A Strange Likeness
A Strange Likeness
Paula Marshall
FAMILY SECRETSSomething had gone wrong with the London end of the Dilhorne business empire, and Alan had been sent to England to make things right. But almost immediately after his arrival Alan met Ned Hatton, and to his total astonishment found that they were almost identical. It wasn't until he met Ned's sister, Eleanor, and learned more of their family background that he realized the likeness was more than a coincidence. The trouble was, as he grew to love Eleanor, the family secret could sweep away any hope he had of a lifetime with his true love.
His features were a little obscured.
“Wearing a fancy dress so as not to upset your new friend, are you, Ned? Why didn’t you put chains on, too? Then he would have felt really at home.”
Ned looked at her. His eyes seemed bluer than ever, Eleanor thought. They roved over her in a manner which, had he not been Ned, would have made her blush.
Alan found her enchanting. It was very plain to him that Ned had not seen fit to mention to his sister the likeness he shared with Alan. Before Eleanor could commit herself further and add to her embarrassment, Alan spoke at once.
“Your mistake, Miss Hatton,” he told her. “I am not Ned.” And he deepened the accent he had not known he possessed until he reached England.
A Strange Likeness
Paula Marshall
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
PAULA MARSHALL,
married with three children, has had a varied life. She began her career in a large library and ended it as a senior academic in charge of history in a polytechnic. She has traveled widely, been a swimming coach and appeared on University Challenge and Mastermind. She has always wanted to write, and likes her novels to be full of adventure and humor. She derives great pleasure from writing historical romances, where she can use her wide historical knowledge.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Prologue
Temple Hatton, near Brinkley, Yorkshire, 1839
‘O ne of these days Eleanor Hatton, you will go too far,’ sighed Mrs Laura Hatton to her daughter. She was trying to comb Eleanor’s glossy black hair into some sort of order.
‘Really, Mama, if you say that once again I shall have the vapours,’ retorted Eleanor angrily, twisting in her chair.
‘Do sit still, child. You look like an unbrushed pony. No one would think that you were nearly eighteen.’
‘Well, I hate the idea of being eighteen. I’m sure that when I get there Grandfather will start making plans for my marriage to Stacy. He knows perfectly well that I don’t want to marry him. I don’t wish to marry anyone, ever.’
‘I thought that you liked Stacy Trent,’ sighed her vague, gentle mother, who found it difficult to understand her strong-minded daughter. However had she come to give birth to such a hoyden?
‘Oh, I do, I do, as a friend—or as a brother—but not as a husband. Besides, I don’t want a husband chosen for me by someone else. You chose to marry Father, I know.’
Her mother sighed again, and did not need to tell Eleanor that it was the worst mistake she had ever made, Eleanor’s father having been an unfaithful, spendthrift rake of the first water.
‘Really, Eleanor, I think that your grandfather did you no favour when he arranged that you should be educated with Stacy and Ned until they went to Oxford.’
Worse than that, not only did the three of them share a tutor, who had taught them Latin and Greek, but Sir Hartley, her grandfather, had insisted that they should be instructed in Natural Philosophy, or Science, as it was coming to be called, as well as in Mathematics.
Eleanor had been as quick and bright as Stacy, and far more so than her older brother, Ned who hated all forms of learning. She had a mind like a knife, said her grandfather proudly; he secretly wished that her brother, Ned, his heir, was more like her.
Her mother, though, deplored what education had done to Eleanor. It had made her, she frequently and despairingly said, a boy in girl’s clothing, everything which was unfeminine. Besides, her wickedness was all the cleverer for her having been educated. It really served to show that girls should never be taught very much more than how to play the piano a little, paint a little, read a little and the proper way to conduct themselves in public—something which seemed beyond Eleanor.
Her frequent complaints to her father-in-law simply resulted in him saying gently, ‘I have no wish for Stacy to marry a fool.’
Which was all very well, but neither should he wish Stacy to marry a freak. This thought was so painful that Mrs Hatton gave a little moan and dragged the comb through her daughter’s hair more forcefully than she had intended. Eleanor twisted away from her again.
‘Do sit still, child. You will never look like an illustration from The Book of Beauty at this rate.
Eleanor pulled a face. ‘I shall never look like those simpering creatures if I live to be a hundred.’
‘Well, you certainly won’t look like a beauty if you do live to be a hundred! Concentrate on looking like a beauty at seventeen. There, that will have to do. And remember, you must be ready for tea. The Lorimers and some of their friends are coming.’
Eleanor ignored this, racing out of the room and up the stairs, two at a time, shouting as she went, ‘I’ll be back in an instant. Don’t worry so, Mama.’
On reaching her bedroom, she hung out of the window, calling down to one of the stable boys working in the yard below: he was her frequent companion in naughtiness. ‘Nat! Nat! Did you get it?’
‘Yes, Miss Eleanor, you can see it later…’
‘No, I want to see it now. Wait there. I’ll be down presently.’
She shot down the stairs even faster than she had mounted them and ran through a side door into the yard, where she found Nat cuddling an animal which was squirming beneath his jacket.
Nat Swain was a stocky youth from a family which had worked for the Hattons for generations. Although he was three years older than Eleanor he was not much taller than she was, but he was broad and strong, the perfect shape for a stable lad. He, Ned, Stacy and Eleanor had birds-nested and played together as children, and until recently the four of them had been companions and apparent equals.
But then Ned and Stacy had left for Oxford and the wider world outside to which Nat had no access. Ned, nearly four years older than Eleanor, was now a young man about town, and Stacy, almost the same age, was growing up fast, too.
Eleanor, once the two boys had gone, had been forbidden the stables and Nat’s companionship by both her grandfather, who was also her guardian, and her good-natured but ineffectual mother. She had responded by apparently agreeing with them—and then doing exactly as she pleased when no one was about. Sir Hart’s warning that her friendship with Nat must be a thing of the past went unheeded.
Nat showed her his prize: a ferret. Eleanor exclaimed delightedly over it and was impatient to see it running free.
‘No, Miss Eleanor, it’s not safe; it moves so quick we might lose it.’
‘Well, then, at least allow me to hold it.’
Nat looked doubtfully at her. He was well aware that Miss Eleanor was, as Ned, young for her age and that he was not. He had already pleasured one of the village girls out on the moors which surrounded the great house, and had pretended that it was Miss Eleanor in his arms, that grey eyes were really deep blue ones and russet hair was black.
He knew that to desire Miss Eleanor was crying for the moon, but there were times when his longing for her grew unbearable. He also knew that Sir Hart—as everyone called him—had forbidden them to associate with one another once Ned and Stacy had left, and that their recent return had not lifted his prohibition. If Miss Eleanor continued to ignore it, though, then so would he.
Unable to refuse her anything, he handed the wriggling creature over to her. Eleanor, ignoring her fine clothing and recent toilette, cuddled the feral thing, exclaiming over it until she almost drove Nat mad with desire for her, thus justifying all Sir Hart’s prohibitions.
She petted and stroked the little creature, holding it up so that it hung slack from her hands, but her raptures were cut short when the impudent beast bit her finger. With a sharp cry she relaxed her grip. It leapt out of her arms and, before she and Nat could recapture it, the little animal scuttled away in the direction of the house.
Nat’s desire for Eleanor was replaced by an even greater desire to catch the ferret before he could be in trouble for involving Eleanor in this escapade!
Alas, it was more nimble than they were. Scurrying and flowing along, it turned the corner of the house, found the tall glass doors opening on to the Elizabethan knot garden and ran through the drawing room, where Eleanor’s mama was entertaining the Lorimers, the Harshaws and other gentry of the district to tea.
Feminine screams bore witness that the arrival of the ferret had devastated the party.
In the middle of the noise Eleanor’s mama appeared at the doors to face her daughter and Nat, who were both transfixed by the enormity of a prank which had gone sadly wrong.
‘Run, Nat, run,’ Eleanor had said, once the outcry had begun. ‘It was my fault, not yours.’
Too late! Even as he turned her mama said, in a voice severe for her, ‘Miss Hatton, did you release that animal? Shame on you. Is that Nat Swain with you?’
‘Yes, but it was my fault, Mama, not his. It was an accident. I did not mean to upset the tea party. I am sorry.’
‘Sorry! Yes, you should be sorry, Miss Hatton. Swain, you had better come and rescue the tea party by taking the animal away. Sir Hartley must be informed of your misbehaviour once you have removed it. Having done so you will report immediately to him. And you, Miss Hatton, will go to your room at once. At once, I say.’
Her mother was rarely firm, but today she showed no signs of relenting.
Obedient for once, Eleanor, her head hanging, walked to the stairs, where she met Ned and Stacy attracted by the uproar.
‘Well, you’ve really done it this time, little sister,’ said Ned, grinning.
Stacy, just behind him, was more serious. ‘Oh, Eleanor, you’ve got poor Nat into trouble again! You know what Sir Hart said last time.’
‘Oh, Stacy, don’t preach,’ exclaimed Eleanor sharply. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. It was an accident.’
‘Which will cost Nat a thrashing,’ returned Stacy bluntly. ‘It will cost you, as well. Sir Hart won’t be best pleased. You’re not fair to Nat, you know.’
He was not referring to the prank, but Eleanor was too immature to grasp his real meaning—that she was a temptation to him.
‘Oh, Nat’ll take it in his stride,’ said Ned carelessly, nearly as blind as Eleanor. ‘Best you go to your own room, Nell. Mama was really in a taking this time.’
It was nearly an hour before her mother’s maid came knocking on her bedroom door to tell her that her grandfather wished to see her in his study. By then Eleanor had begun to regret her recent rash behaviour and the tears were not far away.
She made her way slowly downstairs, through the long picture gallery and past the giant Gainsborough portrait of Sir Hart’s father, Sir Beauchamp. Sir Beauchamp always frightened Eleanor: he was so cold, so stern and so handsome. It was strange that Sir Hart resembled him so much in appearance but was so different in his kind goodness from his redoubtable and severe father.
Sir Hart’s goodness was legendary; Sir Beauchamp’s ruthless will was equally so. Even in the days when Sir Hart had been a member of Lord Liverpool’s government his virtue had been a byword. It made it difficult to oppose him.
What was remarkable was that Sir Hart had always stuck to his principles first in his difficult youth, under Sir Beauchamp, and then with his equally difficult problems with his two worthless sons, one of whom had been Eleanor’s father. Both of them had died young as a consequence of their dissolute lives.
It must be hard, thought Eleanor, to have had someone like Papa to contend with. And for the first time she felt guilt at her own thoughtless conduct. She wondered how Sir Beauchamp would have dealt with her.
