WILLIAM. That you’re no better than me. And I won’t be doing anything on your say-so any time soon. I just wanted to look you in the eye and say that. I think we both need to be clear about that.

JAMES. Aw man.

Aw man, you’re a nightmare, you’re a dark and stormy nightmare. What am I supposed to do with that?

WILLIAM. I don’t care what you do, little Jamie.

I’m just telling you how it is.

JAMES. You’ve got to know I’m likely to have to execute you for saying things like that!

WILLIAM. So why am I not dead?

JAMES. I don’t want to kill you, Will.

WILLIAM. Well… I got to see what dying in bed looked like, Jamie, and I’m no going like that.

No I am not.

He gets another drink.

My dad took me round all our land a few years back. He’d got it all, all the Douglas land and more, damp patch by damp patch. Banff, Avoch, Aberdour, Moray, Strathaven, Stonehouse… Jesus… He took me over every wet, thistle-sprouting, rocky inch of it. He poked sheep and cattle he’d inherited from all my dead cousins and uncles and he laughed like a crow eating eyeballs at the fat arses on those beasts. This was him showing me how to be a rich man. Proving to me that we were rich men.

And you know what gets me?

He’d been to Rome. Have you been to Rome, Jamie?

JAMES. No.

WILLIAM. No.

Neither had I till you sent me. I suppose you thought you were doing me a favour?

There’s a house, not a rich man’s house, a wine merchant’s house, an ordinary shop man’s house you ride past on your way into town.

It has paintings of angels on its walls that look like a window into the next world.

It has peacocks in its yard. I’m not joking. The wine merchant’s kids are kicking peacocks’ eggs around his garden in Rome.

With angels watching them.

And I come home and I’m supposed to feel like a rich man because I’ve got another hundred wet sheep?

What’s the point? Tell me? What’s the point of that?

Seems to me that round here there’s no point in any of it if you’ve got to do what another man tells you to do. Is there?

You can take my land, take all my money, have my property, go on… I’m a rich man, apparently, take the lot. Take the head off my shoulders, Jamie.

But you’re never going to tell me what to do. Alright?

That’s what it means to be a rich man in this country.

JAMES. So you’d like to be King.

WILLIAM. I don’t want to be fucking King.