The Mysterious Heir

by Edith Layton

  “Oh, Uncle,” Elizabeth gasped when she had finished, “it is too incredible! Anthony has a chance to become the heir presumptive to the Earl of Auden. It seems unbelievable.”

  “Incredible and unbelievable,” her uncle said slowly, “but quite true. Your aunt babbled on for so many years about how her dear Howard had expectations but died too young, it became a joke. We none of us believed her. But we’ve checked the Bible and the peerage and there it is. And now she’s sitting at home like a cat after a bowl of cream. It’s true, all right. Anthony’s in the direct line. Do you know what it would mean for us, Elizabeth? No more working in a shop for you. We could give up that slum of a house we’re dwelling in and get a proper home. And for you, my dear, there would be a chance to shine as you were meant to do in the society where you belong. Above all this,” he said, dismissing the entire town with a wave of his hand, “for with such expectations my credit would rise. I could do everything I’ve always wanted to do for our little family.”

  “Uncle,” Elizabeth said with a small, happy sigh, “it’s beyond everything wonderful. What did Anthony say?”

  “Ah, well,” her uncle said wretchedly, “I didn’t tell him yet. I couldn’t. Not yet. Not till you and I had a chance to talk about it. Well,” he said, not meeting her eyes, “you know what he would say.”

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head sadly and then seeming to let out all the radiance with a long sigh. Her face grew still. “Well, then, so much for your dreams, Uncle. Let’s go home,” and she turned and began to walk again.

  Her uncle caught at her arm. “No, we can’t let it go like that, Elizabeth, we can’t. Think of the opportunity.”

  “Yes, and think of Anthony,” Elizabeth said grimly.

  “I am thinking of Anthony,” her uncle retorted in an undertone, pausing to touch his hat to a neighbor, “and I cannot in all conscience let him pass up such an opportunity. There will come a day,” he went on sweepingly, like an orator upon the stump, “when he will put all this childishness behind him. And then he will regret his lost chance. We,” her uncle said, gazing at Elizabeth, “cannot let him pass up such a chance.”

  “You know,” Elizabeth said as she paced on toward home, “that I will do the best that I can. But even so, I think you refine too much upon it. There are so many ifs in the case. There is no cause to believe Anthony would be chosen as heir above the others; rather the opposite, I should think. And even if he were, why, even in that unlikely eventuality, it might be years before the Earl passed on and Anthony came into the inheritance.”

  “I know for a fact,” her uncle said eagerly, “that the Earl is quite an old chap. I met him years ago when I was in clover. He had two sons, I recall. I know the elder died young, and the other, last I heard, was in the wars. Pity, he must have been killed. And so Anthony stands a very good chance at the succession. One man’s misfortune is the making of another’s; no one lives forever.”

  Seeing Elizabeth’s shocked, barely concealed expression of distaste, her uncle hurried on, “But even if the old chap lives to be Methuselah, Elizabeth—and of course I hope he will—think of what it would mean for Anthony to be designated heir! It would mean,” he said, staring wonderingly at his niece, “that as his uncle, my credit would be restored. That I could bring our fortune back.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Elizabeth repeated earnestly. “I’ll prime him like a pump, I’ll find a way to convince him of the rightness of it, if it takes me days on end. And then we’ll dress him up and send him off to the Earl as a prime candidate for the office. I promise, Uncle,” she said firmly. “Will that suit?”

  “Not quite,” her uncle said slowly. “That won’t be quite enough. You know Anthony, Elizabeth. That won’t be quite enough.”

  Elizabeth tensed. She knew, with a terrible certainty, what was coming.

  “You must accompany him,” her uncle said with finality, as she stopped again and stared at him aghast. “There it is. Think about it. There is no other way. Someone must be there to see he minds his manners. His mother can’t. I can’t. You are the only one who can oversee him, the only one who can handle him at all. Now, you know that.”

  “Ah, Uncle,” Elizabeth began, “I don’t wish to—”

  “Elizabeth,” her uncle said sternly, “what do you think will happen if you don’t?”

