official
search for Jocelyn's last will; a formal application for probate.

When these things were finished, Considine's real work had only begun.
He had to readjust the whole financial fabric of Roscarna, to find out
what money was owed or owing, to decide how much of Gabrielle's paper
inheritance was tangible. He unearthed the firm of Dublin solicitors in
whose hands the business of the estate had been allowed to drift for the
last twenty years. They seemed to him a pack of shifty rogues. He was
not used to dealing with lawyers, and what he took for cunning was
nothing more than the traditional gesture of the profession. It was
unthinkable that a firm of such ancient establishment should show any
traces of haste in a matter of business. When Considine began to hurry
them up they simply offered to surrender the business. No doubt they
knew far better than Considine that there wasn't much in it. He imagined
that they were bluffing and took them at their word, with the result that
there fell upon Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents--leases and
mortgages and conveyances and post-obits--all the documentary debris of a
crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish
had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing
days. Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in
the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room enough for
this accumulation of papers, so they set aside the library at Roscarna
for the purpose, sorting and indexing the Hewish dossier as long as the
daylight lasted. Considine worked steadily through them as though he
were dealing with a mathematical calculation. To Gabrielle, on the other
hand, there was something mysterious in her occupation; fingering these
papers that other fingers had touched she communed with the dead--not
with her father, who could scarcely write his own name, but with the
ancient stately Hewishes who had built Roscarna and grown rich on the
Spanish trade. Sitting at the long table with Considine, a pile of
papers before her, her attention would wander, and while her eyes watched
the west wind blowing along the woods she would feel that she was not
herself but another Hewish woman staring out of the library windows on a
rough day in March a hundred years ago. And in this dream she would be
lost until the light died on the woods in a stormy sunset, and Considine
began to collect the papers in shea