Too Many Cousins

is also extinct, leaving yourself and your surviving cousins to share the residuary estate in the proportion of one third to each branch. How much does the trust fund amount to, by the way?”
“It will be worth over £200,000,” Gecile said.
“After payment of death duties?”
“Yes. I know, because my father made inquiries.” Harvey carefully removed the ash from his cigar. Yvette, by a gesture, invited her guest’s attention to the sandwiches and cakes, but Gecile shook her head. The family fortunes had her in their grip. Her brown eyes searched Harvey’s mephistophelian features, without learning much from them.
“Now let’s go back,” he said. “Tell me what has happened to the intervening generations.”
It was, said Cecile, like a fatality. Before old Rutland Shearsby died in 1926, the family business was in difficulties. It had something to do with Japanese competition, and the post-war slump, and then perhaps her great-uncle Martin was not so clever as his father. The latter knew nothing about the trouble. It was kept from him at first, and by the time the firm was in a really bad way his mind had begun to fail. He was nearly ninety. So his money could not be touched; and when he died, and Martin went to his stepmother for help, she refused to give up a penny of her life interest. And as by the terms of the will the interests of the beneficiaries under the trust were inalienable, they could neither sell their shares nor raise money on them. And so in the end, a year or two after the old importer’s death, the business was closed down. Martin Shearsby, a ruined man, died a few years later. And in the meantime disaster had also overtaken his sister and her husband. Dresser’s Bank had long since been absorbed by one of the big joint stock concerns, and Paul Dresser had retired on an ample pension. But he commuted this, and speculated, and lost everything. Alice Dresser applied to her stepmother for aid, as Martin had done, and with the same result. Then she and her husband died, early in the 1930’s; and Martin’s widow following him to the grave soon after, while Mrs. Deverel Shearsby had been dead for years, here was the end of all Rutland Shearsby’s children and their wives.
Mile Boulanger, with an expressive movement of her broad-tipped, capable fingers—as she warmed to her tale she grew more French—extinguished a whole generation. Refusing more tea, she accepted a cigarette, and Harvey, having risen to light it, crossed to his wife’s bureau and provided himself with a writing-pad.
‘‘Now we come to the second generation,” he remarked. “The grandchildren—the parents, I presume, of yourself and your cousins.”
“I told you it was like a fatality,” Cecile said somberly. “All that generation is gone, too. I will try to put it clearly. You have got down the first generation, Mr. Tuke?”
“Yes. Martin. Alice. Deverel.”
It appeared that two children had been born to the Martin Shearsbys—Euphemia and Geoffrey. Euphemia married a doctor named Ardmore. In the army during World War No. 1, he was taken prisoner by the Turks. His health was ruined, and he died in 1923. His wife died eleven years later. They left a daughter, Vivien.
Harvey was making entries on his pad. “Vivien, then, is another second cousin. Is she married?”
Cecile shook her head. “No. She is engaged.”
“How old is she?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Now we move on to Geoffrey Shearsby and his offspring.”
Geoffrey had gone into the business. When it failed, he obtained a post with another firm of importers. He died in 1933—the 1930’s seemed fatal to the family—leaving a son, Cecile’s second cousin, Raymond.
Harvey wrote this down. “And Raymond?” he queried, watching Mile Boulanger through a cloud of cigar-smoke.
She returned his look with apparent candour. “He is a writer. I haven’t seen him for some time. He was living in France before the war, and now he is somewhere in Hertfordshire. He isn’t married, as far as I know, and he must be about the same age as Vivien. His mother, Aunt Juliet —I always called her that—was killed here in London in an air raid in 1940. The last time I saw Raymond was at her funeral.”
“Two of the six cousins are now accounted for,” Harvey said. “What about the descendants of Alice—Mrs. Dresser?”
The Paul Dressers had also had two children—Caroline, Cecile’s mother, and another Martin. Caroline married Emil Boulanger, the London manager of Courtois et Cie., the Paris parfumiers. Cecile herself had been born in Paris, but she had spent most of her life in London. Her mother died during the lethal 1930’s, and her father in 1941. After the fall of France, said Cecile, he had no work, no money, and no wish to live. “They were bad times, those.” The perfumier’s daughter shrugged away the bad times, and added, in her practical manner: “I worked in my father’s office till 1940, when it was closed. I am thirty-seven.”
“And your uncle Martin?” Harvey queried.
There was the faintest hesitation before Cecile replied briefly that Martin Dresser, like his father, had been in a bank in Chelmsford. He died abroad in 1927. It was his son, Sydney, who had been run over and killed the previous March. Sydney was with a firm of house agents in Birmingham until the war broke out. Being in the Territorials he was called up at once. He had not been married.
Harvey made another notation. “Leaving us,” he said, “with a residue of two cousins, the grandchildren of Deverel Shearsby, I presume?”
Deverel Shearsby, Cecile went on, had one son, Rutland, who became manager of a firm of paint manufacturers and was killed in the last war. His widow died just before this one began. There were two children—Mortimer, the elder, and Blanche, who became Mrs. Cyril Porteous. Mortimer was now thirty-six: Blanche had been two years younger. The chemistry motif\ which ran through her short life, was repeated in her brother’s, for Mortimer was a research worker at the Bedford laboratories of Imperial