‘The new Earl’s in jug,’ said Michele.
‘This does concern all the children,’ said Digby judiciously.
‘Quite,’ said Mr Lillywaite. ‘But unequally.’
‘Unequally?’ said Lady Joan sharply. ‘I don’t see that. I know Dad made a will months ago—when he nearly got run over in Clapham High Street.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Lillywaite. ‘There was that will.’
‘What do you mean? Wasn’t it legal?’
‘Oh yes. So far as I know.’
‘Was there another?’ asked Digby.
‘I hardly think it seemly,’ began Mr Lillywaite, in a badgered tone, ‘With the Earl lying dead in the Hall—’
The gods were on his side. Just as he was beginning to get a sense of the family forming itself into a pack, driving him to earth in the approved manner of huntsmen, a constable entered from the Hall.
‘The Chief Superintendent’s compliments, and he’d be obliged if he could have a talk with Lady Ellesmere.’
Dixie was on her feet a second before the Countess.
CHAPTER 8
THE PINK DAMASK ROOM
Dixie recovered herself in a moment, and attempted to retrieve the situation.
‘Sorry, Mum. Silly of me. I expect he means you.’
The Countess, cast down as she was, did not deign to reply, but shuffled out of the room on the arm of the young constable, muttering to herself. ‘The hide of it,’ were the only words audible to her escort. The incident was not lost on anybody in the room: Mr Lillywaite—regretting, not for the first time, his choice of ally—tut-tutted audibly; Sam cast an ironic look in Dixie’s direction as she subsided stormily into her chair; while Trevor put his hand up to his mouth and whispered to Michele:
‘No prizes for guessing what’s been going through Dixie’s mind.’
Dixie was hardly capable of embarrassment, but having given herself away so thoroughly she did keep quiet for a bit. In any case, she had no need to say anything. She knew what the others were so keen to find out.
It was Digby who led the renewed attack.
‘I don’t want to press the point unduly, sir—’ Digby made a habit of calling older men ‘sir’ when he wanted something out of them—‘but naturally Lady Joan and the other members of the family would like to know where they stand.’
Mr Lillywaite sighed. He might have known that the family’s foxhunting instincts were too deeply inbred to have been eradicated by an upbringing in Clapham.
‘This involves,’ pursued Digby, ‘getting some rough idea of the late Earl’s testamentary dispositions.’
‘His what?’ asked Trevor.
‘The will. What I’m trying to say is, we should be told what’s in the will.’
‘I said the will was all they were interested in,’ said Trevor. But he was beginning to be curious himself.
‘The Countess not being present—’ began Mr Lillywaite.
‘Mum will know all about it,’ said Trevor. ‘Dad never scratched his—back without telling Mum.’
‘No doubt you’re right,’ sighed Mr Lillywaite, beginning reluctantly to concede defeat. ‘I think the Countess was present when we discussed it.’
‘Go on, tell them,’ said Dixie, from her seat by the window. ‘If there’s going to be a row, we might as well have it now, while Mum’s not here.’
‘Very well; the position is this: when the late Earl came into the property, some six weeks or so ago, I prepared an emergency will, as a holding measure so to speak, designed to meet just such a contingency as has now—regrettably—arisen. It left token amounts—generous token amounts—to the two younger children, an annuity to the Countess, and the rest to the elder son, Philip.’
‘And this will was legal—signed, and so on,’ asked Lady Joan, in a small, high voice.
‘Naturally,’ said Mr Lillywaite, at his most austere. ‘I would hardly let so long go by without tying it up legally. The Earl and I agreed that this was to be a temporary safety-net, a mere stop-gap measure.’
‘Until what?’ asked Trevor.
‘In my opinion, and surely in the opinion of anyone who knows our levels of death duty, the property should have been transferred to the elder son in the late Earl’s lifetime. It is the only way to minimize the duties, and the longer the Earl lived thereafter, the better for the heir. I should say in all honesty that I had not convinced the late Earl of the wisdom of this step, though I had high hopes of doing so.’
‘You had no hopes,’ said Joan, her voice harsh with disappointment. ‘Dad was very fair.’
