Violet Sins

The will was three pages long. I was on all of them.

The solicitor read it the way solicitors read things, flat and careful, so the wording could not be held against him later. I sat on the visitor side of his desk in a chair upholstered in the colour of strong tea, and I did not move. The window behind him faced the granite back of another building. A square of Aberdeen sky showed above the gable. Grey. Constant.

My aunt Margaux was dead.

Eight months. I kept waiting for that fact to find a shape my body could hold, and it kept refusing. Today it was sitting two seats to my left, in the chair where she would have sat, except she was the reason we were here. My mother’s older sister. My godmother. The only person who had ever, in my life, paid attention to me on purpose.

“Section three,” the solicitor said. “Sub-clause C.”

I made myself listen.

It was not money. The shares, the ones whose existence I had no idea about until last Tuesday, sat in a private holding company called Mercer & Cross Capital. Energy investments, North Sea, Aberdeen-based. I knew the name the way you know any name printed on the side of a building you walk past without looking. Margaux had bought into the firm 12 years ago. Nobody in the family had been told. Margaux had never thought she owed her family information about her money.

The solicitor reached the condition.

“In the matter of the holding,” he read, “the bequest is made conditional upon the recipient – Miss Violet Sinclair – undertaking a six-month embedded position at Mercer & Cross Capital, in such role as the firm’s principals deem appropriate, before the shares vest. Failure to complete the period, or refusal to undertake it, returns the shares to the residue of the estate, which is bequeathed in such case to St Catherine’s Hospice, Aberdeen.”

He set the page down. He looked at me.

I counted three slow breaths. Then I said, “I would like to read it myself, please.”

He passed the document across the desk. I found sub-clause C with my finger and read it as if for the first time. The wording was exact. There was no other reading.

Margaux. You absolute woman.

She had spent, exactly 58 years refusing to apologise for any decision she had ever made. The shape of the bequest was not surprising once I saw it on paper. What was surprising was that the shape included me. She had told me a hundred times I was smarter than I let the world believe. She had said it during the worst of the Gregor years and she had said it three weeks before she died, sitting up in bed in the hospice with morphine in one hand and a bowl of tinned peaches in the other, saying it like she was passing a verdict in a long trial she had been chairing alone.

The solicitor cleared his throat. He had another appointment at half past.

“I will need to confirm the terms with the firm directly,” he said. “There has been correspondence already. Would you like to meet them this morning? They are in the city. They are, I am told, available.”

He did not blink while he said it. Solicitors did not, usually, organise meetings without instruction.

I looked at him long enough to make sure he registered it.

“Whose suggestion was that,” I said.

“Mr Mercer’s,” he said. “When he received notice of today’s reading.”

“Mm.”

He waited. I was supposed to fill the silence. I did not.

“Shall I,” he said, after a moment.

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

The walk to Mercer & Cross was six minutes. Past the bookshop on Union Street, left at the war memorial, along Albyn Place where the granite went paler and the buildings remembered being houses. I walked it with my coat unbuttoned because the morning air was cold and I wanted the cold. Wind off the North Sea had been at the city since before dawn. The light, what there was of it, was white in the way Aberdeen light is white. The granite eats it and gives nothing back.

Margaux. You knew.

I had spent eight months trying to write down what she would have said about Gregor MacAulay had she lived a year longer. She would have said, I am not surprised. I have been not-surprised for a long time. I waited for you to leave him because I have known since you were seven that you do not respond to instruction, you respond to your own conclusions. Then she would have said, Now what.

And the answer was, apparently, six months at a private investment firm where I had no relevant experience, no introduction, and no reason to be other than a clause in a dead woman’s will.

The building was converted Victorian. Three floors. The brass plate beside the door read MERCER & CROSS CAPITAL in letters small enough to suggest the firm did not need to convince anyone of anything.

I pushed the door.

Inside, warmth, the deliberate kind that had been built room by room. Wood. Lamp light. A reception desk that held nothing on it except a phone, a slim laptop, and a woman with grey-streaked auburn hair tied back, a navy jumper, and a face that registered me without cataloguing me.

“Miss Sinclair,” she said. “I’m Helen. They’re expecting you.”

“They.”

“Mr Mercer and Mr Cross.” She was already on her feet. “Conference room, first floor. The solicitor’s office let us know you were on your way.” She looked at my coat. “Tea or coffee?”

“Tea.”

“Milk?”

“Just tea.”

“Right.”

She led me up a staircase too narrow for the building’s age, pressed one palm to a panelled door, and stood aside.

I walked into a room that was almost empty.

A long oak table. A window that looked down into a small walled garden. Two men. They had stood up. Of course they had. I took this in the way I took everything in now, fast, and without showing that I had. Margaux trained that into me at seven. Gregor educated it into me at 25.

