Marrying Up (21 page)

Alexa watched him call up the message. It seemed to have an electric effect. His pink face went white and, suddenly in a hurry,
he yanked up his Union Jack boxer shorts. He shot her a terrified glance as he wiped his sweating forehead with a handkerchief
produced from his pinstriped pocket. The handkerchief was of fine linen and sported a ducal coronet.

Alexa propped herself up on one elbow. ‘What’s the matter?’ Perhaps an ex-girlfriend? She would take care of all that, she
thought triumphantly. Now she had a foot in the door.

Wharte-Hogge edged backwards over the carpet and round the other side of the bed, as if to put its rumpled bulk between himself
and her. He caught his foot in her bra, on the floor, and clutched at the half-tester’s red brocade curtains for support.
Under the onslaught of so much weight, the Wharte-Hogge coat of arms wobbled dangerously.

‘You’re Heirfix, aren’t you?’ he said, looking at her wildly.

‘Airfix?’ Bits of plastic that little boys stuck together? Or was this some reference to cosmetic surgery?

‘
Heir
fix. That’s what everyone’s calling you. Because you find a title and you stick to it like glue. I’ve been warned,’ he added,
rather hysterically, clutching the curtains as if for protection.

‘Warned? Who by?’ Alexa demanded.

As if she didn’t know.

‘Annabel Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe. We’ve all been told to steer well clear of you.’

‘Who’s we?’ Alexa had started to get dressed; there was obviously nothing to be gained from remaining naked.

‘All us unattached titled chaps. She told us that you were operating mainly at weddings, but I’ve just got a text from her
saying that you’d extended your activities to funerals.’

He was fumbling at his wrist. With her eagle eyesight Alexa spotted the Wharte-Hogge family crest on the cufflinks and felt
a sickening pang of loss. This, combined with the insult, sent her into a sudden, mighty spasm of rage.

‘And you should be bloody grateful,’ she snarled. ‘Do you think I screwed you for your good looks and fascinating personality?’

She slammed out of the bedroom. The loud thump and yell that followed brought her some mild satisfaction as she stamped
down the wide eighteenth-century staircase. The coat of arms had evidently finally detached itself and fallen on Lord Wharte-Hogge’s
head. Alexa hoped it had knocked it off altogether. Heirfix! The bloody cheek. She’d show them. She’d bloody well show them.

‘Come on, Poll.’ Marcus had squatted down beside her and was grinning into her face. The scent of marijuana drifted from his
dreadlocks. ‘What is it? You can tell your Uncle Marcus. You know what they say about a trouble shared being a trouble doubled
. . . Hang on, I’ve got that wrong, haven’t I?’

Polly forced a smile. Sam and Marcus were always trying to flirt with her and did not seem in the least to mind being given
the cold shoulder. On the contrary, they appeared to enjoy it.

‘Well it can’t be a broken heart,’ Sam opined as he laid plastic over his hole. ‘She’s too pretty. What guy in his right mind
would mess
her
about?’ He gave Polly a longing look.

‘You know,’ Marcus said teasingly, ‘I once dug up an ice maiden. Inuit princess, three thousand years old. Canadian Arctic,
that was.’

Polly did not dignify this with an answer.

‘I’d leave her alone if I were you,’ Sam counselled his friend as he shook out a noisy length of thick plastic sheeting. ‘You’re
dabbling in the stuff of other people’s souls.’

‘Do it all the time, mate.’ Marcus, standing up, squinted as he lit a roll-up behind a dirty cupped hand. ‘Check out the guy
over there.’ He waved a tattooed arm at Polly’s skeleton. ‘Not much privacy for him, for all we’re preserving the dignity
of his remains by not having him on general display.’

He shook the match and made as if to throw it on the ground.
‘Oops,’ he said, pulling a face and placing it carefully in the pocket of his filthy combat trousers. ‘Don’t want that ending
up in the British Museum, do we? Remember that fag packet on Shetland, Samster?’

Sam, laying the plastic sheeting over his most recent area of digging, looked up and grinned. He had splendid straight white
teeth. ‘You should have been there, Poll. Greatest archaeological mystery of modern times.’

‘What happened?’ Polly slipped her lunchbox into her rucksack. It was, as usual, only half empty.

Sam straightened up, unfolding to his full six foot four. ‘OK, so we were on Shetland, right. And we found a fag packet. So
why was it a mystery?’

