Ursula's Secret

by Mairi Wilson

  “Blood. That’s it! Only blood relatives of Helen’s …”

  “Finally, she gets there. That’s right, Lexy. The estate is entailed on blood relatives only. I’m not Helen’s child. I am not a Buchanan, and yet here I sit.”

  “But what happens if … I mean, there isn’t anyone else. Helen’s children died with her— Oh, they were Helen’s, weren’t they, or … or …”

  “They were Helen’s all right. Yes. After all that time trying for a child and nothing, within a few months of bringing me into the family home, old Gregory finally started sowing his seed. Ross. My baby brother. Rightful heir to the Buchanan throne, not that it would ever have come to that. Helen would have had to confess to the whole scam for that to have happened and I doubt she’d have done that. No. She couldn’t even legally adopt me without telling Gregory, so you can see why it was all a bit … shaky, shall we say?”

  “It can’t possibly matter now, though. Helen’s line is finished. There are no more Buchanans, so—”

  “Sure about that, are you, Lexy? Perhaps rather than spending all that time working out who Ursula’s son was, you’d have been better asking yourself who your own mother was.”

  Lexy felt a worm of anxiety twitch in the pit of her stomach.

  “What do you mean? You know who my mother was. Isobel Sh—”

  “After she married, yes. But that’s not what I said. I wasn’t asking for her name. I said you should ask yourself who she was.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s that got to do with … Look, I’m not interested in the rights and wrongs of your inheritance. What matters to me is that you’re Ursula’s son, and for better or worse that gives us a kind of connection, makes you a virtual uncle—”

  The boom of David’s laughter cut Lexy off.

  “Oh dear child,” he said wiping tears from his cheeks, “you really are priceless. You see I am. I am your uncle, or at least your grandmother would have had the world believe so.” He dissolved again into laughter.

  Lexy’s mind was blank. She had absolutely no idea what he meant. Was he drunk? Mad? She looked at the door. It seemed a very long way away from the low sofa she’d sat back down on. And David was standing now, still laughing gleefully, going back to replenish his glass, to the sideboard between her and the door.

  “I’m going to tell you something Lexy, for all the good it will do you. You won’t be able to prove any of it and I will deny it if you try. And believe me, no one in this country will take your word over mine. I’ve spent a lot of money over the years making sure I’m always believed, that history is always written and recorded in the way I decide. Sure you wouldn’t like a drink? You look a little pale; it might revive you.”

  Lexy shook her head, her brain still refusing to understand what David was saying. How could he possibly be her uncle? That would mean … what? Ursula was Izzie’s mother? Or … or … Cameron …

  “Well, now, little Lexy, I can see you’re struggling with this. And perhaps I’m being a little … elastic … with the strict legality of the relationship, but suffice to say I’m more of an uncle than you clearly ever imagined. A kind of connection, indeed. Rather more than that.”

  He was enjoying this, she could tell. She really wasn’t sure she wanted to hear any more, doubting already the wisdom of tracking down this smug, overbearing man, subjecting herself to what she was sure was going to be an unpleasant discovery.

  “Let’s see, where shall I begin?” He dragged on his cheroot, watched the smoke rise as he exhaled. “None of us is ever quite the person we seem to be. And in our family, that’s especially so. You’re right that I’m Ursula’s son, and Cameron’s. And that Helen was a sort of de facto mother to me, even if the arrangement was never ratified in the eyes of the law. But she and Gregory went on to have a son of their own.”

  “I know. I’ve seen photos of you both as small boys with Helen and Gregory.”

  David nodded. “Touching, those family portraits. Helen loved having them done, would fuss over our hair and shirts and goodness knows what. Odd that she discontinued the practice after she married Cameron. Sad, really, because it meant there were so few of our beloved sister.”

  The worm of anxiety turned into a snake, a boa constrictor winding itself around Lexy’s windpipe, cutting off the air, stilling her breathing.

  “Oh, dear God, no …”

  David’s smile split his face like a knife slash.

