“It isn’t up to you,” Stephen retorted. He tried not to watch. He tried not to resent that grace. And couldn’t help it. The war had left him with half a foot. And this damned cane. Trenchfoot and gangrene, for God’s sake, not honorable wounds! No more long walks over the Downs, no more tennis, no more dancing, no more riding to hounds. He could still bowl at cricket, but awkwardly, terrified he’d lose his balance and fall flat on his face.

“All the same, Cormac’s right,” Rachel said. “I can’t imagine this place a museum. Livia would feel it was a betrayal.”

“Think of the cost,” Daniel added. “You’d need money for upkeep, repairs, staff. A trust of some sort. Olivia may have been famous, but she wasn’t that rich! In her own right, I mean.”

“We could afford it,” Stephen persisted. “Or perhaps the National Trust would be interested.”

“Not without a handsome endowment,” Cormac replied, stopping by the windows, his back to them. “It would take more than three quarters of your inheritance.”

“What are you saying? That we divide up the furniture— the sideboard for me, the piano for you, and who’s going to take the grandfather’s clock?—then sell the house and grounds? Pretend Olivia and Nicholas never existed, that the family—what’s left of it—doesn’t care?” Stephen was steadily losing his temper.

“You want a museum to your own memory, not hers,” Susannah said suddenly. “It’s your immortality you’re thinking about, don’t pretend it isn’t!”

“Mine?”

“Yes, yours! The war’s changed you, Stephen—and not for the better. Oh, I’ve heard you at dinners since she was found out, simpering when someone asks who the love poems were written about. You think it’s you, her darling, her favorite!” There was heavy sarcasm in her quiet voice. He’d been Mother’s favorite too. He was Susannah’s twin—and always so much more than her equal.

“Well, what if they were written about me? I’ve as much right as any of you to think what I please. You’re greedy, that’s what it is, wanting the money, wanting every penny you can squeeze. And that’s why she left her literary estate to me. A pity she didn’t include the house as well!”

“Who died last?” Rachel put in diffidently, not sure she wanted to know. “If it was Nicholas, then it’s his will we’re haggling over, not hers.”

“They were the same. Everything to each other, and if that failed, the poems to Stephen, and the house to the four survivors, jointly,” Cormac told her over his shoulder. There was no resentment in the level voice that he hadn’t been included.