Chapter Fourteen 2009 #2
I did not enjoy killing animals, no matter how much Richard, the stalkers and the ghillies insisted that it was not only tradition, but conservation.
They said we needed to keep the deer population under control, but there was something about an animal’s wild eyes when the bullet pierced its flesh, the way its herd abandoned it to the humans who planned to bleed and strip it.
When I was eight, Granny had told me about a wounded stag that had once stumbled over the moors for three days, travelling eleven miles, before it finally collapsed into a stream and drowned.
I put my face in my hands and wept. But I did like being in the bracing northern air.
If I joined the hunt, I mostly lay down in the heather and looked up at the sky while the others whispered and crawled around like boys pretending to be soldiers.
The stag was being hunted by everyone in the Highlands, but so far he was proving elusive.
I imagined him hiding in the tall grass, standing perfectly still as men swung their rifle scopes right past him.
Richard and the ghillies went further up the hill, while Louis and I were ordered to huddle between two smooth rocks on the slope.
I picked at my cuticles while Louis kept a lookout, watching the horizon through his binoculars, just as Richard ordered.
The relentless early mornings were catching up with him, dark circles under his eyes.
“When do you think Papa will get here?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
My jacket was becoming wet in the sodden grass, but I still felt quite cheery to be with my brother on the blustery moors. A sunrise was blooming violet over the mountains.
“Do you think he’s with Annabelle?”
Louis frowned at me and then returned his gaze to the binoculars. We rarely mentioned Annabelle by name. She was known only as “her,” delivered with a certain breathless intonation that left the other in no doubt who you were talking about.
“Probably,” he said quietly. “But they’re single now. They’re going to see other people.”
“It’s always been her, though, hasn’t it? He’s not going to see anyone else, because he never stopped seeing her.”
We fell silent. Louis obscured his face with his binoculars, but I knew he was gathering his thoughts.
“I think…” he said slowly, “he loves her and probably always has. I don’t know how he felt about Mum. It’s probably easy to say now that it’s over that he never loved her, but I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Why didn’t they just let him marry Annabelle?”
“You know why,” he said. “The Catholic thing and the whole divorce thing. She was kind of old. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t fight hard enough.”
I thought of Louis’s cheek resting on Kris’s shoulder, his eyes closed, his face soft. I didn’t want him to give that up.
“Do you think you’ll fight?” I whispered.
He looked at me quizzically. “For, like, a girlfriend or whatever? Yeah, I guess.”
“Will you fight for Kris?” I whispered into the heather, my heart lolloping in my chest. I had no idea what I was even doing, but I was suddenly terrified for him.
Louis stiffened so that the lines of his face were as fine as cut glass.
He said nothing. Only the quivering muscles in his jaw gave away that he had heard me.
After a minute of silence, he crawled over the rocks, slowly ascending the hill to join Richard on the peak.
I lay there for a long time, buffeted by the stinging winds.
Finally, a gunshot cracked overheard and echoed through the valley.
Louis avoided my eyes for the rest of the day, riding up front with Richard in the Range Rover, accepting the back slaps and praise of the ghillies for his exceptional shot—he had brought the stag down with a single shot through his heart.
After dinner, which was dedicated entirely to re-enacting every moment of the stag’s demise, Louis disappeared to his room and kept his door closed.
The next morning, I woke at dawn and looked out the window and there he was, marching wearily towards Richard, who insisted they pivot to fly-fishing for the rest of the week.
Bereft, I went back to spending my days wandering the castle with Demelza and Birdie in tow.
Granny’s springer spaniel Pearl was pregnant, so we helped Granny prepare a whelping box for the birth, sitting on the floor shredding newspapers and taking stock of old towels.
We discussed names for the litter, too, even though Granny had found homes for all the puppies but one, kept to ensure her spaniel’s line continued alongside her.
Silence was the weapon of choice for our family, but it was one Louis and I rarely used against each other.
Three days later, I was in bed, listening to the crackle of the fire, when I heard a knock on my door.
