shooting at Balmoral,” he said. “I thought birding might be in my DNA, but perhaps I’ll stick to cooking.” He rubbed his hands together. “On that note, I do think it’s time for lunch.”
“Amen,” I said, wiping my hands clean on a towel. “What did you pack for us today?”
Nick plunged a hand into the wicker picnic basket and withdrew two cold ham sandwiches—the meat cut thick, the bread heavy with salted butter, a beautiful calorie bomb—a pair of apples, a Thermos that I suspected contained clandestine Pimm’s Cups, and some hard-boiled eggs.
“Surely there’s a baked good in there somewhere,” I said. “You weren’t bashing around the kitchen for no reason this morning.”
“Guilty as charged,” Nick said. “Jam tarts.”
He pulled them out with a flourish. They had cracked in half.
“You’re making progress,” I said, taking an exploratory bite. “It’s…apricot?”
“Spot on!” Nick looked delighted. He stretched out next to me, long and lean, with his head on a crumpled-up sweater, a sandwich in one hand, and Birding: A Life in the other. “This entire book is gibberish,” he said, squinting at it. “If Father had ever bothered to take me hunting with him, maybe it would be different, but Mum was always the one who wanted to take us outside. She was never afraid to get grubby. Father would always come back immaculate from shooting grouse, and we’d be on the lawns rolling about in the mud after a rain looking for earthworms. He told her off about it once, said we were being improper, and she walked right up to him and grabbed his face and kissed him, and left two giant muddy handprints on his cheeks.”
I laughed. “I would have paid good money to see that.”
“Mum could be very funny, when she wanted to be.”
His smile faltered. Nick didn’t have many memories like that of his mother, because mental illness had overcome her when he was still young. Emma, Princess of Wales, spent most of her days now in a seaside retreat in Cornwall, which had hidden her from the world’s prying eyes both before and after everyone learned the truth about her condition.
I leaned over and gave him a peck. “Her spirit lives on in you, Steve,” I said. “God knows you didn’t get your sense of humor from Richard.”
He grinned around a mouthful of ham and then lifted the book back to his face.
I returned to my project. Like Nick, I’d been dabbling, though in my case it was only to expand my artistic horizons to paints from my usual sketching; today I’d managed a mediocre watercolor of the triangular Caerlaverock Castle, which rose from a dirty brown pond that wouldn’t have offered much protection back in the day—which probably explained why the castle had been brutalized by siege warfare between the English and the Scots. Since landing in Wigtown, we’d spent countless days touring Scotland’s many remote and ruined castles, which for me was a kicky diversion and an excuse for fresh air but carried a little more personal weight for Nick.
“I wonder if any of my lot are responsible for this one,” he’d say, touching a crumbling wall in a building that had, once upon a time, been sacked and burned. Another day, we’d taken a rowboat to Threave Castle, and he’d opined, “I suspect this moat was meant to keep my family out. If Archibald the Grim’s grave is here, he’s spinning in it.”
It seemed that, while our decision to run had been spontaneous, visiting the various trappings (or crime scenes) of the institution we’d left behind was reinforcing Nick’s desire to stay away. And how ironic that, in the end, I had run off in order to save myself. Just not with Freddie, the way he’d hoped. I wondered idly if he’d thought of that, too. Or what he was thinking at all. Over the last several weeks, I’d written a hundred texts to Freddie that I’d deleted instead of sending—partly because I’d waited too long to know what to say. Hey, we saw a sausage roll that looks exactly like Cousin Nigel didn’t seem to cut it after all this time.
A burst of raucous laughter carried across the lawn.
“You’re off your head,” a girl cackled from several yards behind us.
“I am not! Look at him in that uniform! And now he’s all heartbroken, and needy, which makes him even sexier,” her friend said.
“Give that here,” said the first girl, and I heard the flutter of what sounded like a magazine being tossed