‘Fibber,’ Libby, the art director’s assistant, retorted cheerfully. ‘Let me see.’ She tweaked the magazine out of Ella’s hold before she could stop her, Libby’s eyebrows lifting queryingly. ‘You’re trying to lose weight?’
Ella’s heart sank. Soon the elegantly slender Libby would be telling everyone and then the whole office would be laughing at her.
‘Well, you don’t need to waste your time eating Ryvita biscuits,’ Libby told her without waiting for her to reply. ‘What you need to do is go and see my doctor and get some of his special pills. I lost a stone in a month. They’re amazing.’
‘Diet pills?’ Ella questioned uncertainly. She hadn’t known such things existed. She’d seen advertisements for some kind of toffees one was supposed to eat three times a day, but nothing for diet pills.
‘Yes, that’s right. Everyone takes them, all the models, only of course no one admits to it. Look, why don’t I ring Dr Williamson now and make an appointment for you? But you must promise not to tell anyone that I told you.’
‘I…’
Before she could say anything, Libby was picking up the telephone receiver and giving the operator a number she was reading from her pretty leather-covered diary.
‘There, it’s all fixed,’ she announced triumphantly a few minutes later. ‘Dr Williamson can see you at lunchtime. He’s only in Harley Street.’
The man was still watching her. Not that Emerald was surprised. Of course he was. She was very beautiful, after all. Everyone said so. The visit to the Louvre, one of the cultural activities organised by the French finishing school she was attending, had threatened to be so dull that she had been tempted to find an excuse to escape from it, but now, with an admirer for her to tease and torment behind the back of the ancient art historian who was accompanying her round the museum’s treasures, the afternoon was promising to be far less dull than she had expected. Very deliberately, almost provocatively, she smoothed her hand over the neat fit of her fawn cashmere sweater. She would have preferred to have worn something in a more noticeable colour, but typically her mother had insisted that the neutral shade was far more elegant. Far more correct had been what she had really meant, of course. Far more likely not to draw the admiring male attention to Emerald’s figure that her face already received. How foolish of her mother to imagine that she could stop men admiring her, Emerald thought contemptuously. That was impossible. Not that her mother had ever come anywhere near acknowledging that. It infuriated Emerald that her family, her step-and half-siblings, but most especially her mother, should refuse to admire and pay homage to her undeniable superiority–of birth and breeding as well as looks. Her mother behaved as though she were no different from any of the others: Ella and Janey, the daughters of Jay; the twins, Cathy and Polly, still at school, who were her half-sisters, but most of all, Emerald’s half-Chinese cousin, Rose. Just thinking about Rose made Emerald feel furious. A half-Chinese bastard who, for some unimaginable and irritating reason, Emerald’s own mother actually treated as though she were her own child. Her mother had fussed over Rose and given her more attention than she had ever given Emerald, her own daughter. Emerald would never forgive her mother for doing that. Never. Both Nanny and Great-grandma had always said that Rose was a mere nobody; a child who should have been left to die, whilst Emerald was the daughter of a duke, one of England’s richest men; an honourable heroic man, whom everyone had admired, not like Rose’s father, a wastrel and a drunk. Great-grandmother had always said that the reason Uncle Greg drank so much was because he was so bitterly ashamed of Rose. By rights Emerald’s mother should have felt the same way instead of treating Rose as though she was someone special–more special than Emerald herself. That, of course, was impossible. Emerald believed that the reason her mother made such a fuss of Rose was because she was jealous of Emerald, jealous of the fact that Emerald had been born a duke’s daughter and had been so much loved by her father that he had left her virtually all his money. A fortune…
If she could have done so, during her childhood Emerald would have demanded that she be allowed to live in one of her father’s houses, as befitted her status, and not at Denham with her mother and Jay and the others.
She had flatly refused to attend the same school as the others, and where they had treated their coming-out parties and presentation at court as old-fashioned rituals to be gone through for form’s sake, Emerald had deliberately held back from having her own until afterwards so that she didn’t have to share with them. Now she was insisting on having the kind of season that her great-grandmother had told her about when she had been younger. Blanche Pickford might not have possessed any blue blood herself but she knew its importance and she had made sure that Emerald knew it as well.
Well, it wasn’t Rose who had a title and a fortune, and it wasn’t Rose who would be the débutante of the season and who would marry a man who would make her even more important. Then Emerald’s mother wouldn’t be able to ignore her in favour of a Hong Kong gutter brat, or insist, as she had tried to do so often, that Emerald and Rose were equals. Emerald had always been determined that she must be the winner in every contest with a member of her own sex.
Always.
The man who had been watching her was standing up and looking as though he was about to come over to her. Emerald eyed him calculatingly. Her admirer wasn’t very tall and his hair was thinning a little. Disdainfully Emerald turned her back on him. Only the very best of the best was good enough for her: the tallest, the most handsome, the richest and the most titled of men. Her step-siblings, with their ridiculous plans to work, like common little shop girls, would have no option other than to end up with dull ordinary husbands, whilst Rose, of course, would be lucky if she found any decent man willing to marry her at all. But it was different for Emerald. She could have and must have the most eligible, the most prized husband there was.
In fact Emerald had already chosen her husband. There was in reality only one man it could be: the elder son of Princess Marina, the Duke of Kent, who was not just a duke like her father had been but, even better, a royal duke. Emerald could see herself now, surrounded by the envious gaggle of bridesmaids, all of them green with envy because she was marrying the season’s most eligible man.
They would be in huge demand, invited everywhere, and other men would look at her and envy her husband, other women would look at her and be filled with jealousy because of her beauty. Emerald intended to cut herself off from her family. She certainly intended to refuse to have anything to do with Rose. As a royal duke her husband couldn’t be expected to socialise with someone like Rose, and since her mother thought so much of her then she wouldn’t mind being excluded from Emerald’s guest lists so that she could keep Rose company, would she? Emerald smiled at the thought.
The young Duke of Kent had celebrated his twenty-first birthday only the previous year, and had already gained a reputation for being very difficult to pin down when it came to accepting invitations, but of course she would have no trouble in attracting him, Emerald knew. He wouldn’t be able to help falling in love with her. No man could.
It was a pity that the Duke of Kent didn’t own a proper stately home, not one of those dreadful ugly places that even the National Trust wouldn’t take on, but rather somewhere like Blenheim or Osterby. She would have to have a word with Mr Melrose, her late father’s solicitor and her own trustee, Emerald decided. It was surely only right and proper that, as a royal duchess, she should have the use of her late father’s property and estate; there was Lenchester House in London, where she was having her coming-out ball, and the family seat as well. Her mother had tried to prevent her from having her coming-out ball at Lenchester by saying that technically they had no right to use the house, which now had been inherited through the rule of primogeniture, along with everything else that was entailed to the dukedom, by the new ‘heir’: the grandson of her late father’s great-uncle, the ‘black sheep’ of the family who had been shipped off to Australia as a young man. Initially,