Page 11 of The Beloved Escapade

“Yes.”

“It is not a formality. In the eyes of the Crown, from today onwards, your uncle Henry is deceased. His estate passes under the terms of his will. Which is why I have asked you here this morning.”

“I know.”

He waited. She said nothing more. After a moment, he cleared his throat.

The second paper was older. Yellowed edges. Faded ink. Uncle Henry’s own hand. She knew it before she knew what it was.

Her chest went tight.

Her father fitted his spectacles and lifted the paper.

He read the will. The substance was simple enough. Everything to her.

Lucy nodded. She had known. Or she had assumed. Uncle Henry had told her once, standing at this very hearth with a glass of her father’s brandy in his hand, that when he was gone, she would have his little bits and pieces to remember him by. Little bits and pieces. That was how he had put it. She was not sure what the whole came to. His books. His instruments. The trunks in the attic. Whatever coin was left in his accounts.

Her father looked at her a long moment. “This is of some import, dear.”

Something in his voice made her sit up straighter.

He drew a third paper from the drawer. Neat. Formal. A solicitor’s fair copy. She could see the seal even from where she sat.

“Captain Belafonte prepared this in 1812. He drew it up in Bristol, with witnesses, and lodged it with his man of business. It came to light after the sinking. There has been considerable dispute over it in the seven years since.”

He turned the paper toward her but did not release it.

“He made your uncle his heir.”

Lucy stared. “His heir?”

“To Grey House. And to a considerable annuity from investments in the Funds. And to the household contents. And to certain moneys held at Coutts. The captain had no living children. His two sons had both fallen in the wars. He had come, in the years he and your uncle worked together, to regard Henry almost as a third son, and had already welcomed him as a permanent houseguest, so he made him his heir.”

She could not speak.

Her father went on carefully. “There was difficulty because your uncle and the captain died in the same shipwreck, most likely in the same hour, perhaps in the same moment. The law does not always know what to do with cases like that. Distant cousins of the captain came forward to contest the will. There were arguments in Chancery about which of them had died first.” He slowly shook his head, sorrow evident on his face. “More arguments about whether Henry could inherit anything at all when he himself was presumed dead. It has taken seven years to settle. In the end, the court ruled that Captain Belafonte’s death came first, however narrowly they could determine it from the accounts of the sinking. Which means his estate passed to your uncle before your uncle himself was lost. Which means⁠—”

He stopped and looked at her.

“Grey House is yours, Lucy. The captain’s fortune is yours. Together with what your uncle himself left. It is a very considerable estate. Two thousand a year in rents alone. More from the investments. The house and its contents. All of it.”

The fire popped.

She did not move.

Grey House rose in her mind so clearly she could almost smell the salt on the wind. Dark stone on the rise above the estuary. Long windows catching the light. The stone terrace where the captain took his morning coffee. The boathouse and the tower she had climbed to watch the ships come up on the tide.

And there had been Captain Belafonte, retired from the Navy.

She had been a little afraid of him at first. A great mountain of a man with white brows that stuck out sideways above pale blue eyes and a voice like a foghorn. He had lost half his left hand to a French cutlass at the Nile. He had frightened her in the entrance hall the first afternoon by seizing her chin and turning her face to the light.

“Same eye,” he had said. “Look at that. Same eye as your uncle. There is a devil in it.”

She had been terribly pleased.

Mama had not been pleased at all.

The captain had taken her round his study after that. Shown her the ships in bottles and the astrolabe from an Arab dealer in Alexandria and the great globe on its brass stand that he let her turn slowly with her fingertips. A room full of charts. A case of pistols. A Malay dagger with a curved blade and a hilt of black horn.