  She paused, and he knew the battle was won by the arrested look in her eyes. But still she went on falteringly, “Oh, Uncle. What do I know of Earls? And the society they travel in? I’d make just as much of a cake of myself as Anthony would. And I haven’t been invited. And I haven’t the clothes for such a venture,” she said desperately. “And what of my position with Miss Scott? One shouldn’t cast off dirty water till one has clean.”

  Her uncle smiled benignly, and her spirits sank.

  “You have common sense, Elizabeth, and good breeding and birth, much beauty, and beautiful manners. That will serve. And it is unexceptional for a young man of Anthony’s age to travel with an older female relative. And I can raise enough funds to see you and Anthony dressed in style.”

  Her uncle took her arm as they walked the last street toward home.

  “Your Miss Scott is such a toadeater, she would be delighted to tell all and sundry that her assistant is off for a visit with an Earl. Even if it all worked out badly—which it won’t, my dear, which it won’t—she’ll snap you up again as helper, for you’re the only one who knows how to make her poky bonnets look stylish. It will serve, Elizabeth, it will serve. It must serve,” he said forcefully, tightening his grip on her arm. “I must have a chance to recoup our fortune. Elizabeth,” he said, swinging her round to face him and looking directly into her clear light brown eyes, “let me have at least just that one last chance, once more before I die.”

  Elizabeth looked at the pleading expression upon her uncle’s flushed face and closed her eyes. She owed him so much, she thought wearily. So be it, she thought with resignation, and nodded. “Yes, Uncle.”

  “And don’t look so forlorn,” her uncle replied happily, his spirits restored miraculously, for Elizabeth was the brightest in his household and he had never really doubted her support. He knew he could rely upon her, even as he had known that with her natural shyness the scheme would terrify her, “First you’ll talk Anthony round,” he continued blithely, “and then we’ll tog you out in the style you should have had years ago. And then you’re off to the Earl’s.”

  “To the Earl’s,” Elizabeth echoed dully.

  “Not just to the Earl’s,” her uncle amended lovingly with a distant look growing in his eyes; he raised his head to the sky and let each syllable roll off his tongue like a sweet: “But to Lyonshall, principal seat of the Earl of Auden, Viscount Louth and Baron Kitteredge. That’s all one man, y’know,” he finished helpfully.

  “I was afraid it was,” Elizabeth said sadly.

  3

  The sun was the palest of yellows, and a little nippish breeze warned wise men that spring was in its early days yet. But as Elizabeth sat and watched the clouds go by as tearaway as spring-struck lambs, she was filled with gratitude to whatever powers were that it was at least not raining. For she would have gone on a picnic today even in the teeth of a gale. Picnics were, after all, among Anthony’s favorite diversions. As she had to speak with him alone and apart from the rest of the family, and speak with him when he was at ease and content, a tranquil picnic party was the ideal circumstance for their conversation.

  Anthony stood apart from her, looking out over the countryside. Elizabeth sat upon a blanket hugging her warm woolen cloak about her, wishing she had had the foresight to bring at least two more blankets, for the earth was cold beneath her. She and Anthony had happily demolished the contents of the wicker basket they had brought, so lovingly and hopefully packed up by Elizabeth’s mother and Aunt Emily. “For if he’s had enough chicken, the way I make it,” Aunt Emily had said contentedly, “he will agree to anything.”

  “And my
biscuits,” Elizabeth’s mother had reminded them, “are Anthony’s idea of heaven.”

  Elizabeth sighed. But if only biscuits were Anthony’s idea of heaven, this whole subterfuge would not have been necessary. She well knew what Anthony’s idea of bliss really was; that was the crux of his problem. But as she had known Anthony from the moment he had teethed upon his first biscuit, she had to believe she also knew what exactly to say to him to make the scheme that she, her uncle, her mother, and her aunt had sat up nights hatching, palatable to him. For now, upon Anthony’s narrow young shoulders, the entire family fortunes rested.

