by Wendy Holden
She had no choice, Alexa realised. Otherwise it was Mum and Dad’s. And there was no chance that she was going home again. Unless the home involved had the word ‘stately’ in front of it.
Chapter 24
At Oakeshott, the grass waved and shone in the sunshine and the trees glowed with fresh green leaves. Above, the sky was blue; around, the air was warm and sweet with the singing of birds. But Polly was not thinking of the summer.
‘Is there a bottom to space?’ she heard Kyle asking, from what seemed a great distance away.
Polly blinked and came back down to earth. She and the children had stopped for lunch and were sitting on the grass at the side of the trench. Kyle had left his group of friends and had come over to where Polly was sitting some distance away, hunched over her knees, sandwiches untouched, her water bottle dangling in one hand. ‘What?’ Polly said, vaguely recalling something about bottoms.
Kyle repeated his question.
Polly took a slug of water and pondered. Of late, as he became more interested, Kyle had been firing questions at her like a machine gun, not just about Romans, with which she was fine, but about everything, about which she could be patchy. He was, for all his shaven head and lack of finesse, an extraordinarily bright child. His brain never seemed to stop; something in it was always digging away, like Napoleon the dog.
Long gone were the days when Kyle thought the ancient world was invented by George Lucas. Now, he could recite most of the main dates in Roman history, even manage the odd sentence in Latin. ‘Kylus sum,’ he would say, banging himself across the chest in a clenched-fist salute.
‘I’m not sure that there is a bottom to space really,’ Polly managed eventually. ‘Space is, well, infinite.’
Kyle, however, had moved on. ‘And what would happen if Jupiter fell on the earth?’
Polly stretched her eyes and tried to remember about gravitational pull. ‘Well it wouldn’t because . . .’
Kyle was opening a bag of crisps as he listened. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked next, stuffing handfuls of Quavers in his mouth.
Polly felt tired. It was all rather intense for a Tuesday lunchtime. ‘Well, he is a historical figure,’ she conceded vaguely.
‘Do you believe in him or don’t you?’ Kyle was narrowing his eyes at her; his stubbly hair bristled in the sunshine. He was evidently determined to nail the issue.
‘Well, I believe in something more powerful than myself,’ Polly said evasively, taking another sip of water.
‘But that’s not saying much, is it?’ he said dismissively.
Polly had to grin. No, it wasn’t saying very much. And, actually,
she didn’t need Kyle to point out how unimportant she was.
A week, Max had said. But a week had already gone and there was no word from him. She wasn’t seriously worried. Just puzzled. He had given her no contact details; she didn’t even know where he was. But he had promised to get in contact, and she must have faith that he would.
Fortunately, there was work, although possibly not for much longer. Polly, in the shallow excavation trench, looked down at the brown soil, which had been worked over and sifted through again and again. It was pretty likely that nothing was left. All that could be excavated had been; it had all been duly drawn, plotted, photographed and recorded. She needed to let the county council, as well as Mrs Butcher, know that work was coming to an end. The thought of telling Mrs Butcher, let alone Kyle, was a difficult one.
Perhaps she would put it off another week.
‘But if God created the world in six days, what about the Big Bang?’
Kyle was off again. Polly groped for the answer, even though this very morning on the Today programme they’d had a Christian fundamentalist and a scientist going hammer and tongs on Creationism versus Darwinism. She racked her brains to remember what they had said.
‘What does Mrs Butcher say?’ she hazarded, eventually.
‘She says that God created the Big Bang.’
‘Ah.’ Polly smiled. As neat a way of getting round it as any other. She rose to her feet. ‘Back to work, everyone.’
Of course, there was no work left to do now really. She paced slowly over to her own area of the trench, crouched down and poked the soil. It was a part that had been examined many times before. Yet something – sentimentality? – was urging her to have one last look. She probed away gently with her trowel, following the progress of the tool with her fingers and thinking of Max. The soil gave way easily. Down and down went her questing trowel; deeper it bit, deeper than previously. She knew nothing was down there, but it was soothing somehow, this peaceful, effortless exploration, feeling the sun on her back, aware of the children chattering and bickering in the background.
