Chapter 2
Alex
“Please tell me you’ve been going to bed at a reasonable time, Lily,” Alex muttered, holding the phone to his ear as he rifled through the documents he’d received from the tax office.
He’d been expecting them since his mother had died, but the government’s new death duties had caused chaos in the world of inheritance tax. All in all, he’d been waiting for these sodding documents for almost four years.
Alex had just never expected them to be this catastrophic.
“I do intend to go to bed at a reasonable time,” Lily said, unaware of Alex’s inner turmoil. “Surely that counts for something.”
Alex scrubbed a hand over his forehead, a reluctant smile curling his lips. “Have you been to the Dower House to visit Ben?”
“Of course.” A small meow interrupted Lily’s words, and Alex could easily envisage his sister in Silverburn’s library, sitting on the armchair next to the phone, with their cat, Possum, curled up on her lap. “I went over there for dinner. I haven’t long been back.”
“How is he getting on with his new valet?”
“Excellently, apparently. Ben says this one doesn’t treat him like a simpleton just because he’s blind, nor does he seem to shy away from Ben’s scars, judging by the limited interaction I observed between them.”
Well, that was the single ray of sunshine in the steaming pile of shit that was his life.
“Good.” The word left him on a sigh of relief, even as a familiar twinge of guilt crept in. Whilst Ben and Father had been in the trenches during the war, Alex had been assigned a plum job in the War Office in London. His work had been vital, but he’d hated the ease of it, the safety.
Alex had begged his commanding officer to send him to the front lines.
And then, in quick succession, Ben had been injured in a gas attack and their father had been killed at the Somme.
After that, Alex had been relieved that he worked in the War Office. It meant that he could take the train back to Scotland every weekend to stay with Ben during his recovery, to be there to comfort him whilst he adjusted to his sudden blindness.
Then he’d felt guilt for feeling relieved, knowing just how many men there were giving their lives for his safety.
He’d put the guilt to good use, donating huge sums to their local war hospital—Craiglockhart—as well as funding the creation of a facility on their estate, Kirknewton, that continued to help soldiers struggling with their war experiences.
He looked up at the grandfather clock in the corner of the office of their Pall Mall home, ticking away the seconds without mercy. “You should go to bed, Lily. It’s getting late.”
“I will. I just want to finish this row of stitches. And maybe the chapter in the book I’m reading.”
Alex snorted. It was a battle he didn’t think he’d ever win—but then Lily was nineteen now. An adult. Sometimes he forgot just how quickly the time passed; it seemed like only yesterday he was reading children’s stories to her at bedtime. “You would have been better off being born as an owl.”
“I would.” Lily’s laugh tinkled down the line. “Although I don’t think the diet of raw mice would suit me.”
“No,” Alex admitted, wryly thinking of how much of a fussy eater his little sister had been growing up.
“I should be home soon. Another day or two should do it.” His goddaughter, Caroline, had got into a spot of bother with her new husband, Harry—who’d turned out, as it happened, to be a lying bastard, hoodwinking her into marriage only to steal her trust fund and abandon her. It was nothing Alex wouldn’t sort out.
Even if Caroline had become strangely attached to her father-in-law, the Marquess of Menai.
He was sure it was nothing. Soon, Alex would get Caroline’s marriage annulled and the entire mess smoothed out.
“Good. I miss you. It’s rather lonely in the castle with just me and the servants.”
Guilt plagued him for even leaving her this long. She wasn’t a child anymore, but he didn’t feel any less responsible for her. Their parents were gone. He was all Lily and Ben had now, and he wanted to ensure that neither of them wanted for anything. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
Once he sorted out the devastation the letters from the tax office had wrought.
“Good. I’ll speak to you tomorrow, Alex.”
“Speak to you tomorrow, pet. Sleep well.”
God knows he wasn’t going to.
Alex breathed a long sigh as he put the phone down, slumping back in his chair.
It wasn’t often he stayed at their London house, a towering fortress of classical stone and weathered balustrades at the end of Pall Mall, a stone’s throw from St James’s Palace and Clarence House.
The last time he’d spent any proper time here had been during the war, when he’d worked at the War Office over on Whitehill—a mile away.
