his amazing castle and stories of the death of his beautiful mother.
Then, under his real name, racy stories of his dating models, pictures of him falling out of nightclubs, and a tabloid nickname, the Party Prince. There was also a small gossip item about him, speculating at his missing Christmas parties and wondering whether he was in rehab, as well as links to his social media accounts that proved the matter beyond doubt and were also full of ridiculous pictures she could easily pull, with him shooting deer and posing next to Ferraris. It was absolute gold. It was patently clear he’d been banished.
She had his quotes about Mure and how he couldn’t wait to go; she had pictures—as well as the freeze-frame pulls from the video—and now it was absolutely up and ready to go. This was brilliant. She was going to get promoted for sure. It had absolutely everything: money, good-looking people, nobility, tragedy, shame, and, her readers’ favorite thing, someone being punished ferociously. It couldn’t fail. They’d have it up by the evening, clickbait of the finest order.
She emailed off the final copy for the page mock-ups with satisfaction. Then she headed out to get the last flight of the evening. God, she’d be pleased to shuck off this crap hole and get back to London. How could they handle being so far away and stuck in the middle of nowhere? It was absolutely freezing all the bloody time and there was nothing going on. Although to be fair, that statue wasn’t bad.
Anyway, her work was done. She was out. She packed her neat little wheelie bag and headed through the snow to the airport.
Chapter 57
For once, the night of December 23, just for once at the Rock, everything went flawlessly. Well, as flawlessly as a dinner for quite a lot of extremely old people can go. There was some delicious lobster bisque, quite a lot of which made it onto the starched white tablecloths, and the waitstaff, many of whom were young recruits who knew or were related to absolutely everybody there, found themselves doing more cutting up of the meat than they might have expected in a normal service, and the noise levels reached an absolute cacophony even without the nice album of Christmas carols being played, so they took that off pretty sharpish.
The vast tree was beautifully decorated in scarlet and gold and gently twinkling lights, crowned with a huge golden star.
The salmon was delicious; the goose tender and pink and crispy on the outside.
Fintan didn’t actually even bother turning up at all, to the point where Joel was going to go round the farmhouse and yell at him (or, more realistically, get Innes to yell at him), but apart from that, it was great. And the fact that Mrs. O’Brien got stuck crying in the toilets, because old Seoras, whom she’d been secretly in love with since 1954 and who had been widowed the previous year, on account of which she had gone all the way to the mainland to get her hair and makeup done professionally in Debenhams, which had been all right when she’d left but had gotten somewhat blown about on the ferry back, leaving her with mascara halfway across her cheeks and a definite slipping effect, but nobody had told her about it until she went to the bathroom, they’d all told her she looked lovely, which she might if you didn’t have your glasses on, but when you could see properly she clearly looked like Haggis McBaggis, and anyway, Seoras was already cracking on, chatting to that blowsy Julie McSquire, who had always been a bit of a one, and here she was again, getting away with it, when Mrs. O’Brien had loved him for sixty-five years, so surely—surely—she had dibs.
That took a lot of talking down. But apart from that, it was flawless. Ish. Flora was a little concerned that a lot of raspberry juice from the light-as-air cranachan was adding to the lobster bisque and red wine on the tablecloths, making it look a little as if they’d been hosting a large selection of grizzly bears, but surely the laundry could cope.
In the kitchen, however, all was sweetness and light, apart from them having to occasionally turn back sweet Mrs. Piper, who had a tendency to wander, but everyone looked after her and was used to seeing her around and about, except Gaspard, who made the mistake the first time of giving her a biscuit, which