Kate's Wedding Read online

  CONTENTS

  Kate’s Wedding

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Chrissie Manby

  About the Author

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder and Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Chrissie Manby 2011

  The right of Chrissie Manby to be identified as the Author of the Work has been

  asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

  persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN: 9781444733662

  Book ISBN: 9781444733655

  Hodder and Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Josephine Annabel Christine Hazel

  Prologue

  29 July 1981, Littlehampton, Sussex

  To the two little girls waking up in their caravan that morning, 29 July was going to be a bit like Christmas. All the usual rules were to be suspended on the day when Lady Diana Spencer married her prince. Even though they were holidaying in a caravan at a Caravan Club rally held on a sports field, the young sisters were going to be allowed to dress up. The bridesmaids’ dresses they had worn for the wedding of their mother’s younger brother had been brought all the way from Birmingham for this very special second outing.

  Kate, who was, at nine, the elder by two years, was first to get out of bed.

  ‘I’ve made a royal wedding breakfast,’ her father, John, called from the awning. He had draped a Union flag over the little fold-up table. There was bunting hanging from the guy ropes that held the brown and orange awning in place.

  ‘Red strawberries, white cream and blue—’

  ‘Pancakes!’ Kate squealed. ‘The pancakes are blue!’

  ‘Food colouring,’ her father explained. ‘I don’t suppose even Prince Charles is eating such a patriotic breakfast today.’

  Tess, just seven, refused to eat anything that wasn’t its proper colour. The girls’ mother, Elaine, was dispatched to make some toast.

  The whole campsite was beginning to wake up now. After weeks of speculation about the weather, the sun was shining like a smile. Everyone had a greeting for their neighbours as they went about their business. After breakfast, Kate accompanied her father to empty the chemical toilet. The festive mood prevailed even by the cesspit, where several other fathers admired John’s Union Jack shorts.

  Around the camp leader’s caravan, preparations for the celebrations ahead were well under way. There was to be a huge buffet lunch in lieu of the street parties people were missing back home. Every caravan had received its instructions: each person should bring their own chair, a plate, a knife and fork, and a teacup; Kate’s parents had chipped in for their family’s allocation of barbecue food.

  Dressed in her bridesmaid’s finery, Kate turned cartwheels in the middle of the field while she waited for something to happen. Tess tried to follow suit, but she could just about do a forward roll. Meanwhile, John and Elaine carried chairs and beer and wine bottles to the trestle tables by the camp leader’s caravan. In return for three bottles of cider, a colour television with a remote control had been borrowed from a house that backed onto the campsite.

  The morning dragged. Kate turned more cartwheels. Someone’s radio played ‘songs for a princess’. Every tune had something royal in its lyrics or music. Until at last, at last, the montage of scenes from the lives of the Prince of Wales and his future wife was replaced by live footage. The royal wedding had begun.

  Just before eleven twenty, Kate and Tess joined their parents in the circle that had formed round the borrowed television. Kate climbed onto her father’s lap. The sun was shining so brightly they could hardly see the screen. Kate struggled to the front of the circle and the shade of the camp leader’s awning to get a better view.

  Up and down the country, millions of loyal citizens watched Lady Diana Spencer glide up the aisle of St Paul’s on her father’s arm, to the sound of the ‘Trumpet Voluntary’. In her dress, with its yards of taffeta, Diana was the embodiment of every little girl’s dream. She was celebrated that afternoon with toasts of champagne, of cider and of dandelion and burdock. On the campsite at Littlehampton, there was dancing until dawn.

  Kate Williamson fell asleep beneath a trestle table. Her father scooped her into his arms to carry her back to the caravan. Halfway across the field, she stirred into wakefulness.

  ‘One day,’ she told her father, ‘I’m going to marry a prince.’

  Chapter One

  20 October 2010, Paris

  It was much too cold and wet to be standing in a queue to go up the Eiffel Tower, but Ian was insistent. How could you go to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower? Especially as, Ian reminded Kate, he had never been to Paris before. That was a sore point. Ian had been so proud of organising this surprise mini-break in the City of Light. He was gutted when Kate told him that not only had she been to Paris before, she had actually stayed in the very hotel where he had booked a junior suite.

  Kate stopped short of telling him that on her last visit – jus
t two years before – she and Dan had stayed in the hotel’s honeymoon suite. Not that there was ever any chance of a honeymoon with Dan, as he had somehow managed to be involved in complicated divorce proceedings for the entire four years Kate was with him, despite having officially separated from his wife two years before Kate arrived on the scene.

