“That’s not how the game is played,” Frederick said.
“Yes, I know,” Natalia snapped. “If Poppy produces the golden male child, the newborn will leapfrog right past me into a top place at the bank.”
“He won’t leapfrog past me,” Liam said. “Half of Oscar’s shares came from my father, and I want them back.”
“Liam, have you learned nothing since you’ve been here?” Frederick said from the head of the table. “You’re getting ahead of yourself.”
“Indeed,” Oscar said. “Even if you got those shares, it won’t make any difference. I will have unanimous consent from the rest of the shareholders to support the merger, so your ten percent won’t matter.”
Natalia still seemed annoyed. Gwen had never had any interest in the bank, but Natalia loved it. Watching Liam or a newborn child have the doors opened to them just because they were male must be galling.
Natalia looked at Frederick. “Is he right? Are you still firm in your decision to support the steel merger?”
Tension mounted as Frederick met her question with a gleam in his eye that seemed unnervingly ominous. “The chess pieces are moving,” he said. “The world is changing. Power is shifting. I will be very interested to see what happens next.”
Patrick sat on the back porch of the house with Gwen and Liam, watching more members of the Blackstone family disembark from various yachts and ferries all afternoon. Liam held a pair of binoculars to his face while Gwen provided insight into each group of people heading up from the boathouse.
“That’s Bertie,” she said, nodding to a portly man with a huge walrus mustache. “Don’t mention golf, or he will talk your ear off, but he is hysterically funny. He can burp ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
“Does he have a job?” Patrick asked.
Gwen thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. Neither does his son, Chester, who spends most of his time at the horse races.”
The sea breeze carried laughter up the cliffside, making Patrick uneasy. He had nothing in common with these well-heeled people of leisure. Ladies with parasols strolled across the lawn while clusters of men smoked cigars. They were all dressed in white! Patrick had never owned a white suit in his life. Such an impractical garment wasn’t part of a workingman’s wardrobe.
This was awful. He was underdressed and out of place. Everything was so much easier when he and Gwen were on the fire escape, but if they were to have a future, this was the family he would join. He needed to see if he could get along with them. He returned to listening to Gwen point out the new arrivals as they disembarked from the ferry.
“The little girl in the pink dress is Penelope-Arabella. She plays the harp and has a pet turtle. And there’s my cousin Edwin!” Gwen pointed to a slim young man wearing a white suit and a straw boater hat. He stood out from the others because of the cast on one leg, but he hobbled along with the help of a cane. Gwen proclaimed Edwin the most interesting of all her cousins, a man who traveled the world collecting rare antiques.
“After Edwin’s last trip, he showed me a jade funeral urn,” she said. “It’s two thousand years old and very rare.”
It was hard to keep these family members straight, especially all the elderly women. Frederick had five sisters, which accounted for the fragmentation of shares among their sons and grandsons, while Frederick’s only direct male heir, Oscar, had accumulated a disproportionate share.
“I guess there’s no more avoiding it,” Liam muttered as he stood, looking overly formal in the dark suit Gwen had insisted on buying him. He looked like he’d rather have a tooth pulled than meet the people heading toward them, but Gwen was serene as she performed the introductions.
“Look who has decided to join us for the lobster bake this year,” she teased, causing some polite laughter to ripple through the crowd.
Gwen stuck close to Liam as she introduced him to family members, all of them bursting with curiosity about the return of the missing heir. Some appeared fascinated, others skeptical. All were polite because of Frederick’s acceptance of Liam as his grandson, and no one was ready to mount an outright challenge this early in the game.
Patrick stood a few yards away, hands fisted at his sides as he scrutinized the family members. Despite Frederick’s skepticism, one of these people might be responsible for the assault on Liam. Patrick doubted anyone would try something in this public gathering, but he was on edge.
The gaggle of great-aunts were impossible to tell apart. They all wore white gowns and had their gray hair in identical buns mounded atop their heads. All had wrinkled faces and a complete lack of decorum as they swooped down on Liam.
“Good heavens, he does look like poor Theo, doesn’t he, Blanche?”
Aunt Martha, the one Gwen adored, chimed in next. “You used to drool like a spigot,” she told Liam. “Your poor mother needed to carry a second set of clothes for you. It looks like you’ve finally managed to contain it.” She reached up to pinch Liam’s cheek.
Aunt Helen was even worse. “Do you remember the time you escaped from your bath and came tearing outside during the annual picnic for the bank employees?” she asked with a cackling laugh. “You were buck naked, streaking through the front lawn in front of everyone. Do you remember that?”
“No, ma’am,” Liam said.
“We do,” Aunt Helen roared. “What about the time you jammed a snail up your nose? Your poor mother! She had to summon the doctor to get it out.”
All these relatives vied to dominate Liam’s attention, and he wasn’t a skilled conversationalist. Gwen was tireless as she stood beside him, providing introductions and smoothing awkward lulls in the conversation.
Someone tugged on Patrick’s elbow, and he looked down to see a young girl in a pink dress. She couldn’t be more than eight or nine years old.
“Can you get me an ice cream cone?” she asked.
She’d probably mistaken him for a servant because he wasn’t dressed like the other men. Patrick smiled anyway and hunkered down so he could be on eye-level with her. “I don’t know if there’s any ice cream. What’s your name?”
“Penelope-Arabella.”
“That’s a pretty name. Do people call you Penny?”
Her face soured, and her voice brimmed with scorn. “I’m named after a woman who sewed two hundred scarves for soldiers during the American Revolution. I don’t think asking someone to say my complete name is asking too much.”
Gwen overheard the comment and rushed to the rescue. “Darling, the cook made strawberry shortcake for the children and set it on the back terrace. Would you like some?”
Penelope-Arabella dropped the snotty attitude and tore across the lawn to join the other children who swarmed around the dessert table. Gwen sent Patrick an apologetic glance for the girl’s tone, then continued chatting with the elderly aunts.
Heat pounded down, and Patrick’s attention wandered over the dozens of people on the terrace. The well-dressed people of leisure mingled with soft laughter and genteel greetings. Maybe the way they ignored him was to be expected. They hadn’t seen each other in a while and might not have noticed the stranger in their midst.