to pay for things she wanted from her trust fund.
Of course, her mother hated it that she was going to be so very rich…
And as for Rose…Emerald’s mouth hardened. How could her mother even acknowledge her, never mind make such a fuss over her? Didn’t her mother realise how badly having a cousin like Rose could reflect on Emerald? Emerald’s great-grandmother had been right: Rose should have been sent back to Hong Kong to live in the slums where Uncle Greg had found her mother.
It was just as well that she had had the forethought to persuade her godmother to offer to present her, and have her to stay in London with her, ‘so that Mummy can get on with her work, Auntie Beth,’ as she’d put it to her sponsor. She’d have far more licence to arrange things how she wanted under the aegis of her godmother than she would with her own mother.
Emerald was well aware that her godmother had high hopes of a match between her and her own second son. After all, Rupert had no money to speak of, and one day Emerald would have rather a lot. But she certainly did not intend to waste either herself or her fortune on such a nonentity. Equally, Emerald was also aware of exactly what was meant by the damp forceful squeeze Gwendolyn’s father had given her hand when he had called at the villa ‘to see how my little girl is’. Of course he would find her attractive, because she was.
Emerald was saving the pleasure of telling Gwendolyn exactly how revolting her father was–making up to girls his daughter’s age when he was married–as something to savour when the time was right. For now, she had more important things to think about, like what she wanted to be wearing the first time the Duke of Kent saw her…
London, February 1957
Dougie looked round the empty basement beneath the Pimlico Road photographic studio, which would soon be packed with the young and the beautiful, all intent on partying the night away.
He reckoned he’d been lucky to have met Lewis Coulter. Lew–to those he knew well–supposedly employed Dougie as a junior photographer, not a general dogsbody, but when you were an Aussie newly arrived in the old country, no longer sure of your station in life, and you had your own private reasons for being here, you didn’t start protesting to the employer who had taken you on simply because he’d liked the look of you.
Besides, Dougie liked his boss and his work. He’d learned a lot from watching Lew doing his stuff–and not just with his camera. For all his outwardly lazy charm, Lew could move with the speed of lightning when he saw a girl he wanted–so fast, in fact, that the poor thing was as dazzled by him as though she had been a rabbit blinded by the headlights of his Jaguar sports car.
The fact that Lew was a member of the upper class only made the situation even better. Working for him gave Dougie an entrée into a world in which he might otherwise never have been accepted. He could study this exclusive world at first hand, something he needed to do all right, since by all accounts, if this lawyer bloke was right, then he was a member of the aristocracy himself. A duke no less. Strewth, he still hadn’t got his head round that. After all, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a duke. He’d done pretty well for himself without being one, keeping his supposed title a secret from his new friends in London, along with his real reason for being here. He didn’t want to be tracked down and revealed to be a duke, so he had also kept quiet about his background in Australia. He didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.
He’d taken a look at the house in Eaton Square that was supposedly his, although he hadn’t been to see the other place yet, the one in the country. From what he’d heard Lew saying about Britain’s aristocrats, they were all so deep in debt that they couldn’t wait to offload their old houses onto the National Trust, and he certainly didn’t intend to part with any of his inheritance keeping an old ruin going.
Dougie reckoned he’d been lucky in meeting Lew. But then Lew wasn’t your normal upper-class snob. He was a true decent bonzer bloke, who could out-drink anyone, including Dougie himself. Not that Dougie had been doing much serious drinking recently. He was too busy working for Lew.
They’d first met in a pub in Soho and, for some reason that he couldn’t remember now, Dougie had challenged Lew to a drinking contest. Dougie had fallen in with a lively group of fellow Aussies, and egged on by them, he had been sure he would win. How could he not when he was six foot two, heavily muscled and an ex-sheep shearer, and his opposition was barely five foot ten, had manicured nails, spoke with an irritating drawl and dressed like a tailor’s dummy? No contest, mate, as Dougie had boasted to his new friends.
He had kept on being sure he would win right up until he had collapsed on the pub floor.
When Dougie had finally come round he had been in a strange bed in a strange room, which he had later discovered was the spare bedroom of his now employer.
When he had asked Lew what he was doing there, the other man had shrugged and responded, ‘Couldn’t leave you on the bar floor, old chap. It isn’t the done thing to leave one’s mess behind, don’t y’know, and since your own friends had gone, I had no choice other than to bring you back here, unappealing though that prospect was.’
Still half drunk, Dougie had promptly come over all emotional and had thanked him profusely. ‘You know what, you’re a real mate.’
Lew had responded, ‘I can assure you I am no such thing. I had to remove you from the pub because the landlord was threatening to make me pay for a room for you. The last thing I wanted in my spare room was a sweaty drunken Aussie stinking of beer and sheep.’
Dougie had soon realised that Lew was something of a ladies’ man, bedding them faster than Dougie could count and then dropping them even faster. It was nothing for him to have three or four girls on the go at the same time. Dougie had never had any trouble attracting girls himself, but he freely admitted that Lew was in another league altogether.
Lew explained to Dougie that he was the only son of a younger son, ‘which means I’m afraid that whilst my veins might be filled with blue blood, my bank account sadly is not filled with anything. D’you see, old chap, the eldest son gets the title and the estate, the second son goes into the army, and the youngest into the Church, unless they can find heiresses to marry. Such a bore having to earn one’s own crust, but I’m afraid needs must.’
From what Dougie had seen, Lew’s life was anything but boring. When Lew wasn’t photographing, he was either out partying or, like tonight, throwing parties of his own. Tonight was to be a ‘bring a bottle’ get-together, to celebrate the birthday of one of Lew’s many friends.
There’d be models, and the more daring society girls and their upper-class escorts, sneaking a look at Lew’s bohemian and louche way of life, actors coming in from the nearby Royal Court Theatre, arty types; writers and musicians.
Pretty soon now people would start arriving. A smooth Ella Fitzgerald number was playing on the gramophone. Dougie always felt nervous on these occasions. He was proud of what he was–an Aussie from the outback–but he knew that the more sophisticated young Londoners liked to make fun of colonials and laugh at their gaucherie and inadvertent mistakes. Dougie was constantly getting things wrong, putting his size elevens in it and ending up looking like a prize fool. There’d been no call where Dougie had grown up for the fancy manners and customs that Lew’s sort took for granted. His uncle had been too busy running his sheep station to have time to teach his orphaned nephew all that kind of fancy stuff, even if he had
