Ashford’s Version
I’m not petty enough to not feel slightly ashamed for having accepted money from someone else. While Jemma was signing all those cheques, I wished I could dig a hole in the floor of the bank and jump into it. However, if we rationalise the whole situation, we will find that, technically, it was a simple transaction. We can say that I lent my title to her so that she could receive her inheritance; therefore, I consider that money a reward.
This is what I thought until yesterday, when I went back home with a light heart, finally at peace with myself and with the banks. This morning I’m even euphoric. First of all, I assured my mother that the royal visit will be announced with a week’s notice, so she can feel free to go to Bath as she had planned. Therefore, in less than four hours, there will be a hundred miles between me and her.
Moreover, I realised something extraordinary that puts me in a position of absolute predominance.
Before this whole story, I was a fish to be caught by any debutante in Hertfordshire. Whether I liked it or not, one of them would have married me, eventually – even with the help of chloroform, if necessary – and my life would have been very similar to that of my parents.
But that’s no longer the case. I’m already legally married, but, de facto, I’m free, and nobody will ever impose on me again.
I never thought I’d say this, but this marriage has made a free man out of me.
My mother does have a difficult personality, but that’s nothing compared to a wife who’s also a duchess. If there’s something I don’t want, it’s having a pest in a Chanel dress who tells me where to go, what to do and how to do it, all day long, every single day.
I’m not exaggerating: duchesses, countesses and baronesses are all the same. Fairy tale princesses who sing while picking flowers do not exist. What do exist are an awful lot of nagging shrews who are always ready to compete with other nagging shrews: who’s most elegant, whose gala was more successful, who’s the best dancer, who’s thinner, and so on.
I’m so full of energy that I got up at dawn to go for a ride around the estate on Agincourt and, on my way back, I’m really looking forward to the hearty banquet I had the servants make for breakfast. However, while entering through the front door, I hear the desperate sound of a wailing woman.
My mother.
At best, she’s discovered that we’ve finished the bottles of 1986 Château Lafite and that is unacceptable with an upcoming royal visit.
At worst… well, there’s no limit to catastrophe.
I find her surrounded by her corgis in the study with Margaret, in a state of utmost anxiety.
She’s marching up and down with a tissue in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
In the name of God, let’s hope she hasn’t found out that one of her long standing rivals will receive a royal visit to her estate!
“This will ruin my reputation forever! Such things should be planned and thoroughly thought out, not rushed like this! What will people think of me? And of our family? We know nothing about it!” She utters in despair.
Margaret is trying to signal to me to leave while my mother is looking away, but then she sees me. “You, degenerate son! How could you do this to me! You dishonoured the good name of our family!”
I look at her in amazement, as I don’t have a clue what she means. “Mother, what are you talking about? I don’t understand.”
“You don’t, do you? I didn’t understand this morning, when Lord Fairfax and Lady Westbridge phoned to congratulate me! Then I opened the newspaper,” she says, giving me the shred of a page. “And this is what I see!”
After reading the first lines, I blanch. There’s an article proclaiming that, yesterday, Ashford Parker, the twelfth Duke of Burlingham, married the mysterious and unknown Jemma Pears.
“My son, the bearer of a centuries old title, secretly married in a civil ceremony! To a Miss Nobody, some Jemma Plum.”
“It’s Pears, Your Grace,” Margaret corrects her.
“It’s all fruit!” My mother is out of her mind. “I can’t believe it? You sneaked out like a thief! You went to London, you married a stranger, and you didn’t say a word. I just wonder when you would have informed me if I hadn’t discovered it in the newspaper?”
“I…” The answer is easy: never.
“I knew you were hiding something. You went to London three times in three days. But what happened? Did you fall for some loose woman?”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” I don’t know what to tell her, none of this was part of my original plan. And now, my only plan B is to let her cool down.
“So, did you get her pregnant?” My mother’s investigative inclination is far from dying down.
“No, Mother. Don’t talk nonsense. Now please, calm down and get ready to go to Bath.”
“How can you expect me to calm down! Your marriage should have been a social event of primary importance! You should have married a girl from a good, well known family who is suited to being a duchess. It would have been a big event, worthy of your title and your social status…”
“Listen, Mother, my social status has always been your priority, not mine, and the idea of a big ceremony has always been just in your head! I’m not into all that!”
“What about Portia, then?” She asks.
“What about Portia!” I lose it.
“She would have been a perfect duchess.”
“For someone else, maybe!” I say.
“So, according to you, this Jemma is the perfect duchess, is she?”
“She certainly is nothing like those tarted up mannequins I’m forced to meet at every party, who bow and scrape and flatter me, thinking that they will convince me to marry them!”
“If nothing else, I know who they are and where they come from, I know their parents and I know they are respectable people,” she yells.
“Just because you don’t know Jemma’s parents it doesn’t mean they are not respectable.”
I suddenly find myself defending Jemma, but you know what they say: the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
“So, that’s it, is it: you fell desperately in love and you got married. Well, now that you have a wife, would you please explain what we’re going to do with her?”
“What do you mean, Mother?”
“There are people – friends, acquaintances, people of rank, like us – who will come here, day by day, expecting to see your duchess. What am I supposed to do? How does this surprise marriage work?”
It doesn’t. It just doesn’t, because there was no afterwards in my plan.
In my plan there was no bloody spy running to blab everything to the newspapers.
As I leave my mother’s study, exhausted, my mobile vibrates in my pocket: it’s Derek.
I don’t even let him say hello. “Will you please explain what the hell happened? It’s in all the newspapers, for God’s sake!”
“News leak. It was the clerk at the Register Office. She called some gossip magazine saying that she was a witness and she had copies of the documents that proved the marriage.”
“I’ll be at your office in an hour.” I hang up without further ado.