Christmas at a Highland Castle

Chapter 24

It didn’t strike Sebastian until Jess had left the room. We could do B and B in the castle … We. He clung to that tiny word, even as the seas of his despair tossed her idea like driftwood, snapping it and dragging it under.

It was as good an idea as any, he supposed – and one more than he’d managed to come up with – but the fact was they would have to do B and B in the castle for about a thousand years to clear the debts. And that was without all the improvements they’d need to make to the castle itself before anyone would want to stay. People parting with their hard-earned cash wouldn’t be impressed by slow plumbing, or icy temperatures, however grand the room was.

When he’d said rock and a hard place, he’d meant it. It may not be as simple as wanting to keep the estate in the Barclay-Brown family. Regardless of what he’d said about the tenants, and however hard he wanted to protect them, things might have already gone too far.

Sebastian heard the slam of the main entrance door, the chattering voices of his sister and Candida floating along the corridor. Blinking for a few seconds too long, he wondered how long it would take Olivia to seek him out, especially if she’d got wind of Edward Ellingham’s visit.

Not long, if the sounds from the corridor were anything to go by. He could hear Olivia asking Jess where he was.

‘He’s in here.’ Jess’s voice floated in, followed by her pushing open the library door, carrying a mug of coffee in one hand and tailed by Olivia.

Once Jess had deposited the coffee, raised her eyebrows at Sebastian and had withdrawn from the room, Olivia plonked herself into a chair.

‘Good couple of days away?’ Sebastian asked.

Olivia shrugged. ‘Suppose so. Good couple of days here?’

‘I suppose so,’ he countered.

‘Any important visitors while I was away?’ The rise in Olivia’s eyebrows told him she knew all about Ellingham’s visit.

‘I won’t make any decisions without informing you first, Olivia.’

‘Why, thank you so much I’m sure, Your Lordship,’ she said, sarcasm lacing every word. Then she held up her mobile, waving it in his direction. ‘I’ve just received an email from the laboratory. Thought I’d wait until I was here before I opened it, as it concerns you as much as it does me.’

‘They emailed through the results?’ he said.

‘It’s a next-day premium service, so they’re hardly going to rely on snail mail, are they?’

Sebastian bit his lip to stop himself from asking how much the ‘premium service’ had cost.

Olivia paused as she studied the email, her eyebrows furrowing, then arching as she scrolled.

‘Well? What does it say?’ Sebastian was sure the results had never been in any doubt, but the expression on his sister’s face made his fingers tighten around the arms of his chair. She turned her gaze onto him and began to smile.

Olivia’s smile broadened and, to Sebastian’s consternation, she began to laugh.

‘Oh my God. That’s … Well, that’s hilarious.’

‘What’s hilarious?’ Sebastian couldn’t work out how anything to do with establishing their parentage could be so funny. In a way, if it did turn out that he wasn’t Henry’s son, maybe handing all the financial problems over to Olivia might be amusing. But there was no way he had any doubt over his mother, or her misguided loyalty to his father.

‘So, I took some hair from Daddy’s dressing room, from his comb. You know how messy he was, how he left everything lying around. Maybe I should have realised, because I found it on the floor. Anyway, the hair from his comb wasn’t ideal, it’s supposed to have the follicles still on the ends, but it was the best I could do. And I sent that, as well as yours and mine.’ Her features creased into a grin which she fought to get under control. ‘Or at least, I thought it was some of his hair.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Well, it looked like his hair. Although if I think about it, it does make sense. I mean, she doesn’t have much control over it, does she? It goes all over the house.’

‘Speak English, Olivia.’

‘It was dog hair.’ Olivia tossed the phone in his direction, then dissolved into giggles again.

‘Dog hair?’ Sebastian scanned the email. Close familial links between two of the hair samples, likely closely related, siblings with same parents. One hair sample erroneous. Not human hair, instead animal – likely canine. ‘Digby?’

