The Irresistible Inheritance Of Wilberforce by Paul Torday

first time I went to Caerlyon - such an odd name: a remnant of the Dark Ages, before the Saxon and Dutch settlements. Caerlyon had survived and kept its identity intact, an island in the flood tide of Saxon and then Danish place names that arrived after the Romans left. The present version of the house was early Victorian, I believe, but there had been settlements in that place since the Bronze Age: Roman, medieval, an Elizabethan house. The Victorian house had been built in the days of the Black family’s greatest prosperity, when they had mined the rich coal seams that lay under the poor farmland that had sustained them in earlier centuries. That evening I had left my office as usual at about half past seven in the evening. My office, a miracle of black glass and marble, was in almost the last building at the edge of a modern industrial estate, south-west of Newcastle. It was an evening in late May. It was the time when I normally left work in order to get to the local shopping centre to buy a pizza or some other form of instant nourishment before all the shops shut. I would buy whatever pre-cooked meal came to hand, go home, microwave it and eat it, sit in front of a computer for an hour or two and then try to get five or six hours’ sleep before heading back to the office around five in the morning.
    I still remember what a beautiful evening it was, with the magical light that occurs as spring changes into early summer. The sky was a pale pink, shading to a light green, which hinted of the Aurora. The industrial estate where I worked, a wilderness of aluminium sheds and modern glass-and-brick palaces like my own offices, was eating slowly into the side of a green hill. At the top of the hill, green pasture shaded into brown and rushy fell. For no reason, I turned off the road to the shopping mall and went up a little lane, driving up the side of the hill instead of along its base, towards the pale edge of the evening sky, as if there was a message waiting for me at the top of the escarpment. The offices and the factories below were already shrouded in the gloom of approaching night. I thought that it might be pleasant to see the last of the evening sunlight, as if I had, for a moment, sickened of all those years of neon-lit offices.
    At the top of the hill, which I had driven up with some spirit in the Range Rover that I had bought for myself that year - the first (and last) expensive car I ever owned - I pulled in to the side of the road. Beyond me was a different landscape of small farms and allotments rising up to the great brown slopes of the Pennine moors. Just beyond where I had stopped the car was a little lane, with a brown sign pointing down it, and in white lettering the words ‘Caerlyon Hall’. I felt light of heart. I was breaking my routine, and I found that it was refreshing. I made a promise to myself that I would give it another ten minutes, then would turn around to go and buy my pizza and put in my couple of hours working on a new computer program. I turned the car down the lane through a planting of dark trees, and there in front of me was an enormous grey house. The drive gates were locked and barred and a sign said, ‘Gateshead County Council: Community Outreach Centre’.
    I drove along the lane beside a high stone wall. The lane seemed to head towards the back parts of the house. After a hundred yards I found an opening in the wall that led into a cobbled courtyard, with stables and outbuildings. A large ‘A’ board was positioned by the side of the road: in gold Palace script on a burgundy-coloured background it announced: ‘Francis Black: Fine Bordeaux Wines. Visitors welcome.’
    I remember feeling a little like Alice must have felt when she found the table at the bottom of the rabbit hole, with the little bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’. She knew very well that it would be wiser not to drink it, but strange things had already started to happen to her since she’d fallen asleep in the