I can't imagine Alec Loding will get any more out of Brat no matter what happens -- he's in Brat's debt now, since Brat hid Loding's identity when he could easily have pointed to him and possibly gotten him into serious legal trouble. And if Brat marries Eleanor, she seems like the type who keeps or at least oversees the keeping of her own books; there's no way substantial amounts of cash would disappear without her knowing, and given her attitude at the end of the book, she might well tell Loding to go ahead and sell the story if he wants, knowing that it will compromise him as much as Brat and that not being a friendless orphan who happened to discover his birth family in the process, he'll be regarded much less sympathetically.
In the village, of course, they'll say that Brat's revelation of who he was was actually a double-cross so that he could get out of paying Loding and still get the estate after murdering the innocent Simon and marrying the inexplicably besotted Eleanor (strange how women always fall for these unsavoury types, isn't it?) Since Eleanor couldn't inherit without Simon's death, and Brat couldn't have shaken off his blackmail obligations and married the owner of Latchetts while Simon was alive -- voila, IT WAS MURDER!
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Date: 2014-03-24 07:30 pm (UTC)In the village, of course, they'll say that Brat's revelation of who he was was actually a double-cross so that he could get out of paying Loding and still get the estate after murdering the innocent Simon and marrying the inexplicably besotted Eleanor (strange how women always fall for these unsavoury types, isn't it?) Since Eleanor couldn't inherit without Simon's death, and Brat couldn't have shaken off his blackmail obligations and married the owner of Latchetts while Simon was alive -- voila, IT WAS MURDER!