Her great-aunt Almeria, Sir Beauchamp’s only daughter, had said once to Eleanor’s mama that he had never suffered nonsense from anyone. She had added that he’d had the coldest heart she had ever encountered. Eleanor thought that her great-aunt resembled Sir Beauchamp—but was a little kinder.
By the time she had reached Sir Hart’s study door Eleanor was in a mood which was new to her. Seeing Sir Beauchamp as though for the first time had set her thinking of how unsatisfactory Ned was. With his easy charm and his heedlessness of the consequences of his rash actions, he was behaving exactly like their dead father.
Worse than that, she was suddenly unhappily aware that she was following the same path as Ned—and that would never do. The deeper implications of her friendship with Nat and her own thoughtless conduct were presenting themselves to her for the first time. Later she was to think that her life changed fundamentally on that afternoon—and all because Nat Swain had brought her a ferret!
She found Sir Hartley Hatton standing by the window looking out over the moors: his favourite position. He was in his late seventies but was still a handsome man, nearly as straight and tall as he had been in his prime.
‘Pray sit down, Eleanor.’
She chose a high-backed chair opposite to his desk, clasped her hands loosely in her lap and hung her head. Sir Hart thought that she might be so subdued because for the first time she was questioning her own conduct, and was wondering, perhaps, why she had behaved so wildly. It was plain that she was feeling shame for more than the silly prank itself. It was a good sign.
He came straight to the point. ‘I don’t often give you an order, Eleanor, but I gave you one over young Swain. Why did you disobey me?’
His voice was so kind that the tears threatened to fall immediately.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Grandfather. I thought that it was unkind of you, when I was lonely once Ned and Stacy had gone, to deny me Nat as well.’
‘Why do you think I gave it?’
Sir Hart’s voice was still kind, but there was a hint of sternness in it.
Eleanor twisted her hands, and said painfully, ‘I suppose it was so that I shouldn’t play a silly prank, as I did with the ferret. It wasn’t intended, though, Grandfather, and it wasn’t Nat’s fault. Please don’t punish him for it.’
Her grandfather waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, the business with the animal was stupid, and caused distress, but that was not the fault, only the symptom. Pray answer my question.’
Her eyes full of tears, Eleanor murmured, ‘I suppose because I’m too old to play childish tricks and run wild…’ She faltered to a stop.
‘Indeed, but more than that you are being unfair to young Swain. He is not of your world, Eleanor. What was innocent and passed the time when you were children became less so as you grew older. It was positively wrong once Ned and Stacy had left and you were on your own.’
Sir Hart paused. It was plain to him that Eleanor did not know what a temptation she presented to the lad now that she was growing into a beautiful young woman. What she must also understand was that he could not agree to young Swain going unpunished.
‘You must be aware that you have left me with no alternative but to instruct Hargreaves to give him a thrashing. He was expressly ordered not to associate with you once Ned and Stacy had grown up. He disobeyed me, so he must be punished as well as you. How shall I punish you, Granddaughter?’
‘In my grandmother’s day they did not hesitate to thrash naughty young ladies,’ she said steadily, her face white.
‘That is true, but it is not the fashion now, and I do not think that it is required. I believe that you understand that you have done wrong, and worse, I suspect, than you intended. No, what I have in mind for you is both more and less severe. I propose to send you to your great-aunt Almeria Stanton in London—without your mother. She cannot control you, I know, and that is bad for you, for you can control her. Almeria will teach you to be a young lady and prepare you for life. She is strict, but kind. You shall have your come-out, and she will make you ready to marry young Stacy—which is, as you know, my dearest wish.
‘Stacy is both good and steady, which is what you need in a husband. You have a fine mind, Eleanor, but you have been misusing it. On the other hand, apart from this folly with young Swain, you do not lack application. I have no wish for you to go the way that Ned is going.’
Eleanor was now crying bitterly. ‘Oh, no, Grandfather, I don’t wish to live in London. I’ve always hated it there. Please let me stay here. I promise to be good in future.’
‘No, Eleanor. You would have had to leave soon in any case, with or without your mother. You are merely going earlier than I intended. Your mother has been told and she does not like this, either, but she lost control of both you and Ned long ago, and we must all, I fear, pay for our failings as well as our sins.’
That was the end. There was no use in pleading—and no dignity, either. Kind Sir Hart might be, but he was also firm, and what he decreed was law.
‘You may go, Granddaughter. Tomorrow you must prepare to leave.’
Eleanor rose and walked to the door, where she turned and looked at him. Her face was white but the tears had stopped falling.
‘I will be good, I promise. I don’t want to be a fine lady, I despise them, but I will become one for your sake, Grandfather.’
‘And for yours, too, Eleanor. For yours, too.’
Chapter One
London, 1841: Monde and demi-monde
M r Alan Dilhorne, ‘the person from Australia’, as some butlers were later to call him, stood in the foyer of the Haymarket Theatre, London, on his second night in the capital.
Tired after the long journey from Sydney, he had gone straight to bed at Brown’s Hotel when he had arrived there, but a day’s sleep had restored him to full vigour and a desire to explore the land which had exiled his father. He looked eagerly about him at the fashionable crowd, many of whom stared at his clothing which, however suitable it had been in Sydney, branded him an outsider here.
Curious stares never troubled Alan. His confidence in himself, helped by his superb physique and his handsome face, was profound. It was backed by the advice offered him by his devious and exacting father.
‘Work hard and play hard’ was his maxim, which Alan had no difficulty in following. He had come to London to carry out a mission for his family which promised him a busy time in the old country. He was not going to allow that to prevent him from enjoying life to the full while he executed it.
He had walked through the demi-monde on his way to the theatre, and it was obviously much larger and livelier than its counterpart in Sydney.
A hand fell on his shoulder and spun him half around. A man of his own age, the late twenties, fashionably dressed, slightly drunk already, was laughing in his face.
‘Ned! What the devil are you doing here so early, and in those dam’d awful clothes, too?’
‘Yes,’ chimed his companion. ‘Not like you, Ned, not at all. Fancy dress, is it?’
‘Ned?’ said Alan slowly. ‘I’m not Ned.’
The small group of young gentlemen before him looked suitably taken aback.
‘Come on, Ned. Stop roasting us. What’s the game tonight, eh?’
‘Not roasting you,’ said Alan firmly. ‘I’m Alan Dilhorne, from Sydney, New South Wales. Don’t know any Neds, I’m afraid.’
He had deepened his slight Australian accent and saw eyes widen.
‘Good God, I do believe you’re not Ned,’ said his first accoster.
‘Bigger in the shoulders,’ offered one young fellow, who was already half supported by his friends. ‘Strip better than Ned, for sure. Bit soft, Ned.’ Other heads nodded at this, to Alan’s amusement.
The first speaker put out a hand. ‘Well, Not Ned, I’m Frank Gresham, and you’re like enough to Ned to deceive anyone. I’d have taken you for him on a fine day with the hounds running.’
Alan liked the look of the handsome young man before him, whom he took to be younger than he was—in contrast to himself; he looked more mature than his years.
‘I’d like to see Ned. Ned who?’
‘Ned Hatton. Not here yet, obviously. Always late, Ned. Look here, Dilhorne, is it? Meet us in the foyer in the first interval and you shall see him. And if this play is as dam’d boring as I expect it will be, we’ll make a night of it together.’
Most of them looked as though they had made more than a night of it already.
‘You got that shocking bad hat and coat in Australia, I suppose?’ said Gresham’s half-drunk companion, introduced as Bob Manners. ‘Better get Ned to introduce you to his tailor—won’t want his face walking around in that!’
‘Shame on you, Bob,’ said Gresham genially. ‘Fellow can’t help where he comes from.’
He put his arm through Alan’s—he had obviously been adopted as ‘one of theirs’ on the strength of his likeness to Ned—whoever he was. ‘Buy you a drink before the play, Dilhorne—girls’ll look better with a drop inside.’
Bells were already ringing to signal the start of the entertainment, but Gresham and his chums took no notice of them. The man at the bar knew him.
‘Yes, m’lord, what is it tonight?’
So Frank, who had walked him over, was a lord and Ned, who had still not arrived, was his friend. The foyer emptied a little, but Alan’s new friends continued to drink for some time before they decided that they were ready to see the play.
He made his way to his seat as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb the audience or the others in the box. Frank and his companions, who were a little way away from him, were not so considerate. They entered their box noisily and responded to the shushing of the audience by blowing kisses and, in Bob Manners’ case, by dripping the contents of a bottle of champagne on to the heads of the people below.
Alan, looking eagerly around the garish auditorium, expected them to be thrown out, but the other people in his box, half-amused, half-annoyed, knew the revellers.
‘It’s Gresham’s set again,’ said one stout burgher wisely to his equally plump wife.
‘Disgusting,’ she returned. ‘They should be thrown out, or not allowed in.’
‘Manager can’t throw Gresham out—too grand.’
The spectacle on the stage amused Alan, although it did not engage him. Half his mind was on his recent encounter, and when the curtain fell at the first interval he was down the stairs in a flash to see Ned, who wore his face.
Gresham’s friends, who had quietened a little after their entrance, had further annoyed the audience by leaving noisily before the first act ended, and were already busy drinking when Alan arrived in the bar. He was loudly greeted, and he guessed, correctly, that his new acquaintances were bored and needed the diversion which he was providing.
Well, that did not trouble him—who knew how this odd adventure might end?
‘It’s “Not Ned”, the Australian,’ proclaimed Gresham. ‘Here, Ned, here’s your look-alike.’ And he tapped on the shoulder the tall man standing beside him.
Ned Hatton turned to confront himself. And it was a dam’d disturbing experience, he reported afterwards. All he said at the time was, ‘Jupiter! You’ve stolen my face.’
Alan was amused as well as startled by seeing his own face without benefit of his shaving mirror.
‘As well say you’ve stolen mine.’
‘Not quite your voice, though,’ offered Manners. ‘Nor your clothes. But, dammit, you’re even the same height.’
‘I’m Alan Dilhorne, from Sydney, New South Wales,’ said Alan, putting out a large hand to Ned for it to be grasped by one very like his own. Yes, Manners had been right: Ned was softer.
Fascinated, Ned shook the offered hand. ‘Well, Alan Dilhorne, what you most need is a good tailor.’
‘And a good barber,’ commented Gresham critically. ‘Although nothing could improve the colour—as shocking as yours, Ned.’
General laughter followed this. Alan’s amusement at their obsession with his clothes and appearance grew.
The bells rang for the start of the next act. None of his new friends took the slightest notice of them. Alan debated with himself. Should he go back, alone, to his box? Or stay with this chance-met pack of gentlemen and aristocrats whom in normal circumstances he would never have met at all?
Fascination at meeting his exact double kept him with them. Almost exact was more accurate, for Manners was right: Ned was certainly not in good shape, would not strip well, and was, in all respects, a softer, smoother version of himself.
