Chapter Twenty-One #3
“Our coat of arms,” he said. “The Dixon coat of arms. We have this as well…”
He nipped into the nearest room and returned with an A5-size folder.
He presented it to me. On the front, the coat of arms was reproduced again and now I could see that in the first red square was a picture of a large building, maybe a house, maybe a museum, I wasn’t sure.
Diagonally opposite, in the other red quarter was a dollar sign; that was pretty unambiguous.
In the yellow squares were a flower and a rectangle with something sticking out of the top of it; it looked like an old-fashioned TV set.
James was standing by my shoulder, looking down at the folder. “The pictures represent us, our achievements and interests. I chose red for me because I like red, and yellow for you. You like yellow, don’t you?”
I nodded. I preferred blue.
“It shows this house that I’ve bought and the money I’ve made: they didn’t have a pound sign, but dollars are recognized all over the world. And to represent you, you have a daisy, for your name, and a TV. You like watching TV, don’t you?”
Was that the only thing he could think of when he thought of me?
With dread, I opened the folder. Inside were certificates proclaiming us Lord and Lady Iffley, although you won’t find us in Debrett’s and it was never mentioned again.
I turned the folder over and on the back was the name and contact details of a company—Titles To Go— based in Nevada.
I turned to James. He was grinning as if all our Christmases had come at once, and I realized this wasn’t a joke.
My heart sinking, I looked again at the family tree. Of course I wanted children; after all, I had a bloodline to continue. But ten? And I’d thought we might wait a while. I stepped closer and counted again. James misinterpreted it and began pulling me by my arm toward the door.
“Shall we make a start on tab number one?” he said.
At the time, I set aside my misgivings. I was confident things would settle down. I thought maybe James had meant it as a joke, and I hadn’t responded as he expected. Either way, I was sure our vision for the future would fall into line. In every other way he was perfect.
***
Arty duly brought his girlfriend to the house to be measured. She was pretty and petite, and when I got to speak to her I found she was incredibly likable. Mrs. Billings thought so too, when they found out they were distantly related.
“That’s what it’s like round here, though,” Arty said.
“You can’t go anywhere without meeting someone from your family tree.
” I kept quiet and thought about our empty tree in the hall and how James was the only person I was related to, which suddenly felt wrong, while hearing about all their relatives.
But then again, I was from Langley Hall, which, really, trumped all of it.
I saw them off at the back door, where a pane of glass had fallen out of one of the panels in the top half. Mr. Billings had already covered it with newspaper.
***
By the end of the afternoon, the fact of Arty’s imminent departure and the reality of his girlfriend had deflated me. I went to the priest hole and took out a multipack of Chipsticks. But I’d forgotten to keep an eye on the time.
“WHAT IS THAT YOU’RE EATING?” James’s voice boomed across the great hall, making me jump out of my skin.
I dropped Chipsticks all over my lap. I was still shaking as he noticed the priest hole that was open next to me.
“What the hell is that?” he asked, striding up to see.
He peered into it. “Did you cut a hole in the stairs?”
I stayed silent, looking at him. “Well?” he shouted.
“It’s a priest hole,” I whispered and I began to explain about the religious kettle of fish they’d found themselves in, in the sixteenth century, but he wasn’t listening, he was too busy pulling out everything I had in there.
With every item—my Monster Munch, my Hobnobs, my Cadbury’s Mini Rolls—he turned and stared at me with incredulity, until he got to Lennie’s satchel. He tipped it out onto the floor and started going through the contents. He picked up the pages of the memoir and scanned them.
“This is his, isn’t it? Lennie Green’s. How long have you had it?” I stared at him, trying to think what the right answer would be. “How long!”
“I found it,” I whimpered. “In the field. I knew we couldn’t leave it there, so I brought it here.”
“You didn’t think to tell me? I was out there looking for it for days on end.” He didn’t expect a reply and he didn’t ask me anything else. He just took the whole lot, bar one packet of Jaffa Cakes that he missed.
“You could hide a body in this,” he said of the priest hole, before stomping off with my goods. Yes, James, I thought, as my heart rate returned to normal, that was rather the point of it. Which he would have known had he listened to my explanation.
He threw all the snacks in the bin, shoving them deep down into the depths of the waste. I don’t know where he took the satchel. I didn’t see it in the house again.