Chapter 57
Petey
Bang! The Wetherby’s auctioneer bought his gavel down on the sale of another piece of Buckford’s horrendous art collection.
“Sold to the lady in the pink hat for eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”
The Great Hall was full to bursting with collectors, media, and the Saving the Love Manor film crew.
There was real excitement about the auction—and not only in the room.
Thanks to a little marketing push from Jonty, Zoe, Ellie, Armando, and the other Love Manor influencers, the Buckford art auction had captured global attention.
A bank of phones had been installed along one wall to accommodate overseas bidders.
The auction was going to be the final episode of season one of Saving the Love Manor—and it was the biggest episode we’d recorded since the one featuring Sunny and Ludo’s wedding several weeks earlier (and, thanks to Sunny’s mum, that one had BAFTA written all over it).
I’d been running around barking directions at my team through my headset but circled back to where William was sitting with his mum, his Aunty Karma, and Gran.
They were all wearing hats decorated in acorns.
For luck, apparently. It was good TV—if Indira could convince one of the channels to buy it.
“How are we going?” I asked.
“Not good,” William said, eyes full of concern. I reached for his hand, and he grabbed mine, putting it to his mouth and kissing it.
Gran looked up from her notepad, where she was keeping tally of the numbers.
“We’ve raised eight point five million quid so far,” she said. “Which is a lot of carrots, to be fair.”
She was right. It was wild to be throwing around these kinds of numbers so casually, let alone to be worried they weren’t nearly enough.
The house was a money pit, with a long list of essential repairs.
The target we needed to raise had been shifting northwards constantly, with the accountant revealing (on camera, obviously) the final amount we needed to gross was ￡14.
6 million. Ten per cent of anything raised today went to Wetherby’s Auction House, and twenty per cent would go in capital gains tax.
We needed ￡4.3 million to cover the original tax bill, ￡130,000 to cover the interest, and the rest to fund repairs and William’s plans for the estate, including buying the rights to The Love Manor.
But the trouble with selling the art was, much like selling the village, we could only do it once.
This auction was our first and last hope. Everything depended on it.
“Next, a beautiful buckskin mare by George Stubbs,” the auctioneer announced. “Where shall we start the bidding? Do I have any takers at three hundred thousand?”
“How many pictures left?” I asked
Bunny leant over to whisper in my ear. “The Stubbs, the two Reynoldses, and the Holbein,” she said.
“What will be will be,” Karma said. Which wasn’t exactly encouraging.
I squatted down beside William. He turned to look at me. “Whatever happens, we will make this work,” I said. “You and me. Together.”
William nodded. “We’re a team.” He squeezed my hand.
“I need to get back to it,” I said—conscious a camera was trained on William and our family to capture their every reaction. I slipped back into the shadows, like a good producer, to watch from a bank of monitors.
The Stubbs went for ￡720,000.
The first Reynolds went for ￡610,000. The second for ￡820,000.
On the monitor, I could see William looking agitated as the bidding began on the final painting— the creepy Holbein of Queen Elizabeth the Undead.
He was biting his thumbnail, his hands shaking, his knees bouncing.
Bunny put her arm around his shoulder. I wanted to be there beside him, but I had a job to do.
Everything rested on this painting. When the gavel fell, it had sold for ￡2.
2 million. The air left my lungs. That only took us to ￡12.
85 million—almost ￡2 million short of our goal.
My eyes were glued to William on the monitor.
He looked devastated. I knew how he felt.
The Wetherby’s auctioneer told everyone the sale had concluded.
The room filled with the sounds of chairs scraping on floorboards and people murmuring.
This was it. We’d done well, but we’d come up short.
We could pay the tax bill, but the future of Buckford Hall was far from secure if we couldn’t fund the projects that would bring in long-term income.
I watched my beautiful man on the monitor, my heart breaking for him.
Suddenly, he sat upright, shoulders back.
He turned to face the camera, his eyes boring directly into mine through the lens with an intensity that must have come direct from the French kings.
He gave an almost imperceptible nod, then stood.
“Just a moment!” he called out to the room. My heart was thumping.
I hit the button on my headset. “Thandiwe, stay on William. Haruto, get crowd reactions.”
The room hushed.
“I have a late addition to the catalogue.” William pointed to the painting on the wall high above the auctioneer’s head. “What will you give me for Thomas Gainsborough’s ‘Crossing the Buck’?”
The auctioneer’s face split into a beaming smile.
The room broke into a hubbub of frenetic activity.
Camera flashes went off everywhere. At the bank of phones, attendants were scrambling to call back their international bidders.
Amid all this chaos, William calmly sat back down in his chair, looked straight down the lens of the camera at me again—and winked.
The painting had been behind the auctioneer all morning—everyone had had hours to admire it.
The bidding was fierce. I listened intently as the numbers climbed.
One million. Two million. My body was so awash with adrenaline I couldn’t feel my teeth.
Three million. Four. Five. Six. I watched William’s face on the monitor, eyes wet but steely with determination.
He was selling this painting for us. Not only to save the estate but so we could build a future together here, so we could both follow our dreams and march through the world side by side, hand in hand.
I was already crying when the hammer finally fell.
The big Gainsborough had sold for ￡8.6 million.
William roared like he’d won a rugby final, fists punching the air.
I thought for a second he was going to rip the shirt clean off his chest—which would have been great TV.
Instead, he picked Bunny up and swung her around in circles.
He kissed Karma on both cheeks and gently kissed my gran on the back of the hand, like a proper gentleman.
Then… then he came running towards me—and I threw off my headset and leapt into his arms.
“You did it,” I said, hot tears burning my cheeks. “You saved the estate.”
“We saved the estate,” he said. “We did it together.”
My heart burst with love and pride and joy. I held William’s jaw in my hands, already wet from his tears, and I kissed him.