Housebound.

Five hundred years is an awfully long time for a house to stand. More than enough time to acquire a character of its own, quite separate and apart from the family that rattles and groans and laughs inside its timbers and brick, even if its own fate is bound up in the fortunes and follies of the people within. By Alex’s reckoning, Balcraigie hadn’t even been in the Carr family for the first one and a half centuries that the heap had been glowering and spreading and folding its wings on the edge of the Highlands. 

“The Murrays were here before the Carrs, you know,” Alex explained to me as we picked our way over the tricky loose soil that crumbled into the property’s stream from its banks. “You can blame a lot of the worst of this place on them. The Orangerie and the greenhouse are Carr disasters, but the first poor decisions were dreamt up by one nutter of a Murray after another.”

Back in the last October of the Before Times, after Alex had kissed his daughter good-bye — one on each cheek, right then left, right then left, then a peck on the lips and a nuzzle of her forehead — we’d flown north from Dorset to Scotland for the final leg of our very last pre-COVID holiday. Ostensibly, we were there to visit his mum and meet her new(-ish) boyfriend Andrew, and to check on the state of the roof. But really we were there for Alex to reintroduce me to Balcraigie.

“You see, we are something of a package deal, the house and me,” Al said, kicking fat brown pinecones out of our path while we tromped through the stand of trees that led away from the water and back to the terrace. “I quite literally come with the territory.”

Balcraigie itself had passed as part of a Murray bride’s dowry sometime around the time Queen Anne’s bloated corpse was rolled onto a bier and lowered into the Stuart vault at Westminster Abbey. The marriage had been a bit of a coup for that generation of Carrs, a family vaguely related to the Marquess of Lothian, but not in a way that had done a jot for their finances or their social standing.

The family had spent decades in decreasingly gentle penury on the border with England, draining its cash on marrying off the buckets of winsome daughters it excelled in producing. The few excess boys they did manage to sire were pushed towards the military on either side of the border; this particular branch of the Carrs had been notably fickle when it came to pledging allegiance to a particular side, generally taking up with whomever could pony up more money.

Until one younger son said “fuck this” and decided to trade on the little capital he did have: £100, two excellent suits of clothes handed down by his older brother, and a pair of very fine cheekbones. Maria Murray had, according to family lore, literally beaten away with her ivory fan at least ten other ladies clamoring to make Thomas Carr’s acquaintance at a ball.

“You can see where I get it,” Alex teased, posing in front of a full-length portrait of his forebear hanging in the hall leading from the gardens. Aping the posture of his Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Thomas, Al pointed one toe towards me while grasping his hip and tilting his jaw at the ceiling defiantly.

“Yes,” I said, reaching forward to pull a flake of ceiling plaster from his shoulder. “Very early Georgian ‘Blue Steel.'”

Thomas Carr had set the tone for generations to follow: spend money without worrying too much where the next installment might come from, trade on your looks and marry well to get yourself out of a hole. Old Tom (as Al and Fenn call their great and storied progenitor) also had, allegedly, generous helpings of the same urbane, silky wit that had passed down to caddish Uncle B. When Old Tom’s dearest mama Lady Carr urged him to visit his distant Robertson relations in Dunkeld, she’d done so knowing her younger son was likely to get into nearly as much trouble with women up north as he had down in Ladykirk. She just hoped that trouble came along with a few bags of money, rather than irate fathers.

Maria Murray was the very youngest of a brace of daughters, each more temperamental and vain than the last. Given that Maria was number five, the concentration had become quite intense when it reached the end of the line. Each of the elder Murray girls had found suitors willing to take on a flighty, ill-tempered and haughty wife due to their most attractive shared feature: sacks of extremely filthy lucre. Great-Great-oh-however-many Grandfather Sir Gerald Murray had one last Murray girl to marry off, and Maria was proving extremely difficult to dislodge from the family home. Famous for her hot temper, it was Maria’s slippered heel that kicked the great and still visible dent in the soft plaster of Balcraigie’s kitchen wall.

Old Tom’s appearance could not have been more fortuitously timed, even if Sir Gerald knew the smooth charm and placid fortitude of a fortune hunter when he saw one. After all, at least three of his four sons-in-law were of a similar breed. (Supposedly one of Maria’s sisters had made a love match, but legend is the groom was very hard of hearing.)

When Thomas Carr blew into Dunkeld, all high high cheekbones and low low intentions, it was the bona fides of the Robertsons that got him into Sir Gerald and Lady Murray’s ball, and the Robertsons who sent him on a mission to find a wife. After all, they were nearly as eager to cut free a straggly end of their family as Gerald Murray was to fob his petulant daughter off on some (literally) poor slob willing to put up with her shit.

“Most of the stories I heard were from my Granddad, but Uncle B says he heard the same from his grandfather, so there’s likely something of the ring of truth about them,” Alex continued as he shooed me down the dark, crooked passage that led past the stone walls and timber gallery of the Great Hall, or what was left of it. This was the original Renaissance start of the house, the only room remaining from 1551, as the house cheekily claimed to be on the stone tablet over the Palladian entrance to what lay inside.

As an art history major I was itching to get inside and poke about the grand old hall. On the many visits I’d made to the house as Julian’s girlfriend, and then wife, I’d only ever been allowed to look over the wonky, worn down oak threshold. Inside, a diminutive, domestic Hogwarts, if Dumbledore had let the rain seep down the walls and mossy outcroppings thrive in the joinery. Clinging to the cold grey walls were two medieval tapestries — the ones that had survived the great storm that had broken a kiddie pool-sized hole in the roof above — which had come to the Murrays through a French bride, and thence to the Carrs.

Alex maneuvered me against the dark oak panelling for a kiss; the hard knob of a carved wooden rose dug into one of my shoulder blades as he pressed his lips to mine. “They call this the Lovers’ Hallway, you know,” he whispered, trailing a finger from behind the most tender spot behind my ear to rest beneath my chin.

“Do they really?” I could imagine Old Tom and the haughty Maria in this very spot. Like his great-whateverith-grandson Alexander, I conjured an image of the debonair young Thomas Carr quashing his beloved’s anxious flutterings with a succulent crush of a kiss.

Al patted my cheek. “Nah, not really. I just thought you looked adorable and I wanted a kiss. Let’s move on to the library, bit less gloomy in there.” With another tug on the arm of my Shetland wool sweater (a second, thinner jumper lay just beneath) to pull me along on my junior chatelaine’s journey, Alex kept up the patter on his family’s rather dubious past.

“Of course all the rooms down here show the worst of the hodge-podgery, I’m afraid. Upstairs is strictly late Georgian, James and Felicity Carr’s work, but we’ll be coming to them soon. Mind your step, here’s where the floorboards hit the marble.”

Though I’d passed over this spot, where the Jacobean brick and timber and plaster heart of the house — some of the last of the Murray handiwork — met the greater bulk from the 18th century, many times before, it never failed to trip me up. This was no exception, and I plunged headfirst towards the great sweep of the main staircase.

“Careful, sweetest,” Alex murmured, grabbing my sweater from behind with a taut jerk. “Wouldn’t be the first to lose a bit of her brain there.”

In turn, we peeked into the pink and blue sitting rooms, mirror images of each other on either side of the slender wing which jutted away from the squat domestic jumble of the kitchen, hall and main dining room. The blue had been the one I’d spent more time in during my stays here, benefitting from its south-facing aspect on the days the sun actually could beat its way through not only low-hanging clouds but also the murk of the occasionally washed windowpanes. There was an excellent carved marble fireplace, a little later than the room itself: delicate honeyed Siena stone columns against a greater surround of pale pink marble mottled with shots of charcoal. In the center of the mantelpiece was a finely-cast plasterwork frieze of Aesop’s fable of the Fox and the Crow. Facing the fireplace was a large and deliciously overstuffed midnight blue sofa, fairly new yet already coated in tufts of dog hair.

