Bad Brides (44 page)

Because, since being informed that Milly had spotted her being carried back to the Hall by Abel after getting tipsy on cider, Brianna Jade had decided that her visits to the pigpens would have
to become much less frequent. In a series of sly asides during the
Style
shoot, Milly had implied some truly nasty things about Brianna Jade’s friendship with Abel, things that had
made Brianna Jade feel dirty and sordid. Not only would she never dream of cheating on her fiancé, but to imply that her happy, guilt-free friendship with Abel was sordid and creepy in some
way, that Abel had some sort of designs on her, that he had got her drunk deliberately so he could make a pass at her . . . that was just
horrible
, and it had completely tainted Brianna
Jade’s ability to hang out with Abel as she had done before.

She knew, of course, that none of it was true. She and Abel had simply made friends because of their mutual love of animals in general and pigs in particular, and not only had Abel not got her
drunk on purpose, his
grandmother
had been there the whole time! Nothing could have been more innocent, and yet Milly’s nasty little quips about Abel’s size, dungarees and
ability to sweep Brianna Jade off her feet had somehow poisoned the well, made it very difficult for her to feel as easy and natural and unaffected with him as she had been before.

So she had cut right back on her visits to the pigpens and to the Empress of Stanclere, and honestly, she almost thought sometimes that she missed them as much as she missed seeing her mom.
Which was ridiculous, of course, but she couldn’t help feeling it. In fact, when Mrs Hurley popped her head round the door, Brianna Jade had been struggling with the urge to take the old
route for her daily run, swing by the pigpens and see what Abel, the Empress and the rest of the pigs were up to; there would definitely be fewer now since the pre-Christmas pig slaughter. The
impulse to visit the remaining ones was so strong that she greeted Mrs Hurley’s intrusion with huge gratitude for the distraction, her smile almost as bright and welcoming as it had been
before she had effectively lost both Tamra and Abel from her life.

‘What is it, Mrs Hurley?’ she asked, sounding encouraging enough for the housekeeper to smile back in relief and come fully into the library.

‘I didn’t want to disturb you, miss,’ Mrs Hurley said, ‘but there’s a visitor asking for you. Says she’s your cousin from America.’

She cleared her throat, the well-trained servant’s way of indicating disbelief without actually saying a word.

This was not, in itself, impossible. Brianna Jade had a lot of cousins in America: both Tamra and the late lamented Brian Schladdenhouffer had had numerous siblings who had gone on to produce
numerous spawn. And yet Brianna Jade very much doubted that one of her many Schladdenhouffer or Krantz cousins, or whatever surname of predominantly Scandinavian or German extraction taken on
marriage by the female Schladdenhouffers or Krantzes, had decided to fly across the Atlantic and make their way to Rutland County for the purpose of visiting their very estranged relative without
even so much as a phone call first.

No, this female ‘cousin’ could be only one person. And suddenly, Brianna Jade found herself wishing devoutly that her only problems were the absence from her life of her mother and
her best friend at Stanclere Hall.

‘She’s called Barb, right?’ Brianna Jade said, a sense of doom enveloping her as thickly as if a dark blanket had been dropped over her head.

Mrs Hurley nodded.

‘That’s right, miss. I think she rang you here, months ago, didn’t she? So she
is
your cousin?’

She managed to pitch the second sentence so perfectly between a statement and a question that Brianna Jade could have chosen not to answer it if she hadn’t wished to; it wasn’t Mrs
Hurley’s place to query her employer, but at the same time, as the housekeeper of Stanclere Hall, it was her business to know how to treat every guest who came below its hallowed roof.
Considering the appearance and demeanour of this new visitor, her relationship to the Earl’s fiancée would certainly make a difference to which bedroom might be assigned to her, or
whether she merited a maid’s unpacking her suitcase.

‘Not really. Sorta,’ Brianna Jade muttered in confusion. Barb had a hold over her: Brianna Jade couldn’t directly contradict something Barb had said. ‘It’s, uh, a
big family on both sides. She’s kind of . . . anyway . . .’

‘Brianna Jade! Honey, you in here?’

Behind Mrs Hurley’s apron-clad figure, Barb Norkus burst into the library, grinning from ear to ear.

‘Wow, look at all these books! Have you read ’em all? Sheesh, this place is so
old
! Hey, you’ve come a long way from that tumbledown shack of the Lutzes’,
right?’