  “Oh yes, Lexy. No photos of our lovely Isobel. Tragically lost with our mother, Helen, and my brother, Ross, in the mudslide tragedy. The tragedy that was reported to have caused 144 deaths but in fact should more accurately have been reported as a mere 141. The same tragedy that they tried to lay at the door of this company, at the time Helen Buchanan was at its helm. Imagine that. The saintly Helen Buchanan accused of such dreadful negligence, so many innocent souls lost on her watch.”

  Lexy couldn’t hear that syrupy voice any more. Blood was rushing through her head, thrumming in her ears. Izzie. Her mother. Helen’s daughter. Which meant that she … Lexy was … oh God. This changed everything. She looked up at the man opposite her and realised she was the one person left who could take it all away from him. She was blood. She was the rightful heir to Buchanan’s.

  David was watching her with those small eyes, tapping his signet ring against the whisky glass like the tick of a clock. Why would he tell her this? Why? What would he do to stop her telling anyone else? Lexy forced herself to stay calm, to hide her alarm, her fear.

  “You’re … you’re saying my mother was your sister. Stepsister. That they survived the … But how? And why didn’t—”

  “I adored her you know, your mother, when we were small.” David ignored Lexy’s questions, a real smile playing on the fleshy features as he remembered. “And she adored me. Daydid. That’s what she called me. Never did master my name before …”

  David stood and went over to a picture of a baobab tree, two birds in its branches. He took it down from the wall and Lexy realised it covered a safe. He spun the dial swiftly and, after a series of scarcely audible clicks, pulled open the small heavy door. This was becoming more and more like a B-movie, the whisky and cigar fumes, the safe. All it needed was David in a white tuxedo, stroking a cat. She half expected him to pull a gun from the safe, was relieved when she saw it was a large Manila envelope.

  “My father continued the tradition of family portraiture. Helen found it too painful to join them, of course, after her beloved Gregory had passed away, so she is absent from the picture. But here are the rest of us, outside the house in Zomba. Don’t we look happy? And the resemblance, my dear, is remarkable between you and your mother, even given the difference in ages.”

  Lexy was looking at a faded print. She recognised Cameron and the boys, but they were joined by a young girl of four or five with abundant curls and large dark eyes. Her mother’s eyes. Her own eyes. And, she now realised, Helen’s eyes, too. The similarities between the generations were remarkable.

  Lexy reached forward to take the print.

  “No. I don’t think so. I’ll hold on to this, if you don’t mind. It means so much to me. I shouldn’t worry about it quite so much, I know, when we have the negative safely secured out of harm’s way.”

  Lexy was beyond confused, now. She was in a state of shock. There was no doubt that was her mother. No doubt at all. And similarly, there could no longer be any doubt that Helen was her grandmother. The shock she’d had when she’d opened Ursula’s photo album and looked into a young Helen’s eyes should have told her. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t accepted it earlier. But she’d thought she was here to find Ursula’s son, a surrogate family, not a real one.

  David had put the print back in the safe, replaced the picture and was now pouring whisky into another glass.

  “Take it,” he said, not unkindly. “We need to talk, now, seriously talk, don’t we? Come on, Lexy, there’s a good girl. Drink up. I don’t want to have to slap you out of it.”
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  Lexy shuddered and coughed as the fire hit the back of her throat.

  “Good.” David sat again. “Feeling better? You’ll be wondering why I’ve told you this. And perhaps you’re also already thinking of speaking out about this, staking a claim to Buchanan’s, even. But that would be very foolish, in so many ways. Dangerous even. And would all be for nought anyway, as there is no way you will be able to prove anything I’ve said. I have spent a good deal of time and money ensuring that the past stays buried. One of the joys of a country like this is that we have a small and close-knit community that takes care of its own, for the right … motivation. There are, unfortunately, no official records, no birth certificates or suchlike, available to the public that would help you prove your story, if you were indeed driven to try to do so. No. Nothing at all.”

