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Authors: Michael Innes

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‘He has a look of young Nicholas, you know, of young Nicholas.’ Grimble had turned to his hostess and, between gulps of soup, offered this informatively. ‘Only young Nicholas would always speak up. Well do I remember the occasion upon which I caught him stealing my strawberries. He was under the net, you know, under the net. So he couldn’t get away. And I was carrying a switch, I was carrying a switch, I say.’ Grimble produced a high-pitched cackle of laughter, and then slid more soup with surprising dexterity through a slit in the bird’s nest. ‘So he spoke up, you know, he spoke up loudly.’

‘Mr Grimble’s memory isn’t quite right.’ Gadberry addressed the table at large, and to the accompaniment of his sunniest smile. ‘It was the coachman’s boy who was under the net. I was astride the wall, with my strawberries already picked. And I was treacherously cheering on the vicar at his good work.’

‘That is certainly correct.’ Mrs Minton nodded her head emphatically. ‘My dear husband made a note of it at the time. A Comberford, he justly remarked, would not readily let himself be caught in the net.’ Mrs Minton looked down the table. Although the story didn’t really appear to represent her great-nephew in a wholly amiable light, she took evident satisfaction in it. Indeed, she expatiated on this now. ‘I am glad, my dear Nicholas, that you hold so much of that early period in your memory. It is a very proper sort of piety. Boulter, we will take wine.’

The company took wine – and with reasonable elegance at this stage of the meal, since Boulter was instantly able to produce a suitable Madeira. Had Mrs Minton (as she was quite capable of doing) not uttered these words until her guests had munched their way to the other end of the feast, Boulter would have been equally dextrous in the production of Sauterne. Gadberry had a high regard for Boulter’s professional accomplishment. When he became master of Bruton – he found himself thinking – he would probably keep Boulter on.

‘One branch of the Comberfords, indeed,’ Mrs Minton was proceeding, ‘have a motto that is apposite here. It is
Cave Retiola
. Just what is meant by the little nets is obscure. But, in general, wariness is being enjoined. The injunction is at least a politic one.’

Gadberry agreed. To be wary of the little nets, he reflected, was precisely his business.

‘I speak only of a cadet branch of my family. The motto of our own line, Nicholas, you know very well.’

This was awkward, and there was a slight pause. It was a piece of homework that Gadberry ought to have done long ago. Only he hadn’t. That armigerous families have mottoes, coats of arms and the like just hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Hold everything!’

It was Dr Pollock who had enunciated this loudly and emphatically, so that for a moment Gadberry had a confused impression that the company was being summoned to confront some sudden crisis. But Mrs Minton was again nodding approvingly.

‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘It is an excellent motto, and particularly to be regarded in the present age of legalised expropriation and robbery. One ought to give nothing away. Except, of course, in moderation, and to the good poor. At Bruton, however, it is very doubtful whether we any longer
have
good poor. People are either not poor, or not good. So the question does not arise. Nicholas, pray mark this.’

Gadberry did his best to look like one who marks this. In point of fact, he wasn’t at all sure that he would much care to live up to this particular family motto. If he came into enormous wealth – enormous wealth even after the real Nicholas Comberford had received his whack – he would probably find it rather fun to give away quite a lot of money in various odd ways. The Bruton fortune was already coming to strike him as oppressive. Perhaps it was some sense of this that had motivated the real Nicholas to initiate his extraordinary deception; he wanted money without the feeling of being bludgeoned by it.

There was something alarming, Gadberry told himself, in his own intermittent tendency to go motive-hunting in this way on the real Nicholas’ behalf; it touched off in him an obscure sense that the play in which he had been given so prominent a role was one that he didn’t really have the hang of. But that way panic lay, and to avoid it he plunged abruptly into conversation with Miss Bostock on his left. In any case it was time that he had put up a little civil conversation to Aunt Prudence’s companion.

‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Would you agree that we have no good poor on the landscape?’

‘I regard myself as most definitely in that category. I have no fortune. A settled amiability is my sole balance in the bank, and sometimes I feel I shall overdraw on it.’ Miss Bostock, who went in for this astringent note in her conversation with Gadberry, gave him a steady look. ‘Perhaps you have some fellow feeling for me in this?’

