Gunpowder Plot Read Online Free PDF Page A

her room and type up notes of what she could recall of Sir Harold’s discourse.
    She was halfway up the stairs when Lady Tyndall and Jack came out of the drawing room. They didn’t notice her.
    “Dearest,” Lady Tyndall was saying, “it’s not that I mind your being an engineer, if that will make you happy.” She turned and took his hands. “You know I only want you to be happy.”
    “I know, Mother.”
    “But I will hate your living so far away. I thought once you were finished with school and university, you’d come home for good.”
    “Coventry’s not far. Not much more than thirty miles. I’ll be able to buzz over at weekends.”
    “If your father will have you in the house. Oh Jack, I’ve never known him so angry!”
    “I’m still his only son. But if he does disown me, I can earn my living doing what I love instead of dying of boredom. You’ve no idea how I loathe the idea of spending my life worrying about pruning and late frosts and blossom rot and peach-leaf curl, if that’s what it’s called. If the worst comes to the worst, you can always come and visit me in Coventry. I say, doesn’t it strike you as rather funny?” Jack said gaily. “Instead of being sent to Coventry as a punishment, I’m being threatened with disinheritance if I go there.”
    Lady Tyndall burst into tears. “Jack, you’re such a child still,” she sobbed. “How can you know how you want to spend the rest of your life?”
    He hugged her. “Wait till I show you round the factory, Mother. You’ll see why I want to be part of it all. Maybe I’ll even be able to take you up in a ’ plane!”
    Daisy, though greatly tempted to linger and listen, had continued to tiptoe up the stairs and across the landing. She turned up the three steps into the passage and heard no more.

3
    A fter half an hour’s work, Daisy had enough historical background for her article, barring a sentence or two about the form of the celebration, if any, during the Great War. Though she hadn’t really listened, thinking back she heard an echo in her mind of Sir Harold saying they had dressed the guy as Kaiser Bill. She hoped so. It would be a nice touch.
    The article had to start with an explanation of the Gunpowder Plot for her American readers. No, first she’d quote “Please to remember . . .” and then go into the explanation.
    The baby started doing acrobatics. Daisy put her hand on her abdomen and felt its head, then an elbow or knee. Girl or boy? she mused. She didn’t really mind, and Alec claimed he didn’t, either. Belinda, her stepdaughter, wanted a little sister. Daisy missed Bel, who had chosen to go to boarding school with her friends instead of staying at home and attending a day school in London.
    Daisy loved Belinda dearly, but she could understand now that it might be even more difficult to let go of one’s own child, a child once carried in one’s own body. Lady Tyndall, after suffering the separation of school and university, had had every reason to expect Jack to come back to Edge Manor and stay. His home and the home of his ancestors awaited him. Yet he chose to follow his own dream, even if it meant renouncing his inheritance.
    Could Sir Harold legally disinherit him? Since he had threatened to do so, presumably the land was not tied up in trusts or entails or whatever it was that had caused Daisy’s family estate to revert to a distant cousin when her father and brother both died. Though the baronetcy would no doubt go automatically to Jack, he would be Sir John Tyndall of nowhere in particular. But who would end up with those rich orchards and market gardens?
    Not Babs, the logical person, if Sir Harold’s tirade meant anything. Adelaide’s older boy, perhaps? Reggie was at least a direct male descendant, though through the distaff side. Might the baronet require him to change his name to Tyndall and conveniently ignore the intervening female generation?
    A knock on the door interrupted Daisy’s reflections.