  She gazed at Anthony with a mixture of fondness and consternation, as he stood watching the quiet spring Sunday afternoon peacefully tick by. Her feelings toward her young cousin had always come in twos: pride and shame, amusement and anger, impatience and guilt. For Anthony was, in the words of his uncle, “a rare terror.” One wouldn’t think it to look at him. For he was an ordinary enough lad. Just a slender seventeen-year-old of medium height and dark eyes and hair. Still beardless, still enough of a boy to have a fishhook or two in his pocket, yet old enough to take on the affect of a man. And bright, ferociously bright, the vicar who instructed him in Latin and languages had said. But he had also said kindly, “A bit misguided.”

  A bit! Elizabeth thought, biting back a groan. If it were only a bit, she would not have to sit up on a damp hillock and secretly plot and scheme. But should anyone say right out to Anthony that he had a chance to be named heir presumptive to an Earl, he would in all probability say right out in response that they might take themselves away and do something vulgar to their own persons. For Anthony did not believe in Earls, or Kings either, for that matter. Anthony, for reasons no one in his family had ever been able to fathom, though Lord knows they had cudgeled their brains about it often enough, was a flaming revolutionary.

  Where other boys were lost in hero worship to Nelson or Wellington, Anthony was far gone in absolute adoration of Bonaparte. Through the course of the war, in fact, since he was tall enough to reach the top of the map he had pinned to his bedroom wall, he had charted the course of his hero with gaily colored pins. It was in vain that the family talked to him of patriotism, loyalty, and the glories of being an Englishman. Anthony would agree to all that, and then say he awaited the day when he could be an Englishman under the rule of the greatest man of his century: Napoleon Bonaparte. As he grew he had begun to lounge about the commons and the green, extolling his hero’s virtues. Since everyone in town had known him since he could toddle, he had been greeted at first with amused condescension. And since everyone knew what an upstanding family he came from, he was said to be “going through a phase” and ignored.

  But when the war had begun to heat up and when Mr. McArdle, the grocer, had lost his Willie in Spain and the Wilsons grieved for Johnny in an unmarked watery grave somewhere near Nelson’s fleet, their amused tolerance vanished. When Anthony had come home twice with blackened eyes, the family decided to call the town off limits for him. And he was left to follow the course of his own star from the confines of his own house.

  It was not only his being entranced with the Little General; it went across the board. Anthony championed a multitude of people he had never seen: chimney-boys, child prostitutes, weavers, miners, impressed seamen. And he railed against an equal number he had never clapped an eye upon: Dukes, Kings, Duchesses, all those who flew in high society. If Anthony had his way, the tumbrils would be rolling through the heart of London. He buried himself in books and incendiary pamphlets and for hours discoursed on the inequality of life as he knew it. Not discoursed, Elizabeth corrected herself, harangued. Till his uncle grew flamed-faced and slammed out of their little house, till his mother wept, till his aunt called him ingrate, or until Elizabeth herself came down from where she had sought refuge from the battle in her own small room, to quiet him and lead his thoughts in other directions.

  For only Elizabeth could handle him at all. From the first, when his mother, newly widowed and deep in mourning, had come home to her brother’s house for succor, Elizabeth, then only a shy seven-year-old, had looked down upon the sleeping year-old babe in his cot and had inexplicably taken him to her heart. Perhaps it was because she herself, fatherless and bereft, had come to her uncle’s house only a year earlier and had sympathized with the mite. Or perhaps it was because no one else, neither her mother, busily working as housekeeper for the brother kind enough to shelter her, nor his own grieving mother, nor her uncle himself, busily trying to repair his finances, had then had time for the babe. But Elizabeth had taken to him and it was she who had helped him with his lessons, drilled him in table manners, and soothed his hurts. It was she who had at the age of seven appointed herself as his mother.

  And like a good mother, she now sat on the hillside and tried to arrange matters so that he could advance in the world. So that the family could advance in the world. For at that moment Elizabeth definitely felt the invisible breathing anxiety of her whole family behind her. She let out a long sigh.

  “Why, what’s the problem, Coz?” Anthony asked, turning and seeing her lost in thought.

  “Why, nothing.” Elizabeth laughed, turning a bright countenance toward him. “What could possibly be troubling anyone on such a delightful day?”

  “Delightful?” Anthony frowned. “Yes. I suppose it is for those with money and leisure enough to sit and occupy themselves with pleasure.”

