Page 61 of All of Us Murderers
She was looking at him properly now, intent and unblinking. Zeb ploughed on. “I don’t like this at all and I want to leave. I think you should too, because the things he’s been saying about both of us are awful. He’s been refusing to have me driven to the station because of the mist, but if you added your voice to mine and showed we won’t put up with this, we might be able to put enough pressure on him.”
Elise’s face hadn’t changed. “You think I should leave. Why, exactly?”
“You were literally crying with fear the other night because of this business. And given the way Wynn has spoken to and about you—”
Her upper lip lifted into a touch of sneer. “Do you disagree?”
“Your personal affairs are none of my business.”
“Have you spoken to Bram?”
Zeb had no desire to repeat any of their recent conversations. “I can’t get much sense out of him. He feels unjustly done out of his inheritance.”
“And is blaming me, of course. My faults as a wife are legion. There is no need to consider Bram’s infidelities, his endless pawing of the maids.”
“Uh.” Zeb had no idea how to respond to that. “I’m sorry to hear it.”
She smiled like ice. “Rather them than me.”
“Well,” Zeb said uneasily. “The point is, I don’t trust Wynn’s behaviour or intentions, there’s a worrying amount of money atstake, and Bram and Hawley are being awfully odd. I’m fed up of it all, and I thought you might have had your fill too.”
She gave him a long, considering look. “You don’t trust Wynn’s intentions.”
“No. Not at all. I think, for whatever reason, he’s tried to stir up trouble between us all.”
“That’s not hard,” she pointed out.
“No, true, but why invite us in the first place? If he wants to leave Jessamine the house, why not just do that? He could ask her future husband to change his name to Wyckham, if that matters to him.”
Elise gave a little tinkling semi-laugh. It was the sort of noise elegant women made rather than snorting. “You believe in Jessamine?”
“Sorry?” Zeb said. “Of course I do, I’ve seen her—what do you mean?”
She rolled her eyes. “If that girl is seventeen, so am I. She’s unquestionably over twenty-one, and you may detect a resemblance to the Wyckhams in her face, but I don’t.”
Zeb’s jaw dropped. “You don’t think she’s really Jessamine Wyckham?”
“Isthere a Jessamine Wyckham?” Elise asked. “Bram attended the funeral of precious Laura’s bastard to ingratiate himself with Wynn—”
“Her name was Georgina.”
“He saw no baby at the graveside and heard nothing of Wynn raising a child from that day until this visit. Are we really toaccept Wynn never divulged the existence of his own granddaughter from birth to now? I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Jessamine’s not his granddaughter,” Zeb pointed out. “She’s, uh—well, she’s Laura’s granddaughter, and Laura was Wynn’s aunt—”
“And Laura’s child was Wynn’s,” Elise said. “Do pay attention.”
Zeb blinked at her. “You think Wynn and Laura—But she was his aunt. She was brought up as hissister.”
“And she got in the family way at sixteen, while living here with sixteen-year-old Wynn, and Wynn still seethes with hatred of the father who sent her away, and as soon as the old man was dead, Wynn brought her back and filled the house with very expensive portraits of her.”
“Well, if you put it like that,” Zeb said. “Right. Gosh. That’s sordid.”
Elise slanted a brow. “So why would Wynn not bring up his granddaughter, the last remnant of beloved Laura, here? Adopt her, even, and make her his heir?”
“He would, wouldn’t he? Oh God, you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. The little witch is a patent fraud.”