What was that? Polly was jolted from her reverie. The edge of the trowel had struck something. She felt her fingers make contact with a smooth object. She stopped digging and felt with sure, gentle but feverish fingers the small expanse of what had been exposed and which now gleamed grey in the sunshine.
Hardly daring to breathe, she picked up her trowel again and began gently to move the earth around it away. One never expected to find them; the last time had been a complete surprise as well . . .
Polly glanced up at the children, all frowning over graph paper as they plotted their finds. They were occupied, absorbed. She bent her head; her hair flopped into her eyes. She shook it aside and set to work.
A few minutes later, alerted by some instinct, Kyle looked up. He saw Polly’s crouching figure and realised she was, even for her, very absorbed.
Kyle narrowed his eyes. Was she gazing into space again? Her attention didn’t seem to be on them any more. He knew there was something wrong; they all did, and Poppy said it was definitely because Miss Stevenson was in love with that good-looking man with the dark hair whose dog had dug up the bone that time, and who hadn’t been back for ages. ‘Rubbish,’ Kyle had said robustly, only to have Poppy snap that it was true and that she knew about these things and he didn’t.
Poppy, who knew nothing about the Big Bang, or gravitational pull. Let alone about the Pubic Wars; it was Pubic, wasn’t it?
Kyle still felt disappointed that the dog’s bone hadn’t turned out to be a whole skeleton, but even more disappointed in Miss Stevenson. How silly to be in love. He had thought better of her. He himself was never going to be in love, obviously. But if he ever had to, it would be with someone like Miss Stevenson, with her soft hair and the gentle eyes that looked at you in such a kind and friendly way. He felt annoyed with the dark-haired man. How dare he upset Miss Stevenson?
Polly was still working at the soil. His quick, perceptive eye noticed that her movements were unusually swift; there was something excited about them. Had she found something?
Kyle’s instinct, never long dormant, to bring noise where there was silence, chaos where there was order, excitement where there was calm, was mixed with a genuine curiosity about what was happening and propelled him to her side.
He stared in amazement at the earth in front of her.
‘Miss! Mi-iss!’ The noise exploded in Polly’s ear like a trumpet blast. ‘Miss!’ Kyle shrieked. ‘You’ve dug up a skull!’
Chapter 25
The road Barney lived on marked the border between an undesirable west London postcode and its more desirable immediate neighbour. The house containing his flat was on the desirable side but did not get the sun in the morning. Or any other time of day, Alexa now knew. It was small, dark, smelly and faced directly on to a sink estate.
Strictly socially speaking, this did not matter; the W11 postcode for invitation purposes was the crucial factor. Few of Barney’s friends – when he had had them – had ever visited in person.
The flat was entered through a battered front door, whose central panel bore several unsteadily mounted bells of different sizes and vintages, pertaining to the apartments above Barney’s. In the few short weeks she had lived in close proximity to them, Alexa had had to get used to
the reggae DJ who lived on the top floor and the floor-pounding fitness instructor who lived directly above.
The instructor was at it already, Alexa thought, hearing the usual regular thudding of trainered feet on the flimsy ceiling. She lay on her back and watched the swaying lightshade. It was not a question of if, rather of when the floor would give way and the muscle-bound Greek who lived above dropped into her midst accompanied by shattered floorboards and plaster dust.
Alexa’s bedroom was the first door in the grubby hallway. Because it had a high ceiling and the floor space was little larger than the mattress serving as a bed, it looked like a shoebox turned on its end. On the wall opposite the door was a tiny blocked-up fireplace, its mantelpiece festooned with dusty Bollinger bottles with grubby candles stuck in the necks. Next to the grimy window was a small wooden wardrobe on whose ill-fitting, permanently open door Barney’s black tie outfit hung, swathed in dry-cleaner’s plastic and ever ready on a wooden coathanger. Ever ready, but these days hardly ever used.