No one has ever much liked the pink, I remember Fenn telling me, and nobody uses it now if they can help it. It didn’t help that the silk wallpaper — a faded coral ground with red and yellow wreaths of flowers — was hopelessly out of date. Cora had hung it herself in the early 80’s, when she made her newlywed journey with John to this house. John had encouraged her to choose a room for her own, beyond the studio he’d help her set up in the Orangerie and the kiln in the icehouse, and I could see it had the bones for a place to be apart from what was then a house filled with people she hardly knew. But it rarely received much daylight, and no matter how often a fire was kept burning in a fireplace nearly as grand as the one across the hallway, the room never was cozy. Fenn swore this was one of the haunted rooms, and that she’d seen Maria Murray herself once standing at the window, looking out over what had once been the many acres that surrounded Balcraigie, acres that had long since been sold off to pay for the house to keep standing.

“This part went up nearly as soon as Old Tom and Maria made their home here at last,” Al continued, nudging me briefly into the stem-green environs of the music room, where an upright piano hunched along one side of the room. Some Carr of a former generation had decided to paint its walnut partially matte black, and the fingernail-scratched initials and doodles scarred its sides. No one played the thing, even if it were capable of ever being tuned, which no one thought it was. The rest of the room was taken up with Fenn’s sewing projects — a violet organza skirt in a state of half-construction was pinned to a tailor’s mannequin, and on the large ash folding table in the center of the room was spread a pair of moss green tweed trousers mid-assembly.

“What beautiful light in here,” I remarked, and it was true. The pea shoot green of the walls contrasted gently with the chalky, dove grey wainscotting below. It was a slightly odd combination, but the soft, muzzy Perthshire light suited it, somehow made the room seem even brighter than it should be. From the plain center medallion on the ceiling dropped a simple brass chandelier, six lights drooping down then looping back in clean U’s. “Was that always electric?” I said, pointing up.

Al craned back his neck. “In my lifetime? Yes, just. This and the library were the last of the rooms to get wired after Mum came.”

Mum and her money, I thought, but held my tongue.

“Let’s press on, we still have the library to visit on this wing,” he said over my shoulder as he hustled me from behind. I nearly lost a kneecap brushing past the threadbare and lumpy russet tweed easy chair where Cora liked to knit, from the looks of the unfinished sweater sleeve clinging onto a circular needle she’d left draped over its arm.

“It’s not like I haven’t seen it before,” I protested. “I’ve spent plenty of time in there with … with Minty. When we would wait for you and Jules and Fenn to come back from shooting.”

Alex stopped pushing me down the slick surface of the polished marble, and folded me in his arms, resting his chin atop my head. The buckle of his belt dug a little in my back, but didn’t hurt, just a reminder of how close he kept me.

“We can make new memories now, Mel,” he said softly. “I want you to see all of these rooms now as I wanted to show you the first time.”

We stood there in the hall for some time, staring towards the family portrait of Thomas and Maria with their eldest daughter, Janet. It was rather hard not to — it was a striking composition, from a pupil of Godfrey Kneller. Mother and child were in vaguely classical garb. The vibrancy of the bright salmon pink and cream fabric draped over Maria contrasted starkly with her pale skin and nearly black hair; one arm cradled her belly where her first Carr boy, James, grew. I have always admired the slight sneer to the set of her plump lips — she was a woman who clearly did not want to be there but showed up nonetheless. Janet, a dark-haired babe in white with a thick cerulean sash about her waist, clung to her mother’s thigh, looking up in slightly vapid admiration. Thomas was magnificent in a scarlet frock coat slashed with gold, white hose to show off some killer calves, and a long mess of dark blonde curls. He thrust his right arm behind him, pointing towards an out-of-focus but still identifiable rendering of Balcraigie against an unnaturally azure sky for that part of Scotland. The painter had thrown in a few extra Ionic columns and a massive urn in the foreground for added effect. It was absolutely absurd and de trop and I had always fucking loved it.

Alex cleared his throat lightly. “Story is that by the time Maria was ready to be married off, there was very little unentailed land left that Sir Gerald could give to his youngest daughter, and it’s not like the Carrs had much of anything to hand over to Tom. Balcraigie was a bit of a family joke already then, but it would have to do. They had to have something, and this house, whatever it is, is better than nothing.”

“It’s far better than nothing,” I said, and let him lead me into the warmth of the library.

It’s odd — the library has the same aspect as the pink sitting room and yet I can’t recall it feeling anything but snug inside. The room itself was clearly part of the Palladian efforts of Old Tom and his snappish wife Maria, but from the looks of the ornate giltwood fireplace, the place had had a minor makeover in the early part of the 1800s. In the grate, a cheery fire cracked and popped; one of the blessings of Andrew Kilmartin’s wooing of Alex’s mother had been a thorough cleaning of all the many, many chimneys in the house and a steady supply of firewood. Just as importantly, Andrew’s money ensured that the impossibly high coffered ceilings in the rooms of this wing had been dusted for the first time since their old housekeeper, Mitch, had packed her bags and wished the family well when the twins were 12.

“Well, it’s nearly nothing now,” Alex muttered, pulling a slim volume from one of the ceiling-high bookshelves. After a brisk burst of breath to blow free the dust on the book’s top edge, he flipped the pages slowly.

One of Alex’s curls dropped forward from behind the ear where he’d tucked it, and I reflexively pushed it behind his ear. “Bollocks,” I said in protest.

“What, Voltaire? I thought you quite like him.” Alex wrapped his arm around me and drew me closer. “Glad I lit the fire in here earlier, it can feel like a tomb on this side of the house sometimes.”

The comforting funk of old book, vanilla and wood and the musk of many hands, drifted beneath my nose. Though it was a smell I was so familiar with after nearly a year at the bookshop, it never failed to make me feel safe, stable, balanced.

While Al quietly slipped out books from the mahogany bookcases, disturbing more than a few moths as he went along, I pulled away for a turn about the room. The bookcases were all of a piece, likely put up at the same time, and therefore very unlike almost all of the rest of the house. However it was clear, to my eye at least, that they had been cut down and transported here from some other room in some other house. Along each wall five even cases, each about four feet in width, stretched ten feet high, high enough that even Alex needed to use a stepstool.

Not that the greatest treasures were found amongst the tomes at the top. On the very highest shelf of one of these cases, tucked behind a run of books on the biology of invertebrates, Alexander Carr, aged 14, had discovered his late father’s pornography stash one rainy Wednesday morning. “I feel like I learned far more about my dad that day than I ever truly wished to know,” Alex told me, and left it at that.

I knew from my first visit to this house that the main collecting had been done in the early years of the 19th century, when Duncan and Kitty Carr had found themselves the accidental heirs to Balcraigie. Duncan was Old Tom’s great-grandson, no doubt, but hadn’t ever expected to inherit much of anything from his Carr relations in the Great and Wild North. The second son of a second son of Old Tom’s boy James, Duncan been brought up in London with his older brother Robert amongst his mother’s kin. His father Lt. Alisdair Carr was too busy messing about with boats in the Royal Navy to be around that often, and growing up in London was “probably a good deal more fun than Portsmouth, then as now,” Alex told me. Balcraigie was probably only a name to him, the context to his father’s accent maybe.

