Free By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs by Antoinette Stockenberg Page A

by the demonstration,
looked even younger than his thirty years. He smiled a slightly
lopsided smile and said, "Gee, I dunno. Become an astronaut?"
    There was general laughter and he said, "One
last question."
    It came from a widely known and respected
television journalist who was himself a keen sailor. "Alan, do you
think the Americans have a snowball's chance in hell against the
Australian winged keel?" he asked somberly.
    "Yes," Seton answered with an ambiguous
smile. Then he stood up, said, "Thank you very much," turned, and
walked quickly away from the podium toward a rear exit. For a few
seconds the press, caught off guard, remained where it was. Then it
split as if by design into two groups: the first took off for
Seton, hounds after the hare. The second raced to report their
stories, convinced there was nothing more to be had from Seton.

Chapter 5
     
    So that's that, Mavis thought as she
slipped out with the second wave. Really, it was drearily like a
presidential primary campaign. One misstep and you were out, never
mind how good you were. Destiny had stuck her foot out in front of
Alan Seton, and he had tripped and fallen on his aristocratic nose.
The great-grandson of a British peer. Well, well.
    A hulking bulldozer of a reporter was
elbowing his way furiously through the crowd, and his upper arm
shoved into Mavis's left breast.
    "Watch where you're going, you fool!"
she snapped, enraged.
    His eyes widened. "Lady, lady—take it easy.
I'm sorry," he exclaimed, and kept moving, with a fellow reporter
bringing up the rear. "I'm not, really," he said in a stage whisper
to his buddy. "She had great tits."
    Mavis Moran didn't believe in blushing, but
that was exactly what she was doing now. Not because of the uncouth
remark; but because in one of those well-formed breasts she had
discovered, a week earlier, a lump. Not a big lump; no need to
panic; it was most likely only a cyst. She'd had them before. But
it was still ... a lump. She would wait until after her period and
then if it hadn't gone away, she'd see about ... the lump. Part of
her wanted to race immediately to her gynecologist. The other part
of her despised her fearfulness.
    Her fear at that moment was not of death or
of pain, because she was only thirty-two, and she was stoic. No,
her dread was much more irrational than that: she feared
mutilation. The thought that some future bulldozer might bump into
a prosthesis instead of her warm, real flesh filled Mavis Moran, an
heiress who could probably pay for a new wing on Sloan-Kettering,
with horror. And fury. It seemed impossible to her that despite her
intelligence and wealth, there were situations which she could not
control. Mavis was scrupulous about diet and nutrition, exercised
religiously, kept abreast of trends in life extension. So why the
lump ?
    Heredity, she supposed. That was where the
cyst, if it was a cyst, came from, and where her Irish fatalism
came from. She had a sudden, vivid memory of her grandmother, Tess
Moran, a woman who was a great beauty in her day, a woman of
indomitable will and daunting intelligence—and a woman felled with
a limp that Mavis knew was from a gunshot wound. Was her
grandmother bothered by the fact that she could not carry herself
with the same poise as other great beauties of her era? Not that
anyone could see.
    Mavis was thrown back to a beautiful summer
evening at Beau Rêve, her grandmother's estate. She was six or
seven, playing on a big granite boulder on the edge of the lawn
that legend had it was hurled from the sea in the great storm of
1815. Mavis slipped and fell, scraping her leg and hitting her knee
hard enough that she limped, crying, to her grandmother, who was
seated on the veranda with Doctor Whitman, her oldest friend,
having tea. Doctor Whitman looked Mavis over and pronounced her
well enough to have ice cream for dessert. The two grownups
exchanged sudden, sad smiles, Mavis remembered, and her grandmother
said, "It's been nearly ten years, and