Miss Alexandra Chester
Lucian’s sister. Unmarried, living in the house Judith pays for, attended by a succession of companions Judith also pays for, and in the habit of telling people she has just met that she is mad.
Miss Alexandra Chester. CVM Sekai original art.
Alexandra is the most misread character in this book, and this site was misreading her until the text was checked line by line. She looks like a blackmailer. She is not one. She is an unmarried woman with no independent means whom Judith has quietly supported for ten years, and the needling she does in public is the behavior of somebody who knows precisely how dependent she is and hates it.
What she actually holds over Judith is not a secret. It is the fact of being Lucian’s sister, showing up whenever she likes, and being physically unignorable on the subject of a husband Judith has spent a decade not discussing. She turns up on his birthday. She says he would not have approved of Gideon. She is a walking reminder, and she knows it.
She also gets an ending, which is more than most needling relatives are given: she decides to marry, and Judith signs the house over.
The file
| Name | Miss Alexandra Chester. The Miss is load bearing and the book uses it |
|---|---|
| Marital status | Unmarried for the whole novel. Decides to marry at page 330 |
| Family | Sister of Lucian, Lord Chester. Sister-in-law to Judith |
| Residence | Chester House |
| Means | Something was left to her by Lucian’s parents after his death, page 161. It is plainly not enough to live on |
| Supported by | Judith, who covers the servants’ salaries, the upkeep of the building, and a continuous succession of companions for her, page 162 |
| Attachment | Mr. Nigel Howard, an artist whose brilliance, in her words, has yet to be recognized |
| Circle | The artistic community that had been her brother’s world, page 164 |
| Habit | Tells people she has only just met that she is mad, page 166 |
| First appearance | Page 153, arriving unannounced while Judith is with Gideon |
| Status at the end of the volume | Alive, engaged, and about to own the house |
| Book and series | A Little Bit Wicked, Last Man Standing book 1, by Victoria Alexander |
The entrance, and the line she says in front of Gideon
My lord, may I present my sister-in-law… Miss Alexandra Chester.
Lucian wouldn’t have liked him at all.
That is her opening move and it tells you her entire method. She does not accuse Judith of anything. She invokes the dead husband, in the present tense, to a man Judith is standing next to, and lets it do the work.
She pays me, you know.
Judith begins to correct it and Gideon, to his credit, defuses the whole thing with a joke about tailors. But the line is out, and it is true, and Alexandra chose to put it in front of the one person whose opinion Judith cares about.
Note what is not happening here. She is not threatening to reveal anything. She is announcing her own dependence, loudly, in company. That is not extortion. That is somebody making her benefactor uncomfortable because it is the only power she has.
The arrangement nobody calls charity
Page 162 itemizes it: servants’ salaries, upkeep of the building, and a continuous succession of companions for Alexandra. That last item is the one worth sitting with. Companions, plural, in succession, paid for by somebody else, is not a social arrangement. It is care.
Page 161 adds the detail that Judith had wanted to deed Chester House to Alexandra outright and was talked out of it, on the grounds that keeping the title in her own name was the only way to protect something. The novel does not spell out what, and this page will not guess.
And Judith’s private reaction when Alexandra floats moving out is relief, immediately suppressed. She has been doing this for a decade and she is tired, and she never once says so to Alexandra’s face.
[She] stifled the urge to scream.
Oh, but I like calling on you, sister dear.
The birthday
It’s his birthday as well and you hate it.
Six words, and they are the sharpest thing anyone does to Judith in the novel. She is not wrong, she is not lying, and there is no way to answer it. It is also, read the other way, the observation of the only other person alive who is still marking that date.
Mr. Nigel Howard
His brilliance has yet to be recognized but it will be soon.
“Can Mr. [Howard] support a wife?” “I wouldn’t think so but I can support him.”
Nigel is a dear, dear man but I must admit he’s a little too dear.
Mr. Nigel Howard is an unrecognized artist out of the same artistic community Lucian belonged to. Alexandra cannot support herself and proposes to support him, which means what she is really negotiating with Judith is the size of the settlement.