In a low vitrine beneath one of the picture windows was a collection of miniatures, mostly Carrs past, with the occasional mystery woman in a slightly risque gown. (Fenn called these “a fine selection of Scottish tarts” and had grouped them together on the left side of the presentation.) I spotted Duncan right away — like his great-grandfather Old Tom, Duncan had a flair for fashion, matching a rather staid black jacket with an extravagant white cravat, bursting like a swirl of cotton candy beneath his strong chin. He had the long Carr nose, just like the twins and Uncle B, and his dark curls swept across his forehead.

If I ever keep that promise to myself to write a romance novel, it should be about about Duncan and Kitty Carr. In a family of hopeless romantics and dark, brooding sub-Heathcliff types and dandies and schemers and social climbers (Old Tom being a prime example of most of those attributed), Duncan and Kitty’s story is… wholesome. It’s basically an 18th century rom-com, with a meet-cute and mistaken identity and a riches to rags to riches to… Balcraigie thing going on. Plus babies. But this one I intend to get paid for, so I’ll keep schtum for now.

“Who is this woman in the photo?” I yelled over to Al, who had made himself comfortable on the forest green leather sofa in the center of the room, stretching his long body along its cracks and tears. “The light-haired one with a toddler on her lap.”

The sofa groaned in protest as he rolled over on his side to face me, letting the book he’d brought with him from the far side of the room drop to the floor. “My great-grandmother Sarah, the suffragette. The girl is my Great-Aunt Verity. Grand-aunt? I always get it wrong. That’s from just after the end of the war. The First World War.”

Sarah smiled back at me through the vitrine glass. Unlike Maria Murray, this smile was gentle, not a threat, nor a rictus of submission. Two dimples framed her full lips; if I’d been little Verity on her lap, I would have certainly found myself trying to stick my pinky in them on the regular. Her hair was pulled back in what I presumed must have been a bun or a simple knot — a woman with a more sophisticated style surely would have been putting it on display. Her simple blouse was enlivened only by a large brooch in the shape of a peacock. Verity? Well, Verity somehow managed to look both fierce and bored, quite a talent at such a young age.

A light rumble shuffled over my shoulder from the general vicinity of the couch. “Alex?” I called out.

The sofa creaked its impatience with his body shifting position again. “Hm? What? I wasn’t asleep,” Alex murmured. It was utterly unconvincing, not least because he almost immediately began snoring again.

Past the vitrine were more books, books that had been shelved with some general order to them, a complete anomaly in a house that had specialized in jumbled disorder and light to moderate chaos for centuries. On this wall were foreign language and history, biography and gardening, and part of the large fiction collection. From the looks of it, Carrs had tried to learn languages as diverse as Swedish and Igbo, Manx and Urdu, but unsurprisingly there was a glut of schoolbooks of every vintage in French and Latin. Alex has zero proficiency in French, though he supposedly did well enough in his Standard Grade exam to make him an attractive prospect for Bristol. He says there’s no use for knowing any of it now anyway that he’s married me. “All I need to know is ‘voulez-vous coucher avec moi ici et maintenant,’ as far as I’m concerned,” he told me, which earned him a small pillow to the head.

In the far corner was Alex’s father’s collection — mostly British and European economic policy, several copies of the fairly weighty volume he’d co-written on David Hume and Rousseau, a deep collection of books on 18th century prime ministers (quite a bit on Lord North, I noted), and many, many issues of Private Eye. The coffee and tobacco-stained chair he had favored remained in this corner; if you stuck your nose close enough to its rough orange canvas, you could still get a strong whiff of Benson & Hedges. John Carr I knew only from places like this, places stamped hard with his likeness, hard enough that I could still see his image faintly over 25 years after his death.

Neither Alex nor Fenn has ever spoken much of their father to me. I suppose I don’t really blame them. Alex claims to recall very little of him, besides learning sums with him in the upstairs bedroom that had been turned into a schoolroom. What Fenn remembers is decidedly unflattering, though she still idolizes him when it suits her.

I grabbed a biography of the Duke of Grafton and joined Alex on the sofa, placing my head at the other end from his so that we lay top to tail on the crazed surface. He didn’t respond when I said his name again, but it was hard to criticize Al for falling asleep. The room was warm, and the earlier glimpses of late afternoon sun had turned to a steady rain that patted the windows. The steady rhythm of his breath, a rolling purr in-out in-out, and the warmth of his body where I’d tucked myself against it was the kind of heavenly safe I’d been reaching for for years.

Here it was, in Balcraigie of all places, on a tatty old Chesterfield with buttons hanging from its backrest. I could see myself here, another Kitty Carr, an unexpected interloper who first made do, and then made this place her own. Maybe I too could put up with the ghostly sightings of Maria Murray and whatever it was in the yellow bedroom that made the place completely off limits.

There was money enough, thanks to the Cranford cash I’d been granted by a supremely pissed off family judge, to keep patching the roof and the mildew at bay. If I wanted to really splash out, the great hall could be fully restored. I imagined a Balcraigie partially open to the public, maybe a Sunday a month, for polite parties of middle-aged Scottish mums and beard-stroking history types. But until I was certain, I didn’t date breathe a word of these feverish plans, and I still haven’t. I know my husband. One word about even considering decamping to the UK and he’d have me trussed up like a guinea fowl and thrown in the hull of a ship bound across the Atlantic.

“Alex?” I asked once more, but this time I punctuated the question with a toe jab to his calf.

“Oof,” Alex grunted, and flipped on his side. “No need to be violent about it.”

You’re safe here, I reminded myself. Ask away.

“What do you remember of your father?”

He reached down over the side of the sofa to flip the pages of a bashed up paperback on flying aces of the Second World War. He’d clearly fetched the thing to give the appearance of something involving rather a bit more consciousness than sleeping. “When did Mum say dinner would be?” he murmured.

“Al.”

Alex sighed and flipped back on his back, the book abandoned. He beat a solid tap-tappity-tap on his chest with his long fingers in sloppy syncopation. “You’re not my therapist, Dr. Freud.”

“You don’t even have a therapist,” I replied, slotting the tips of my stocking feet beneath his bottom for warmth. And also so I could feel his ass up a bit, I admit.

“I’m not auditioning for one either,” he snarled, and flung an arm over his eyes. It did come off as slightly melodramatic, even if he almost certainly hadn’t intended it. It’s moments like these that I’m keenly aware that he’s Fenn’s twin brother, since this move is absolutely her stock in trade.

I tried another angle. “You said he was the one who first got you interested in math.” Surely this would be something pry out a few memories. A few days before I’d accidentally set Al on a path involving him explaining uses for inductive proofs of arithmetic and geometric sequences, and I’d nodded thoughtfully for fifteen minutes while he mentioned x’s and n’s and 1’s and x+1’s and I understood nothing of it. It had made him very chirpy in the car on the way to Dorset, and we both needed to do something relaxing in the immediate aftermath of Julian’s solid planter in Al’s eye socket at the wedding.

“Fenn was Mum’s from the start. I sometimes think I was Dad’s consolation prize,” Alex said with a bitter note, not moving his arm from where it still rested.

I raised myself between his legs and rested the elbows of my scratchy wool jumper on his knees. “That’s really unfair. To you especially, but to your dad, too. You’ve never been anyone’s consolation prize.”

“Really?” he said, a little too smoothly. “Is that so?”