‘Well, my boys, let’s be off,’ said Gresham. ‘A dam’d dull play, and a dam’d unaccommodating audience. Give it a miss, Dilhorne, and come with us. Let’s find out if you can hold your drink better than Ned. Looking at you, I’d bet on it.’ He clapped the protesting Ned on the shoulder. ‘Come now, Ned, you know you’ve less head for it than Manners here, and that’s saying something!’
He removed the stovepipe hat which Ned had just put on and tossed it into the street. ‘Last one to leave pays for the rest. First one buys Dilhorne a drink.’ And the whole company streamed convivially out of the theatre, bound for another night on the town.
A couple of hours later Alan found that he could hold his liquor better than any of them, including Ned, which was not surprising, because although he appeared to keep up with them he took care, by a number of stratagems taught him by his father, not to drink very much.
They had been in and out of several dives, had argued whether to go on to the Coal Hole or not, and at the last moment had become engaged in a general brawl with some sturdy bruisers guarding a gaming hell just off the Haymarket. Ned expressed a wish to go to Rosie’s. Gresham argued that Rosie’s was dull these days. Alan intervened to prevent another brawl, this time between the two factions into which the group had divided.
His suggestion that they should split up and meet again another night met with drunken agreement. He announced his own intention to stay with Ned.
‘Mustn’t lose my face,’ he announced, and accordingly the larger group, under Gresham, reeled erratically down the road, to end up God knows where. Ned and another friend, whose name Alan never discovered because he never met him again, made for Rosie’s, which had the further attraction for Ned of being near to where they were, thus doing away with the need for a lengthy walk or a cab.
Rosie’s turned out to be a gaming hell-cum-brothel similar to many in Sydney, though larger and better appointed. Hells like Rosie’s were sometimes known as silver hells, to distinguish them from the top-notch places to one of which Gresham had led the other party. Ned, though, liked the easier atmosphere of these minor dives rather than the ones which the great names of the social world patronised. Besides, they were rarely raided by the authorities.
The gaming half of Rosie’s was a large room with card tables at one end and supper tables spread with food and drink at the other. The food was lavish, and included oysters, lobster patties and salmis of game and salmon. The drink was varied: port, sherries, light and heavy wines stood about in bottles and decanters.
Alan, who was hungry, sampled the food and found it good. The drink he avoided, except for one glass of light wine which he disposed of into a potted palm, remembering his father, the Patriarch’s, prudent advice.
Disliking bought sex—another consequence of his father’s advice—he smilingly refused Ned’s suggestion that he pick one of the girls and sample the goods upstairs.
‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Much too tired for exhausting games in bed. I think that I’d prefer a quiet hand of cards—or even to watch other people play.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Ned agreeably. He was always agreeable, Alan was to find, and this was a handicap as well as a virtue, since little moved him deeply.
‘Play cards by all means,’ Ned continued. ‘Girls are better, though. I always score with the girls, much more rarely at cards. Don’t wait for me, Dilhorne. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at Stanton House.’ He had earlier invited Alan to visit him at his great-aunt Almeria’s, his base when he was in London.
He went upstairs on the arm of the Madame, a pretty girl in tow, leaving Alan with the other highly foxed member of the party slumped on a bench near the gaming tables. Alan made himself comfortable in a large armchair which gave him a good view of the room. Sitting there, half-asleep, he watched two well-dressed members of the ton enter. One of them flapped an idle hand at him, and murmured, ‘Evening, Ned.’
Alan did not disabuse him. He could tell that they were both slightly tipsy, at the voluble stage, and when they seated themselves at a table near him the larger, noisier one began chaffing the other about a visitor he was expecting to arrive at his office on the following morning—‘Or rather, this morning, to have it proper.’ He had apparently reached the pedantic stage of drunkenness.
‘From New South Wales, I understand, Johnstone.’
The other laughed humourlessly. ‘Yes—if it isn’t bad enough that I have to earn a living at all, I’m expected to dance attendance on a pack of colonial savages who have set up in London and are sending one of their cubs to tell us our business. I understand that Father Bear went out there in chains. What a set!’
‘And when do you expect Baby Bear?’
‘Tomorrow, as I said. He sent me a note today, telling me that I am to have the honour of his presence at ten. The honour of his presence! And at ten! I don’t recognise the time. Well, Baby Bear will have to wait. He proposed the time, not me. The honour of his presence, indeed!’
He choked with laughter again, spluttering through his drink, ‘Young Master Alan Dilhorne must fancy himself.’
Alan had early begun to suspect exactly who Johnstone was speaking of, and this last sentence confirmed it. The true son of his devious father, he gave nothing away. Johnstone had risen, looked over at him and said, ‘A game of cards, Ned?’
Alan nodded. At some point he would have to speak. He, and not his older twin, Thomas, had inherited their father’s talent for mimicry. He tried out Ned’s voice in his head. It was light and careless, higher than his own, a very English upper-class drawl. He thought that he could pull it off. Impersonating Ned would be harder than some of the tricks he had played at home—but it would give him a different form of amusement.
Meantime, he warned himself, he must watch his vowels—it wouldn’t hurt to appear to be a little drunk. Johnstone and his pal called in another man so that they could sit down in pairs to play piquet. Johnstone against Alan, and his friend against the stranger. Alan prayed that Ned would not return; he had said that he would not, but one thing was very plain: he was not reliable and said whatever pleased him at the time.
It soon became equally plain that, for Johnstone, Ned was a pigeon to be plucked. He assumed that Ned was both drunk and careless and his manner was lightly contemptuous. Well, he might be in for a surprise. Alan began by knocking over his glass of light wine and dropping his cards. He fell on to his hands and knees in order to pick them up, exclaiming, ‘The devil’s in them tonight.’
He heard Johnstone and his friends, Lloyd and Fraser, laugh while he continued to offer them the picture of incompetence which they both expected from flighty Ned Hatton. All three, indeed, obviously regarded Ned as little better than a fool. Lloyd even winked at Johnstone when Alan dropped his cards again.
By the end of a couple of hours, though, they were all frowning. Stupid Ned Hatton was having the devil’s own luck, and was far in advance of the game, having consistently won despite muttering and moaning, losing his cards and once depositing all his gaming counters on the floor.
‘Hands and knees business, again,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Rising like Venus from the waves,’ he drunkenly told them all, before he began winning again. In his last hand, before he broke Johnstone completely, he even Rubiconed him—a feat rarely performed.
‘By God, Ned, you’ve got the cards tonight,’ exclaimed Johnstone, unable to credit that it was skill and not luck which was defeating him.
‘Fool’s luck,’ muttered Alan, picking up yet another of Johnstone’s IOUs with shaking hands. His father’s tuition and his own mathematical skills, honed by several years of running the money-lending side of his father’s business, gave him a good edge over most card players—even those as skilful as Johnstone, who was obviously unused to losing.
Towards the end Alan began to suspect that Johnstone’s friend was shrewd enough to guess that there was something odd about Ned Hatton that night, and when Lloyd’s game came to an end, with him as winner, Alan announced that he was too tired to continue. Since Johnstone had also had enough, they finished playing in the early hours of the morning.
Stone-cold sober, as he had been all along, Alan was careful to stagger out of Rosie’s some little distance behind Johnstone and his friends. The Haymarket was alive with light and noise—he was in the midst of the demi-monde about which his father had warned him. Chance and his strange resemblance to Ned Hatton had brought him here—and had also given him a strange opportunity.
He laughed to himself all the way to Brown’s. Not only would he be better prepared to meet Johnstone in the morning, but he was relishing the prospect of watching the other man’s reaction when someone with Ned Hatton’s face walked into Dilhorne and Sons’ London office.
And in the afternoon he was due to visit Stanton House off Piccadilly. It should be an interesting day.
Although perhaps not quite so surprising as the one just past!
‘You’re up early today,’ Eleanor Hatton commented to a yawning Ned, who had come down for breakfast in the middle of the morning and not at its end.
He took a long look at her and said inconsequentially, ‘I still can’t get used to how much you’ve changed.’
Eleanor smiled somewhat ruefully. She was remembering the first occasion on which Ned had visited Stanton House after her great-aunt Almeria had taken her over. She had only been away from Yorkshire for three months—the longest three months of her life, she had thought at the time.
At first she had fought and argued in her determination not to be turned into a fine lady. She had hated London and longed for her carefree life in the country. Worst of all had been to be told to forget notions of educating herself beyond the mere demands of most fashionable women’s lives.
Finally she had confronted her great-aunt with an ultimatum. ‘If you will allow me to spend a few hours each week with Charles and his tutor, Mr Dudley, then I will agree to be groomed for the life of a fine young lady. Otherwise…’ And she had shrugged.
Almeria Stanton, faced with a will as strong as her own, had capitulated.
‘A bargain then,’ her aunt had agreed, amused by Eleanor’s strange mixture of learning, and athleticism, both qualities totally unsuitable for the lady of fashion which she was destined to be.
Charles was Lady Stanton’s grandson, a lively twelve-year-old who had been left behind in England when his soldier father had been ordered to India. His tutor, an earnest young man, had been pleased to teach her once Eleanor had proved that her interest in learning was genuine. He had also, much against his will, fallen in love with the lively young woman who was so far beyond his reach.
Eleanor kept her promise. Ned, meeting her again after nearly two years, had barely recognised her. She had entered the room where he’d been reading the Morning Post, stripped off her gloves, pulled off her poke-bonnet to reveal her fashionably dressed hair, and smiled at him in the cool, impersonal way she had learned from her great-aunt.
‘Oh, Ned, how nice to see you,’ she’d murmured, graciously offering him two fingers and her cheek.
Ned had been lost between admiration and horror. Where had tomboy Nell gone to?
‘Good God, sister, what have they done to you?’
‘I’m a lady now, Ned. I’ve had my come-out and two proposals of marriage. Both unsuitable, I hasten to add. I’ve also got a marquess dangling after me. Not that I care about him; he’s as old as the hills.’
Almeria had surveyed her transformed charge approvingly. ‘Well done, my dear—although we could have done without the bit about the Marquess.’
‘Well done?’ Ned had exclaimed scornfully. ‘What do you think that Stacy will have to say about this?’ He had flipped his hand derisively in his sister’s direction. ‘I thought that you, at least, were a girl of sense. Never thought that propriety would overtake you, Nell.’
‘Eleanor,’ she’d said automatically, colouring faintly and moving away from him. ‘Nell’s days are over. Sir Hart was right. My behaviour was not proper. In any case, I have to leave now. I need to change for Lady Lyttelton’s soirée.’
‘Oh, you’ll come about, I’m sure,’ Ned had said uneasily, but she hadn’t. Some of their old rapport had returned, but the Nell who had romped with Ned, Nat and Stacy had gone for ever.
