Chapter 17
Petey
The blast of a fox horn pierced the cool morning air in Buckford Hall’s carriage court.
Our run of good luck with the weather had ended.
The day was grey and threatening to rain.
To my left, Armando—dressed in a bright red hunting jacket—put his foot in a stirrup and expertly launched himself into the saddle.
To my right, a pack of ten beagles was being loved to death by a dozen members of the cast—including Lola Q, who was following the dogs around with an itchy Instagram finger, and Jonty, who I noticed was following Lola Q like a puppy.
The horn blasted again, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Tom, the hot farm boy, was getting trumpet lessons from the show’s historical consultant—learning the different calls traditionally made during a hunt. My headset squawked.
“Dorinda’s almost ready. Five minutes.”
I checked my watch. Ten thirty a.m.
Despite Ellie’s rebellion, we’d managed to get five of the cast to agree to the mock hunt.
Tom was so enthusiastic there was a chance he might actually kill a fox if the opportunity arose.
Tom was… troublingly intense. Armando was on the Italian national polo team and would have agreed to anything to be on horseback, and I was reasonably certain how good he looked on horseback was exactly why Indira had us here.
Fitness influencer Cristina, Theo the carpenter from Luton, and Ridhi the Bookstagrammer had also been willing to take part.
Tom blew on the trumpet again, and a moment later, I heard shouting across the carriage court.
“No! No! NO! Ab-so-lutely not!” It was William’s voice.
But I couldn’t see him. I’d snuck out quietly that morning, desperate not to wake him, unable to face him after the night before.
His voice came again. “Stop this at once! Are you mad?” My ears found the direction of his voice, and I looked up to see him shirtless and hanging out a window at the top of his tower.
“Pardon?” I called up, heart in my throat.
A well-muscled arm thrust from the window, pointed finger jabbing in my direction.
“Stay. Right. There,” William yelled. Then he disappeared inside the tower, pulling the window closed behind him.
Then opening it again. Then closing it. Then opening and closing it several times in quick succession.
I think he was struggling with it. He opened it wide again and hung out of it a ridiculously long way.
“Don’t you dare move, Peter Topham.” He slid back inside, slamming the window shut, but it seemed to bounce open again.
He continued opening and closing it for a moment before it swung wide open and, given he didn’t reappear, I assumed he’d abandoned it.
Forty seconds later, he was striding across the carriage court in bare feet, wearing nothing but his tiny red satin boxer shorts and the gold chain bouncing around his neck.
His face was as full of thunder as the skies overhead.
Every pair of eyes in the carriage court was fixed on him. Even the duck stopped to watch.
“What didn’t you understand about what I said last night?” he demanded.
My breath caught in my throat. He had to be kidding. He wanted to do this here? Now? In front of the entire cast and crew?
“Uh-oh, trouble in paradise!” That was Jonty, obviously. Although I wanted to throttle him, it did remind me William and I were meant to be madly in love.
I grabbed the ridiculous aristocrat by his bicep, ignoring the sexy way it tensed under my touch, and turned him back towards the house.
“Not in front of the children, darling,” I said, letting my nails sink in as I dragged him away. “Shall we talk about this inside?”
In fact, a few moments later we’d marched all the way through the house to the lake on the other side. William’s face looked like it had been boiled in a bag. I was fuming.
“Never ever show me up in front of my cast and crew like that again,” I barked.
“I can’t believe you,” William said. He was pacing around on the gravel, shaking his head. “That’s what you’re worried about?”
“My job requires me to maintain a level of respect and authority,” I said.
“So does mine!” I could literally see the veins on either side of his neck pulsing. “And I clearly have neither your respect nor any authority, because if I did, I wouldn’t have been woken up by a hunting horn.”
“Wait, is that what this is about? We woke you up? Do you still keep Regency hours? Were you up gaming all night at your club?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “William, I thought this was about last night.”
“This is about last night. I could not have made myself clearer last night.”
I wasn’t having it. “Oh, mate, you absolutely could have made yourself clearer last night. In fact, I really wish you had. Because I made an idiot of myself. I hate that I now have to live in a freaking tower with you, that I have to pretend that I’m in love with you, that I’m going to marry you, when in fact all I want to do is never see your stupid, perfect, posh-twat face ever again. ”
William stopped pacing and spun around to face me, his eyes wide. “You think this is about the kiss?”
