Page 3 of Wild About You

The office was in the front corner of the manor house of Stonemore, a Neo-Classical mansion house a few hundred yards away from the ruins of a Real Life Castle. The Mulholland family had built the house in the late 1700s when the castle became too uncomfortable to live in. Its façade was impressive: built of honey-coloured stone, two vast fluted columns flanked the front entrance and its steps, with symmetrical lines of windows running either side. It looked out over a pristine carriage drive and a deer park. Its whole appearance gave the impression of precision and order; I wondered where wildness would find its place here.

It sounds glamorous, working in a mansion, but there were drawbacks, which I discovered within fifteen minutes. Air temperature: roughly the same inside as it is outside. Number of insect and mouse traps: many. And then there was Tally, who appeared as soon as I walked in the door, and was if anything even more brittle than when she’d interviewed me. She was the collections manager, which meant she was responsible for every single bit of art and furniture in the place, as well as all the volunteer guides. But she gavethe impression that herpurview(her word) extended to the entire running of the estate.

My desk faced hers, with Fi’s desk at a right-angle between us. It was a big enough room – painted an institutional cream, but with lots of pictures on the walls and about four different antique carpets layered over the floorboards. Callum had an office next door. I realised immediately that my new colleagues and I were going to be spending a lot of time in close quarters.

‘The kettle’s over there, the blue mug is yours, the loo is first on the right down the hall,’ Fi said, hawkishly watching her inbox update as she took her coat off. Then she double-clicked something on the screen, picked up the phone and dialled a number. ‘When you say water ingress, do you mean a leak or a flood?’ she said sharply, kicking off her trainers and putting her work heels on. ‘Bear with me, I’ll be there in five minutes. Anna,’ she gave me a bright smile, ‘I’ll be back in a little while to get your computer set up for you, there’s just something I have to deal with.’ She was out the door in a moment, heading off through the innards of the house.

Sixty seconds after I’d settled into my desk chair, Tally narrowed her eyes and asked if Fiona had fully briefed me about theetiquetteat Stonemore. At interview, she had identified gaps in my knowledge about this kind of thing. Did I know how to address Jamie Mulholland, 8th Earl of Roxdale?

I’m afraid her imperious look was like a red flag to a bull to new, negative, me. ‘By his name?’ I said. She looked asthough she was going to implode, and shook her head in a way that should have been stern but made me want to start laughing. ‘Just call him my lord,’ she said, in a tone that was soft but severe. ‘Mylord.’

I didn’t dare say I’d never heard of him until the day of my interview. To hear Tally talk, you’d think we worked for the king of England. It’s all about correctformand the sense that the earl isvery important. I said it didn’t really matter what I called him, especially as it seemed I was never going to actually meet him. She gazed through me, as though I was dematerialising in front of her very eyes.

‘We do things differently here, Anna,’ she said. ‘Whatever you did inLondon, it doesn’t apply here.’

I smiled neutrally. She’d have to warm up eventually, right?

I felt positively jubilant when Callum took me out onto the estate that morning. We drove away from the house and its Neo-Classical neatness into the wilder part of Stonemore, bumping and jolting in an ancient green Land Rover. I loved this side of the place immediately: the expanses of heather, the vast hills, the wind-battered trees. The occasional shaft of sunlight on the browns and greens of the hills and the swiftly moving, constantly changing clouds. Callum parked the Land Rover beside a stream, the clear cold water running fast around grey boulders and rocks with a rushing sound that was astonishingly loud in the silence. The beautiful but unsparing landscape seemed to both match my stateof mind and lighten it. And it was as far from my old life as it could reasonably be.

‘What d’you think?’ asked Callum as we looked out at the landscape we were going to be shaping and caring for together. And I felt a little tremble run through me – something like joy, and anticipation, which I quickly slapped down with atake it slow, don’t overinvest.

‘It’ll do,’ I said, and smiled at him.

‘Glad to hear it,’ he said, and handed me back into the Land Rover in a way that made me feel positively fluttery.

On my return to the office, I was enjoying my sense of calm as I settled down at my desk and took possession of the laptop Fi had got for me (‘There’s no IT helpdesk,’ she said cheerily, ‘just me.’). Despite Tally’s evident suspicion of me, I was still very much in a ‘no regrets’ state of mind about the place in which I’d chosen to rebuild myself. I was searching the drawers of my (enormous, Victorian) desk when I became aware that someone else had entered the room, and looked up.

A tall man with short blonde hair and piercing blue eyes stood a metre from my desk, hands jammed into the pockets of his green waxed jacket (I made a mental note to buy one – it was clearly the uniform). I’m not going to deny it, my first thought out of the gate was –he’s hot. The second thought was –he’s grumpy. He stood there like an unhappy spirit blown in from the hills (if spirits could be that, er, ripped), wearing an ancient cable-knit jumper and black cords with boots that were caked in mud. And there was no doubt about it – he was glaring at me.

‘Er, hello?’ I said.

‘Will you be warm enough in that?’ he said, unexpectedly.

I mean, he was right. I was wearing a thin cotton blouse layered over a green vest top and black jeans, trying to look smart, and it was nowhere near warm enough. But there was something about his tone, a general dismissiveness, that riled me.

‘I’ll be fine, thank you,’ I said crisply.

‘Lord Roxdale!’ Tally had re-entered the room and almost dropped her William Morris print mug on the floor, decanting some of her tea onto the aged Axminster carpet.

He flicked a glance at her then looked back at me and narrowed his eyes. ‘I take it you have everything you need, apart from a coat,’ he said.

Dear lord, I thought the hopelessly rich were meant to be incredibly polite. Wasn’t that meant to be their saving grace?

‘Actually,my lord,’ I said, with a glance at Tally, ‘perhaps we could meet to discuss priorities, and there are a few things I need, some stationery—’

Meaning: a whiteboard, some multi-coloured Post-it notes, coloured highlighters. I’d almost had a panic attack when I realised there was no stationery cupboard.So I have an addiction. No one’s perfect.

‘Tell Fi.’ He was already turning away. ‘I’m told you had an assistant in your last job – will you be able to manage without one?’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘We all muck in here.’

I doubt that, I thought silently, then realised from hisexpression that this was probably written all over my face. ‘I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I said brightly, with a definite subtext ofscrew you.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, don’t come to me if you’re not,’ he said, and departed with a slam of the door.

I sat back down at my desk, waiting for my pulse to return to normal. Andthat’swhen I regretted coming to Stonemore. Because that was the moment I realised I was working for the most miserable man in Northumberland.

CHAPTER 3

‘Why didn’t you tell me how grumpy he is?’ I wailed to Fi that evening, with a large glass of red wine in my hand.

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