Now, sitting opposite to her, months later, drinking coffee and nursing a thick head after the previous evening’s debauchery, he asked, somewhat blearily, ‘Going to be in this afternoon, Eleanor?’
She looked up from her plate. ‘I shall be with Charles and his tutor until four-thirty, and then I’m free. Why?’
‘I’ve invited an Australian friend I made last night to meet me here around half past four. I promised to take him to Cremorne Gardens this evening. Thought that you might like to meet him before we go.’
He did not say so, but Ned was hoping to play a jolly jape—his words—on his sister when Alan arrived. It was all that she deserved for turning herself into such a fashionable prig.
‘An Australian?’ said Almeria Stanton doubtfully. ‘Is he a gentleman, Ned?’
‘As much as I am,’ returned Ned ambiguously. ‘Which isn’t saying much, I know. But I think that you’ll like the look of him.’
He laughed to himself when he said this, and watched Nell rise gracefully from the table. She and Great-Aunt Almeria were about to spend the morning shopping in Bond Street, an occupation which the Nell who had once been Ned’s boon companion would have rejected completely.
Never mind that, though. Ned nearly choked over his coffee when he thought of the shock she would get when she met Alan Dilhorne. He wondered idly what his new friend might be doing on this bright and shining early summer morning.
Alan was enjoying himself by combining business with pleasure. He rose early, ate a large breakfast and arrived at Dilhorne and Sons’ London office promptly at ten. They were situated in one of the rabbit warren of streets in the City, at the far end of a filthy alley. This appeared to signify nothing, since several of the dingy offices sported brass plates bearing the names of businesses equally if not more famous than Dilhorne’s.
He still wore his disgraceful clothes, and the clerk in the outer office gave him a look which could only be called insolent.
‘Yes?’ he drawled, not even putting down his quill pen. His contemptuous look dismissed this poorly dressed anonymous young man.
‘I have an appointment with Mr George Johnstone at ten of the clock,’ Alan announced without preamble.
‘Doubt it.’ The clerk’s drawl was more insolent than ever. ‘He never gets in before ten thirty, mostly not until eleven.’
‘Indeed.’
Alan looked around the untidy, disordered room, and listened to the staff chattering together instead of working. He noted the clerk’s languid manner and the idle way in which he entered figures into a dog-eared ledger. He reminded himself that his father, always known to his family as the Patriarch, had sent him to England with instructions to find out what was going wrong with the London end of the business.
He wondered grimly what the Patriarch would do in this situation. Something devious, probably, like not announcing who he was in order to discover exactly how inefficient the business had become. Yes, that was it. They could hang themselves, so to speak, in front of him. Yes, deviousness was the order of the day.
‘I’ll wait,’ he offered, a trifle timidly.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said the clerk, grinning at Alan’s deplorable trousers. ‘He won’t see you without an appointment—and I’ve no note of one here.’
Alan forbore to say that, judging by the mismanagement he could see in the office and its slovenly appearance, the clerk’s list might be neither accurate nor reliable.
Time crawled by. When the clock struck eleven the clerk looked at Alan and said, ‘Still with us, then?’
‘Nothing better to do.’ Alan was all shy, juvenile charm, which the clerk treated as shy, juvenile charm should be treated by a man of the world: with contempt.
‘Pity.’ The clerk’s sympathy was non-existent.
Everyone stopped work at eleven-thirty. One of the junior clerks was sent out for porter. Alan looked around, identified where the privy might be, used it, and came back again to take up his post before the clerk’s desk.
‘Thought you’d gone,’ tittered one of the younger men, currying favour with the older ones, waving his pot of porter at him.
No one offered Alan porter. He resisted the urge to give the jeering young man a good kick and sat back in his uncomfortable chair.
It was twelve-fifteen by the clock when George Johnstone entered, blear-eyed and yawning. The clerk waved a careless hand at Alan. ‘Young gentleman to see you, Mr Johnstone.’
Johnstone looked at Alan in some surprise.
‘Good God, Ned, what are you doing here? Still wearing those dreadful clothes, I see. Lost all the Hatton money?’
‘I came to see how hard you businessmen work.’
Alan’s imitation of Ned’s speech was perfect enough to deceive Johnstone.
‘Come into my office, then. Thought that I’d have a visitor waiting to see me. Some colonial savage—but he’s obviously given me a miss. Or he’s late. You can entertain me until he arrives.’
Alan followed him into his office. It was little cleaner or tidier than the one which the clerks occupied.
‘Have a drink,’ offered Johnstone, going immediately to a tantalus on a battered sideboard. ‘Must get ready for Baby Bear.’
‘Not in the morning,’ said Alan, still using Ned’s voice.
‘T’isn’t morning,’ said Johnstone, sitting down and swallowing his brandy in one gulp. ‘By God, that’s better. Hair of the dog. But have it your way, Ned.’
‘I fully intend to,’ returned Alan, in his own voice this time. He rose abruptly: now to do the Patriarch on him. He leaned forward, seized Johnstone by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet with a jerk. He let go of the astonished man and stood back.
‘Stand up when you speak to me, you idle devil!’
His cold ferocity, so unlike Ned Hatton’s easy charm, was frightening in itself. Coming from someone with Ned’s face it was also overpoweringly disconcerting.
‘You aren’t Ned!’ squeaked Johnstone, beginning to sit down again.
‘How perceptive of you. No, I’m not. And stand up when Baby Bear speaks to you.’
‘Oh, by God, you weren’t Ned Hatton last night, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t Ned Hatton last night, either. I am your employer, Tom Dilhorne’s son Alan, come over without his chains to find out what has gone wrong with the London end of the business. I only needed to look at you to find out. Would you care to explain how a worthless fine gentleman like yourself came to be in charge here?’
‘But why do you look exactly like Ned Hatton? Are you his cousin?’
Alan surveyed Johnstone wearily. ‘No, I’m not his cousin. It’s just a strange likeness, that’s all. Pure chance. And I’m not a pigeon for the plucking like poor Ned, either—which you found out last night.’
‘Doosed bad form that, pretending to be Ned Hatton.’
‘You called me Ned first. You were so dam’d eager to fleece him that you couldn’t look at him properly. You haven’t answered my question.’
‘What question?’
Alan sighed. ‘How you came to be in charge here? Good God man, where’s your memory?’
‘I was Jack Montagu’s friend. He knew I needed to find work so he made me the manager here when he married his heiress.’
‘I suppose you think that you’ve been working. Good God, man, you don’t know the meaning of the word, but you will by the time that I’ve finished with you.
‘I want to inspect all your books and papers. I want to interview every clerk in your employment, see all contracts, bills of sale, be given a full account of all transactions, wages, rents, and what you’re paying for this hole—it had better be cheap. In short, I want a full account of the whole business, and I want everything ready for inspection by ten of the clock tomorrow. Not ten-thirty, mind, but ten. You take me, I’m sure.’
This last sentence was delivered in a savage imitation of Johnstone’s own gentlemanly drawl.
Johnstone blenched. ‘I can’t, Dilhorne, you’re mad.’
‘Sir, to you,’ said Alan, in the Patriarch’s hardest voice. ‘You can and you will, or it will be the worse for you.’
‘Good God, sir, it will take all night.’
‘Then take all night. You and the rest of the idlers in the other room have wasted enough of the firm’s time and money. Now you can make some of it up.’
Johnstone sank back into his chair, his face grey.
‘I didn’t give you leave to sit, you idle devil. You’ll remain standing until I leave.’
Mutinously Johnstone rose, silently consigning all sandy-haired young Australians to the deepest pit of Hell.
‘Now mind me,’ said Alan pleasantly. ‘You’ll jump when I say jump, and you’ll say please nicely when I ask you to if you don’t want instant dismissal. And if you think that Baby Bear plays a rough hand I can’t recommend you to meet Father Bear. He’d not only eat your porridge, he’d eat you, too.’
He strolled into the outer office, leaving behind him a stunned and shaken man. The clerk, quite unaware of what had taken place in Johnstone’s room, gave him yet another insolent grin, and said, ‘Got your interview, did you? Not long, was it?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan sweetly. He looked judiciously at the clerk, registered his leer, leaned forward, picked up his inkwell and slowly poured its contents over the page of ill-written figures which the clerk had been carelessly copying from various invoices, receipts and notes of hand.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ yelped the clerk. ‘That’s my morning’s work ruined.’
‘Well, you ruined my morning’s work,’ said Alan reasonably, head on one side, surveying the havoc he had wrought. ‘You can do it again, legibly this time.’
He turned and shouted at the door behind him, ‘Johnstone! Come here at once!’
To the clerk’s astonishment the door opened and a respectful Johnstone appeared.
‘Sir?’ he said to Alan, and the office fell silent at the sound.
‘What is this man’s name?’ asked Alan.
He still had the inkwell in his hand and he leisurely began to pour the remains of the ink on to the clerk’s head. The clerk let out another strangled yelp and looked reproachfully through the black rain, first at Alan and then at the subservient Johnstone.
‘Phipps,’ Johnstone said. ‘Nathaniel Phipps.’
‘Phipps,’ said Alan thoughtfully. ‘Dirty, isn’t he?’ He critically surveyed the ruined ledger and the ink dripping down Phipps’s face.
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Johnstone nervously.
‘You did it,’ squealed Phipps at Alan. ‘He did it, Mr Johnstone. Not I.’
“‘You did it, sir,” is the correct usage,’ said Alan, putting down the empty inkwell. ‘Say it after me, please.’
‘Mr Johnstone, sir,’ roared Phipps desperately. ‘Please stop this madman.’
‘Madman? Tut-tut,’ said Alan. ‘And if I am mad you’ve driven me into that condition, what with making me wait over two hours in a dam’d uncomfortable chair and enduring your insolence while I did so. I’ve a short fuse, which anyone who works for me soon finds out.’
This was a lie, but Phipps was too agitated to care.
‘Works for you! I don’t work for you! I work for Mr Johnstone.’
‘And he works for me,’ said Alan gently. He picked up the clerk’s quill pen, and with the whole office and Johnstone watching him silently, breath drawn in, he rolled it in the ink and negligently wrote his initials on Phipps’s forehead.
‘Yes, he works for me, and so do you now. You’re mine, Phipps. Alan Dilhorne’s property so long as you’re in this room. Unless, of course, you care to resign.’
The silence in the room grew more deathly, broken only by the clerk’s whimpering while he scrubbed at his face with his handkerchief. ‘This can’t be true, Mr Johnstone.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ said Alan. ‘Now clean up your disgusting person and your disgraceful work and do it again: properly this time.’
‘It’s not fair,’ said Phipps tearfully. ‘You should have told me who you were.’
