‘No, madam, the matter is listed for King’s Bench in September.’ I bade her sit, wondering again why she and her brother hated each other so. They were themselves the children of a merchant, a prosperous corn chandler. He had died quite young and their mother had remarried, their stepfather taking over the business, although he himself died suddenly a year later, upon which old Mrs Deborah Cotterstoke had sold the chandlery and lived out the rest of her long life on the considerable proceeds. She had never remarried, and had died the previous year, aged eighty, after a paralytic seizure. A priest had made her Will for her on her deathbed. Most of it was straightforward: her money was split equally between her two children; the large house she lived in near Chandler’s Hall was to be sold and the proceeds, again, divided equally. Edward, like Isabel, was moderately wealthy – he was a senior clerk at the Guildhall – and for both of them, their mother’s estate would make them richer. The problem had arisen when the Will came to specify the disposition of the house’s contents. All the furniture was to go to Edward. However, all wall hangings, tapestries and paintings, ‘of all description within the house, of whatever nature and wheresoever they may be and however fixed’, were left to Isabel. It was an unusual wording, but I had taken a deposition from the priest who made the Will, and the two servants of the old lady who witnessed it, and they had been definite that Mrs Cotterstoke, who though near death was still of sound mind, had insisted on those exact words.