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Natalie gave her an ‘are you insane?’ stare. ‘Can I at least make a mini-Simon out of modelling clay and stick pins into him?’
‘That’s money,’ Holly said, ‘you could spend more satisfyingly on posh gin.’
‘Oh, the modelling clay and pins would be satisfying enough,’ Natalie said. ‘But you’re right. Posh gin’s a good idea. And we are so having posh gin at the ball. So I’ll meet you at Paddington Station at four o’clock on Friday—next to the Paddington Bear bench—and we’ll get the next train to Bath.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve got our tickets. I’ll send you the email so you’ve got the PDF of our tickets, too, just in case something goes wrong with my phone.’
‘It’s more likely to be me forgetting to charge my phone. You know how hopeless I am,’ Holly said wryly. ‘You’re the best friend ever. Thanks, Nat.’
‘Roman archaeology, afternoon tea and a Regency ball. That’s all our favourite things covered,’ Natalie said with a smile.
‘And no matchmaking,’ Holly said, mindful of her best friend’s views about how to get over a broken relationship. ‘Just a nice girly weekend. You and me.’
‘A nice girly weekend. You and me,’ Natalie echoed.
* * *
Wine plus his parents really wasn’t a good combination, Harry thought. He was really glad that that his brother Dominic, his sister Ellen and their partners were here, too. It was the only thing that made a visit to Beauchamp Abbey bearable. He wished the meal had been Sunday lunch rather than Saturday dinner, because having small children around might have dampened the sniping a bit.
Then again, the sniping had been there when he’d been a small child, too. It had grown worse over the years, and it had been truly unbearable when Dom and Nell had both been at university. Harry hadn’t been able to keep the peace between his parents and he’d hated all the conflict, so he’d escaped to his grandmother’s as much as possible. His parents’ behaviour had gone a long way to putting him off the idea of ever getting married.
At least Ellen had asked him to stay with her, so he didn’t have to put up with a whole weekend of their parents. Now, with the cheese course over, his father was making inroads into the brandy and getting really snippy. ‘You’re thirty now, Harry. Isn’t it about time you got married again and settled down properly?’ George asked.
Trust his father not to pull his punches. And considering that Viscount Moran had made it very clear that Harry’s ex-wife was much too lower class for his son... Harry damped down the anger. Having difficult in-laws wasn’t the only reason, or even one of the main reasons, why he and Rochelle had broken up. But it hadn’t helped.
‘I’m a bit busy with my career, Pa,’ he said as blandly as he could. ‘It’s not fair to ask someone to wait about for me when I’m touring so much.’ And if marriage hadn’t worked with someone who was in the same business and understood that you had to travel a lot to make a living out of music, it definitely wasn’t going to work with someone who’d be left at home all the time.
‘I think we’ve given you your head for quite long enough, letting you mess around with your cello for all these years,’ George said. ‘It’s way past time you came back here, settled down and pulled your weight in the family business.’
‘Messing around’ wasn’t quite how Harry would describe graduating from the Royal Academy of Music with first-class honours, or working w
ith a renowned string quartet for the last six years. Not to mention the fact that he’d paid for the repairs of the conservatory roof at the abbey last year. He did his share of supporting the family estate, except he did it from as much distance as he thought he could get away with.
And it was getting harder and harder to bite his tongue. He knew his father resented the fact that Harry had gone his own way, but did George always have to bring it up and try to make his youngest son feel as if his career was worthless and he was a useless son? But, much as he wanted to stand up to his father’s bullying and tell him where to get off, Harry didn’t want to make life hard for his brother and sister. They were the ones who lived locally and would bear the brunt of George’s temper, whereas Harry had the perfect excuse to escape to wherever the quartet was playing next.
‘I still think my father would turn in his grave at the idea of people poking around the house,’ George grumbled.
‘Nobody will be poking around the house, Pa,’ Dominic reassured him. ‘They’ll be following a defined visitor route. Nobody will go into areas we’ve roped off as private. And we’ve done Open Garden weekends for years without a problem; opening the house to visitors is just an extension of that.’
‘The gift shop, the plant sales and the café we’re going to set up in the Orangery will help to make the estate pay for itself,’ Ellen added. ‘We’re developing an exclusive range of biscuits at the factory, based on some of the old recipes we found in the library, and we can sell all the gifts through our website as well.’
‘Biscuits.’ George’s voice dripped with contempt.
Harry could see his sister-in-law Sally and his brother-in-law Tristan squirming, embarrassed by the escalating family row and not quite sure how to deal with Viscount Moran’s uncertain temper, worried that anything they did or said would make things worse. With age, George had become more and more crusty, to the point where he was almost a caricature. One of these days he’d be in a satirical cartoon, with his mop of grey hair he couldn’t be bothered to style, his jowls and his red cheeks, pointing a finger and shouting.
‘Well, I don’t want anything to do with it.’ George swigged his brandy crossly. ‘I don’t see why you can’t just wait for me to die before you start all this nonsense.’
‘That can be arranged,’ Barbara said, rolling her eyes at her husband.
George’s temper flared. ‘As for you, what do you care about Beauchamp? You grew up—’
Harry knew what was coming next: a pot-shot at his mother’s background as the daughter of a local biscuit manufacturer. She was a commoner with her background in trade, not the gentry. And that in turn would escalate to comments from his mother that the Morans hadn’t minded the money from Beckett’s Biscuits rescuing them when George’s father had drunk and gambled away the estate to near-penury, forty years before...
He stood up. ‘Both of you. Please. Just stop,’ he said quietly.
To his surprise, his parents did so.
It was a heady feeling that they were actually listening to the baby of the family for once. And maybe he’d drunk too much wine, because he found himself folding his arms and looking his father straight in the eye. ‘Pa, Dom and Nell are absolutely right. This house eats money and it needs to start paying its way. You’ll still have your private space and nobody’s going to disturb that. We’re simply letting people enjoy the garden and the artworks here, and it’ll mean you won’t have to sell yet another painting to pay for the next lot of repairs and work out how you’re going to hide the faded patch on the walls because you can’t afford to renovate the silk wall coverings.’
George stared at him in complete silence.