“What else could it be about?” I’d barely thought about anything other than my appallingly misjudged workplace assault since it happened. I’d barely slept all night, worrying what to do about it. My only reprieve had been my alarm going off and throwing myself into my work.
“This is about the fact there’s a bloody fox hunt meeting in my carriage court. Are you insane?”
I hadn’t seen that coming.
“I blathered on for ages last night about my father’s legacy, how Buckford is a wildlife sanctuary, how it’s my parents’ life’s work. And this morning I find you organising a fox hunt.”
He crossed his eyes, stabbed a finger into his head, and stuck his tongue into his bottom lip so it protruded grotesquely.
It was the unmistakable gesture used by children everywhere to tell other children they’re too thick to function.
Message received. Honestly, this pretend fox hunt had already been far more trouble than the footage was worth.
If Indira hadn’t spent so much money on the costumes, I’d go back there and talk her out of it—but I knew she wouldn’t change her mind.
“It’s not real,” I said.
“It looks real.”
“Fox-hunting is illegal. It’s obviously not real.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re romanticising a brutal blood sport. There are freaks out there who will watch this on TV and think, Oh what a shame, one of the old traditions of the English countryside that’s disappeared, let’s bring it back.”
I hated that I agreed with him because I was still incredibly angry with him. When I say I was angry, I mean I’d been embarrassed and anger was how I was processing it. My headset crackled, and I lifted it to my ear.
“Where the hell are you?” Indira barked. “Dorinda’s ready.”
Thunder rumbled through the sky. I looked at William.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” I said. “Some of the cast raised concerns, too, but they’ve fallen on deaf ears.”
William shook his head. “You know my parents organised the anti-fox-hunting rallies across the East and West Midlands? For years. Buckford Hall was base camp.”
“I’m sorry, William. It’s not my decision. You can take it up with Indira, but you won’t get anywhere.” I put my headset on and turned to walk back through the house to the carriage court. “Coming, Indira,” I said.
As I trotted up the stairs, I turned back to look at William. He was shaking his head.
“You’re going to awaken forces you don’t even understand,” he shouted after me. It sounded like the ravings of a madman.
By the time Dorinda had filmed her parts and the hunt got underway, it had started to rain heavily.
I joined Indira in the production office in the Old Coach House, listening to the storm thrum against the slate roof tiles.
It smelt like petrichor and diesel fumes and Indira’s cigarettes, which added an extra frisson of danger to the events about to take place.
“What did Lord Bucknaked want?” Indira asked.
I shrugged. “Nothing I couldn’t fix.”
We had five crews on electric quad bikes set up on a predetermined course around the Buckford Estate, ready to film our pretend hunt.
Except for one fixed camera trained on the actor Samuel Fox, which was livestreaming directly back to the Old Coach House, we had no way to beam the footage back to us live, so we couldn’t see what was happening.
We had to rely on reports coming in from our crews in the field on the walkie-talkies. Ours crackled into life.
“Base, this is Unit One.”
“Go ahead, Hassan.”
“Base, uh, we’ve got company.”
Indira squinted, and I wondered if this was how she powered up the lasers in her eyes.
“Define ‘company’ for me, Hassan.”
“We have at least two dozen anti-fox-hunting protesters on set.”
“Where the fuck did they come from?” Indira’s eyes narrowed further, and I got a sinking feeling her eye lasers would be pointed at me any second. “Can we film around them?”
The walkie-talkie crackled.
“Negative. They’re spread out all across Home Field. They have placards, and they’re shouting anti-fox-hunting slogans. Even if we can keep them out of the shot, the audio will be unusable.”
Indira switched the channel on the walkie-talkie and barked an order at the head of security to send every single person they had to Home Field to deal with our unexpected guests, then switched back to the regular frequency.
“Hassan, push onto Hill Gate. Unit Two, are you there?”
The walkie-talkie crackled, and Su-wei confirmed she was waiting with her crew at Hill Gate.
“Any sign of anyone in the woods?”
“All clear, Base.”
“OK, get ready for handover. Once we get the cast through the gate, we should be good to go.”
Indira’s hand dived into her cigarette packet. She produced a dart and lit it with such fluidity it resembled tai chi. She sucked in the tobacco and held it in her lungs until I thought she might actually have died, then blew it out in a heavy stream that fogged the air around us.
“Any idea how they knew about this?”
