The funeral was a quiet occasion, with few in attendance and even fewer guests with whom the late Lady Mathilda Catherine Kensington could stand the company of whilst she was alive enough to voice such opinions.
A scarcity of tears were to be seen, of which the majority were cried by the occupants of the first few rows of black folding chairs. These were the guests who received invitations of expensive black stationery embossed in silver calligraphy one week prior; the others attending (who admittedly represented a strong majority of the crowd) had received grapevine invitations from behind secretive hands and hasty letters written in gossip infused ink.
This latter group had donned appropriate shades of funeral-black and were quite punctual in their arrival times, none of them strolling across the fastidiously manicured lawn of the graveyard any later than ten minutes to the hour. Some brought sleek black umbrellas on the chance that it rain later in the day, but others decided that the pewter grey sky looked too pale for any precipitation and instead favored bowler hats or elbow length gloves.
One thing this unconventionally invited party did have in common was their reason for taking the time to attend this small funeral on a Saturday morning in April for a woman none of them cared much for to begin with. You see, the late Lady Kensington was in possession of quite a large fortune at the time of her passing, and, having no surviving children or husband to claim the sum, it was not publicly known who would inherit the money. Any number of people could be willed it, and any number more (who were ambitious and persuasive enough) might yet see the old money of the Kensington family, even though many of them had more than enough of their own to be getting on with. But greed is as greed does, and none of them were willing to walk away from this opportunity to add several million pounds to their already considerable fortunes.
The former group, being friends or close acquaintances of the deceased, did their best to ignore the dry-faced blue bloods who stood behind the rows of chairs and waited patiently for the will to be read, which would not be until the end of the service.
One of the persons in attendance, however, seemed to fit comfortably into neither company. This particular young woman arrived at fifteen minutes till and sat in the back row of folding chairs, her crisp black invitation peaking out of a pocket in her belted, calf-length raincoat. She wore a pink-tinged orange scarf that was mostly hidden beneath a cascade of auburn hair so dark you could barely see the red at all, as well as grey fingerless gloves that matched the shade of the sky so precisely that they might have been cut from the clouds. She sat quietly throughout the funeral, but with none of the curious anticipation that plagued those standing behind her.
The identity of this mystery guest was inquired upon by a young man in the front row at her arrival, but none he asked had even the slightest idea who she was or how she had come by a proper invitation. (“Who, that pretty young thing? She looks as though she took a wrong turn somewhere and wandered in by mistake,” commented the late Lady Kensington’s lifelong gardener. “What, and just decided she’d pop into a funeral and hang about?” Retorted his wife, who quite enjoyed disagreeing with him.)
At the reading of the will, however, it became clear to all in attendance that the “pretty young thing” in the back row was Claretta Bishop, great niece of Lady Matilda Catherine Kensington, and heir to the large Kensington estates along with a sum of no less than 35 million pounds.
***a “laughing heir” is someone who is legally entitled to inherit from someone who has died, even though they are only distantly related, and therefore this person has no personal connection or reason to be upset over the death
No comments:
Post a Comment