Free Heathersleigh Homecoming by Michael Phillips Page A

on the cloth-domed roof above him made him pensive, as it often did. Solicitors dealt in facts, of course. His profession had forced him to be more pragmatist than philosopher. Yet his was a far more reflective nature than either father or uncle, from whose combined shares he had inherited sixty-three percent of the firm that twice bore his name, appearing as bookends on the sign painted in black and gold on the window looking out upon the heart of Exeter’s business district.
    The will he had just read—to the silent stares and sniffles of a small room of black-clad mourning nephews and cousins and aunts and one very aged great-great-grandmother—had put him in an even more somber mood than usual. He did not know the family, longtime residents of the city. Yet the mere setting unnerved him.
    He did not like reading wills. It was an aspect of his duty he would just as soon do without. Probably not unlike officiating funeral services for those of the clerical profession, he mused. He wondered if ministers and vicars and priests enjoyed their death-business any better than he did his. He ought to ask one sometime.
    The two ideas—the will executed by his firm, and curiosity concerning thoughts of ecclesiastics at funerals—gradually merged in his mind as he turned onto High Street. How exactly the progression of ideas followed one upon the other he could not have said. But before long he found himself thinking about the old woman fromthe country who had visited him several days ago with her strange business.
    He had drawn up a will for her too, although he yet had a little more research to do into the legalities of the terms specified on the deed, to see whether she indeed possessed legal right of bequeathal in the peculiar affair. He had thought of her on and off ever since and had not been quite able to get her out of his mind.
    Why did memory of her visit strike a clerical chord of recognition in his brain? Something had been gnawing at him, something he seemed to be forgetting out of the distant past . . . something important.
    The old deed with its peculiar terms . . . yes, there was a bishop involved. That must be the connection between clerics and wills that set him off on today’s rainy, philosophical ramble.
    Clerics and wills . . . hmm . . .
    No, something else was pricking at his brain, from farther back in memory. The fellow’s name from the woman’s deed . . . what was it . . . somehow it rang a faint bell . . . but from where? Clerics and wills . . . what was the connection?
    Crumholtz reached the front door to his office when suddenly a flash of mental light stopped him in his tracks.
    Crompton!
    Of course! It was the name on that envelope from years ago that his uncle had been given, to be opened on some occasion or another. He remembered his uncle’s instructions when he told him about it. An altogether peculiar business.
    He stepped under the awning, lowered his umbrella, and hurried past his secretary and into his office, his curiosity now aroused. He went straight to the safe containing such unique documents for which the firm was responsible and proceeded to open it.
    Five minutes later he sat with the three documents in his hands, the will he had been asked to draw up, and the two sealed letters. He had been puzzling over them for several minutes. Strange that after all this time, suddenly into his office would walk the very heir that the instructions concerning the old document from 1856 had apparently foretold. Whatever contents this sealed envelope held, he remained legally bound, as had been his uncle and father before him, not to open it until the prescribed conditions were fulfilled, if such a time ever came at all. That it now seemed to be approaching with that very woman’s advancing years, he was all but certain.
    Did she have a premonition of what was in the envelope? he wondered. Did