My heart was in my throat. “No idea.”
The laser eyes were on me. I froze, in case her vision relied on movement.
“What exactly was it Lord Fuckstud wanted earlier?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
Indira wasn’t buying it. The lasers were heating up.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”
“And what, specifically, did you handle?”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was suddenly too dry, so I let my sandpapery tongue rasp down my throat to my stomach and then crawl its way back up again.
“He… had some concerns.”
“About anything in particular?”
“I couldn’t say…”
Indira sucked on her cigarette, eyes never leaving me. “Was it about fox-hunting, by any chance?”
The jig was up. “He might have mentioned that the whole estate is a wildlife sanctuary and very specifically that his parents led the anti-fox-hunting rallies before the ban.”
“Shit.”
“For the whole Midlands.”
“Shit.”
Indira blew the smoke out the side of her mouth and closed her eyes, holding them shut. “How much time have they had to prepare?”
I checked my watch. It was midday. “Ninety minutes? He only found out about it when he heard the hunting horn go.”
Indira opened her eyes and nodded, slowly. “OK, how much damage could they possibly organise in ninety minutes, right?”
The walkie-talkie crackled. “Base, this is Unit Two.”
“Go ahead, Su-wei.”
“Base, we’ve lost the dogs.”
Indira and I stared at each other.
“What do you mean you’ve lost the dogs?”
“Base, the old butler dude turned up with, like, I swear, maybe two hundred cooked sausages. He threw them to the dogs, and, well, have you ever met a beagle? They’ve scoffed the lot, and they’re all passed out across the bridle trail, we can’t even get around them on the bike.”
Indira shook her head. “Are the dogs OK, Unit Two?”
“Base, I’d say the dogs have never been happier. But they won’t be bounding up this hill any time soon.”
Indira turned to me. “How do you find and cook two hundred sausages in ninety minutes?” She squinted. “Are you sure you didn’t let anything slip last night while you were shucked up in your love turret?”
“I promise. This isn’t my fault.” Somehow it felt like my fault, but I literally could not be blamed for this.
Indira inhaled on her cigarette like an asthmatic on a Ventolin puffer.
“Unit Two, can you get around the dogs?”
The walkie-talkie popped and squeaked. “That’s a negative for the bike. The horses can pick a route through the trees.”
“OK, Unit Two, you stay with the dogs. Send the cast up to Unit Three. Unit Three, are you reading?”
“I gotchyu, Base.”
“Jameelah, is there any sign of any trouble up there?”
“We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
It was a tense ten minutes while our “hunt” rode up Buckford Hill in the pouring rain to the stone circle, where Indira had planned for a stunning drone shot that would show the cast on horseback, in their hunting clobber, looking out over the estate—Buckford Hall glittering in the sunshine. Except we’d lucked a storm instead.
“Base, we got a problem, innit.”
“What is it, Jameelah?”
“We got two old women—come out of nowhere—running around the stone circle with their tits out.”
Indira’s head landed with a thud on the desk. “The mad fucking mother.”
The walkie-talkie crackled again.
“Base, Derek’s trying to catch one of them.” Crackle. “Oop, nearly.” Crackle. “Oh shit—”
Indira sat up and grabbed the walkie-talkie, holding it between us.
“Come in, Unit Three. Are you OK?”
Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty seconds passed before the walkie-talkie fizzed back into life.
“Base, we got a situation, innit?”
We could hear screaming in the background. For the first time, I saw genuine worry on Indira’s face. “Go ahead, Unit Three.”
“Derek slipped and went arse up. I think he’s broken his arm.”
Indira turned and shouted “Medic!” The sound of it echoed down the Old Coach House. My pulse was racing, but Jameelah wasn’t finished.
“That ain’t even it, though,” her voice came again. “Only when he fell his duck slipped out of its baby sling.”
Indira’s head was in her hands. “Is the duck OK, Unit Three?” she asked wearily.
The walkie-talkie crackled.
“Scarpered, mate. Flapped his wings, took off, did one lap overhead, and disappeared. To be fair, I think that’s why Derek’s screaming.”
The head medic appeared in the doorway, and Indira barked instructions at him. It was then my eyes caught the monitor showing the live feed from the camera we had trained on our “fox.” My heart sank. I pointed to the monitor.
“What now?” Indira barked.
“I think someone has kidnapped the actor Samuel Fox,” I said.