Again, Nell caught on quickly. “The Flamborough! Well done, Lori. We’ll put a call through to Miss Kingsley.”
Miss Kingsley was the concierge at the eminently respectable Flamborough Hotel in London. She thought it a concierge’s duty to maintain detailed files on her guests in order to provide them with the kind of personal service that had brought the Flamborough its share of tastefully subdued fame. In other words, Miss Kingsley was to run-of-the-mill conciergedom what the Encyclopaedia Britannica was to a matchbook cover. She knew not only what her clients ate and drank, but what side of the bed they slept on and who was likely to be sleeping on the other side.
I sometimes thought she knew more about Bill than I did, since she’d been keeping notes on him since his first stay at the hotel, when he was twelve. He and Willis, Sr., had used the Flamborough as their London base for years. If the English Willises had done the same, I reasoned, Miss Kingsley would know about Gerald.
Nell had stayed at the Flamborough as the guest of her paternal grandfather, a stuffy old earl, and she knew Miss Kingsley well, so, while she explained my idea to Emma, I returned to the desk and dialed Miss Kingsley’s number. She answered promptly, and after the usual pleasantries I asked, in as conversational a tone of voice as I could manage, “Did you know that Bill has relatives in England? English ones, I mean.”
“Certainly,” said Miss Kingsley.
I flashed Nell and Emma a thumbs-up. “Has William called to ask you about them recently?”
“Certainly not,” said Miss Kingsley. “The two branches of the family haven’t communicated for ages.”
“Why the long silence?” I asked.
“I’ve been given to understand,” Miss Kingsley replied, choosing her words carefully, “that a falling-out between brothers led one branch of the family to emigrate to the New World in 1714. They haven’t spoken since.”
I was impressed. The Willises really knew how to hold a grudge. Could this be the “family matters past” Dimity had mentioned in her note? “Any idea what the fight was about?”
“A veil of discretion is always drawn over the story at the crucial point,” Miss Kingsley explained apologetically. “I’ve never been able to discover what precipitated the original argument.”
Had Willis, Sr., decided to dig up the cause of the ancient feud? It seemed unlikely. Willis, Sr., was all for family harmony, but I couldn’t envision him leaping from his chair to solve a fraternal spat that had been pending for almost three hundred years. “Have there been any recent quarrels?”
“Not between the two branches,” Miss Kingsley answered. “As I said, they do not communicate. The English branch, however, has had nothing but trouble for the past few years.”
“Has Gerald Willis been part of the trouble?” I asked.
“Indeed he has,” Miss Kingsley replied gravely. “Two years ago, he lost his position with the family firm, sold his London town house, and moved to Haslemere, in Surrey. His family was most disappointed in him. He’s the eldest male of his generation, you see.”
“How many of them are there?” I took a pencil from the desk drawer and scribbled names as Miss Kingsley reeled them off.
“An aunt, Anthea, and two uncles, Thomas and Williston, all of whom are retired. The firm is currently run by two cousins, Lucy and Arthur. Lucy’s younger sisters work for the firm as well, but they’re on maternity leave at the moment.”
Lucky them, I thought. Then, scanning the list with a quickening of interest, I added, Lucky me. An aunt, two uncles, and five cousins, two of whom were about to produce still another generation of Willises—I had a whole new world of in-laws to explore, a second chance to connect with Bill’s family. “Why did Gerald leave the firm?”
“No one knows for sure,” Miss Kingsley told me. “I’ve heard rumors about financial improprieties and seen evidence of other... improprieties.”
“Wine, women, and song?” I asked, amused by Miss Kingsley’s reticence. “Or something more serious?”
“Let us say simply that, since his retirement, Gerald has taken to entertaining the sort of woman the Flamborough does not ordinarily welcome in its dining room,” Miss Kingsley replied primly.
“Oh-ho,” I murmured.
“It’s only to be expected,” Miss Kingsley assured me. “Gerald’s in his late thirties, very good-looking, and quite well off. Though why he should fasten onto an aging—” Miss Kingsley caught herself. “Ah, well, as my aunt Ed wina used to say, there’s no accounting for taste.”