Olivia nodded. ‘Must be. If you think about it, his hair and Daddy’s hair are quite similar, in colour at least.’

Sebastian couldn’t help himself, pressing his fingers to his lips as he tried to suppress his laughter. Digby’s fur was a pale silvery grey underneath the apricot tinge on top, and he supposed Olivia was right. Their father’s hair hadn’t been all that dissimilar. He chuckled at the thought of what his father would have made of someone mistaking dog hair for his own, then glanced at Olivia and allowed himself to laugh, enjoying the feeling of sharing a joke, and a proper belly laugh, with his sister.

It took him a while to notice Olivia had stopped laughing, her face creasing as she began to weep instead.

‘What’s wrong?’ Sebastian rounded the desk and wrapped her in a hug. ‘Olivia, what’s the matter?’

‘I can’t do anything,’ she wailed. ‘I’m useless. I’ve never done anything except live here. I’m a leech. When you sell up, what the hell am I going to do?’

Sebastian pulled back, framing her tear-streaked face with his hands. ‘You’re not a leech.’

‘Yes I am.’ The wailing intensified.

‘Well, OK. Maybe you’re a bit of a leech.’

She spluttered a laugh and he hugged her tighter.

‘But you’re also my sister and I love you, bar the blood-sucking bit. It’s OK. It’s all going to be OK.’

‘How? How is it going to be OK?’

It was a decent question, and he didn’t have an answer. ‘I don’t know. Not yet anyway. But it’s going to be OK.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I shouldn’t have listened to him; I shouldn’t have believed him over you. Or Mummy.’

‘I don’t think I need the apology. But she does. She’s the one you really hurt with your wild accusations.’

For once in her life, Olivia didn’t push back. Instead she nodded and said, ‘I will. She didn’t deserve that. I mean, there’s no one less likely to go all Connie Chatterley and have a secret love affair with someone, is there?’

‘As much as I’d like her to find someone – be happy – I genuinely don’t see it.’

‘It’s not like there’s anyone around here to fit the bill, is there? I mean, practically everyone in Kirkshield is of pensionable age. I suppose there’s a few single men – but it’s not as though she’d have anything in common with someone like Robbie. They don’t exactly move in the same circles, do they?’ Olivia shook her head.

Sebastian frowned at the idea of their mother with another man. Which was completely irrational; if anyone deserved a shot at happiness, it was her. Then he studied his sister for a moment. Maybe there was more than one way to bring happiness into his mother’s life. ‘Liv, if I’m going to make this creaking behemoth of an estate work, I’m going to need all the help I can get.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. Thing is, I kind of agree with you about the unfairness of my inheriting this entire place. It does seem very out of step with the twenty-first century.’

‘That’s because it is. As far as I can see, it’s nothing more than a way for the lucky few to hang on tight to as much as they can. And if I’d been born Oliver, rather than Olivia, you’d be the one left with nothing.’

Sebastian grinned. ‘The irony being that there’s still nothing, even though on paper I’ve got it all. In fact, there’s less than nothing.’ He shuffled some papers, drawing out the one he’d shown Jess – the bank statement displaying the full horror of the estate’s finances. He passed it to Olivia. ‘Take a look.’

Olivia scanned the sheet of paper, her eyes widening in a similar way to Jess’s. She twisted the paper and pointed to a figure. ‘Is this a minus?’

Sebastian stifled a laugh – she’d used the same phrase as Jess had done. But it wasn’t in the slightest bit funny, and Olivia tilted her head at his unexpected response. ‘Yes,’ he conceded. ‘That’s the overdraft. That’s why I need all the help I can get. And now you’ve seen how difficult this is going to be, I wouldn’t blame you if you perform the biggest back-pedal ever with your offer of support.’

‘Really?’ She looked defiant. ‘I’ve spent the last ten years hiding my relationship from my father, when it would have been far easier to have bowed to his will and given Candida up. Married some chinless wonder and pretended I enjoyed having him sweat all over me. No. You’re looking at a woman who doesn’t give up, or give in. It’s almost like you don’t know me at all, little brother.’

