Stuart had forgotten how beautiful Fairleigh Park was, even so late in the year. The gardens had been planned with the progression of the seasons in mind; the estate abounded in foliage the colors of wine and gold, warm and vivid against a backdrop of mossy evergreens.
Twenty years it had been, since he left for India at seventeen, furious at both his father and Bertie. But it felt even longer. The scent of Fairleigh Park in deep autumn—of falling leaves and the stillness of the countryside between the end of harvest and the bustle of yule—was one he associated with his earliest years in Yorkshire, before he started public school and came back home only during Christmas, Easter, and the months of summer.
He walked the mile from the gates of the estate to the village. The sun shed an anemic light, but it was still a clear, crisp day. The village had been built upon an incline, its biscuit-colored houses hugging the sides of a tributary to the Ure. A stone bridge from the sixteenth century spanned the fast-flowing brook.
As he passed through the village, curtains fluttered; curious faces appeared from around corners and behind drystone walls. The villagers had guessed his identity. He wondered what they thought of his seemingly triumphant return, at this once-illegitimate up-start having at last entirely supplanted Bertie.
Atop the bridge two young boys threw rocks and twigs into the stream below. Engrossed in their game, they paid no attention to him. He stopped and watched them.
See that leaf in the water, Stuart? If it’s lucky, it will go all the way to the sea.
Will it really?
If it’s lucky. My mum lived on a house by the sea, in the south. She died there. It was a pretty place. I want to go there again.
Even though your mum died there?
I wasn’t there when she died. It will remind me of when she was alive. She used to sit on a chair and watch me when I sea-bathed.
He shook his head. That conversation had to be almost thirty years old. Amazing what random tidbits the mind uncovered at times, washing up on the shores of consciousness like jetsam after a storm.
He followed the market road out of the village and kept to it for another mile before setting out across the still green pastures to climb up the limestone ridge that defined the perimeter of the dale. From this vantage point it was easy to see that Fairleigh Park was a modestly scaled country house, more Petit Trianon than Chateau de Versailles. But once upon a time it had been grand to him, grand and spectacular, the closest thing he’d ever seen to a fairy tale castle.
I don’t know where you live.
Somewhere in the shadow of the prince’s castle.
He let the rocky paths take him the long way around to the woods behind the manor, in the direction of the gamekeeper’s cottage. Bertie had left Fairleigh Park in sound shape: the estate supported itself and the urban properties were as lucrative as Stuart had supposed. Out of a four-foot stack of papers, only two items of expenditure had struck him as anomalies. One, Madame Durant’s wages were notably less than what he’d expected. Two, Bertie paid for the public school fees of one Michael Robbins, the adopted son of Fairleigh Park’s longtime gamekeeper.
Bertie had been generous in his charitable giving, but in every other instance his money had gone to churches, institutions, and committees—intermediaries, not individuals, except in the case of Michael Robbins. And Bertie didn’t send the boy to some third-rate school, but to Rugby, one of the oldest and most prestigious public schools in the country and—ironically enough—Stuart’s alma mater.
He wasn’t certain how he felt about possibly having a nearly grown nephew. Old, perhaps. But if Michael Robbins were indeed Bertie’s natural child, then Stuart would do right by the boy, as his own late father had done right by him—as well as he had known how.
The gamekeeper’s cottage was squat and ordinary, its walls constructed from the same weathered white rock used in the miles of drystone walls that delineated fields and pastures in the dale. James Robbins, the gamekeeper, was in his early sixties, short, bald, and stout. He smiled widely as he realized who had come to call, his eyes nearly disappearing into the leathery folds of his face. Mrs. Robbins, as old as her husband, plain, and stooped, was visibly flustered as she welcomed Stuart into her unassuming home.
Stuart remembered her as the spinster daughter of the local curate, accompanying her father from time to time on his visits to Fairleigh Park. She’d married down considerably. The gamekeeper’s cottage was shabby compared even to the curate’s house, which had been no palace.