Page 84 of The Heir Apparent
I had not told Amira everything about that day in Scotland. I had told no one that after Jack’s car had disappeared down the drive, I turned from the window and found Richard standing on the landing. He was in a suit—strange, I thought, even for our family—and his hands were clasped together over his belly as he waited for me to see him. He raised his eyebrows and grinned. Feeling self-conscious in my pyjamas, I wrapped my arms around my chest.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Has your chap gone already?” he asked. “Such a shame. I thought you almost had him on the hook there, but alas, he wriggled away. It was a problem poor Isla had too, I suppose.”
More than anything, I was afraid. I could see in his eyes that whatever he had been planning, the time was now. An ambush predator will lie motionless in the sand, it will change its skin to mimic leaves, it will burrow into the earth for as long as it takes for its prey to walk blindly into its lair. He had been waiting for me, I knew it. I could see it, I had sensed it for eight months. I wanted my father, but he wasn’t here anymore. No one was. I attempted to pass him so I could flee down the hallway, but he caught me by the elbow with one large hand.
“Don’t run off just now,” he said calmly. “You and I have barely had a chance to chat since we got here.”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I said, shaking his hand off my arm. “I know what you said to him.”
He briefly looked confused and then smiled. “Oh, dear, are you upset about that? I must say, I really am surprised at your naivety sometimes. Did you think you could dress him up like your little doll and prop him on the sofa with the Queen andwe’d all be one happy family? Lexi, do think logically for once. Do you truly believe he was invited tothisplace because we were all so keen to meet your Australian boyfriend?”
I looked up and down the hallways, desperate for a servant or a valet to appear, but we were alone.
“You know,” he said, putting a finger to his chin as if a novel thought had just occurred to him. He was enjoying himself immensely. I wondered how long he had spent plotting this conversation. “I always thought your biggest flaw was that you were your mother’s daughter. But I’m starting to see that you truly are Freddy’s girl. Gosh, he was just the same—hopelessly gaga for Annabelle, who was, despite her good breeding, nothing but a divorced stable girl. We invited your mother up here that summer so your father would understand what needed to be done. Anyway, I suppose there are people in this family who still believe in your accession. But in the end, they didn’t even need to put that much effort into running your farmer off, did they? You did that all on your own.”
Trembling, I stepped forward. My hopelessness had combusted into rage, and I was no longer afraid of him. I was the heir apparent, the sole surviving descendant of the Prince of Scotland, the tip of the great Villiers spear.
“I want you to stay away from me,” I said in a low voice. “If there’s not a camera on us, I don’t want you anywhere near me. If I read one more lie about myself in the paper, I am going straight to the tabloids to tell them everything I know about you—and my father liked to talk, so I knowquitea lot. And then I’m going to Granny and telling her everything.”
His lips quivered into a smile, revealing his mismatched teeth. “But if you did that, I’d have to tell her about David Rossi. It didn’t take all that long for the private investigator to track him down, you know.”
I shook my head. “Who the fuck is David Rossi?”
Again, that smile as he stepped into my space. He was drenched in a Tom Ford cologne that burned the back of mythroat. “I think you know who David Rossi is. And if you really don’t, I’m sure it’ll come back to you. Give it time.”
The name meant nothing to me, but it meant something to him. I stepped past him, and this time he let me go. Whatever trap he had laid for me, he was confident that its steel teeth were now deep in my flesh.
“Lexi,” he called after me. “Once you remember, you come see me. You have until the end of the year—obviously.”
David Rossi, David Rossi.
Ten weeks on and it still meant nothing. I studied it so closely that it had lost all meaning. It was a jumble of letters and nothing else.
At the deck’s edge in the predawn, I lowered my feet into the water and turned the name over in my mind, again and again. Nothing surfaced.
I pushed the coat off my shoulders and slid into the black water. My breath came out of me in steaming billows as I swam forward. Once I was at the pond’s still centre, I let myself sink. It was so cold down there that it burned. I felt obliterated, suspended in nothing. It was like the darkest hour of night. I allowed myself to descend deeper, raising my arms over my head like fifth position in ballet. It wasn’t what I thought it would be like down there. Had she fought to the end? Had she splashed and screamed until her strength gave out? Or had it been like this—a slow, silent descent to the unknown. I knew it would hurt, that she had felt the agony of water rushing into the lungs. But only for a moment. Then it was just like drifting on the outer edges of sleep.
Underwater reeds wove their slimy fingers around my ankles and I jolted, remembering Mum’s face that last time I had seen her. I hadn’t known it would be the last time and I had barely taken her in. Suddenly back in my body, desperate for air, Ikicked and struggled. By the time I broke the surface, gasping and coughing, I remembered. Of course I remembered. I had always known. From the moment he said it, I’d known. The letters in the name came sharply into focus, like the perfect twist of the microscope that revealed the flourishing bacteria on the petri dish.
Davide Rossi, there you are, I thought.
Not David, as Richard had pronounced it, butDavide, with that sharp first syllable, the curt vee sound, and then the floating vowel at the end, almost impossible for any English speaker to get right. Exhausted, I swam back and heaved myself onto the deck. My lungs burned. I was spent; I was done.
“You alright, love?” the lifeguard called. “I was about to jump in after you.”
Lying there, I nodded, gasping like a sailor who’d survived the wreck and made it to shore. Once the lifeguard was gone, I pulled my coat back on with numb fingers and sat there for a long time, listening to the morning birds as the sky brightened into dawn. There was nothing left to do. I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialled the number. I imagined him on the other side of the planet, the sun setting over Tasmania as he looked at the screen, surprised to see my name, hesitating as he decided whether to answer. Finally, he picked up.
“Lexi?”
I took a deep, shaky breath. My teeth were chattering. “Uncle James, I’m so sorry.”
“Lexi, what happened?”
“I have to tell you what I did.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
