Tamplin was, for once, not thinking of herself. That is to say, she was not thinking of her appearance. She was intent on graver matters.
Lady Tamplin was a well-known figure on the Riviera, and her parties at the Villa Marguerite were justly celebrated. She was a woman of considerable experience, and had had four husbands. The first had been merely an indiscretion, and so was seldom referred to by the lady. He had had the good sense to die with commendable promptitude, and his widow thereupon espoused a rich manufacturer of buttons. He too had departed for another sphere after three years of married life—it was said after a congenial evening with some boon companions. After him came Viscount Tamplin, who had placed Rosalie securely on those heights where she wished to tread. She retained her title when she married for a fourth time. This fourth venture had been undertaken for pure pleasure. Mr Charles Evans, an extremely good-looking young man of twenty-seven, with delightful manners, a keen love of sport, and an appreciation of this world’s goods, had no money of his own whatsoever.
Lady Tamplin was very pleased and satisfied with life generally, but she had occasional faint preoccupations about money. The button manufacturer had left his widow a considerable fortune, but, as Lady Tamplin was wont to say, ‘what with one thing and another—’ (one thing being the depreciation of stocks owing to the War, and the other the extravagances of the late Lord Tamplin). She was still comfortably off. But to be merely comfortably off was hardly satisfactory to one of Rosalie Tamplin’s temperament.
So, on this particular January morning, she opened her blue eyes extremely wide as she read a certain item of news and uttered that non-committal monosyllable ‘Well.’ The only other occupant of the balcony was her daughter, the Hon. Lenox Tamplin. A daughter such as Lenox was a sad thorn in Lady Tamplin’s side, a girl with no kind of tact, who actually looked older than her age, and whose peculiar sardonic form of humour was, to say the least of it, uncomfortable.
‘Darling,’ said Lady Tamplin, ‘just fancy.’
‘What is it?’
Lady Tamplin picked up the Daily Mail, handed it to her daughter, and indicated with an agitated forefinger the paragraph of interest.
Lenox read it without any of the signs of agitation shown by her mother. She handed back the paper.
‘What about it?’ she asked. ‘It is the sort of thing that is always happening. Cheese-paring old women are always dying in villages and leaving fortunes of millions to their humble companions.’
‘Yes, dear, I know,’ said her mother, ‘and I dare say the fortune is not anything like as large as they say it is; newspapers are so inaccurate. But even if you cut it down by half—’
‘Well,’ said Lenox, ‘it has not been left to us.’
‘Not exactly, dear,’ said Lady Tamplin; ‘but this girl, this Katherine Grey, is actually a cousin of mine. One of the Worcestershire Greys, the Edgeworth lot. My very own cousin! Fancy!’
‘Ah-ha,’ said Lenox.
‘And I was wondering—’ said her mother.
‘What there is in it for us,’ finished Lenox, with that sideways smile that her mother always found difficult to understand.
‘Oh, darling,’ said Lady Tamplin, on a faint note of reproach.
It was very faint, because Rosalie Tamplin was used to her daughter’s outspokenness and to what she called Lenox’s uncomfortable way of putting things.
‘I was wondering,’ said Lady Tamplin, again drawing her artistically pencilled brows together, ‘whether—oh, good morning, Chubby darling; are you going to play tennis? How nice!’
Chubby, thus addressed, smiled kindly at her, remarked perfunctorily, ‘How topping you look in that peach-coloured thing,’ and drifted past them and down the steps.
‘The dear thing,’ said Lady Tamplin, looking affectionately after her husband. ‘Let me see, what was I saying? Ah!’ She switched her mind back to business once more. ‘I was wondering—’
‘Oh, for God’s sake get on with it. That is the third time you have said that.’
‘Well, dear,’ said Lady Tamplin, ‘I was thinking that it would be very nice if I wrote to dear Katherine and suggested that she should pay us a little visit out here. Naturally, she is quite out of touch with Society. It would be nicer for her to be launched by one of her own people. An advantage for her and an advantage for us.’
‘How much do you think you would get her to cough up?’ asked Lenox.
Her mother looked at her reproachfully and murmured:
‘We should have to come to some financial arrangement, of course. What with one thing and another—the War—your poor father—’
‘And Chubby now,’ said Lenox. ‘He is an expensive luxury if you like.’
‘She was a nice girl as I remember her,’ murmured Lady Tamplin, pursuing her own line of thought—‘quiet, never wanted to shove herself forward, not a beauty, and never a man-hunter.’
‘She will leave Chubby alone, then?’ said Lenox.
Lady Tamplin looked at her in protest. ‘Chubby would never—’ she began.
‘No,’ said Lenox, ‘I don’t believe he would; he knows a jolly sight too well which way his bread is buttered.’
‘Darling,’ said Lady Tamplin, ‘you have such a coarse way of putting things.’
‘Sorry,’ said Lenox.
Lady Tamplin gathered up the Daily Mail and her négligée, a vanity bag, and various odd letters.
‘I shall write to dear Katherine at once,’ she said, ‘and remind her of the dear old days at Edgeworth.’
She went into the house, a light of purpose shining in her eyes.
Unlike Mrs Samuel Harfield, correspondence flowed easily from her pen. She covered four sheets without pause or effort, and on re-reading it found no occasion to alter a word.
Katherine received it on the morning of her arrival in London. Whether she read between the lines of it or not is another matter. She put it in her handbag and started out to keep the appointment she had made with Mrs Harfield’s lawyers.
The firm was an old-established one in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and after a few minutes’ delay Katherine was shown into the presence of the senior partner, a kindly, elderly man with shrewd blue eyes and a fatherly manner.
They discussed Mrs Harfield’s will and various legal matters for some twenty minutes, then Katherine handed the lawyer Mrs Samuel’s letter.
‘I had better show you this, I suppose,’ she said, ‘though it is really rather ridiculous.’
He read it with a slight smile.
‘Rather a crude attempt, Miss Grey. I need hardly tell you, I suppose, that these people have no claim of any kind upon the estate, and if they endeavour to contest the will no court will uphold them.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘Human nature is not always very wise. In Mrs Samuel Harfield’s place, I should have been more inclined to make an appeal to your generosity.’
‘That is one of the things I want to speak to you about. I should like a certain sum to go to these people.’
‘There is no obligation.’
‘I know that.’
‘And they will not take it in the spirit it is meant. They will probably regard it as an attempt to pay them off, though they will not refuse it on that account.’
‘I can see that, and it can’t be helped.’
‘I should advise you, Miss Grey, to put that idea out of your mind.’
Katherine