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Prologue
“Was there anything else, Home Secretary?”
Alexia De Vere smiled. Home secretary. Surely the most beautiful two words in the English language. Except for prime minister, of course. The Tory Party’s newest superstar laughed at herself. One step at a time, Alexia.
“No, thank you, Edward. I’ll call if I need you.”
Sir Edward Manning nodded briefly and left the room. A senior civil servant in his early sixties and a bastion of the Westminster political establishment, Manning was tall and gray and as rigid as a matchstick. In the coming months, Sir Edward would be Alexia De Vere’s constant companion: advising, cautioning, expertly guiding her through the maze of Home Office politics. But right now, in these first few hours in the job, Alexia De Vere wanted to be alone. She wanted to savor the sweet taste of victory without an audience. To sit back and revel in the profound thrill of power.
After all, she’d earned it.
Getting up from her desk, she paced around her new office, a vast aerie of a room perched high in one of the Gothic towers of the Palace of Westminster. The interior design was more functional than fabulous. A matching pair of ugly brown sofas at one end (those must go), a simple desk and chair at the other, and a bookcase stuffed with dusty, unread tomes of political history. But none of that mattered once you saw the view. Spectacular didn’t begin to cover it. Floor-to-ceiling windows provided a panoramic vista of London, from the towers of Canary Wharf in the east to the mansions of Chelsea in the west. It was a view that said one thing and one thing only.
Power.
And it was all hers.
I am the home secretary of Great Britain. The second-most-important member of Her Majesty’s government.
How had it happened? How had a junior prisons minister, and a deeply unpopular one at that, leapfrogged so many other senior candidates to land the big job? Poor Kevin Lomax over at Trade and Industry must be spitting yellow, coffee-stained teeth. The thought made Alexia De Vere feel warm inside. Patronizing old fossil. He wrote me off years ago, but who’s laughing now?
Pilloried in the press for being wealthy, aristocratic, and out of touch with ordinary voters, and dubbed the new Iron Lady by the tabloids, Alexia De Vere’s sentencing reform bill had been savaged by MPs on both sides of the house for being “compassionless” and “brutal.” No-parole sentences might work in America, a country so barbaric they still had the death penalty. But they weren’t going to fly here, in civilized Great Britain.
That’s what they said. But when push came to shove, they’d all voted the bill through.
Cowards. Cowards and hypocrites the lot of them.
Alexia De Vere knew how unpopular the bill had made her, with colleagues, with the media, with lower-income voters. So she was as shocked as everyone else when the prime minister, Henry Whitman, chose to appoint her as his home secretary. But she didn’t dwell on it. The fact was, Henry Whitman had appointed her. At the end of the day, that was all that mattered.
Reaching into a box, Alexia pulled out some family photographs. She preferred to keep her work and home lives separate, but these days everyone was so touchy-feely, having pictures of one’s children on one’s desk had become de rigueur.
There was her daughter, Roxie, at eighteen, her blond head thrown back, laughing. How Alexia missed that laugh. Of course, the picture had been taken before the accident.
The accident. Alexia De Vere hated the euphemism for her daughter’s suicide attempt, a three-story leap that had left Roxie wheelchair bound for the rest of her life. In Alexia’s view, one should call a spade a spade. But Alexia’s husband, Teddy, insisted on it. Dear Teddy. He always was a soft touch.
Placing her husband’s photograph next to their daughter’s, Alexia smiled. An unprepossessing, paunchy middle-aged man, with thinning hair and permanently ruddy cheeks, Teddy De Vere beamed at the camera like a lovable bear.
How different my life would have been without him. How much, how very much, I owe him.
Of course, Teddy De Vere was not the only man to whom Alexia owed her good fortune. There was Henry Whitman, the new Tory prime minister and Alexia’s self-appointed political mentor. And somewhere, far, far away from here, there was another man. A good man. A man who had helped her.
But she mustn’t think about that man. Not now. Not today.
Today was a day of triumph and celebration. It was no time for regrets.
The third picture was of Alexia’s son, Michael. What an insanely beautiful boy he was, with his dark curls and slate-gray eyes and that mischievous smile that melted female hearts from a thousand paces. Sometimes Alexia thought that Michael was the only person on earth she had ever loved unconditionally. Roxie ought to fall into that category too, but after everything that had happened between them, the bad blood had poisoned the relationship beyond repair.
After the photographs it was time for the congratulations cards, which had been arriving in a steady stream since Alexia’s shock appointment was announced two days earlier. Most of them were dull, corporate affairs sent by lobbyists or constituency hangers-on. They had pictures of popping champagne bottles or dreary floral still-lifes. But one card in particular immediately caught Alexia’s eye. Against a Stars-and-Stripes background, the words YOU ROCK! were emblazoned in garish gold. The message inside read:
Congratulations, darling Alexia! SO excited and SO proud of you. All my love, Lucy!!!! xxx
Alexia De Vere grinned. She had very few female friends—very few friends of any kind, in fact—but Lucy Meyer was the exception that proved the rule. A neighbor from Martha’s Vineyard, where the De Veres owned a summer home—Teddy had fallen in love with the island whilst at Harvard Business School—Lucy Meyer had become almost like a sister. She was a traditional homemaker, albeit of the über-wealthy variety, and as American
as apple pie. Alternately motherly and childlike, she was the sort of woman who used a lot of exclamation points in e-mails and wrote her i’s with full circles instead of dots on the top. To say that Lucy Meyer and Alexia De Vere had little in common would be like saying that Israel and Palestine didn’t always see exactly eye to eye. And yet the two women’s friendship, forged over so many blissful summers on Martha’s Vineyard, had survived all the ups and downs of Alexia’s crazy political life.
Standing by the window, Alexia gazed down at the Thames. From up here the river looked benign and stately, a softly flowing ribbon of silver snaking its silent way through the city. But down below, Alexia knew, its currents could be deadly. Even now, at fifty-nine years of age and at the pinnacle of her career, Alexia De Vere couldn’t look at water without feeling a shudder of foreboding. She twisted her wedding ring nervously.
How easily it can all be washed away! Power, happiness, even life itself. It only takes an instant, a single unguarded instant. And it’s gone.
