“It’s the bonfires, my lord.”
Once my face was satisfactorily dry, I looked up at my employee.
“Bramley, why are you wearing a crown of flowers?”
“It’s Beltane, my lord.”
I sighed.
“Of course.” I looked at my watch. I don’t know why. It doesn’t chime whenever there’s a pagan festival. Although it would be handy if it did.
“The dowager baroness said I looked very smart.”
For a moment, I considered jamming my head back inside the toilet. This time on a more permanent basis.
“Let me check I’ve got this right. We’ve got fifty people arriving over the next few days. Two dozen of them expecting to live within the walls of this crumbling ruin you and I have the misfortune to call home. We have a to-do list as long as the Bayeux Tapestry. And my mother is currently running around a bonfire, in the middle of a stone circle, in the middle of the forest, in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but old muslin curtains?”
“That’s about the size of it, my lord.”
“Brilliant. Glad we’ve all got our priorities clear.”
Bramley pointed at the lavatory. “Do you want me to call the plumber up from the village, my lord?”
I dropped the plunger to the ground and put my head in my hands. The bill for a call-out to fix faulty Victorianplumbing on this scale, at this time of night, would be eye-watering. The production company’s initial instalment cheque for allowingThe Love Manorto be filmed at Buckford Hall had already been spent on emergency roof repairs. It was the only way we could guarantee our guests and their expensive camera equipment would stay dry. The money had been a godsend. We’d had a tarpaulin on the roof ever since a big storm at Christmastime, when the chandelier in the Long Gallery began doing a splendid impression of the waterfall thingy at Changi Airport. My grandfather, the fifteenth baron, would be horrified we were letting a television programme be filmed in the old ancestral pile. The night I signed the contract, I swear I could hear his screams drifting over the hill from his crypt in the family mausoleum. But needs must, Grandad. And it was hardly the worst place this family had found the money to keep the roof on over the centuries.
“No,” I said firmly, sitting upright. “I’m not giving up yet. There’s bound to be a YouTube video covering this exact situation.”
Four hours later, I slumped into an armchair in the East Drawing Room. I was exhausted and smelly but reasonably confident I had saved the estate a plumber’s bill totalling several hundred quid. I knocked the top off a well-earned bottle of beer, put my socked feet up on the coffee table, and stared up at a portrait of the ninth baron. He’d earned a fortune investing in the railways in the Victorian era—enough to think nothing of more than doubling the size of the original Jacobean house. It was his arrogance, his largesse, his bloody ego, that’d had got us into this mess. Maintaining a house of this size had been a millstone around the neck of every baron who’d come after him. I sipped at my beer and flicked on the TV, hoping to watch the rugby on catch-up. As the wheel of death began slowly loading,my eyelids started to feel heavy. I closed them, briefly, while I waited.
Something wet splashed across my face. I recoiled, wiped my cheek, and blinked into the light streaming in through the drawing room window, bright and yellow. I must have fallen asleep on the sofa. I closed my eyes against the sun, only to become aware of a loud, repetitive thudding across the floorboards.
“Morning, darling!”
I opened one eye enough to see my mother and her best friend—my godmother, Aunty Karma—wafting around the room like geriatric ballerinas, muslin trailing behind them. The smell of smoke had drifted in with them. I clamped my eyes shut before I could be confronted by naked breasts.
“Beltane’s blessings upon you,” my mother said, her voice now right behind me. She planted a kiss on my forehead. Wetness splashed across my face again.
“Stop it! What is that?” I nearly opened my eyes but thought better of it.
“It’s morning dew!”
“Why? Why is it morning dew?”
“It keeps you young and beautiful.”
“I’m twenty-five!” I bleated. “Surely a pair of withered old crones could find a more urgent use for your precious morning dew than waking me up with it?”
“But it’s Beltane!” Mum said, her voice drifting around the room. Thundering footsteps continued to dance around me, testing the strength of whatever the woodworm had left of the floorboards. At any moment, either of these women mightplummet through to the wine cellar. With any luck, both. Mum and Aunty Karma were in their late fifties. They’d been up all night dancing around the stone circle on the top of Buckford Hill. Where the hell did they get their energy?
“The great goddess of the earth is at her fullest,” Aunty Karma said, adding her two pennies’ worth to the madness. “Her womb is ripe. She awaits the seed of new life.”
“How ghastly.”
A pair of hands grabbed my knees. “This is a time of abundant fertility. Of sexualenergy!”
“Stop, please. This is too much.”
The hands released their grip. A smoke-scented breeze hit my face as my mother danced away again.
