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  There was an audible groan from everyone, but no one contradicted him.

  *

  Driving home Sir John was admitting to himself that he felt tired.

  It was not only the parties he was obliged to attend every daym but he was having a somewhat wild love affair with an extremely pretty woman whose husband had been unexpectedly called to the North of England when he least expected it.

  “His sister is very ill,” the beauty told Sir John, “and, as William will not be back for at least a week, it gives us a chance to see each other.”

  It meant, naturally, that Sir John went to their house in Belgrave Square for dinner.

  He was driving back home in the early hours of the morning when, as he told himself, all sensible men were asleep so they would feel fresh and lively in the morning.

  Now, as the carriage stopped outside his house in Grosvenor Square, he thought to himself that he was a fool to let himself do so much, pleasant and amusing though it was.

  “Goodnight,” he called to his coachman. “I am very sorry to have kept you up late. I will come home tomorrow at a more reasonable hour.”

  The coachman grinned and touched his cap.

  “We likes you to ’ave a good time, Sir John,” he said, “and if your ’orse wins on Thursday at Newmarket, we’ll all be celebratin’ the victory!”

  “I hope you will not be disappointed,” Sir John said as he walked into the house.

  His valet was dutifully waiting for him, although he had obviously dozed off until his Master appeared.

  It did not take him long to undress.

  When he then sank down in his large and extremely comfortable bed, it was with a sigh of relief that he would go straight to sleep and not think about anything that might demand his attention until tomorrow morning.

  It was only as his valet left the room and Sir John was blowing out the candles by his bedside that he saw that there was a telegram waiting for him.

  For a moment he just stared at it wondering why it was there.

  Then he was at once aware that his secretary would not have put it there if it had not been urgent. He would undoubtedly have kept it downstairs until the morning.

  With a sigh he reached for the telegram wondering why it should need his attention at this very late hour of the night.

  Yet he recognised that it was quite obviously of extreme importance.

  He sat up against his pillows and almost reluctantly opened the envelope.

  At a glance the telegram appeared to be a long one and then, as he began to read the first lines, his whole body stiffened.

  Holding the telegram high up so that he could see the words more clearly, he read,

  “Please come and see me immediately.

  I have only a short time to live and I must see you before I die.

  Gavron Murillo.”

  There was no need for Sir John to ask where he must go.

  The telegram came from France.

  As Gavron Murillo was of great importance in his life, he knew that wherever he was he would be obliged to obey his request.

  It meant leaving London first thing in the morning for Paris.

  Sir John read the telegram through twice.

  Then he blew out the candle and lay down against the pillows.

  Could it really be true that Gavron Murillo, the man who meant so much to him and all his family, was really breathing his last?

  It seemed impossible.

  Yet he knew that Gavron Murillo would never have sent him such a message unless it had been true and it was indeed only a question of time before he died.

  Looking back into the past, Sir John was aware that everything he had become was due to this one man.

  If he asked him to go down to Hell itself, he would have been obliged to obey him.

  In the darkness of his room he could remember all too clearly how young he had been when Gavron Murillo had come into his life.

  Not just to save his father from bankruptcy but also to change his life completely and make him the success he was now.

  It seemed extraordinary that one man should have changed his whole existence from misery and poverty to riches and grandeur.

  Yet it was exactly what Gavron Murillo had done.

  It seemed to Sir John then that the foreigner was in every way entirely different from his father and the other men he had met when he had been at home.

  They had always talked desperately of what they did not own. They always bewailed and regretted the thing they had lost and apparently had nothing to boast about in their future.

  Just like a whirlwind or perhaps, as Sir John had thought later, like an Archangel had dropped from the sky, Gavron Murillo had come into his father’s life.

  From that moment everything had changed as if he had touched it all with a magic wand.

  To a boy of fifteen Gavron Murillo had seemed old and rather strange-looking.

  In fact there was nothing of the English gentleman about him, but once he had had the good looks and the quickness of brain of a man who would inherit the earth.

  He had both drive and brilliance.

  His mother had been French and his father was from the Far East.

  Monsieur Murillo had the ability of being able to pick a man who had the capability of great success if not the thrust and the authority needed to achieve it.

  Sir John was never quite certain how his father had first met the Oriental, but for some reason that had always puzzled him they had become great friends.

  It was perhaps in the Englishman and his very long Family Tree that Gavron Murillo had seen what he himself lacked, but which he would have loved to possess.

  Whether it was that or other reasons, Sir John had never known exactly what had happened.

  But he was well aware that Gavron had taken over for the moment his father’s place as the Head of the Family and began to direct everything in an entirely different way from which it had been directed before and it had led to success.

  The Gilmour ancient house in the country had been filled with workmen cleaning up the dirt of centuries and making it seem double its size.