He came in, looking wearier than ever. He was dressed in his Astley hoodie, and he sat on the edge of my bed, leaning against the Scottish oak bedpost. We looked at each other for a long time.
I wondered if perhaps we would say nothing, but I should take his presence at the foot of my bed as forgiveness.
“Did you see us in New Zealand?” he finally asked.
“No,” I said. “At school.”
He looked surprised. “Where?”
“The Mound, after the spring dance.”
I watched the shadows and warm light from the fire dance across his face. He didn’t look angry or frightened, only exhausted.
“Have you told anyone?” he asked quietly.
“No, but Amira was with me. She’d lost her coat and we went up to find it and we saw you dancing. But we haven’t told anyone.”
He nodded and then leaned his head back against the post and closed his eyes.
“Louis,” I said, “it’s not a big deal.”
His eyes snapped open. “Not a big deal?”
“I just mean… it’s not a big deal to me, you know, if you like boys. That’s cool—I don’t care.”
He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Don’t be naive, Lexi. It is a big deal, and you know it.”
I was quiet for a moment. “Do you love him?”
He snorted, as if out of habit, and then his face became soft.
How long had they been obscuring their soft hearts behind roughhousing and machismo?
Our ancestor, one of the Edwards, felt the kind of all-consuming adoration for his favourite that saw him lavish the young man with silver and land.
His obsession was so offensive to the court that Edward’s father ripped great fistfuls of hair from his son’s head.
The favourite was exiled multiple times, but he and Edward could not be apart.
On his fourth and final attempt to return to court, the barons kidnapped the man, put him on trial and beheaded him.
“You know, things are different now,” I said. “At some point there’s going to be a gay king, and they’ll just have to deal with it.”
He blanched at the word. “I don’t know if I’m that.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling childish and out of my depth. “That’s okay too. Whatever you are, or whatever you want to be, it’s fine.”
He snorted again, but his eyes were wet. “Thanks. But you know it’s more complicated than that.”
“If you told Mum, she wouldn’t mind at all. You know that, right?”
It was suddenly important to me that he know that.
I had no clue how Papa would react, and the prospect that he would ever find out filled me with terror.
But Mum’s devotion to us was like gravity.
It was as dependable as the rising sun, the tick of the clock, the slow, relentless expansion of the universe.
There was nothing we could do or say that would make her let go.
“I know,” Louis sighed. “But don’t tell her. She’s got too much going on. We need to take care of her right now, not the other way around.”
The two minutes in age between us always felt like an era to me.
I assumed that whatever he had gleaned about life in that sliver of time before my arrival had made him as sage and worn as an old man.
When Mum was sobbing in the bathroom, it was Louis who put the music on loud in my bedroom and went to comfort her.
When Papa and Mum were fighting again, he would take me for a long walk around Elton Park so I couldn’t hear the insults they threw at each other.
Now I wished he could be the boy he was supposed to be without the crown winking at him in the distance.
“How about we just… don’t do anything for now? It’s just you, me, Kris and Amira. Like it’s always been,” I said.
He nodded, gazing at nothing. After a while he surfaced from the depths of himself and smiled at me. “Yeah, okay.”
There was a rap at the door and Granny came in, wearing her burgundy dressing gown and slippers.
“Oh, you’re here too,” she said to Louis brightly.
She was breathing a little hard, as if she had been running. Her face was glowing with excitement and adventure.
“Pearl has gone into labour,” she said to me. “The first of the litter should be here within the hour. Would you like to join me while I help her?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Louis, you can come too, but you’ll have to watch from the back. This is women’s business,” Granny said as she left the room.
I pulled a jumper over my head and shuffled into my ugg boots. Louis was still on my bed, his arms wrapped around himself. He had a fragile look, like he had been crying a long time, and now he was sated and spent.
“Come on,” I said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “It’ll be fun.”
We hurried through the dark halls of the castle together, ready to stay up all night, just so we could watch new life burst into the world.