Justice Hall - Laurie R. King [89]
Long-lived and late to breed, I noted. Fairly typical for aristocrats.
“But to go back to the fourth Duke’s generation. Lionel’s brother Charles died without issue. The third brother, Gervase, had two sons, William, born 1842, and Louis, in 1847. William is the father of Alistair, his sister Rose, and his brother Ralph; Louis had one son, Ivo Michael—your shooting companion of yesterday.”
“All right,” I said. I scribbled and crossed out names, finally arranging the relevant generations (that is, minus most of the women) into a family tree. That gave me the following:
After Marsh, the seventh Duke, the future line of succession would be: Lionel’s son Thomas; Alistair; Ralph; and Ivo. If Philip Peter had sons somewhere in South Africa, they would come after young Thomas and before Alistair; if Ralph had sons, they would come before Ivo. That no sons for Ralph were noted in the Bible meant little, since the latest date I could see recorded the death of a distant relative in 1910. Thomas’s birth in 1914 was missing, as well as those of Lenore and Walter Darling.
“We can do nothing about the boy Thomas until Wednesday,” Holmes noted. “I should like to have seen Gabriel Hughenfort’s last effects, had you not dragged me away with such haste. We must also enquire about the fifth Duke’s brother, Philip Peter, as well as Alistair’s brother Ralph.”
“Are you going under the hypothesis that yesterday’s shooting was an attempt to clear the succession?”
“The possibility cannot be ignored. See here: In January 1914, the sixth Duke—Henry—was alive and well, and could have made up the better part of a cricket team out of his heirs, with his brother Lionel’s wife expecting a child in the spring-time. By the end of 1918, heirs were getting a bit thin on the ground. The seventh Duke’s heir is this boy Thomas, who has some doubts attached to him. At the beginning of the War Alistair, to take one possible candidate, was seventh from the strawberry leaves; yesterday there appears to have been only that one doubtful boy between Alistair and Marsh’s title. When the seventh Duke and his immediate heir presented themselves in the close vicinity of a barrage of shotguns, well, temptation may have reared.”
“How ironic,” I mused, “that after all the hazards those two have weathered over the years, they would very nearly die on their own doorstep in peaceable England.”
“Tell me your impressions of Sidney Darling,” Holmes said, not interested in irony at the moment.
“Languid gentleman on the surface, modern-day robber baron underneath.”
“Even twenty years ago he’d have had to conceal the latter, if he wanted to move in the levels of society his wife’s name would open to him. Now, a little greed is looked upon as an amusing foible. O, saint-seducing gold!” he growled. “That for which all virtue is sold, and almost every vice.”
“War seldom enters but where wealth allures,” I retorted, figuring that Dryden was at least as apposite a misquotation as Shakespeare or Jonson. “And I don’t know that you could in the least call Darling a saint. His greed lies deep, and I think he’s sunk a fair bit of his own money into the stud, for one thing, and is worried about being suddenly left without a home.”
“Who came up with this boy, Thomas?” Holmes asked abruptly.
“According to what I’ve picked up, the mother herself wrote. She’d somehow heard of Henry’s death in the summer and sent her condolences—and, rather pointedly, those of the new duke’s nephew,