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There was no use calling her again. If it wasn’t her signal going, it was her battery, so I had no choice but to sit tight and wait for her to email me.
I couldn’t believe I’d said yes. I was insane, and I was in way over my head here.
It couldn’t have been a kid’s party, could it? With easy games of Pass the Parcel or Musical Chairs? Where sausage rolls, cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks, and cheesy puffs were the order of the day?
I could probably pull that off.
A couple of party games. Food to make them all hyper. A clown to scare the shit out of them, you know.
The basics.
No.
I couldn’t get a clown to scare the upper class, could I?
I mean, I could.
Technically.
There wasn’t a law against it or anything.
It just… wasn’t appropriate.
Appropriate was overrated.
Regardless of what I could and couldn’t do, I didn’t know anything about these people. Thankfully, the Internet was at my disposal, and there had to be something about the current holder of the dukedom of Devon on there somewhere.
Mostly, I needed to have some kind of bloody idea what I’d gotten myself into.
I sat on the sofa, turned on an episode of Friends for some mindless background noise, and booted up my laptop. As I’d suspected, it didn’t take long for Google to spit out hundreds of thousands of search results for my reading pleasure.
Bypassing Wikipedia, I clicked on the next search link. The website that loaded up looked as though it’d been ripped from the coding of The National Trust and modernised, but I didn’t have long to dissect that before the page fully loaded and a photo of an extremely large, Jacobean manor house that wouldn’t be out of place in an Jane Austen adaptation.
Cavendish House.
An appropriately pompous name.
I tapped on the box that invited me to get more information and grabbed my bag of popcorn. I had eaten more than enough for one day, but now I needed to comfort eat.
Camilla might as well have been sending me to Buckingham bloody Palace.
The page finally loaded, and I leaned closer to the screen to read it. Cavendish House was originally built on Exmoor in 1392 on the outskirts of a village called Moorhaven. After a fire destroyed a third of the building in the fifteenth century, it was rebuilt in 1503, when it was handed to the Devon family to be the seat of the dukedom. An extension to the original building was completed in 1612, which explained the Jacobean architecture given the actual house’s age.
The estate consisted of more than eight hundred acres of woodland, pasture, and arable farmland, and the website noted that of the over five hundred acres of farmland, almost all of it was rented out to local farmers. What was left was currently being used as a small petting farm.
A quick detour to that website showed it was quite popular and, apparently, quite the little money maker.
Nice work if you could get it.
Anyway. Back to the fancy website.
Cavendish House was currently home to the Duke and Duchess of Devon, their two adult sons, and The Dowager Duchess of Devon. It noted that the Duke and Duchess’s daughter was married and living nearby, although it didn’t elaborate further on that.
And that was it.
That was all the information, aside from some other menial information about the estate that I didn’t care too much about.
I leaned back against the sofa cushions and stared at the photos.
