Royal Pain (20 page)

Bronte’s laughter bubbled over and Devon started to laugh along with her, then he continued.

“The thing is, Bronte, you can’t let them see you falter. If you are feeling shaky or out of place, by all means, give me a quick signal—tug on your ear, what have you—and I will immediately whisk you out to the gardens for a stroll if Max is detained. All joking aside, get ready to put on that Teflon raincoat and let it roll right off your back. Those women are three generations of Heyworth bitches.”

Bronte started laughing again to hear Devon’s aristocratic chivalry and royal charm punctuated at the tail end by his version of a Snoop Dogg slap down.

“Oh God, Devon”—she wiped at the tears of laughter at the corner of one eye—“I am so looking forward to hanging out with you over a few pints. I just had a vision of bringing little hostess gifts to your Mom, Claire, and Lydia: little pink T-shirts with
Heyworth
Bitches
spelled out in tiny rhinestones across the chest… and I could greet your mom as ‘Yo, bitch’—”

By that point, Devon and Bronte were both laughing hysterically and Max had come back into her living room, looking a bit miffed to be left out of the joke.

“I wanted you two to get acquainted, not get on like a house afire for chrissake. Pass me the phone.”

“All right, Devon,” Bronte gasped through her settling laughter, “Max has just come back into the living room, and apparently he is the only person allowed to make me laugh that hard. Can’t wait to meet you in person next week. Here’s your brother.” She widened her eyes with a smile of exaggerated innocence as she handed the phone back to Max.

Clearly, Devon was not going to present a problem.

Bronte had also touched base with a very contrite Willa and David, sharing the happy news that she and Max were engaged, but that they were keeping it quiet until Max had told his family in person. And that believe it or not, she had
not
imagined it this time around.

“Bronte, we are utterly disgusted with ourselves,” Willa dove in. “Please come ’round for a kitchen dinner one night while you are here. It was beastly what David said—” The phone was wrenched from her hand, dropped, and then David got on the horn.

“David here, Bron. Quite a cock-up over here at The David and Willa Show. Still can’t believe I said that crap about you and Max last year. I mean, what an ass I was! I hope you will forgive us and that we can all still, you know, put all that ‘thinking men are in love with you—’” Phone grabbed. Scuffle.

“Willa again here. He cannot be trusted, Bron. He is such an ass, but I am married to him so I don’t know what that makes me. An ass’s wife, I suppose. In any case, please tell me you and Max can come for dinner, okay?”

Bronte was smiling broadly as she finally made her way into the conversation. “Willa, it was such a crazy way to start a relationship—the whole I’ll-never-see-him-again-so-why-bother-telling-anyone-about-him thing was really idiotic, so no worries about David basing future results on past performance as far as I was concerned. Your ass is an investment banker after all—his pragmatic honesty is one of the things I admire most about him. So, yes, of course I would love to come ’round, as you say.”

They made tentative plans for Thursday night, barring any unforeseen complications with Max’s meetings that day.

Bronte looked down at her third tomato juice and decided to give up on reading her novel. She made her way quietly back to her pod next to Max and tried to force herself back to sleep for the next hour or two of the flight.

***

A few hours later, Max awoke feeling rested and ready. He heard the flight attendants trying to be quiet in the galley, noticed the sun beginning to come through the edges of the window shade across the aisle, and felt the steady thrum of the 747 engines pulsing through his body.

He held still while he looked at the gorgeous sleeping beauty who was breathing evenly a few inches from him. The past week had been overwhelming on so many levels. The main thing was that he had succeeded in convincing Bronte that everything was going to be smooth sailing this week, when in fact he was dreading every minute of the upcoming family gathering.

His mother was just the tip of the iceberg. Her glacial response was to be expected on some level. After seeing to her husband’s happiness, her only other concern was making sure each of her children had a “proper” marriage.

Claire had fallen into line—and look where that had led. A wanker of a husband who slept around. Max found the whole scenario utterly ridiculous. The women of England had finally crawled out from under centuries of oppression, and Sylvia had to go and throw it all back in the crapper.