Alan’s face was suddenly like stone. ‘Ah, but you see, I needed to know how you would treat someone whom you didn’t know was your employer’s son, and I found out, didn’t I. Didn’t I, Phipps? And if you can’t see what was wrong with what you’ve just said, then we shall never get Dilhorne and Sons’ London branch straight again, shall we?’
He swung round and addressed his staring staff. ‘The rest of you can get down to it immediately, and do an honest day’s work for once. You’re none of you fit to work in my Sydney office. Mr Johnstone will tell you what I expect of you by tomorrow, and God help you all if it’s not ready by ten.’
He walked to the door before turning and delivering his parting shot.
‘Oh, and by the by, mid-morning porter is out, from today!’
Chapter Two
T hat afternoon Eleanor left the schoolroom, where she had been working with Charles and young Mr Dudley, and decided that, four-thirty being almost upon her, she would not trouble to change her clothes in order to meet Ned’s Australian friend. She was still wearing her deep blue walking dress and that would have to do.
She had reached the last step of the graceful staircase which spiralled to the top of the house when she met Staines, the butler. He bowed and said ‘Mr Ned is in the drawing room, Miss Eleanor, awaiting his friend, and asks you to join him there.’
Somehow Eleanor gained the impression that he was enjoying a small private joke. She immediately dismissed this notion as fanciful and walked across the stone-flagged hall to the drawing room door.
She should have trusted to her instincts. Ned had spent the afternoon avoiding her. He had also given orders to Staines for Mr Alan Dilhorne to be taken straight to the small drawing room with the message that Mr Ned Hatton would shortly join him there.
He had taken care to tell Staines of the likeness and to warn him not to inform anyone else of it before Alan arrived.
‘For,’ he had said ingenuously, ‘I wish to tease the family a little and you must not spoil the fun.’
Staines had agreed to be discreet. All the servants liked Ned: he was so easy, jolly and kind, although some worried what would happen to the Hatton fortune when Sir Hart had gone to his last rest.
Eleanor said over her shoulder to Staines, in a sudden access of her old impetuous spirit, ‘Australian, is he? D’you think he’ll be wearing his chains?’
Staines, bowing his head again, opened the double doors for her, and she entered the drawing room to find not the Australian guest but Ned, standing in front of the fireplace studying Lawrence’s portrait of Great-Aunt Almeria in her youth, which hung above it.
Eleanor resembled her father’s aunt a little, but Almeria Stanton was sterner-looking, and even her airy draperies and the posy of flowers which she was holding did not soften her austere expression. Ned had his sandy head tipped back, the better to inspect it, which struck Eleanor as amusing—as did the outlandish clothes he was wearing.
She gaily continued teasing him when he turned towards her, his back to the light so that his features were a little obscured. ‘Wearing fancy dress so as not to discommode your new friend, are you, Ned? Why didn’t you put chains on, too? Then he would have felt really at home.’
Ned looked at her. His eyes seemed bluer than ever, and they roved over her in a manner which, had he not been Ned, would have made her blush.
Alan found her enchanting. She did not resemble Ned in the least, either in manner or appearance. She was a tall girl, beautifully proportioned, elegantly dressed, from the crown of her glossy head to the toes of her well-shod feet. Ned had spoken of a sister and this must be her. Her colouring was deeper and richer than Ned’s and her hair was a raven-black in colour.
It was very plain that naughty Ned had told her of a visitor from Australia but had not seen fit to mention the likeness. His mouth twitched in involuntary amusement, but before he could identify himself Eleanor spoke again.
‘I understand that you’re taking him to Cremorne Gardens. Tell me, don’t you think that your colonial friend will be overset by such worldly sophistication?’
Before she could commit herself further, and add to her ultimate embarrassment, Alan spoke at once, privately deciding to reproach Ned for putting his pretty sister in such a false position. He had already learned enough about him to know that what had been done was deliberate.
‘You mistake, Miss Hatton,’ he told her, ‘I am not Ned.’ And he deepened the accent which he had not known he possessed until he reached England.
Eleanor’s hand flew to her mouth in an embarrassed reversion to childhood.
‘Not Ned? Then you must be the Australian visitor of whom he spoke. Oh, dear, I have been so mannerless, so gauche. How can I apologise? On the other hand you are so like Ned I can be forgiven for being tactless. Only your voice is different, and, yes, I do believe that you are even bigger than he is.’
Alan decided not to favour her with his wickedly accurate imitation of Ned’s light drawl.
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s too deep. The voice, I mean. It’s the chains. They weigh it down, you know. They took them off…’
He paused tantalisingly, still smiling. He had two sisters whom he liked to tease gently, and he wanted to see how this poised and pretty girl would react to similar treatment.
Eleanor took the bait.
‘The chains? Took them off?’
‘Yes, when we boarded the ship for England. They said that if we wore them during the journey they’d slow us down too much. The weight again.’
‘They did?’ said Eleanor, fascinated by this young man who looked so like Ned but who was yet utterly unlike him when he teased her. On closer inspection he looked very much more severe than Ned, but there was a gentleness in his manner to her which her wild brother had never possessed.
‘Yes. Sorry to disappoint you by not having ’em on.’
‘I’m not disappointed,’ said Eleanor truthfully.
‘I can see that. The Patriarch says—’
‘The Patriarch?’ Eleanor was fascinated all over again.
‘M’father. We call him the Patriarch occasionally—he does come on rather patriarchal at times. He also says that they slow you down when you’re working. So they took them off him soon after he arrived in New South Wales. More trouble than they were worth, he said.’
‘Do stop,’ said Eleanor faintly, trying not to laugh. Great-Aunt Almeria insisted that young ladies never laughed. Lord Chesterfield wouldn’t have liked it, she said. ‘You’re not a bit like Ned now that I’ve got to know you.’
‘No, I’m not,’ agreed Alan cheerfully.
‘But you do look very like him.’
‘Yes—but it was a naughty trick to play on you—and so I shall tell Ned.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have said all that to you about chains if I hadn’t thought you were Ned.’
He agreed with her, head on one side judiciously, adding, ‘Not to my face, perhaps, but afterwards.’
‘Yes, no. Oh, dear.’ She laughed out loud this time, but was saved further embarrassment by the arrival of a grinning Ned.
‘I see you’ve found one another,’ he offered carelessly.
‘Too bad of you, Ned,’ Eleanor began.
‘Miss Hatton found me,’ said Alan. ‘I didn’t do any finding. Our resemblance confused her somewhat.’
Ned’s grin was wider than ever. ‘Thought it might. Bit of a shock was it, Nell?’
‘My name is Eleanor,’ she said repressively. ‘You are quite disgraceful, Ned. I behaved very badly as a consequence of your silly trick and Mr—?’ She looked at Alan.
‘Dilhorne, Alan Dilhorne,’ he told her. ‘But then I behaved badly, too. I was a dreadful tease, I fear.’
‘Indeed you were,’ she agreed, captivated by his charm. No, he was not really very like Ned, despite the resemblance.
‘So, we are quits,’ he said to Eleanor, ignoring the grinning Ned, who was beginning to annoy him.
‘Quits,’ she agreed, and put out her hand to take his and shake it, which pleased Alan mightily.
There was no false affectation about her, despite her overwhelming air of fashion and consequence. He looked at Ned and said, only half-jokingly, ‘Beg both our pardons, Ned, and introduce me properly to your sister, there’s a good fellow.’
The note of command in his voice was such that Ned had begun to obey him when the doors opened again, and Almeria Stanton entered. Her eyebrows rose alarmingly when she saw Ned and Alan standing side by side, their two faces and figures so alike. Yet she thought that there was no doubt which was Ned. The face on the right possessed a power and a strength missing in her great-nephew’s.
Almeria sighed. Inconvenient likeness were the bane of the aristocracy’s life, but if this were the Australian visitor of whom Ned had spoken then the likeness had to be put down to chance.
But she would still like to know more of the origins of Ned’s new friend…
‘I understand that you are taking Mr Dilhorne to Cremorne Gardens tonight, Ned. I must remind you that you were out late this morning. I’m not sure that your grandfather would approve of your way of life.’
‘I’m well of age,’ said Ned sulkily.
Watching him, Alan thought that Ned Hatton was strangely juvenile, for all that he had reached his mid-twenties.
So, apparently, did his formidable great-aunt.
‘You must remember, Ned, that you are dependent upon Sir Hartley for your income—and that you do little in return for it. You make no attempt to begin to learn the management of the estate which you will one day inherit. Besides, if you are living in my home you must respect my wishes. No, I propose that you ask Mr Dilhorne to dine with us instead. Should you like that, Mr Dilhorne?’
Alan looked from Ned’s scarlet and embarrassed face to Almeria Stanton, so serene and sure of herself.
‘If Ned does not mind forgoing our entertainment this evening—and I’m sure that Cremorne Gardens will be there for another time—I should be honoured to dine with you. Although, as you see, I am not properly dressed for it.’
‘No matter. I will ring for Staines and tell him to see that another place is laid at table.’
Having done so, she sat down and began to draw out this young man who so improbably possessed her nephew’s face.
‘Since Ned has been as mannerless as usual and has failed to introduce us, I must introduce myself. I am Almeria, Lady Stanton, Ned and Eleanor’s great-aunt, and you, I believe, are Mr Alan Dilhorne. I seem to remember, from my childhood in Yorkshire, that it is a surname commonly found there, but I have not come across it in the south.’
‘It is not common where I come from, either,’ Alan told her. ‘I have no knowledge of any relatives of that name in England.’
‘I presume that you are in England on pleasure, then?’
‘Not at all,’ said Alan. He was beginning to admire this forthright old lady. He thought that Eleanor Hatton might grow to be like her in time. ‘I am here on two pieces of business. My first relates to the London branch of the family firm.’
Ned was struck by this. ‘Of course, Dilhorne and Sons! What a forgetful ass I am. My friend, George Johnstone, is manager there.’
‘Yes,’ said Alan with a small smile. ‘I know.’ He thought that the friendship revealed a great deal about Johnstone.
Almeria Stanton knew that one should not ask someone from New South Wales about his family’s origins, but she cared little for society’s rules and regulations. Besides, the resemblance was beginning to make her feel uncomfortable, and the more she could discover about this self-controlled young man—so unlike Ned in that—the better.
‘You must be a member of the Dilhorne family which, I understand from my brother-in-law, who is at the Board of Trade, runs something of an empire in Sydney and district. Pray where did your father originate from, Mr Dilhorne?’
Alan was amused, although he could see that Miss Eleanor was shocked by her great-aunt’s bluntness. The people whom he had met so far had danced around the tricky subject of his origins. He decided to give the straightforward old woman a straightforward answer, however much it might shock her or his hearers.
