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“Resist what?” I ask with a bite of my lip.
His dark eyes flare open again, glinting like seeds in the dirt. “The female sex.”
A small shiver slides down my spine. All of a sudden, I’m aware of my confinement in a dark room I’ve never been inside, in a dark house that isn’t mine, that I’m a stranger in these realms and that there exists, presently, a substantial power imbalance between the two of us.
“You have very interesting art here,” I declare abruptly, casting a desperate gaze around for something to focus on. A stuffed eagle owl stares back at me, its vivid orange eyes glaring above an indignantly pursed beak. “It’s quite different from the rest of the manor.”
“This is the Death Room,” he drawls, no wry twist to these words. “My escape from the day-to-day, a reminder that we’re all nothing but blips within what is itself a blip in time. There is peace to be found in that acknowledgment, in the inevitability of our own demise.”
I picture ribbon around my throat, the hiss and whisper of silk against skin. “Sometimes the inevitability can be hastened,” I say, because death seems like a more comforting topic of discussion than sex. With his reported dalliances with women, I know that sitting opposite me is a man experienced and wise in both sex and death (Master for the thirtysomethings, Daddy for the twentysomethings, my mind recalls unwillingly), whereas I’m new and afraid of both.
Oscar Munro raises an eyebrow. “Unfortunately for my enemies, suicide has never appealed. Every day is a challenge and there is power in winning it.” He stands suddenly, approaching a glass cabinet lined with expensive varnished teak. “Perhaps something stronger.” It’s not a question.
I watch him pull out a bottle, a decanter. Something crystal and pretty with a glass mushroom stopper, amber liquid swishing inside. He pours strong-smelling alcohol into two tumblers, unevenly distributed, and gives the one with the smaller amount to me.
The fire crackles as I mutely accept the glass.
Captain Porthos raises his head to yawn, curling his spindly limbs closer to his chunky, elephantine body. He looks happy, content — more so than the occupants of the Death Room, that’s for sure.
I inspect my glass, turning it so that the crackling fire filters through the honey-colored liquid. “What is it?”
“Bruichladdich.” Oscar Munro’s glass dangles idly between his fingers. “I find myself a contradictory mix of Anglo and Celtic, an English landowner on Scottish land. But whisky will always be my weakness. One of the few things the Scots manage to do right.”
I can hear Finlay ranting in my head at this insult. I hear him as clear as the rich crystal in my hands, calling him a jumped-up English Tory prick, a sad lying weasel of a man who’s fucked up lives and killed people in the name of his political legacy.
“Uisge-beatha, they call it in Gaelic. Water of life.”
“Alba gu bràth,” I murmur to myself, like a chant, testing out the flow and cadence of the phrase.
Finlay isn’t there to correct my pronunciation but apparently improvement isn’t needed because Oscar Munro gives a derisive, humorless laugh and says, “I don’t think so, no.”
The more I talk to Oscar Munro, the easier it is to understand Rory and the prism through which he experiences the world. Everything he believes in, and doesn’t believe in, is a direct product of his Prime Minister father. And his father is a conflict of ideas, a collision of the sad personal and the angry political and of other people’s ideas he’s buried, ostrich-like, in the sand.
“You were there that night, on stage,” he declares in sudden realization as he inspects my face, downing his whisky as though in victory. “That’s why I recognize you.”
Hesitantly, I say, “The night of the…” Because it wasn’t just the night of the talent show. It was the night of the shooting. It was the night Benji insisted had been entirely orchestrated to get him inside the castle.
“The dancer,” Oscar Munro breathes, and then he snaps his fingers. He downs the last of his whisky and drops it onto the table, close to the curling, well-thumbed pages of Finlay’s dossier. “My mind was elsewhere that night, but you… You were one of the few who lived up to the word ‘talent’.”
I bow my head slightly at this unexpected praise, but I’m more interested in his first statement. Why was his mind elsewhere? Had he truly manufactured the shooting for his own gain? A document of research transcribed by a student, conducted by a terrorist on behalf of the government to take down the monarchy?
This goes all the way to the top.
My mind whirls. It’s speculation. I pick up my glass of whisky and, against my better judgment, take a hearty sip.
It burns. It feels like I’ve swallowed the fire roaring in the grates beside me, the fires of hell, and sweat begins to bead along my hairline.
But at the same time, it’s thick and heady andrich. So rich, with an almost honeyed undertone and aftertaste. I decide there and then that whisky is a luxurious, slow-acting suicide, similar to the way insects are congealed by the gloopy nectar of a snapping, carnivorous plant.
I rub my eyes, aware that I’m being watched by the Prime Minister, that he sees me failing to drink alcohol like a proper grown-up. I tighten my lips, knowing I’m about to cough, knowing I’m about to splutter and maybe even spew the poison from my system, but instead my face burns a hot, anguished red and my eyes sting with fierce tears.
When I look back up at him, there’s a sharp slant to Oscar Munro’s mouth. “Your first whisky?”
“No.” Hallowe’en had been my first; it had been so much weaker than this, but even with something so weak, I’d still seen faces in trees staring back at me.
“I’d like you to see me tomorrow.”
“Why?” I ask, utterly bemused. Why on earth would this man, of all people, be interested in seeing me? I can’t even drink his whisky properly.
“I don’t believe we’ve plumbed the discourse surrounding art and death,” he says with a hint of wryness. “What else will you be doing after midnight?”
Fantasizing about your son.
“I suppose…” Who better to figure out the world I’m currently living in right now than to meet with the lord of the manor himself?
“Tomorrow it is, then. Meet me in the Death Room and we can continue our talk.”
