The Death of Mrs. Westaway(110)

Get out—if you know what’s good for you. While you still can . . .

“She was the only person left who knew the truth,” Hal said slowly. “And he knew . . . he knew that she was going to warn me. . . .”

She thought back through the years, counting the bodies, falling like dominoes from that first moment of anger in the boathouse. And the last domino, Hal herself. Except . . . she hadn’t fallen. He had.

“Abel . . . Mitzi . . .” She stopped, groping for what to say, and in the end the only phrase that came was the clichéd perennial response to the unbearable: “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“And I for yours,” Mitzi said, and there was a kind of wisdom in her round, pink, horsey face that Hal would never have expected to find there, when they first met. An infinite compassion, beneath the self-satisfied fa?ade. “He was your father.”

It was not Hal who flinched at the word, but Abel, putting his face in his hands as though he could not bear it, so that Hal wanted to reach out, and tell him that it was okay, that it would all be okay. Whoever, whatever her father was—had been—she’d had not one but two remarkable mothers, women who had fought for her and protected her, and she was lucky in that.

But she could not find the words.

“When you’re better”—Mitzi patted the sheet over her knees—“we’ll have to get Mr. Treswick to come and see you again, Harriet.”

“Mr. Treswick?”

“It seems . . . well, it seems as if Mrs. Westaway did know what she was doing when she drafted that will.”

“Mr. Treswick has looked into it,” Abel said. “In view of what we know now, the wording is quite clear and unambiguous. That legacy is meant for you, Hal. It always was. The house is yours.”

“What?”

The shock was so unexpected that the word slipped out, like an accusation, and then Hal could not think of anything more to say.

Abel was nodding.

“Mother knew you were her granddaughter. I think that’s very clear. And with the will . . . well, I think she wanted all of us to ask questions, start digging into the past. It’s what she meant, I think, by that line to Harding in her letter.”

“Après moi, le déluge,” Hal said softly. And she finally understood what Mrs. Westaway had set in motion with her will. There had been malice, yes, but also cowardice. The truth had been a horror that she could not bear to face while she was alive. Instead her grandmother had waited until she herself was beyond pain—and unleashed this catastrophe on the living.

For a moment Hal imagined her lying there, bed-bound, waited on hand and foot by Mrs. Warren, and planning the cataclysm that was to come. Had she rubbed her hands as she signed that will, full of a bitter glee? Or had it been done with a weary resignation and pity for the living?

They would never know.

“What puzzles me,” Abel was saying slowly, “is why the hell Ezra wouldn’t agree to that deed of variation you suggested. It was the perfect get-out for him—an acceptance that you weren’t Mother’s granddaughter. I think Mother must have counted on you being as voracious and bloody-minded as the rest of us, and forcing the truth to come out in court. She never expected you to renounce your legacy without a fight. You were more noble than she could have imagined, Hal.”

“I wasn’t noble,” Hal said. Her throat was sore, as if trying to stop her from saying the words, but she swallowed hard and forced them out, huskily. “I—I knew, when I got Mr. Treswick’s letter, that there had been a mistake. I let you think that I was as confused as the rest of you, but the truth was, I wasn’t. I came down here—” She stopped. Could she bear to do this? “I came down here to deceive you all. You don’t know—you can’t understand what it’s like, any of you, to struggle so much, to never know where the next month’s rent is coming from. You were rich, to me, and it felt like . . .” She stopped again, twisting the bedsheets with her fingers. “I felt like this was fate’s way of righting the scales, and a few thousand here or there would mean nothing to you—and everything to me. I was on the run from a loan shark.” How small and unimportant it seemed now, Mr. Smith and his small threats, in comparison with what she had survived. “And I only needed a few hundred pounds to make it all okay. I hoped—I hoped I could walk away with a little bit of money, and start again. It was only when I met you I realized I was wrong, and when I found out the legacy wasn’t something small, but the whole estate, I knew I couldn’t go through with it. But I think I know why Ezra wouldn’t agree to the deed of variation.”

“Why is that?” Abel asked, and there was a kind of wariness in his tone, as if he couldn’t bear to be ambushed with more revelations. He looked, Hal thought, years older than when she had waved hello to him beneath the clock at Penzance station, but the pain and lines on his face somehow made the kindness in his eyes more apparent, and she felt ashamed of her suspicions, and that she could ever have thought poor Edward was behind all this.

“I think . . . I think he was worried that Harding would sell the house, and what they might find if he did. In the lake.”

“What do you mean, Harriet?” Mitzi said. She leaned forwards, put her hand on Hal’s. “Did Ezra tell you something, before he died?”