Beneath two layers of wool, the hair on my arms prickled. “If you’re saying you’re my consolation prize, you haven’t been paying as close attention to me as you say you always did.” I didn’t raise my voice, though I was tempted. “That’s utter junk anyway. If anyone was a consolation prize, it was Julian.”

I took Al’s snort as a positive sign.

I ploughed on. “But your dad was the one who got you interested, right?”

With another deep sigh, he dropped his Sarah Bernhardt pose and hauled himself up into a sitting position, forcing me to retreat slightly to the other end of the sofa. “What is this actually about, sweetest?”

“I… I just want to understand this place better. Understand you better. Your father –“

“If you think you’re going to find out any clues to what makes me who I am,” Alex interrupted, “in how my father treated himself and my family, best of luck.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I just feel like I know your mother and Fenn and all the stories about Uncle B but your dad’s like this great unknowable.”

“Hmm, Mel, I wonder why my father is unknowable,” Alex said crabbily, and pushed himself off the sofa. He paced in his argyle socks in front of the glow of the fire, his tall body slightly bent forward with his arms behind his back. “The most simple reason could be that he’s been dead for 25 years.”

“I’m not trying to be mean, honey. I just want –“

“And that he left us without any warning, completely unprepared. One morning he was eating breakfast with me in the kitchen, reading the paper, and that same afternoon, gone. Bye.”

“You do remember something then.” I was trying to be encouraging, but it sounded depressingly condescending once it fell out of my mouth without any way of stuffing it back in.

Alex paused and turned his back to the fire to face me. “HA!” Alex barked before resuming his attempts to wear down the floorboards with his pacing. “Of course I remember things about my father. Don’t try to make this into some childhood trauma so severe that I’ve blanked him out completely, that there’s a Dad-shaped void drifting in my memory. I just don’t remember as much as Fenn. There’s no magic to it.”

He sounded deflated at the end, like the last trickle of water from a faulty tap turning off at last. I have learned that sometimes with Al it’s better to look and not touch until the spikes retract. They’re never out for long. So I listened to the fire snap as it ate its way through the logs in the grate, and to the increasingly nasty rain batter the windows, the wind whipping sheets of water on the panes. Alex’s storm would pass far more quickly than the one out there.

“My dad wasn’t an easy person,” he said at last, turning to face the fire. He reached down to grab one of the balled-up sheets of yesterday’s copy of The Scotsman that were kept in a nearby basket for tinder and tossed it in the hearth. The flames consumed it greedily. “I don’t remember too much of that. But yes, he was the one who taught me my numbers and the elegance of maths.”

I told him I liked how “elegance” sounded when he rejoined me on the tattered Chesterfield. I am not a mathematician, even though I did allegedly take Calculus A/B and B/C. But I find comfort in numbers, too — the buttery glide of a 4, the fat and happy 8, the sensible 15, the sproingy 22, the wild and woolly 47.

“Well, they are, when you think about it,” he said, taking my hand to his mouth for a kiss. “They all make sense, nearly all of the time, if you know what you’re up to. Not that I always do.”

We sat like that for a time, side by side before the fire, my hand resting in his. The storm picked up its clamor to be let inside the home, but the mullioned windows would not unhook their latches, not without a fight. Wind whistled down the chimney, drew licks of flames into the flue and spat them back. For all the furor that nature railed against the house, it would not bend. A tumbledown and cobbled-up house like Balcraigie doesn’t stay upright for 500 years without a decent bit of “come at me bro” in its bricks and mortar and marble and slate.

We might have sat like that for even longer, had Beast not bolted in the room, on the run from some unseen pursuer. Like a kid on a Slip-n-Slide in some suburban backyard, Beast skidded across the threadbare Persian runner at our feet, stopping only when he reached Alex’s feet. I wasn’t surprised — that dog has an obsession with bare toes, and one of Al’s was poking out of his sock.

“Steady, old boy,” Alex laughed, and mussed the Irish setter’s head where it rested on a fold of the rucked up carpet. “I think he must have heard my thoughts — tomorrow’s going to be perfect shooting weather. And you wouldn’t miss that now, would you, boy?”

Beast rose and plunked his long, russet legs one-two on Alex’s knees. The scent of eau de chien blasted me as Beast leaned over to bestow a sloppy, pink-tongued kiss on my cheek.

“He smells awful,” I said with a gag at the end, but Beast didn’t seem to care. “And tomorrow’s supposed to be more rain in the morning. How’s that perfect?”

Beast turned his attention back to Alex, who hefted the dog into his lap and submitted to a canine face bath. “Beast smells like a dog. Don’t you, boy? He smells perfect. And tomorrow is perfect for shooting because every day is perfect for shooting, if you’re lucky enough to be in God’s own country and in possession of a firearms certificate and a rifle.”

“You don’t even believe in God,” I batted back, and rubbed my hand over Beast’s soft red coat. “But I suppose Beast doesn’t mind how he smells.”

Alex smiled. “Correct.”

“Much like you don’t mind how you smell either.” It wasn’t completely incorrect, though Al’s true gaminess in my experience was directly linked to how much beer he’d been drinking at football practice.

“Hm,” Alex sniffed. “I do wear all those hoity-toity scents you buy for me, I’ll have you know. Ran said I smelled like a high-priced Parisian gigolo last week.”

“And how would she know?”

“That’s what I asked her. She said she has a fine imagination,” he chuckled, and stretched his legs out, wiggling his feet, bare big toe and all, towards the fire. Beast made his displeasure at being displaced from Al’s warm lap known with a grunt and a very audible and whiffy fart. “Dear God, dog, what the fuck are they feeding you?”

“My guess is whatever they fed you to make you so rank growing up,” I said with a smirk. “That smells like death. Let’s continue the tour. Explain to me who all those people are in the vitrine.”

“Vitrine,” Alex jeered as he followed me to the case I’d been staring into before. “It’s a bloody glass cabinet. You make us sound very la-di-da here.”

I stopped in my tracks a pace in front of him. “Are you seriously telling me… do you really not see what you are, Al? You’re posh!”

I didn’t mean to giggle, but once one popped out of my mouth, it was impossible to stem the tide. I got even louder when his brow-knitted look of confusion morphed into bright spots of pink on his cheeks. The contrast with his healing black eye made it even more ludicrous. It took staring at the photo of a sour-faced Victorian matron in the vitrine to compose myself before I let myself look back to Al.

“Stop it,” he grumbled, looking improbably adorable in his scowl of recognition that I was probably right. “Am not.”

“Al, come on. You may not have had a lot of money when you were a kid, but you know who all your ancestors were going back hundreds and hundreds of years. There’s like a dozen Barons This or That and Viscount Whosits and an Earl.”

“Unfair! That Earl was nearly 600 years ago.” He still had the scowl, but his mouth began to flick upwards at the corners intermittently. “And those Viscounts were both English and the brothers of women who married in. I don’t count them.”

I turned around and drew a lazy arc with my arm. “And look at this place. Thousands of books in here. There’s late medieval tapestries on the walls in the other room that probably belong in a museum. The rolltop desk in the pink sitting room is genuine Louis XV, I can tell, and so is that beat up marquetry table by the front door you throw your keys and packs of cigs on. You have a ballroom. Who the hell has a ballroom?”

Alex was now staring into the vitrine too, mostly to avoid catching my eye and cracking up himself at the absurdity of it all, I presumed. “Sasha’s parents have a ballroom,” he protested.

A fair point, but I wasn’t conceding.

“And a screening room set up to look like something in Leicester Square,” he said with a nod towards one of the faces in the vitrine staring up at us. “And, and an indoor swimming pool. I don’t see a swimming pool around here.”