  It was now so very different from what it had been before that many people came from all over the country to admire it.

  Inside the ancestral pictures of the Gilmour family were cleaned, repaired, polished and then reframed until the Picture Gallery was one of the most talked about and admired of all private collections.

  Where there had been one or two gardeners, there were now a dozen and the garden began to look as it had once been planned.

  To Sir John it was as if he was swept on wings into another world all together.

  He was taken away from the school he was at and sent to Eton and from there he went on later to study at Oxford University.

  In the holidays he found himself wildly excited by the horse he was given to ride and the Racecourse which was built in the grounds of their home.

  There were endless high jumps he was expected to take and not be afraid that he would fall off in doing so.

  Because his father had suddenly became important in the Social world, Sir John found himself having parties at his home in the holidays while he himself was invited by some of the most influential families in England to hunt or shoot with their sons with whom he had either been at school or University.

  It was when he passed his twenty-first birthday he gave parties not only for his friends he had met at school, but had also entertained at their new house in Grosvenor Square.

  He had discovered, almost overnight, that he was one of the many young men who were sought out by the ambitious mothers of debutantes and was expected, sooner or later, to choose one as his wife.

  As everything about Gavron Murillo happened as if the ground opened when he ordered it to do so or the stars came down from Heaven to shine at his command, Sir John felt as if he had stepped from Hell into Heaven or rather from penury to great wealth.

  That in fact was indeed the tru
th.

  It was really because Gavron Murillo had needed his father’s title and had paid with amazing generosity for the use of it, he had made him rich beyond his dreams and in consequence more influential than he had ever been.

  As he had suddenly sprung into great success, many people had sought his companionship and it was Gavron Murillo who had made the most of it.

  “Your father is brilliant,” people would say to Sir John at parties.

  He knew from the wild enthusiasm with which they spoke and the light in their eyes that, in some magical way Gavron had taught his father, he had benefited his friends as well as himself and they were exceedingly grateful for what they had received.

  It was all like a Fairytale in a book.

  Even now Sir John found it difficult to realise how different Gavron had made his father’s life and his own.

  His mother had died when he was only fourteen.

  She had therefore not known about the magic wand which had changed his rather quiet and dull existence into an incomparable success.

  It was to Sir John as if he was being propelled in an almost breathless way towards a winning post, which in the past he had not even realised existed.

  It was not only the house in the country, which had been crumbling for so long that most people had forgotten its existence, that was made new and greatly admired.

  Because the house in London had been sold for a mere pittance, as they could not afford to keep it open or in any way repair it, John suddenly found that the house in Grosvenor Square which his father now owned was one of the most impressive in Mayfair.

  The ballroom was continually being lent to their friends for balls, Receptions and Weddings and they were deeply grateful for being able to enjoy the luxury of it all.

  If he had enjoyed his time at Eton rather than the school at which he had spent his first three years, he had found that his College at Oxford University gave him the chance to excel. Not just in the classroom but on the river as well.

  He became an excellent oarsman and, when Oxford beat Cambridge, it was claimed that it was John Gilmour who had made it possible.

  He was fêted and admired by a great number of the friends he had made at Oxford, but he never imagined for one moment that he would find himself one of the most sought after young men in the whole of Mayfair.

  There was never a party or a ball that he was not invited to.

  Besides the invitations in London, those to parties, Race Meetings and Hunting in the country became more numerous year by year.

  As he often told himself, it was due entirely to the organisation, intelligence and drive of one man.

  Nothing his father had achieved would have been possible without Gavron Murillo helping him, guiding him and making sure that everything he touched turned at once to gold.

  As he grew older he often asked himself how it was possible for one man to have changed his father’s life and his in such an extraordinary manner.

  But he had realised, because by this time he was exceedingly intelligent that, if Gavron Murillo had meant much to them, they meant a great deal to him.

  He had the brains but he was not yet, at that time, in the right position to get in touch with the people who he needed for the development and expansion of the many Companies he owned and financed.

  The fact that he was so close to John’s father gave him exactly the social position he needed in France.

  Of course there was no question of him not being able to be introduced to anyone who he wished to meet in England once John’s father could afford it.

  They might have been forgotten and ignored when they were poor, but there was little doubt that the Gilmour Family Tree was one of the oldest and finest in Debrett’s Peerage.

  If Gavron Murillo had made John’s father’s wealth more fantastic than it had ever been before, he certainly lifted him from the loneliness and the depression of never being able to afford what one wanted.

  He made him into a rich man who had the pleasure of owning not only one of the most famous ancient houses in England but one that was greatly admired by everyone who saw it.

  John, when he turned twenty-five, had a huge party at Gilmour Hall. His guests rode on the Racecourse and swam in the great lake and danced the night away in the ballroom.

