A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(76)

She’d awakened that morning in an exquisite agony that hadn’t diminished as the day continued. In the early hours, she’d maintained such a fine focus on carrying out her duties to her brother, his family, his friends, and the community that she’d been able to ignore the stranglehold which the fire had on most of her body. But as people said their final goodbyes, it became more and more difficult to ignore what was so earnestly trying to claim her. The reading of the will had provided Ruth a momentary diversion from the disease. What followed the reading of the will was continuing to do so.



Her exchange with Margaret had been blessedly and surprisingly brief.

“I’ll deal with the rest of this mess later on,” her sister-in-law had asserted, wearing the expression of a woman in the presence of rancid meat, her body stiff with outrage. “As for now, I want to know who the hell they are.”

Ruth knew Margaret was referring to the two beneficiaries of Guy’s will other than his children. She gave Margaret the information she wanted and watched her sweep from the room to engage in what Ruth knew very well was going to be a most dubious battle. This left Ruth with the others. Frank Ouseley had been surprisingly easy. When she approached him to stumble through an embarrassed explanation, saying surely something could be done about the situation because Guy had made his feelings quite clear with respect to the wartime museum, Frank had said in reply, “Don’t trouble yourself about this, Ruth,” and had bade her goodbye without the slightest degree of rancour. He would be disappointed enough, though, considering the time and effort that he and Guy had put into the island project, so before he could leave she told him that he wasn’t to think the situation was hopeless, that she herself felt sure that something could be done to bring his dreams to reality. Guy had known how much the project meant to Frank and he’d surely intended...But she couldn’t say more. She couldn’t betray her brother and his wishes because she didn’t yet understand what he’d done or why he had done it.

Frank had taken her hand into both of his, saying, “There’ll be time to think about all this later. Don’t worry about it now.”

Then he’d gone, leaving her to deal with Ana?s next. Shell shocked popped into Ruth’s mind when she was at last alone with her brother’s lover. Ana?s sat numbly on the same love seat she’d taken during Dominic Forrest’s explanation of the will, her posture unchanging and the only difference being that she sat there now alone. Poor Jemima had been so eager to be dismissed that when Ruth murmured, “Perhaps you might find Stephen somewhere in the grounds, dear...?” she’d caught one of her great large feet on the edge of an ottoman and nearly knocked over a small table in her haste to be gone. This haste was understandable. Jemima knew her mother quite well and was probably foreseeing what was going to be asked of her in the way of filial devotion in the next few weeks. Ana?s would require both a confidante and a scapegoat. Time would tell which role she would decide her gangling daughter was going to play.

So now Ruth and Ana?s were alone and Ana?s sat plucking the edge of a small cushion from the love seat. Ruth didn’t know what to say to her. Her brother had been a good and generous man despite his foibles, and he’d earlier remembered Ana?s Abbott and her children in his will in a fashion that would have relieved her anxiety enormously. Indeed, that had long been Guy’s way with his women. Each time he took a new lover for any period longer than three months, he altered his will to reflect the extent to which he and she were devoted to each other. Ruth knew this because Guy had always of necessity shared the contents of his wills with her. With the exception of this most current and final document, Ruth had read each one of them in the presence of Guy and his advocate because Guy had always wanted to be certain that Ruth understood how he meant his money to be distributed.

The last will Ruth had read had been drawn up some six months into her brother’s relationship with Ana?s Abbott, shortly after the two of them had returned from Sardinia, where they’d apparently done very little more than explore all the permutations of what a man and woman could do to each other with their respective body parts. Guy had returned glaze-eyed from that trip, saying, “She’s the one, Ruth,” and his will had reflected this optimistic belief. Ruth had asked Ana?s to be present for that reason and she could see by the expression on her face that Ana?s believed Ruth had done so out of malice.

Ruth didn’t know which would be worse at the moment: allowing Ana?s to believe that she harboured such a desire to wound her that she would allow all her hopes to be dashed in a public forum or telling her that there had been an earlier will in which the four hundred thousand pounds left to her would have been the answer to her current dilemma. It had to be the first alternative, Ruth decided. For although she didn’t actually want to be the recipient of anyone’s antipathy, telling Ana?s about the earlier will would likely result in having to talk about why it had been altered. Ruth lowered herself to the seat. She murmured, “Ana?s, I’m terribly sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

Ana?s turned her head like a woman slowly regaining consciousness. She said, “If he wanted to leave his money to teenagers, why not mine?

Jemima. Stephen. Did he only pretend...?” She clutched the cushion to her stomach. “Why did he do this to me, Ruth?”

Ruth didn’t know how to explain. Ana?s was devastated enough at the moment. It seemed inhuman to devastate her more. She said, “I think it had to do with Guy’s having lost his own children, my dear. To their mothers. Because of the divorces. I think he looked at these others as a way of being a father once again when he couldn’t any longer be a father to his own.”