Ivy Tree by Mary Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

us."
    I watched the ash from my cigarette float and fall towards the waste-basket. I didn't look at her. I said at length, with no expression at all: "You want me to go to Whitescar. As Annabel Winslow." She leaned back. The basket chair gave a long, gasping creak like a gigantic breath of relief. It was obvious that she had taken my apparent calmness for compliance.
    "Yes," she said, "that's it. We want you to come to Whitescar ... Annabel." I laughed then. I couldn't help it. Possibly the laughter was as much the result of taut nerves as of the obvious absurdity of her proposal, but if there was a suggestion of hysteria in it, she took no notice. She sat quite still, watching me with that expression which, suddenly, I recognised. It was the look of someone who, themselves uninvolved, coolly assesses a theatrical performance. She had all this time been weighing my looks, my voice, my movements, my reactions, against those of the Annabel Winslow of whom she knew so much, and whom she and her brother must have spent the greater part of the last three days in discussing. I felt some nerve tighten somewhere inside me again, and deliberately relaxed it. My laughter died. I said:
    "Forgive me, but it sounded so absurd when it finally got put into words. It— it's so theatrical and romantic and impossible. Impersonation— that old stuff? Look, Miss Dermott, I'm sorry, but it's crazy 1 You can't be serious!"
    She said calmly: "It's been done."
    "Oh, yes, in stories. It's an old favourite, we know that, from the Comedy of Errors on. And that's a point, too: it may be all right in books, but on the stage* where one can see, and still one's supposed to be deceived, it's absurd. Unless you do really have identical twins... or one person plays both parts."
    "That," said Miss Dermott, "is the whole point, isn't it? We have got identical twins. It could be done."
    "Look at it this way," I said. "It's something, you say, that has been done. But, surely, in much simpler times than these? I mean, think of the lawyers, handwriting, written records, photographs, and, if it came to the point, police . .. oh, no they're all too efficient nowadays. The risks are too great. No, it belongs in stories, and I doubt if it's even readily acceptable there any more. Too many coincidences required, too much luck . . . That vein was worked out with The Prisoner of Zenda and The Great Impersonation. Pure romance, Miss Dermott."
    "Not quite worked out," she said, on that note of soft, unshaken obstinacy. "Haven't you read Brat Farrar, by Josephine Tey? You couldn't say that was 'pure romance*. It could have happened."
    "I have read it, yes, and it probably is the best of them all. I forget the details, but doesn't Brat Farrar, who's the double of a boy that's dead, go to the family home to claim a fortune and an estate? I agree, it was wonderfully convincing, but damn it, Miss Dermott, it was a story. You can't really do that sort of thing and get away with it! Real life is—well, it's not Brat Farrar, it's the Tichborne Case, and Perkin Warbeck. I forget just what the Tichborne Claimant got, but poor Perkin—who in fact may have been just what he claimed to be—got chopped."
    "The Tichborne Case? What was that?"
    "It was a cause celebre of the eighties. A certain Roger Tichborne had been presumed drowned; he was heir to a baronetcy and a fortune. Well, years later a man turned up from Australia claiming to be Roger Tichborne—so convincingly that to this day there are people who still think he was. Even Roger Tichborne's mother, who was still alive, accepted him." "But he didn't get the estate?"
    "No. The case went on literally for years, and cost thousands, and pretty well split the country into two camps, but in the end he lost it. He got a prison sentence. That's the real thing, Miss Dermott. You sec what I mean?"
    She nodded. Arguing with her was like battering a feather pillow. You got tired, and the pillow stayed just the same. "Yes, of course.