Sam’s eyes were laughing, but Polly knew she was being tested. Were Sam and Marcus, like Neil, beginning to wonder about her
credentials?

She folded her arms defiantly. Part of her, the part that had, since Max’s departure, almost lost interest in archaeology
altogether, didn’t care about the cigarette packet at all. But there yet remained a part that did. She forced herself to think.
‘It must,’ she said slowly, ‘be something to do with where you found it.’

‘You’re getting warm,’ Marcus said.

Polly returned her gaze to Sam. ‘You . . . found it in an unexpected place?’

‘Warmer,’ Sam told her.

‘Unexpected? Just a bit,’ Marcus said, puffing on his roll-up. ‘We found it under an Epipalaeolithic cairn. That’s—’

‘Eleven to thirteen thousand years old. I know,’ Polly grinned, feeling as if something within her that had been frozen was
starting to move again. Then she frowned. ‘But . . . it was
under
the cairn? That’s impossible. They didn’t have cigarettes thirteen thousand years ago.’

‘You reckon?’ Sam was chuckling. ‘The site director asked me if they were still smokable. I said, yeah, they’re a bit dry,
but they sure knew how to make ’em; these are better than mine.’

Polly was still thinking. ‘So how did they get there?’

‘That’s the big question, sister.’ Sam and Marcus were watching her with bright eyes.

Polly unfolded her arms and started to pace up and down slowly. ‘Someone must have dropped them on the site. They must have
got in . . . down some sort of hole?’ She looked hopefully at her inquisitors.

‘Yeah!’ Marcus punched the air with a taut, tattooed bicep. ‘That was it exactly. You should have been with us, Poll; it took
us a day to work it out. A bloody rabbit had dug a burrow under the cairn. At some stage, it collapsed, and the packet got
down there when the soil surrounding the burrow slumped in.’

For a few seconds they all just looked at each other in delight. ‘Bloody amazing, isn’t it?’ Sam said rather gruffly. ‘This
business we’re all in.’

‘So, you coming to the pub, then?’ Marcus put in swiftly. ‘The new bloke from France is meeting up with us there,’ he added
persuasively. ‘You’ll like him. He’s
very
good-looking.’

Polly gave him a disdainful stare. ‘What makes you think I’m interested in good-looking men?’

Sam whistled. ‘Aren’t you? Does that mean there’s hope for us?’

‘No, it means that I’ve given up on men full stop.’

‘Aw, come on,’ Marcus urged. ‘I’m sure there’s something I could do to change your mind.’

‘You’re incorrigible,’ Polly said, laughing. But it was hard not to be touched by such friendliness, especially if the alternative
was a night at home with Mum worrying about her weight and Dad saying ‘I told you so’. ‘OK then, I’ll come for a drink,’ she
said, trying not to sound as reluctant as she felt.

‘The ice maiden thaws!’ Marcus grinned at Sam.

That night, walking to the Shropshire Arms, Polly was nervous. Intense sociability of the sort that lay ahead was exactly
the sort she was most out of practice with. She felt awkward and
self-conscious. She could see, through the open door as she approached, Rosamund clutching a pint and furiously arguing a
point with Neil; Marcus and Sam, meanwhile, were vigorously chatting up Amber and Rose.

She squeezed her way through the crowds. Standing with Marcus, Sam and the girls, she saw, was a broad-shouldered blond man
in a navy hoody and jeans. He had his back turned. Oxford University Archaeological Society, declared his back in white letters.

Polly’s insides twisted. It couldn’t be.

‘Polly!’ Marcus and Sam had spotted her. ‘Over here! Come and meet the new recruit. Polly, meet Jake. Jake, this is Polly.
She’s given up on men for good.’

He turned; she felt the full, familiar blaze of his arrogant eyes. Amber and Rose were staring at him, clearly mesmerised.

‘Given up on men?’ Jake drawled. He tossed back his sun-bleached locks. ‘And why might that be?’ He grinned.

‘I’ve got another idea,’ Barney said genially, looking up from his armchair and
Daily Telegraph
.

‘Another?’ Alexa was suspicious. The last one had hardly been a startling success.

‘I’m taking you to an auction.’ Barney beamed.

‘You’re going to sell me to the highest bidder? One social astronaut, slightly foxed—’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ Barney interrupted pleasantly. ‘It’s merely a question of a change of focus,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve
just been reading,’ he rattled the newspaper for effect, ‘about this perfectly enormous sale that’s taking place up north
somewhere. The Earl of Highcastle is selling off things from his attics and it’s bound to attract people from all over.’

