The Belting Inheritance Read Online Free Page B

matter of weeks of each other.
    “She shut herself up for two weeks, and she never ate or drank in all that time. And when she did come out, her hair that was black with just a few streaks of grey in it, had turned pure white.”
    That turning of the hair white, which looks slightly comic and implausible now that I put it down on paper, impressed me greatly at the time. Stephen and Clarissa had no children, and I think it was partly for this reason that Lady W “adopted” me. I put the word in inverted commas because there was no actual adoption, nor any firm arrangement ever made about my position. If she had got tired of me she could, I suppose, have cast me out, although I am sure she would never have been guilty of that inhumanity. She was a possessive and lonely woman, and in many ways far from an admirable one, but she was never anything but kind to me. I suppose she enjoyed being able to talk to me about Hugh and David, as she did during school holidays, when I helped her with research into the Egyptian Wars. This “research” – the word again deserves inverted commas – was carried out in the Map Room (or as Uncle Miles called it the Pam Moor), a bleak cold room with a north light, which had spread out over the floor a great panorama of the positions at Tel-el-Kebir. There was a large expanse of sand, there were Arabi’s encampments, there were all the preparations made for Wolseley’s decisive night attack. General Wainwright had managed to buy a big collection of Victorian lead soldiers and guns that were approximately of the right regiments (Arabi’s troops, I’m afraid, were of a motley kind, but there were a great many of them), and the whole layout really looked very fine. It was a thing to delight the heart of a boy, and I spent hours with the panorama, imagining possible moves that might have been made by either side. Battle prints of the Crimean War looked down upon me, and so did sketches and photographs of General Wainwright, a mild and even gentle-looking man.
    My job in the Pam Moor, which was what I called it to myself and to Uncle Miles, was to help Lady W collate the material gathered by her husband in several large boxes, and added to by her. If only she had somebody to organise the thousands of notes in those boxes and put them into proper card index form, she told me, she would be able to finish the book. When I came to work on them, however, I found that the notes were for the most part no more than casual jottings, and that she had not done any work on them for years. What she really wanted was to pour out her feelings about her two dead sons, and she did so to me in that cold, ghostly room, her face alight with eagerness, her dark eyes burning, and the white hair piled like a pyramid above her head. It was David who had helped his father make the Tel-el-Kebir panorama, and David who had made the great battle map that half covered one wall, a map which General Wainwright had said was the best thing of its kind that he had ever seen. Hugh, I gathered, had been more active, he had set up the shooting range I had found at the back of the stables, and had also made an obstacle course I discovered, a course of which the only remaining relics were bits of old pipe for crawling through and a few broken hurdles. David, it seemed to me, had been the arty one, Hugh the sportsman. When I put this idea to Lady W, however – she sat perched on a sort of dais in the Pam Moor and listened to my questions as I sorted out papers and notes – she received it with a frown.
    “They were both artists. We are an artistic family. David was a poet, Hugh was a playwright. Are you interested in books, would you like to write?” I said that I would, although I had no idea about it, because I sensed that this was the proper answer. I asked whether Hugh’s plays had been successful, and she said sharply that they had not been performed. “Producers are very difficult. But they were both wonderful boys, they