Someone to Love (Westcott #1)(17)
Lady Anastasia Westcott, alias Anna Snow, sat straight-backed on her chair, her hands clasped in her lap—without his quizzing glass Avery could not see if they were still white-knuckled—and looked calmly back at them all. Perhaps, Avery thought, she was in shock.
He strolled forward and set a hand on his stepmother’s shoulder. He squeezed slightly while smoothing the other hand over Jessica’s head. “A lawyer,” he said, “cannot be disbarred or imprisoned or cast into hell merely for telling the truth.” Unfortunately.
He had not raised his voice. Yet it seemed everyone had heard him, including his stepmother, who stopped talking and closed her mouth with a clacking of teeth. Everyone looked at him—the dowager through her lorgnette while she batted away her daughter’s hand and the vinaigrette. There was expectation on almost every face, just as there had been earlier when he walked into the room, as though they expected him to wave some magic wand—his quizzing glass, perhaps?—and set their world to rights again. But ducal powers were, alas, finite.
“I believe,” he said, “Brumford has more to say.”
Miraculously everyone who was standing sat down again, Molenor removed his arm from about his wife, and there was silence once more. The solicitor looked as though he wished he had been disbarred years ago, or had never been barred, if that was indeed the opposite of disbarred. He must ask Edwin Goddard, Avery thought. He would know.
“The late Earl of Riverdale’s nearest legitimate paternal male relative and therefore the rightful successor to his title and entailed properties is Mr. Alexander Westcott,” Brumford said. “Congratulations, my lord. All his unentailed properties and all of his fortune, according to the will he made at Beresford’s office in Bath twenty-five years ago, now belong to his only daughter, Lady Anastasia Westcott, who is here present, having been fetched from Bath.”
The countess rose again and turned, a look of strangely mingled blankness and resentment on her face. “And this is all my doing,” she said, addressing the woman who was Lady Anastasia Westcott, sole legitimate daughter of the late earl. “I thought to do you a kindness. Instead, I have disinherited my own son and shamed and beggared my daughters.” She laughed, but there was no amusement in the sound.
“Harry is no longer the earl?” Abigail asked of no one in particular, her hands creeping up to cover her mouth, her eyes huge with shock.
“But I have no wish to be the Earl of Riverdale,” Alexander Westcott protested, getting to his feet and frowning ferociously at Brumford. “I have never coveted the title. I certainly have no wish to benefit from Harry’s misfortune.”
“Alex.” His mother rested a hand on his arm again.
“You,” Camille said, rising to her feet and pointing an accusing finger at Lady Anastasia. “You conniving, scheming . . . creature. How dare you sit here with your betters. How dare you come here at all. The Duke of Netherby ought to have had you tossed out. You are nothing but a vulgar, ruthless, fortune-hunting b-b-bastard.”
“Camille.” Lady Molenor rose and reached across the chair in front of her to try to draw her niece into her arms. But Camille pushed them away and took a step back.
“But it is we, Cam, who are the bastards,” said Abigail, as ashen faced as her mother.
There was a beat of shocked silence before Avery’s sister Jessica wailed again over the horrible blow that had just been dealt her favorite cousins and launched herself once more at her mother’s bosom.
Harry laughed. “By Jove,” he said, “and so we are, Abby. We have been disinherited. Just like that.” He snapped a finger and thumb together. “What a lark.”
“Humphrey was always trouble,” the dowager countess said. “No, Matilda, I do not need smelling salts. I have always maintained that he worried his father into an early grave.”
Another voice spoke, soft and low pitched, and silenced them all, even Jess. It was the voice of a schoolteacher accustomed to drawing attention to herself.
“I am Anna Snow,” the voice said. “I do not recognize the other person you say I am, sir. If I am indeed the legitimate daughter of a father and mother I now know by name for the first time, then I thank you for disclosing those facts. And if I have indeed inherited something from my father, I am pleased. But I have no desire to take more than my fair share, however much or little the whole might be. If I have understood you correctly, the young man in front of you and the young ladies on either side of him are also the children of my father. They are my brother and sisters.”
“How dare you! Oh, how dare you!” Camille looked as if she were about to burst with outrage.
Harry laughed again, a little wildly, and Abigail clutched his arm.
“Miss Westcott,” Brumford said. “Perhaps—”
But Camille, realizing suddenly that he was addressing her, whipped about and turned her outrage on him. “I am Lady Camille Westcott to you,” she said. “How dare you!”
“But you are not, Cam, are you?” Harry said. He was still laughing. “I am not even sure we are entitled to the name Westcott. Mama certainly is not, is she? What an absolute lark.”
“Harold!” his aunt Matilda said. “Remember that you are in the presence of your grandmother.”
“Brothers! Oh, I could murder Humphrey,” the duchess said. “I am only sorry he is already dead.”