“Let me see; we had finished your father’s funeral. Or had we finished? Does anything else occur to you that you think significant?”

“No. After the Bishop’s sermon, or eulogy or whatever it was, everything seemed to be much what one might have expected. He had so irrevocably transposed the whole thing into a key of fantasy, with his rhapsodizing on that irrelevant motto, that I went through the business at the cemetery without any real feeling, except wonderment. Then perhaps of the funeral people a hundred and seventy trooped back to the house for a final drink—a lot of drinking seems to go on at funerals—and stayed for a fork lunch, and when that was over I knew that all my time of grace had run out and I must get on with the job of the will.

“Beesty would have been glad to help me, I know, and Denyse was aching to see it, but she wasn’t in a position to bargain with me after the horrors of the morning. So I picked up copies for everybody concerned from my father’s solicitors, who were well known to me, and took them to my own office for a careful inspection. I knew I would be cross-examined by several people, and I wanted to have all the facts at my finger-tips before any family discussion.

“It was almost an anti-climax. There was nothing in the will I had not foreseen, in outline if not in detail. There was a great deal about his business interests, which were extensive, but as they boiled down to shares in a single controlling firm called Alpha Corporation it was easy, and his lawyers and the Alpha lawyers would navigate their way through all of that. There were no extensive personal or charity bequests, because he left the greatest part of his Alpha holdings to the Castor Foundation.

“That’s a family affair, a charitable foundation that makes grants to a variety of good, or apparently good, causes. Such things are extremely popular with rich families in North America. Ours had a peculiar history, but it isn’t important just now. Briefly, Grandfather Staunton set it up as a fund to assist temperance movements. But he left some loose ends, and he couldn’t resist some fancy wording about ‘assisting the public weal,’ so when Father took it over he gently eased all the preachers off the board and put a lot more money into it. Consequence: we now support the arts and the social sciences, in all their lunatic profusion. The name is odd. Means ‘beaver’ of course, and so it has Canadian relevance; but it also means a special type of sugar—do you know the expression castor-sugar, the kind that goes in shakers?—and my father’s money was made in part from sugar. He began in sugar. The name was suggested years ago as a joke by my father’s friend Dunstan Ramsay; but Father liked it, and used it when he created the Foundation. Or, rather, when he changed it from the peculiar thing it was when Grandfather Staunton left it.