Max’s father, George, had been nigh on obsessed with ensuring absolute equality when it came to providing for his four children. He had no time for sexist policies that favored sons or the firstborn. That innate egalitarianism had been passed down from his own father and mother.

George’s father, Henry, had married the royal princess, Augusta Pauline, the very mild seventh child of George V. Everyone knew her simply as Polly. It had been a love match: a perfect joy for both Henry (who lived to protect and adore the ethereal Polly) and for Polly (who lived to admire and adore the strapping Henry). Everyone smiled benignly at the idea that their ten Heyworth offspring, wild-eyed woodland creatures left to roam free over the endless acres of Castle Heyworth, were also royal by Polly’s blood. Royalty didn’t seem to bear much significance to Max’s grandmother. Her country habits and instinctive modesty were passed down much more than any conscious acknowledgment of elitism or regal entitlement.

Henry spent most of his life as the “spare,” only to be surprised somewhat late in life with the ducal title. As it turned out, Henry’s elder brother, Freddy, had been born and raised to be the duke, had married and prospered accordingly, and had had a houseful of children; alas, all six were daughters.

So, when the rugged, frugal Henry became the seventeenth Duke of Northrop in 1968, he and Polly were mildly disapproving of his older brother’s rather fun-loving handling of the finances. There was never any malfeasance of any sort, but according to the freewheeling Freddy, the idea of fiscal responsibility was something you read about in the
FT
, not something that you ever applied to your own habits.

Upon inheriting the title, Henry promptly sold off the race cars, dismantled the recording studio, and turned the major rooms at Dunlear Castle—including the salons, reception rooms, and art galleries—over to the National Trust. Henry and Polly Heyworth were the new breed of duke and duchess: practical, considerate, no-nonsense.

Henry’s years as a field officer in Africa during the Second World War had ensured a sense of leadership and confidence that easily translated to his parenting. His second eldest son, George, had been the spare to the spare, so he had even less intention of ever taking over the lofty responsibilities that attended the title. George lived a carefree childhood in the wilds of Yorkshire in the postwar 1950s and was devastated when his older brother died in a car accident in the early 1960s. When George’s father became the seventeenth Duke of Northrop, George finally had to accept that the title would one day be his, but given his father’s obscenely hale constitution, he had little thought of that turn of events coming to pass anytime soon.

For nearly twenty years, Henry and Polly Heyworth trimmed the sails at Dunlear Castle and ensured the ongoing prosperity of the Heyworth family. Their large family was well-provided for, and Henry rarely treated the dukedom with anything more than passing respect, a form of practical modesty that he passed on to Max’s father, George.

After his parents moved to Dunlear Castle, it was decided that a rather young, shy twenty-one-year-old George was to stay at Castle Heyworth in Yorkshire to oversee the running of that large property. Like his royal mother, Polly, George preferred the wild solitude of the country and hoped to raise his own family there when it came to that. Despite the blood in his veins, George Heyworth never really felt he was cut from royal cloth, preferring a long walk in the woods to any awkward social obligation.

It was this seed of social insecurity, perhaps, that led George to choose Sylvia Beckwith as his wife. She was dreadfully pretty, of course, but more to the point, she was
aspirational
. Her sister had married an earl.

Her entire family excelled at propriety.

Sylvia was utterly dedicated to the appropriateness of everything: education, etiquette, friends, interior decoration, even the cars they drove. The irony that George was the royal one but Sylvia knew more about the peerage was not lost on either of them. She didn’t really
do
anything per se, but she was the supreme arbiter of taste. And because George would rather haul bundles of rough switches on his bare back than decide who was to be invited to the next house party, he proposed marriage to Sylvia.

After Claire was born—and oh how Sylvia had cursed her own treacherous body for not delivering a male baby first—she proceeded to suffer several miscarriages. After eight years of near constant anxiety—punctuated by intermittent weeks or short months of ecstatic, tortured hope—she finally produced Maxwell Fitzwilliam-Heyworth.

