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I laughed. “Anyway, Conch was an absolute bastard. Great man, absolute pig to work for.”
Grace grinned.
“He’d make me haul his crap around all the time,” I said as we started walking, this time down the hill towards the cottage. “He’d handed me this list of tools to fetch from his shed, and when I got there, the door was smashed in, and there was this giant fucking stag inside with the biggest antlers I’d ever seen in my life.”
She buried her chin and mouth into her scarf, but I caught how her shoulders shook with a quiet laugh. “What did you do?”
“Screamed, almost shit myself, and sprinted a mile to where Conch was trying to clear some overgrown brambles.” I rubbed my hand down my face slowly while she laughed, not even bothering to hide it this time. “To this day, I have never been so scared in my entire life.”
“What happened to it?” she asked through her giggles.
“Conch and a couple of the other guys on the groundskeeping team managed to usher it back towards the woods, but I was never able to live it down.”
“Does he still work here?”
“What? So you can pump him for stories?”
“Perhaps.”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, he retired a few years later. Thank God. Although, by that time, I wasn’t spending quite as long up here every summer. The time I did spend was with my grandparents.”
“Did you spend all summer up here? Every year?”
“Most years,” I answered. “Sometimes we’d delay the start if we were having a family holiday or something, but at least four weeks out of the summer break would result in my parents leaving me and Freya here. Freya didn’t always last the entire four weeks, but I didn’t have much of a choice.”
Grace frowned. “At all? That seems a shame.”
“Not really. Dad would spend a week or so up here every year with me to keep up to date on the estate.”
“That must have been hard.”
“As a kid, yeah. I hated it. That changed when I got older, and I started to fully understand the weight of the family history. This place,” I said, looking around. “Is my future. I get it now.”
“Wow.” Grace slowly nodded her head, and she reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. “I guess that’s true. You’ll move here, right?”
I rocked my head from one side to the other in uncertainty. “I don’t know if my parents will move here when the inevitable happens, so I haven’t even thought that far ahead for myself. Times are different now, especially since it’s not like I grew up in Scotland. I’m part English by blood, and I’m extremely proud of both parts of my heritage, but I’m sure there would be many who wouldn’t be pleased to have an outwardly English man holding a Scottish title and living here. Maybe things will be different when it’s my turn, but who knows.”
“I suppose,” she said softly. “What would you do with the castle then? And the rest of the estate?”
“It would remain under our control, of course, but if I didn’t live here, I’d probably open it up to the public fully. There’s plenty to see here, and it would create both tourism and jobs for the local communities.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “No, not really. It’s just one of those ‘what if’ scenarios that must be considered.”
“You’re right. And here I am just trying to figure out which pens are best for note taking in my research,” she replied with a light chuckle.
“Have you thought about what you’ll do when you’ve completed your PhD?”
She took a deep breath and sighed it out. “No.”
I dropped my chin, laughing, and looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “Have you considered teaching?”
“I’d rather gauge my eyeballs out with a knitting needle and use a nuclear bomb on my eardrums,” she replied without batting an eyelid. “No, I will not teach.”
“Don’t you have to with your PhD?”
“Thankfully, no. It wasn’t a requirement for me. Only optional. I opted for absolutely frigging not.”
