“Hold on, weren’t you on the tour yesterday?” Xanthe inhaled sharply. “Did I leave you behind?”
“No, no, I drove myself.”
“Oh, that’s all right then!” Xanthe darted a guilty look at Tom. Was this something she’d done before? “Pregnancy brain! Well, everyone’s driven themselves today, so I’m off the hook. And from next week, none of us has to worry.” She gazed up at the sooty, flaking ceiling with a sigh, as if it were a nostalgic memory worth preserving. “Unless some miracle happens.”
Tom felt bad for her. There would be no miracle. “Xanthe is marrying Duncan’s son, Connor,” he explained to Amelia, as he stashed the mop and wine bottle in the cupboard, “so she’s pretty much family.”
“Ha, the poor cousin, if so! Remember me when you’re living it up on the Riviera,” Xanthe said, walking out. “Only thing I own is my van, and I owe money on that.”
“She doesn’t believe me when I tell her how skint the family is,” Tom said to Amelia, when Xanthe was out of earshot. “People think I’m about to pocket millions of pounds and skive off to the Med. Let’s decamp to the library until they’ve passed through. It’s the only room with air con, which means heat. I need to split more kindling before I can light the other fires.”
They crossed the entrance hall into the library, where he found the heat pump remote and switched it on. “We got a grant for the heat pump from a heritage fund, though I’ve all but given up using the thing. I’d rather spend what little money we have on wages than electricity to keep documents and photos…” He trailed off, looking around.
“Tom?”
“Now, that’s strange. Things have been moved around in here.”
Amelia looked around, though she no doubt wasn’t seeing what he was. Documents piled in different places on the walnut desk. A filing cabinet left open. Disturbed dust in the bookcase. “Is that a concern?”
“Probably just the valuers. Though I was in here with them, and they just documented the furniture and art and left.”
“Maybe they came back to look for tax receipts from 1750.”
“Maybe,” Tom said, unconvinced. Maybe it was just paranoia after last night. Once you started looking for tears in the fabric of your existence, you tended to find them. Even if it was true that there was no body, he still felt a creeping dread that something wasn’t right. He rubbed the back of his neck.
“This is your family?” Amelia said, staring up at the family tree mural on the wall.
“The chosen ones, yes.”
“The what?”
“Something look odd to you?”
She studied it, tilting her head. “The children’s names. They’re all male. The girls didn’t count?”
“Not unless their sons succeeded. They do now—my father changed that rule. Or they would, if there were any.”
“And it’s only the line on the left of the tree.”
“The earls and their heirs. The lottery of birth. I’d add everyone else—fill the wall, fill theroom—but it’s all about to be smashed down, earls and all. Out with the old, in with the tech bro. That’s not the only family record, of course. There’s a book in here that traces me all the way back to Adam and Eve, if that’s what you believe. Through William the Conqueror, Charlemagne…” He scanned the bookshelf. “I can’t see it. I should pack it away. The local historical society is coming to salvage the rest of the archive. Not that the book matters anymore. It’s mostly about the rules of succession and inheritance.”
“Still, being able to see exactly where you came from…”
“You’d probably be able to trace back the same links. They reckon anyone with a drop of European blood can trace their ancestry to Charlemagne. The tricky part is to follow the lines back along the right route.”
“Not me.”
“It’s probably easier than you think these days, with the internet.”
“I don’t have much of a starting point, and it’s … awkward. My mom was adopted and has no idea who her birth parents were. And my father was an anonymous sperm donor—Mom had me when she was thirty-nine and the right man hadn’t come along. So, I can’t go further back than my mother, genetically.”
He stood there blinking at her like an idiot. He’d spent his life feeling like the blood in his veins wasn’t his own, like every name on the wall was peering over his shoulder, critiquing his every step. Legacy. Family. Inheritance.
“Which is all fine,” she added hurriedly, evidently noting his shocked expression. “My mom and my grandparents—her adoptive parents—are the best.”
“You’re not tempted to use one of those DNA websites?”
“I feel like that’s Mom’s decision, not mine. She’s on a reunion registry, where you can find your birth parents, but if they’re out there they don’t want to be found. And my sperm father would have donated with the expectation that his child would never find him.”
