THE HEIR OF HARTWELL

Chapter 1

The rejection letter was polite. They always were.

Alexander Calloway folded it along its original crease, slid it back into the envelope, and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket, the navy one with the fraying left cuff, the one Vivienne had asked him three times to throw away. He stood for a moment on the pavement outside the glass-fronted offices of Pemberton and Associates, watching his reflection in the revolving door. Oxford First in Business. Three years of sending out applications. Thirty-one letters of polite rejection.

He loosened his tie and started walking.

The Bernadotte townhouse sat on a quiet street in Mayfair, four storeys of white stucco that managed to look both beautiful and reproachful, as though the building itself were aware of his shortcomings. He stood at the front door a moment longer than necessary before pressing the handle.

Inside, the hallway smelled of the lilies Constance Bernadotte had delivered every Monday without fail. His mother-in-law was in the sitting room, her reading glasses pushed up into her silver-blonde hair, a telephone pressed to her ear. She looked up as he passed the doorway. The look lasted perhaps two seconds. It contained, in those two seconds, everything she thought of him.

He went through to the kitchen.

Vivienne was at the island counter, scrolling through her phone, a half-eaten cracker on the marble beside her. She was still in her work clothes, a charcoal blazer over a silk blouse the colour of a winter sky. She had not heard him come in, or was pretending she had not, which amounted to the same thing.

"Well?" she said, not looking up.

Alexander set his keys on the counter. "Not this time."

Vivienne's thumb paused on the screen. She set the phone down and looked at him, not with anger, which would at least have suggested investment, but with the particular weariness of someone who has confirmed a suspicion they wished had been wrong.

"Of course not, how useless!" she said.

"Vivienne."

"I am not having this conversation again, Alexander."

He said nothing. He had learned, over three years, that silence was the only currency he possessed in this house that could not be devalued.

She slid off the bar stool and picked up her phone. "Dinner needs to be done by half seven. Mother's having the Carmichaels round." She was already walking toward the stairs. "Something without garlic. You know how she feels about garlic."

He listened to her footsteps on the staircase. He stood in the kitchen and thought about the rejection letter folded in his pocket, and about the eleven before it, and about the particular texture of this life he had somehow arrived at: the borrowed house, the borrowed name, the borrowed patience that was, if he were honest with himself, beginning to run very thin.

He opened the refrigerator and began to cook.

* * *

Constance returned to the kitchen an hour later, while Alexander was reducing a pan of shallots in white wine. She stood in the doorway with the air of someone conducting a safety inspection.

"Is that boeuf bourguignon?" she asked.

"Coq au vin," he said.

"I said nothing with garlic."

"There is no garlic in it."

She stared at the pan as though daring it to contradict her. "You look as though you have been dragged through a hedge," she said. "Do try to change before the Carmichaels arrive. I would rather not have to explain you."

She said it with the complete absence of cruelty that made it so much worse than cruelty would have been. It was not an insult. It was simply a fact she was passing along, the way one might mention that it was due to rain.

Alexander stirred the pan.

"Do not call me Mother," she added, as she turned to leave, as though he had just done so. "I have asked you repeatedly. I do not know why it is so difficult."

He had not called her Mother. He could not remember the last time he had.

* * *

After dinner, which the Carmichaels praised effusively and specifically to Vivienne, who accepted the compliments with the ease of someone who had made the dish herself, Alexander washed up. Douglas Bernadotte, Vivienne's father, lingered after the others had moved to the drawing room. He was a broad, unhurried man in his late sixties who had built his own money before marrying into the kind that came with opinions, and he carried a quiet authority that his wife and daughter had somehow never inherited.

He picked up a tea towel without being asked and began drying the glasses.

"Pemberton?" he said.

"How did you know?"

"You always fold your collar down when you have had a bad day. You have been doing it since you moved in." Douglas set a glass on the rack. "Their loss, for what it is worth."

Alexander handed him another glass. "It is not worth very much at the moment."

"No," Douglas agreed. "I do not suppose it is. But these things have a way of correcting themselves."

It was the kindest thing anyone had said to him all day. He tried to hold onto it as he made his way up the back staircase to the room he shared with Vivienne, the room where, that night, he would notice a message on her phone that would change everything, though he did not know that yet.

He only knew that he was very tired, and that the house, beautiful as it was, had never once felt like home.