The strain she must have been under to fulfill what, to her mind at least, was her singular, primary responsibility must have been quite heavy, because once it was lifted, she managed to pop out Devon and Abigail in very rapid succession. After Abigail’s birth, Sylvia’s responsibilities now utterly and completely fulfilled, she left the raising of the three younger children almost entirely in the capable hands of her extensively researched and lengthily interviewed nannies and tutors. By the time Max’s father discovered that Sylvia’s aptitude for decision making and delegating formed the basis of her motherhood plans for the three young ones, it was far too late to consider the long-term consequences that parenting-by-proxy may have on actual children.

Claire, on the other hand, was always the exception. Those eight long years of Claire’s being an only child, with her mother’s ever-growing fear that she might be
the
only child, had forged a bizarre intimacy between Sylvia and Claire. Sylvia doted on Claire in the extreme, carefully choosing every outfit and writing out weekly menus for her every toddler meal.

Such deep attachment might have been endearing, had it not been such a marked contrast to how Sylvia treated her subsequent three children. It was as if, having suffered through the intensity of those intervening years with only Claire and the constant threat of no more children, the duchess had permanently exhausted her parenting resources.

Sylvia was always concerned with Claire far more than she was with the others, which, Max supposed, was understandable on some psychological level, but their mother-daughter relationship never really contributed to what one might call overall family harmony. While Max’s father was still alive, Sylvia was always able to couch her favoritism in a supportive-if-sexist vein: to wit, the boys were born knowing how to take care of themselves, and Abigail was always being taken care of by the boys.

George always agreed with Sylvia in theory, but he often spent extra time with his Three Musketeers, as he dubbed the younger siblings, when Sylvia began taking the teenaged Claire to London for extended shopping and museum visits.

And so the contemporary family dynamic, like so much of the Heyworth family history going back as far as Henry V, was set in very ancient stone. Within weeks of George’s death, it was no longer a matter of Sylvia couching her feelings in any way whatsoever. Because she no longer needed to even pretend to appease her husband’s nebulous feelings of something-amiss-in-the-sibling-equality-department, she was free to ignore Max, Abigail, and Devon quite categorically.

During Max’s early twenties, his mother had finally turned her attention to her eldest son. She wanted to get down to the business of brokering an excellent marriage for Max. She had been quite adamant about the importance of Max finding a suitable bride, and quickly. After his father’s death, she changed her tune. With Max a confirmed bachelor about town, and relatively young and bookish at that, she soon realized that she could be enjoying her time as the Duchess of Northrop for many years to come.

Enter Bronte Talbott, upstart American. Stage left.

Max continued looking at the planes of Bronte’s fabulous face and sighed as he contemplated the arctic gleam that would appear in his mother’s eye when she would be introduced to her usurper. It wouldn’t occur to her that her dear, devoted husband had left her one of the wealthiest women in England. It wouldn’t occur to her that her son was going to be deliriously happy each and every day of his wedded life. It would never occur to her to actually share in the patent abundance.

Max must have sighed more audibly on this last thought because Bronte slowly opened her glazed green eyes, particularly seductive in the reflection of the growing dawn as more passengers began to open their window shades across the aisle.

“What are you sighing on about?” she asked as she drew her hand out from under her blanket and caressed his cheek with her index finger, then let her hand wander down toward his chest.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish, Ms. Talbott,” he whispered as he grabbed her hand and placed it back on her own side of the sleeping pod. “I’ve already warned you that I have no interest whatsoever in joining the mile-high club.”

“Neither do I, Max. I just wanted to touch you first thing in the morning. You don’t need to make everything about sex, you know.”

“Well, when you are lying eight inches away from me and making all of those kitteny, wake-up noises, it’s quite difficult to make it about anything else.”

“Nice try.” Bronte wriggled herself into more of an upright position. “I saw the Max-look-of-worry cross your face right as I was waking up. What’s up?”

“I don’t really want to dwell on it, and I know Dev has been really great about keeping things light and all that, but Bron, my mom is a real piece of work.”