Original Sin

‘I’ve just been reading a manuscript.’

‘Must have been good.’

‘You didn’t give me the chance to find out,’ she smiled, wanting to keep the excitement of her discovery under wraps at least until she had read more. ‘How was your day, anyway?’

‘Fifth consecutive day I’ve been studio-bound,’ sighed David. ‘I’m sure it must be some kind of record.’

David was a co-anchor for CTV’s World Today, a lunchtime news programme that broadcast from eleven a.m. to one p.m. each day, often broadcasting live from the scene of breaking news. In any given month he could be in Afghanistan or Somalia, Paris or Moscow.

‘Good news for the world, I suppose,’ she smiled. ‘No hurricanes, no coups d’états. And definitely good news for me.’ She squeezed his knee. Sometimes she enjoyed David’s busy schedule, but it was nice to have him home once in a while, especially now when there was so much to be done.

‘Not such good news for CTV, though,’ said David. ‘The ratings have been down and one of our big interviews fell through, went to Anderson Cooper.’

‘Ah honey, that’s a bummer,’ she said, genuinely disappointed for him.

‘But …’ He paused and looked at her. ‘… It looks like I’ve got twenty minutes with the Palestinian PM on Sunday.’

‘You’re going to Palestine?’

‘It’s gone crazy over there again.’

Brooke began to protest, then bit her tongue. She knew it was futile reminding David that they had three possible wedding venues to go look at in Connecticut and, anyway, she had to agree that the pressing details of their seating plan seemed slightly petty compared to discussing the finer points of the Middle East crisis with a world leader. Still, it was a blow. She had been looking forward to them spending a little time together for once, getting wrapped up in the romance and excitement of the wedding.

‘I guess I’ll go and look at those venues on my own then.’

‘Come on, honey,’ said David, stroking her cheek, ‘I thought girls loved this stuff. Don’t tell me your DNA skipped the bride gene?’

She laughed, despite herself.

‘Well, maybe you should take your mother?’ suggested David.

‘I’m not a masochist,’ she smiled. Ever since the engagement, they had quickly found that both sides of the family had very strong ideas about where and how they should be married. David’s mother, a grande dame of New York society, had very decided and conservative views about venues that were considered ‘proper’ by ‘the right people’. It needed to be large enough to host all her influential friends, and grand enough for her family. Only a church ceremony would be considered, preferably with a bishop – at the very least – presiding. Meredith, meanwhile, had vetoed every possible reception venue they had been able to find in New York. The Ritz Carlton was ‘too dingy’, the New York Library ‘too public’, and even the many gorgeous venues that Alessandro Franchetti, Manhattan’s premier wedding planner, had tracked down were similarly rejected. Brooke was beginning to think nothing would ever please her mother. It was a feeling she was familiar with.

‘Well, you never know,’ said David. ‘Alessandro might have come up trumps with the place we’re going to see today.’

Brooke gave a wry smile. ‘Don’t hold your breath; he did call it a “wild card”.’

‘We’re going all the way to Duchess County for a wild card?’ asked David, annoyance in his voice. ‘It’s a long way to travel to say no. Anyway, I thought we were picking him up?’

‘We are.’ She leaned forward and tapped Miguel, David’s driver, on the shoulder. ‘We have to detour to Sutton Place.’

David pulled a face. ‘Couldn’t we have met him there?’

Brooke laughed. ‘He’s not that bad.’

‘Oh he is,’ grinned David.

Outside a smart brownstone on Sutton Place South, a short, overly groomed man was standing on the roadside looking at his watch. Alessandro Franchetti was a former bit-part TV actor turned society wedding planner, who had recently made it onto New York magazine’s Hot 100 List. Although there were thirty couples in the city delighted to have Alessandro planning their nuptials at vast expense, the truth was that most of their weddings were arranged by Alessandro’s team. He took on only two weddings a year himself, and this was by far his biggest, possibly the biggest of his career. No wonder he was looking anxious. Brooke and David wanted an early fall wedding and they still didn’t have a venue. Screw this up and he’d never work in New York again.

‘Nice building,’ said David, peering through the car’s tinted windows.

‘The average New York bride spends one hundred thousand dollars on her wedding,’ smiled Brooke. ‘He has money.’

‘At last! My two favourite people in New York,’ gushed Alessandro as he clambered into the passenger seat next to the driver. ‘And I’m so glad to finally have you both together. There is such a lot to talk about.’

Snapping open his briefcase, Alessandro pulled out a spreadsheet and put on a pair of black horn-rim reading glasses. ‘I can only look at this for a second because reading and travelling makes me feel sick,’ he said in an aside.

David’s lips twitched with amusement.

‘I had an early start at the studio,’ he whispered to Brooke, settling back in his seat. ‘I might just grab a little shut-eye.’

Brooke jabbed him in the ribs. ‘No, you don’t!’

Alessandro looked up, oblivious to their whispering.

‘Now, I know everyone is keen to set a date as quickly as possible, but you’ve said no to The Pierre. No to the Four Seasons Pool Room. No to the Plaza, St Regis, the Yale Club and the Frick.’ He turned round and eyed Brooke and David carefully. ‘Do you know how many strings I had to pull to even put the Frick as an option?’

