Chapter 19 Lord Edlesborough #2
“She is six,” Andrew said. “The very last, unless Mama has a surprise in store for us.”
They all laughed, even Mama, but Simon was stunned. When had he last heard laughter in Edlesborough? It had never been a happy place, but now… his father must have changed indeed to cause such a happy transformation.
“We have overwhelmed him,” Andrew said, still smiling.
“You have, rather,” Simon said. “I confess, this is not what I was expecting, Kendle.”
His brother nodded. “You were always very correct, brother, but I suppose you are in the right of it. I do not take the title officially until after the funeral.”
After the funeral? Take the title?
Simon’s jaw dropped. “Then you mean… he is dead?”
So that was why his mother looked so different. Finally, she had escaped from tyranny.
They all burst into excited speech.
“Then… you did not know? You have not come in response to my letter?” Andrew said.
“I saw no letter. I came on a matter of my own. Well, if that does not beat all,” he said, suddenly outraged.
“I came all this way to finally confront him and give him a piece of my mind, and the old buzzard has gone off before I could tell him precisely what I thought of him. Well! Now I shall never have the chance. That is the most infamous thing.”
They all laughed again, and Andrew shook his head.
“Simon, you must be the only person in the entire Kingdom who is sorry he is dead. Well, maybe his hunting cronies, perhaps, but no one else. Certainly no one else in this room. We have been quietly celebrating, I assure you. I wrote to you and Juliet within an hour of his death.”
“Juliet!” Simon cried. “She is waiting in the carriage outside.”
The entire crowd streamed out into the hall and down the steps, the carriage door was wrenched open and Juliet urged excitedly out.
Andrew said to the footman who had followed them out, “See the carriage sent round to the stables, the luggage unloaded and the postilions seen to. Mr Simon and Lady Juliet will be staying here.”
***
The ladies bore Juliet away to some feminine fastness, but Andrew sent the rest of his brothers away, and led Simon to a small office cluttered with boxes of papers in a far corner of the house.
“Come in here, brother,” he said. “I need to talk to you, and I am settled in this room for the moment. The steward’s office.”
“You do not wish to use the library?”
Andrew visibly shuddered. “Too many bad memories. What will you have — Madeira? Canary? Port?”
“Claret, if you have any.”
“Good idea. I’ll get Spearman to fetch some up. The cellar is full of the stuff, but we were never allowed to touch it before. Unless there were guests, of course.”
Thus fortified, the brothers settled into a pair of chairs set either side of a small table in the window.
“So tell me what happened,” Simon said. “It sounds as if it was sudden. Did Mama poison him? He always said she was trying to.”
“No one would have blamed her if she had,” Andrew said sombrely.
“He treated her abominably. But it was his own fault — he would eat lobster and it never agreed with him. His digestion had only got worse over the last few years, and this time he had only taken a mouthful or two when he just dropped like a stone. Served him right, frankly. He always said it was Mama’s fault when he overate.
Do you know, he put a clause in his will that if he were to die after eating something, Mama should be arrested for murder,” he said, in outraged tones.
“The man was pond scum. Fortunately, Dr Caffrey has better sense than to do anything of the sort. He said Father had always suffered with his digestion and this was just a particularly virulent bout of it, and the foaming at the mouth was not unusual in such extreme cases. We have all seen him do it before, after all.”
“I never remember him doing so,” Simon murmured. “But that was a long time ago.”
“Far too long,” Andrew said, smiling. “But you are looking so well, brother, and Juliet, too. You both look as fine as fivepence.”
Simon, laughing, told him of their borrowed finery. “But how are you?” he said gently. “You do not look as robust as I recall.”
Andrew pulled a face. “I am worn to the bone, brother, but there we are. We cannot control our health. I trust I will go on better now. But tell me, were you truly planning to confront Father? That would have been a sight to behold.”
Simon explained to him the discovery he had made of his father hampering his career.
“I felt it could not be allowed to pass without challenge,” he said, “so yes, I was planning to confront him. Since he had already ruined my attempts to become an architect, he could hardly do me further harm. Did you know what he was about?”
