Dear Trustee (2 page)

“Yes, miss. Certainly. Justice is always administered in public, as you might say,” the policeman said. “There’s an interesting libel case on now, if you like to look in. Up those stairs and first door on the right. If you’re lucky,” he craned his neck and looked up at the big clock, “you may hear Mr. Picton.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Picton. Gregory Picton. Very up and coming man, Mr. Picton.”

“I’m sure he is,” Cecile said, recalling the keen, comprehensive glance which the up and coming Mr. Picton had given her the evening before. And, with a lively sense of curiosity, she went up the stairs as directed.

Somehow, she had expected the court to be a huge place, and she was disconcerted to find that it was, in fact, so small and curiously intimate that, as she tiptoed to the front of the gallery, she felt like an intruder and an unpunctual one at that.

However, no one took any notice of her and, having slid into her seat, she looked down on the scene with immense interest.

Except for the Judge, unmistakable in his robes, the various personalities were a little difficult to identify at first. The person she took to be the defendant turned out to be no more than an unsatisfactory witness, and the defendant was presently identified as a distinguished and respectable-looking gentleman whose air suggested that he thought poorly of the proceedings.

To her disappointment, Gregory Picton was not to be seen. Until someone in a wig and gown rose to his feet with a deceptively casual air and she suddenly realized that this was he.

In her interest she leaned forward too far, and it was only with difficulty that she caught back her handbag which had been resting on the ledge in front of her. It seemed to her, in her mortification and fright, that she caused quite a stir as she scuffled to retain her bag. At any rate, as he looked round, Gregory Picton also took a moment to look up, and it seemed to Cecile that he looked straight at her.

She felt herself blush furiously, and she was certain that his unusually brilliant blue eyes narrowed considering for half a second, and that the faintest smile passed over his lips. Then he looked away again and began to address the Court.

Until that moment, Cecile had been sure that the defendant had an excellent case. Also that he had felt completely secure. But now the whole atmosphere of the Court began to change, and Cecile saw the defendant was listening with painful attention, rather than casual disdain, and she could discern a gleam of moisture on his face.

“I believe he’ll lose!” she thought. And the completeness of her conviction astonished and shocked her.

But it was when the cross-examination began that she realized how deadly the counsel for the plaintiff could be. In fact, in her own mind she couldn’t help thinking of him as “counsel for the prosecution”. Leaning negligently on one hand, he proceeded to ask a series of questions which seemed literally to peel layers of pretence from the wretched man in front of him.

There was nothing bullying about it. Only the questions followed each other, in that quiet, relentless voice, and somehow there was no dodging them—or the situation which they laid bare.

By the time Gregory Picton sat down again, the case was as good as over.

To Cecile there was something quite frightening in the fact that all this had been accomplished in a quiet, almost beautiful voice, with an air of considerable restraint. And she thought, “I should hate to be on the wrong side of Mr. Gregory Picton!”

The case was now moving to its close, and, glancing at her watch, Cecile decided she had better go, if she wanted to find somewhere to lunch before her appointment with Mr. Carisbrooke.

She rose silently to her feet. But the slight movement seemed to catch the attention of Gregory Picton. He glanced upward, and again she met that keen glance with a sensation that was curiously like a physical shock. Then she turned away and made her way quietly out of the gallery.

Both policemen had a smile for her as she passed them again, and the one at the street exit asked, “Did you hear Mr. Picton?”

“Yes. I did.”

“Pretty good, isn’t he?” The policeman spoke as though he were an actor. And perhaps, thought Cecile, in a way he was.

“Very good,” she agreed sedately. And then she went on her way to have lunch.

But she was excited, and even faintly apprehensive now, about her interview with the solicitor, so she ate little, and presented herself in excellent time at the offices of Carisbrooke, Carisbrooke and Hayter.

Here a grave and respectful senior clerk received her, conducted her to the office of Mr. Carisbrooke, and introduced her into the presence with a discreetly uttered, “Miss Bernardine to see you, sir.”

“Ah, come in, Miss Bernardine, come in.”

Mr. Carisbrooke, an austere, dignified, elderly gentleman, received her courteously, installed her in a large leather-upholstered armchair and then sat down again behind his desk and moved some papers about as though, thought Cecile in some astonishment, he were a trifle ill at ease.

“I was indeed sorry to hear of your father’s death, Miss Bernardine,” he said sincerely. “An old client and a valued one, I might say. But now—” he cleared his throat
—
“we have to consider
your
present position, which is, I am bound to tell you, a somewhat complicated one.”

“Is it?” Cecile was surprised, and looked it.

“Yes. There is, first, the question of your mother—”

“My mother?” Cecile was more than ever astonished. “But she died years ago, didn’t she?”

“Well—no. That isn’t quite correct,” said Mr. Carisbrooke, as though there might be degrees of being dead. “Not correct at all,” he amended. Then he sighed. “I am sorry your father never saw fit to explain the situation to you himself. But, in point of fact, your mother is alive.”

