PART 1 — TABLE TWENTY-SEVEN
The invitation came on card thick enough to cut yourself on.
Gold lettering. The wedding of Alaric Branmoor and Clementine Hale, daughter of a senator, at the house on Lake Averil.
I stood at the window of my flat in Marrowgate and turned it over about four times.
Alaric signed our divorce in 2020 without once looking up from the page, while his mother stood behind him with her coat already on.
“Mama, who’s getting married?”
Linus had hold of my jumper. Behind him Gus and Ivo were building something out of sofa cushions and arguing about it.
Four. Five in the February.
All three of them have Alaric’s grey eyes and his dark hair, and that is the whole of what they got from him.
I left that house at nine weeks pregnant and I did not tell him. I was twenty-nine and frightened and I had watched what Rowena Branmoor did to people in rooms with lawyers in them, and I decided that if she knew about a pregnancy she would take it apart.
So I went, and I did not say why, and I have had five years to think about that decision.
I worked. I built a marketing agency out of a rented flat with three cots in the room and I am now one of the larger independents in the country, and I will not be putting the number here.
I rang my assistant on the Tuesday.
“Clear Saturday. And ring the tailor.”
“For what?”
“Three dinner suits. Four-year-olds.”
Saturday was bright and cold.
That estate looked like a magazine. White roses in banks, a quartet by the fountain, four hundred people on the lawn with champagne.
Rowena was on the upper terrace watching the drive, because of course she was.
What came through those gates was three black cars.
The first one stopped at the top of the aisle and about four hundred people turned round.
I got out in green.
And then I turned and put my hand back toward the door, and Linus got down onto the gravel, and then Gus, and then Ivo, in three small velvet dinner suits with their hair done.
I have never heard four hundred people stop talking at the same time before.
Because every single person on that lawn was looking at three boys with Alaric Branmoor’s face.
An usher came over with the seating cards, and Rowena came down off that terrace faster than a woman of sixty-eight should be able to, and took the card out of his hand.
She did it smiling. She gave it to me herself.
And she said, loudly enough for the first four rows:
“Give me that, I’ll do it. Table twenty-seven, Catrin — by the kitchen. You’ll be more comfortable where nobody’s looking at you.”
Then she looked down at the three of them.
See more on the next page