Then, when Judith agrees that a marriage would need arranging, Alexandra pulls the rug: Then I won’t marry him. She does this repeatedly. Judith’s own summary of the pattern is the giveaway.
[She] had fallen into traps far too often to let her guard down now. It was always the same.
Judith has never met Mr. Howard. The whole negotiation is about a man she has not been introduced to.
The word she uses about herself
You should probably stop telling people you’ve just met that you are mad.
You’re absolutely right.
Read Judith’s line carefully, because it is doing something specific. She does not say you are not mad. She says stop telling people. It is advice about disclosure, not a contradiction, and Alexandra agrees pleasantly and presumably carries on.
This sits about thirty pages from the passage in which Judith refuses to think the words mad or insane about Lucian, and the novel never puts the two together. No character suggests a family pattern. No condition is named for either sibling. See Lucian’s profile, which records the same juxtaposition and declines to close it, because the book declines to close it.
The one moment Judith sees her
It struck Judith that it had been a very long time for Alexandra as well. Judith had moved on with her life but…
That is the hinge of the character. Judith lost a husband and rebuilt around it. Alexandra lost a brother and did not rebuild around anything, because she had nothing to rebuild with: no money, no marriage, no household of her own, and a sister-in-law paying for her companions.
The same conversation includes the observation that ten years since Lucian died is long enough, and a negotiation about how long to wait that lands on a year. Judith is being pressed on whether she is in love with Gideon, and answers no a beat too slowly to be believed.
“No,” Judith said quickly but apparently not quickly enough.
How it resolves
I’ve decided to marry Nigel [Howard].
[I] shall speak to my solicitors at once about transferring ownership of the house to Mr. [Howard].
Ten years of maintenance, and Judith resolves it in a sentence the moment there is a husband to transfer it to. That is a period-accurate detail rather than a slight: the house goes to Mr. Howard, not to Alexandra, because that is how it worked.
It is also the cleanest evidence that this was never a hostage situation. Judith had wanted Alexandra to have the house back at page 161 and was advised against it. The instant a legitimate route exists she takes it, at once, without negotiating.
What the book withholds
Her age. Never stated.
What is actually wrong with her, if anything. She calls herself mad. Nobody else in the book does, and no condition is named. The companions imply something needs managing and the novel never says what.
What Lucian’s parents left her, and why it is insufficient. Referred to once at page 161 with no figure.
Why Judith was advised not to deed her the house. The advice is mentioned, the reasoning is not, and the adviser is not clearly identified.
Whether she knows what her brother became. She is the person best placed to know and the book never asks her.
Where she connects
Judith, Lady Chester
Her sister-in-law, her landlord and the source of her income, in that order.
CharacterLucian, Lord Chester
Her brother, and the subject she raises whenever she wants leverage.
Book hubA Little Bit Wicked
Last Man Standing book 1. Plot, arcs, tropes, reacts and the full cast.
CastAll characters
Everyone who speaks or is spoken to in this book.
The RaeRae take
I had Alexandra filed as the one extorting Judith, and going back to the actual pages killed that reading in about four minutes. Nothing is being extorted. There is no secret and no threat. There is a dependent woman who says embarrassing true things in public because it is the only leverage available to a person with no money and no husband in 1850s London.
She is genuinely unpleasant to Judith and she is genuinely owed something by her, and the novel is comfortable holding both. The birthday line is cruel. It is also the observation of the only other person still counting. She dangles Mr. Howard to extract a settlement. She also plainly likes him, and she marries him in the end.
What I would push on is that the book gives Judith a whole interior life about her ten years and gives Alexandra one sentence of it, at page 165, filtered through Judith noticing. Two women lost the same man on the same day. One got a novel. The other got companions, plural, in succession, paid for by somebody else.
Sources
Primary source is the novel itself: A Little Bit Wicked by Victoria Alexander, Last Man Standing book 1, 374 pages, read on Kindle. Page numbers are Kindle page numbers, verified by in-book search on the terms Alexandra and Howard so every quotation above sits at the page given.
No secondary source, wiki, blurb or adaptation has been used. Where the book does not say something, this page says that it does not say it.