“No, Oliver, you have not. This is by nature of a surprise visit.”
“And a very welcome surprise too! Upon my word, what a distinct pleasure this is. I shall cancel my luncheon engagement immediately.” Which was his way of telling me that he would double his hourly fees for this unannounced visit, which did not bother me because I had no intention of paying. Sir Oliver and his partners had sent their children to the best schools and their wives to the most expensive fat farms on the proceeds of the Stowey Estate, and I considered it was high time he did something for me. “I see you’ve been given some whisky,” he said. “Good! Good! Do come into my sanctum, John!” He always greeted me as ‘my lord’, and thereafter used my Christian name to show that he could assume intimate terms with the nobility. The man’s a creep, but a clever one.
He fussed me into his office which was stiff with leather chairs and ancient hunting prints. At weekends he plays the country squire, plodding round six damp Essex acres with a shotgun and a mangy spaniel. “Sit down, John, do! I shall just rearrange luncheon, if you’ll allow me.”
Ten minutes later we were served plates of salmon salad in his office. He opened a bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers. “I was so sorry not to have attended your mother’s funeral,” he told me as he poured the wine. “I had an unbreakable engagement that day, which was so very sad.” He lied, of course. If the Rossendale family had still had any flesh on their bones he’d have been down to the funeral like a shot, but as he thought he’d squeezed us dry then there had clearly been no profit for him in making the journey. “So sad,” he murmured.
“I missed the funeral too,” I said. “I walked out before it began.”
He must have known that already for he showed no reaction, not even to enquire why I had abandoned the ceremony. Instead he smiled beneficently. “I must say, John, you do look very well. Sun and sea, eh? And still as thin as ever! You do put the rest of us to shame.” He paused for a split second. “I thought you were even now sailing into the unknown? So very brave of you, I always think.” He bestowed me an admiring look. In fact Sir Oliver 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 naïve 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?”