Page 6 of All of Us Murderers

Four

The library was in the east wing; Wynn’s study turned out to be in the west. Jessamine escorted Zeb there and left him at the door.

His cousin was seated at a desk, with Gideon at a second smaller table. Behind him was another painting of a woman from the dining room, in a familiar style. “Is that Laura again?” Zeb asked.

Zeb knew enough about the financial side of the art world to know what that meant: Alma-Tadema’s prices were sky-high. He had to applaud Wynn’s loyalty to his disgraced sister-aunt. “It’s very fine.”

“Thank you, Zebedee. Or rather, Zeb.” Wynn put a certain amount of relish on the single syllable and its ending. “Zeb-b. I see Jessamine brought you here; I hope you two are getting along?”

“We met in the library,” Zeb said. He could feel Gideon’s gaze, and tensed his muscles so as not to look. “She told me about the house. Was it really built on the site of a monastery?”

“So I understand. There are…certain legends associated with the site.”

“I bet there are, if Walter had anything to do with it,” Zeb said. “I’d call this a pretty inconvenient place for any sort of establishment, religious or domestic, but I dare say nefarious rites and perverse sexual crimes are best done in isolation. Where are the ruins?”

“Ruins?” Wynn said. He sounded slightly off-balance. Zeb’s conversational style could have that effect on people.

“There must be some, surely? It’s not as if anyone’s used the land for anything else, and Walter Wyckham wouldn’t have demolished a real medieval ruin when he could have held moonlit dinner parties in it, or wandered around looking plangent and melancholy. Do I mean plangent?”

Gideon coughed in a strangled sort of way. Zeb realised he was digressing. “Anyway, I didn’t come to ask about that. Actually, I came to say I’m going to leave.” He saw Gideon’s jolt out of the corner of his eye but didn’t look. “I’d like to go today if you can spare the motor.”

“Leave?” Wynn demanded. “But you have only just arrived. We have had no time to get to know each other.”

“No, well, that is a shame,” Zeb said. “But I think I should go because—”

“Wait. I think this is a private conversation. Leave us please, Grey.” Wynn waited for Gideon to shut the door behind him. “Now, go on, Zebedee.”

Zeb took a deep breath. “Wynn, I cannot believe this scheme to marry Jessamine to one of us is right. She’s awfully young.

She hasn’t had any opportunity to develop her own character, or taste, or to make a wide acquaintance.

And tying the inheritance to her hand is surely guaranteeing a proposal for the wrong reasons. ”

“The reasons are that I want Lackaday House to stay in the Wyckham family, and my Laura’s grandchild to make a match from which her unfortunate birth would otherwise disqualify her. I thought I made that clear.”

“But you’re asking her to marry a man she doesn’t know.”

“Hence I invited you all to stay for this fortnight. She will know you by then.”

Zeb scrubbed at his face with the heels of his hands.

The hard thing here was that Wynn wasn’t being entirely unreasonable in principle.

Old-fashioned, certainly, but few people would dispute his motives.

“I see you are acting with the best intentions,” he said.

“But she is a charming young lady, and surely, in this day and age, her birth is not such a millstone as all that. Why not settle a reasonable sum on her and let her choose her own path?”

“She is my Laura’s grandchild. I want her to be mistress of Lackaday House.”

“Then why don’t you just leave it to her?”

“Because it must go to a Wyckham,” Wynn said, as though Zeb were a slow child. “It is Walter Wyckham’s legacy. Jessamine will marry a Wyckham, and she and her husband will be my heirs together. That is how I will right the wrongs of the past.”

“Marry which Wyckham, though?” Zeb demanded. “Colonel Dash, if you’re counting him, could be her father. Bram is married already. And Hawley is not a man I would want my sister to marry, if I had one.”

“Why not?”

Hawley was dissolute, decadent, and impatient of convention.

That might sound very thrilling on paper, but in practice made him a nasty, self-centred, sneering piece of work, not caring who he hurt.

Zeb’s social circles intersected with Hawley’s enough that he was aware of a string of affairs that never ended happily. Well, look at Elise.

“He takes after his father,” he said. “Sorry, but he does. What is Jessamine, eighteen? Hawley doesn’t treat women well at the best of times; he’ll walk all over a schoolgirl.”

“You think so? Is there not a chance that innocence will conquer the rake where worldly experience could not?”

“That’s tripe out of books. He’ll ruin her life.”

Wynn raised a brow. “And that leaves only yourself.”

