Patricia Wentworth: Through The Wall

A miss Silver mystery, 1950

Mr. Ashton, the senior partner of Ashton & Fenwick, solicitors, looked benevolently across his broad writing-table at Miss Brand. He had no means of knowing whether her extreme restraint of manner was natural or the result of shock. He had just finished explaining to her that under the will of her uncle, Martin Brand, she had succeeded to a very considerable fortune. Since, owing to a family quarrel, she had not up to this moment so much as known that she possessed such a relative, it was not unnatural to suppose that the intelligence had come as a shock. He thought it best to make a pause in the proceedings before handing her the letter entrusted to him by his late client. An eccentric fellow Martin Brand, but not sufficiently eccentric to give the other relations any chance of upsetting the will. He had had a houseful of them on his hands. He hadn’t liked any of them very much, and he had left everything to the daughter of the young brother who had flung out of the house and out of the family circle thirty years ago.

And here she was, Marian Brand, very quiet, very self-contained. She was extremely pale. The pallor might be the result of emotion, or it might be natural. There had, at any rate, been no attempt to remedy it. The fine, even skin was untouched by rouge, the well-cut lips were innocent of lipstick. This pallor and the quietness of her manner may have made her seem older than her twenty-seven years. The manner showed breeding. It was quiet, but it was neither nervous nor uncertain. Her voice when she spoke was pleasant and cultivated. He knew that she had been working in a house-agent’s office. He considered that she would have been an asset to the firm. She looked-he hesitated for a word and arrived at responsible. Well, she was having responsibility thrust upon her.

He had reached this point, when she spoke.

“Do you mind repeating the last thing you said? I want to be sure about it-about the income.”

He leaned back in his chair smiling.

“Well, I can’t pretend to give you an exact figure-you will understand that. But by the time all deductions are made- death duties, outstanding accounts, and allowing for income tax and surtax at the present rates-I think you may count on a clear two thousand a year. It may be more-it will, I think, almost certainly be more-but at the most conservative estimate it can hardly be less. Probate will, of course, take some time, but Mr. Brand arranged that a sum of money should be available without delay. You have a banking account?”

Marian Brand said, “No.” Then she smiled and added, “Only in the Post Office Savings Bank. I have never had anything but what I earned. I haven’t saved very much, I’m afraid-my sister hasn’t been strong.”

“So Mr. Brand said.”

Five pounds a week, and a delicate sister to support, and the delicate sister’s work-shy husband. He hoped that most of the money wouldn’t just run away down that drain.

He took Martin Brand’s letter from a drawer and went out of the office, leaving her to read it alone. She opened it without being able to feel that any of this was really happening. The part of her mind which recognized facts and their relation to other facts, the part which dealt with such things as cause and effect, was in a stunned condition, as completely in abeyance as if the events in which she was taking part were the events of a dream. In a dream nothing astonished you-you no longer expect anything to follow a reasonable course. She turned mechanically to the letter which Mr. Ashton had given her.

The letter was written in a clear and legible hand. She read it with a steady deepening of the feeling that none of it really mattered, because presently she would wake up and find that it had never happened.

My dear Marian,

You will not receive this letter until I am dead and buried. Since we have been strangers in life, there is no need for you to pretend to a sorrow you cannot feel, or to be plunged into the intricacies of family relationships in the morbid atmosphere induced by a funeral. If you decide to meet your relations-and I suppose you may find youself obliged to do so-let it be in circumstances which do not encourage the emotions. I am afraid you must be prepared for these emotions to include hurt feelings, resentment, jealousy, and so forth, but not any personal grief. My relations do not love me any more than I love them. You will naturally ask yourself, since you cannot ask me, why I should have harboured a houseful of them for so many years. The answer is a very simple one. At first the arrangement was one of mutual convenience. I was a helpless widower and a natural prey to the womanly feelings of any unattached female relative. A not sufficiently distant cousin who had become my brother Alfred’s widow settled on me with her son. She is Mrs. Alfred Brand, your Aunt Florence, a large woman with small, determined aims. Her son Felix plays the piano. After a year or two the constant visits of Florence ’s unmarried sister, Cassy Remington, merged into permanent residence at my expense. She also is related to you, and will doubtless make herself quite as unpleasant as if the relationship were a much nearer one.

So much for preliminaries. When I made up my mind that I would rather leave my money to a dogs’ home than to anyone in what Florence calls the family circle, I thought that before proceeding to such extremities I would have to look at you and at your sister. I knew where you were, because your father wrote to me during the last week of his life. My reaction at the time was that it was rather late in the day to expect me to be interested. I did, however, instruct my solicitors to make some enquiries, and to furnish me with a quarterly report. I saw no reason why you should not, in the words of the Catechism, learn and labour truly to get your own living, but in a case of extremity I was prepared to intervene. Not to put too fine a point upon it, I considered that I had enough dependent relations and had no wish to add to their number.

I have already indicated the reasons which led me to change my mind. Before taking any steps in the matter of my will I decided to see you. The reports I had received informed me that you were a hardworking, industrious, and well-behaved young woman. I am quite aware that you will consider yourself insulted by this description. Nevertheless you will owe a considerable fortune to these work-a-day qualities. The reports informed me that your sister, on the other hand, was not a suitable beneficiary. She was delicate, easily influenced, and married to a young man too unstable to stick to a humdrum job, and not competent to achieve anything better. I have always greatly disliked incompetence, and see no reason why it should be subsidized.

I am therefore leaving everything to you. Rather a gamble perhaps, but I think I am entitled to amuse myself by taking a risk. When you read this Mr. Ashton will already have explained to you that the Mr. Brook who came down to look at houses and wasted so much of your time without ever really coming to the point was myself in the laudable pursuit of knowledge, not about houses, but with regard to a possible heiress. Speaking as a dead man, I find you very possible indeed. I think you have good looks, good temper, good sense, and good principles. So I am not tying you up too tightly, only I do request you to use the good sense. Do not transfer capital to your sister-it will not benefit her. You will have a power of appointment over half the estate. Mr. Ashton will explain to you what this involves.