TEMPLETON MANOR, DORSET, UK

The first thing Chloe did when she arrived at Templeton Manor was tell Imelda to run her the hottest bath imaginable and make sure her room was festooned with as many fabulous white tulips as Elena Grimaldi, the Tulip Queen of Amsterdam, could spare. She was desperate to be rid of the icky stench of travel and, truth be told, to have some much-needed time to herself away from Guy and his all-consuming gloom. He had barely spoken to her since they’d left the hotel in Goa, and any hope Chloe might have had of getting him to open up to her about his latest, and assuredly most egregious, transgression, she soon realized was a wasted effort. No amount of persistence was going to make him talk, at least not to her.

The whole situation was beyond the pale. Chloe loved her brother dearly, but time and again it seemed her devotion was thrown back in her face, leaving her to ponder whether what the others said of him was true, that Guy was a waster and a scoundrel and that they – the Family – would be far better off without him. But this went against Chloe’s entire philosophy of being. The world was such a dark and scary place to her that turning one’s back on one’s own flesh and blood – regardless of whether such rejection was deserved – was simply too heartbreaking for Chloe to bear. It was bad enough that she had had to endure her mother’s premature death only three short years ago – a shock and a grief that still had not left her – but to follow this up with closing her heart to her nearest and dearest next of kin would surely render her into a state of such emotional paralysis, Chloe was certain she would never recover.

Chloe felt deeply. In fact, Chloe felt so much she feared such feeling would one day prove her undoing. While she recognized that she had been born into a world of privilege – and with such privilege came distinct advantages, of this she was also aware – Chloe liked to think of herself as just another girl, no different from an average High Street shop clerk or City worker-bee with an exorbitant rent to pay and the responsibilities of any other reasonably well-adjusted single woman living the London dream. At least this was how Chloe preferred to see herself.

The reality, of course, was anything but. It wasn’t that she was embarrassed by the size of her bank account or that she was titled (as opposed to entitled, a word Chloe would have banned from the English language if she’d been able), or that she frequently appeared in the pages of Tatler, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Sunday Times style section. She wasn’t about to deny there were certain perks to being an ‘It Girl.’ Chloe just felt that in order to make a maximum impact upon the world, it behooved her to play down the trappings of her undeniably charmed existence and focus on her boundless compassion and approachability – for Chloe felt herself to be extremely approachable, much more so than her siblings and any of the other ‘It Girls’ in her social milieu. She believed her open face and welcoming aura inspired the less fortunate to come and seek her assistance and care. There was nothing Chloe loved more than to be enveloped in the arms of the tragic and poverty-stricken, preferably brown-skinned and thousands of miles from her home turf. The English poor didn’t interest her. She couldn’t relate. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a town square, let alone an ASDA or a B&Q. Not that she necessarily related to Bangladeshi sweatshop workers, Sudanese victims of FGM, or ISIS widows stuck in refugee camps in Syria…she didn’t. But she had a foundation (S.A.S.S.) dedicated to exposing and improving the plight of sweatshop workers in countries where such horrors existed, and to Chloe’s (albeit limited) knowledge, sweatshops simply didn’t exist in the UK, at least not anymore. If they had, perhaps she would feel differently. Probably not. Chloe Templeton’s psyche was tempered by post-colonial guilt.

But no amount of compassion – real or otherwise – could help Chloe come to terms with what she feared was happening to her family. Guy was a disaster, yes, but if anything he was merely the tip of the iceberg. Chloe saw herself as the Titanic and the path before her was a veritable minefield of icebergs larger and deadlier than anything Guy and his failed business and financial ventures could throw her way. Of foremost concern (naturally) was what would happen once her father finally gave up the ghost, the inevitability of which seemed more definite with each day since his collapse. Chloe couldn’t bring herself to think about how she might react when Lord Carleton finally expired. The very notion gave Chloe hives. She knew there would be a power grab: with so much money and property at stake, not to mention a business portfolio valued at least in the hundreds of billions, how could there not be? It wasn’t that Chloe expected to benefit from Lord Carleton’s death. (She wouldn’t dare allow herself such mercenary aspirations!) She simply didn’t want her father’s legacy to fall into the wrong hands, namely those of an outsider, specifically those of one Lady Eliza Brookings.

