The surviving Davenalls-Gervase's widow Catherine, his son Hugo, and his cousin Richard-unite with Trenchard in rebuffing the claimant, only to fall victim to his knowledge of nasty family secrets: that one night in 1846 Gervase used his unsavory friend Prince Napoleon, pretender to the throne of France, as a decoy to lure Scottish governess Vivien Strung into a topiary maze and rape her that Hugo Davenall, the current baronet, is actually the son of Catherine and Richard and that James himself is not Catherine's son. Eleven years later, one James Norton appears on Constance's doorstep, which she now shares with husband William Trenchard, and announces that he's James Davenall, having renounced his fiancee when he was diagnosed as a victim of congenital syphilis and having spent a decade in America before learning that the diagnosis was wrong. A few days before he's to marry Constance Sumner in 1871, James Davenall, oldest son of irascible Sir Gervase Davenall, leaves a suicide note and disappears. Goddard, a master of intricate period skullduggery (Past Caring, 1986 In Pale Battalions, 1988), hits his stride with a superb thriller on the old, old theme of the claimant to the identity of a long-vanished heir.
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