Barb’s voice was as sharp and nasally inflected as ever, but she was much thinner and paler than Brianna Jade remembered; her face was greyish, in fact, and although Barb had made an
effort to outline her eyes in black pencil and gloss her lips, the use of concealer to hide the dark circles beneath her eyes and the rough reddish skin around her nostrils would have been
considerably more useful in improving her appearance. You couldn’t grow up where Brianna Jade had without being familiar with the signs of meth use, and she had no doubt, looking at the
skinny figure before her, the jeans and sweater Barb was wearing hanging off her bones, that a lot of the money Brianna Jade had been sending Barb had gone up her nose or into a pipe.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Brianna Jade said automatically: she was so accustomed by now to asking this question of British guests that it popped out of her mouth, and she could
have bitten her tongue off when Barb burst into raucous laughter.

‘Get
you
, lady of the house!’ she said maliciously. ‘I guess you’ve been watching
Downton Abbey
to learn all this British shit!’

Barb’s hair was freshly bleached, with barely any roots showing; she had pulled it back into a long ponytail and her nails were newly done. She had made some effort to spruce up before
dropping in on Brianna Jade. The jeans and sweater looked new as well, and the big bag slung over her shoulder, which she now dumped onto the library table, was a Coach ripoff from Macy’s; it
was obvious that Barb had come up in the world financially. But you would never have looked at her thin frame and imagined for a moment that she had once been Corn Queen of Watseka. You needed
curves to be a beauty queen, and curves were not what a diet of cigarettes, meth and diet sodas got you.

‘A plate of sandwiches, please, Mrs Hurley,’ Brianna Jade said, standing up and managing to summon some sort of outward composure as her brain raced frantically. ‘And, um . .
.’

Tea had been refused, but if she suggested water, Barb would laugh in her face.

‘A pot of coffee,’ she decided. ‘This is my, uh, distant cousin, Barb Norkus.’

‘Coffee’d be good, and I gotta say, I’d kill for a beer!’ Barb grinned, displaying a mouthful of teeth that bore painful witness to her meth habit. ‘What you
got?’

Brianna Jade ignored this question, and so did Mrs Hurley: while rich Americans entertaining at home liked to show off their abundance of supplies, Brianna Jade had learnt that when visiting
British aristocrats you simply accepted wine, or beer, or a cocktail when offered, without doing anything so vulgar as treating their home like a restaurant and asking for specific information on
what you were about to receive. Mrs Hurley reluctantly withdrew, closing the door behind her.

‘Do you have any luggage, Barb?’ Brianna Jade asked as politely as she could manage.

‘Nah, travelling light.’ Barb grinned even wider. ‘I figured I could pick up whatever I needed here. Or borrow stuff from you.’

‘You won’t fit into most of my clothes now, Barb. You’re so slim,’ Brianna Jade said, hoping that Barb would take this as a compliment; she didn’t want to lend Barb
anything, as she clearly wouldn’t get it back.

Barb preened, running one hand through her bleached fringe: it was so crispy and fried with the harsh treatments that it looked as if it might snap off under her fingers. She sank into a deep
leather armchair opposite Brianna Jade’s, one of a set arranged around a low inlaid circular table.

‘Wow, this is real cosy,’ she said admiringly, her arms splayed out along the wide, buttoned arms of the chair. ‘If it had a footrest, it’d be better than a
La-Z-Boy.’

‘What are you
doing
here, Barb?’ Brianna Jade blurted out, as Barb reached for her bag and fished out a pack of Marlboro Reds and a plastic lighter. ‘This wasn’t
the deal at
all
! You were supposed to stay in the States – I mean, we never even talked about you leaving, I totally assumed you wouldn’t come over here – it never ever
entered my mind! I can’t believe you’d just turn up here without even being
invited.
’

‘Hey, if I waited for you to be nice and ask me to visit, I’d have gone old and grey first, amirite?’ Barb said, lighting up without even looking around to see if there was an
ashtray near her. ‘So I figured I’d turn up and give you a real nice surprise. Bet you’re glad to see me! Finally you can let your hair down after having to suck up to all these
British snots. Boy, that has to be the biggest pain in the ass!’

