Chapter Twenty-One 10 October 2023 #3
It was the first time I’d ever said it out loud, and the first time I realised it was true. I would never go back to Tasmania. I would never practise medicine again. The throne was waiting for me, and when my time came, I intended to take it.
Jack walked perilously close to the cliff’s edge, breathing deeply with his hands on his hips. Part of me wanted to go back to the trees along the river, where he’d trail his fingertips along my jawline, the real world somewhere else, somewhere very far away.
“I think we should go back,” he said. “I have to pack for tomorrow.”
“Jack,” I said, “please don’t be angry at me.
You said it yourself. You have your father’s vineyard, and I think that’s so special.
But I have to be here and you have to be there.
When Georgia asked you to go to New York with her, you wouldn’t do it.
I’m not going to ask you to do something you can’t. ”
He turned then and his eyes were blazing. “I didn’t go to New York with Georgia because I was in love with you. After that mess with the photographer, she realised how I felt and that’s why she applied for that job. She tested me and I failed.”
I opened my mouth to speak. The whole time he’d been at the estate, I’d been terrified he would say it.
I could see it in his face when he kissed me, when we woke up together, when he looked at me across the table through candlelight.
I had willed him not to say the words because I had always known that his love would humble me.
It would make me soft. It would make me need him.
And once the connective tissue that bound us grew so intricate and so fibrous that I could no longer live without him, he would finally see me for who I was, and he would recoil.
I refused to trap him inside palace walls with me while I watched that happen, so I turned and started walking back to the car.
I wanted to be out of this place. I wanted the granite walls of the palace around me, the endless ticking of the grandfather clock keeping time with my heart. I had to get home.
“Lex,” he called but I kept walking to the car. “Damn it, Lexi, this is why I’ve never told you before. I knew you’d do this. Why can’t you ever just be honest with me? Why can’t you ever just tell me what you’re thinking?”
Blinded by my tears, I fumbled for the keys in my pocket and dropped them in the scrub.
“Is this about that guy?” I heard Jack say. I turned to look at him, the keys forgotten at my feet. “Your uncle said there was something going on. I don’t know, something about a library.”
My stomach roiled. Jack and Richard crawling through the heather together two days earlier. I had seen him lean across and whisper in Jack’s ear. “You talked to Richard about me?”
He ran his fingers through his hair again and hesitated. “He cornered me on the stag hunt. I know what he was up to—I’m not stupid. I was going to ignore it. But… is that what this is about?”
I thought of Colin, with his titles and his top hats.
Granny liked him; the tabloids adored him.
Being my consort wouldn’t destroy Colin’s life, or keep him from his land, or twist his family’s history of activism into something shameful.
This was what Colin was born for, just as I was born for the throne.
I stooped to pick up the keys. “We should get back.”
“Lex. I don’t—”
“I’m not the girl in the barn anymore.” I wiped my cheeks with my fingertips and shook my head. “I don’t think I ever was. You were wrong about me. You should go home—it’s better this way.”
The advancing storm clouds cast us in a low blue light.
There were tears in both of our eyes, but neither of us would let them fall.
I knew that as long as I lived, the look on his face would never leave me.
I desperately wanted to get in the car. And I desperately wanted to stay here on this cliff forever so we never had to say goodbye.
“You were never going to take a risk, were you?” he asked.
The next morning, I hid in my room like a coward. Finn knocked softly on the door and then let himself in. He sat on the foot of the bed.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“You’ll take care of him?”
He dipped his head. “Who’ll take care of you, though?”
Tears spilled over my cheeks. I had lain awake all night and now I had a drilling headache.
“Oh, doll,” Finn soothed, “are you really sure about this? I know it’s complicated, but I’ve been living with you two for seven years now. What you have, I don’t think it’s easy to find.”
“You know I’d ruin it,” I said, though I was speaking to myself. I sat up and gathered him in my arms. “You’re going to make a really good surgeon.”
He smiled, but he looked mournful. “We’re going to stay friends, though, right?”
“Of course.”
He looked down at his hands. “I know I’ve always got people around me. And maybe it didn’t start that way… but you’re the first real friend I ever had.”
I smiled. “I really do love you.”
He held me again, kissed my forehead and then hopped off the bed. He was dressed in the clothes Mary had bought for him, as well as the Barbour jacket that was meant for Jack.
“Okay, we’re going to head out.” At the doorway he stopped and smiled. “And if you can’t find anyone, I’ll marry you. It’d be fun.”
I managed to laugh. “Honestly, though, maybe. It’s not such a bad idea.”
After he left, I lay back in the pillows and counted the rippling folds in the canopy above me.
Then my heart surged, and I ripped back the blankets and ran down the hallway in my pyjamas.
From the window on the stairs, I watched as a footman packed their luggage into a Range Rover while they stood together on the gravel driveway.
Their backs were to me and I saw Finn rest a hand on Jack’s shoulder.
When they climbed into the car, Jack looked up and saw me standing there, hiding in a tartan drape.
Our eyes met for one last moment, that old charge still coursing between us.
He dropped his head and I couldn’t tell if it was a bow or an admission of defeat. Then he was gone.
Going over it with Amira now, I told her as much of this as I could bear. She listened in silence, stroking Chino’s fur. She knew me well enough to keep her eyes averted while I told her my story. When I was done, she propped her head on one hand and gazed at me.
“I really am sorry,” she said. “I know you’re hurting, but I think you did the right thing. It sounds like he would have come here if you asked him. But it probably would have been a disaster.”
I nodded at the ceiling.
She checked the time on her phone. “Come on, let’s go have some dinner and then we can get drunk on the couch and watch Love Island.”
The day after the hospital visit, I rose early and went to the pond for the first time in months.
The sun was yet to rise, and I was the first one through the gates and onto the frosted deck.
I sat down and dipped my feet in the dark water, trying to work up the courage to lower myself into it.
Scotland Yard had reassigned Rita to other duties when I stopped swimming, and I had managed to slip out through Cumberland’s gates undetected.
For the first time in a very long time, I was alone.
I had not told Amira everything about that day in Scotland.
I had told no one that after Jack’s car had disappeared down the drive, I turned from the window and found Richard standing on the landing.
He was in a suit—strange, I thought, even for our family—and his hands were clasped together over his belly as he waited for me to see him.
He raised his eyebrows and grinned. Feeling self-conscious in my pyjamas, I wrapped my arms around my chest.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Has your chap gone already?” he asked. “Such a shame. I thought you almost had him on the hook there, but alas, he wriggled away. It was a problem poor Isla had too, I suppose.”
More than anything, I was afraid. I could see in his eyes that whatever he had been planning, the time was now.
An ambush predator will lie motionless in the sand, it will change its skin to mimic leaves, it will burrow into the earth for as long as it takes for its prey to walk blindly into its lair.
He had been waiting for me, I knew it. I could see it, I had sensed it for eight months.
I wanted my father, but he wasn’t here anymore.
No one was. I attempted to pass him so I could flee down the hallway, but he caught me by the elbow with one large hand.
“Don’t run off just now,” he said calmly. “You and I have barely had a chance to chat since we got here.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I said, shaking his hand off my arm. “I know what you said to him.”
He briefly looked confused and then smiled.
“Oh, dear, are you upset about that? I must say, I really am surprised at your naivety sometimes. Did you think you could dress him up like your little doll and prop him on the sofa with the Queen and we’d all be one happy family?
Lexi, do think logically for once. Do you truly believe he was invited to this place because we were all so keen to meet your Australian boyfriend? ”
I looked up and down the hallways, desperate for a servant or a valet to appear, but we were alone.