Around the walls of discolored brocade hung portraits of ancestors, Montroses and Monteagles, Farquhars and Frazers, Murrays and Mintoes. Surely such a gathering could not be the ancestors of one old woman? Still, you never knew, with the Scots.

Bigger than them all, in a vast frame above the fire that clearly was never lit, stood a man in a kilt, a painting evidently much more recent than the other blackened antiques, but still discolored by age. The face, framed by two bristling ginger muttonchop whiskers, glared down into the room as if its owner had just spotted a coolie impudently collapsing from overwork at the other end of the plantation. “Sir Ian Macallister, K.B.E.,” read the plate beneath the portrait.

Martin Thorpe dragged his eyes back to Lady Macallister, who was slumped in a chair, fiddling as she constantly did with the hearing aid that hung on her chest. He tried to make out from the mumblings and ramblings, sudden digressions, and difficult accent, what she was saying.

“People have come before, Mr. Martin,” she was saying; she insisted on calling him Mr. Martin, although he had introduced himself twice. “But I don’t see why I should sell. It was my husband’s company, don’t you see. He founded all these estates that they make their money from. It was all his work. Now people come and say they want to take the company away and do other things with it—build houses and play around with other things. I don’t understand it all, not at all, and I will not sell—”

“But Lady Macallister—”

She went on as if she had not heard him, which indeed she had not, for her hearing aid was up to its usual tricks because of her constant fiddling with it. Thorpe began to understand why other suitors had eventually gone elsewhere for their shell companies.

“You see, my dear husband, God rest his poor soul, was not able to leave me very much, Mr. Martin. When those dreadful Chinese killed him, I was in Scotland on furlough, and I never went back. I was advised not to go. But they told me the estates belonged to the company, and he had left me a large part of the company. So that was his legacy to me, don’t you see. I could not sell his own legacy to me …”

Thorpe was about to point out that the company was worthless, but realized that would not be the right thing to say. “Lady Macallister—” he began again.

“You’ll have to speak directly into the hearing aid. She’s deaf as a post,” said Lady Macallister’s companion.

Thorpe nodded his thanks at her and really noticed her for the first time. In her late sixties, she had the careworn look of those who once had their own independence but who, through the strange turns of fortune, have fallen on harder times and to survive have to put themselves in bond to others, often to cantankerous, troublesome, exhausting employers whose money enables them to hire others to serve them.

Thorpe rose and approached the senile old woman in the armchair. He spoke closer to the hearing aid.

“Lady Macallister, the people I represent do not want to change the company. On the contrary, they want to put a lot of money into it and make it rich and famous again. We want to start up the Macallister estates, just like when your husband ran them. …”

For the first time since the interview had started an hour before, something like a glimmer of light awoke in the old woman’s eyes. “Like when my husband ran them?” she queried.

“Yes, Lady Macallister,” bawled Thorpe. He pointed up at the figure of the tyrant on the wall. “We want to create all his life’s work again, just the way he would have wanted it, and make the Macallister estates a memorial to him and his work.”

But she was gone again. “They never put up a memorial to him,” she quavered. “I tried, you know. I wrote to the authorities. I said I would pay for the statute, but they said there was no room. No room. They put up lots of statutes, but not to my Ian.”

“They will put up a memorial to him if the estates and the company become rich again,” Thorpe shouted into the hearing aid. “They’ll have to. If the company was rich, it could insist on a memorial. It could found a scholarship, or a foundation, called the Sir Ian Macallister Trust, so that people would remember him.”

He had already tried that ploy once, but no doubt she had not heard him or had not grasped what he was saying. But she heard him this time.

“It would cost a lot of money,” she quavered. “I am not a rich woman.” She was in fact extremely rich, but probably unaware of it.

“You don’t have to pay for it, Lady Macallister,” he said. “The company would pay for it. But the company would have to expand again. And that means money. The money would be put into the company by my friends.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she wailed and began to sniff, reaching for a cambric handkerchief in her sleeve. “I don’t understand these things. If only my dear Ian were here. Or Mr. Dalgleish. I always ask him what would be for the best. He always signs the papers for me. Mrs. Barton, I’d like to go back to my room.”

“It’s time enough,” said the housekeeper-companion brusquely. “Now come along, it’s time for your nap. And your medicine.”

She helped the old woman to her feet and assisted her out of the sitting room and down the corridor. Through the open door Thorpe could hear her businesslike voice commanding her charge to get onto the bed, and the old woman’s protests as she took the medicine.

After a while Mrs. Barton came back to the sitting room. “She’s on the bed, she’ll rest for a while,” she said.

Thorpe smiled his most rueful smile. “It looks as if I’ve failed,” he said sadly. “And yet, you know, the stock she holds is quite valueless unless the company is rejuvenated with fresh management and some hard cash, quite a lot of it, which my partners would be prepared to put in.” He turned to the door. “I’m sorry if I put you to inconvenience,” he said.

“I’m quite used to inconvenience,” said Mrs. Barton, but her face softened. It had been a long time since anyone had apologized for putting her to trouble. “Would you care for a cup of tea? I usually make one at this hour.”

Some instinct at the back of Thorpe’s mind prompted him to accept. As they sat over a pot of tea in the back kitchen, which was the housekeeper-companion’s domain, Martha Thorpe felt almost at home. His mother’s kitchen in Battersea had not been dissimilar. Mrs. Barton told him about Lady Macallister, her whining and tantrums, her obstinacy and the constant strain of competing with her all-too-convenient deafness.

“She can’t see all your fine arguments, Mr. Thorpe, not even when you offered to put up a memorial to that old ogre in the sitting room.”

Thorpe was surprised. Evidently the tart Mrs. Barton had a mind of her own when her employer was not listening. “She does what you tell her,” he said.

“Would you like another cup of tea?” she asked. As she poured it, she said quietly, “Oh, yes, she does what I tell her. She depends on me, and she knows it. If I went, she’d never get another companion. You can’t nowadays. People aren’t prepared to put up with that sort of thing these days.”

“It can’t be much of a life for you, Mrs. Barton.”

“It’s not,” she said shortly, “but 1 have a roof over my head, and food and some clothes. I get by. It’s the price one pays.”

“For being a widow?” asked Thorpe gently.

“Yes.”

There was a picture of a young man in the uniform of a pilot of the Royal Air Force propped on the mantelpiece next to the clock. He wore a sheepskin jacket, a polka-dotted scarf, and a broad grin. Seen from one angle, he looked not unlike Martin Thorpe.

“Your son?” said the financier, with a nod.

Mrs. Barton gazed at the picture. “Yes. Shot down over France in nineteen-forty-three.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. One becomes accustomed.”

“So he won’t be able to look after you when she’s dead and gone.”