Free A Change of Heir by Michael Innes Page A

Except, of course, in moderation, and to the good poor. At Bruton, however, it is very doubtful whether we any longer have good poor. People are either not poor, or not good. So the question does not arise. Nicholas, pray mark this.’
    Gadberry did his best to look like one who marks this. In point of fact, he wasn’t at all sure that he would much care to live up to this particular family motto. If he came into enormous wealth – enormous wealth even after the real Nicholas Comberford had received his whack – he would probably find it rather fun to give away quite a lot of money in various odd ways. The Bruton fortune was already coming to strike him as oppressive. Perhaps it was some sense of this that had motivated the real Nicholas to initiate his extraordinary deception; he wanted money without the feeling of being bludgeoned by it.
    There was something alarming, Gadberry told himself, in his own intermittent tendency to go motive-hunting in this way on the real Nicholas’ behalf; it touched off in him an obscure sense that the play in which he had been given so prominent a role was one that he didn’t really have the hang of. But that way panic lay, and to avoid it he plunged abruptly into conversation with Miss Bostock on his left. In any case it was time that he had put up a little civil conversation to Aunt Prudence’s companion.
    ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Would you agree that we have no good poor on the landscape?’
    ‘I regard myself as most definitely in that category. I have no fortune. A settled amiability is my sole balance in the bank, and sometimes I feel I shall overdraw on it.’ Miss Bostock, who went in for this astringent note in her conversation with Gadberry, gave him a steady look. ‘Perhaps you have some fellow feeling for me in this?’
    ‘I don’t know that I have much amiability,’ Gadberry said. ‘But what I have I don’t feel any drain upon. It’s been wonderful coming back to Bruton, you know. I have always loved it.’ He had decided long ago that ingenuousness of this sort was the safest line with Miss Bostock. ‘Particularly in winter,’ he added rather at random.
    ‘You surprise me. It has been my impression that when you ceased to be of an age to be despatched here involuntarily your visits became infrequent. Is that inaccurate?’
    ‘No, I think you are quite right.’ Gadberry inwardly cursed the woman. She was coming to trail her coat quite a lot in this fashion. She realised, no doubt, that there wasn’t much future for her at Bruton now. ‘Young men are often shockingly undutiful. And, of course, I had all sorts of irons in the fire.’
    ‘You still have one or two, I imagine.’
    Gadberry made no reply. He simply smiled, as if Miss Bostock’s last remark had been a particularly pleasant one. In fact she was clearly telling him that she judged him to be a schemer and a parasite. And this, when one thought of it, was odd. It was true in a way. But it wasn’t a truth that Miss Bostock could have any real glimmer of.
    At least he could, for the moment, stop talking to the woman. So he turned to Mrs Pollock on his right, and prepared to say something to her. But Mrs Pollock, as it happened, spoke to him first.
    ‘Mr Comberford,’ Mrs Pollock asked, ‘do you often see the Master now?’

 
     
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    Gadberry was so taken aback by this question that for a moment he supposed Mrs Pollock to have addressed him under the influence of religious enthusiasm, and to be directing her curiosity upon the privacies of his devotional life. Then he realised that this wasn’t the state of the case at all; that the conversation had remained decently secular; and that the person thus alarmingly imported into it simply enjoyed, for one reason or another, the right to the designation Mrs Pollock had applied to him. And Gadberry’s alarm had two occasions. He had been addressed during a lull in the not particularly lively talk that Mrs Minton’s dinner-table