CHAPTER ONE

LONDON, ENGLAND

Wandi Meggaharto Widjawa was in London with her mother, Adeline Salim Meggaharto, supposedly to watch her nephew Kristian compete in a fencing tournament, but secretly they were both there for their triannual visits to the clinic of Dr. Ben Stork on Harley Street, who was considered by the most discerning filler addicts to be the Michelangelo of Botox. So deft were his hands at plunging needles into fine lines, fragile cheekbones, and delicate nasolabial folds, even his patients with the thinnest skins never bruised, and so subtle was his artistry that every patient visiting his clinic departed with the guarantee that they would be able to close both eyelids completely should they ever choose to blink.

As Wandi sat in the elegant Hollywood Regency–style waiting room of the clinic in her floral embroidered Simone Rocha dress, waiting for her mother to get her usual combo of Botox^®, Juvéderm Voluma^®, Belotero Balance^®, Restylane Lyft^®, and Juvéderm Volbella^® injections, she paged through the latest issue of British Tattle. She always flipped to the back of the magazine first to look at the Spectator section, which featured party pictures from the only parties that mattered throughout the realm. She loved scrutinizing all the English socialites from head to toe—the women looked like either chic swans or unmade beds (there was no middle ground).

This month’s Spectator section was quite disappointing—nothing but photos from the twenty-first birthday bash of yet another kid named Hugo, the launch party for yet another Simon Sebag Montefiore book, and some boring country wedding. She could never understand why all these aristocrats loved getting married in decrepit little English country churches when they could have the most lavish nuptials at Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral. Suddenly Wandi’s eyes zeroed in on the obligatory photo of the bride and groom. As was the custom with all the wedding shots in British Tattle, the couple was pictured posing underneath the stone archway of the modest rectory festooned with a few anemic sprigs of roses, sporting painful grins as rice was being pelted at them. But the thing that stood out to Wandi was that the bride was Asian, and this immediately triggered an alert.

Wandi was part of a particular breed of Chindocrat that had been raised in a very specific manner—the only daughter of an Indonesian Chinese oligarch, she was a typical third-culture kid who had grown up all over the world. Born in Honolulu (for the American passport), her early childhood was divided between her family’s hospital-wing-size house in Singapore and the historic family joglo in Jakarta, where she attended kindergarten at the exclusive Jakarta International School (JIS). In the second grade, she was sent to the elite Singapore American School (SAS) before an unfortunate fake-Prada-backpack-trafficking incident in eighth grade led to her expulsion and swift enrollment into Aiglon, the boarding school of choice for privileged rebels in Chesières-Villars, Switzerland. After Aiglon, Wandi spent two years majoring in marketing at the University of California at Santa Barbara before dropping out and marrying the son of another Indonesian Chinese oligarch, shuttling between homes in Singapore and Jakarta, having her baby at Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu, and going through the existential crisis of trying to decide whether to send her firstborn son to JIS, SAS, or ACS.

Like most of the women who made up Asia’s jet set, Wandi had an innate radar for OAWS—Other Asians in Western Settings. Whenever she was traveling outside of Asia and happened to be, say, lunching at Tetsuya’s in Sydney, attending the International Red Cross Ball in Monaco, or hanging out at 5 Hertford Street in London, and another person of Asian descent happened to enter the room, Wandi would notice that Asian well before any non-Asian did, and their face would immediately be run through the ten-point social-placement scanner in her brain:

At this point in her life, Wandi’s social-placement test was so finely calibrated, it could evaluate a new Asian face in a matter of nanoseconds, thus determining to what degree Wandi felt prettier, richer, or more important than this OAWS, and what appropriate overture she felt comfortable making—whether it be stealth eye contact, a nod of recognition, the slight smile, or actually greeting the person in close physical proximity.

Of course at the present moment the OAWS in question only appeared in a rectangular two-by-three-inch photograph, but it was so highly unusual for an Asian face to appear in this setting—an English country wedding worthy of being featured in the Spectator section of British Tattle—that Wandi couldn’t help but take notice. The text block in the middle of the page simply read:

WINTER WEDDING WONDERLAND

The unexpected snowfall didn’t deter England’s grandest from dusting off their furs and braving the icy roads for the wedding of Lucien Montagu-Scott at St Mary’s, Chipping Norton. Naturally, the Glencoras were out in full force along with the Devonshires, the Buccleuches, and a smattering of Rothschilds and Rochambords from both sides of the channel. Many a girl mourned that Lucien aka #TallDrinkofWater was off the market, but no one could fault the bride, Colette Bing, whose porcelain-doll complexion and ravishing smile could warm all the frigid chapels in the Home Counties put together.

Wandi couldn’t believe her eyes as she stared at the picture of the couple again. There was no way the bride in the simple, almost monastic high-necked wedding gown was the same Colette Bing she had seen splashed over all of Asia’s tabloids. What happened to the signature swath of black eyeliner and her matador-red lipstick? This girl’s face bore no evident traces of makeup, her lips ghostly pale. Where was the spectacular gold Giambattista Valli dress that she had commissioned for her wedding? And most important, why wasn’t she wearing some glittering tiara?

Wandi dug into her Mark Cross white python handbag for her phone, quickly snapped a photo of the page, and sent it via WhatsApp to Georgina Ting, who was at that very moment lounging poolside at the American Club in Singapore, not watching her daughter splash around in the deep end of the pool.

