Lord Deverill's Heir Read Online Free PDF Page B

There was a sudden new crispness to his voice, but she didn’t care. At last he was doing as she had bade him to.
    Lady Ann shifted gracefully in her chair and gazed from the corner of her eye toward the library door. She turned back, drew a determined breath, and straightened, her face straight forward, now looking neither to her left nor to her right.
    “. . . and to the faithful Deverill butler, Josiah Crupper, I bequeath the sum of five hundred pounds, with the hope that he will remain with the family until such time as . . .”
    He droned on and on, mentioning, it seemed to Arabella, the name of every servant in her father’s employ, both past, present, and future. How she itched for all of it to be over and done with.
    Mr. Brammersley paused in his reading, raised thoughtful eyes to Elsbeth, and allowed a tight smile to crease the corners of his mouth. His voice softened and he read more slowly, speaking very clearly and precisely,
    “To my daughter Elsbeth Maria, born of my first wife, Magdalaine Henriette de Trécassis, I bequeath the sum of ten thousand pounds for her sole and private use.”
    Well done of you, Father, thought Arabella. She turned at the gasp of surprise from her half-sister and saw her lovely dark almond eyes widen with disbelief, then with barely suppressed excitement. Ah, yes, it was very well done. Arabella had no idea why Elsbeth hadn’t been raised with her. She’d always trusted her father implicitly, and when he’d said simply that Elsbeth didn’t want to be here, that she preferred living with her aunt, she had believed him. And now he had left her a rich young lady. She was pleased.
    Mr. Brammersley chewed furiously at his lower lip, guiltily aware that he had violated a professional trust. But the final statement the earl had written about his gentle eldest daughter had seemed so malevolent, so unnecessarily cruel, that he could not bring himself to say the words.
    What had the earl meant in any case—“that she, unlike her whore of a mother and the rapacious de Trécassis family, will honestly and freely bestow this promised sum on her future husband.” Yes, what had the earl meant? No, he wouldn’t read that, not here, not now, not ever.
    Arabella pulled her attention back to Mr. Brammersley and waited, impatiently tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair. She assumed that now would come her father’s instructions for holding his estates in trust for her until her twenty-first birthday. She hoped her mother would be named her primary trustee. But she knew a profound sadness. There was no male relative to assume the title.
    George Brammersley looked down resolutely at the finely written script in his hands. Dash it all, he had to get it over and done with. He read, “My final wishes I have weighed with careful deliberation for the past several years. The conditions that I attach to them are binding and absolute. The seventh Earl of Strafford, Justin Everhard Morley Deverill, grandnephew of the fifth Earl of Strafford, through his brother, Timothy Popham Morley, is my heir, and I bequeath to him my entire worldly fortune, whose primary assets include Evesham Abbey, its land and rents . . .”
    The room spun. Arabella stared at Brammersley, his words hanging about her, but yet she couldn’t take them in, couldn’t make sense of them. The seventh Earl of Strafford? Some sort of grandnephew of her grandfather?
    No one had ever told her that any such grandnephew existed. God, there must be some sort of mistake. This man wasn’t even here. Surely there was no such male. Suddenly there was a stirring in her memory of the opening and closing of the library door. Almost reluctantly she turned in her chair and met the cool gray eyes of the man she had seen only that morning by the fishpond. Her absolute astonishment held her silent and still. He wasn’t a bastard, the wretched bastard wasn’t an actual bastard. He was real. It was all she could think of, all that made any sense