publicity, but he wouldn’t blame her for it. In fact, like old Lord Uppingham, he might even be tickled by the jacket and the Oreo-throwing.
No, it’s Mom I need to protect. She’s the one who’ll really get the fallout.
London society, Brianna Jade had already observed, was a very different beast from the small, cohesive county of Rutland. London had a level of snark and cattiness and competition, of scheming
to get into the right parties and look down on people who settled for the wrong ones, which was infinitely more cut-throat than life in the countryside. The highest echelons even mocked people who
got photographed too much: that last one utterly baffled Brianna Jade, as all the West Palm Beach social set cared about was having their picture in the papers every single day of the week. But
Lady Margaret had counselled Tamra that quantity, over here, did not at all mean quality, and that Tamra should be very selective about what invitations she accepted if she wanted to be part of the
highest echelons. Hence Tamra’s membership of Loulou’s, the nightclub below the private members’ club, 5 Hertford Street; the whole point about clubs like Loulou’s,
Annabel’s and George’s, all in Mayfair, was that absolutely no cameras were allowed inside their hallowed precincts.
Like Las Vegas, what happened in those clubs stayed there. The very top of the
gratin
disliked being in the press at all; Edmund certainly would be much happier never doing one of those
photo shoots again, though he knew what he had signed up to and was a very good sport about it. Lady Margaret was helping Tamra walk the line, work out what was ‘good’ publicity –
i.e. could be passed off as charity work – and ‘bad’ – seeming to court it for one’s own ends.
But no way is
this
good publicity! It’ll just give everyone who dislikes Mom and me for being so rich a way to tear us down, and Mom will just hate it. It’ll mess up so
many things she’s worked so hard for.