Page 17 of Spearcrest Prince

Four: that the world of rich people is small, and that when I’m spending time in a place frequented by the wealthy, I should be careful who I make out with. It’s why I was always so careful to only make friends from Aurigny, not from the Côte d’Azur. Just because I’ve left France doesn’t mean the rules are different here.

Finally: that Séverin Montcroix is much more handsome in real life than in photographs.

That’s saying a lot because his social media posts and professional portraits are so impeccably curated they feel more like fiction than reality, a modern take on Rococo portraits. But his good looks are real—they defy any camera lens that might ever have tried to capture them.

His beauty is for fairy tales: raven’s-wing-black hair, eyes green like moss or the underside of birch leaves. His skin has that olive richness to it he’s probably inherited from his mother’s Moroccan royalty heritage, his features graceful and handsome. The dusting of freckles on his nose gives him a sort of whimsical youthfulness, and there’s a slight curl to his lip that gives his mouth a sort of disdainful shape. That, he must get straight from his father.

Only blue-blooded French aristocracy could manage to look so effortlessly displeased and arrogant all the time.

But if photographs concealed Séverin’s real beauty, they also concealed his childish impetuousness and ridiculous imperiousness. I expected him to be exactly like all the Côte d’Azur old money kids I’ve been forced to meet over the years, but I’ve never before met anyone who exudes quite this much delusion and self-importance.

I’m pretty sure that when he pictures himself, Séverin Montcroix sees a crown on his head and an ermine-trimmed fur around his neck.

WhenIfinallygetback to Spearcrest after my unfortunate encounter with him, I go straight to sleep and spend the next day cleansing myself of everything that happened at the club.

I wash the smell of expensive alcohol and designer perfume off my skin; I drink litres of water to flush out the alcohol still coursing through my veins. I eat a healthy breakfast and try to think only positive thoughts.

Cleansing my body is the easy part. Cleansing my mind, not so much.

I would love to be the kind of girl who could sit in a square of sunlight and meditate her troubles away. But the only way I can ever process anything is by sketching the thoughts right out of my skull and onto paper.

So I grab my sketchbook and tin of pencils, wrap myself in a thick jumper and pull a woolly hat over my damp hair, and head out into the Spearcrest grounds.

Spearcrest is beautiful. I could even imagine myself loving it if it wasn’t so full of archaic rules and rich kids with arrogant sneers. Luckily for me, most students seem to either still be in bed or nursing their hangovers because the grounds are mostly empty when I stroll out of the sixth form girls’ dormitory.

I cross the manicured lawns with their emerald-green grass, the rows of aspens and benches lining the paths. There is a patch of trees north of the campus that’s calling to me, big ancient oaks with gnarly trunks and towering firs that spike the horizon with velvet green.

Instead, I end up settling in the Peace Garden. It’s a square of beauty; it stands out like a window to another world, with its colourful flowers and marble statues, all arranged with mirror-like symmetry around an ornate fountain.

Hoisting myself up on the rim of the fountain, I settle myself: legs crossed, sketchbook balanced on my knees.

When I left Aurigny, the sketchbook was perfectly empty, blank pages awaiting my thoughts and feelings, but it’s filling up fast. There are scribbled sketches from my first quick tour around the school, dreamy doodles from my first sleepless nights. Illustrations of the details of Spearcrest, the little features which caught my eye.

Like the geometrical pattern of the cupola crowning the library, or the intricate curlicues of the wrought-iron gates, or the thorny skyline formed by the turrets and finials of the Old Manor, and beyond that, the pines and firs.

Today, though, I’m not in the mood for sketching the school. But the flowers of the Peace Garden, with their moist petals and lush softness, are exactly the kind of gentle shapes I want my pencil to follow. My mind curves to the petals, softens with them, becoming elastic and alive.

As I draw, the spell of my pencil gliding across the paper takes shape. It wraps around me, around my blossoming mind, reshaping my thoughts around the shape of flower stems, flower petals, the powdery anthers. I lose myself in the images, in the mesmerising glide of the pencil.

My pocket vibrates, startling me and sending a pencilled line across one flower. I pull my phone from my back pocket and glance at the screen. My favourite name in the world appears over a picture of a boy holding fistfuls of torn-up grass-like spikes through his fingers.

I accept the call and wedge my phone between my shoulder and my ear, doing my best to incorporate my erroneous line into my drawing.

“Hello, Noël.”

“Hello,ma petite étoile. How’s it going?”

All the tension inside my body disappears, dissipating within me like a cloud of steam released into cold air.

My brother’s voice floods me with a warm wave of relief. My entire body melts, releasing tension I didn’t even know I was holding.

“It’s… well, it’s going.”

“England not living up to the dream, then?”

His voice is light. When Noël worries, you would never know. When Noël is sad or angry, you would need an eagle’s sharp eye to even guess. He’s a master at concealing his emotions—I’ve learned everything from him.

And I’ve still got a lot to learn.

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