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Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

ANCESTRAL VICES

Tom Sharpe

First Published in 1980

Chapter 1

Lord Petrefact pressed the bell on the arm of his wheelchair and smiled. It was not a nice smile, but few of those who knew the President of Petrefact Consolidated Enterprises at all well, and they were an unlucky few indeed, would have expected him to smile nicely. Even Her Majesty, persuaded against her better judgement by the least scrupulous Prime Minister to grant Ronald Osprey Petrefact a peerage, had found his smile almost threatening. Lesser dignitaries were accorded smiles that ranged from the serpentine to the frankly sadistic depending upon their standing with him, a function purely of their temporary utility, or, in the case of his more memorable smiles, of his not needing them at all.

In short, Lord Petrefact’s smile was simply the needle of his mental barometer whose scale never registered anything more optimistic than favourable and was more frequently set at stormy. And since his illness, occasioned by the combined efforts of one of his financial editors (who had unwittingly slated shares in which Lord Petrefact had recently invested) and a particularly resentful oyster, his smile had assumed such a lopsided bias that it was possible to sit on one side of him and suppose that, far from smiling, he was merely baring his dentures.

But on this particular morning his smile almost approached the genial. He had, to employ his favourite metaphor, thought of a way of killing two birds with one stone, and since one of those birds consisted of the members of his own family, it was a singularly pleasing thought. Like so many great men Lord Petrefact loathed his nearest and dearest, their nearness and in the case of his son, Frederick, certainly his dearest in financial terms, being directly proportional to his loathing. But it wasn’t simply his immediate family who would be put out by what he had in mind.

The numerous and infernally influential Petrefacts scattered about the world would be highly indignant, and since they had always disapproved of him he found a great deal of pleasure in anticipating their reactions.

In fact it had taken all his financial guile and the collaboration of an American company which he had surreptitiously taken over to put an end to their meddling in what had until then been the family business. Even his peerage had been a source of considerable acrimony and it had only been his argument that unless he was allowed to elevate his own name he would almost certainly desecrate that of the entire Petrefact tribe by going to gaol that had persuaded them. But then they prided themselves on being one of the oldest families in the Anglo-Saxon world and counted among their ancestors several who pre-dated the Conquest. Not that they had made themselves socially conspicuous. They had, as it were, kept themselves to themselves to the point where Uncle Pirkin, who compiled the genealogical record in Boston, Mass. , had several times to invent spurious wives to obscure the taint of incest.