The room had been Barney’s, but now he slept on the sitting room sofa. This gave Alexa’s room, grim as it was, a context. It was small, noisy, comfortless and damp, but at least it was private. She should be grateful.
Alexa got up and found her host in the tiny sitting room.
‘Good morning!’ Barney trilled. ‘Marvellous day, isn’t it?’ He was so positive, he made her feel listless by comparison. He was like an engine that was always switched on. His energy seemed to throb through the room.
He was ensconced in one of the few pieces of furniture: a very tatty winged armchair with a standard lamp beside it, its shade skew-whiff. He wore pyjamas of shiny pale pink cotton, trimmed with dark blue piping. Over this was a silk paisley dressing gown, and there were burgundy velvet slippers on his plump little feet. Barney always dressed as if he was breakfasting at Brideshead rather than opposite one of the capital’s most notorious council estates.
He, too, had apparently only just got up; the habits of a night owl, he claimed, were hard to break. Although the invitations to white-tie balls or to play poker all night in exclusive Mayfair clubs had dried up, Barney kept the same hours.
He now spent them on Facebook, and with enormous benefit to them both; Alexa had found her page exhaustively updated with awe-inspiring views of Scotland and distant glimpses of baronial towers; the on-site claim being that, due to a family emergency, this was where she had been spending the summer.
Barney was not online now, however. He was reading a newspaper, his brow furrowed in apparent deep concentration. Beside him on the floor was an elegant white and gold cup and saucer. None of his china matched; purloined as it was from various stately homes and grand hotels, his plates, cups, dishes and ashtrays name-checked palaces of gracious living a world away from the battered kitchen cupboards in which they sat. Reaching up to get a cup down, Alexa would feel taunted.
She padded barefoot over the dirty grey carpet to the small square dining table at which no dinner parties were ever held and lifted up the coffee pot. Her eye fell on a white piece of paper unfolded near the pot: Barney’s annual membership renewal letter from the London Library.
‘It costs a fortune!’ Alexa picked up the bill in astonishment.
Barney looked up mildly. ‘But it’s very social. You see influential people in the lift all the time.’
Alexa remarked that hundreds of pounds a year was a high price to pay for this privilege; indeed, it was possible that the influencer concerned would privately appear in any lift Barney cared to nominate for less.
‘That may well be true,’ Barney concurred. ‘But I can’t start removing myself from society.’
Alexa pulled out a chair from under the small table and cursed as a pile of magazines slipped off the seat and landed on her foot. Barney’s flat was not only cramped and dark, it was squalid and full of rubbish. It needed cleaning, although Alexa had no intention of obliging. Nothing would more eloquently advertise the end of her hopes of advancement than getting on her knees on the bathroom floor and scrubbing out the toilet bowl.
A great wave of misery swept over her. ‘Oh, Barney,’ she groaned. ‘What are we going to do? It’s social death!’
Barney looked up from his newspaper. His small mouth was turned upwards in a beam. ‘Precisely, my dear Alexa. That’s just what it is.’
‘Social death?’ she repeated. Then why did he look so happy about it?
‘Yes! I’m taking you to a memorial service!’
There was a silence.
‘You’re taking me to a memorial service?’ Alexa managed.
‘Lord Bedstead’s died,’ Barney announced cheerfully. ‘It’s a great opportunity for you.’
‘I may be desperate,’ Alexa muttered, ‘but necrophilia’s not my thing.’
She had heard of Lord Bedstead; not his real name, but a reference to his sexual prowess. Which could have had possibilities had not the peer in question not been several decades older than her and with a penchant for Brazilian cross-dressers. And dead, into the bargain.
‘He died as he’d have wanted to,’ Barney told her. ‘Breathed his last in the arms of a seven-foot-tall transsexual with steel teeth.’
Alexa rubbed her face. ‘What’s all this got to do with me?’
‘Lord Bedstead’s memorial service,’ Barney said slowly, in the emphatic tones of one speaking to an idiot, ‘is certain to be attended by a great many male aristocrats of similar rank. Not all of them will bring their wives. Not all of them will be married, even.’
