Twenty Past Four

Rowan Ashby had been told, in writing, by three separate solicitors, that he was not welcome at his grandfather’s funeral. So he waited until the last car had left the churchyard, and came to the will instead.

The Ashby Grand stood where it had always stood, on the headland above Porthcarrow, white as a wedding cake and about as sound in a storm. Below it the sea was the colour of pewter, heaving slowly against the rocks. Gulls hung on the updraught without moving their wings. He parked the rented car at the end of the drive and sat for a minute with the engine ticking, looking up at the terrace where, twelve years ago, his grandfather had told him to pack one bag and not come back.

He had been nineteen. Eleven thousand pounds had gone from the hotel safe over a bank holiday weekend, and only three people had the combination: the old man, his cousin Marcus, and Rowan. Marcus had been in Bristol, he said. Rowan had been at the boathouse with Delia Pryce, he said. And then Delia, white-faced in the drawing room, had said that no, she had gone home early that night. She had not seen him after nine.

That was all it took. One sentence, from the one person whose word he would have staked his life on. He had left the next morning on the first bus, and in twelve years he had built two restaurants in London and lost one, learned to sleep four hours a night, and never once let himself wonder why she had said it.

The front door was open. Nobody stopped him. The hall smelled the way it always had, of beeswax and wet coats and the salt that got into everything, and the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs had been stopped at twenty past four, the old way, for the dead. He stood beneath it a moment. Then he walked into the drawing room, and the conversation died as if someone had pulled a plug.

They were all there. Aunt Verity in black, upright in the wingback chair, her mouth drawn into a line so thin it looked stitched. Two cousins from Truro he barely remembered. Mr. Penrose, the solicitor, squaring papers at the card table with the air of a man who wished he were anywhere else. And by the window, one hand on the back of a chair as though he already owned it, Marcus.

Marcus had thickened. Good suit, bad colour in his face, the ease of a man who has been told for twelve years that he is the heir. “Ro,” he said, as if they had seen each other last week. “You shouldn’t have come.”

“I was invited.” Rowan held up the letter, Penrose’s letterhead at the top. “Apparently.”

Then he saw her.

Delia was sitting on the window seat, half in shadow, her hands folded in her lap. She wore a dark green dress and a wedding ring, and her hair was shorter than he remembered, cut close at the nape. She did not look away when he looked at her. That was new. At nineteen she had never been able to hold his eye when she was hiding something. Now she held it steadily, and what he saw there was not guilt, exactly. It was something closer to fear.

“Mrs. Ashby,” he said. He had not known it would come out that way until it did. Something flinched at the corner of her mouth. “Rowan.”

“If we might begin,” said Mr. Penrose, and cleared his throat, and began.

The first part went as everyone had expected. Bequests to staff. The cottage at Tregarrow to Verity. A painting to the church. The hotel, its lands and its debts, and there were debts, Rowan could hear them in the careful way Penrose read the figures, to Marcus Ashby, grandson, in recognition of his years of loyal service. Marcus let out a breath he had clearly been holding since the funeral. Verity nodded as though a hymn had ended correctly.

“There is,” said Penrose, “a codicil.”

The room went very quiet. Outside a gull cried, and the sash window rattled in its frame.

“Dated the fourteenth of last month. Witnessed and in order.” Penrose adjusted his glasses. “‘I, Edmund Ashby, being of sound mind, and having lately learned certain facts regarding the events of August twelve years past, revoke my bequest of the controlling share in the Ashby Grand Hotel Company and leave it instead to my grandson Rowan, with my apology, which is overdue. The particulars are in the sealed letter, to be given to him alone.’”

Penrose drew an envelope from his case. Cream paper, the old man’s heavy hand across the front: Rowan. Read this before you decide anything.

Marcus had gone the colour of the ash in the grate. “He was ill,” he said. “He was confused, he was on morphine. Penrose, you can’t seriously think—” Verity had a hand at her throat. One of the Truro cousins had begun, very quietly, to laugh.

Rowan took the envelope. It was heavier than a letter ought to be. Something stiff inside, a photograph perhaps, or a key. He could feel the whole room watching his hands.

Then Delia rose from the window seat and crossed between him and her husband on her way to the door, and as she passed, her fingers brushed his, and he felt the folded square of paper she left in his palm. He did not look down until she had gone. Four words, in the small upright hand he had once known better than his own: Boathouse. Eight. I’m sorry.

The clock in the hall was still stopped at twenty past four. Marcus was saying his name, louder now. The envelope was warm from his grip. He had perhaps a minute before someone in this room did something none of them could take back.