“She is—alive? And no one ever told me? But why not?” In the intensity of her feeling Cecile flushed and then paled.

Again Mr. Carisbrooke sighed.

“I am afraid your parents were deeply estranged for most of their married life. It is an old story, of course, and no useful purpose is ever served by reviving these melancholy disputes. I can only tell you that your father and mother were temperamentally quite unsuited, and that when you were only a few years old, your mother left home to—ah—pursue a stage career.”

“You mean she was—is—an actress? Here? In London?”

Mr. Carisbrooke inclined his head.

“In what are, I believe, called secondary roles,” he added somewhat austerely.

“But then—” suddenly a great lump came into Cecile’s throat and she had to swallow hard, “There is nothing to prevent my—my going to see her—making myself known to her?”

“Except the fact that your father very strongly believed you were better apart. He disapproved of her and her way of life.”

“Do you mean she was not—not respectable?”

“Oh, Miss Bernardine!” Mr. Carisbrooke was evidently horrified at being invited to make what he regarded as a slanderous statement. “I was not suggesting such a thing for one moment.”

“It sounded very much like it,” Cecile told him. “But, whatever my father’s reasons, he thought it better I should regard her as dead. How unfair!” And again, she flushed and paled.

“That was not how your father saw it.”

“But now—” she continued to pursue her own line of thought—“now I can make my own decisions, can’t I?”

“To a limited extent, yes.”

“Why only to a limited extent?” she asked quickly. “Am I not my own mistress now?”

“No, Miss Bernardine. Not entirely. Your father, foreseeing that on his death you would be very much alone, except for a mother he preferred to have kept at a distance, appointed three trustees to look after your affairs. And yourself,” he added as an afterthought.

“
Three
trustees?” Cecile, appalled, saw her new, attractive independence beginning to fade. “You mean—people who have a right to tell me what I must do and not do?”

“No, no.” Mr. Carisbrooke rejected this inaccurate reading of a trustee’s duties somewhat testily. “They have power to administer your financial affairs, possibly to decide on your place of residence and—”

“It’s more or less as I said,” Cecile interrupted resignedly. “Three of them! How dreadful. Who are they?”

“One is your aunt, Mrs. Coulter.”

“Oh,” Cecile became more cheerful, “that isn’t too bad.”

“Then there is Mr. Algernon Deeping, who—”

“Deeping;?” Cecile smiled and coloured suddenly. “I know
someone of that name. Maurice Deeping. He knew my father.”

“I believe this is his uncle,” Mr. Carisbrooke said. “But I must tell you that Mr. Algernon Deeping is elderly and in poor health. I doubt if he will take a very active part in your affairs.”

“Nor will Aunt Josephine, to tell the truth.” Cecile smiled, for she was beginning to feel that the trustees were not going to be such a hindrance to her as she had at first imagined. “I suppose, Mr. Carisbrooke, that you are the third trustee?”

“No, no.” Mr. Carisbrooke disclaimed the honour firmly. “Your father rightly chose someone well able to deal with any difficulty which might arise. The third trustee is Mr. Gregory Picton, the well-known Q.C.”

“Gregory Picton?” Cecile stared at Mr. Carisbrooke, absolutely aghast. “You can’t mean it! But how perfectly awful. Can’t we upset the trust or something?”

“Miss Bernardine, indeed we cannot!” Mr. Carisbrooke was almost equally aghast, in his turn. “And why should we? Mr. Picton is a most highly respected and admirable person.”

“He may be. But he’s a sarcastic sort of beast as well,” declared Cecile, who was in no mood to choose her words. “I’ve just been watching him tear strips off some poor wretch in Court.”

“Tear strips—” Mr. Carisbrooke’s eyes positively bulged. “You must be completely mistaken, I assure you!”

“Oh, no, I’m not. He was counsel for the prosecution or something. And he was perfectly frightful, in a quiet way, to the wretched accused. The man was left without a leg to stand on.”

“But, my dear Miss Bernardine,” Mr. Carisbrooke had found his way back out of the maze of modern metaphor, “it is not the business of the prosecution to make the defendant feel comfortable and at ease.”

“No, I daresay not. But there are ways and ways, aren’t there?”

Mr. Carisbrooke did not seem to think there were. He smiled drily. But he said, in a pacific tone of voice:

“Remember, you will not be in the same position as the defendant, Miss Bernardine. You are allowing your prejudices to run away with you. Your father knew and respected Mr. Picton highly.
He
felt that your interests would be safe in Mr. Picton’s hands.”

“But do you think my father was always right, Mr. Carisbrooke?” Cecile suddenly looked the solicitor full in the face.

“No one is always right, my dear,” Mr. Carisbrooke smiled.

“About my mother, for instance—do you think he was right to keep us apart all these years?”

“It isn’t really for me to say,” declared Mr. Carisbrooke, not sorry, Cecile thought, to get out of it that way.

“I suppose what I really meant was—will Mr. Picton think the situation right and try to maintain it?”

“In consultation with the other trustees—” began the solicitor. But Cecile shook her head and interrupted.

