Dance to Your Daddy

'I am hoping that Selina can hang Felix Napoleon on it, that is all, and Romilly, too.'

CHAPTER NINE

BOLERO-MOTHER AND SON

'Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,

Or, like a fairy, trip upon the green.'

Venus and Adonis.

(1)

Lady Selina Lestrange had always regarded her more eccentric relatives with suspicion and disapproval, and it was with false cordiality that she welcomed Dame Beatrice to the ancestral home. She was the relict of Dame Beatrice's first husband's brother, and therefore the relationship between the two elderly ladies was not consanguinous and they had nothing in common except their age and sex.

'Well, Adela,' she said, 'this is a surprise!'

'Yes,' agreed Dame Beatrice, meekly.

'If I had known you were coming...'

'I am not going to stay,' Dame Beatrice assured her. 'My business may take half-an-hour, or very little longer, at the most. I come in search of information.'

'Not another of your odious cases of murder!'

'A by-product of one. Did you know that Hubert has been killed?'

'Hubert? Hubert who?'

'The Reverend Hubert Lestrange.'

'I have never heard of him.'

'That is most interesting. I wonder whether you have heard, then, of Felix Napoleon?'

'Oh, dear! Please don't mention that old reprobate!'

'Who was he?'

'He was some sort of cousin. He was descended from a pirate or a bushranger, I believe-something disgraceful, anyway. We have never recognised the relationship, needless to say.'

'But he had a right to his name?'

'Oh, he was a Lestrange, if that is what you mean. He was also extremely wealthy, as a result, I have always supposed, of his ill-gotten inheritance.'

'Is there any reason why he should have entertained kindly feelings towards me?'

'Towards you? Why, did he?'

'Failing his granddaughter and her next-of-kin, he seems to have left his fortune to me.'

'Oh, well, if there is a granddaughter, you are hardly likely to outlive her.'

'In the midst of life, of course-but you have failed to grasp the purport of my question. Apart from any suggestion of a legacy, why should he have thought of me at all? To my certain knowledge, I have neither met him nor corresponded with him. In fact, I am perfectly certain that I did not know of his existence until very recently.'

'If he mentioned anybody, apart from his nearest relatives, in his Will, it ought to have been Ferdinand.'

'My son Ferdinand? Why, what has Ferdinand done? Successfully defended him against a charge of some kind?'

'Exactly.'

'Then why have I not heard of it?'

'You were in America at the time, and it never became a cause celebre. The unspeakable Felix Napoleon was thought to have strangled a chorus girl or a member of a corps de ballet or something. She had borne an illegitimate child which she was attempting to foist on him, I believe. Anyway, Ferdinand was mixed up in it somehow.'

'Oh, was there an illegitimate child?'

'Oh, yes. That was not in dispute.'

'You would not, of course, remember the baby's name?'

'Certainly not.'

'You never heard it?'

'I may have done. I should not dream of charging my memory with anything to do with such disgraceful goings-on.'

'Suppose I suggested to you the name Romilly?'

'Is it of any importance?'