“Sasha’s father is a Ukrainian oligarch. That’s not exactly apples to apples. It’s like…” I strained to find something to compare Sasha’s father’s outlandish wealth to. Even the Cranfords lived relatively frugal lives compared to the Yavorskys. I had, after all, once seen Ed Cranford top up a practically empty jar of Bovril with water from the kettle to fix himself a drink. “Seems a waste,” he’d said when he caught sight of me with my mouth hanging open.

“Amanda. The Harringtons have been around from the year dot.”

“Wrong,” I countered. Oh, this was a fun truth. “They’re loaded, sure, but Julian told me something. He said never to tell anyone but one night Mr. Harrington got real drunk after dinner. He ended up telling Julian that somewhere around the middle of the 19th century an ancestor just started pretending he was a member of the Harrington family and because he was so rich, he paid everyone to keep quiet. Eventually everyone pretty much accepted he was a very distant cousin.”

“Really?” Al laughed.

“That’s what Jules told me.”

It was a completely preposterous story I had doubted, but Jules had gone so far as to hire a genealogist to see where the counterfeit Harrington had wormed his way in. “I thought I might want to marry her at one point, Mel. I did my homework on you and you are precisely as advertised.” And though I was creeped out that he’d researched my family tree, he did make a gift of the work to my parents, who thought it utterly charming. Even my mom.

“Jamie then,” Alex said with an air of firm conviction. “You’ve never been to his family home in Cheshire. Gi-gan-tic pile, nearly as old as this one. Acres and acres of land. There’s a short course of nine holes, even. And you think Jocasta Cranford likes staff to order around? Ruth Fairleigh makes hers wear uniforms.”

“Nice try,” I replied, and backed away a little, a light tease of a distance when I could tell he was trying to keep me close. “Jamie’s great-grandfather was a shopkeeper. That house hasn’t been in the family for more than fifty years.”

“His dad has a knighthood.”

“Bestowed four years ago! You posted pics on Facebook of the party Jamie and Felix threw in his honor.”

Alex paused and slowly walked his fingers across the glass of the cabinet to meet mine. “You’re not going to let me win this, are you?”

“Nope. You’re a posho, posho.”

“Posho,” Al snorted. “Don’t feel like it. I especially didn’t feel like it the years after dad died. All the money my granddad left us got gobbled up in inheritance tax when my father went. Dad was even worse with money than Mum is, from what Uncle B told me. Should have been B who got this place, he might’ve kept the house from falling apart even more.”

“You know, if you ever want to talk about your dad, I’ll listen.” This was partly, I admit, because I was so curious about this missing piece of the Carr family whose presence seemed to still fizzle in the rooms.

Al’s slim arm pulled me closer to the vitrine again. “I’m not talking about him anymore today, sweetest. Let’s go over the lunatics in here, shall we?”

With a deft flick, Alex popped open the latch that fastened down the delicate sheet of glass topping the cabinet and folded it carefully to one side. “That dark-haired woman in blue with the sweet smile? That’s Kitty Carr. Lovely, isn’t she? Fenn found one of her dresses once in the attic. Well, she thinks it must have been hers, but Fenn’s got an eye for that sort of thing. The tiniest shoulders. I guess as a family we’ve gotten larger over the years.

“Duncan’s right next to her,” he continued, “the one with the nose.” Alex tapped his own lightly.

“You look like family,” I said, and it was true. Duncan’s skin was a bit ruddier, and his eyes had been painted a brilliant blue, not Alex’s deep brown, but there was enough of an echo in their plush lips and high cheekbones — Old Tom’s gift to the family tree — that I shivered.

“Four greats of a grandfather, that one. He’s the one to blame for the Orangerie, if you were ever looking to pin that on a particular member of my family. Let’s see, who else is in here.”

Alex talked me through the jewel-like miniatures in oil and watercolor, and on to the slightly larger daguerreotypes and trading card-sized studio portrait photographs, through to what must have been mid-1950s shots taken on a Brownie camera. The Carrs as a family went almost temporarily respectable in the late Victorian era when Robert Henry Carr, Duncan’s grandson, stepped up as paterfamilias.

“By all accounts, my great-great-grandfather Robbie was a terrific bore. Those muttonchops were about the one of the only interesting things about him. Sublimely dull, according to Great-Great Aunt Fennella’s diaries, and not terribly bright. He collected and pressed ferns as a hobby.”

“Ferns?”

“Hm, yes. Rather a lot of them. Six entire scrapbooks of them, in fact, that we’ve found, filled with crumbly brown and yellow fronds. So far. Fenn found another one a few years ago.”

“Maybe he was dull, but he was handsome,” I said, trying to defend poor Robert H. Carr’s honor. It seemed disrespectful to speak ill of the dead, particularly one who major sin may have only been that he was a snoozefest.

“The only other thing interesting about him is the sheer number of mistresses he kept. Four of those fancy ladies on the left are his. Spent so much on all of them that he nearly went bust. There were more, those are just the ones we have pictures of.”

“Oh.” Maybe I didn’t feel so bad about maligning Robert H. after all.

His finger moved up and to the right to hover over the studio portrait of another relation. “Now that,” he marveled, “that is a Carr.”

Good heavens, and what a Carr this man was. Dressed in a frock coat over a heavily embroidered waistcoat, his dark hair tumbling down his starched white collar like a late Victorian Fabio, the Carr in this photo was consciously aping the stance of his ancestor Old Tom in the portrait down the hall. He, too, pointed a toe towards the portrait’s viewer and jutted his chin up in some decent measure of defiance, but his arms were instead firmly on his slightly cocked hips rather than directing the viewer to an idealized Balcraigie in the far distance. The high Carr cheekbones were particularly sharp on this specimen, and he pursed his mouth in a moue like a proto-duckface. Over his shoulders was draped what I can only describe as a capelet.

“Sweet mother of God,” I said under my breath.

“I know, right?” Alex said, sounding awestruck. “That, sweetest, is my great-grandfather Alexander Blaisdell Carr. My namesake.”

“Not namesake. Eponym,” I replied automatically, without looking away from the photograph. He was, quite simply, fierce. I could have seen him sashaying down the runway in a sequin gown of his own creation on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

“‘Eponym,'” Al repeated. “Huh. That makes sense. What do you think of him?” Alex copied Alexander B. Carr’s stance, down to the sucked in cheeks and popped out pout.

“Did he know he was gay?” I said it before thinking and immediately apologized, but Al just chuckled.

“Camp, but probably straight,” Alex replied, and plucked the photo out of the case for me to consider more closely. “And if not straight, game enough to try it at least four times. See those three boys in sailor suits? That’s my granddad William, and my great uncles Henry and Archibald.”

“Archie!” That was a name in the Carr family history I knew, as the downstairs neighbor of P.F. and Primrose, Cora’s parents. If it hadn’t been for John Carr seeking a sofa to sleep on in Archie’s flat one rainy day in 1982, there would have been no Alex of my own to point out the sensational ancestor who shared his name. But here Archie was the shortest of the three dark haired boys in cocked white hats, lined up by height like von Trapp children on the high seas, and the only one who grinned. The boys were so alike, they looked like an unstacked Matryoshka doll.

“Uncle Archie was always my favorite, thought I admit I don’t remember Uncle Henry too well. Archie always had chocolate to share, not the boiled sweets Aunt Verity tried to fob off on us.”

I pointed back to the picture of dimpled Sarah Carr, cradling her grouchy daughter. “And Verity was their sister.”

