The Hostile Inheritance

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The hand on the blanket was not his. Victor knew this before he knew where he was, because the scar that should have crossed the wrist was gone.

He moved the fingers. The unfamiliar fingers obeyed.

A woman beside the bed pressed the call button. She had been holding a paper cup so tightly that its rim had folded inward. When he turned toward her, relief changed her face for a moment. Then she saw him looking at her as if she were a stranger, and the relief became something more guarded.

"Arthur?"

He tried to answer. His throat hurt. Behind his eyes, another room arrived with the completeness of something happening now: a white tablecloth, Gideon's hand on his shoulder, Lydia standing between him and the door.

He remembered trying to get up. He remembered Gideon saying his name gently, almost affectionately, while refusing to let him move. The last part had been neither gentle nor clear. His breath had failed him before his anger did.

Now there was a machine beside the bed, a pale ceiling and the wrong hand.

"Where's Gideon?" he asked.

The woman put the cup down.

"I don't know who you mean. Don't try to get up."

He had already begun. His body answered with a weakness he could not negotiate, and he stopped halfway, furious at the blanket for containing him.

The clinician who came in introduced herself as Dr Han. She asked short questions, one at a time. Victor knew the city. Merrow. He knew what a hospital was. Asked his name, he opened his mouth and looked again at the woman in the chair.

"Arthur Pendelton," she said before he could answer.

Dr Han asked her to let him respond.

Victor knew that name. A careless young man in an expensive suit, once pointed out across a dining room as though poor judgment were a species of entertainment. Pendelton land was worth examining. The son had not seemed worth remembering.

"Arthur," he said.

The word came out in a voice too light and young to belong to Victor Sloane.

Dr Han asked what he remembered. He said a room, someone preventing him from leaving, then nothing he could place. She did not supply an explanation that made the account convenient. She asked about pain, checked what needed checking and said that confusion and changes in what felt familiar needed attention, not an argument at the bedside.

He told her that his body did not feel like his own.

She listened. The woman beside him stopped attempting to improve the answers.

They went through the next steps. He had come through emergency care overnight after a collapse. The information about what happened before he arrived was still being assembled. Dr Han would return, and he should ask for help before trying to walk. He was not being discharged because his family preferred a familiar bedroom to an inconvenient hospital.

After she left, the woman introduced herself in a way that hurt her to have to do.

"Beatrice. Your sister."

Her face settled into a faintly familiar pattern. Victor had met Beatrice Pendelton once, across a different table. She had asked a precise question about a sale condition. He remembered answering the man beside her instead. Now she was sitting close enough for him to see a small run in the sleeve of her cardigan.

"I know the name," he said.

It was the least dishonest thing he could offer.

She asked if he remembered home. He could picture three of his own homes with uncomfortable clarity. None belonged to Arthur. The strongest image was his last apartment, a glass wall over the harbor and a coat his daughter had stopped coming back to collect.

"Not properly."

Beatrice took the answer without believing it would be the final one. She said his belongings had been returned in a bag. Some things were wet. She had not brought anyone from the office or told the press anything beyond what had been necessary. Then she added that she had told the household he was improving.

"Am I?"

She looked toward the door. "You're awake."

He accepted the distinction. A lifetime of receiving polished summaries had not prepared him to need the untidier answer himself.

When he was allowed to sit more upright, a nurse helped him arrange the bed. He asked for a mirror. The nurse brought a small one, not an expression of disbelief. He thanked her automatically and then realized he could not remember the last time he had thanked someone before knowing whether their work would satisfy him.

The face in the mirror was Arthur Pendelton's.

Younger than his own by nearly twenty years. A small mark near the eyebrow, tired eyes, dark hair flattened in the wrong direction. He touched the cheek. The reflection touched its cheek. He turned his wrist again. No scar. A little ridge crossed the right thumb instead, and there was a stain near one nail that looked like ink.

He waited for the trick to reveal its hinge.

There was no hinge.

Beatrice watched him from the chair. "What is it?"

He could have told her he was Victor Sloane. He could imagine what would follow: more questions, his account carried into rooms where people would decide which parts of it belonged to Arthur's medical care and which to the family's embarrassment. He did not know what he could prove, or even what he believed beyond the unbearable certainty that the man in the glass was not the man who had begun the night.

"I need a little time," he said.

"You've had a way of asking for that."

The sharpness surprised both of them. Beatrice looked down at her hands.

"Not for this. I didn't mean for this."

He put the mirror facedown. Whatever Arthur had done before this morning, the consequences had not vanished when Victor opened his eyes. The woman in the chair was tired for reasons he could not yet price.

Later, when she stepped out to take a call, he heard his own name from a television farther along the corridor. Victor Sloane. The next words were too faint to make out. He asked the nurse whether there was news about him.

She checked what he was asking before answering. A businessman had died. It had been reported that morning. She did not know the circumstances and would not invent them from a headline. Did he want her to ask someone to bring the report?

Not yet, he said.

The request came from fear, not strategy. He could endure the wrong face for another minute more easily than he could endure a neat account of the death he remembered from inside it.

Beatrice returned with a clear belongings bag. Inside were a wallet, a phone, a folded scrap of paper and a watch Victor recognized before she tipped it into his palm.

His own watch had been silver, with a second, smaller dial set too low on the face. He had bought it at an estate auction seven years earlier, because he liked an object whose maker had made something odd look inevitable. This one had the same misplaced little dial. The case was scratched differently. A narrow line divided the engraving on its back.

The hands had stopped at one oh nine.

"Is this mine?" he asked.

"It came from the family things. You've been wearing it recently."

"Does it usually run?"

"I haven't been inspecting your watch, Arthur."

She spoke more softly after the sentence, but did not withdraw it. She was his sister, not a service organized to return every missing fact on demand.

He kept the watch in his hand. There were two of them. He could not yet decide whether the knowledge made the impossible morning worse or gave it an edge he could begin to hold.

The folded paper in the bag carried a name and a telephone number. Nora Kestrel. Underneath, in handwriting he did not recognize, were the words: before signing anything else.

Beatrice saw him reading it.

"Your solicitor. You arranged to see her about the debt. I'll tell the office to move the appointment."

"Let me speak to her first."

It was an ordinary request. Her hesitation made it less ordinary.

"You need to rest."

"Then we'll decide what can wait after we've spoken."

She looked at him for a long moment. He had heard that pause around junior people whose work had suddenly become worth considering. He had never expected to be inside it.

On the bedside table she placed an envelope that had arrived for Arthur. It concerned an obligation, she said, not something he had to solve in bed. He agreed to leave it closed until he could speak with his adviser.

The name on it was Arthur Pendelton. The name on the dead man's news report was his own. Between them lay a watch that had stopped and a body that had not.

Victor closed his fingers around the silver case. He had survived with a rival's name. It was only beginning to occur to him that the name might belong to someone more complicated than a rival.