After all, the Patriarch had never repudiated his origins, nor sought to hide the fact that he had arrived in chains. He was always frank about his past, being neither proud nor ashamed of it.
‘I believe my father lived in London before he was transported to New South Wales.’
It was as much of the truth as he was prepared to give. Later, he was to be grateful for this early reticence.
Eleanor’s face was shocked when her unfortunate gaffe about chains came back to haunt her. Ned would have guffawed had Alan made his answer in male company, but being in his great-aunt’s presence always made his behaviour a trifle more reticent than was habitual with him.
For her part, Almeria Stanton was cool. ‘I collect that he was the architect of your family’s fortunes, Mr Dilhorne. I find that most praiseworthy, given his unfortunate start in life. But you spoke of two reasons for your visit?’
Alan was pleased to hear her ask this question. Now for the second and somewhat different bombshell.
‘My second reason is perhaps why I am here at all. I have come to clear up the business of my mother’s inheritance.’
He paused, watching for—and finding—the twitch of surprise on their faces.
Eleanor, throwing on one side all good manners which prescribed that you did not bombard new acquaintances with personal questions, but fascinated by Ned’s new friend who looked so like him but was really not like him at all, took up the inquisition.
‘Your mother’s inheritance? May we know of it, Mr Dilhorne? It must be substantial to bring you all the way from the Southern hemisphere.’
‘Indeed. My mother happens to be one of the Warings of Essendene Place in Surrey. By chance she has fallen heiress to the entire estate since Sir John Waring, who never married, left it to her. She is the daughter of Sir John’s younger brother, my grandfather, Frederick Waring, who died in Sydney before I was born. I understand that there are some distant cousins of mine in the female line who were unaware of my mother’s existence until her name appeared in Sir John’s will and who had consequently hoped to inherit Essendene. They are rightly demanding proof of her existence and I have come to furnish it.
‘I also understand that Sir John had only lately decided to leave everything to my mother, and that this, too, is causing friction. My mother hopes that if her claim is substantiated I can bring about a reconciliation of sorts, once I have settled the legal situation to the satisfaction of us all.’
Ned was looking fuddled at the end of this precise and exact recital. The two women thought all over again how little the two men really resembled one another.
Almeria’s expression was one of astonishment for another reason. ‘You are saying that your mother is one of the Warings of Essendene? I had understood that it was the Lorings who stood to inherit—through their grandmother.’
‘You mean my friend, Victor Loring?’ Ned offered. ‘I had heard that he’d had a great disappointment recently over a will. They’re as poor as church mice.’
He looked respectfully at Alan, who, despite his apparently dubious origins, had turned out to be related to one of the oldest families in England.
Alan was amused to notice by their changed expressions that his worthless grandfather, Fred, a remittance man who had died of drink, having gambled away what little he had left, leaving Alan’s mother penniless, had given him an introduction into high society which his own father’s sterling qualities could not have achieved for him.
‘Fancy that. Related to Caroline and Victor Loring,’ laughed Ned. ‘You have a whole pack of relatives over here whom you do not know. And plenty more cousins to discover, I’ll be bound. The Warings married into all the best families.’
Unspoken was the question, How did your mama come to marry an ex-felon? Politeness rendered them all silent, but left them bursting with curiosity.
Alan decided to be downright. ‘They can scarcely be expected to wish to know an Australian cousin who has come to dispossess them—for that is how they will see it.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Almeria sharply. ‘If your mother’s claim is a true one, then the laws of succession must hold.’
‘With respect, Lady Stanton, my father would not agree with you. The women in our family have been given the same rights as men. They, and my elder twin brother, Thomas and myself, all have the same legal standing. He does not hold with primogeniture or the subjection of women.’
‘Your twin,’ said Eleanor, sparkling at him. ‘Is he Ned’s double, too?’
‘Fortunately not. Begging your pardon, Ned. He is very much like my mother—and her long dead brother Rowland, she says. Except that Thomas is tall and dark while she is little and dark. Had he gone to the theatre no one would have taken him for Ned.’
Eleanor pursued a point. ‘You said that your sisters were equal in law with you and your brothers. Can that really be true? We women have so many constraints and Mr Dudley, Charles’s tutor, tells me that we have no legal existence at all.’
‘My father had contracts and settlements drawn up for them. One of his sayings is, “In matters of judgement sooner a clever woman than a dull man.”’
‘Is this commonplace in the colony, Mr Dilhorne?’
‘By no means, Lady Stanton. I fear that our women are under even more constraints than they are in England, and are even less regarded. The Patriarch—I mean my father—is, however, very much his own man.’
‘Well, he would be my man,’ said Eleanor decidedly, ‘if he treats women so well.’
‘Eleanor, you forget yourself,’ said Almeria, ever ready to rebuke her great-niece when she showed her old outlaw spirit.
Alan regarded Ned’s radiant sister with approval. There was obviously much more to her than there was to her charmingly lightweight brother.
‘With respect, Lady Stanton, I think that the Patriarch would admire Miss Hatton greatly.’
The look Eleanor gave him was glowing. His smile made her tingle all over in the oddest manner. No man had ever affected her in such a strange way before.
Throughout the dinner which followed, where Alan knew how to use all the right knives and forks—doubtless his mother’s influence being Almeria’s inward comment—the good impression which he had made on the two women grew with each passing moment.
By unspoken agreement Alan was quizzed no further until, sitting over their port, the women having retired into the little drawing room, Ned remarked, a trifle roughly for him, ‘Do you always make such a good impression on the ladies, Dilhorne?’
Alan’s answer was an oblique question. ‘Lady Stanton and Miss Hatton approved of me, then?’
‘You know dam’d well they did.’
‘Excellent. It’s nice to know.’
The contrast between the two men could not have been more marked. Ned drank heavily of the port, Alan drank little, and by the time they rejoined Almeria and Eleanor in the drawing room Ned’s drawl was already blurred. He was not entirely sure that he liked his women approving so much of his new friend—it took a little of his pleasure in him away.
Alan, meantime, contented himself with admiring both Miss Hatton and her great-aunt, for entirely different reasons!
Eleanor Hatton had to admit that she was fascinated by Ned’s new friend. It was not the likeness which intrigued her, but the differences between them. Not only was Alan so much cleverer than Ned, but she also liked Alan’s easy athletic carriage, which was such a strong contrast to Ned’s slouch.
For the first time in her short life she found sleep slow in coming. She relived her first meeting with Alan: something which she had never done before. Her great-aunt had said to her after he had left, ‘Mr Dilhorne seems to be a worthy young man, my dear, despite his doubtful origins. We must not condemn a man because of his father’s mistakes.’
‘The Essendene connection must count for something, too,’ Eleanor had said, trying not to sound too eager.
‘If it’s proved,’ Almeria had replied dryly—although she had no real doubts. ‘It’s hard on the Lorings, though.’
Eleanor agreed. Caroline Loring, a shy, pretty girl, was one of her London friends—although she had told Eleanor nothing about the problem of the Essendene inheritance. Consequently, the next afternoon Eleanor took the Stantons’ carriage and was driven to Russell Square, where the Lorings, Alan’s cousins, lived.
They were all at home: tea was just being served. Victor, who had been about to go out, put down his gloves, hat and cane when she was announced, and returned to the drawing room.
‘I’ve decided to stay for tea after all,’ he said.
He was already half in love with Eleanor, and the fact that she was Sir Hartley Hatton’s granddaughter, and would have a good dowry when she married and stood to inherit even more when the old man died, was an attraction to a man whose family was perennially short of money.
Eleanor was not sure how much she liked Victor. At first she had been drawn to him, because he was not only tall and dark, but handsome as well. Unfortunately he did not improve on further acquaintance, and if she was not sure whether or not she wished to marry Stacy she had no doubt that Victor would not do as a husband. His manner to his mother and his sister was frequently unpleasant and dismissive.
That his manner to Eleanor was always charming and courteous somehow made matters worse, not better. Only pity for Caroline kept her friendly with the Lorings at all. Victor, armoured in conceit, was quite unaware of her aversion to him.
Today the conversation turned immediately to the question of Hester Dilhorne’s claim to the Waring fortune and estates. It was like a sore tooth to Victor, and to a lesser extent to his mother and sister. Their father had already succumbed—at a relatively early age—to his dissolute life. He had been a boon companion of Ned Hatton’s father and uncle.
Before Eleanor had time to tell them that she had met Hester Dilhorne’s son, Victor exclaimed viciously, in the middle of a long tirade, ‘How do we know that the dam’d woman, her felon husband, and the whole Dilhorne family aren’t gross impostors anyway?’
‘Oh, Victor, we’ve been over all this before,’ said his mother wearily. ‘You know that the lawyers have affidavits from Sir Patrick Ramsay and Colonel Frank Wright testifying that they knew your great-uncle Fred, and Hester. Colonel Wright was even a guest at her wedding to Tom Dilhorne. There’s no real cause for doubt, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Then why did your cousin Hester forget herself and marry a dam’d ex-felon is what I want to know?’ said Victor ferociously, forgetting his manners and his speech before ladies. ‘And why did Sir John lose his mind and settle everything on her?’
‘I expect that there were few others she could marry,’ said Caroline quietly.
‘Well, she should have had nothing to do with the brute, remained a spinster and not done us out of what we had come to expect.’
Eleanor decided that this was one of the days when she disliked Victor. She was remembering the pride and affection with which Alan Dilhorne had spoken of his father, the man Victor was calling a brute.
‘I met Hester Dilhorne’s son last night,’ she said at last, when Victor had run down.
Victor was incredulous. ‘Met him? Here? In London?’
‘Well, I could hardly have met him in Sydney, Australia, could I?’ asked Eleanor reasonably, unable to resist teasing Victor a little, even at this serious juncture. ‘Ned met him by accident at the theatre the other evening and brought him home to dinner last night. Only fancy. He is Ned’s double, but bigger, I think. His name is Alan Dilhorne.’
‘Looks like Ned, only bigger, named Dilhorne, and here in England. The whole thing grows more unlikely every minute—which I have already told you, Mama.’
Really, thought Eleanor, Victor can be very wearisome at times.
‘He can scarcely be a gentleman if he comes from Botany Bay and is an ex-felon’s son,’ ranted Victor. ‘How in the world did Lady Stanton allow such a creature to sit down to dinner with her at all?’
‘His manners are perfectly good, although I admit that his clothes are odd,’ said Eleanor, suddenly indignant on Alan’s behalf. ‘He struck me as remarkably clever, although Ned laughed when I said so. “No one with his face could be clever,” he said. Great-Aunt agreed with me, not him.’
She did not add that her great-aunt had said that the young man was inconveniently clever, and was apparently not aware of it. Almeria had noticed, even on this short acquaintance, that young Dilhorne appeared to be able to control Ned, a feat which no one else had ever performed.
