Read Online A Change of Heir by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

promoted to his own pony. This was as far back in the Memoirs as Gadberry had researched so far, and it was proving to be rich in valuable anecdotal matter. But Nicholas had been no more than five. How much about one’s five-year-old self does one remember? Gadberry found that he had to review his own authentic childhood in order to get a measure of what might be plausible in the case of his spurious one, and that this process of comparison was not without its dangers. It would never do to try feeding Aunt Prudence with reminiscences actually drawn from Gadberry and not Comberford family history.
    Aunt Prudence … Was it a little odd that he had really come to think of Mrs Minton as that? Gadberry closed the Memoirs . They just weren’t holding his attention. For here was another field of speculation which produced uneasy feelings. Of course it was very convenient that he had fallen so easily into his part. Every now and then, and with alarming unexpectedness, danger did appear. It wasn’t in the nature of the case that Bruton shouldn’t, so to speak, pack dynamite in its every mouldering corner. He might be betrayed, suddenly and irrevocably, in a hundred different ways. Yet his moments of actual panic had been few, and were becoming fewer. He was ceasing to believe that he could be exposed. But why was he ceasing to believe it? Why?
    Gadberry finished his sherry, glanced again at his watch, and for the first time gave himself a straight answer. It was because, all unconsciously, he was ceasing to believe that the imposture was an imposture. To put the matter very moderately, he was ceasing wholly and simply to believe that he was George Gadberry. There was an increasing component in him – one had to use some such word as that – which was quite willing to be Nicholas Comberford. It was this component that said, and thought, ‘Aunt Prudence’ so spontaneously.
    A lay imposter (so to speak) might have judged this all to the good. But Gadberry, being a professional actor, understood the hazard it presented. Cease to be conscious of your part as a part, and in no time you will be playing it damned badly. He had been relying on his professional approach to safeguard him from what he had somewhere read about as the chief risk which imposters run. It was just this risk of losing grip on the fact that one was an imposter. As with actors, in fact, so with this particular form of criminal. Lose the sense of artifice, and the role dies on you. You may even come to believe that you really are what you set out to pretend to be. In other words, the job of being an imposter round the clock can play queer tricks with you, and finally send you off your rocker. Gadberry seemed to remember reading in a history book at school that Perkin Warbeck, or perhaps it was Lambert Simnel, had really believed himself to be one of the Princes in the Tower.
    This was all very uncomfortable. Gadberry had no fancy for finding himself edged into something like a play by Pirandello. Gadberry pretending to be Comberford, however legally reprehensible, was rather fun. Gadberry believing himself to be Comberford was quite a different matter.
    Of course all these fancies were merely morbid. There was no risk of anything of the sort really happening. Only he did find himself wishing he was in contact with just one person who knew he was Gadberry. It would even be a comfort to feel there was at least one person who suspected he was not really –
    Gadberry pulled himself up abruptly. That way, surely, madness did veritably lie. But the thought had brought the true Comberford back into his head. Comberford was the only person in the world who knew who he – George Gadberry, living here at Bruton Abbey – authentically was. Gadberry found himself wishing that, every now and then, he could conduct a secret nocturnal telephone conversation with Comberford – this on the pretext of reporting progress, seeking advice.
    What if he never saw, or heard of,