  He was forgetting, Elizabeth thought, her anger boiling up, that they had little money and she had only leisure today because it was a Sunday and Miss Scott’s establishment was closed for the Sabbath. But then, Anthony did not think much of material things. Nor of the Sabbath either, she remembered.

  “Come sit down with me,” she said placidly enough.

  He flung himself down and plucked at a new stalk of spring grass.

  “Anthony,” she began, “wouldn’t you delight in being able to help those who are too poor and too wretched to enjoy such a day, to help them to be able to disport themselves as happily as we are doing?”

  “You know that is my aim in life,” he retorted, “but little chance at it I get here in Tuxford.”

  “But if,” Elizabeth guided him, “for today is a lovely spring day, and such days were meant for air-dreaming. If you could, wouldn’t that be the best of all worlds?”

  “I think,” Anthony said, “of little else. But how, Elizabeth? I cannot join the army, you know. Mother won’t hear of it.”

  Elizabeth refrained from commenting that was because the only army he had wanted to join was the French one, and merely nodded.

  “Uncle hasn’t the funds to send me to a proper school where I could make political connections. The church is out of the question, for they would only try to teach me how to preach forbearance, and I’ll have none of that. What opportunities are there for me? A position in Mr. Eldrige’s shop? He wanted me to be clerk, Elizabeth. I, Anthony Courtney, a clerk in a sundries shop!”

  Elizabeth bit her tongue to keep from reminding him that he was conversing with Elizabeth DeLisle, a lowly clerk. Pasting another vapid smile upon her face, she stretched and went on, “Just think, Anthony, if you were born a Duke, or a Marquess, or, say, an Earl, of what you could do.”

  “A Duke or an Earl?” Anthony snarled. “Have your wits gone begging, Elizabeth? Those parasites born to money and title? All men should be equal. It is just those sorts of titled leeches who hold the world in thrall!”

  “But if,” Elizabeth put in hastily, seeing another tirade beginning, “you had such a title, such a position, what you could accomplish!”

  “It is not necessary to be born to fortune,” Anthony said morosely. “Just think of Bonaparte himself. He wasn’t born to greatness, he made it for himself.” But here his voice dropped a bit in confidence, for his hero was presently kicking his heels in a snugger sanctuary than the one he had burst forth from last year in 1815.

  “But think, Anthony,” Elizabeth said with enthusiasm
, “if he had been born to wealth and fortune, how much easier it would have been for him. Why, if a man were born to a dignity and to a fortune, and then he decided to change the world, he would have the leverage to do so, wouldn’t he?”

  “Of course,” Anthony said, flopping down full length upon the blanket, “but not one of them does. They are content to just sit and revel in luxury. Without a care for the workingman, without a—”

  “Anthony!” Elizabeth put in quickly, seizing her chance before Anthony, who had never turned his hand to a day’s labor, began again about the travails of the working class. “I have news for you. News that could change not only your life but also the lives of countless others. Workingmen, and…chimney climbers and…perhaps even Napoleon himself,” she added wildly.

  Anthony looked at her as though she had run mad. The cool wind had stirred her light tresses into silken streamers, her usually pale white oval of a face was flushed with high color, her eyes sparkled like water in a brook.

  “Are you ill, Coz?” Anthony said, fearfully edging away, for he was wary of infection, his own father having succumbed to an influenza.

  “No, dear nit,” she said affectionately, “but I have news. That’s why I lured you here today. Anthony, what would you say if I told you that you may at last have your chance to change the world? But that you’d have to be very, very sly to go about it?”

  His interest caught, for the thought of being clandestine tickled him immensely, as Elizabeth had known it would, Anthony leaned forward to catch her next whisper. For now she spoke rapidly and in low tones, though there was not a soul to hear them within miles, save for a few sheep, who could not care less about the future of the suffering hordes of mankind.

  Elizabeth talked herself dry as the afternoon grew old. And while the air grew chill after its brief exercise in spring, her words became warmer, and Anthony’s face became positively overheated with the force of his emotions. At last, with the sounds of her own voice ringing still in her ears, Elizabeth stopped, parched and exhausted. But Anthony seemed in transports of delight.