‘If it’s not a distasteful question,’ said Trevor, who was rapidly recovering some of his old insouciant spirit, ‘what sort of sum would you describe as a generous token amount? In figures, I mean.’
‘The sum was twenty thousand pounds.’
Trevor whistled.
‘Not bad. Could be better, but not bad.’
‘You’re a fool, Trevor,’ snapped Joan. ‘It’s chickenfeed. It would have been much, much more if the old will had stood.’
‘It would have meant the dismemberment of Chetton, and of the whole artistic heritage that goes with it, as well as the end of the place as the family’s home,’ said Mr Lillywaite severely, and with feeling. Then his cratered face collapsed, and he sighed. ‘Not that the question arises now. The subject is purely academic.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Trevor.
‘As I have already explained to Lady Port—to the new Countess, two lots of death duties, as well as the small amount payable on the death of the old Earl, effectively destroy any possibility of maintaining the heritage in the family. There is no way the money can be found and Chetton held on to. It means the ruin of the Spenders.’
His words fell into silence. Dixie, slumped in her chair by the windows, glowered. The rest of them thought, the ticking of their mental processes running a race with the ticking of the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece. Digby raised an eyebrow at Joan. She was a family member. It was for her to put their thoughts—for had they not discussed it, over and over?—into words.
‘But,’ said Joan hesitatingly, ‘death duties are only a proportion. A percentage.’
‘A very high proportion,’ said Mr Lillywaite austerely. ‘I believe that even in the Scandinavian countries, hotbeds of egalitarianism though they are, the proportion is not nearly so high.’
‘But even if you take eighty per cent of what Dad inherited here, and then eighty per cent of that, even then—’
‘What Joan means,’ said Digby officiously, ‘is that, suppose the house, grounds, pictures and so on were sold, there would be an amount left to inherit, even after paying the duties.’
‘Oh yes, certainly. When I talk of the ruin of the family I refer to their inability to maintain themselves at Chetton after three and a half centuries.’
Dixie, by the window, pricked up an ear.
‘How substantial,’ asked Digby, ‘would the amount left be?’
‘A . . . small . . . fortune,’ said Mr Lillywaite cautiously.
‘And all, now, going to Phil,’ said Trevor.
‘You see what I meant about the old will,’ said Joan, very tight-lipped. ‘Didn’t Dixie play her cards well?’
Dixie stood up, hands on hips, much of her old good-humour restored. She looked, in fact, like some old bruiser of a tabby, sated on fish.
‘Don’t be bleeding daft, Joanie. You heard Mr Lillywaite. That will was made weeks before we came down here.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Digby, ‘that means essentially that Phil gets the lot.’
‘That’s the way the cookie crumbles,’ said Dixie, a favourite expression of hers when the cookie crumbled to her advantage. ‘And when you think of it, it’s quite fair. Remember Phil and I have all those kids to bring up, educate—’
She gazed out to the Dutch Garden, where the children were playing very disconsolately. Perhaps she was about to enlarge on the future she planned for them at Eton and Benenden, b
ut she was forestalled by the telephone. The others looked at each other uncertainly, but Dixie—for the moment at least Mistress of Chetton—marched over and lifted the receiver.’
‘Yes, this is Chetton . . . Who am I? Lady Portsea—well, Lady Ellesmere, I suppose I should say . . . Yes, it is quite terrible. Shocking . . . Who is it speaking, please? . . . Oh, the Daily Grub. Well—’
But she was cut off in mid-sentence. Mr Lillywaite had strode over, and in the most commanding manner consistent with politeness had seized the phone. He spoke into it rapidly, with finality.
‘Yes, it is true that the Earl of Ellesmere has met with a fatal accident. There is nothing the family wishes to add to this. Should it be necessary to issue a statement at a later date, I, as legal adviser to the family, will communicate it to the press . . . No comment . . . No comment . . .’
He banged down the receiver and looked around the room.
‘If I may advise you,’ he said, in a voice that was far from advisory, ‘I would suggest no member of the family answer this telephone. I’m afraid the newspapers are on to the story. We must expect, and shortly, a state of siege.’
