Page 71 of The Heir Apparent
When I came back from peeing in the bushes, I found Louis alone. He was staring into the fire and hardly seemed to notice when I sat down beside him. Without the others, the sizzling tension between us eased. We sat quietly by the fire for a while, listening to its hiss and sputter as it split a log in two.
“Can I tell you something?” he asked softly. His bravado was gone.
“Yeah.”
“Last Guy Fawkes Day, we went to a friend’s place in Scotland for a bonfire. Some guy brought peyote, and I took it,” he said. “And the next day I woke up locked in a room. They’d boundmy wrists with a scarf. Kris and Amira said they’d had to sit with me all night to calm me down.”
“What happened?”
“They said I’d kept running towards the fire. I was fighting them off and screaming that I needed to get into the fire. It took four guys to get me locked up inside. I told everyone that I didn’t remember what happened. But I remember.”
He was staring into the fire now, the flames lighting up his storm-coloured eyes.
“What do you remember?” I asked.
He looked at me. “I could hear Mum screaming from inside the bonfire. She was begging me to come get her. She was calling both our names, screaming for our help. And no one would let me get to her. It was so real.”
We said nothing for a long time, but we both had tears in our eyes. We looked into the fire, and I tried not to imagine Mum trapped inside it. We had never talked about what had happened. After she was gone, we rarely spoke of her again.
“Do you think she was calling for us at the end? Out there on her own?” he asked.
I covered my face to hide my tears, because that was all I ever thought about. Louis put his arms around me, and I buried my face in his shoulder. We held each other for a long time as the fire began to dwindle. In the days after her death, there had been too much to do, too much to hide, and we’d never sought much comfort from each other.
“You’re the only one I can talk to about it—the only one who understands,” I said. I felt him nod as his head rested against mine. “I don’t want this distance between us.”
We were motherless children who’d been stupid enough to lose each other as well as her. Finally we broke apart and looked at each other with shining eyes.
“I know you don’t support what I’m doing,” he said. “But I can’t do the other thing, I can’t. Amira and I are friends—we’ll take care of each other. Granny’s giving us SherbourneHouse after the wedding. Amira’s happy for me and Kris. And she wants this life—she wants to be queen.”
I wiped my face and nodded, trying to understand. “Does Papa know?”
“He knows and he doesn’t know,” Louis said, looking towards the pearly moon on the horizon. “We’ve never really spoken about it, but, yeah, he knows.”
We hadn’t been this honest with each other since the night in the Highlands when we were still children.
“I want you to be happy,” I said. “I want Amira to be happy. I want Kris to be happy. I just worry someone’s going to get hurt in all this. I worry someone will use this against you. I’m just… worried, I guess.”
“So am I,” he admitted. “But no one’s figured it out yet. And the thing is, I think we can all be happy this way. No one ever gets everything they want. But this way, we get pretty close.”
We knew that life was a ledger and that happiness would always be offset by pain and sacrifice. Kris and Louis could be together under the guise of close brothers-in-law. Amira could have the life of Vikki’s dreams and a marriage of convenience.
“This feels like an insane conversation to be having in this day and age,” I said.
“It is, but you know our family’s about a hundred years behind everyone else,” Louis said. “You don’t have to support what we’re doing. But I do need you.”
I grabbed his hand and squeezed, the way Mum used to. We would be at a dreary Easter service or a garden show or yet another polo game, and she would absently take our little fists in her hand and knead them.
“It’s a good life you have here,” Louis said. “I’m really happy to see you so healthy. I was worried about you at the end.”
“Yeah, same.” I sniffed. “I’m sorry I left you like that. I just… it felt necessary.”
He nodded. “Are you really going to be a doctor?”
“My hospital internship starts next week.”
“Jesus Christ.” He laughed. “I think Papa’s secretly impressed. He’d never, ever admit it, though.”
We drove back to Hobart two days later, salt-crusted, tanned and triumphant. Louis and I had waded out until, finally, the sand flats gave way to deep water. We swam in the frigid bay, watching a glossy seal pirouette past us. We drank red wine by the campfire and walked the great length of the sand when the tide receded. I dozed in my tent in the afternoon sun and listened to Jack tell Louis about his dreams for the vineyard. When we got back to the property, Ragu galloped towards us and leapt into Louis’s arms. By his last night, I was almost looking forward to the wedding, when we would be together again.
