Barty’s was just down the street from the carpark, so I hauled the strap of my handbag over my shoulder, clutched the top of it, and made my way off the smooth concrete pavement onto the cobbled street that would lead to the restaurant.
It looked much the same as every other building in the upmarket area of the village. It was straight out of the Georgian period, a continuation of the nearby city of Bath, and the architecture amazed me every single time I walked among the intricately carved buildings.
And thank goodness for my beloved espadrilles—flat ones today, stopping me from falling flat on my face on these cobblestones.
Not that I’d ever done that.
Ahem.
I approached Lord Bartholomew’s and dipped under the awning that provided shade by the door. The heavy wooden door had a large brass handle that I gripped to open it as I slid my sunglasses on top of my head. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the lower light inside, but as soon as it did, I saw Adelaide and Eva at our usual table.
They were identical twins, but due to a lifetime of knowing them I could tell them apart. Adelaide’s hair was slightly darker than Eva’s, but Eva was about half an inch taller than Adelaide, something Addy made up for by always wearing a heel. Even without that, I knew who was who because Addy had two dimples but Eva only had one, and Eva almost always tucked her hair behind her left ear while Addy tucked it behind her right.
I felt a little bit like God around these two sometimes.
“Oh, look, it’s the Cottage Core Queen!” Adelaide grinned as she stood up, and Eva groaned, following suit.
“Very funny,” I murmured. I greeted them both with a hug and kiss on the cheek and took one of the empty seats. We always had the table by the bay window, and as the restaurant overlooked the local park, it had the best view. “How are you both?” I asked after a moment. “We haven’t done this in a while.”
Eva tucked her hair behind her ear and sighed. “Work has been so busy I’ve barely had a moment to breathe. I think this is my first day off in ten days. We’re preparing for a big exhibition for a local artist and it’s taking forever to set up because Jay keeps changing his mind about how to set everything out.”
Eva worked as the assistant manager in the art gallery in the village, and we’d heard so many times how fussy her boss was, so this wasn’t surprising.
“Ugh, I’m sorry,” I said, removing my sunglasses from my head and folding them on the table next to my water. “What about you, Addy?”
“Same old,” she replied. “Still trying to make it as a writer, still getting manuscripts kicked back for reasons not even cows would crap out.” She opened the menu and scanned it. “You?”
I sighed. Where did I begin? “The goats keep escaping, Alexander stayed over last night, I can’t work on this assignment for love nor money, and if anyone murders the gardener, it wasn’t me.”
She snapped the menu closed. “That sounds far more interesting than me perusing this menu when I already know I’m getting the chicken alfredo.”
“Amen to that.” Eva followed suit. “Spill.”
So I did.
I told them about the goats and how they must have watched The Great Escape because that’s what they kept doing. I followed it up with the discussion about Alexander and how he thought I should tell my father about the course I was doing that I was almost certainly going to fail if I couldn’t figure out this garden layout, and how utterly frustrating Miles Kingsley was.
The worst.
They both nodded along and made sympathetic noises, exactly as I’d expected them to do. They were my best friends, after all, and that was exactly what I wanted from them. No judgement, no snarky comments, no eye rolling. Just good old-fashioned co-operative sympathy.
The waitress came to take our order, and we all ordered the same thing as usual—Adelaide with the chicken alfredo, Evangeline with the soup of the day, and me with the salmon and hollandaise sauce.
“Wow. Does your dad still not know about the course?” Eva asked, reaching for her water.
I shook my head. “I know I need to tell him, but I’m not sure how to. Alex said last night that I’ve built it up more in my head than I needed to, but given that Dad’s been in Windsor the past two days and made it clear he was setting me up with Steven…”
Addy shuddered. “No. I don’t care if he’s going to be one of the most prestigious dukes in the country, nothing is worth being his wife and duchess.”
Eva nodded. “Absolutely. Unless you wanted to go black widow on his bum after you had his child.”
“But that would require having his child. Talk about diluting the bloodline,” Addy mused.
There would be no arguments from me. “We dated, remember? It didn’t work. I think he got that when I reminded him, but that doesn’t mean he won’t come back with a date for me. Plus he wants me to go to the state banquet with the Spanish royals.”
“Aren’t you going?”
I shrugged, toying with the edge of a serviette. “I don’t know. They’re long and monotonous and so full of protocol, and it’ll be nothing more than a matchmaking endeavour for my father. At the same time, I don’t know how I can get out of it.”
“You can’t.” Eva shook her head and snapped a breadstick in two. “Your only way to do that is to find a boyfriend yourself or tell him you want to focus on your education.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t like either of those options.”
“I’m not sure that you have a third.”
I knew she was right. “Fine. I’ll tell him. This afternoon. Before he spends anymore time in Windsor organising the state banquet and finds someone else to attempt to set me up with.”
“Good.” Adelaide nodded approvingly. “You know parents always find stuff out. I think we could be seventy with a secret and they’d all find a way to haunt us and tell us they know what we’re hiding.”
“No kidding,” Eva muttered. “I literally travelled fifty miles away for a date and Mum still found out.”
My eyebrows shot up. “How did she find that out?”
With a sigh, she explained. “David Courtenay introduced me to his cousin at Beatrice’s birthday, and we hit it off. Unfortunately, the date was a bust, but Lady Harvey saw us. Naturally, she called Mum immediately, and that was the beginning of one night of hell.”
I winced. I could imagine. While Lady Vic didn’t care if her children married into titles or not, she was still very invested in their dating lives. Almost a little too much sometimes, especially if there was a hint that they could marry ‘up’ as people liked to say.
It was a very antiquated way of thinking, if you asked me.
Unfortunately for me, nobody had asked. Not that it ever stopped me offering my opinion, mind you.
Our food was brought over at that point, and we passed the meal by sharing small talk. I asked how Addy’s book was going, and she groaned that she was struggling massively and wasn’t sure she’d make her agent’s deadline to submit to publishers. Eva once again bemoaned her boss, and we very childishly suggested many ways to prank him that would probably get her fired but were hilarious to think about.
By the end of the lunch, after we’d split the bill and said our goodbyes, I felt a thousand times better than I had this morning. I still felt the weight of my impending assignment, but it no longer felt like the crushing landslide it had before I’d left.