He had reconciled Ned to his loss of the Cremorne expedition, and had quietly checked him at dinner when Ned had begun to speak of unsuitable topics before Eleanor. Later, when Charles had come down into the drawing room after dinner, he had entranced him by telling him of his intention to inspect railway lines and engines while he was in England, Charles being of a mechanical bent.
His charm was enormous, and it had certainly impressed Eleanor and Almeria, as well as Ned and Charles. Eleanor found herself spiritedly defending him.
After Victor had indulged in some further rant, for his anger at being dispossessed had been fuelled by the arrival in England of one of his dispossessors, Eleanor said quietly, ‘You know, Cousin Clara—’ she was distantly related to Victor’s mother ‘—I think that Victor wrongs him. Mr Dilhorne said that his mother was all for a reconciliation with you, and with his other relatives in England whom she does not know, and that he hopes to achieve one before he leaves.’
‘A likely tale,’ sneered Victor, ‘and easy for him to say when he has taken all.’
Eleanor decided all over again that this was one of the days when she definitely disliked Victor. ‘Seeing that he is the younger twin, and that his father apparently does not believe in primogeniture, he will only take his share. Furthermore, since the lawyers took some time to trace his mama, she could scarcely have connived at influencing Sir John.’
Clara Loring took a hand when Victor, red in the face, began to answer Eleanor.
‘You have to admit that it is quite beyond us to affect matters now, Victor,’ she said wearily. ‘The young man must have brought proof of Cousin Hester’s existence and her marriage, so we must reconcile ourselves to accepting that Sir John’s will must stand. It is both unmannerly and fruitless to continue to rail at fate. It is certainly not poor Eleanor’s fault that Ned has become acquainted with him. If it proves that the lawyers are satisfied by the young man’s evidence, it will be our duty to receive him, once at least, for my cousin Hester’s sake. Let that be all for now.’
‘But, Mama,’ began Victor.
‘No, that is quite enough. There are other topics to occupy us. Eleanor will think us all savages to go on so. Tell me, my dear, when do you hope to return to Yorkshire? I know how much you miss the country.’
‘I don’t know exactly when I shall go home,’ murmured Eleanor, relieved that the question of the Waring inheritance had been dropped. ‘I suppose when Great-Aunt thinks that I am sufficiently polished.’
‘You look remarkably well polished to me,’ said Victor, who was suddenly worried that his recent churlishness might have put Eleanor off him. He was not wrong. Eleanor did not like this new face which Victor had shown her, so different from that of his usually easy self. His anger over the whole business seemed excessive.
Victor could have told her that it was not. The Lorings had been financially desperate even before his own folly had made matters worse. The prospect of inheriting Essendene, and his possible marriage to Eleanor, were the only things which had kept them going.
They had borrowed heavily on their expectations.
Their creditors would allow them no more rope once Hester Dilhorne’s claim had been proved. What would happen to them after that Victor dared not imagine. Only a rich marriage could save them, otherwise they were ruined.
He devoted his efforts to trying to charm Eleanor again, but she left earlier than she had intended. Her manner to him was as pleasant as usual, but he was unhappily aware that that meant nothing: Almeria Stanton had turned her into the very model of a complete young lady of fashion, who never gave any of her true feelings away.
By the way that Eleanor had carried on about that colonial swine, Dilhorne, he had obviously made it his business to win her over—which was another nail in the coffin of Victor’s hopes.
Chapter Three
E leanor was delighted to discover that her great-aunt was also impressed by Alan Dilhorne.
‘If Ned is determined to be his friend, then I must launch him into good society,’ Almeria said decidedly to her niece. ‘He cannot be left to wander about the demi-monde, which is all that Ned can introduce him to. He deserves better than that. Ned must also introduce him to a decent tailor, since he plainly does not lack money. I shall speak to Lady Liston about him. She is the hostess of the biggest reception of the season next week, and for him to be received at Liston House will give him all the social cachet he needs.’
The shrewd old woman was not thinking solely of assisting Alan. It was plain to her that he was a steadying influence on Ned, and for that reason alone the friendship ought to be encouraged.
Ned did more than introduce Alan to his tailor. A fortnight after meeting Alan he asked him to Stanton House, took him to his rooms, called for his valet, Forshaw, and said in a manner which brooked no opposition, ‘Come on, Dilhorne, if you’re going to visit the best houses, and given that it will be some days before the tailors have your new clothes ready, you might as well be outfitted in my spares. I’ve enough to fit you up twice over, haven’t I, Forshaw?’
‘Certainly, Mr Ned, and no problem about the size, either.’
Alan began to demur, but the prospect of wearing clothes which would not raise eyebrows was too much for him. Ned and Forshaw danced around, sorting out shirts, jackets, trousers, socks, shoes and assorted underwear as assiduously as a pair of drapers in one of the new shops which were beginning to arrive in Oxford and Bond Street.
Forshaw also trimmed what he privately called young Dilhorne’s ‘errant hair’, and when he was togged out to their mutual satisfaction a trunk was filled with more of Ned’s ‘spares’ and the two of them set off to see the town.
They met Almeria and Eleanor in the hall. They had just come back from a similar expedition—ordering two more evening dresses for Eleanor to dazzle the ton in.
They both stared at the handsome pair. Almeria said faintly, ‘Properly dressed, Mr Dilhorne, it is quite impossible to tell which of you is which.’
Eleanor, on the other hand, had no such difficulty. She exclaimed, ‘Oh, no, Mr Dilhorne is the one on the left. I can’t understand, begging your pardon, Great-Aunt, how anyone could mix them up!’
‘Alan, please, Miss Hatton. We have gone beyond Mr Dilhorne, I think,’ Alan said quickly, before naughty Ned could begin to tease his sister by falsely claiming that, not at all, he was the man on the left. He was delighted, and a little surprised that Eleanor could immediately, and correctly, identify him. A girl of common sense as well as spirit, he decided.
Eleanor blushed charmingly, ‘Then if you are to be Alan, I must be Eleanor.’
‘And all the more so,’ he returned gallantly, ‘as a reward for your good sense in distinguishing me from Ned.’
‘Dam’d odd that,’ Ned told Alan, when they had made their adieux to the two women and set off together for an evening on the town. Later they were going on to a reception at the Ailesburys’, to which they had both been invited and where they would later rejoin Lady Stanton and Eleanor. ‘No one else can tell us apart, even when we’re wearing quite different clothes. Wonder how she does it?’
Alan could offer no convincing explanation, and nor could Eleanor, when Almeria Stanton quizzed her later.
‘Oh, it’s simply a feeling I have when I look at them,’ she offered hesitantly. ‘I can’t explain it. It’s something which goes beyond reason, I think.’
Her tough old great-aunt thought that there might be a very down-to-earth explanation which the innocent Eleanor was not yet mature enough to understand. She had already noticed that her charge sparkled whenever Mr Alan Dilhorne walked over the horizon, and that her eyes followed him around the room.
Whether his apparent attraction for her niece was a good thing or a bad thing she was not yet in a position to say. Though his influence on Ned was so beneficial that she decided to give him carte blanche to visit Stanton House whenever he pleased.
Others at the function were obviously ready to accept him in society: he was rapidly surrounded by a group of fascinated members of the ton, most of them women.
‘He’s already got La Bencolin after him,’ grumbled Ned to Frank Gresham, having met with a polite refusal himself from the lady who was the merry widow of Lord Bencolin, who had left her his not inconsiderable fortune.
‘Oh, Marguerite’s always after the latest sensation,’ drawled Frank, who had once scored with the lady himself, ‘and Dilhorne’s certainly that.’ He admired Ned’s look-alike: talking to him was always refreshing. One never knew what he was going to say next.
Frank had found Alan a body-servant, Gurney, who had been a professional boxer, with whom he sparred in a gymnasium off the Strand—much to Frank’s amused admiration.
‘How the devil did a great bruiser like you, Dilhorne, acquire such a head for figures? You certainly don’t resemble Ned: he possesses neither talent,’ Frank had said after watching Alan work out one afternoon. ‘Ned tells me you spend the morning grinding away in the City. He says that the rumour is that your father’s rich enough for you never to work again.’
Alan, towelling himself off, had stared at young Gresham, armoured in idleness like all the young men whom he had met through Ned.
‘Now where would be the fun in that? Look at the trouble that fellows like you and Ned have in filling your days. Some useful occupation would certainly do him a world of good.’
‘Ned? Useful occupation!’ Frank had snorted. ‘You’re light in the attic. He hasn’t the brains of a flea, poor fellow.’
‘Now, how do you know that?’ Alan had queried. ‘I doubt whether anyone ever troubled to find out.’
‘Well, he made a dam’d poor fist of it at Oxford, I can tell you, and I was there with him.’
Alan raised his eyebrows. ‘Now, what do you think that proves? That he can’t construe, or write Latin verses. What in God’s name has that got to do with anything?’
‘Better than nothing,’ Frank drawled. ‘Though I confess that my ability to recite pages of Livy isn’t exactly helpful—though it’ll be pretty impressive when I do choose to sit in the Lords, even though half my audience won’t know what on earth I’m spouting about. Be off with you, then. If you aren’t going to be a bruiser you can concentrate on making yourself even richer than you are. Better than being like Victor Loring, perpetually strapped.’
Alan asked, apparently idly, ‘The Lorings? Poor, are they?’
‘Church mice,’ agreed Frank cheerfully. ‘And there’s you, you devious devil, filthy with it, doing them out of that, too. Life isn’t fair, else I shouldn’t be ready to take my seat in the Lords and live on milk and honey.’
Alan thought that Frank was a little devious himself. He might be living a rackety life around town, but he possessed a good brain beneath his idly cheerful façade. He suspected that it would not be long before his wild life palled, and Frank, Lord Gresham, would place his obligations and duties first, and not second.
Meantime he was a jolly companion, and it was he who had introduced Alan to La Bencolin at the Ailesburys’: a kindness which Alan had already begun to appreciate before Eleanor and her great-aunt arrived.
‘So that’s Ned’s discovery and his improbable look-alike,’ said George Johnstone’s older brother, Sir Richard, who was a great friend of Lady Stanton’s. He was amusedly watching Alan charm the ladies before taking La Bencolin off to supper. She was hanging on to his arm as though she never meant to let go of it.
‘You know that my brother George is working in the City, Father having left him nothing. He’s been entertaining us all with the goings-on at Dilhorne’s ever since young Master Alan arrived there one fine morning.
‘He entered the office like a whirlwind and frightened everyone to death. Told ’em they were all slackers,’ Sir Richard continued cheerfully, ‘which wasn’t surprising considering George’s attitude to life. He got the job by accident, and being George, didn’t even try to do it properly. Young Dilhorne made ’em work all night, not once, but twice—took off his coat and worked with ’em in his shirtsleeves. He made George do the same—now, that I would like to have seen. Then he sent them all home, and worked most of the next day himself—God knows when he slept, because he was on the town with Ned Hatton the same night!