In the silence after these words, Alexa felt the pistons in her brain break through the rusty coating left by the last few weeks and start to pick up speed. She could see what Barney was getting at. A cathedral full of peers. Some unattached. Sitting ducks. The service would be of a length to allow her to pick her target from the discreet distance of the pews.
It was ingenious.
There was only one problem.
‘I never knew Lord Bedstead,’ she admitted. ‘Did you?’
‘No, actually.’
‘So how will we get in?’ She felt irritated that he had raised her hopes whilst overlooking this crucial factor.
‘Anyone wishing to pay their respects can apply for a ticket,’ Barney said gleefully. ‘I’m applying for two.’
Alexa’s smile broadened into a grin. It was inspired, it really was. You didn’t have to be invited into this social inner sanctum. You only had to buy a ticket to be back in the swim.
‘Lord Wimble will be there,’ Barney added.
Alexa nodded. Wimble was the earl she had all but lap-danced on the way to Willoughby Hall. His family fortune was negligible and his generous proportions gave a whole new meaning to ‘family seat’. But he was a start. Once back on the ladder, she could trade him in for two wings, a dome, fishing rights and a villa in Umbria.
Chapter 26
The white and gold double doors of the Crown Prince’s bedroom swung tentatively open. The anxious, smooth red face of Monsieur Hippolyte, the royal private and press secretary, peered in and looked nervously about for something small, hairy and ferocious.
Was the blasted dog there? It had a nasty habit of nipping the ankles of anyone who stepped over the threshold.
‘Your Royal Highness?’ he murmured.
There was no answer. Hippolyte could make out little in the gloom of the Crown Prince’s bedroom. At the tall windows, the thick lined curtains were pulled shut, but with apparent crazed haste and with no eye for aesthetics. Not in a manner, Monsieur Hippolyte concluded, that suggested the Prince’s valet had done it, but then the Prince had not allowed his valet near since he had come back from England. He had allowed very few people near, in fact. To say that the heir to the throne was unhappy was not dissimilar to saying that the King was ever more short-tempered and the Queen increasingly tense.
Hippolyte cleared his throat. ‘Sir?’
There was no answer.
The press secretary felt horribly hot. Summer w
as gathering its full force in Sedona, blasting the mountainous Mediterranean kingdom with scorching rays even at this time of the morning. Hippolyte fished a crumpled white hanky out of his pocket and wiped his sweating brow. Squinting into the darkness, he pressed his fat little hands together and flexed his flabby biceps beneath his crisp white shirtsleeves. Gingerly, he touched his head. The increasing stress seemed to be increasing the size of the bald patch in the centre. Certainly, arranging the hanks of determinedly black hair that covered it was getting more complicated.
But nowhere near as complicated as dealing with Prince Maxim. It was all that wretched PR consultant’s fault. It was easy for him to demand the Crown Prince come home and get married for the good of the economy, then to flounce off to his next lucrative engagement, leaving others to actually manage the reluctant heir and find him someone to marry.
Others like Hippolyte. Together with Maxim’s parents, he had scoured entire forests of royal family trees and thumbed from dawn till dusk through every gazette of lineage and peerage he could lay his hands on. He had pondered lists of quadruple-barrelled archduchesses until his eyeballs twisted. Life at the Chateau de Sedona recently had been a whirl of entertaining as every eligible daughter in Europe came to stay. But to no avail.
Engelbert, as the entire castle staff knew, was at his wits’ end with his son. ‘He’s just not making an effort,’ the King would rant, pacing up and down the same patch of carpet in his private secretary’s office. ‘There was nothing wrong with that Spanish girl. She did have a strange laugh, but I told Max the trick was not to tell her jokes, that was all.’
But the Prince had been unmoved by the Spanish infanta, as well as the Austrian archduchess, the German baroness, the Italian contessa and the female Scottish laird. Likely candidates were running out. But Maxim had to marry someone. The people of Sedona wanted a wedding. The King wanted a wedding. Everyone wanted a wedding, except the person expected to be the groom.