35. Rory
RORY
Jamie’s been gone ten minutes when Janey barrels into my office as if she runs the place. Her normally sunny expression has been switched for one I know all too well.
“Have you completely lost your mind?”
I don’t look up. There’s a bottle of Finn’s whisky open on the desk and an empty glass. Part of me wants to down the lot, sleep until tomorrow and pretend this day hasn’t happened. But that’s not going to solve anything.
“I assume this is related to Edie.”
Janey stands in the doorway, arms folded. “What on earth were you thinking.”
I raise my eyebrows for a moment and say nothing.
“Sorry, what on earth were you thinking, Your Grace .” The words drip with irony.
I sigh. “Janey?—”
“Don’t you Janey me. That girl has worked her backside off for the best part of three months, done nothing but respect this place, make herself useful, win everyone’s heart and you’ve chucked her out like yesterday’s leftovers. ”
There’s a silence. I stare at the bottle and let out a long, slow exhale.
“I thought she’d found something,” I say finally. “I thought?—”
Janey uncrosses her arms and closes the door, leaning back against it.
“Please sit,” I say, gesturing to the chair on the other side of my desk.
Janey looks at the chair with distaste but sits down, crossing both her arms and legs in disapproval. The clock chimes nine o’clock.
“You thought what?” She crooks a brow. Her tone is anything but warm.
“That I wasn’t… legitimate.”
She blinks. “Excuse me?”
“My father said something once. Years ago. I don’t even remember what started it – one of his drunken rambles when he spat poison. But he said back then I wasn’t like the rest of them – that I didn’t belong. That it was all because I wasn’t the true heir.”
I glance up to see Janey frowning at me, an expression of confusion on her face.
“You weren’t the what?”
“The true heir.” After all the years of carrying it around it feels alien to say the words aloud.
“You’ve carried that around for goodness knows how many years and never said a word?”
I nod once, briefly.
“Rory,” she says, leaning forward and resting her chin on her folded hand as she looks at me. “That is pure and unadulterated bullshit. I’ve heard some crap come out of your father’s mouth,” she looks up at his painting scowling down at us and snorts. “But that absolutely takes the biscuit.”
She gets up, walks out of the room and disappears. I hear her footsteps in the corridor and the sound of the library door opening then banging shut a moment later. I take another glass from the cabinet and pour myself a drink, and one for Janey when she returns. If she returns.
She comes back five minutes later with one of the diaries that have been haunting my dreams for months but this one is black leather, not red. There’s a stack of papers, too. She places them down on the desk and shakes her head as I offer her a drink.
“I have to drive back to the cottage, remember.”
I watch as she flips it open and flicks through the pages, eyes narrowed as she focuses on the handwritten words.
“Here.” She turns the book around and passes it across the desk. She taps the page with a finger. “Read that.”
It’s not his writing. It’s my mother’s, neat and careful compared to his expansive scrawl.
I shouldn’t have ridden. He was drunk again, and I had to get away and now everything’s broken. It’s my fault. The baby’s gone.
I look at the date and it punches the breath out of me.
“She miscarried before you were born,” Janey says softly. “She kept diaries too, but she wanted them locked away in the library. I’d say it tore the marriage apart, but those two should never have been together. Your father was…” She tails off.
I don’t need her to say any more. To the outsiders he was unpredictable, charming, mercurial. To the people who knew him well, he could be impossibly cruel.
“That’s what your father was talking about. I heard it more than once. It wasn’t you. It was never you. ”
The floor shifts underneath me.
Janey gets up and puts her hand on my arm for a moment, squeezing it gently. “I’ll let you be.”
I stare at the page for a long time, my heart contracting at the sight of my mother’s writing. No wonder she left him, left us all. All that courage to walk away only to die of cancer a few short months later. It doesn’t seem just.
And then I look down at the stack of papers Janey’s left on the desk. It’s Edie’s draft. There’s a yellow Post-it note sticking out midway through the pile. I recognise her writing.
Was going to delete this section. Not sure it’s useful – I thought you might like to see it and decide.
I start reading.
It’s not about me. It’s not about forged birth certificates or secret paternity. It’s not about missing heirs, or my mother or firstborn children lost to tragedy. It’s about bloody land.
Underhand deals, broken promises, manipulation and subtle power plays. Ancient crofts and farms annexed into the estate under the pretence of stewardship then sold to a private shooting syndicate for a fat profit a decade later. It goes on and on, pages and pages of it.
The real betrayal’s been here the whole time under my feet, and I’ve been too blinded by my own hubris to see it.
And Edie wasn’t going to expose it – she’s flagged it. For me.
I shove the untouched glass of whisky away. I need to focus right now. I sit for hours, reading the work she’s been doing, realising that she’s tried her best to paint a picture in words that tells the story of my father’s stewardship and skirt the edges of exactly what kind of man he is.
“Fuck.” I push my hands through my hair and look up and realise that the skies have darkened. I’ve been sitting here for hours.
“You okay?” There’s a knock at the door and Janey pops her head round the door, her face puckered with concern.
I nod.
And then Jamie’s voice echoes in the corridor and a moment later his face appears, towering over hers as he puts both hands over her shoulders and looks in at me, brows raised and his usual cheerful expression on his face.
“Alright, bro? Everything sorted?”
“Sorted?”
“Edie,” he says as Janey turns around slowly and faces him. “She’s back, yeah?”
I push my chair back and stand, my hands gripping the edge of the desk. “What do you mean?”
Jamie’s expression changes in an instant.
“What the fuck, Rory? Edie had become a friend. I liked her. Everyone did.”
Janey turns back to me for a moment and looks at me with an expression I’ve never seen on her face before.
“She was here to do a job. She wasn’t a friend.
When the hell will you realise that people don’t want to be friends with us.
They want our money or our power or our influence.
” I stride over to the window and look out at the loch.
“The girls that dance around you at parties don’t give a damn about you.
They love the castle, they love the money.
Look at him—” I point accusingly at the portrait on the wall.
“For all his grand events, he died alone.”
Jamie stares at me for a moment before he speaks.
“Well, he was a hell of a lot less lonely than you’ll be.
You might as well be the hunchback of Notre Dame.
Edie genuinely cared about you, and you were too fucking stupid to see it.
You know she chewed Anna up and spat her out in the car.
She stood up for you—not that you deserved it.
She said she wasn’t going to fly home with her and that’s when she got out and started walking. ”
Everything inside me turns to solid ice.
“I assumed she’d ring you. Or show up. I dropped her at the crossroads hours ago. She said she wasn’t going back to London.”
“She what?”
“She took her bags. She looked like she meant it. I thought she’d be here.”
I can’t even blame him. This is my fucking fault. Hubris again. Maybe I am my father’s son after all.
Janey’s face is blanched white. “It’s almost dark.”
My body’s already moving. Keys, phone, get in the Defender.
“I’ll come with you.” Jamie’s at my shoulder.
“Bed.” I point to the study and the dogs slink back, not even trying to push their luck. I swipe open my phone and call the one person I don’t want to owe.
“Brice,” I bark. “I need a favour.”