Excerpt of In Pursuit of The Proper Sinner by Elizabeth George
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Julian Britton was a man who knew that his life thus far had amounted
to nothing. He bred his dogs, he managed the crumbling ruin that was his
family's estate, and daily he tried to lecture his father away from the
bottle. That was the extent of it. He hadn't been a success at anything
save pouring gin down the drain, and now, at twenty-seven years of age, he
felt branded by failure. But he couldn't allow that to affect him tonight.
Tonight he had to prevail.
He began with his appearance, giving himself a ruthless scrutiny in his
bedroom's cheval glass. He straightened the collar of his shirt and
flicked a piece of lint from his shoulder. He stared at his face and
schooled his features into the expression he wanted them to wear. He
should look completely serious, he decided. Concerned, yes, because
concern was reasonable. But he shouldn't look conflicted. And certainly he
shouldn't look ripped up inside and wondering how he came to be where he
was, at this precise moment, with his world a shambles.
As to what he was going to say, two sleepless nights and two endless days
had given Julian plenty of time to rehearse what remarks he wished to make
when the appointed hour rolled round. Indeed, it was in elaborate but
silent fantasy conversations--tinged with no more worry than was enough to
suggest that he had nothing personal invested in the matter--that Julian
had spent most of the past two nights and two days that had followed
Nicola Maiden's unbelievable announcement. Now, after forty-eight hours
engaged in endless colloquies within his own skull, Julian was eager to
get on with things, even if he had no assurance that his words would bring
the result he wanted.
He turned from the cheval glass and fetched his car keys from the top of
the chest of drawers. The fine sheen of dust that usually covered its
walnut surface had been removed. This told Julian that his cousin had once
again submitted to the cleaning furies, a sure sign that she'd met defeat
yet another time in her determined course of sobering up her uncle.
Samantha had come to Derbyshire with just that intention eight months
previously, an angel of mercy who'd one day shown up at Broughton Manor
with the mission of reuniting a family torn asunder for more than three
decades. She hadn't made much progress in that direction, however, and
Julian wondered how much longer she was going to put up with his father's
bent towards the bottle.
"We've got to get him off the booze, Julie," Samantha had said
to him only that morning. "You must see how crucial it is at this
point."
Nicola, on the other hand, knowing his father eight years and not merely
eight months, had long been of a live-and-let-live frame of mind. She'd
said more than once, "If your dad's choice is to drink himself silly,
there's nothing you can do about it, Jules. And there's nothing that Sam
can do either." But then, Nicola didn't know how it felt to see one's
father slipping ever more inexorably towards debauchery, absorbed in
intensely inebriated delusions about the romance of his past. She, after
all, had grown up in a home where how things seemed was identical to how
things actually were. She had two parents whose love never wavered, and
she'd never suffered the dual desertion of a flower-child mother flitting
off to "study" with a tapestry-clad guru the night before one's
own twelfth birthday and a father whose devotion to the bottle far
exceeded any attachment he might have displayed towards his three
children. In fact, had Nicola ever once cared to analyse the differences
in their individual upbringing, Julian thought, she might have seen that
every single one of her bloody decisions--
Excerpted from In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner by
Elizabeth George. . Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
