Chapter 21
Petey
We went upstairs to William’s bedroom in the belvedere so we could open some windows.
The belvedere was a bit like a summer house but stuck on top of the tower.
It had glass on all sides, giving us an incredible view across the lake, the fields, and the hilltops of the Buckford Estate.
William’s temporary bed was a mattress on top of some sort of wooden platform.
The place was like a fairy-tale castle. We sat opposite each other, cross-legged on the bed—William in his boxers, me in my robe—coughing our lungs up.
“This is rough,” I said, passing the joint back to William.
“Gordon Ramsay could attack my lungs with a cheese grater and it would feel smoother than this,” he said.
I was getting a very light buzz, but nothing worth losing the lining of my throat over.
William took another small hit and fell about spluttering.
“Now I remember why I haven’t done this in years.”
He passed it across and leant back on his elbows on the bed, getting some air into his lungs.
The shadows of the leaded lighting in the windows cast diamonds over his smooth skin, the curves of his arms and pecs, and the small hump of his softening belly.
The sight was doing more to get me high than the dope.
I wanted to get the conversation around to Horatio Blunt.
I wanted to know who he was and what he wanted—because William had been furious to see him turn up at the pub, and his face had been practically purple by the time their conversation was over.
I felt weirdly protective of this beefy horse-riding himbo, and I needed to know what could upset him like that.
But William’s eyes were still watery—and I knew it wasn’t from the gin or the ancient spliff.
“What was he like, your old man?” I asked, giving the geriatric doobie another go.
William sighed and stared out the window while I hacked up the smoke.
“Dad was a hippie. Decades too late to be a real hippie, obviously. He was rebelling, I suppose. Like we all do.”
He looked straight at me then. I looked away. I didn’t want to talk about Sir Edward and Angelica now. I couldn’t help but notice William hadn’t actually described what the old baron had been like as a father.
“How do you rebel against a father who leaves pot for you in his desk drawer?”
William laughed. “You become a fantasy-reading, Dungeons and Dragons–playing rugby jock.”
“How did that go down?” I offered him the joint, but he shook his head.
“He didn’t care in the least, as long as I was happy.”
My heart wrung itself out in my chest, the way it always did when someone talked about having loving, supportive parents.
“You’re lucky, bruv. What was it like growing up here?”
“As childhoods go, it could have been a lot worse. My parents indulged our imagination. They encouraged us to get outside and play. We had four thousand acres and no discipline. I remember, one time, David and I had a fight over—I don’t remember—something stupid.
I felt slighted and I declared, rather pompously, as I was all of seven, ‘I demand satisfaction.’ Goodness only knows what I’d been reading at the time.
Well, Dad thought that was hilarious. So, our parents acted as seconds while my brother and I fought a duel, over there on the Great Lawn, with pea-shooters made from hollowed-out biros.
David and I fired spitballs at each other for five minutes, until I finally managed to hit him square between the eyes with a really gloopy one, and honour was satisfied. ”
I laughed. “For real?”
“That was parenting the way my folks did it.”
“Sounds magical.”
“It was. I thought so, anyway. Until I discovered he was as lax with everything else as he was with discipline.”
William was opening up. He was quietly crying. Neither of us mentioned it.
“Do you mind if I ask what happened to them?”
“You don’t know?”
I said I didn’t, and William shrugged. “It’s all a matter of public record.
It was a light plane crash. David was an amateur pilot.
He’d taken Dad up for a joy flight. He liked to do that sometimes.
They had engine trouble, David tried to land it in a field, came down too steeply, and instead of skating along the grass, slammed into the ground. They died instantly.”
“I’m so sorry.” I couldn’t think what else to say. William reached for the joint and I handed it to him, grateful to have something to do. “That must have been a really hard time.”
“I was on a rugby trip down in London when it happened. There was a train strike, the roads were jammed. I couldn’t get home.
I was stranded, heartbroken, and alone. I cried myself to sleep in a cheap hotel in Saint Pancras that night.
When I finally did get home and someone called me ‘my lord’ for the first time, I found I was actually rather angry.
I still am, sometimes. At Dad. At David.
