Old sins [antikvár]

PrologueLondon, May 1985Rosamund Emerson looked across the room at her stepmother and her father's mistress and decided he couldn't possibly have loved either of them.Not to have subjected them to this; to have insisted that they met, under these circumstances. She found the thought comforting.Just for a moment, just a brief moment, it was almost worth all her own pain, her sorrow that he had died, to witness theirs: and the added distress they were feeling by being forced to be in the same room, observing a degree of social nicety.They were sitting, the two of them, on either side of the heavy marble fireplace, in the first-floor boardroom of the family solicitors' office in Lincoln's Inn, both formidably quiet and still, neither looking at the other; occasionally Camilla would shift in her chair, and turn another page of the magazine she was reading (Ms, Roz noted with a stab of vicious amusement, such inappropriate reading for a mistress, so deeply symptomatic of Camilla's earnest American feminism) but Phaedria stared fixedly into the fire, almost unblinking; she seemed barely conscious.Roz felt an almost overpowering urge to go over and wave her hand in front of her face, to say 'boo'. This personification of grief, the latest of the many roles she had watched Phaedria play over the past two and a half years ranging from child bride to wronged wife, via media cult figure was probably, she thought, the most pathetic. She was doing it well though; as she had done all of them. God in heaven, why had her father not seen through her earlier? She sighed, her own unhappiness surfacing again, fiercer for the brief respite; the pain made her irritable, impatient. What the hell was going on? Why wasn't anything happening? Why did she bother being punctual, when half the family well, a good third of it still hadn't arrived? And what was Henry Winterbourne doing? He was so hopelessly inefficient; just because Winterbourne and Winterbourne had looked after the family since 1847 (when old Sir Gerald Winterbourne had offered his services to his friend Marcus Morell in settlement of a gambling debt) nobody ever seemed to question his tendency to behave as if Queen Victoria was still on the throne and his inability to recognize the close association between time and money. Well, Roz was about to question it, and to find herself a lawyer of her own: someone young,1