COUNTESS BYRFIELD, RETURNING late from a charity lunch in Cambridge, passed the strange dog on the stairs up to her apartments. Each turned her head to watch the other as the countess continued climbing and the lurcher headed toward the kitchen. The countess was thinking, In better days than these the gamekeeper would have shot a mongrel like that. Who knows what Patience was thinking?
At least her own rooms remained a haven of peace from her son’s ridiculous friends: the one who was always covered in mud, the impertinent one with the dog, and the one who if memory served—and it always did—was actually the handyman’s brat! Alice Byrfield closed her door behind her with an audible sigh of relief. At least in here the world still operated according to the rules that had obtained for most of her life. At least in here things knew their place.
At least here she had the privacy to consider how these new developments might affect her. How much, if at all, she should admit to knowing. She was alone—her maid didn’t come in on Sundays: how very different things were when she was a girl! So slowly, thinking all the time, she took off her jacket and hung it up, and took off her earrings and put them away, and pressed the button on the electric kettle, which was as close to domestic work as Alice Byrfield ever got.
With the cup of Earl Grey thus provided, she sat down in her wing chair in the bay window, with its matchless view across the park toward the lake and the fields of Home Farm, and thought about the little hummock in the grass and whether the discovery of its contents had the power to disturb the life she had created here.
* * *
Finding herself at a loose end after tea, Hazel gravitated—as she had in spare moments through much of her childhood—toward the stables. The brick-built boxes were empty, but curious heads lifted from grazing in the paddocks beyond. She recognized Viv’s old hunter, twenty-five years old but still game for a day out if the opportunity presented; the old earl’s favorite broodmare, barren now, which Pete Byrfield occasionally threw a saddle on; even one of the old ponies Hazel had ridden. A quick calculation told her their combined ages must now be something over seventy. Don Jackson, the local knacker, who for years had looked forward to getting a call about them, had just about given up, suspecting that the three horses would dance at his funeral.
A footstep on the cobbles behind her warned Hazel she had company, and she turned, to find Lady Vivienne Byrfield—unmarried despite her mother’s best efforts, highly successful as Something in the City—bearing down on her like a Corvette at full revolutions. She hadn’t been a pretty girl and she wasn’t a handsome woman, but she radiated a mixture of self-confidence, genuine competence, and a totally unsentimental kindness that made people like her anyway.
“Hazel!” she boomed as she strode across the stable yard. She always managed to give the impression of being a much bigger woman than she was. Her brother had monopolized whatever tall genes dangled from the family tree: Viv was on the short side of medium height and the broad side of medium build. “Taking Starlight for a spin?”
Hazel gave a rueful grin. “I’d need something a bit bigger these days. The last year I Pony Clubbed him, I had to pick my feet up over the jumps.”
“Take Leary, then.”
Even from half a field away, even at twenty-five, Cavalier was a bigger, stronger horse than Hazel had any ambitions to ride. “Thanks for the offer, but—would you believe it?—I left my parachute at home.”
Viv grinned. “He’s a bit keen, that’s all. You’d enjoy him.”
“No,” said Hazel carefully, “Mill Reef was a bit keen. Desert Orchid was a bit keen. Arkle was a positive slug by comparison. Maybe I’ll get Pete to saddle Blossom for me sometime.”
“That old thing!” snorted Viv, tossing her dark brown hair as a horse tosses its mane. “Couldn’t jump out of your way. Couldn’t fight its way out of a wet paper bag.”
“My point entirely.” Hazel smiled.
Viv Byrfield gave in with a good grace. “I’m really here to see Pip. Just wanted to say hello to the old chap on my way in.”
As they walked toward the house, Hazel reflected on the paradox of the English nobility—or one of them—which was that someone like Lord Byrfield could trace every relative, every forefather (and -mother), every dotty aunt, disappointed cousin, and strategically married sister back to the Battle of Bosworth and still be not quite secure in his own identity. She decided it was something to do with the names. Guardians of the lineage gave their children names like Peregrine because they’d look good on the pedigree, not because they’d wear well on the child. They didn’t even use them themselves—his mother called the current earl Pippin, his sisters called him Pip, friends called him Pete. No wonder he was never entirely sure who he was.
