“Not on my watch,” she snapped back. Her eyes were glinting fire; this was Pippa’s happy place. She was primed for charging into battle. “Bridezilla needs feeding, she’s getting hangry, and I’ve got to go and make sure the orangery roof isn’t leaking on my velour seat pads.”

“Is it raining?” asked Ameerah.

“No, thank fuck. It snowed again in the night, and there’s a crack in one of the glass ceiling panels. I got somebody to patch it yesterday. Go feed Jenna before she murders the manicurist.”

As they got up to leave the dining room, the sound of heavy feet on the stairs drew them out into the hall. Charles, Guy, Jeremy, and Dev—who had been adopted as an honorary groomsman—were in the process of being banished from the house, still in their pj’s. They carried their suits in large garment bags, and all of them, barring Dev, had the kind of hair that suggested they’d slept heavily after a hard night’s drinking. Dev waved and smiled kind of goofily at Ameerah as they passed. He blew her a kiss, which, to Nory’s astonishment, Ameerah made a show of catching.

The men were bundled into Andy’s car, ready to be driven to one of the old coach houses, which had been turned into holiday lets. A full English breakfast was being laid out for them, and when they were wedding ready, they would be deposited in the Mead and Medlar until it was time for the wedding.

“How come men always get the easy jobs?” asked Ameerah, shivering against the chill of the early morning whisking into the entrance hall.

The courtyard glittered with a thick crystalline layer of ice, which had formed over last night’s snow, a salt path melted through the middle. The sky was still dark but cloudless, and it didn’t look like there would be any more snow today.

“Male privilege,” Nory replied as the butler pushed the door closed.

“It’s not fair. All they have to do is dress, eat, and go to the pub. While we’ve got to tame the bridal beast.”

“Yeah, but imagine if we left Charles, Guy, and Jez in charge of organizing the wedding.”

“I wouldn’t trust them with organizing my sock drawer, let alone a wedding.” Ameerah scoffed.

“Then you’ve answered your own question. They get the easy jobs because we don’t trust them with anything else. It’s a perpetuating cycle—we don’t give them responsibility because we assume they can’t handle it, and therefore they never learn to do the things we moan about them not being able to do.”

“It’s a bit early for that kind of radical feminism, isn’t it?”

“I had three coffees with breakfast.”

“Pace yourself, Noel, it’s gonna be a long day!”