It was a great deal quicker than commuting from the family estate, Silverburn, in Edinburgh.
The journey had become astoundingly quick over the last few years—eight hours on the fast train from Edinburgh to King’s Cross—but it was a tad too much for an everyday commute.
The death duties paperwork was strewn across the desk like a shroud, until its green leather inlay was hidden from view. It had taken him most of the day to sort through the papers, identifying just how much tax the government was demanding.
The death duties were going to be 40% of the total value of the estate.
It was going to cripple them.
There was no denying the fact that they were wealthy—very wealthy—but the vast majority of that wealth was tied up in properties or investments.
The last thing Alex wanted to do was break up an estate that had stayed intact since its creation by George I.
The marquessate was under his care; what right did he have to sell chunks of it to save his own skin?
Except it wasn’t just his own skin on the line, was it?
Lily was only just getting over the death of their mother, whilst Ben hadn’t had an episode of melancholy for more than a year—or, heaven forbid, a suicide attempt.
What would they do if Alex sold their home out from under them?
And what was the alternative? Sell off everything except Silverburn—the farmland, the external properties, the sanatorium, his share in the hospital association—only to have no income with which to pay for Silverburn’s upkeep or their living.
The silence was broken by a soft knock on the door.
“Come in.”
MacDonald swung the door open, his butler’s livery every bit as polished as it had been at breakfast. By comparison, Alex knew he must look like he’d dressed in the dark.
“Your lordship,” MacDonald began, briefly casting his eyes over the equally chaotic desk.
“Mr Dey is in the library. He apologises for the late hour, but was wondering if he might have a word.”
The pessimistic events of the day immediately had him thinking the worst. Prithviraj Dey, a talented British-Indian businessman, owned half of a hospital association, and he managed the business on a day-to-day basis, with the other half being owned by the Lakenheath estate.
Ben’s accident had launched Alex’s interest in it, and he’d had the good luck to meet Raj at Craiglockhart during Ben’s recovery.
They’d worked together ever since. Without Raj’s assistance, Alex would have been lost—he had the funds and the desire to help, but Raj had the knowledge and the talent to make it happen. “Show him in.”
Whilst MacDonald fetched Raj, Alex went over to the drinks cabinet and fetched a bottle of Raj’s favourite—a blended whisky made by Berry Bros—and two glasses, leftover from their quarterly meeting earlier this week. Another visit so soon, and late in the night suggested bad news.
And if bad news was on its way, he might as well be three sheets to the wind.
He had just finished pouring when footsteps approached.
He looked up to see Raj at the door, dressed as impeccably as ever in a finely-tailored three-piece suit, his grey tie matching the silver streaks in his hair.
He’d teamed it, as always, with a fetching pair of spectator shoes and a charismatic smile. Alex held up a glass. “Drink?”
“Well, it would be rude not to.” There was a twinkle in the corner of Raj’s eyes as he swept across the room. “Thank you for seeing me at such a late hour. I was driving past, saw your office light was on, and decided to take a chance.”
“I’m glad you did, especially as you’ve navigated through the perilous jungle of inheritance tax and come out on the other side alive.
” He gestured towards the chair on the other side of the desk, relieved—and a little confused—about the lack of awful news.
He and Raj had worked together for years, but they weren’t friends.
“Sit,” Alex murmured, wondering if Raj had some hidden agenda.
Raj surveyed the documents scattered across the desk. “The death duties you mentioned during our meeting?”
He nodded, taking a generous sip from his glass.
It wasn’t bad, this blend, albeit unnecessarily pretentious.
Of his own volition, he’d be happy with most single malts.
He used to favour whiskies from the old Dean distillery at home in Edinburgh, purely because he could place an order on the telephone and an hour later it’d be at the castle gates.
Alex grabbed the notepad on which he’d totted up the amounts and threw it across the desk.
He was too exhausted to be embarrassed, and it was only calculations, after all.
It wasn’t like he was handing over the death duty documents in full. “It’s enough to ruin the estate.”
Raj placed his drink on the desk, the liquid untouched, and began to read over Alex’s workings out. “I remember going through this after my first wife passed away. It is a cruel thing to strike a person at their weakest, and yet the government does it to all of us, in the end.”