“I got this weird phone call from him a couple of hours ago,” confided Viv. “I don’t suppose you know what it’s about?”
Hazel played for time. “What did he say?”
“Just that something had happened and he needed me down here, ASAP. My first thought was Mother, but he said she’s all right. He said he was all right, too, though I’m not sure I believed him.”
There were things Byrfield had said to Hazel that Hazel couldn’t possibly pass on, not even to his sister. But there were other things that were a matter of public record, and if Viv knew about the grave they’d found, it might make it a little easier for Pete to open the conversation that was to come. Though God only knew how he was going to end it.
So she explained about the archaeological survey, the grassy mound between the woods and the lake, and what it turned out to be hiding. “So now Byrfield’s in the middle of a police investigation. My friend and I just happened to be visiting my dad at the time. I imagine Pete’s looking to you for moral support.”
Viv broke her mannish stride just long enough to give Hazel what used to be called an old-fashioned look. “Really? When you’re here?”
Hazel shrugged that off without much thought. “Of course I want to help, any way I can. But when things get unpleasant, there’s nothing quite like family.”
“That’s true,” agreed Vivienne. “There’s certainly nothing quite like mine.”
Ash, who seemed to have slipped into the role filled in earlier times by the butler, met them at the door. Hazel was introducing them, and about to ask where Byrfield was, when the answer preceded the question. Despite the immense solidity of the building, raised voices were making their way through the heavy doors and down the wide staircase. It was hard to make out words, impossible to follow the conversation, but when Hazel identified one as Byrfield’s—she’d never heard him shout before—she knew at once both who the other was and what the subject of the argument must be.
She glanced at Viv. “Do you think you should go up?”
Viv was already on her way, taking the broad steps two at a time. “Probably not,” she cast back over her shoulder, “but I will anyway.”
Even without the voices to guide her, she’d have headed directly to her mother’s rooms. In this house, disputes had almost always revolved around Alice. She tapped—no, rapped—on the door as she went in, but the absence of an invitation did not deter or even delay her. With no children of her own, Vivienne Byrfield had always felt keenly protective of her younger brother.
Before the door shut, Hazel heard the words “And now we’ve got the Last Tycoon sticking his oar in!”—delivered not, as they might have been, in good-natured exasperation or even irony, but with a hard-edged deliberation designed to hurt. Then the thick timber lodged against its equally substantial jamb, and the rest of the exchange was muffled to mere rumbling.
Viv Byrfield clenched her jaw on all the sharp, angry, telling retorts trying to fight their way out, knowing that another argument with her mother about her own way of life could only distract from whatever business her brother had here. That had to be serious, because nothing avoidable would have made him confront the countess, or stay if he found himself confronted. There had been a time when she’d envied Pip his inheritance, resenting the absurd rule of primogeniture that gave the title and the estate to the younger child when she knew that she herself would have done a better job. She didn’t envy him anymore. If his inheritance included sharing the house with their mother till death should part them, he could keep it.
She said, tight-lipped, “Would one of you care to explain this … performance?”
Alice swiveled, her haughty gaze coming around like the beam of a lighthouse. “Since this is my home,” she declared imperiously, “I think I’m the one entitled to an explanation.”
Viv tried her brother. “Pip?”
He passed a hand across his mouth as if to stop himself from screaming. Then he turned to face her. “You’ve heard about the child?” Viv nodded wordlessly. “They can’t be precise, but he’s probably been there about thirty years. You’d have been five or six when he died. Viv—have you any recollection, from when you were small, of another child in this house? An older child?”
When she realized what he was asking, her eyes flew wide. She tried hard to remember. “I don’t think so. I remember the cousins coming and sometimes staying. There were parties here—children’s parties. But that’s not what you mean, is it? You mean another child who lived here. Our … brother?” While she was still reeling from the implications of that, she thought she spotted the flaw in his reasoning and relief flooded in. “But Pip—if we had an older brother, he’d be the earl, not you.”
