Patrick sat on the back porch of the house with Gwen and Liam, watching more members of the Blackstone family disembark from various yachts and ferries all afternoon. Liam held a pair of binoculars to his face while Gwen provided insight into each group of people heading up from the boathouse.

“That’s Bertie,” she said, nodding to a portly man with a huge walrus mustache. “Don’t mention golf, or he will talk your ear off, but he is hysterically funny. He can burp ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“Does he have a job?” Patrick asked.

Gwen thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. Neither does his son, Chester, who spends most of his time at the horse races.”

The sea breeze carried laughter up the cliffside, making Patrick uneasy. He had nothing in common with these well-heeled people of leisure. Ladies with parasols strolled across the lawn while clusters of men smoked cigars. They were all dressed in white! Patrick had never owned a white suit in his life. Such an impractical garment wasn’t part of a workingman’s wardrobe.

This was awful. He was underdressed and out of place. Everything was so much easier when he and Gwen were on the fire escape, but if they were to have a future, this was the family he would join. He needed to see if he could get along with them. He returned to listening to Gwen point out the new arrivals as they disembarked from the ferry.

“The little girl in the pink dress is Penelope-Arabella. She plays the harp and has a pet turtle. And there’s my cousin Edwin!” Gwen pointed to a slim young man wearing a white suit and a straw boater hat. He stood out from the others because of the cast on one leg, but he hobbled along with the help of a cane. Gwen proclaimed Edwin the most interesting of all her cousins, a man who traveled the world collecting rare antiques.

“After Edwin’s last trip, he showed me a jade funeral urn,” she said. “It’s two thousand years old and very rare.”

It was hard to keep these family members straight, especially all the elderly women. Frederick had five sisters, which accounted for the fragmentation of shares among their sons and grandsons, while Frederick’s only direct male heir, Oscar, had accumulated a disproportionate share.

“I guess there’s no more avoiding it,” Liam muttered as he stood, looking overly formal in the dark suit Gwen had insisted on buying him. He looked like he’d rather have a tooth pulled than meet the people heading toward them, but Gwen was serene as she performed the introductions.

“Look who has decided to join us for the lobster bake this year,” she teased, causing some polite laughter to ripple through the crowd.