“I know,” I say. “Trust me. But I was afraid of what you’d say.”
“Me?” Bea places her hand on her chest. “I am supportive. Look how well I trained you to get in and out of a car.”
“Pet, you’d have horsewhipped her, and you know it,” Gemma says pleasantly.
“Speaking of, where is your sister?” Bea says. “I’ve a verbal horsewhipping for that girl that she’s had coming for years.”
I put up my hand and start to speak but Freddie beats me to it.
“Leave it out, Bea,” he says flatly, his voice stripped of its usual exuberance. “Trust me, Lacey could not feel any worse right now. She’ll have gutted herself enough already.”
Bea takes a look at his wretched visage, as he leans against a dark corner of the room staring moodily into a scotch, and her features soften in a way that I have never seen on her. She walks up to Freddie and takes his face in her hands.
“My darling boy,” she says simply. She stands there for a second until he reddens, and then she clears her throat. “Yes, well, if you’d asked me which of us was going to end up blackmailing another, I’d have always said Clive.” She turns on Gemma. “Bex’s judgment is obviously questionable, but I can’t believe you were ever with him.”
Gemma wrinkles her nose. “You and I were in a fight! And it was barely dating,” she says. “If it makes you feel better, he’s a terrible kisser. If that’s what you even want to call it.”
Bea frowns. “I have to tell Pudge. She’s still not answering her phone.”
“What if Pudge is in cahoots with him, too?” Gaz says.
Bea folds her arms across her chest. “Have you forgotten how brutal the Mail and The Sun and the rest of them were to her during her five-year bender? Pudge hates the gossip press. She’s only with him because she thinks he’s writing fluff, like that moronic piece about the county councillor who also sells personalized cheese wheels.”
“She told me Clive is mainly her tantric pupil,” Gemma pipes up.
Bea flicks her hand. “The point is, who knows what he’s got on her. My sister is a celebrity, too, of a sort.” She takes her phone out of her clutch. “I’m calling her again.”
“And where is Lacey?” I say, frowning at my own phone. Nick squeezes my leg.
“She’ll turn up, Bex,” Freddie says. “She’s probably with your mother.”
“Paddington Larchmont-Kent-Smythe, your tantric pupil is a bastard,” Bea is saying into her phone. “I want you to take his laptop and run it over with your car and then call me immediately.”
Then she takes a pencil from the gold-plated cup on Richard’s desk and jabs it through a hasty chignon, ready for war. Cilla leans over the back of the sofa and hands me a scotch.
“Drink up,” she tells me. “It will bring you the strength of my forebears.”
“You’re from Yorkshire,” I say, taking the glass from her.
“I have distant family in Inverness,” she says. “It’s quite dramatic, actually—”
“Enough.” Bea stops her. “You can lie about Scotland after we vanquish Clive.”
“I don’t know if I think we can vanquish Clive,” I say.
Bea slams her hand on the desk and then lifts it up to reveal the fly, crushed. “I can vanquish anything.”
Nick tugs at his hair. “Let’s assume you can’t, and that this is running tomorrow no matter what,” he said. “What’s next?” He turns to Freddie. “What do you think?”
Freddie is surprised. He didn’t expect to be consulted.
“Er, well. Let’s see.” Freddie pushes off from the wall and starts wearing his own groove in the floor. “I’m not sure what good Marj could do at this point. It’s not like Clive works for the Mail. There’s no one above him to call and turn the screws.”
“Should we give her and Barnes a heads-up that this is coming?” I ask. Through a cracked window, I can still hear murmurs from the party. There are going to be some hungover dignitaries at the wedding. Maybe they’ll be throwing up too much to check the Internet.
“We could,” Freddie says. “But if we tell Barnes, he’ll tell Father, who’ll call Gran, and she’ll probably scare up Agatha, who will call Edwin, because if she has to get dragged into this then she’ll think he should, too.” He shakes his head. “Then we’ll all look peaky tomorrow.”
“Unless they call it off,” I say. “I mean, to me, that’s the other issue.”
The room gets quiet. Everyone, I can tell, is wondering which would be considered the greater ignominy: canceling the wedding, or going through it knowing the people gathering under the Buckingham Palace balcony will have read or heard my sister’s testimony and think they’re bearing witness to a sham. I wish Lacey were here, because as much as she was the architect of some of this, it doesn’t feel right trying to solve it without her.
“If they cancel, then I think you’re done, Bex,” Bea finally says.
Gemma nods. So does Freddie.
“Bea’s right,” Nick says. “It’s hard to come back from that in a month’s time and say, ‘Er, sorry about that, big misunderstanding, let’s do it all again, shall we?’”
“Maybe we call Xandra Deane and give her a counter-scoop,” says Cilla.
“About what?” Bea asks. “What could possibly overshadow this?”
“Quick, somebody plant drugs on Nigel,” Gemma jokes.
“Plant them? More like find them,” Freddie says. Then his eyes widen. “Maybe Lacey and I should elope.”
This suggestion is met with chuckles, until we see he’s not kidding.
“It’s not actually the worst suggestion,” Bea says slowly.
“Yes it is,” Nick and I say, almost in unison.
“Think about it, though,” Freddie says, coming around and sitting in front of us on the coffee table. “We can claim we were having a lovers’ tiff and so she made up all that stuff to Clive. And if we’re married, legally married, it mucks up his entire thesis that I’m snogging Bex and Lacey is furious about it, because if we were, why would she then go off and marry me?”
Bea opens her mouth and Gemma whacks her in the leg, shaking her head sternly. Freddie has turned pale, as if saying the words I’m snogging Bex was a step too close to revisiting the inciting incident in front of everyone.
Nick ponders this, then shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “We’ve got a bit to work out, Fred, but that’s a sacrifice you can’t make. I won’t allow you and Lacey to be stuck like that.”
“I’m sure she’d muddle through,” mutters Bea.
“It might be the only thing she and I can do, though,” Freddie says helplessly, spreading his hands. “We owe you. We’ve got to do something.” He is emotional. “Please.”
“I appreciate it. I do,” Nick says. “But even discounting all that, we just cannot use the press,” he says. “I think…I think Mum would hate it, if she knew. Don’t you?”
Freddie nods slowly.