‘The problem is we all want somewhere new,’ said David, turning on the charm. ‘Somewhere we haven’t been before.’

Alessandro peered over the top of his glasses. ‘Between the two of you, you must have been to every wedding, funeral, benefit, and bar mitzvah in the Tri-State area. New is presenting something of a challenge.’ He sighed, pushing out his tanned cheeks.

‘Are you sure you don’t want it at Belcourt or Cliffpoint?’

Belcourt was the Billingtons’ magnificent family estate in Westchester County, and Cliffpoint was their forty-five-roomed summer house in Newport. There were, of course, other properties the family owned: a villa in Palm Beach, a ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, and a palazzo in Venice, but the reason for not hosting the wedding at one of the Billington-owned properties was the same.

‘Ahem, how shall I put this?’ said Brooke. ‘It’s important to my mother to have the hosting responsibilities.’

‘And you’ve definitely ruled out Parklands?’

Parklands was the Asgill family home. Three years ago it had been the venue for a large and rather overblown wedding for her sister Liz, who was divorced from her husband twelve months later.

‘Mother doesn’t like the omens.’

Alessandro took off his glasses and sighed. ‘Lord save me from the mother of the bride. Well, never fear, Toots, I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’

The car slipped out of Manhattan, crossing the George Washington Bridge and heading up into New York State, the metropolis quickly thinning out into towns and then fields. Brooke was glad to escape the city. She had always loved New York, she was born and bred there, but lately the Big Apple had started to shrink. It wasn’t that she disliked the attention, but the constant intrusions – people she didn’t know calling out her name in the deli, teenage girls pointing and giggling; she’d even had a death threat – it was all starting to wear her down. It had been nine months to the day since she had met David Billington; despite also being a native of Manhattan, Brooke had had to go all the way to Europe to meet him. She had been in the Alsace region on a nostalgic trip to France to visit a family with whom she had done a summer exchange in her junior year at Spence. Three days into the trip, her host Mrs Dubois had discovered her husband was having an affair. Brooke supposed this might not be a problem for the chic Frenchwoman, but Mrs Dubois kicked him out. Politely withdrawing, Brooke hadn’t wanted to go home, so on a whim she’d headed down to Biarritz. A Park Avenue girl, she had always been athletic and outdoorsy, and she wanted to go surfing on the legendary beaches down there. When she first saw David, she was standing on the shore in her wet-suit.

He had come over to the shore to check she was okay; she remembered thinking he looked vaguely familiar, but she had not been expecting to meet New York’s most eligible bachelor in a wetsuit on a cloudy, blowy day on the Atlantic coast. The attraction between them was instant, although Brooke suspected that David’s interest in her went up a notch when he discovered she was also from a very wealthy New York family. If she was honest, some of that was true for her too. Like most little girls, growing up, Brooke had always dreamt of marrying a handsome prince, but in her case it had almost come true.

Not that it had been exactly a fairy tale; back in New York, the first three months of their relationship had been conducted in secret. Dates were either dinner at unfashionable restaurants in Brooklyn, or ridiculously luxurious hotels in remote locations like the Hudson Valley – sometimes it felt like having an affair with a rich married man. David didn’t explicitly say that he was testing her out before he went public with their relationship, but Brooke knew the rules of dating were just not the same for men like David Billington. Last month, on Valentine’s Day, he had whisked her off to Paris. Well, it wasn’t exactly the fourteenth of February. It had been ten days later, thanks to work commitments in Beirut and Uzbekistan, but it was wonderful nevertheless. The penthouse suite at the Bristol, shopping in St-Germain, where David had treated her to armfuls of gifts from Saint Laurent, then dinner at Le Voltaire. Back at the hotel, he had popped open vintage champagne on their terrace overlooking the city, which had been studded with hundreds of glowing tea-lights. Even so, Brooke hadn’t expected it when he had pulled a ring out of his pocket and dropped down on one knee. They’d been dating less than a year, but the night had been so perfect, it had been impossible to resist.

It was almost seven by the time they arrived in Duchess County. Light was falling out of the sky, the dipping sun casting an orange glow over the lake. Brooke had been there before to visit the Rhinebeck Antiques Fair for its lovely old chests and gilt mirrors, and loved the area’s raw natural beauty.

‘This place certainly smells good,’ laughed Brooke, breathing in a cool fresh scent of mist and freshly mown grass through the open window. They came off the road and through a pair of white gates, down a long gravel drive curling around the lake, framed by horse chestnut trees bursting with their long ivory flowers. At the end of the drive was a short pier where a small motor launch was moored.

‘Is it across the lake?’ asked Brooke, excitement in her voice. They all climbed out of the car and up onto the pier, David taking Brooke’s hand to help her on. It smelt of linseed oil. The boat took ten minutes to chug across the lake, finally turning into a bay dominated by a huge white colonial house. Brooke gasped.

‘Isn’t it spectacular?’ grinned Alessandro, spreading his arms dramatically. ‘Now, when we get there you’ll see it’s a little rundown, so I want you to use your imagination.’