“If he’d lived,” said Byrfield in a low voice.
“Well yes, if he’d lived. What I’m saying is, if they had a son before me, they’d have been over the moon. Everyone would have known about it. There’d have been announcements in the London papers, for heaven’s sake! And almost certainly no more children.”
“He wasn’t … normal,” mumbled Byrfield. “The medical examiner thinks he had Down syndrome. A son, but not a very satisfactory heir. I want to know if…” And there he ran out of words.
“If?” demanded Alice harshly.
Byrfield’s sister pressed him, gently, as well. “Pip? What is it? What is it you’re thinking?”
There was no alternative. He had to say it. He had to say it, and risk his mother’s fury and his sister’s disbelief. He had to say it if the sky should fall. “I want to know if they had a disabled son and kept quiet about him in the hope of producing something better. I want to know if they got rid of him when I came along.”
The silence that followed was like an animal in the room with them, huge and dark and dangerous, the stench of its breath burning the air. They were transfixed by the certain knowledge that if any of them spoke again or moved, it would strike.
Predictably, it was Alice who broke the spell. For something over forty years she’d been confident in the knowledge that the most dangerous animal in any room was probably her, and even an accusation of murder wasn’t going to intimidate her for long. “You”—she spun the word out while she looked for something substantial enough to follow it—“pup! How dare you say that to me? I am your mother. You owe everything to me. I will have your respect.”
Byrfield’s voice came from somewhere in the toes of his boots. “Then tell me I’m wrong.”
“Wrong?” Her voice rang with soaring contempt. “You’re not just wrong, you’re insane! If we were trying to improve the Byrfield stock, whatever makes you think we’d have settled for you?”
Byrfield flinched as if she’d slapped him. Viv shouldered between them as if she, too, anticipated violence. “Stop this, both of you! Are you mad? Pip, you can’t really think…?” But it was clear from his face that nothing he’d said had been thoughtless, or casual, or merely for effect. He looked as if he’d dragged the words up from inside his bones and they’d left bleeding, open wounds. Viv turned a quadrant. “Mother? Is this making any sense to you?”
Alice fixed her with a cold glare. “You have to ask? Ask him what evidence he has. Or if it’s just another opportunity to hurt me. I know none of you can ever resist the chance.”
“That is so unfair,” whined Byrfield, and Viv nodded fierce agreement.
“Don’t let’s open the book on who hurt who most, Mother,” she said tersely, “it really doesn’t show you in your best light.”
“I haven’t had a civil word from any of you since the day your father died!”
“Pip has shown you every courtesy! Which is a great deal more than you ever showed him, or any of us!” She turned back to her brother. “I wouldn’t put it past her. But is it even feasible? If they had a child before me, even if he wasn’t perfect, it would be a matter of public record. I don’t see how they could have kept him secret for ten years.”
“The miscarriage,” mumbled Byrfield wretchedly.
“What?” Alice’s voice climbed to a crescendo of furious disbelief.
Viv was watching her brother intently. “Mother’s first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. I know.”
“Abroad. Italy, wasn’t it?”
“On a yacht in the Adriatic, so I was told.” She glanced at her mother for confirmation, but the countess just stared bitterly over her shoulder. Viv shrugged and carried on. “A last chance for a holiday before parenthood hit them. But how does that help?”
Byrfield looked utterly miserable. “What if she didn’t lose the baby? What if he was born alive but”—he, too, glanced at his mother—“unsatisfactory? There was time for them to decide what to do. What to tell people. If they said she’d miscarried, people would sympathize and wish her better luck next time. And there was no reason to suppose their next two children would be girls.”
Lady Vivienne Byrfield had built a successful career on two things: dropping the title, which suggested to the business world that she might be better at opening factories than buying and selling them, and seeing the whole picture—the broad outline and the fine detail. She could look at a proposal and see, almost instantly, if it was a goer and where the problems would lie. That’s what she was doing now. “If they were prepared to kill their first child, why would they go to the trouble of smuggling him back into England—back to Byrfield? God knows, a yacht in the Adriatic was a pretty good place to dispose of an unwanted baby!”