Lady Eliza was the stuff of Chloe’s waking nightmares. In this, if in nothing else, she and her older sister Diana were united. Yes, if what her mother, the late and much lamented Lady Fiona, had said about the circumstances surrounding Lady Eliza’s entering their lives was true – that it wasn’t an affair in the traditional sense, but rather a sanctioned “intervention” arranged by Lady Fiona herself to assuage her husband Lord Carleton’s “voracious” sexual appetites – then, however much Chloe might object to such an arrangement on moral grounds, there was nothing illicit about Lady Eliza and Lord Carleton’s relationship that Chloe could easily pin on Lady Eliza for wrongdoing. That her dearly beloved mother had been a saint, there was no question. That Lady Fiona would approve of, let alone help facilitate, such a distasteful arrangement out of love for her husband, Chloe’s father, wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility. Chloe preferred, however, to believe that her mother had been the victim of coercion, that Lady Eliza had had her sights on Lord Carleton for years, and had used Lady Fiona’s illness as the impetus to pounce. Chloe didn’t know Lady Eliza well, but she was certainly well enough familiar with her to know without a doubt that Eliza was an unscrupulous opportunist who would lie, cheat, charm and steal to get what she wanted, regardless of family, illness, or just plain old-fashioned propriety. And once Chloe got a notion in her head – justified or otherwise – there was nothing that could or ever would convince her to believe any differently. It was this uncompromising belief in the rectitude of her own judgment that Chloe felt was the backbone of her philanthropic success. She had yet to be proven wrong.

Chloe’s mission to Goa had provided her a welcome distraction. She had been able to put any fears and misgivings she had about Lady Eliza on the back burner while she focused her attention on saving Guy. The fact that, in a sense, her mission had failed – for it was immediately clear that Guy had no intention of being saved by her or by anyone – hadn’t bothered Chloe to the extent that it might have done, had present circumstances been any less fraught. She had merely used the hours spent airborne reflecting on how horrid the conditions had been in Goa and banging out emails to the S.A.S.S. board on how they needed to make the Indian subcontinent their next focus. The street children that had run alongside the hired car that had taken her to and from the airport had caused Chloe no small amount of angst.

“They aren’t wearing any shoes!” she had declared to the driver, an affable but glum elderly gentleman dressed in an ill-fitting black suit that looked as if he’d been wearing it since Partition. He had merely shrugged and shook his head at her in the car’s crooked rearview mirror as if it was of no consequence to him whatsoever that the street children were barefoot. “I mean, surely it isn’t safe for them to be running around like that completely unshod? And why aren’t they in school?”

“It is because they are poor, Mum,” the driver replied, as if that was reason enough. “This country is filled with many poor people.”

Chloe was indignant. “That’s no excuse!” she exclaimed. “Where are their mothers, or if not their mothers, their Aunties? It’s unconscionable. And can you please turn up the air conditioning? I’m melting inside my clothes.”

“Sorry, Mum. My apologies. The air conditioning is not working. Roll down your window. There is plenty of fresh air outside.”

“I most certainly will not roll down my window!” The heat, the smell, and the congestion had overwhelmed her. She felt like she was dying, and not for the first time Chloe asked herself whether being the family’s moral compass was perhaps a more onerous task than she could handle.

It was this thought – this nagging undercurrent of self-doubt – that returned to her at an exponential intensity twenty-four hours later (or however long it was) after she had submerged herself in the scalding (but hopefully purifying) waters of the bath Imelda had drawn for her upon her arrival at Templeton Manor. Guy’s continued silence about the situation from which she had rescued him silently infuriated her, as did his seeming reticence at the imminent death of their father. Was it reticence or just plain insolence? Chloe wanted to shake him. It had taken almost all of her remaining energy not to throttle him in the car on their long drive from Heathrow. Guy looked as though he had been through a war zone. It was embarrassing. No, more than embarrassing, it was humiliation. Chloe felt humiliated by Guy’s appearance and even more so by his apparent lack of self- awareness … or was it just old-fashioned bloody-mindedness? Chloe suspected the latter.

And, of course, the paps were staked out in the Terminal Five Arrival Hall snapping away with their cameras as they blitzed her with their intrusive questions. Chloe had a love-hate relationship with the press, as they did with her. You didn’t get to be an “It Girl” without a certain amount of pandering.

“If I didn’t know better,” Chloe said to no one in particular once she and Guy were safely ensconced behind tinted windows in the backseat of the family town car, “I would almost think Penelope tipped them off. You know she’s always so weirdly keen to get this family’s name in the broadsheets, and she hangs around with that social media crowd with their perpetual air of desperation. Do you know what I mean?”

Guy shook his head. “Not really,” he mumbled.

Chloe squinted at his profile behind her oversized Chanel sunglasses. “It might do you a world of good to be more aware.”

“More aware of what?”

“I don’t know.” Chloe supposed she should be grateful that Guy was actually speaking to her now, but she could tell from the tenor of the conversation and how he wouldn’t look at her, that the satisfaction to be parsed from the interaction was minimal at best. “Just more aware of whom you are…where you are…what you look like,” she continued. “Appearance and perception are everything, Guy. We may not like it. And yes, I suppose it is a very shallow way to live one’s life, but such is our lot. We have a certain responsibility to present ourselves in a certain way.”

“And what way is that?”