Free The Weaver's Inheritance by Kate Sedley Page A

hissed and sputtered among the flames.
    ‘Do you believe him,’ I asked, ‘or do you think he just wants to frighten you and force you into accepting this man?’
    Alison kneaded her hands together in her lap. ‘Oh yes, he’s done it! The lawyer was leaving just as we arrived. But he’s signed his own death warrant.’
    ‘Oh come!’ I protested with more confidence than I felt. ‘You mustn’t think like that. No one in his right senses would risk doing away with a benefactor who has just left him all his worldly goods. If the Alderman were to die suddenly now, the finger of suspicion would point directly at the one who stands to gain the most.’
    Alison glanced scornfully at me. ‘Of course he wouldn’t do anything immediately! Even I don’t suppose the man’s that much of a fool. But my father is a very sick man: anyone can see that he hasn’t long to live. It wouldn’t need much cunning for either the wretch himself or his partner to help my father out of this life without arousing too many misgivings.’
    ‘When you say his partner…’ I was beginning, but she cut me short.
    ‘He’s bound to have one, isn’t he?’ Her tone was impatient. ‘He can’t be as well-informed as he is without having been primed by someone who knows the family. It stands to reason.’
    ‘Unless he really is your brother,’ I suggested tentatively, braving her wrath.
    But she didn’t fly at me as I had expected. She merely said flatly and with complete conviction, ‘This man isn’t Clement.’
    ‘How can you be so sure?’
    Alison hunched her thin shoulders. ‘Clement and I grew up together: there wasn’t a great difference in our ages. We were close.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I repeat, this man is not my brother.’
    In the face of such conviction I felt there was probably nothing I could say to persuade her otherwise, but I had to try in case she should be wrong.
    ‘Is there anything you could ask him to which only your brother would know the answer?’ I suggested. ‘A secret, perhaps, which you and Clement shared as children?’
    Her lips curled. ‘I have no intention of wasting my time on the creature. As William says, I should demean myself by giving even the slightest hint that I take his claim seriously.’
    It was not for me to point out that such blind prejudice had already done her and her husband a great disservice in her father’s eyes, probably costing them the remaining half of Alison’s inheritance. I also suspected that the greater intransigence they displayed, the more entrenched became the Alderman’s belief that Clement had been miraculously restored to him. The Burnetts had mismanaged a delicate situation from the start, with William goading his stubborn wife into direct opposition to her obstinate father, when a little sympathy and understanding might have given them ascendancy over the old man’s mind.
    ‘Are you quite sure,’ Alison asked me, ‘that you never saw Clement’s body?’
    ‘As certain as I’m sitting here now.’ I leaned forward, my elbows resting on my knees, and stared earnestly into her face. ‘I could only guess at the fate of your brother and all the others who had disappeared from that inn, by what happened to myself. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that one of the victims couldn’t have survived. And this young man, so my mother-in-law tells me, says that a blow to his head robbed him of his memory for the next six years. I suppose that could be possible. I’m not a physician, but the Infirmarian at Glastonbury Abbey did once tell me the Greek word for such forgetfulness. I can’t recall it at the moment, but it shows that the condition exists.’
    I might as well have talked to the wall: Alison Burnett remained totally unconvinced.
    ‘You found Clement’s tunic,’ she accused me. ‘Some beggar was wearing it. If my brother wasn’t dead, how did this man get hold of it?’
    I sighed. ‘Your brother could have been stripped while he lay