‘Antique dealers, you mean?’ Was he mad? Alexa thought. She might be desperate, but not so desperate as to want to settle
down with a sexagenarian with mustard moleskins, polished brown brogues and an obsession with Georgian barometers.

‘Antique dealers, yes, but not just that,’ Barney said, his good humour not flickering for an instant. ‘All kinds of what
I could describe as the minor gentry will be there too. Lots of lovely boys work for the great auction houses, as you know.’

Alexa did know. During one country house weekend in her halcyon days, she had found herself at dinner next to a beady baronet
auctioneer. He had been able to tell her, sotto voce, the
value of every item in the room in which they were sitting. Including the people.

‘And others will be there out of curiosity, or perhaps to pick up a dining table to replace their rotten Chippendale.’ Barney
twirled a monogrammed-slippered foot. ‘You might not, at this particular point, be looking at marrying one of the country’s
more senior titles, my dear Alexa. But you can always begin as many others have, with a small country manor and trade up.’

And so here they were, on the Highcastle estate, awaiting Alexa’s opportunity to acquire a small country manor. For the time
being, however, they were in a tent.

‘Camping!’ Alexa had squealed, when Barney had first suggested it.

He had explained in his mild yet forceful manner that as they were both absolutely poverty-stricken, as neither of their banks
would, in the age of new austerity, lend them any more money and as the train fares would cost more than they had anyway,
staying in a hotel or even a pub was out of the question. The Highcastle estate had a campsite, which would obviously be very
handy for the auction. And since the rasta upstairs, with whom Barney was on unexpectedly friendly terms, had agreed to lend
them his festival tent, the subject, so far as Barney was concerned, was closed.

‘They really are marvellous, these modern tents,’ he remarked cheerfully as he banged in metal pegs and the water ran off
the peak of his cap into his eyes. The tent in question was an arc-shaped two-man affair spray-painted all over with outsize
cannabis leaves. Its lurid red, yellow and black stood out startlingly from the site’s green surroundings and had drawn censorious
glances from the other campers, all of whom had accommodation in subdued forest colours.

Alexa scowled and folded her arms ever tighter over her best tweed jacket. Purchased in a sale that spring, in the expectation
of a winter of shooting parties with Florrie that would never now materialise, it was, Barney judged, nonetheless capable
of bagging
some reasonably sized game at the auction. ‘Everyone at these things dresses like one of the Mitford girls,’ he explained.
‘Men included.’

They spent an uncomfortable night, the water seeping into the tent from below. ‘Richmond never gave me a groundsheet,’ Barney
complained.

Alexa snorted. ‘Probably gets so stoned at whatever festivals he goes to, he doesn’t even notice the weather.’

The inside of the tent, certainly, smelt overpoweringly of weed. Alexa hoped it would not cling to her clothes; the tweed
jacket and the miniskirt that matched it were hanging from a loop above her head in the faint hope that they would dry in
time. But her suede boots, which she had stuffed with Barney’s
Daily Telegraph
and placed just inside the zippered door, were ruined and she had serious worries about her hair.

There was a loo block, but Alexa had not even approached it. To do so would have been to bring home all too starkly the depths
to which she had sunk. She would remove her make-up with what remained of her Dr Hauschka from the good old days, and pee
behind a tree if necessary. One enduring relic of her time in high society was a disciplined bladder – going to the loo all
the time being frowned upon in the best circles.

Happily the auction, which was taking place in a huge white marquee, was supplied with the sort of smart Portaloos that had
basins. Alexa planned to commandeer one of them first thing in the morning and stay in for as long as it took to attain the
period-sitcom look Barney recommended.

As Barney snored away, Alexa lay awake, looking out of the net-covered window aperture at the great spread of Orion wheeling
across the sky. Remembering vaguely that he was the Hunter, she hoped he would grant her a happy hunting day tomorrow.

After the torrential rain of the night before, the day of the auction dawned bright and fresh. The route from the campsite
passed Highcastle Hall, an enchanting medieval sprawl of golden
stone, turrets and towers and higgledy-piggledy mullioned windows. Alexa sighed. She had known the son and heir, Percy Highcastle,
in better days and remembered with a pang how his party piece had been to swallow-dive on to a table of glasses of Krug.