Georgina forwarded the photo on to Tatiana Savarin, and then started doing a bit of googling on her own. A few moments later, Tatiana, who was holidaying on the island of Mustique, answered back.

From RANKMYPEER.CO.UK

Lord Lucien Plantagenet Montagu-Scott, Earl of Palliser, is the eldest son of the Duke of Glencora. In 2013, Tattle listed him as one of the ten most eligible bachelors in Britain. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the Duke of Glencora is the fifth-largest landowner in England, with holdings in Northamptonshire, Suffolk, and Scotland. But the crown jewels of their portfolio are vast property holdings in Central London. Next to the Dukes of Westminster and Portland, the Glencoras are London’s leading landlords, owning huge swaths of prime Bloomsbury and Chelsea. Furthermore, Lucien’s mother, Liliane, hails from the French Rochambords. C’est formidable!

Suddenly, all three women’s phones started buzzing as a group call was being initiated from a Shanghai number.

“Tatiana, you silly bitch,” Georgina muttered under her breath as she swiped her phone to initiate the group call.

“Hi Kitty!” Wandi said in an overly cheery pitch.

“Hi everyone. What’s this you sent me?” Kitty asked.

“Um, did you look at the picture or look at the link I just sent? Check out the photo. Don’t bother looking at the other links,” Tatiana piped in urgently. There was a brief pause while Kitty scrutinized the picture on the screen of her phone.

“What am I supposed to be looking at? There’s a bunch of gray-haired women with yellow teeth.”

“You don’t see the bride?” Wandi asked.

“No—”

Georgina cut in. “Kitty, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Do you see the image of the bride and groom?”

There was silence for a few moments, as the girls all held their breath, not knowing how Kitty would react.

“How interesting,” Kitty finally said in a frighteningly neutral tone.

“Colette looks awful, doesn’t she? Without her usual makeup and jewelry, she’s such a plain Jane—her common features really come out.” Wandi sniggered.

“She looks like she’s fallen on hard times,” Tatiana remarked.

Kitty let out a little laugh. “I can assure you Colette hasn’t fallen on hard times. She’s just trying to appear modest to impress her new relatives. They look like the sort of people Corinna Ko-Tung is always trying to introduce me to. Well, good luck to her and her new English life.”

Georgina was relieved that Kitty was taking it all so well. She was crossing her fingers, hoping to God that Kitty had completely missed the articles about the bridegroom when Kitty suddenly asked, “So do we know anything about the Rochambords?”

Damn, she’s read everything, Wandi said to herself.

“I’ve never heard of them.” Georgina sniffed.

“Hey, I’m at this house party on Mustique right now, and there’s a girl here who might know,” Tatiana offered, adding rather unnecessarily, “She comes from a high-society family in France, from what I’m told.”

Tatiana padded out onto the terrace of the Balinese-style villa, where the girlfriend of her husband’s business partner sat sipping black coffee out of a bowl. “Lucie, I’m on the phone with some friends. Have you ever heard of a family in France called the Rochambords?”

“Which branch?” Lucie asked.

“Um…I don’t know. We know someone who married a guy whose mother is a Rochambord. Here, let me put you on speakerphone…”

“The mother’s name is Liliane Rochambord,” Georgina offered.

Lucie’s eyes widened. “Liliane de Rochambord? Are you talking about the mother of Lucien Montagu-Scott?”

“Yes! Do you know him?” Tatiana asked excitedly.

Lucie shook her head with a sigh. “I don’t know him personally, but my God, every girl in France was madly in love with him. I mean, he’s a future duc, and his mother is one of the Bretagne Rochambords, not the Paris branch that are the poorer cousins.”

“But who are the Rochambords?” Georgina pressed on.

“Oh, they are an ancienne famille de la noblesse…how do you say…an ancient noble family that intermarried with the Bourbons, and their line goes back to Louis XIII. The Paris branch has all the vineyards—you know, Château de Rochambord—but the Bretagne Rochambords own one of the biggest military defense companies in France. They make all the submarines and ships for the French navy. So who’s your friend that married Lucien?”

“Colette Bing. But she’s not our friend exactly,” Tatiana said awkwardly.

“She’s a socialite and fashion blogger from Shanghai that—” Wandi began.

“She’s a spoiled little cunt!” Kitty suddenly blurted out.

Everyone was too shocked to speak at first, but Georgina tried to turn it into a joke. “Haha, yes, she’s famous for that spoiled rant that went viral, isn’t she, Kitty?”

The line went silent for a few moments.

“Uh…I think Kitty hung up,” Tatiana said.

Smiling, laughing, frowning, or arching of eyebrows is highly discouraged, though.

What Wandi doesn’t know is that the only people who can be married in Westminster Abbey are members of the British royal family, Order of the Bath members and their children, or anyone living in the Abbey’s precincts. St. Paul’s only allows weddings for members of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George, the Order of the British Empire, holders of the British Empire Medal, and members of the Imperial Society of Knights Bachelor and their children (but not their grandchildren).

Chinese + Indonesian × Aristocrat = Chindocrat

She knew by age three that Hugo was too dumb to get in to Raffles.

If they happened to be Japanese, Vietnamese, or any other type of Asian not mentioned on this list, abort scanner function. Totally inconsequential.