“No, because I’m not going to marry her,” Zeb said. “She seems delightful, but I’m not a player in this game. Count me out.”

Wynn had grey-blue eyes. They were, Zeb discovered, quite piercing. “Not a player. Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to marry her!”

“But why not? She is young, charming, beautiful. Any man would want her.”

Zeb regularly attended a club well-stocked with men who really wouldn’t. “It’s not personal. I simply don’t care to marry a stranger for the sake of an inheritance.”

“If you got to know her, she would not be a stranger. Zeb, you have told me very eloquently what is wrong with the other candidates. Why do you want to remove Jessamine’s best hope?

You are the youngest, I dare say the most attractive to a girl’s eye.

Would she not be better off with you than anyone else?

Do you want to deprive her of that option?

What is your true objection to Jessamine? Her birth?”

“I don’t have any objection to her except that she’s far too young.”

“She is ten years your junior. When you are forty she will be thirty; that is not a gap to concern anyone.”

“Yes, but—” Zeb could feel Wynn’s logic closing in on him. He struck out in another direction. “Anyway, all this seems a bit hard on Bram.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bram. You’ve allowed him to live in the expectation for a long time, and Elise too.

Perhaps you have a reason to change that.

But if he hasn’t done anything to deserve being disinherited—” The irony of what he was saying occurred to him forcibly.

“The point is, I don’t like this and I should rather not be involved. ”

Wynn leaned back, interlacing his fingers. “Do you think Elise would do well as mistress of Lackaday House?”

“I should call her aesthetically perfect. She’s the very model of Lady Ravendark in Coldstone Abbey, all icy beauty and hauteur.”

“Ha!” Wynn looked genuinely pleased. “You’ve read Walter’s books?

Yes, quite. Lady Ravendark comes to a sorry end, doesn’t she?

Pushed down the stairs by her own husband because she is carrying another man’s child.

What is it he says? ‘The house of my father will live on through my son. But not his.’ And then he pushes her. What a moment.”

“And then her lover shuts Lord Ravendark into the family vault and leaves him to go mad in the dark with his ancestors’ corpses, since he cares so much about the family line.”

“And thus the noble house comes to ruin because of a woman’s infidelities,” Wynn concluded. “An excellent analogy, Zeb. It quite expresses my own concerns as to Elise.”

Zeb had the sudden plunging sensation of a man who’d put his foot in it. “Hold on. I didn’t mean—”

“I understand your meaning perfectly.”

“I only meant that she has a very assured manner and she’s very lovely.

And this is none of my business, any of it.

You can leave your money as you please, and I dare say you’ll be with us another thirty years anyway, so it’s hardly pressing.

You might even marry: Walter did at your age.

All I’m saying is that I don’t want to be part of your plans. Could I be driven to the station?”

Wynn sighed. “If you will not give my dear Jessamine a chance, I cannot make you. But I do want you to stay, all the same. I should like to get to know you properly. And who knows, perhaps you and your brother might reconcile, after a decade’s estrangement.

Perhaps you may discover you have been wrong about Hawley’s character.

Perhaps you will find yourself becoming fond of Jessamine as a cousin if not a lover. She will need a family soon enough.”

“Er, why?”

Wynn grimaced. “You said I had another thirty years. I regret that is not the case.”

He sounded meaningful, though he looked hale enough. “Is something wrong?” Zeb asked. “Are you not well?”

“You might say that. I think we spoke of the Wyckham curse last night?”

“Curse?”

“The fact that, since Walter, not one Wyckham has lived to be fifty. Not a child, a sibling, or a wife.”

“Haven’t they?” Zeb said. “Well, I suppose Walter’s wives couldn’t have, considering the rate he got through them. And his children died earlier than one might hope—”

“And their wives too. Your parents, mine, Hawley’s. Every one of them dead before fifty.”

“I thought Hawley’s mother ran away,” Zeb said. “I would have in her shoes.”

“Dead.”

“Oh. Well, that’s very sad, but Walter got to nearly eighty. That surely balances out.”

“More than you know. I take it your father never told you the story.”

“He probably told Bram,” Zeb said, perhaps a little sourly.

Wynn leaned back in his chair. “Walter was, of course, a successful man of business as well as an author. The tale goes that one of his workers died, and this man’s mother, who also worked for Walter, cursed him in vengeance.

He was at that time just turned forty-nine, and already planning a grand celebration for his half century; she foretold with strange imprecations that he would be dead before he was fifty.

So Walter sold his wives’ and his children’s futures in exchange for his own. ”