Sebastian smiled. ‘And there she is – that’s the Olivia we’re going to need.’

‘Right,’ she said, scanning the figures on the paper again. ‘First things first. Let’s see what we can trim immediately. Cars. I love my Landy, but I don’t need it. That can go.’

‘I’ve already contacted the garage about the Evoque, too. They’re collecting it this week.’

‘Good. I think Mummy should keep her Audi, though. Perhaps we could all share that.’

‘I’ll let you ask her,’ he said.

‘Ask me what?’ Their mother was in the doorway. ‘What’s going on in here? You two look like you’re planning something – and doing it together, for once.’ She looked amused.

‘Seb’s finally realised my worth, and I’m helping him sort out his life,’ Olivia said. ‘But, seriously, we’ve got to make some drastic changes around here. Cut out the dead wood.’ She looked more animated than Sebastian had seen for years. ‘Oh, another thought. We can let Jess go. It was my idea to have her here in the first place, and I agree with you now, Sebastian. It was insensitive of me to replace Elsa, the “Angel of Death”, so quickly. I just thought it would be good to have some help over Christmas – but we can manage without her, can’t we?’

Sebastian didn’t fully hear the last part of what Olivia said, he’d got stuck on the bit about letting Jess go. ‘No.’

‘No? No to which part?’

He shook his head. ‘No. We can’t let Jess go.’

‘Why not?’

Why not? It was an excellent question, one to which Sebastian didn’t have a straightforward answer. He mumbled something about seeing through her contract, that their younger sister and her family was about to arrive for Christmas. He saw Olivia’s frown and knew his words didn’t match up to the way he’d impressed on her the need to make cutbacks.

He did his best to deflect, by reminding Olivia how she was going to apologise to their mother, then sitting back in his chair as the two women talked. Wondering why it was he wanted to include Jess in his version of the lifeboat Edward Ellingham had mentioned.

Dee listened to Olivia’s apology, mildly bemused. Olivia only ever apologised as a last resort, or on occasion as a way to get something she wanted. But this apology seemed genuine. As though she’d actually taken on board how deeply her accusations of infidelity had stung Dee.

The fact that she had remained faithful, no matter what, had been something Dee had clung to – a sort of a moral life raft. It had been a way to try to separate herself from the way her husband had behaved. Maybe it would have been easier to have sunk to his level. Maybe that was what he was waiting for, so that he could get rid of her and take another, even younger, wife.

Maybe she’d never wanted to give him the satisfaction of doing that, or to furnish him with anything else with which he could control her.

To hear herself vindicated – even if it was through her daughter’s need to DNA-test her son – went some way to allowing Dee to breathe freely again. And the fact that Olivia and Sebastian looked as though they were exploring a way to run the estate together was music to Dee’s ears. That was until Olivia made a throwaway comment.

‘And with us taking charge of making this place work, you can concentrate on you. It’s about time you thought about what you want next, don’t you think?’

Dee’s smile grew broader. Perhaps this was the moment to tell them about her feelings for Robbie.

‘In time, you might even want to find someone new,’ Olivia said. ‘I mean, why not? Although to be fair you might struggle around here. We were just laughing about it – the only single bloke in the vicinity is Robbie, and it’s not like you’d be interested in someone like him, would you? He’s like a part of the estate furniture – and you two couldn’t be more different if you tried.’

Dee froze. She’d been right. Her children thought the idea of her and Robbie finding love was crazy. Worse than that, they thought it laughable.

She swallowed hard; the smile she’d allowed to grow broader at the way her children were finally acting as a team slipped from her lips. She stayed put, in one of the library’s leather armchairs, as Sebastian excused himself, didn’t move from her chair when Olivia left the room, too, in search of Candida.

Dee was back to square one, hiding her true feelings from the people she loved the most. But who should she hide them from? Her children, or Robbie? Which of them was she willing to disappoint?