• • •
The Countess was crying again, but she was no longer wailing with grief. Her sobs were resigned, almost comfortable.
It must have been her interviewer who had done it. It certainly wasn’t her surroundings. The Pink Damask Room was a beautiful creation (another of those designed for the lady of the third Earl by her seducer, James Wyatt, who had his fell way with her while the Earl was away with his regiment, attempting to frustrate the Americans of their foolish whim of independence—though to be fair to James Wyatt, he would certainly have had his way with her even had the Earl been at home). But its delicate pink wall-coverings, its two high pier glasses, were not such as to appeal to the Countess—nor, indeed, to Superintendent Hickory, who had been bewildered by the multiplicity of choice, and settled here only because it was suitable in size and conveniently placed.
All of Superintendent Hickory that the Countess was aware of at this moment was a monumental paunch. This rotund, tweed-clad stomach—clearly part of an immense, weighty man—protruded over the delicate little table that was between them, and it seemed to the Countess comforting: something solid and stable in a shifting world. The stretch of the elderly tweed suggested that this was something that would expand rather than collapse. She did not look at the Chief Superintendent’s face, but his voice was reassuring: a rich, slow, warm voice, like drinking stout. It reminded her of days back in the ’fifties when the family had clustered round the radio listening to The Archers. It was like having a sympathetic chat with Tom Forrest.
‘No, I didn’t wake during the night,’ she said, her grief now no more than an occasional strangulated sob. ‘I did wake in the morning, though—I remember it was light—and I thought he was getting me my morning cuppa, and I went back off.’
‘Always got you an early cup, did he?’
‘Always!’ the Countess wailed. ‘Nobody’s ever going to get me a morning cup of tea again!’
‘He sounds like a good man.’
‘He was. One of the best. Trevor just said he was the only one of us that was any good, and for once he hit the nail on the head. Apart from Phil, of course. . . . Neither of them’s got a selfish thought in their head.’
‘And before all this—’ a fat, heavy hand waved round at the work of James Wyatt—‘you’d always lived in Clapham?’
‘Hackney, and then Clapham. We’d been very happy there . . . nice neighbours . . . brought up the kids there . . . Kids didn’t always turn out as we hoped, but there you are.’
‘Kids seldom do in my experience. Best not to expect anything.’
‘Phil’s a nice boy,’ said the Countess forcefully, raising her eyes from the tweedy paunch to look into his face, as if he had suggested the contrary. But the face, weather-beaten and kindly, merely looked at her encouragingly. ‘One of the best,’ she concluded. ‘I only wish he were here.’
‘Tell me: over the years, did you ever expect to come into the title, these estates. Ever talk about it?’
‘Never!’ said the Countess emphatically. ‘Never crossed our minds. ’Course, we knew we were related.’
‘You knew that? Closely related?’
‘Yes, we knew that, but we didn’t hardly know anything about the old Earl—what kids he had, how many grandchildren. Didn’t have no contact with him—nor want any, either.’
‘You never read about him in the papers?’
‘Not to my recollection. He wasn’t one of those personalities, was he? Like Lord Longford, or Lady Olga Whatsit who has the column. From what we’ve heard down here he kept himself very much to himself. Like us, really. We’re very private people, Trevor excepted.’
‘So it all came as a rather splendid surprise, did it?’
‘Nasty shock, more like. Bolt from the blue, that’s what it was. Rung up by old Lillywaite, then forced to come down to this horrible place . . . draughty old barn . . . to be driven from pillar to post by that death’s-head skull of a man . . .’
‘Business matters, I suppose? Decisions to be taken?’
‘Oh, he was probably only doing his duty. But there’s ways and ways, and I didn’t like his, no more did Perce. Really got Perce’s goat at times. Badgered him.’
‘Oh, what about?’
‘The will. What we were going to do with this hole. I hold it against him, and always will, that Perce didn’t have no peaceful death. He should have done—gone gradual: he was the type. Instead of which, day after day, it was nothing but that dryasdust old stick going on about making provisions, securing the property, transferring the estate.’
