Now Arabella’s goal of marrying off her children “to the debilitated descendants of Victoria and Albert” has become even more urgent. She’s especially concerned about her only son, Rufus, a wayfaring dreamer who spends his time painting and surfing and being described by the press as “sex on a stick” whose “brow ridges alone could command half a billion.”
To his mother’s distress, he’s also getting too close to Thomas Tong’s daughter, Eden – an unassuming childhood friend who grew up next to Greshambury Hall.
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For Arabella, when there’s a will, there’s a way — especially when you’re connected to an empire of status-obsessed individuals who have honorific titles, own luxury super yachts and have personal art consultants on speed dial.
Arabella calls upon some familial help. With just one phone call, she is taking a helicopter from Battersea to Paris for a meeting to enact a trifecta of royal marriages. By having her son marry Princess Solene de Courcy of France, she can finally link the Greshams with the noblest houses of Europe and become the matriarch of her own self-made dynasty.
Cue a montage of globetrotting action from London to Venice to Paris to Hong Kong to Beverly Hills to Marrakesh to Hawaii. Money can dismantle boundaries and borders. The Greshams use it to affix families together.
Like Jane Austen featuring Asian people, Kwan’s novel has the impressionistic quality of a Bridgerton episode. Everyone is blessed with ethereal beauty, and it is beauty alone that will inevitably attract fortune.
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