The Lorimer Legacy Read Free

while to explain, though, how in one way they were the same.
    â€˜William and Ralph are both very hard-working,’ she told her ward. ‘Able men, and ambitious too, in their different ways. William has put all his energies intorunning a business, and he has been wonderfully successful. Being well established before our father died, he was very quick at that time to seize every opportunity to increase his fortune. Ralph was only a schoolboy then, when Lorimer’s Bank collapsed. He saw the crash as a judgement on the family for the years of slave-trading which brought us our wealth. That was why, as soon as he was old enough, he chose to go out to Jamaica as a missionary. But as far as I can tell from his letters and Lydia’s, he seems to have taken charge of a congregation which was debilitated and unemployed and achieved a miracle by turning his parish into a thriving agricultural community. I hardly understand how he has done it, but clearly he must be as good a manager as William. What they each inherited was an insistence on being at the head of their own affairs, and a determination to succeed. My father had both these qualities to a very marked degree.’
    â€˜And you?’ asked Alexa. ‘What about you?’
    â€˜If I seem less successful, you must remember that I started from a lower level of expectation. I was brought up as a rich man’s daughter, with everything provided for me. And might have expected to marry young and simply to move from one gentleman’s care to another. To carry me through a medical training I needed the same will to succeed that I have just been describing in William and Ralph – and I had to face much more opposition than they did. I confess that I have been less ambitious since I qualified, but I still share my brothers’ liking for independence. To manage my own household seems as much of a triumph to me as the running of a plantation is to Ralph, or of a shipping line to William. So you see, we all enjoy a fair inheritance.’
    â€˜I wish I could have shared it,’ said Alexa. There was a touch of envy in her voice. For a moment Margarethesitated, wondering whether to take this opportunity of telling Alexa something about her own parentage. But it was not a subject to be approached without preparation. The turn of the conversation had taken her by surprise and she had not had time to think what she might want to say and how it would be best to say it. She stood up and looked her father in the eye again.
    â€˜You were right, Alexa, to think that John Junius Lorimer should not be condemned to cobwebs for ever,’ she said. ‘I hope that as you practise you will find him an appreciative audience.’
    Even as the door closed behind her, she heard the sound of the piano begin again. It seemed a good moment to dispel any remaining suspicions about Alexa’s explorations. She hurried to the top of the house. The attics there were designed to accommodate a far larger domestic staff than Margaret could afford to maintain, and in one of the unused rooms was concealed the only treasure which Elm Lodge contained. It might have been wiser to entrust it to the strongroom of a bank, but Margaret had good reason to be suspicious of banks, and she had no fear of burglars. All the villagers knew that their doctor often had as much trouble as themselves in finding one penny to rub against another.
    Her anxiety proved to be unfounded. The cupboard was securely locked, and when she unfastened it with the key she wore round her neck, the dust lay undisturbed on the old newspapers which she had piled high to conceal the box.
    Margaret opened it and stared in silence at the black leather case whose contents had been the cause of so much trouble to the family, and to herself in particular. It was true enough, as the careful framing of her answer had suggested to Alexa, that her father had left nomaterial inheritance to any of his three legitimate