“No, no, Mr. Carisbrooke. You know
as well as I do that neither my Aunt Josephine nor this elderly Mr. Deeping will be specially emphatic either way. It will be Mr. Picton who will become virtually my guardian.”

“Trustee,” Mr. Carisbrooke corrected, and he winced slightly at this slipshod use of what he regarded as very exact terms.

“Trustee,” Cecile accepted the correction. “But I suppose that amounts to much the same thing in the end, doesn’t it? If he holds the purse strings, he can dictate more or less what I do.”

“Miss Bernardine, you have a most extraordinary idea both of a trustee’s powers and Mr. Picton’s attitude to a clearly defined legal position,” protested Mr. Carisbrooke severely. “What he, I mean the trustees,” he looked annoyed at his own slip, “will chiefly concern themselves with will be—”

He broke off as there was a tap on the door and the discreet elderly clerk insinuated himself into the room.

“Mr. Picton to see you sir,” he murmured respectfully. “And he asked me to say that as he has another appointment, he would appreciate it if you could see him right away.”

“Well,” Mr. Carisbrooke glanced doubtfully at his young client and away again, “all right. Ask Mr. Picton to come in.” Then, turning once more to Cecile, as the clerk withdrew, he said,

“I hadn’t quite covered all I wanted to say to you before Mr. Picton’s arrival, but I think we can finish the discussion with him here.”

Before Cecile could give her views on this, the door opened and the clerk ushered in Gregory Picton.

“Ah, Picton, good afternoon.” Mr. Carisbrooke rose and shook his visitor by the hand, with a nice mixture of elderly condescension and professional respect. “Miss Bernardine, this is Mr. Picton, one of your trustees.”

“How do you do,” said Cecile as formally as she could.

“Hello,” said Mr. Picton. “What did you think of the case this morning?”

“D-did you know that I was there?”

“Certainly. It is my business to know what is going on in Court when I am acting in a case.”

“But—in the public gallery?”

“In the public gallery too.” he assured her. “You’d be surprised how much one can learn from the occupants of the public gallery, eh, Carisbrooke?” He exchanged a smile with the solicitor. “The friends of the defendant often gather there, for instance.”

“I wasn’t a friend of the defendant!”
Cecile declared hastily.

“No, no.
You came to hear me, naturally. Wanted to inspect your new trustee at close quarters. Quite understandable.”

“I didn’t even know you were my trustee then,” Cecile retorted crisply, pleased to show Mr. Gregory Picton he could be wrong.

“You didn’t?” He seemed amused and interested. “Well, anyway, what did you think of the case?”

She looked at that handsome, imperturbable face, with its faintly amused smile, and some resentful instinct she could not have accounted for made her say, quite deliberately,

“I thought you were horrible.”

"You did?” He laughed. While Mr. Carisbrooke uttered the sound which is usually indicated by, “Tch, tch!”

“It seems the defendant did have a friend in the public gallery, after all,” observed Mr. Picton amusedly. “And that friend no less than my own new charge. Did you think there was a miscarriage of justice, then, Cecile?”

“I—No, I don’t think that,” she admitted.

“You feel morally certain the libel was false and malicious?”

“Ye-es.”

“But you think I was horrible—” he savoured the word with an amused appreciation which secretly infuriated her—“to make the libeller give himself away? You would have prefer
r
ed kindness and good manners to have been maintained, even at the expense of justice?”

“No, of course not.” She flushed again, at being pushed into a corner thus. “But since you insisted on asking me and quite obviously expected a compliment, I felt entitled to tell you that your methods were odious.”

“But effective?”

“Well—yes.” She was fair about that.

“Perhaps,” Mr. Carisbrooke cleared his throat, “since Mr. Picton’s time is short, we should revert to more personal matters.”

Privately, Cecile thought they could hardly have been more personal. But Gregory Picton immediately sat down—a little as though the place belonged to him, Cecile reflected resentfully—and, glancing at Mr. Carisbrooke, asked:

“Has Cecile been told of the situation?”

“I know about my mother,” Cecile interrupted quickly, and she looked her trustee in the eye with what
s
he hoped was self-confidence. “And I intend to see her as soon as possible.”

“You
have
seen her, my dear,” was the unexpected reply. “In the play last night. She was the slightly raffish friend of the heroine’s mother. In Act Two.”

“The—the tall woman in green?” Cecile went pale.

“Yes. You didn’t notice a marked likeness to yourself?”

“Why, no. Is there one?”

“Yes, certainly. That was how I guessed who you were when I saw you sitting in the row behind me. I thought you had found out about your mother somehow, and had come on purpose to see her.”

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Agitatedly Cecile tried to recall everything about the minor stage character who now had such personal interest for her, and rather defensively she exclaimed, “I thought she was wonderful in the part.”

“It was right up her street,” agreed Mr. Picton drily.

And, while Cecile was wondering just what he meant by that, Mr. Carisbrooke went on firmly:

“I have explained to Miss Bernardine the position with regard to you and your co-trustees. I have not, however, explained the—er—financial position.”