“Interfering with your clients? I suspected. Early on, I tried to put my friends in the way of giving you business, but one of them blabbed the whole scheme in front of Father, so of course he put a stop to it. Said you were unreliable… implied you were barely sane, in fact. The physicians allowed you to pretend to be an architect but it was all an illusion, something like that. After that, he leaned on me pretty hard to break all contact with you, and Mama, too. He had us followed, you know. He had always had Mama followed, thinking she was up to some mischief or other, but after that, he had me followed, too, and so I never dared to come and see you.”
“I understand that.”
“You never blamed me?”
“Never. I know what he is like… was like.” He paused, grimly forcing himself to remember.
“In some ways, I almost wish he had simply hit us. It would have been easier to deal with, but the constant sniping, and never a good word. The best one could ever hope for was to be ignored. And worse for you, of course, being the heir.”
“Worst of all for Mama,” he said, tossing down the claret remaining in his glass and reaching for the bottle. “At least my mama escaped, in a way, but yours—! God alone knows how she dealt with it, day after day, week after week, year after year. But we got our vengeance, in our different ways.”
“Did you?” Simon said, with a sudden smile. “I am glad of it.”
Andrew smiled, too. “It was not much of a reprisal. Not as much as he deserved, anyway. Mama… well, I never asked what she did, but it is true that in recent years his digestion became much worse.”
“No! Not poison? Not really?”
“As I say, I never asked. No one ever asked, but it started after Ruth was born. I think Mama had just had enough, by then. Father was not kind to her, in their intimate life. But I… I went a different way.”
He stopped, then sighed. “I had to marry, of course. You will remember the fuss — it was not long before you left. He gave me a choice — three women, all from the nobility, wealthy, accomplished, extremely eligible. Trouble was, not one of them was acceptable to me. It was bad enough Father managing every detail of my life, but I could not have borne a wife with the same temperament. I cannot tell you, Simon, how that man has ground me into the dirt. You had the courage to escape, and John and Matthew went to Oxford to be ordained, so they avoided his notice somehow. But his eye was always on me, and I had not the courage to stand up to him, not ever. I never once defied him or refused to do what he asked of me. Such a despicable travesty of a man that I am.”
“You must not blame yourself for his faults. You were the heir, it was inevitable that you had all his attention.”
Andrew shrugged. “Perhaps. But I felt that, whatever his faults were, there must have been some weakness in me that kept me supine, and I had no wish to pass my failings onto another generation. So I put off marrying as long as I could, but… well, you know what he was like.”
“All too well, brother,” Simon said.
“Lavinia was different from the others. She wanted children, but she was nervous about it. Two of her older sisters had died in childbed, so naturally she was afraid. I did not want children at all… at least, not sons. So we made an agreement — only daughters.”
“How on earth did you manage that?”
Andrew laughed. “Lavinia has one surviving sister — her twin, as it happens. She lives in Scotland and they were always very close. So… Lavinia pretended to be enceinte, but ill with it, and you know how Father was with any form of physical illness.”
“Except his own.”
“Precisely. So Lavinia would be banished to Scotland, and in due course she would return with an infant and a wet nurse. We have acquired four daughters in that way, and there are four peasant families in Scotland which are a little better off than they were, and know that one, at least, of their offspring will grow up in wealth.”
Simon could not help laughing. “Four daughters… but no sons? How ingenious, brother!”
“We thought so. It suited Lavinia as much as it suited me, and as long as she was continuing to produce offspring on a regular basis, Father had no cause to hound her for the lack of sons. But you see why I sent for you so speedily, Simon.”
“Me? What is it to do with me? Even if you have no sons, there is still Luke. Surely he had sons before he died.”
Andrew’s smile broadened. “Oh, several. Three sons and four daughters.”
“Well, then. It is nothing to do with me.”
“Let me explain it to you. Well, Luke was pressured to marry just as I was. Do you remember his godfather? An unmarried uncle in Newcastle, and Father always hoped he would leave his fortune to Luke when he died, so he allowed him to visit regularly. Luke met someone there, and settled down to reproduce himself in domestic bliss. Father was delighted, naturally. Luke was the golden boy, unlike me, who failed to produce a son, or you, who escaped altogether.”
“Brother, why do you look so smug? If Luke left three sons, then—?”
“He never married,” Andrew said, chuckling.
“Oh, he told everyone he was, and he produced papers which convinced Father, but everything is fake and I have all the evidence to prove it. Once the lawyers arrive, we shall have all his children officially declared illegitimate. Congratulations, brother. When I breathe my last, you will become the 8th Earl of Edlesborough.”