Page 31 of Duke It Out
“Everything is in those papers. Every lie, every mistake, every bad decision he made. I’m not going to let it all come undone because it’s fun to dig through his dirty laundry.”
I feel my cheeks sting pink as he quotes my own words back to me as if he can read my mind. For a moment I don’t speak, and the air between us crackles with tension. Despite the irritation building in my chest, I feel something, a strange pull towards him. Maybe it’s the sheer force of his frustration, or the vulnerability that he’s determined not to show, but there’s something.
“If you want me to write this,” I say steadily, “you’re going to have to trust me.”
“It’s not you I don’t trust,” Rory says quietly, and I notice the tired shading beneath his eyes. “It’s my father.”
And for a moment I get a sense of the weight of all of it –the responsibility that comes with the privilege, the expectations that are inherited along with the castle and the land and all the rest. I love the history of this place, and the magic of the past that seems to haunt every passageway. For Rory, though, it seems like some sort of poisoned chalice.
“I’ll leave you to it, then,” he says, and turns and walks away.
I look around the study and try and figure out how to make some sort of order from the chaos. A boy in a navy polo shirt and a pair of jeans arrives with some plastic crates.
“These are from Janey,” he says, peering at me around the side of the stacked crates in his arms. “Where do you want them?”
“Oh.” That might make this a little easier. “Pop them on the table there, thank you.”
“No probs.” He flips his long fringe back from his forehead and deposits them on the table, turning to me with a curious expression. “Rather you than me.”
“It’s a challenge,” I concede, smiling back at him. “So do you work here too?”
“Aye,” he says, taking out a packet of gum from his pocket. He offers it to me politely. “I’m Martin.”
“No thanks.”
“I’m taking my life in my hands. ‘I’ll shoot anyone I see chewing gum within five miles of my person’,” he says, doing an impression in a booming voice.
I look at him, perplexed.
“The old duke,” he says laughing. “I wouldn’t have put it past him to do it, either.”
We both look up at the portrait that’s hanging on the study wall. A kilted Dickie Kinnaird in full Highland garb glowers down at us from beneath a pair of impressively thickbrows, his eyes the same unusual green as his son. I try to imagine Rory as a child being raised by that man.
He must have had an ego the size of Scotland. I can’t imagine what it would be like to sit working every day with a painting of myself in my eyeline, but he must’ve chosen to put it there, so maybe that says more about him than he’d have liked.
I can’t resist asking. “What about the new one? Do you think he’s likely to get the shotgun out?”
“Rory? Nah.” He grins. “His bark’s worse than his bite, I reckon.”
“I’m not so sure.” His bark had seemed pretty bloody scary earlier, and not in a good way. Whichever part of his personality that made up the dryly amused, laid-back New York Rory had been well and truly compartmentalised. Or more likely locked in a mental basement somewhere.
“You here for long?” He picks up a red-covered journal and turns it over, flipping the pages without interest.
“Until I get this lot collated and written up.” I wave an arm airily around the general area, trying not to think about the fact that the task right now seems Herculean at best.
“So, about three years then by the state of this place?”
“Something like that.”
He leaves and I get to work. Red journals in one box, papers from the desk in another. It feels weirdly intrusive to open the desk drawers and remove the notes and letters I find in there too, but I tell myself firmly that’s what I’m here for. This is history in the making. It’s amazing, really, to be part of it, even if the dust is making me sneeze.
A couple of hours later, Janey comes to see how I’m doing, bringing cookies and cold Diet Coke.
“You’re doing really well.”
I scrunch my nose in a dubious expression. Right now, it looks like that point where you commit to cleaning up and the place looks worse than it did before you started.
“I don’t envy you. I think hiring an expert to do this was the best choice they made. There’s way too much emotion tied up in the whole thing.”
