estate?” Brisbane asked. “Oughtn’t there to have been a reading of the will when her husband died?”
Portia shrugged. “The estate is relatively new, only established by her husband’s grandfather. As the estate passed directly from the grandfather to Jane’s husband, no one thought to look into the particulars. Now that her husband has died, matters are a little murky at present, at least in Jane’s mind. The relevant paperwork is somewhere in Darjeeling or Calcutta and Jane doesn’t like to ask directly. She thinks it might seem grasping, and she seems to think the matter will sort itself out when she has the child.”
I turned to Portia. “I thought her husband was some sort of wastrel who went to India to make his fortune, but you say he has inherited it. Is the family a good one?”
Angry colour touched Portia’s cheeks. “It seems she wanted to spare me any further hurt when she wrote to tell me of her marriage. She neglected to mention that the fellow was Freddie Cavendish.”
I gasped and Brisbane arched a thick black brow interrogatively in my direction. “Freddie Cavendish?”
“A distant—very distant—cousin on our mother’s side. The Cavendishes settled in India ages ago. I believe Mother corresponded with them for some time, and when Freddie came to England to school, he made a point of calling upon Father.”
Plum glanced up from his wine. “Father smelled him for a bounder the moment he crossed the threshold. Once Freddie realised he would get nothing from him, he did not come again. It was something of a scandal when he finished school and refused to return to his family in India. Made a name for himself at the gaming tables,” he added with a touch of malice. Brisbane had been known to take a turn at the tables when his funds were low, usually to the misfortune of his fellow gamblers. My husband was uncommonly lucky at cards.
I hurried to divert any brewing quarrel. “How ever did Jane meet him? He would have left school at least a decade ago.”
“Fifteen years,” Portia corrected. “I used to invite him to dinner from time to time. He could be quite diverting if he was in the proper mood. But I lost touch with him some years back. I presumed he had returned to India until I met him in the street one day. I remember I was giving a supper that evening and I needed to make the numbers, so I invited him. I thought a nice, cosy chat would be just the thing, but a thousand details went wrong that evening, and I had to ask Jane to entertain him for me. They met again a few months later when she went to stay in Portsmouth with her sister. Freddie was a friend to her brother-in-law and they were often together. Within a fortnight they were married and bound for India.”
I cudgeled up whatever details I could recall. “I seem to remember him as quite a handsome boy, with a forelock of dark red hair that always spilled over his brow and loads of charm.”
“As a man grown he was just the same. He could have charmed the garters off the queen’s knees,” Portia added bitterly. “He ended up terribly in debt and when his grandfather fell ill in India, he thought he would go back and take up residence at the tea plantation and make a go of things.”
We fell silent then, and I glanced at Plum. “And how did you come to attach yourself to this expedition?” I asked lightly.
“Attach myself?” His handsome face settled into sulkiness. “Surely you do not imagine I did this willingly? It was Father, of course. He could not let Portia travel out to India alone, so he recalled me from Ireland and ordered me to pack up my sola topee and here I am,” he finished bitterly. He waved the waiter over to refill his wineglass and I made a mental note to keep a keen eye upon his drinking. As I had often observed, a bored Plum was a dangerous Plum, but a drunken one would be even worse.
I returned my attention to my sister. “If Father wanted you to have an escort so badly, why didn’t he come himself? He is always rabbiting on about wanting to travel to exotic places.”
Portia pulled a face. “He would have but he was too busy quarrelling with his hermit.”
I blinked at her and Brisbane snorted, covering it quickly with a cough. “His what?”
“His hermit. He has engaged a hermit. He thought it might be an interesting addition to the garden.”
“Has he gone stark staring mad? Who ever heard of a hermit in Sussex?” I demanded, although I was not entirely surprised. Father loved nothing better than tinkering with his country estate, although his devotion to the place was such that he refused to modernise the Abbey with anything approaching suitable plumbing or electricity.
Portia sipped placidly at her soup. “Oh, no. The hermit isn’t in Sussex. Father has put him in the garden of March House.”
“In London? In the back garden of a townhouse?” I pounced on Plum. “Did no one try to talk him out of it? He’ll be a laughingstock!”
Plum waved an airy hand. “As if that were something new for this family,” he said lightly.
I ignored my husband who was having a difficult time controlling his mirth and turned again to my sister. “Where does the hermit live?”
“Father built him a pretty little hermitage. He could not be expected to live wild,” she added reasonably.
“It isn’t very well wild if it is in the middle of Mayfair, now is it?” I countered, my voice rising. I took a sip of my wine and counted to twenty. “So Father has built this hermitage in the back garden of March House. And installed a hermit. With whom he doesn’t get on.”
“Correct,” Plum said. He reached for my plate and when I offered no resistance, helped himself to the remains of my fish.
“How does one even find a hermit these days? I thought they all became extinct after Capability Brown.”
“He advertised,” Plum said through a mouthful of trout grenobloise. “In the newspaper. Received quite a few responses, actually. Seems many men fancy the life of a hermit—and a few women. But Father settled on this fellow from the Hebrides, Auld Lachy. He thought having a Hebridean hermit would add a bit of glamour to the place.”
“There are no words,” Brisbane murmured.
“They started to quarrel about the hermitage,” Portia elaborated. “Auld Lachy thinks there should be a proper water closet instead of a chamber pot. And he doesn’t fancy a peat fire or a straw bed. He wants good coal and a featherbed.”
“He is a hermit. He is supposed to live on weeds and things he finds in the ground,” I pointed out.
“Well, that is a matter for debate. In fact, he and Father have entered into negotiations, but things were at such a delicate stage, he simply could not leave. And the rest of our brothers are otherwise engaged. Only dearest Plum was sitting idly by,” Portia said with a crocodile’s smile at our brother.
“Sitting idly by?” He shoved the fish aside. “I was painting, as you well know. Masterpieces,” he insisted. “The best work of my career.”
“Then why did you agree to come?” I asked.
“Why did I ever agree to do anything?” he asked bitterly.
“Ah, the purse strings,” I said quietly. It was Father’s favourite method of manipulation. The mathematics of the situation were simple. A wealthy father plus a pack of children with expensive tastes and little money of their own equalled a man who more often than not got his way. It was a curious fact in our family that the five daughters had all achieved some measure of financial independence while the five sons relied almost entirely upon Father for their livelihoods in some fashion or other. They were dilettantes, most of them. Plum dabbled in art, fancying himself a great painter, when in fact, he had only mediocre skill with a brush. But his sketches were very often extraordinary, and he was a gifted sculptor although he seldom finished a sculpture on the grounds that he did not much care for clay as it soiled his clothes.
“If I might recall us to the matter at hand,” Brisbane put in smoothly, “I should like to know more about Jane’s situation. If it