dislikes me intensely. He’s been our family’s solicitor for almost as long as I can remember and, when I inherited the title, he had thought that I would be naive enough to do whatever he told me. In the end I told him to get stuffed and went off to sea. He’s never forgiven me and probably never will.
“I sailed back.”
“Evidently.” He smiled, then forked a chunk of salmon and mayonnaise into his mouth. “I assume you’re worried about your mother’s will?”
“I haven’t even seen the will.”
“Ah.” He clearly wished he hadn’t raised the matter, and swiftly moved the conversation on. “So to what, precisely, do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“I came to see you, Oliver, because of what that bitch Elizabeth is doing to Georgina.”
He dabbed at his lips with a linen napkin. “Dear Lady Elizabeth.”
“The answer is no.”
“No?” He smiled happily. “No one appreciates the merits of brevity more than I, my dear John, but I must confess that your meaning has momentarily eluded even me.”
“Georgina is not going to live with Elizabeth. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”
“Eminently.” He sipped his wine. Somewhere beyond the heavily curtained window a piledriver began smacking insistently.
I raised my voice over the din. “If you want me to sign something, I will. As head of my benighted family, Oliver, I’m telling you that Georgina’s future is not up for grabs.”
“I don’t think we’re quite ready for signatures yet,” he said ominously. He poured each of us another glass of wine. “Might I ask why you’re so adamantly opposed?”
“Because Elizabeth is a money-grubbing witch who hates Georgina. She only wants her out of Jersey so she can get her hands on Georgina’s trust fund. You know all that, so why ask me?”
He swivelled his chair to stare at a print of Stowey that hung above a leather sofa. “I suppose,” he said airily, “that at sea you must learn to view the world in very simple terms. There’s no room for doubt in the ocean, is there? Yet on shore, my dear John, things can become so deucedly complicated.”
“Stop wrapping it up, Oliver. Tell me.”
He swivelled his chair to face me. “It’s all a question of options, John. So long as your dear mother was alive she wanted Georgina to stay in Jersey, but now things are changing. The good sisters of the convent are under a great deal of pressure to sell the property; indeed, it seems increasingly likely that the diocese will force the sale, which would mean that the sisters are most likely to retreat to their mother house at Nantes. Will the Lady Georgina be happy in France?” He spread his hands to show that he did not know the answer. “Then we must consider dear Sister Felicity. She’s not well, John, not at all, and all of us fear for dear Lady Georgina when Felicity dies. Imagine it, if you can: Georgina would be alone and bereft, in a strange country, with no solace but the sacraments.”
The weight of it crushed down on me. I could see what was in Sir Oliver Bulstrode’s evil mind. The last vestiges of my family’s cash were in Georgina’s trust fund. If Elizabeth took control of that money, then Oliver would get his fee. The trustees of the fund would need to be persuaded, but there were few men better at buttering parsnips than Sir Oliver Bloody Bulstrode. In short the pigs had found a honey trough and were ready to snuffle, and none of them cared a monkey’s toss for Georgina.
“She can be found a good institution in England, can’t she?” I tried.
“Oh, undoubtedly!” he said with fake enthusiasm. “There must be scores of institutions which would gladly care for your sister! Yet would any court of law, I ask you, prefer such an institution to the love and care of a family member? Not, I hope, that this matter will ever reach any court,” he added hastily. “I’m sure we can work it out most amicably.”
“You’d call Elizabeth loving and caring?” I asked incredulously.
“The Lady Elizabeth Tredgarth,” he said huffily, “has undertaken to provide the most proper care and attention for her sister. I note, with the deepest regrets, your reservations about the Lady Elizabeth’s suitability, yet I must tell you frankly, my lord, that I cannot see any court refusing her a supervision order. Not when you consider the alternatives.”
I had noted that he had called me ‘my lord’. That was a danger signal which told me Sir Oliver was on Elizabeth’s side. He was on her side because she had a prospect of scooping the cash. Sir Oliver is a venal bastard, but so are most top lawyers. That’s why so many of them become politicians.
“Supposing I offered Georgina a home?” I asked.
He feigned astonished pleasure. “My dear John! What a very splendid idea! And so typical of your generosity! Can you do it? Naturally, you would have to provide constant nursing care. The premises would have to be suitable, or were you thinking of making her a shipmate?” He chuckled at his own jest. “Seriously, John, such a responsibility will involve a great deal of money!”
“There’s Georgina’s trust fund.”
“Which would hardly be made available to someone with a police record.” The steel was in his voice now. “You would be asking the trustees to grant you authority over a great deal of money. Before they would even consider doing that, they would need to be satisfied that you have demonstrated some fiscal responsibility and domestic stability. I believe, unless I am entirely out of touch with your personal affairs, that you possess neither a house nor a wife?”
I stood up. I had not touched any of the salmon salad. “Georgina can stay where she is so long as Felicity is alive and the hospital remains unsold.”
I had not inflected it as a question, but Sir Oliver chose to treat it as such. “She can certainly remain where she is for a time, yes. The Lady Elizabeth has not, I understand, finished preparing her domestic arrangements.” He paused to shake his head sadly, as though I was disappointing him by my wilfulness. “I really do think you may be misjudging your sister. I grant you that Elizabeth can be tiresome, but I do assure you that she is making the most thorough preparations for Georgina’s welfare. Why don’t you inspect those arrangements? I’m quite sure the Lady Elizabeth would welcome such an inspection.”
“Have you inspected them?” I asked.
“Of course. I lunched at Perilly last week, where I found the Lady Elizabeth’s proposed arrangements entirely satisfactory.”
They had me boxed in. I’d just sailed twelve hundred horrid miles to find that I had been utterly outmanoeuvred. I left Sir Oliver’s office, ran down the stairs, and, once on the pavement, took a deep breath to rid my lungs of the leathery stench of his hypocrisy. The street air stank of fumes and filth. And Georgina, like me, was trapped.
I walked beside the embankment. I went there because there are boats moored to the wall, but they’re boats which are never again going to feel ocean waves on their cutwaters, or heel to a cold cold wind as clean as a rigging knife. The boats are trapped. They’re there to serve as pubs or museum pieces. London has taken their guts and their pride away from them, and reduced them to gewgaws.
And I was trapped. But, God help me, I had some guts and pride left; enough, I hoped, to fillet a twin sister and her fat lawyer.
I paced the river. It began to rain, but I was oblivious to both the rain and the passing time. Up and down I went, between Blackfriars and Westminster, thinking.
I was head of the Rossendale family, but my titular authority counted for nothing because I was poor, had a police record, and a reputation for being irresponsible.
Yet, truly, neither the police record nor the irresponsibility mattered because, when dealing with lawyers, only one thing carries real weight. It isn’t justice, or probity, or any other of their fine words; it’s cash. Lots of cash. Lawyers love cash. They grovel for it, swill in it, lie in it, cheat for it, flatter for it and dream of it.
So I needed cash. The trustees of Georgina’s fund might never entrust the money to me, but Georgina wasn’t tied to the trust. If I could replace the trust fund, then I could arrange her future, so the first question to be thrashed out along the embankment was where I could find a lot of money. There was an obvious answer, of course, but my pride wouldn’t let me grovel to Jennifer Pallavicini. So I had to find another way.
I could sell the few shares left in Uncle Thomas’s legacy and I could sell