  “So why … why even tell me …”

  “Two reasons, Alexis. One you’ll believe, I’m sure, and one you may not, but it’s true all the same. Pragmatically, I believe in controlling as many variables in life as possible. My father taught me the importance of that, of keeping one step ahead of the other players on the board. And you, whether you knew it or not, are most definitely one of those. I have been following your progress, just as I followed your mother’s throughout her life. I hoped you wouldn’t, but I knew you’d have to come to Malawi to find me, and I knew the chances were you would probably succeed. Eventually. So I decided to let you do so, and that I would tell you who you are, to stop you stirring the hornet’s nest any further. Damage limitation. If I am the one to tell you, to control the information flow, I contain the situation, and when I tell you more of the circumstances around your family background, you will, I’m sure, come to agree with me that the best course of action is for you to disappear back to your life in London. Although the £5,000 a month offer still stands, so you might not have to return to that grim little school you’ve been working in. Up to you.”

  Lexy waited, trying to work out what he meant by containing the situation, and what exactly it was in her family background that he could be so certain she’d be complicit in concealing.

  “I don’t want money, I told you.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  “And the other reason?”

  “Ah yes, the one you most likely will choose not to believe. I wasn’t always the man you see today. There was a time when I was an innocent, too, a happy child. I truly believed Helen was my mother and I adored her. And I adored my siblings too. None more so than little Izzie when she came along. For a few short years we were a happy family. Then Gregory died and my childish world started to unravel. Gregory was barely cold in the ground before the man I believed was my uncle married my mother. It was not a happy union. I knew he beat her, but I was still young, and lacked the guts to intervene. I would have done. I wanted to but …” He shrugged. “Then it became a matter of survival of the fittest. Cameron took it upon himself to toughen me up. Successfully, I should add, although his efforts with Ross bore far less satisfactory results, and Izzie he simply ignored, thank God. But despite all that, I retain a good deal of affection for the old days, the days when I believed I was truly a Buchanan, and was proud of it. So, let’s just say it’s the whim of a lonely man. I never intended any harm to come to any of my family. It was all orchestrated and put in place while I was still a young boy. For good or bad, I am simply the inheritor of it all and have never found a reason to change what Cameron put in place. I have the Buchanan company, even if I don’t have the Buchanan family, any family. But that’s enough for me.”

  Lexy watched him drink deeply from the crystal tumbler, saw something akin to sadness flicker across the ruddy face, thought she heard the softest of sighs as he lowered the glass.

  “I have a sentimental attachment to my younger years.” David swirled the dregs in his glass. “Your mother was a part of that. So for her sake, I’ll help you, Lexy, with money, if you’ll take it, and you should, but with advice too. I was curious to meet you, to help you. And believe me, my dear, the best advice I can give you is to go home. Do not dig further into this whole sorry affair; it will do no one any good. You and your grandmother least of all.”

  “My grandmother? What could it possibly matter to a dead woman—”

  “Her memory, Lexy. Her reputation.”

  “What are you trying to say? That you’re trying to buy me off out of some sense of family loyalty? That’s rich. And what about Helen’s reputation? Is this about the accident? The mudslide? That she might be guilty of … But Robert says you’ve got the courts sewn up, so why—”

  “It could still impact on the company. Scandal is never good for business. Murder accusations even less so.”

  “So we’re back to Buchanan’s, back to money. Not ‘sentimental attachments’ at all.”

  David shrugged, drew on his cigar. “Don’t be so scathing, my dear. Money takes care of things. And I did use some of it to take care of my mother, not to pay her to stay away. That was her choice, although I’ll admit as time went on it suited me.”

  “She chose not to use your money. Didn’t want you to ‘take care’ of her.” Lexy wanted to hurt him, knew she was unlikely to succeed. “So whatever salve to your conscience splashing out five grand a month might have been, it wasn’t wanted.”

  David laughed his humourless laugh. “You’d know that, would you?”

  “Yes. I don’t know what she did with it, but there’s nothing, nothing at all to suggest she spent a single penny of it. Nothing to suggest she lived on anything other than her own hard-earned pension.”

