Downtime - Marc Platt [10]
Yours sincerely
St John Byle
‘I’m sorry,’ Victoria kept saying. ‘I know I should have answered the letters, but... well, it’s rather complicated.’
St John Byle, consciously handsome, studied her across his mahogany desk with a detached curiosity. His ice-blue eyes made her feel like an exhibit in the museum. She wished she had asked Roxana to come with her, but she might have to discuss things that her landlady would never understand.
The solicitor took a rolled document from his drawer and undid the dark-blue ribbon that bound it. The paper was yellowed and the script written in a sloping, elegant hand.
Victoria took it from him and put on her spectacles.
‘ I, Edward Joseph Waterfield... ’
She felt a pit open in her stomach. Her skin went cold. She tried to concentrate on the rest of the document, but the words danced before her eyes without registering in her mind. She pulled her spectacles off again and sat fiddling awkwardly with the rims.
‘Where did you find this?’ she asked.
‘We’ve held it here for many years. The will was drawn up by the original Mr Byle in July 1865. In it, Edward Waterfield left all his property and goods in perpetuity to his only daughter, Victoria Maud.’
‘I see,’ Victoria said. ‘And I suppose you think that because my name is Victoria Maud as well, you might be able to trace some family connection.’
‘Unfortunately I don’t think that’s very likely.’ He gave a little smirk as he sat back in his seat. ‘Edward Waterfield was presumed killed in an explosion at a house near Canterbury in 1866. No one could trace Victoria Maud.’
‘Perhaps she died in the explosion too,’ said Victoria.
‘She was thought to be residing in Paris at the time.’
Of course, thought Victoria, that’s the story Maxtible put round. That’s why no one came to rescue me. No one in the household knew I was being held prisoner by the Daleks in the same house.
‘If she had later married and had children,’ Byle continued,
‘then she would have adopted her husband’s name and that would have been the end of the Waterfield line.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Victoria retorted.
‘And with three, maybe four generations in between...?’ He shrugged and smirked again, staring as if he expected or knew of some information she might be hiding. ‘It’s always been our firm’s most mysterious case. Of course, if you feel you have a claim to the inheritance, we would need some sort of evidence of your own family. Say a birth certificate at least?’
‘How many generations of Byles have there been?’ asked Victoria. She was making a weak show of disinterest, but her eyes kept wandering back to the will, even if it was too late to take it back from him. ‘Anyway, what makes you think I might have a claim?’
St John Byle reached into his drawer for a second time, producing another scrolled document, this one less battered than the first. He balanced it between two fingers as he stared at her. ‘This is a revised version of the original will.’
‘Then doesn’t it supersede the first one?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She noticed a sudden quaver in his voice. ‘If we could prove its veracity.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t see how I can help you.’
‘Normally we would contest this as a forgery.’ He unrolled the document. ‘It alters very little of the original, except that now the property is left to the descendants of Victoria Maud.
And you see here, the same signature.’
Victoria forced herself to stare at the writing. She remembered the hand from the regularly maintained notebooks stacked on his secretaire. Next to her father’s signature, a witness had carelessly scrawled the name ‘Keith Perry’. She reached for the document. ‘Please may I see?
What makes you think it’s not real?’
Mr Byle kept firm hold of the scroll. ‘I don’t. But there’s some new text added at the end: “There are dark forces beyond both time and understanding that prey on my mind.
God keep you all from