“But they needed to be sure they could do better.” Pete Byrfield could hardly believe he was saying these things out loud. But he had to if they were going to be dealt with. And he was damned if he was going to back down now and never know, one way or the other. “If they had another son, they could afford to dispose of Mark One. But if they had only daughters, then it was important to have a male child—any male child—to keep the estate in the immediate family for as long as possible. If Dad died first, Mother would be able to stay here if she could produce—like a rabbit from a hat—a legitimate heir. For as long as he lived, she was secure.”
Viv said nothing, trying very hard to see where his reasoning had broken down. But all she could see were minor procedural difficulties, hardly an obstacle to a determined woman like her mother.
Alice Byrfield said, with all the hauteur of which she was capable, “There is no truth in any of this. Not in any of it.”
They were the words her son longed to hear. It was their tragedy that he couldn’t believe them. Biting back tears, he said, “There is a way to be sure.”
“Yes, there is,” agreed the countess. “You can believe what I’m telling you.”
“But you’d tell us the same thing whether it was true or not,” said Viv, with devastating accuracy. “What way?”
“DNA testing.”
They thought Alice had been angry before. Now it was as if someone had found her fuse and lit it. Her voice rocketed; her face was incandescent with rage. “Peregrine Byrfield, you will do no such thing! If you speak of it again, I will disown you. I will leave here and I will never see you again.”
“Mother…” By now he’d given up all attempts to contain the tears.
Viv was a much tougher proposition. “And the downside of that is…?” She had a sharp intellect and a sharp tongue. Sometimes she was quick enough to think of the smart retort and too slow to realize it would be better left unsaid.
There were no tears in Alice’s repertoire. But all her weapons were honed sharp. “Thank God your father didn’t live to see this! He’d never have believed you could treat me this way. After everything I’ve done for you—everything we both did. We lived our entire lives in a way we wouldn’t have chosen so that you could live yours exactly how you want. I never expected gratitude, not from either of you. But I didn’t expect to be accused of murder!
“If you go on with this, you’ll bring the family down. Don’t you understand that? You’re not some small-town solicitor with doubts about his wife’s fidelity. You’re the twenty-eighth earl of Byrfield. You carry six hundred years of history on your shoulders, and the hopes of all the future generations. But if you get yourself tested, everyone will assume it’s because you’ve fathered a bastard. Now, I know you well enough to know that’s unlikely, but not everyone has my advantages. You turn up at some grubby little laboratory, and from that moment on the integrity of the Byrfield line will be in question. It wouldn’t be worth it if there was something much more important at stake than the identity of some child who died three decades ago!”
“Some child? Or our brother? Mother, please,” begged Byrfield, “if you know the answer, tell us. It’s going to come out now, whether you want it to or not. For pity’s sake, don’t let us hear it from a policeman!”
“What’s going to come out?” demanded Alice. “I’m not keeping anything from you! This … fantasy of yours is just that. Something you made up. Maybe it’s your own guilty conscience tormenting you. Because you haven’t been a resounding success as master of Byrfield, have you? There’s really only one thing that’s required of you, and thus far you’ve been a great disappointment!”
“I think Pip’s shown remarkable foresight,” Viv shot back. “He’s clearly decided that if this is what the Byrfield family is reduced to, it’s probably time it was allowed to die out. Anyway, you’ve made one thing patently obvious. Since we can’t trust a word you say, DNA is the only way to resolve this. If Pip doesn’t want to do it, I will.”
Byrfield was more touched than he could say. “Viv…”
She laid her hand on his arm. “Let me do this,” she said quietly. “I’ve nothing to lose.”
He cast her a grateful smile. “No, it’s my responsibility. It sort of goes with the title. But I could use some moral support, if you felt like going with me.”
“It’s a date, little brother.” She squeezed his hand. “You do know I’m proud of you, don’t you?”