“Mmmhmm. Sarah was quite a bit younger than Great-Granddad. Do you know she’s the only Carr we’re aware of that’s spent a night in jail?”

Though I found that slightly hard to believe, I made a non-committal noise that stood between approval and wonder. “Well, if you’re going to get arrested, fighting for votes for women is quite a good reason.”

“Christ, it wasn’t for that. She’d accidentally nicked a bottle of scent from Selfridges. Put it in her coat pocket without thinking whilst she was shopping. Luckily her father was quite a well-connected barrister in the Middle Temple. Sarah was brought up in front of a magistrate the next morning who’d been at her family’s country house only a few weekends before. It all worked out.”

This actually sounded far more like a Carr escapade than leaving incendiary devices outside the Bank of England or blowing up a cricket pavilion. Accidentally setting fire to a cricket pavilion, yes. Bombings, no.

“Great-Granddad met her not long after, at another one of those house parties, right before the Great War started. I’d like to say it was love at first sight like us –“

“Are you sure?” I butted in. “I remember thinking you were very cute but very strange.”

Al leaned over and planted a kiss on the crown of my unwashed hair. “I cannot argue with any of that.”

“But you knew,” I said more to Sarah than Al. Sarah didn’t respond, just continued to smile at her grumpy daughter, who was twisting the neck of a floppy ragdoll viciously.

“It’s what I like to tell myself. It should be true, even if it isn’t.”

“Fair enough. It took me quite a bit longer you know,” I replied, and it was true. It had taken me at least ten weeks to figure out I was utterly lost to Al, but by that time I’d already sealed the deal with Julian. At the time, it seemed pretty tacky to dump Jules for his best friend after we’d had sex four times and he’d already treated me to a weekend in London at Claridges.

“You are,” Alex said, punctuating each word with a kiss up the arm of my sweater, “my dearest, sweetest, most beautiful love. The very best person I know. The kindest, the most indulgent –“

“Are you feeling okay?” I patted his pale forehead, looking for a sheen of sweat. “Do you need a hug?”

His brows were pulled so tight it was as if there were a drawstring of fishing wire drawing them skyward. “I’m trying to be serious.”

Al looked so delightfully befuddled, I decided to push a little and mimicked the slant of his eyebrows in mock concern. “Me too.”

“About what?”

“That I’m seriously in need of another cup of tea.”

Al threw up his hands in frustration. “I’m trying to say something, woman.”

“You’re not doing a great job of it,” I teased, throwing my arms around his chest and burying my face in his black wool jumper for a hug. “You know you smell like stale Silk Cuts and dog pong.”

Alex ignored me. “I have… there’s something that… hm. Huh. You see… well. Melissa. Hm.”

“It must be serious if you called me ‘Melissa,'” I said, but was muffled by the wool that I spoke into.

He was acting weird, even for Al. But then again Balcraigie did tend to make people act even weirder than usual. Only the day before I’d caught the otherwise sensible Andrew Kilmartin in the kitchen digging into a small wheel of Stilton, asking the cheese if it knew quite how delicious it was between quiet moans of pleasure.

With a little wriggling, Al unpicked himself from my embrace. “Just let me think,” he muttered, heading off towards the fireplace. When a hiccup of concern plipped from me with an “oh!” he dismissed me with a wave. Rude, I thought, and not like him, but as I said, the house casts a spell of kook on those inside its walls.

From the way Alex was once again pacing, stomping hard on the parquet floor, I figured he was at least partly to blame for the state of the worn-down rugs scattered about the room. His dark curls bounced on his ears in time with the heel-toe, heel-toe of his broad pace. I’ve learned over time that the longer the stride, the greater the feeling he was tussling with. Coupled with the way he stroked his chin from time to time, this one looked like a doozy.

His presence was like a great bear stalking at very close range. Even I know not to poke the bear, but I couldn’t resist an exploratory prod. “Is everything okay?”

“Okay?” he mimicked. “No, I’m not okay. I’m cocking it all up, as usual. Julian always said I have the preternatural sense of knowing precisely how not to talk about the difficult things.”

The cold glass and steel of the vitrine bit into my back where I’d turned to lean against it. “As if Jules does, Al.”

Alex stopped abruptly but kept his hand on his chin. “He’d be doing a damn better job than I am at all this. Jesus, it’s not like I haven’t done this before.”

“Done wha — ohhhhhhh.” Of course. This trip, the tour of the house, the canter through a cavalcade of Carrs. “Oh no.”

“I thought it was a yes?” He’d stomped his long stride back to the glass case and when he pulled me away from the panorama of his ancestors to the old green sofa, I didn’t resist. Not when his dark brown eyes were that serious, not when those rosy-sweet lips dipped to my temple. Beast, stretched out and nearly filling the cracked leather cushions from top to stinky tail, wasn’t a real deterrent to perching there, though Al managed to swoosh him onto the floor. Beast once again let out a parp of protest and we both gagged lightly.

“I can’t. My nails,” I said, by way of apology, pulling my knees up beneath my chin in the space opened up by the now-dismissed Beast. “They’re so janky after digging at the beach with Lucy. No way I can post a pic on Instagram.”

“So?” Alex was digging under the bottom cushion with great concentration, biting his lip and muttering some truly filthy words. “Sorry about this. I swear it’s here somewhere.”

How many times had I pictured this scene? A number I didn’t really have to hand, that’s for certain. Usually these reveries were set somewhere atmospheric, picturesque. On a hike in the Muir Woods, maybe, wandering through the ancient redwoods, the deep, green scent of bark and moss and wet soil rising from my every step. Or closer to home, up in Big Bear in a snug A-frame cottage while the snow fell heavy, heavy on the weatherbeaten Adirondack chairs on the deck out front. In Bristol maybe, up at the top of Cabot Tower near sunset, the honeyed stone of the university golden in the dying light, the pastel tints of houses like pastry case of petits-fours teetering down the hill towards the harbor.

London, that could happen too: anywhere I couldn’t think of Julian would just about fit the bill. But nowhere would be better than P.F.’s sitting room with the scarlet squoosh of wall-to-wall carpet between my toes, and a steady puff-puff cloud of cherry vanilla pipe smoke from the vicinity of P.F.’s wingback chair. Well done, boy. Now, make sure you can keep her.

Balcraigie made sense though, and it did have a spot on one of my mental Pinterest boards. I hadn’t thought of the library as the most likely location. Not that it mattered, really, but I’d hoped for the great hall instead, before the faded ochre and madder and sapphire blue tapestry of a huntsman returning to a distant manor house, a brace of rabbits hanging from the sable saddle of his creamy white horse. Alex would kneel before me on the hard slate floor, and I wouldn’t miss the tremble in his wrist as he fumbled opening the small box that held Kitty Carr’s engagement ring.

It’s not like I didn’t already know the thing fit me, or near enough. Five Burmese pink sapphires set in bright yellow gold, each round faceted stone tidily wrapped in a ring of gold beads. Before it was stashed in an empty jar of Charlotte Tilbury Magic Cream on Fenn’s vanity upstairs, it was the ring Alex pushed on Minty’s finger. (A much tighter fit, though I shouldn’t be so smug about it.)

Min had let us all try it on at her hen night, a piss up at some rotten wine bar in Chelsea with bleached wood floors and epically uncomfortable and comically high stools to perch on. (Note to designers of “fashionable” wine bars: if you’re going to have a lot of women frequenting your establishment and putting away small ponds of wine in their guts, very high stools are probably an invitation for a claim on your liability insurance.)