‘I don’t know that I have much amiability,’ Gadberry said. ‘But what I have I don’t feel any drain upon. It’s been wonderful coming back to Bruton, you know. I have always loved it.’ He had decided long ago that ingenuousness of this sort was the safest line with Miss Bostock. ‘Particularly in winter,’ he added rather at random.

‘You surprise me. It has been my impression that when you ceased to be of an age to be despatched here involuntarily your visits became infrequent. Is that inaccurate?’

‘No, I think you are quite right.’ Gadberry inwardly cursed the woman. She was coming to trail her coat quite a lot in this fashion. She realised, no doubt, that there wasn’t much future for her at Bruton now. ‘Young men are often shockingly undutiful. And, of course, I had all sorts of irons in the fire.’

‘You still have one or two, I imagine.’

Gadberry made no reply. He simply smiled, as if Miss Bostock’s last remark had been a particularly pleasant one. In fact she was clearly telling him that she judged him to be a schemer and a parasite. And this, when one thought of it, was odd. It was true in a way. But it wasn’t a truth that Miss Bostock could have any real glimmer of.

At least he could, for the moment, stop talking to the woman. So he turned to Mrs Pollock on his right, and prepared to say something to her. But Mrs Pollock, as it happened, spoke to him first.

‘Mr Comberford,’ Mrs Pollock asked, ‘do you often see the Master now?’

 

 

9

 

Gadberry was so taken aback by this question that for a moment he supposed Mrs Pollock to have addressed him under the influence of religious enthusiasm, and to be directing her curiosity upon the privacies of his devotional life. Then he realised that this wasn’t the state of the case at all; that the conversation had remained decently secular; and that the person thus alarmingly imported into it simply enjoyed, for one reason or another, the right to the designation Mrs Pollock had applied to him. And Gadberry’s alarm had two occasions. He had been addressed during a lull in the not particularly lively talk that Mrs Minton’s dinner-table produced, so that attention was now focused on him and everybody appeared to await his answer. And he
had
no answer. He had only – but this was something – a rapidly achieved grasp of what the problem was.

The Pollocks, he had told himself, were not dangerous. Their memories of Bruton didn’t go back far enough. They had never set eyes on him until a few weeks ago. But in forming this opinion, he now saw, he had simply missed out, so to speak, a whole dimension of possibilities. Nicholas Comberford had scarcely been at Bruton since he was a boy. But he had, after all, been elsewhere. In one place or another, and named with his own name, he had lived in some sort of normal contact with his fellows. For a good many years, indeed, his residence seemed to have been mainly abroad. But there was always a possibility of running up against people who had known him, or at least against people who could dredge up some common acquaintance. This was almost certainly what was happening now.

But who was the Master? There was quite a range of possibilities. He might be an MFH. But Aunt Prudence had turned out not to approve of hunting, and was on somewhat chilly terms with its supporters in the neighbourhood. This reference, therefore, was unlikely. The heir apparent to a Scottish peerage, Gadberry knew, is frequently designated as the Master of This or That. Since Mintons and Comberfords were alike supposed to be persons of aristocratic pretention perhaps this was the territory involved. Mrs Pollock might for some reason know, for instance, that Nicholas Comberford had been at school with a Master in this sense, and be proposing to strike an agreeable social note with the topic. But then again, the thought of schools introduced another possibility. Some public schools – Wellington, for example – call their Headmaster plain Master. So there was that possibility too. Again, the heads of certain Oxford and Cambridge colleges are styled Master. But the real Nicholas Comberford was not a university man, any more than the false one was. So that didn’t seem to help. Meanwhile, the silence was (to Gadberry’s sense) painfully prolonging itself.

‘Well, no,’ he said. ‘You see, I’ve been living abroad a good deal.’

‘But that, of course, is why I ask.’ Mrs Pollock’s tone expressed surprise. ‘Naturally,’ she added.

Gadberry experienced an unpleasant sensation down his spine. Mrs Pollock struck him as an obstinate and tactless woman; she would press on with a piece of senseless chit-chat even when it had become evident that something had gone wrong with it. And it was just through the chink of some such small and peripheral occasion as this, Gadberry knew, that the waters of disaster might first trickle and then swell to a sudden flood. What
was
the answer?

‘Mr Comberford,’ Miss Bostock said suddenly, ‘tell Mrs Pollock about the donkeys.’

