The Heir Affair

wanted their money back.
“Bex? Are you coming?”
“One sec,” I managed.
I clicked back over to Clive’s email. Without me and Nick on full display, the media hadn’t moved on; instead, everyone filled in the blanks themselves, conjuring up screaming matches, ongoing trysts, legal confabs, and whispers of divorce. One of the papers assured its readers that I was being deported and our marriage annulled; another claimed I was already pregnant and that the baby’s paternity was a big old question mark. It read like a contest to come up with the most plausibly dire headline. I felt another wave of disgust. Clive had emailed because he needed me and Nick. He couldn’t keep winning this game without his pawns, and knowing me as he unfortunately did, he probably figured he’d provoke a rude response from the unruly American that he could release to the world.
I hit delete. As far as that asshole was concerned, I was a ghost.
*  *  *
“Success!”
I nearly knocked over the jar of murky water I was using to clean my brushes.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Nick said, materializing by my side. “That’s looking marvelous.”
“Gotta keep my skills fresh,” I said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with all these paintings of ruined castles, though. They’re starting to pile up.”
“We’ll frame them and hang them in the Hall of Castles, which is a thing I’ve just made up that we should absolutely have.” Nick tugged down the brim of his baseball cap and knelt on the large plaid blanket I’d stretched over the grass. “I saw a baby lapwing inside the keep,” he said.
“Amazing!” I said. “I assume? I have no idea what that is.”
“It’s a bird,” he said, tossing his copy of Birding: A Life on the ground. “With a thingy on its head. You know. Like…a head thingy.”
“You’re really getting the hang of the terminology,” I teased.
Nick laughed, and swung his binoculars off from around his neck.
“Uncle Edwin is obsessed with birds, and Father loves shooting at Balmoral,” he said. “I thought birding might be in my DNA, but perhaps I’ll stick to cooking.” He rubbed his hands together. “On that note, I do think it’s time for lunch.”
“Amen,” I said, wiping my hands clean on a towel. “What did you pack for us today?”
Nick plunged a hand into the wicker picnic basket and withdrew two cold ham sandwiches—the meat cut thick, the bread heavy with salted butter, a beautiful calorie bomb—a pair of apples, a Thermos that I suspected contained clandestine Pimm’s Cups, and some hard-boiled eggs.
“Surely there’s a baked good in there somewhere,” I said. “You weren’t bashing around the kitchen for no reason this morning.”
“Guilty as charged,” Nick said. “Jam tarts.”
He pulled them out with a flourish. They had cracked in half.
“You’re making progress,” I said, taking an exploratory bite. “It’s…apricot?”
“Spot on!” Nick looked delighted. He stretched out next to me, long and lean, with his head on a crumpled-up sweater, a sandwich in one hand, and Birding: A Life in the other. “This entire book is gibberish,” he said, squinting at it. “If Father had ever bothered to take me hunting with him, maybe it would be different, but Mum was always the one who wanted to take us outside. She was never afraid to get grubby. Father would always come back immaculate from shooting grouse, and we’d be on the lawns rolling about in the mud after a rain looking for earthworms. He told her off about it once, said we were being improper, and she walked right up to him and grabbed his face and kissed him, and left two giant muddy handprints on his cheeks.”
I laughed. “I would have paid good money to see that.”
“Mum could be very funny, when she wanted to be.”
His smile faltered. Nick didn’t have many memories like that of his mother, because mental illness had overcome her when he was still young. Emma, Princess of Wales, spent most of her days now in a seaside retreat in Cornwall, which had hidden her from the world’s prying eyes both before and after everyone learned the truth about her condition.
I leaned over and gave him a peck. “Her spirit lives on in you, Steve,” I said. “God knows you didn’t get your sense of humor from Richard.”
He grinned around a mouthful of ham and then lifted the book back to his face.
I returned to my project. Like Nick, I’d been dabbling, though in my case it was only to expand my artistic horizons to paints from my usual sketching; today I’d managed a mediocre watercolor of the triangular Caerlaverock Castle, which rose from a dirty brown pond that wouldn’t have offered much protection back in the day—which probably explained why the castle had been brutalized by siege warfare between the English and the Scots. Since landing in Wigtown, we’d spent countless days touring Scotland’s many remote and ruined castles, which for me was a kicky diversion and an excuse for fresh air but carried a little more personal weight for Nick.
“I wonder if any of my lot are responsible for this one,” he’d say, touching a crumbling wall in a building that had, once upon a time, been sacked and burned. Another day, we’d taken a rowboat to Threave Castle, and he’d opined, “I suspect this moat was meant to keep my family out. If Archibald the Grim’s grave is here, he’s spinning in it.”
It seemed that, while our decision to run had been spontaneous, visiting the various trappings (or crime scenes) of the institution we’d left behind was reinforcing Nick’s desire to stay away. And how ironic that, in the end, I had run off in order to save myself. Just not with Freddie, the way he’d hoped. I wondered idly if he’d thought of that, too. Or what he was thinking at all. Over the last several weeks, I’d written a hundred texts to Freddie that I’d deleted instead of sending—partly because I’d waited too long to know what to say. Hey,