27. Edie
EDIE
Anna emerges after noon the morning after.
I’m mid-paragraph, working at the kitchen table with a coffee.
Muffin’s lying in a puddle of sunlight under my feet.
I can hear clattering and urgent discussion from the big working kitchen, plans for the ball are really ramping up now, and the castle is a hive of activity.
Meanwhile my flatmate is standing in the middle of it all in pyjamas.
In what is after all my workplace. As if it’s some sort of holiday rental.
I give her a wide-eyed stare.
“What?” She strolls over to the table and helps herself to a grape from the fruit bowl.
“You’re not dressed,” I hiss, half an eye on the kitchen door.
Anna shrugs. “And?”
“We’re not on holiday. I’m working.”
“Pfft.” She hops up to sit on the table, looking over at my screen. “How’s it going?”
I close it and stand up. “It’s going. There’s someone fixing the sash windows in the library, so I thought I’d work in here, but there’s so much stuff going on I keep getting distracted.”
“You’re entitled to a lunch break, aren’t you? I’ll go shower and you can show me round the estate.” She wanders over to the coffee machine and pokes at it hopefully. I get the hint.
“I’ll make you one while you shower. But don’t take ages, I need to work this afternoon.”
Anna rolls her eyes. “Too much to ask if they have oat milk, I suppose?”
“Have you ever tried to milk an oat?” Gregor’s gruff Glaswegian voice makes her jump and me snort with laughter.
“This is why I don’t do the countryside. It’s all fresh air and nothing else.”
“ Anna.” I glare at her and turn to Gregor who is standing there with his arms folded, chuckling to himself as if he’s seen it all before. “Anna, this is Gregor, the chef. This is my friend Anna, who?—”
“Aye, I know who she is.”
I press my lips together to stop myself from laughing. He’s got a way of saying everything while saying nothing.
“Right,” Anna says huffily. “I’ll go and put on some outdoor clothes. You can take me for a drive and show me around.”
Gregor and I stand side by side as she flounces off. As the door closes he turns to me, his bright blue eyes twinkling.
“Huv to admit I thought you’d have better taste in friends,” he says, eyebrows raised a fraction.
I cringe. “She’s—she’s not so bad when she’s in London.”
His head nods upwards in acknowledgment. “Oh, I’ve seen the type many a time up here. I’m teasing you. I’m sure she’s nice enough. ”
“I—” I open my mouth and then close it again. The words “is she?’ are left unspoken.
The next two days don’t get any better. We go to the stables to see Kate.
Anna slips in horse shit and makes a massive deal about getting mud on her boots and doesn’t see the appeal of the fluffy little Highland pony foals, saying they look like cart horses.
We pop into the coffee shop again and she grumbles about her drink.
Again. And then – by which point I’m doing zen breathing to stop myself from shoving her over the harbour wall into the sea – we pop into the village mini-market, where she waltzes around loudly complaining about everything.
It’s as bad as it sounds. Worse, probably.
I feel like I’ve spent two months getting to know everyone and find my feet and in forty-eight hours Anna’s managed to pull the rug out from underneath me.
Everything’s shifted somehow anyway. Sitting in the library working alone I’d grown used to the familiar chime of the grandfather clock and the creaks and groans that the ancient floorboards made, even when there was nobody around.
But now the ball was taking place the whole castle seems to hum with movement and purpose and I keep feeling like I’m getting in the way.
It’s not that I’ve been shut out, it’s more they’re all caught up in something I don’t have any part in.
There are footsteps on back staircases I didn’t know existed.
Floral arrangements are appearing, and buckets of cut stems from the glasshouse and the kitchen garden are lined up in the back rooms beyond the morning kitchen.
Janey’s sweeping around with her iPad and a clipboard, her expression midway between battlefield commander and head girl.
She flashes me a smile as she passes. Every room I pass has someone or something in it – napkins are being pressed, chandeliers being polished, and Tom the under-gardener is tuning bagpipes in the kitchen garden on his lunch break.
It makes me feel… weirdly in the way. Not on purpose.
Kate says it’s always manic in the run up to the ball, and there’s a frisson that comes with it being Rory’s first time in charge.
He’s like a thundercloud on the horizon – I haven’t seen him, but I’ve sensed his presence.