‘The donkeys?’ Gadberry was bewildered. For one thing, although Aunt Prudence’s companion did, through long association, occasionally fall into something like her employer’s manner of speech, she had spoken in an oddly abrupt and commanding fashion.

‘Your mention of residence abroad has put it in my mind. Your struggle against the
mortadella
factory.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Seizing on this as upon a straw, Gadberry plunged into elaborate improvisation. Considering the degree of his perturbation, he was conscious of doing it rather well. He found it hard to believe that Miss Bostock had not performed a deliberate rescue operation. But why on earth should she do so? She had never suggested herself to him as one alert to obviate minor social embarrassments. Yet any other motive than this opened up possibilities too dire to contemplate. Desperately, Gadberry talked on. Every now and then he stole a glance at Mrs Pollock in the endeavour to decide whether she was simply biding her time, determined to bob up again with her enigma as soon as opportunity offered. Fortunately, however, everybody was now following his recital with close attention. The Reverend Mr Grimble (although a little preoccupied with removing fish bones from his beard) was producing intermittent cackling noises evidently designed to betoken appreciation. And Mrs Minton herself was listening with the approval which she was always prepared to bestow upon this episode during her great-nephew’s otherwise censurable expatriation.

But Gadberry couldn’t continue to hold forth indefinitely, and eventually he stopped.

‘Mr Comberford,’ Mrs Pollock asked, ‘do you often see the Master now?’

This time no succour came from Miss Bostock, whose attention had been demanded by Grimble across the table. Various counsels of desperation flashed through Gadberry’s mind. He might say ‘Certainly not: don’t I hate the man’s guts?’ or ‘Don’t you know he was drowned at sea?’ or even ‘Not since they put him inside’. But although such shock tactics might stupefy this hideous woman into silence for the moment they could only lead to trouble later on. In any case, Gadberry was preserved from such rashness by Mrs Pollock’s husband, who suddenly addressed her with marital brusqueness from Miss Bostock’s other hand.

‘Penelope,’ he said, ‘you’re talking nonsense. It wasn’t Comberford that the Master said he knew. It was the young fellow who seems likely to inherit the Hartleys’ place at Spatchett. You should be more careful’ – and Dr Pollock gave Gadberry a sharp glance – ‘not to get your hopeful heirs mixed.’

Gadberry, although he couldn’t fail to feel that this was a loaded remark, gave Dr Pollock a very sunny smile indeed. This particular crisis had collapsed. Indeed, Mrs Pollock had collapsed. Perhaps there was some shocking solecism in muddling Bruton and Spatchett. Mrs Minton certainly seemed to think so, for what she had heard of this exchange appeared to be occasioning her some displeasure.

‘Spatchett?’ she said. ‘Doctor, did I hear you mention Spatchett? The Hartleys, I fear, have a very imperfect sense of their position. There is a young cousin who is almost bound to inherit the estate, such as it is.’

‘Quite right,’ Pollock said. ‘I was just mentioning him.’

‘The family, I am sorry to say, permitted him to undertake the study of medicine. It was a most unsuitable thing.’

‘Ah!’ Pollock said. This time he gave Gadberry a glance in which there seemed to lurk a malicious amusement. ‘Perhaps you are right. I see your point of view.’

‘It must be apparent to anybody.’ Mrs Minton seemed quite unconscious that she was developing this conversation with her own medical attendant on anything other than wholly courteous lines. ‘The young man even went to pursue his studies in Dublin, a city in which I am told that there is virtually no good society left. His interest, I believe, was in obstetrics. One would suppose that skill in the delivery of infants, should such an accomplishment be desired, could be acquired without crossing the Irish Sea and taking up residence among rebels and Fenians.’

‘Well, they have rather a good place for that sort of thing. The Rotunda. The Master of the Rotunda is a top man at the job. We know the late one quite well, and this young Hartley frequently speaks about him. But his health isn’t good, and he has retired to the South of France. Something of the sort has just been running in my wife’s head.’

So that explained
that
, Gadberry told himself – and went to work with renewed appetite on a plate of roast turkey. He still didn’t feel quite happy in his mind. The behaviour of Miss Bostock had been odd and required thinking about. But at least the Master wouldn’t bother him again.

BOOK: A Change of Heir
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