He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [211]
“She had already decided I was to be the man my father refused to be. When I resisted she tried various means to control me. The worst was what she did to Walter. We had been at the same school until then. You know what they were like, even the best of them; brutal discipline and legalized bullying were thought to make men out of boys. I was big for my age and ready to fight back, but Walter would have had a bad time if I had not been there to take his part.
“She separated us. He was becoming a mollycoddle and a coward, she said, and it was time he stood on his own feet. When I came home for the Christmas holidays the year after my father died, I had not seen Walter for months; he wasn’t even allowed to write me. That night it was snowing heavily, and it was in the snow I saw them—a woman and a boy, struggling through the drifts. I caught only a glimpse of his face, so distorted with strain and anger, it was unrecognizable. When I reached the house I told her—my mother—that we must find them and offer them shelter, and that was when I learned the woman had been my father’s mistress, that she had come to her former friend asking for help and had been turned away. You heard what happened. She kept me locked in my room till the following day.
“Well, to make a long story short, there was no way I could trace them; I had no money and no power. Matters went from bad to worse after that night. I was about to go up to Oxford when I discovered she was arranging a marriage for me, with the vapid daughter of a local aristocratic imbecile—and then, like an answer to prayer, I inherited a small amount of money from one of my father’s cousins. It provided enough income to enable me to pursue my studies and take Walter away from his hellish school. For years he had been torn between his fear and dislike of her and what he considered his filial duty; she made it clear to him that he would have to choose between us, that if he came to me she would never see him or speak to him again. So that settled that.
“Much later I did make an attempt to mend matters.” He smiled at me, his blue eyes softening. “It was because of you and Ramses, Peabody; caring as I did for you, I thought perhaps she regretted losing her sons and would be willing to let bygones be bygones. I was wrong. She would not see me. She did not send for me in her last illness, though she knew how to find me. I heard of her death from her lawyers. They told me she tried with her last breath to keep me from inheriting, but she had only the income from her father’s money while she lived; in accordance with the patriarchal tradition, the capital went to her eldest son. I haven’t touched it. It is yours, Ramses, as is the house that has been in my father’s family for two hundred years. So if you are thinking of—er—settling down and—er . . . Well, you are now in a position to support a family.”
He looked hopefully from Ramses to Nefret. When the true state of affairs had dawned on my dear Emerson I could not be certain, but he would have to have been blind, deaf, and feeble-witted if he misinterpreted the nature of their affection now. Of course he would claim, as he always did, that he had known all along. There was one aspect of that relationship of which he was certainly unaware. Ramses would never have mentioned it to his father, and Emerson had not been present when Nefret broke down and confessed—finding, I hoped, a greater understanding than