Setting up the case of mistaken identity

I'd like some advice on how to come up with a convincing case of "mistaken identity".

The MC is related to a family called the Peverils (his aunt married the current head of the family). The Peverils have a tone of "aristocracy fallen on hard times", an arrogant, haughty lot who don't get along well with the MC and his parents, are always putting on airs, and talk about having once had wealth, power, and authority, though they never go into detail about it or how they lost it.

The MC and his parents are about to go on an outing somewhere when they have to take Richard Peveril, who's around the same age as the MC and his cousin (the son of the aunt who married the head of the family) along with them at almost the last moment, due to a complication that the Peverils ran into - or say they ran into. (Richard is just as bad as the rest of his family, so the MC and his parents do not welcome this - but they aren't able to talk Richard's parents out of this.)

At the outing, the MC boards a ride of some sort on his own, which turns halfway through into a horse-drawn carriage and bears him away. It turns out that:

a) the carriage is taking him to another world, from which the Peverils came.

b) the Peverils were aristocracy in that world, until they were driven out of their family seat after one of them stole something valuable (I was thinking of a large gemstone, a bit like the Arkenstone in "The Hobbit", but that might change) and brought a curse upon the family estate.

c) the staff of the family estate, who have been running things since the Peverils were banished, after discovering that the curse is getting worse, and has reached the point where it threatens to destroy the estate, were convinced that only one of the Peverils could reverse the curse, and so had made contact with the Peverils and arranged for Richard to come to the family estate and undo the curse.

d) that was the real reason why Richard was deposited on the MC and his family; the place where they were going for their outing was also the rendezvous point, and when the rest of the Peverils weren't able to go there themselves, they stuck the MC's family with the job.

e) the carriage-driver mistook the MC for his cousin.

What I haven't worked out yet is how the carriage-driver makes this mistake. Does anybody have any helpful suggestions?

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody. I'll think them over and see if I can find an answer from them.

To frimble3: Yep, Richard was born after the Peverils were expelled, probably a few generations later, so the person driving the carriage would never have seen him (making the mix-up more plausible). I think that Richard does want to return, though - only, he'd see his objective as being to find some way of recovering the family patrimony (and if that involves breaking the curse, it's not for heroic reasons, but only so that it makes the family estate livable again - unless the Peverils could work out a system of "absentee landlords" - and even then, they'll need tenants on the old estate or they won't be able to make any money out of it, which means that the curse would have to go).

CassandraW said:

I second Kitty Pryde's idea. It adds to wicked cousin's wickedness, and sounds like something that might actually happen.

Sounds like a fun story, by the way!

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Thanks for the new suggestions - and for your comment on it.

(Incidentally, one of the inspirations for the scene was the second chapter of the first "Harry Potter" book, where the Dursleys have to bring Harry along with them to the zoo - but reversed so that the "non-wizarding" family are the sympathetic characters, the cousin with the weird background is the unpleasant one - not to mention that instead of his being an orphan fostered on the family, his parents are still alive but imposed him on the MC's family. Though the Peverils are more like the Malfoys than the Potters - the Malfoys, that is, if they'd lost most of their wealth and influence, but still held onto their pureblood arrogance.)

CassandraW said:

Sounds delicious! Great name, too. Are they inbred? I'm picturing them doing a lot of intermarrying among the same small group of families, and all with the same weak chin, haughty nose, narrow shoulders, and sunken chest. (I think it's that name.)

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I haven't thought about the inbred issue - the only marriage in the family I'd given any thought to yet was that of Richard's parents; Richard's mother is the MC's aunt, who was attracted to the Peverils' atmosphere of foreign nobility fallen on hard times (I'm not sure yet how much her husband told her about the family's background, though he certainly told Richard). Once they were banished from the family home, they probably didn't have as much prospect of pureblood intermarrying, unless other noble families from that world shared their sentence of exile. (Probably not, since what got the Peverils banished was a specific serious crime, rather than a general revolution.)

I borrowed the name from an English noble surname whose sound I liked; the real-world Peverils claimed to be descended from an illegitimate son of William the Conqueror (though they were probably just boasting). Sir Walter Scott even wrote a historical novel about them, set during the reign of Charles II (not as famous as "Ivanhoe", though it shares at least one feature with it; the supporting characters have a much larger role of bringing about the denouement than the nominal MC!).

Yes, I remembered after I applied the name to the family in my story that it also shows up in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", though it's spelled "Peverell" there. I'm not worried about that, though, because of the spelling variant (and because I took the name from the historical Peverils - which I suspect Rowling did as well).

(Rowling clearly had a fun time coming up with the names for the Peverell brothers. The middle one, Cadmus, is linked to the Slytherin family tree; the original Cadmus was a king in Greek mythology who was turned into a snake at the end of his life, as punishment for having slain a dragon sacred to Ares in his youth. The first and third brothers were named Ignotus and Antioch, which echoes St. Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius' feast-day on the Roman Catholic calendar is October 17, the day after October 16, which was the feast day of a certain St. Hedwig. And St. Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuits, took the name "Ignatius" from St. Ignatius of Antioch, and Ignatius of Loyola's feast-day is July 31 - both Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling's birthday.)