Brianna Jade stared at her, dumbfounded by Barb’s shameless attitude. She had clearly decided to walk into Stanclere Hall as if she belonged here, brazening it out with barefaced cheek,
and it was working: Brianna Jade was letting her make herself comfortable, had ordered her refreshment, was even now standing up to retrieve an ashtray from the console table by the wall so that
Barb wouldn’t get ash all over the carpet . . .

‘So you’ve got somewhere I can bunk down here, right?’ Barb said, not even bothering to acknowledge Brianna Jade’s putting down the ashtray in front of her. ‘I
mean, it’s the country and all, not much going on, but this place is totally cool. I can see myself crashing here for a nice long time. Hey, I bet you’ve got, like, a whole
wing
I could stay in!’

‘You can’t stay here, Barb,’ Brianna Jade managed to say, shaking her head in vigorous denial. ‘You just can’t. Sending you money was supposed to mean you’d
stay away and wouldn’t bother me, not turn up here! This is, like, the
opposite
of the deal!’

‘Well, I guess the deal just got changed then, didn’t it?’ Barb blew out a cloud of smoke. ‘Tough titty.’

Brianna Jade bit her lip, hard.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘You had to get out of town ’cause you owed money to someone. You thought you had some bottomless money pit with me, and you just spent like
there was no tomorrow, and you got caught out and had to leave in a hurry. I bet it’s your dealer you owe, now I think about it.’

She watched Barb’s eyes as she spoke, and could see that she was getting it right so far.

‘Whatever,’ Barb drawled, looking down at her cigarette. ‘I
am
all cleaned out, to tell the truth. The trains here cost, like,
tons
. They were all like, if
you book in advance you save loads of money, but I was like, well, what the fuck, you know? I’m here now! So with that and the cab from the station, I’m totally broke.’

A tap on the door signalled the arrival of the food and drink. Brianna Jade called ‘Come!’, prompting a derisive snigger from Barb, and a footman entered carrying a big silver tray,
which he placed on the inlaid table between the two women. Brianna Jade noticed that Mrs Hurley had provided two water glasses and two coffee cups in case the Earl’s fiancée wanted
some refreshment too, but only one frosted glass for the bottle of Belgian beer; as always, Mrs Hurley had judged things perfectly.

‘I’ll pour, thank you,’ Brianna Jade said to the footman, who duly withdrew, not a flicker on his well-trained face as he got a good look at the unexpected arrival who claimed
to be Brianna Jade’s cousin.

‘All these servants need to take
major
chill pills,’ Barb said, reaching for the beer and swigging it straight from the bottle. ‘They’ve got sticks up their
asses so far they’re practically coming out of their mouths.’

‘Barb, shut up!’ Brianna Jade snapped. ‘You’re disgusting.’

‘Whatever,’ Barb said again, shrugging. ‘Your accent’s showing, by the way. I can hear all that posey Brit crap slipping away the more you talk to me.’

Brianna Jade set her jaw, determined not to be distracted: the only thing that mattered was getting Barb out of here as quickly as possible.

‘You can’t just walk in here and dump yourself down and be rude like that and expect to stay!’ she said.

‘Really?’ Barb put the empty bottle down on the tray with a slam of glass against metal. ‘You’re kidding, right? ’Cause I was under the impression that I can do
whatever the hell I want, just as long as I don’t spill about you being Pork Queen and show those photos of you standing in the back of that pickup in your blue satin dress and pigskin
jacket, dropping the Oreos for the pigs to race, you know?’

She snuffled with laughter as she stubbed out her cigarette.

‘Wanna see? I’ve got them right here in my bag. Oh, and I made copies – don’t think you can just throw them into the fire or something. Seriously, take a look.’

She pulled out a cheap plastic Walgreens photo folder from her bag and tossed it over at Brianna Jade.

‘Hey, who do I have to blow around here to get another beer?’ she added. ‘All this travelling’s made me
real
thirsty!’

Brianna Jade simply didn’t know what to do. She was at her wits’ end. She wanted to handle the situation herself, and if it had been just her and Edmund at risk of
being laughed at in the media, she would have told Barb to shove her photos up her ass, get out of Stanclere Hall and never come back. Edmund, as she had known he would, utterly backed her up in
this when she finally escaped from Barb, leaving her ‘cousin’ ensconced in the library working her way through a six-pack of beer and her Duty Free stash of Marlboro Reds. She found
Edmund on the farm, picking her way towards him in her new Le Chameau wellies over the ruts his equally new John Deere tractor was ploughing in even lines across a wide, muddy field.