  When John was a child, the ballroom had only been used for depositing broken china and furniture that no one wanted.

  Now he thought that his life was almost like a fairy story.

  But he had no idea what would happen next.

  What did happen was, however, inevitable.

  Because his father was so rich and ended up with his own pack of hounds, it was on one winter’s day when the ground was very dangerous after a severe frost that his horse fell at a jump.

  It not only threw its rider but rolled on him.

  That night John became the Head of the Family in his father’s place and inherited the illustrious Baronetcy of Gilmour that was more than four hundred years old.

  He knew that the responsibilities which he had to undertake would not only occupy him as he had never been occupied before but it would also give him a feeling of power and influence that had belonged to his father.

  He had already, under Gavron’s orders, become the Chairman of several industrial Companies.

  He was also on the Board of a number of national Companies of great standing and these had increased year by year.

  Because he was aware that everything he did was reported back to France where Gavron now spent most of his time, he was exceedingly careful, however great the temptation, not to let anything interfere with the businesses that he had been given, which after his father’s death had increased in the most amazing way.

  Sometimes he wondered if he was doing too much even though he was still very young and healthy.

  Then he told himself that he would be a fool not to do exactly as he was told by the man who had transformed his father into the position they were now in, which he had most gratefully inherited on his father’s death.

  ‘I am lucky, indeed luckier than I can possibly say,’ he often told himself.

  Yet now, when he least expected it, Gavron Murillo was dying.

  It was very hard for Sir John to realise that this was true.

  He had known, of course, that Gavron was getting old and that he was nearing his eightieth birthday.

  But because he was so vivacious and so brilliant in business, in fact in everything he did, it had never struck him for one moment that Gavron might die now.

  There were so many things he had planned for the future.

  Some of them were only on paper and had not been put into operation, but they would be, there was no doubt about that.

  They would, quite naturally, be just as successful as everything else that Gavron had planned and produced.

  Yet now he was dying and for a moment Sir John thought that if Gavron did die everything he had created would die with him.

  Then he knew that this must not happen.

  There was only one person who could prevent it from happening and that was himself.

  ‘I must go to him’ he thought. ‘Perhaps it is all a mistake and he will recover and be back in operation in a month or so.’

  Then he knew that the telegram would never have been sent if Gavron Murillo had not believed it to be true.

  ‘I must go to him at once,’ Sir John determined.

  He wished that somehow he could fly from his bed to Paris.

  Then he told himself that, as Gavron had taught him, the one thing he had to be was practical, sensible and at the same time imaginative.

  ‘And I must leave as soon as it is light,’ he decided. ‘Because I want my brain to work as Gavron would want it to do, I must have a little sleep, if only for a few hours.’

  He rang the bell for his valet, who had only left him a little while ago. If he was asleep, the bell was arranged so that it rang at the head of his bed and would wake him up.

  As he
expected, only a few minutes later the door opened.

  “You rang, Sir John,” the valet said.

  “Yes, Hogarth,” Sir John replied. “I have to leave for Paris at first light. Let me sleep until seven o’clock and then I will need to reach Dover as quickly as possible.”

  Hogarth was well used to the unexpected and so he asked no questions.

  “I will see to it, Sir John,” he replied.

  He went from the room, shutting the door behind him and Sir John lay down in the bed against his pillows.

  ‘So for God’s sake, Gavron,’ he said in his mind, ‘don’t die before I am with you! If you leave me now there is so much for me to carry on without you. Wherever you will be, I will need your help.’

  Because everything to do with Gavron Murillo had always been so truly fantastic, John would not have been surprised if a star had fallen in through his window or the moon had suddenly lit the whole place with an unexpected glimmer of light.

  But there was only the darkness of the night.

  As he closed his eyes, he wondered what the future would hold and if wherever Gavron Murillo might turn up he would be able to help him.

  *

  Sir John was deeply asleep when he was aware that the curtains were being drawn back from the windows and that Hogarth was in the room.

  Just for a moment he wondered why he was there.

  Then he remembered the telegram and that Gavron wanted him.

  He sprang out of bed and went into his bathroom where he began to wash. There was obviously no time to bring up hot water for his bath from the kitchen as was usual.

  He was sure that Hogarth, who had been with him for a good long time, would have ordered a carriage to be waiting for him almost as soon as he was roused.

  He was not mistaken.

  A tired butler was waiting with his breakfast in the dining room when he went downstairs.

  He ate quickly and heard his luggage being taken to the front door.

  When he went outside, the sun was only just rising in the East.

  The travelling chaise that was drawn by four of his fastest horses was waiting for him at the door.

  Without being told Hogarth was already seated in the chaise.