At life. But it is what it is. And here we are. ”
William sucked the smoke into his lungs, then covered his mouth as he spluttered and coughed. I passed him my drink. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. Perhaps it’s not a great idea to smoke a joint that’s older than your trauma?” He coughed again. “Anyway, we rallied. My godparents—you remember Leaf and Karma?”
“The fox hunt saboteurs?”
“They came down and stayed for a few weeks, to look after Mum. My sister and her husband came up from London with the kids. We had a lot to sort out. Including what it meant for my sister’s boy, Callum, who was now the heir.
We sat around and drank a lot and talked a lot and had a tonne of meetings with accountants and lawyers and slowly came to the terrible realisation we were all quite fucked. ”
“Fucked how?”
William shook his head. “Never mind.”
He took another hit on the joint, passed it to me, and got up and opened another window. He stood there, letting the cool night air drift over his skin, his body bathed in moonlight. He was beautiful. My stomach fluttered with nerves, and I took a hit to calm them. It was time to shoot my shot.
“The man at the pub today?”
William turned to look at me, resting his buttocks against the windowsill.
“What did he want?”
“He wants me to sell the estate. He’s found buyers. Belarusian oligarchs. They’re cashed up, and they’re determined. They want to turn it into a hotel.”
“You’re kidding. You’re not going to sell it, are you?”
William smiled, a big cheesy grin. He laughed, wiping the tears from his cheeks with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t want to. But Horatio’s right, it would solve a lot of problems.”
At the thought of it, William’s face seemed to change. He looked tired. Suddenly, I could see the weight he’d been carrying around.
“Your money trouble. Is it… bad?”
William looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes.
The great bulk of his chest grew as he slowly filled with air, then gently deflated again as he slowly released it.
When his eyes opened, the moonlight glinted in his tears.
He walked across the room, smoothly sweeping the joint out of my hand and sticking it in his mouth on the way.
He reached for his book and plucked out a brown envelope.
He passed it to me and sat back against the windowsill, sucking back on the last of the joint.
“Open it,” he said, coughing. “Do you want any more of this?”
I shook my head. “Not without anaesthetic.” He dropped the roach into his glass.
I turned the envelope over in my hands. It was from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the words URGENT: DO NOT IGNORE written across it in red ink. I’d never seen one like that before. I was horrified.
“You’re meant to open these.”
William waved a hand. “You open it.”
I stared at him, unsure if he was serious.
“Please.”
I slid my finger into the corner of the envelope and extracted the letter. It started out boring enough. Then my eyes landed on the number.
“Holy shit, William, you owe HMRC four point three million pounds.”
He sighed, his shoulders slumping.
“Did you know about this?”
He shook his head. “I knew we owed a lot. I had no idea it was so much.”
I kept reading the letter. “William, you’ve only got like five months to pay this. The deadline is Halloween.”
“That’s fittingly ghoulish,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Perhaps this year I should dress up as a taxidermied version of myself? Being as I’m so completely stuffed.”
I couldn’t imagine having that kind of debt. How was William functioning? This letter was dated weeks ago. Why hadn’t he dealt with this? He was going to lose everything.
“Do you have the money?”
“Nowhere near it.”
“What are you doing about it?”
“Well, I thought The Love Manor cheque would help—”
“William, that’s not even going to scratch the sides. What else are you doing?”
He looked stricken and lifted his shoulders. “It all helps, right?”
“How did this happen? I thought these sorts of places were always in a trust?”
“It is. But every ten years you have to pay tax on it. My father didn’t leave enough. He might have had a plan to pay it, but if he did, he didn’t tell me. He might have told David, but…”
The tears were silently streaming down his face, along his neck and over his chest.
“William, I’m so sorry.”
He turned and rested his hands on the windowsill, looking out across the estate.
“It costs one point two million pounds a year to keep the lights on and everything ticking over,” he said.
“Thank God for the rents. I’ve been doing my best these past three years, but I wasn’t raised to do this.
I was the spare. I wasted my education playing rugby and reading fantasy novels. David would have known what to do.”
I thought of our picnic in the bluebell woods, of all the stories William had told me today, of the obvious pride he took in his family’s centuries of achievement at Buckford. This place was so a part of William, I couldn’t imagine him selling it. Yet the stress it was causing him was clear.