  “Really? Maybe you just didn’t know where to look.” David’s twisted smile was annoying Lexy. She hated being patronised, manipulated, played for a fool. And she hated most of all having to learn about her birthright, her family from this odious man.

  “Of course I knew where to look. I went through everything, spoke to her solicitors, her bank. Nothing. Her flat was modest, her lifestyle no more than you’d expect of a retired matron, so if she did spend it, I don’t understand where it went.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because the money wasn’t for Ursula. You forget, my dear, I had two mothers.”

  She didn’t like being on the receiving end of his cryptic remarks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh come, Lexy dear. We’ve just been through this. Do I really have to spell it out? My mother, the woman I called my mother, was Helen. Helen Buchanan.”

  Lexy felt as if she’d been thumped in the chest. “But she … Helen … she’s dead.”

  “Is she?”

  Lexy fell back into the sofa, its springs squealing at the force of her landing on the leather cushions.

  David filled his glass again, waved it in her direction. “Top up? You look like you need it.”

  Lexy shook her head. “Helen Buchanan is alive. That’s what you’re saying. She’s alive.”

  “Very much so. Couldn’t bear that brute of a man, my father – or me, I suppose – so ran out on us both. Taking my siblings with her. At the time, we all thought they’d died in the tragedy. But she always was a clever woman. She’d seen her chance and off she’d gone. Left me behind with dear old Dad. Cheers.” He raised the glass to her, drained it, turned quickly back to the sideboard to fill it again so Lexy couldn’t see his face. But she’d caught it. A glimpse of … what exactly? Pain? Bitterness? Disgust?

  “Where is she, David?”

  “Good question. I have no idea.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that.”

  “Believe what you like. It makes no difference to me.” The mask was back, the features hardened once again as he wandered back to his chair behind the desk, another hearty slug of whisky swooshing in the glass as he sat down again.

  “You must know. A man with your … resources.”

  He laughed. “That fixer Richard Chakanaya, you mean? Perhaps he knows, perhaps he doesn’t. If he doe
s, though, he’s kept it to himself. You’d have to ask him, although he doesn’t come cheap. Everything has a price, and for him information is the most precious commodity he has to sell.”

  “But surely you asked him—”

  “It’s not something we discuss. I have as little to do with him as possible. His type are a necessary evil in parts of Africa. I don’t have to like him, just pay him. In any case, Richard was my father’s man, really, I simply inherited one or two … services he renders the company when I took over. And why would I want to know anyway? My father made these financial arrangements and it’s been easier to continue them than not, just as I’ll now continue them for you. It’s easier than any alternative.”

  “But why did she do it? Why didn’t she come back?”

  “She had her reasons. My father made sure of it. Small matter of murder charges.”

  “The mudslide—”

  “Amongst other things.”

  “But Cameron’s gone. And the company’s been absolved of responsibility, for now at least. Robert said—”

  “Ah yes, Robert again. Our very own knight in shining armour. Intent on saving his little Audrey’s family name with his futile crusade. Unlikely, but if he succeeds, well, it will cost a lot of money. And put Helen, as the only surviving director in post at the time, in the dock. She’ll stay hidden.”

  “But she … Helen—”

  “Is nothing to me. An old woman playing hide and don’t seek somewhere all by herself. No one wants to find her.”

  “But you just said she’s your mother, you were happy. I can’t believe you’ve never even tried to find her—”

  “She abandoned me!” The glass slammed down onto the desktop, whisky and spittle speckling the gleaming wood as David’s anger burst through his cynical demeanour and he lurched to his feet, leaning over the desk, glaring at Lexy. “Threw this honeybird out of her nest, or rather took the nest away and left me here with … with him.” He was breathing heavily, his face mottled red, twisted and ugly. He dropped his head, then swung his heavy frame round to the window. Despite it all, despite his arrogance, his smug superiority, his refusal to acknowledge the truth openly, Lexy couldn’t help but feel pity. She watched him in silence, the broad shoulders heaving as he struggled to bring his breath, himself, under control.