Everyone’s being as polite and friendly as normal, but there’s a difference between being tolerated and being part of something – I’ve lived most of my life in that gap. Maybe that’s why I’m aware it’s there.
I’m supposed to be working. I am working.
Perched on the window seat in the library with my laptop, I’m transcribing notes in the late duke’s now-familiar writing, trying to turn his scribbled fragments of memory into something solid that will last generations.
And trying to work out how to deal with the fact that I’m typing into the record books the incontrovertible truth: he was responsible for a careful and calculated land grab from farmers whose land surrounded the estate, paying them under the odds and taking away their agency and freedom only to rent it back to them.
There’s nothing about this man I like. I glare at the spidery ink of his notes as if they somehow contain his essence.
“There you are,” Anna says as if I’m a five-year-old who has gone missing at preschool. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
I glance around the library. “I’m working.”
“Yes, I can see that.” She gives me a familiar beseeching look. “You don’t have any nail varnish remover? ”
I slam the duke’s diary closed and sigh under my breath. I can tell where this is going already.
“I don’t.” I’ve known Anna for fifteen years. I’ve rented her spare room for the last two years. I’ve been allergic to nail polish all that time.
“Well, that is annoying.” She cranes her neck to peer over my shoulder, watching as Gregor manages a food delivery. “Someone must.”
I close the laptop before she can see what I’m writing. If she even reads one page, my NDA is toast, and so is my career.
Anna wiggles her fingertips and looks at them with distaste. “And I’m going to guess the chances of a nail bar in this backwater are slim to none?”
“Non-existent.” I look down at my own unpainted nails.
“Can you ask one of your new mates if they’ll lend me some?”
I think of Janey’s harried expression when I saw her running up the stairs earlier, and of Kate – practical and forthright – who would probably laugh in my face if I asked.
I stand up and tuck my laptop under my arm. “They’ll have some at the village shop.” Anna folds her arms and gives a satisfied smile. “Give me a minute and I’ll stick this stuff in my room.”
“Oh, you don’t need me to come, do you? I was going to go for a swim.”
What I want to say and what I do say are two entirely different things.
“Sure.”
“You are a doll. No point both of us shlepping all the way over there and back. You need a break from the books, anyway. ”
I was going to go and take a walk down to the boathouse. “Okay, I’ll just pop these things upstairs.”
“Oh, I’ll take them for you.”
“No.” I clasp the laptop protectively. The last thing I need is Anna getting her paws on it. “I need to get the keys from my desk anyway.”
“Thanks, babe,” Anna says, sprawling on the chaise longue by the fire as if she was born to it.
Outside a wind is blowing up from the loch and the sky seems to have dropped somehow, the clouds gathering over the pine trees heavy with the threat of rain.
The castle walls shift with the weather like a massive sandstone barometer.
Last week it glowed warm and golden in the spring sunlight.
Today it’s grey and dull, despite the buzz of activity that’s going on inside.
The village, though, seems to be the opposite.
I park at the end of the harbour and walk along to the shop, stopping to say hello to Flora in the coffee shop and breathe in the welcoming cinnamon and vanilla smells.
When I go into the little village store the woman behind the counter looks up and gives me a smile.
“Hello hen, what are you looking for today?”
“I need some nail polish remover.”
“Och we’ve had a run on that. Everyone’s getting fancied up for the ball, I expect. How are the preparations going up at the big house?”
It was a surprise at first, but now I’m used to the fact everyone feels like they’re part of a huge extended family.
“Very busy.” I smile and pull out my phone to pay. “And a lot of bagpipe practice.”
“Oh, I love the pipes. Can’t wait for a dance tomorrow night. ”
Everyone’s talking about the ball as if it’s some sort of fairytale climax but I have a feeling something’s going to break before the music starts.
By the time I get back to the house the rain is lashing on the windscreen and tiny rivers running down the path away from the castle drains. I run inside, shaking the water from my hands and pushing sodden tendrils of hair back from my wet face. Highland rain is like nothing I’ve ever seen.
I walk into the house and slam straight into Rory, bouncing back off the solid muscle of his arm as I crash through the door, soaked and rushing to get out of the rain. It’s dripping from my hair, my shirt clinging to me like seaweed.
“Oh god, sorry—” I gasp, stumbling back, dropping the bottle of nail polish remover which thankfully doesn’t split open. Somewhere in my brain registers the dry, woody scent of his aftershave.