  So Ian had sulked all the way from St Pancras to Gare du Nord. He seemed set to keep sulking all day. At the Hôtel Renoir, Kate prayed that the receptionist would not recognise her, as she had recognised Dan two years earlier. How awful that had been. Putting two and two together to make five, the receptionist had greeted Kate by Dan’s ex-wife’s name.

  ‘We have put you in your favourite room, Mrs Harper,’ the girl said.

  That was how Kate and Dan came to be in the honeymoon suite. She told him it was one thing to be taken to the hotel where he and his ex had tried to save their marriage – on several occasions, as it turned out – but it was something else to have to sleep in the same bloody room. Dan was forced into a hasty upgrade.

  Despite that inauspicious start, Kate had liked the Hôtel Renoir and for that reason she persuaded Ian that there was no need for them to find a different hotel for their mini-break.

  ‘This trip is already a hundred per cent better than the last time I was here because I am with you,’ she assured him. ‘Everything is different.’ That much was absolutely true.

  Neither did she mind doing the tourist sights since Dan, of course, had been to Paris dozens of times with his Francophile wife and so refused to spend even a minute of Kate’s birthday weekend queuing to see the Mona Lisa. Kate wanted to see the Mona Lisa. She also wanted to see the Venus de Milo. She wanted to go to the Musée d’Orsay and see the Impressionists at the Orangerie and have her picture taken beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The Eiffel Tower, however, had never been high on Kate’s to-do list. Given her slight fear of heights, she had no particular desire to spend an hour getting to the top of the thing to spend five minutes looking at the ground. Especially on a wet, grey day like this. What would they be able to see, anyway? They should go to Saint-Germain instead, she suggested. Find a little bar and get quietly hammered on pastis.

  ‘No,’ said Ian, digging in his heels. ‘I’ve always wanted to go up the Eiffel Tower.’

  And so they went up the Eiffel Tower, squashed into the lift with a group of American tourists who were commiserating with one of their number over a handbag snatched. At the top, Ian pulled Kate away from the crowd. At least, as far away from the crowd as was possible in one of the world’s most visited monuments. There was no hope of being entirely alone.

  ‘Shame about the weather,’ Ian muttered.

  ‘Hmm.’ Kate looked out over the city towards the fairytale white domes of the Sacré-Coeur, barely visible through the mist. She was remembering standing in front of that cathedral, hearing Dan say that even now his divorce was through he wasn’t sure that he was, you know, ready to ‘move on’ and make their relationship permanent, when Ian interrupted her reverie with the question she should have known to expect.

  ‘Sorry?’ Kate didn’t quite catch what he’d said.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked again. He looked so scared. He was actually shaking, though maybe that was only through the effort of half sinking to one knee. Ian didn’t want to put his knee down properly because the floor was wet and his trousers were new. Kate asked if he was joking.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘of course I’m not joking. Kate Williamson, will you marry me?’

  Two of the American matrons from the lift were watching.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Kate, so intensely aware of her audience that she caught the cat’s-bottom tightening of lips her blasphemy elicited. ‘I mean, yes,’ she said, and it was as though she’d said it as much to appease the American matrons as to please Ian. She hadn’t had time to consider whether it pleased her. This was all so sudden.

  ‘Oh, Kate.’ Ian pulled her into a bear hug. ‘My Kate, my Kate, my Kate.’

  Kate dropped her camera. One of the matrons picked it up and obligingly took a series of snaps.

  ‘You’ll want to remember this moment for ever,’ she told Kate as she handed the camera back. ‘We are so pleased for you. You two young people take care of each other now.’

  ‘I am going to take care of this woman until the day I die,’ Ian responded proudly. He hugged Kate close again, rendering her unsteady on her feet.

  ‘You’ve made our vacation,’ the matron assured him. ‘To see a proposal in the most romantic place on earth!’

  Ian was looking at the photos on the camera already.

  ‘There we are,’ he said. ‘That’s us. That’s you and me getting engaged.’

  The Kate in the photographs looked ambushed, staring over Ian’s shoulder with wide and frightened eyes.

  ‘Were you surprised?’ Ian asked her, beginning the reminiscing before the moment was even complete.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Kate. ‘I suppose I was.’

  ‘Are you happy?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  She felt breathless and tearful. Exactly as she’d felt the time she almost died stepping out in front of a bus while exhausted from an all-nighter at the office. She could almost hear the squeal of the brakes. Was she frightened? Relieved?

  They joined the queue shuffling back towards the lift.

  ‘I haven’t got a ring yet, because I didn’t want to get something you didn’t like. I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Kate. ‘We can choose something in London.’