The taller of the two was at the head of the table. Dark hair cropped close. Jaw he had not bothered to do anything about this morning. A suit that had been cut by a person who knew how to cut a suit. His hands were at his sides, large and quiet, and he was looking at me the way a person looks at a thing that has finally arrived. He did not move towards me. He waited.

The other one was at the right of the table. Lean. Dark blond. Green eyes that were already adjusting his face into something hospitable. He smiled the kind of smile that had cost nothing to produce and was, all the same, real.

“Miss Sinclair,” the dark-blond one said, and the warmth in his voice was measured. “Dorian Cross. Thank you for coming on so little notice.”

“You’re welcome.”

“My partner, Callum Mercer.”

“Mr Mercer.”

“Miss Sinclair,” Callum Mercer said.

His voice was lower than Dorian’s, and slower, and I had to tilt my listening for it. He did not extend a hand. Neither did Dorian. I was grateful for both decisions.

There was a chair pulled out for me.

I sat in it without checking.

Dorian’s face went briefly different. A thought that interested him, packed away before it showed. I didn’t catch what Callum did because I wasn’t looking at Callum. I was looking at the table, at the file folder placed in front of my chair, at the embossed edge of Mercer & Cross stationery.

Helen set the tea down at my elbow. Milk after all, two fingers’ worth. She had read me on the stairs. She withdrew.

The door clicked shut.

“Margaux,” Dorian said, “spoke about you.”

I lifted the cup. I did not drink. “Did she.”

“For about 12 years.”

I didn’t answer. I put the cup down. I opened the folder.

Inside, an offer letter on Mercer & Cross stationery. Six-month embedded position. Title – Strategic Liaison, which was not a job, but the firm had been thoughtful enough to invent it. Salary that was more than I had earned in 22 months at the financial services firm where I had a junior analyst chair and Gregor’s monitoring of my expenses. A line referring to suitable accommodation, available at the firm’s discretion. A clause about confidentiality. Standard. Another about non-engagement with rival firms during the period. Standard. A signature line beneath my printed name.

Pre-prepared. Down to the spelling of Sinclair with the c.

I read the whole letter twice.

I looked up.

“You’ve already drafted this,” I said.

“We have,” Callum Mercer said.

He did not apologise. He did not explain. He waited.

I looked at Dorian, who had the better face for being looked at, and who returned my look without changing his expression.

“You assumed I’d say yes.”

“We hoped,” Dorian said.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

A pause. He did not look at Callum. Callum did not look at him. 12 years of partnership communicated itself in the air between them, and I filed that.

“We assumed you’d want time,” Dorian said, “to read the will. We had this drawn up so that, if you decided to proceed, the practical arrangements wouldn’t delay you. The accommodation clause is, of course, optional.”

“What does the firm do.”

“Mostly,” Callum said, “we invest in energy assets in the North Sea and adjacent. We assess deals other firms cannot price properly. We sometimes act as the patient money in operations that would otherwise be sold under duress.”

“What would I do for six months.”

“Whatever,” he said, “we ask you to do.”

It was, I thought, the first time anyone outside of Margaux had answered a question of mine without dressing the answer up.

I took a sip of the tea. It was exactly the temperature it should be. I set the cup down and looked at the offer letter, and the strange thing happened, the strange thing that had been happening in pieces for eight months, where Margaux was, briefly, in the room. As if she were sitting in the empty chair on my left, smoking the cigarette she had quit at fifty, watching me with the expression she wore when she had set up a long bet and was waiting to see whether the horse remembered which way the track went.

Now what, she said.

I looked across the table at the two of them.

I thought: I don’t know what this is. And after, quieter: I know what this is. I’m not going to say so yet.

Six months.

I took the pen from the folder. The pen had been weighted. I noticed it the way I had been noticing everything that had been arranged for me, which today was everything.

“I’ll need conditions of my own,” I said.

“Of course.”

“In writing.”

“Yes.”

“By tomorrow.”

“By tomorrow,” Callum said.

I signed my name at the bottom of the offer letter and watched the ink hold.

I closed the folder. I pushed it back across the table. I stood up. They stood up with me, in the same beat. I didn’t register it as planned because nothing in the morning had been unplanned, by now, I was only registering what I would need to think about later.

“I’ll see myself out.”

“Helen will see you out,” Callum Mercer said.

“Of course she will.”

I stepped into the corridor. The door clicked behind me.

Halfway down the staircase I stopped, one hand on the rail, and breathed in once through my nose. Lamp oil. Wax. The cold of granite that had not been warm since 1899. Somewhere on the floor below, a kettle. Above me, two closed doors at either end of a corridor, with a quieter space between them I had registered without meaning to as I came up.

Margaux.

I did not say it aloud. I never did.

Now what, she said.