Miranda was particularly taken with it, and I admit it did look quite nice against her olive skin. “I used to think this might have been mine,” she cooed, tilting her left hand to catch on its facets the candlelight of the plain white votive in the middle of our table.

Overpriced pinot grigio shot from Sasha’s nose. “Bollocks. You never wanted to marry him. You don’t even want to get married, ever.”

“Who said that?” Miranda said with a sour snip, twisting the ring off and passing it to Amanda.

“You did,” Sasha, Minty and I said in unison.

Amanda nodded vigorously, and would have pocketed the thing if I hadn’t cleared my throat. “Fine, have it,” she sneered, passing it to Sasha for the transfer to my hand.

On my ring finger, it was a little loose and wobbled towards my pinky. Two smaller stones on each side flanked a large rosy sapphire. The gold was a little bright for my tastes, but it was far, far more tasteful than the garish diamond ring Julian had presented me with. Twice.

“It’s lovelier on you than me,” Minty confessed. “Do you ever wonder… what if?”

I knew what she meant immediately, but I wouldn’t tell the truth. I’d had my chance, several times, and blown them all away. I slipped the ring from my hand and pushed it back on Minty’s.

It was one of the few things Alex could take back from her in the divorce, as Uncle B had made damn sure that the couple understood that it was trust property, not Alex’s. “On loan only,” Minty had explained before she passed it around. “When I die, back it goes to the Carrs.”

Macabre at the time, sure, but dying wasn’t the only exit that would trigger the ring’s return to Balcraigie. A homecoming that would allow it to glide once more on my hand.

“Bugger, bugger, bug– got it!” Alex crowed triumphantly. “Now, don’t look. I need to — it’s fiddly. Close your eyes.”

More sotto voce swearing followed while I squinched my eyes shut tight. I wasn’t quite sure what would have been fiddly, but eventually I heard a soft click.

“Can I open them?”

“Almost. Do you want the words first or after? The ones where I tell you I love you and adore you and –“

“It kind of sound like I’m getting them first whether I want them or not,” I laughed.

“Open your eyes then.”

No ring. Instead, a flat and very tatty leather-covered case lay in Alex’s broad hand. Its small brass latch was misaligned, probably broken, but I couldn’t see inside through the gap.

Alex tugged at his collar with his free hand. “Mel, my sweetest. I’m going to bungle this, fuck!”

“No, no, it’s perfect,” I murmured and pulled his hand into mine. “Go on.”

“Right. Sweetest, I’m rubbish. I get everything wrong all the time. I can barely make a sandwich.”

“You can now I taught you!” I’d had a few more of his creations since that first lesson in his Cow Hollow kitchen, and he nearly had the knack of cutting almost equal slices of bread.

He shook his black curls lightly. “I can because you are in my life. I wish I’d never let you slip away from me, again and again and again.”

“That’s not all your fault.” I flipped his hand over and brought his wrist to my lips. “I let you go. I never fought for you.”

“You wouldn’t have had to fight very hard. That night you kissed me –“

“The night at the party.”

“At the party. You tasted of Smirnoff Ice and tears and I knew that the real you would taste even better. I’d been thinking about it, how you might taste for a while, at the strangest moments. I thought you might taste like a strawberry, but not real strawberries. Like the strawberry boiled sweets Great-Aunt Verity had dishes of in her study.”

“You thought I’d taste… fake?”

Alex winced. “Fuck! Of course not. Jesus, idiot boy, think before you open your damn mouth! No. Not fake at all. You’d be sitting there with –“

“With him. Don’t say his name.” I wasn’t letting that ghost in the room. Maria Murray? Sure, come on in and sulk at the rain through the window all you like.

“– with him in the living room, teasing each other and laughing and looking so beautiful. I mean you, you looked beautiful. Like a rose in bloom, open to the world, with love enough for him and me.”

“You weren’t wrong.” Even while I fell in love with Julian, I never closed Alex out. Platonic friends, I assured Cait and Sean and everyone that Christmas, though Jenn had raised an eyebrow at some of the pictures I showed her on my computer. I admit, I did look a little handsy at times.

He smoothed back the tendril of hair I was trying to blow out of my line of vision and tucked it behind my ear. “Do you remember that time when you asked me if I’d make a good boyfriend for you?”

“You heard me.” I never thought he had. At the time I’d quizzed him, his reply wasn’t even certain enough to be classified as non-committal. It was as if I’d asked him what the time was and he’d answered “purple.”

He tapped a kiss on my forehead. “I did. I was always paying attention to you, sweetest. But I didn’t think you wanted to hear my answer.”

“If this is about Jules –“

“Nuh-uh,” Alex tsked. “Sauce for the goose, little goose. It’s not about him. Not at all. Or much. I would have felt like a shit taking you away from him back then, of course. I still loved him, most of the time.”

“Tell me then,” I sighed. “Tell me all of this, so we can get on with the good stuff.”

“Ahhhhh, the ‘good stuff’ sounds very much to my liking,” he chuckled. “All right then. The reason I didn’t tell you was because I didn’t think I’d make a very good boyfriend for you. I was a fucking disaster back then. My clothes were shit, I was permanently skint, my sister was a complete fucking mess and my mum and my uncle expected me to somehow fix her. On top of all that, I was hate-fucking Miranda and drunk more often than not. That, my lovely, is why I didn’t think I’d make a good boyfriend for you.”

“You could have told me,” I reassured Al. “I would have listened. I would have helped you in any way I could.”

“I don’t doubt a word of it. But think about it. I was a 20 year old boy. Do you really think I wanted the girl I thought was the best fucking thing in the universe to know I was an uncontrollable mess?”

“Fair point,” I conceded. “But how about now? Do you think you’d make a good boyfriend for me now?”

“I’m still grumpy,” he insisted. “I still make a dog’s dinner of half the shite I try to do. I still rely on you much more than I should. I shout at my sister. I’m crap at controlling my temper. I snore. I probably should quit drinking beers at football practice so I don’t bollocks up my ankle again. And I’m not really that trustworthy. I fell in love with my best friend’s wife, for fuck’s safe.”

“All excellent points,” I replied pulling his free hand back to touch my cheek. “But I know all these things and I still like you a lot.”

“You’re very silly for a very bright woman, you know. But in answer to your question, no. I don’t think I’d make a good boyfriend for you now.”

I arched an eyebrow. “No? Too bad you are already.” I wanted him to hurry up and shove that ring on my finger, nearly as much as I wanted to finally hear him ask if I’d marry him.

“Woman, just let me get this out!”

“Sorry,” I said with a pout. I was enjoying this far more than the two proposals I’d had from Jules.

The first, en famille at Christmastime in Suffolk, was tolerable. Jocasta Cranford even pretended for a couple of hours that I was an acceptable spouse for her angelic son. She made a point of calling me “Melissa” instead of “Amanda” almost every single time that day. It was quite a feat for her, considering I’d nearly toppled over the achingly tasteful Christmas tree when Jules showed me the ring. (She didn’t forget my name is Melissa when she doled out that rebuke.)

Jules’s second try involved the same ring — a four carat pear shaped dazzler hugged on each of its sloping sides with a sinuous curve of smaller round ones. It was stupendously vulgar. Julian had shown up — unannounced and completely uninvited — at my poky Pasadena apartment 10 days before to ask for it back. “So I can earn the right to give it to you again.” I was so furious at Alex after Seattle that I accepted both Julian’s seemingly sincere contrition and the ring back without a second thought.