  You’re not properly engaged until you’ve got the ring, said a little voice at the back of Kate’s head. There’s still time to change your mind.

  No, Kate told the voice firmly. This is exactly what I’ve always wanted. This is the best moment of my life so far. She looked at Ian’s handsome profile as he pushed ahead through the crowd. She hadn’t been lying when she told Ian that everything about this, her second romantic weekend in Paris, was better than the first. She loved her kind and generous boyfriend. He made her feel so much better than any of the muppets she’d dated before him. She knew that when he promised he would always look after her, Ian actually meant it. He was steadfast and trustworthy. He was a proper, grown-up man who would never give her cause to worry or distrust him. She knew that he had made his proposal out of the very purest love, and there was nothing she wanted more than to spend the rest of her life as Mrs Ian Turner. Yes, Kate told the little voice. This is brilliant. Oh my God, I’m getting married!

  ‘Let’s not go back down to earth just yet.’ Kate caught her new fiancé by the arm. ‘I want to savour this moment for a little bit longer.’

  Kate easily persuaded Ian back to the viewing platform, where she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him so passionately that she raised a cheer from a coach party of pensioners from Frankfurt.

  Chapter Two

  20 October 2010, Cliveden, Berkshire

  Unlike Kate Williamson, Diana Ashcroft was absolutely expecting her proposal. In fact, it was she who had suggested the ideal date, 20 October 2010.

  ‘Twenty ten, twenty ten,’ she spelled it out. ‘That way, we’ll never forget it.’

  Diana’s boyfriend, Ben, nodded mutely while Diana issued instructions. Since her birthday was on 21 October, she continued, it made sense for Ben to take the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off work for a mini-break at Cliveden. Diana had always wanted to go to Cliveden. Either there or Belvoir Castle. It had to be somewhere classy. Somewhere special.

  Somewhere expensive, thought Ben.

  Going during the week would make their hotel stay slightly more economical, Diana added thoughtfully. And she would love him for ever if he granted this one wish and made their engagement a real event. She gave Ben the coy smile that she knew he couldn’t resist.

  Ben duly booked the hotel and started shopping for the ring. At least that wouldn’t be too difficult. Diana and her mother, Susie, had already been into Goldsmiths
at the West Quay Shopping Centre and spent an hour narrowing the contenders down to two, so that Ben could pick his favourite.

  ‘Of course, you get the final say,’ Diana promised.

  However, as he was standing in the shop, taking in the prices in stunned dismay, Diana texted to tell him that she really, really preferred the princess-cut invisible centre and diamond-set band from the new Excitement collection, which was the more expensive ring by several hundred pounds. Ben was altogether less excited than panicked as he handed over his credit card to be swiped to the tune of £3,499.99.

  ‘You’re supposed to spend a month’s wages on the ring,’ Diana told him when he returned to their house looking pale, ‘so you should probably get me some earrings as well.’

  With the engagement ring, the matching earrings and the mini-break at Cliveden, Ben figured that he had spent all his disposable income for the year in one fell swoop. But how could he put a price on Diana’s happiness? he reminded himself. And her forgiveness. This engagement, which had come upon him rather more quickly than he expected, was the sign of commitment Diana had demanded after discovering he had cheated on her with a girl from work.

  ‘It’s the only way I can ever trust you again,’ she told him.

  After the tears and the terrifying screaming matches that had followed his being busted, Ben was happy to agree to just about anything. Like most men, Ben would sooner have faced a machine gun than a crying girl. Forget waterboarding, waterworks were the ultimate torture.

  Ben told himself that he would have proposed to Diana at some point anyway. Diana was the love of his life. The fling with Lucy, the girl from work, was a huge mistake. They had flirted for months, while working on the same project, by text and email, and in late-night ‘meetings’ at the pub. The build-up in sexual tension was incredible, but anyone might have predicted that as soon as the tension was released in an untidy bedroom in Lucy’s damp flat, the scales would fall from Ben’s eyes.

  Even as he lay in Lucy’s bed right afterwards, he started to compare her unfavourably with Diana, his girlfriend of seven years. Lucy’s sheets needed changing for a start. Ben shuddered at the thought that he might not be the first guy to have slept on this set. The walls of her bedroom were depressingly bare but for an Australian flag held up by drawing pins. She had nothing in her fridge but a carton of sour milk, which Ben only discovered was sour when he took an unfortunate swig from it. Lucy’s bathroom was filthy. The pink plastic backing strip of a panty liner curled obscenely on the floor beneath the toilet bowl. She was far from being a domestic goddess.