The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce by Paul Torday Read Free Book Online Page B

a lot of money, when one didn’t have any income, was that it only worked for a time. That time had come. It had been a long while since I had been able to think clearly about my future and I wasn’t sure I was able to start now. I decided to go for a walk to clear my head, to post my letters and the paid bills, and to buy something to eat from the shop on the corner of Curzon Street. Then I checked my wallet, the one that Nurse Susan had kindly returned after I threw it out of the window. It contained three out-of-date credit cards and no cash. I knew my money clip had nothing in it. With some apprehension, I realised I was first going to have to walk down to St James’s Street to my bank and cash a cheque.
     
When Francis’s executors offered me Caerlyon Hall, I said yes, as I had promised Francis I would. The main house and grounds had been let on a long lease to the Council, as a Community Outreach Centre. One wing at the back of the house with a couple of bedrooms, a sitting room and a large kitchen had been kept by Francis for his own use, and so had the huge vault beneath the house, which so resembled the crypt of a church that Francis called it ‘the undercroft’. I had also promised Francis I would take back the main house from the Council, and make my home there, but that part of the promise I have not, so far, fulfilled. It does not look likely that I will ever live there now. Things have changed. Francis had no right to expect me to take on the burden of his house as well as his cellar. He had no right to extract a promise from me, although he did.
    The undercroft itself was a huge Elizabethan vaulted cellar, which went right under the house. It was reached by going into a small stone building next to the stable block and down wide stone stairs to a large antechamber. That was where Francis had spent most of his life - in his ‘shop’. The shop area was where Francis displayed the wine he wanted to sell. The undercroft beyond was where he kept the wine he wanted to drink. The undercroft consisted of a central room, about fifty yards long, with chambers opening off it every few yards, like side chapels in a cathedral. In the main vaulted chamber Francis stacked the cased wine he had inherited or accumulated over the last forty years. There were several thousand wooden cases of wine, piled one on top of another, so that the effect was like a nineteenth-century city, a grid of great avenues and lateral side streets between the cases. There was no order, no system. Margaux was piled on top of Pomerol, St Emilion on top of Médoc; 1982s were stacked on top of 1998s and no one except Francis could ever have found anything. I have tried drawing a map of this cellar and, to an extent, I have succeeded. I have an approximate idea of the location, vintage and château of about half the wine I now own. The rest is a mystery to me - an exploration in progress. It might take me the rest of my life to find all the wine I own; it might take me longer than the rest of my life. My map is not complete; it could never be complete, for there is simply too much there to remember.
    Francis had an eidetic memory. If he had once seen that he had a case of Château Latour 1979 resting on top of a case of Sauternes, he would remember for ever the position of each and, if you asked him about either of those wines, he could lead you straight to it.
    In the side chambers were the special wines, behind locked iron grilles. There were pre-phylloxera Imperial Tokays; Châteaux Yquem from the 1880s; bottles of ancient port; odds and ends, collector’s dreams that might have been sold for the most enormous sums at auction. They will never go to auction now. Francis could never part with a bottle of wine he really loved, and neither will I. I thought about it once, but I would never do it. I could not bring myself to do it. Francis was my friend. To sell his wine would be a betrayal. There has been enough betrayal . . .
    I remember the