‘I’ll have to have a talk to Mr Lillywaite,’ said Superintendent Hickory.
• • •
Mr Lillywaite walked authoritatively around the Pink Damask Room—or at least with an air of authority. He felt perfectly at home there, as he did in any home with pretensions to stateliness, appreciating them not aesthetically, but with a nose for money and tradition. But today he felt less than his usual totally confident self—perhaps because he had recently been checked, by implication rebuked, by a being as lowly as a police sergeant. So he did not look the Superintendent in the eye (as he always did look straight at people when he wanted to impress or bully them). Like the Countess he focused attention on the paunch, and lectured that. The Superintendent, meanwhile, lay back in his chair, as inert as a sack of potatoes, and not much more elegantly covered. When Mr Lillywaite had finished, he asked:
‘There had been a previous will, had there?’
‘Yes, indeed. Made two months or so previously. It was lodged with some firm in Clapham, and I have no reason to doubt its validity. But of course it was superseded by the present document.’
‘I wonder, now, how far the family—’
‘Were aware of the document? Quite. Lady Portsea was, as I say. As to the rest: they certainly behave as if they were not. They did know about the earlier document, that left the property he had then (such as it was) more or less equally divided. Had the subject come up since they came here? If it hadn’t, I doubt if they knew. The Earl and Countess were hardly writing people, you know. And it is not the sort of thing most people would want to discuss on the phone.’
‘No . . . Cui bono,’ said the gravelly voice, somewhat surprisingly, from behind the paunch. ‘Most of the usual motives hardly seem to enter the picture here. Hatred, sex, revenge—hardly conceivable, so far as I can gather. Would you agree he was a likeable old boy?’
‘Oh—er—’ Mr Lillywaite was disconcerted, as always when personal judgements were called for. He was not accustomed to thinking of noble or influential personages in those terms. ‘Well, yes . . . I imagine that in his own circles . . . he would be accounted likeable.’
‘So that leaves money. Property. Titles. Who profits, and who thought they would profit? Obvious candidates: the new Earl, the new Countess, and their heirs.
Call them Phil and Dixie for convenience. Now, I gather the heirs are still children.’
‘Ah—hmm. There is perhaps something you should know.’
Mr Lillywaite, whose face had become pained when the Superintendent had so cavalierly put himself on Christian name terms with the new title-holders, once more began to lecture the paunch. His face twisted still further with distaste when he explained the new Earl’s family affairs. He was still less happy when, at the end of his disquisition, the Superintendent emitted a fruity, country chuckle.
‘Well! This really is turning out to be a beauty of a case! Don’t look so dyspeptic, man: this isn’t the first titled family with legits and illegits jumbled under one roof. So I take it that the new Lord Portsea was brought up in Canada, and probably knows nothing of his present glory?’
‘So far as I know. I don’t even know that he’s alive, though his father seems to assume that he is. If he is, he could be anywhere.’
‘Including here. He’ll have to be traced. So we can now add a phantom heir to our phantom butler.’
‘Ah—so the sergeant has told you.’ Mr Lillywaite shook his head. ‘Most regrettable. Scandalous. I would never have thought it of Parsloe.’
‘He was an old family servant?’
‘Not quite. The breed hardly exists any longer. You know how it is: these days they come from agencies, with references that look perfectly satisfactory. Anyone skilled can demand the earth. Then at the drop of a hat they go off to anyone or anywhere that will pay more—Germany, Saudi Arabia, America. The old Earl’s previous butler is, I’m told, now engaged in a similar capacity in the White House. I would have thought he would have had more pride . . . But Parsloe stayed at Chetton for five years, and Nazeby for three. I would have expected better of them.’
‘And they were paid off by the late Earl?’
‘Yes. A regrettably shoddy business that I warned him against at the time. Not that that excuses them . . .’
‘You haven’t heard that they’ve got other jobs?’
‘No, indeed. My dealings with them were over when I paid them off. They both expressed confidence that they would soon get jobs, and I imagined they had.’
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