Alex moved his hand from mine and began messing with the tarnished latch on the battered case again. “What I mean to say is that as much as I’m rubbish at being a boyfriend, I have been told I make a halfway decent husband. Recently, even, by someone who would know.”

It was true — Minty had told me herself at Jamie’s wedding that Alex was “the best of husbands” with a wistful note that hadn’t really delighted me at the time. Nor had I particularly enjoyed turning around a corner on my way back from the loo to discover Alex opening his mouth wide for Minty to pop one of her famous rabbit liver canapes inside. (I especially didn’t like how she wiped his mouth with a cocktail napkin afterwards, nor how blithely he accepted both the mode of delivery of the canape and the mop up afterwards.)

“And… well, I want to be yours.” Alex looked up from the jewelry case, which didn’t seem to want to cough up the ring. In him I saw the good-natured Duncan and the fashion plate Alexander Blaisdell and even some of the swagger of Old Tom himself. Thankfully I saw little of the philandering and terminally boring Robert H. beyond the fluffy-lipped pout.

I’d had a script for this moment I’d been scribbling at for years, tucked away just in case. I’d wrapped up the first draft during our very first interlude. I find I prefer that word these days when thinking about our various failed attempts to make a decent bash at a relationship — much nicer than “intermittent bone jumping.” Since then I’d been polishing it up and ripping out its guts and selecting new verbs and cutting down on adjectives and excising all adverbs (savagely). Most importantly, it no longer sounded too much like a long-winded Oscars acceptance speech. I no longer thanked anyone but Al, for starters.

Yet here, presented with the tableau I’d always wanted to come across in one of the tiny rooms of my dream house, the words were overworked and drippy. Sentimental, without the sentiment of the actual moment: that I was home, at last. That the puzzle pieces I’d been trying to make fit for years within myself aligned at last without forcing, and all I’d had to do is flip a piece over.

Alex kept up his struggle with the box, which was proving a formidable enemy. “Aaargh, this fucking box, this fucking cunting piece of shit bloody bollocksy — ow! The bloody thing bit me!” Alex shook out his hand.

“Oh, Al,” I sighed, and stretched out my hand. “May I?”

“By all means.” Alex dipped his head in a mini-bow as he passed over the slim container. “Just say yes first.”

In my own hand, the thin, curling leather case was far heavier than I’d expected, and certainly not original to the ring. Too big, of course, more like a cigarette case. Peering inside was of no use. “The lock is jammed,” I said, more to the box than Al. “Pass me your wallet.”

“You want my money already? You haven’t even said yes yet,” Alex said with a cluck at the end. While I tried to prise the case open with my fingernail, he riffled through his billfold. “I’ve a few twenty pound notes but that’s it, I’m afraid. If you tell me you’ll marry me, I’ll write you a cheque. You do take cheques, right?”

The case just wouldn’t budge. It had taken a chunk of my already ragged nail and nearly bit me, too. I’d have given it a hard thwack on the side of one of the bookcases if it hadn’t been a pretty thing in itself, or if I wasn’t concerned the ring would plick! into the air like a champagne cork, straight into the open maw of Beast, who was watching the puzzling hoo-mans very closely.

“Of course I’ll marry you.” I paused, and gave the box an exploratory shake of the sort Rachel used to inflict on Christmas morning on all of her presents — and mine, too. This sounded like a bag of marbles. “Now who’s very silly and very bright?”

“More proof we’re compatible.” Alex puffed out his chest slightly.

“Now pass me a credit card.”

“If I ever wondered what it might be like proposing to Amanda, now I know.” Alex flicked through his cards. “What’ll it be? High limit? Cashback? Air miles?”

Exasperating, but I still love him. “It’s to get the stupid latch open.”

“Well, you might have said.” Alex plucked out a white plastic card and pressed it into my palm. “Tesco Clubcard it is.”

With the plastic slid between the two halves of the brass frame, it only took a few exploratory wiggles of the card for the latch to at last release its hold with a satisfying snap.

“Open it, Ms. de Mornay. I hope you like it.”

Inside, no ring. Instead, on a cream silk pillow lay a jumble of jewels — sapphires, to be precise. A necklace? No, a bracelet. Shaking the box had loosed the piece from the small cloth fastening that must have kept it in place.

Each stone was roughly the size of a pistachio shell. When I picked the piece up and brought it to the light from the fireplace, the blue of the sapphires and the constellations of diamonds wrapped around each large stone winked at me: Hey you, aren’t I obscenely gorgeous?

“Alex,” I breathed. I couldn’t take my eyes from the bracelet, from any of the eight sapphires or the circling diamonds or the intricate gold setting of thistles and leaves that joined the clusters of gems. When I looked up, his face bore traces of both delight and worry. “I don’t know what to say.”

And I didn’t. It wasn’t a ring, for one, or more pertinently Kitty Carr’s ring. In its own way, the bracelet was even more stupendously tawdry than my first piece of proposal jewelry from Julian. But it was far more clever, because it wasn’t purchased from a posh shop in Mayfair with a royal warrant (now revoked). It was a Carr piece, quite clearly, as much as Kitty’s ring was.

“Say yes.” Alex pulled the bracelet from my grasp, each stone rumbling over my hand, then gently clipped the gold clasp to make a circle of the piece around my wrist.

“I already did. But yes, yes again.”

The thing weighed a ton on my arm, unsurprising given the nearly 20 carats of gems it cradled in its setting. But it felt right there, like its heft and size and garishness demanded I see how serious Al was about me. About us. About being a family. About being a Carr, and all that that name’s bonkers past entailed.

Beast inserted himself between us as Alex leaned over for a kiss from me.

“Dog,” Alex groaned while Beast settled his muzzle on my thigh and looked up longingly for ear scritches. “Don’t even think about farting.”

Beast did anyway, which seemed like pure retaliation, if you ask me, since the dog’s rear end was pointed directly at Al.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked while Al attempted to wave away Beast’s death fumes.

“Fire away.” Alex paused. “That was to her, dog, not you. No firing.”

I couldn’t stop running my fingers over my engagement bracelet (what else was it?) but something else bothered me. “I was expecting the ring.”

“Why would you want that thing? It’s probably cursed. Great-Aunt Verity used it for her engagement, and her husband was killed in the war. I give it to Minty, she walks out on me and takes my daughter with her. My dad gave it to Mum, he…” Alex trailed off. “He died too young.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. Beast lifted his head for a scritch under the chin and I delivered a few, with a couple “who’s a good smelly boy”s thrown in as a displacement activity.

“You deserve something ridiculous, because I am ridiculously in love with you.” Alex reached forward for the hand bearing the bracelet, and twisted my wrist lightly to set off the dazzle. “And you need something very, very precious.”

“Because I’m very precious.”

“No. ‘Very, very.’ Precision is important here. And because I want you to have something with a funny story behind it, not a story with death and divorce.”

“I suppose I’m supposed to ask what that is then.” I could tell from the way that Alex was nearly bouncing up and down that there was some ripping yarn to unravel involving another misbehaving Carr.

“Have I ever told you,” Alex began, stretching out his long legs towards the fire and leaning back on the beat up green leather cushions of the sofa. “Have I ever told you much about my great-grandmother Sarah’s aunt, Lady Fennella Dysart?”

It was another Carr legend — and a good one, involving slutty Lady Fenn and a cheating earl and a furious countess and a Jubilee Ball in London. Another tale in an archive of stories, told fittingly in a library, surrounded by the books and portraits and knick-knacks of an entire catalogue of Carrs.

After all, a house that’s been standing for nearly 500 years is bound to hold more than a few stories. And now I am one of them, too.