‘When he’d got everything straight again, after making them work like coolies for the rest of the week, they arrived one day to find that at lunchtime he’d arranged a dam’d fine meal for them all, with enough drink to stun several horses, never mind some half-starved City clerks.
‘He told them afterwards he’d put their pay up if they carried on as devotedly as they had been doing. George thinks he’s God, and has begun to work for his money. What’s more, some whippersnapper of a clerk he’d assaulted on the first day got up and made a drunken speech on Mr Alan, thanking heaven for the day he’d arrived—seems he’d grasped that young Master D had saved the London branch from bankruptcy, and all their jobs into the bargain.
‘I want to meet this paragon, Almeria, and soon. Anyone who is the spit image of Ned Hatton and can make George work must be worth seeing. Tonight he’s walked off with La Bencolin after five minutes’ conversation with her! What will he get up to next?’
‘He can tame Ned, too,’ Almeria said quietly. ‘The only question is, how soon will it be before he leaves Ned behind, or Ned begins to resent him?’
She said nothing of her suspicions that Eleanor had fallen in love—and at first sight, too—with Sir Richard’s paragon. It was perhaps fortunate that Eleanor had missed his encounter with La Bencolin, nor did she see him leave with her later, having been cornered by Victor and Caroline Loring.
Sooner or later the gossip would reach her. Later would be better, when the first gloss of Mr Alan Dilhorne’s arrival had worn off—or so Almeria hoped.
The gloss was not wearing off for Alan. His days were full and he had begun to discover that there were opportunities in London which did not exist in Sydney. And they were not all to do with getting into bed with one of society’s most famous beauties.
His brother, Thomas, had commented shortly before he had left home that a buccaneer like Alan would be able to pillage the pillagers, and he was rapidly beginning to see ways of accomplishing this!
One duty, rather than pleasure, saw him making his way to the Waring family lawyers, who had their offices in Lincoln’s Inns Fields. He dressed with some care, not in Ned’s presents, but in the new suit which his tailor had made for him. Gurney had even tamed his unruly sandy hair, so like his father’s. Thus respectable, he was ushered into the rooms of Hallowes, Bunthorne and Thring.
There were three people waiting for him, and two of them were obviously lawyers. One was sitting at a large desk, the other, holding a pile of papers, was perched on a high stool next to an over-full bookcase, and was obviously the junior of the pair.
The third man was tall and silver-haired. He was in his late fifties or early sixties and the expression on his handsome face could best be described as sardonic when he saw Alan come through the door.
All present rose to their feet.
‘Mr Alan Dilhorne, I believe?’ the senior lawyer said. Alan nodded agreement. He continued, ‘May I present myself? I am Mr John Bunthorne, at your service, and this is Lewis Thring, my junior partner.’
Alan bowed and acknowledged them both.
Bunthorne turned and identified the third man in the room. ‘May I have the honour of presenting you to Sir Patrick Ramsey, KB, once of the 73rd Foot, the Royal Highlanders, stationed in Sydney when Lachlan Macquarie was Governor there. He has come to help us in our duties.’
Sir Patrick bowed gracefully to Alan. Alan responded; the lawyer waved him to a chair before his desk.
‘Being a businessman yourself, Mr Dilhorne, you will, of course, understand that we have a duty to protect the Waring estate from possible impostors.’
He paused, and Alan said, ‘Of course,’ and tried not to look at Sir Patrick who appeared vaguely amused by the whole business.
‘Since we discovered your mother’s existence—Sir John having left her everything without ascertaining whether she was alive or dead—we have taken a number of affidavits from persons resident in Sydney at the time of her marriage but who have now returned to England. These appear to be satisfactory on the face of it.
‘I am sure, though, that you will understand that it seemed wise to ask Sir Patrick Ramsey to meet you as further confirmation, since Colonel Wright left for service in India some six months ago. That is correct, is it not, Sir Patrick?’
Sir Patrick flapped a hand in agreement.
‘Now, as I understand it, Mr Dilhorne, you are here on behalf of your father, Thomas Dilhorne Esquire.’
‘No,’ said Alan, throwing both lawyers into a temporary fluster. ‘My father is Tom, not Thomas, and I am not here on his behalf. It is my mother who inherits the estate, and I represent her.’
Sir Patrick gave a short laugh on hearing this.
Bunthorne favoured Alan with a patronising smile.
‘Not so, Mr Dilhorne. But your mistake is quite understandable, since you may be unaware that under English law your mother’s rights are subsumed under your father’s.’
‘It is you who mistake,’ said Alan gently. ‘At home my mother’s possessions have been contractually reverted back to her. She is a free agent, and, as such, is as full a partner in my father’s firm as myself or my brother Tom.’
Sir Patrick’s laugh was not stifled this time. Memory moved in him when he surveyed Tom Dilhorne’s son.
The lawyer was only temporarily embarrassed. He began again.
‘Your mother’s inheritance. So be it. And you are her representative. Very good.’
He gave a half-bow in Sir Patrick’s direction. ‘Now, Sir Patrick, you see Mr Alan Dilhorne before you. Have you any comments to make or questions to ask?’
Sir Patrick rose negligently. Alan saw that he had been an athlete in his youth and was still supple for his age. He walked to Alan and put out his hand. Alan took it. They shook hands gravely.
‘Only,’ said Sir Patrick, ‘that Mr Alan Dilhorne is the image of the Tom Dilhorne I once knew—only larger. I suppose that, like me, he is feeling his years.’
The lawyer smiled. ‘That merely proves Mr Alan here to be his father’s son, and not necessarily Miss Hester Waring’s.’
Alan looked at Sir Patrick, who said, ‘I remember Miss Waring’s wedding, and also the birth of twins to her. This is the younger twin, I am sure.’
Alan thrust his hand into the pocket of his beautiful coat and took out a locket, which he handed to Sir Patrick. Sir Patrick opened it to find there Tom and Hester, painted as they had been nearly thirty years ago when he had known them.
‘Sarah Kerr’s work, I take it,’ he said examining the portraits carefully. ‘A beautiful woman, your mother,’ he added, handing the locket to the lawyers for them to inspect it. ‘I was right about your resemblance to your father. Is your older brother like him, too?’
‘No. He is like my mother’s brother, who was killed in the Peninsular War before I was born. He is very like my father in character, though.’
‘Both are truly your father’s sons, then,’ said Sir Patrick. ‘When I heard George Johnstone speaking of you in admiration, although God knows why after the way in which you treated him, I was back in Sydney nearly thirty years ago. Tell me, are you as dangerous as he was?’
‘No,’ said Alan. ‘I haven’t had his provocations. My life has been easier.’
The three men were struck by him: by his maturity compared with that of most of the young men in their twenties whom they knew.
The lawyer handed the locket back. Alan passed to him the notarised copies of the documents relating to his parents’ marriage, his mother’s birth certificate, and the records of his own and his siblings’ births. He also passed to the lawyer the power of attorney signed by his mother, setting him out as her agent to act for her in any problems concerning the Waring estate, and a similar document from his father relating to his power over the Dilhorne branch in London.
All the time he felt Sir Patrick’s humorous eye on him.
‘Done, then?’ said Sir Patrick at the end, pulling out his watch. ‘Luncheon calls.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Bunthorne. ‘A piece of advice for Mr Alan here, which it would not go amiss for you to hear, Sir Patrick. The Loring connection are resentful that the estate on which they counted passes to your mother. It would be wise to be wary, Mr Alan.’
‘So noted,’ returned Alan coolly. ‘Do I take it that you are satisfied with my credentials?’
‘After meeting your good self and hearing what Sir Patrick has had to say, and having seen these documents, there can be no doubts in the matter. There remain only the final legal moves—including the granting of probate—which will place the estate in your mother’s hands. The title, of course, died with Sir John.’
‘Of course,’ said Alan gravely, and Sir Patrick cocked a sardonic eye at him.
‘You will be staying some little time in England, Mr Dilhorne?’ pursued the lawyer.
‘Until this and other matters are settled,’ said Alan cheerfully.
‘We shall, then, remain in touch. I gather that your firm employs its own solicitors in London? Pray keep our office informed of your own address, and your movements, if you would be so good.’
Alan assented to this, and they all bowed at one another.
Sir Patrick took Alan’s arm. ‘I insist that we dine at my club, Master Alan. You can tell me the latest news from Sydney. Particularly anything about your redoubtable father and your beautiful mother.’
‘Certainly, Sir Patrick. I believe that you left Sydney shortly after my birth,’ he said, adding slyly, ‘You do not object to eating with the felon’s son, I take it?’
Sir Patrick dropped Alan’s arm and turned to face him. ‘I grew to admire your father before I left. Although I’m bound to say that he frightened me, too. In an odd way, that is.’
Alan laughed. ‘He frightens us all. But the Patriarch is a great man.’
Sir Patrick stopped short and began to laugh. ‘The Patriarch, is it?’ he choked. ‘Let me tell you later of one of my favourite memories of your father. He was pretending to be dead drunk when lying under the gaming table in Madame Phoebe’s brothel. The Patriarch! Well! Well! And do you play, Master Alan? Are you a fly-boy, too?’
‘A little,’ replied Alan modestly. ‘Only a little.’
So it came to pass that he dined with a laird of thirty thousand acres in Scotland, twenty thousand in England, who owned two castles, three country houses, four follies, who had a clever and beautiful wife, and whose happiest memories were of his days as a penniless officer in a frontier town in the Pacific when all the world seemed young and merry.
Alan liked visiting Stanton House. Its interior was beautiful after a fashion quite different from his home in Sydney, which was furnished in the Eastern style. Instead it contained all that was best in European taste, from the paintings on the walls to the objets d’art which stood everywhere, and the furniture on the elegantly carpeted parquet. Best of all he liked its owner, Almeria, and her charge, Eleanor Hatton.
Shortly after Almeria had launched him on London society she invited him to dinner to introduce him not only to Sir Richard Johnstone, but also to his Loring cousins.
‘It will be a splendid opportunity for you to make your peace with them,’ she had said.
He arrived promptly, wearing his new evening clothes. Eleanor, greeting him, thought that, while in one sense it was necessary for him to conform to the society in which he was now mixing, they diminished him in another. He looked more like the smooth young men she knew, and less like the strange, exciting man she had first met.
‘Ah, Mr Dilhorne, you are as prompt as I expected you to be,’ Almeria told him. Privately she contrasted him with careless Ned and other members of the Hatton family, who had been asked to be sure to arrive in the drawing room in time to meet Alan and her other visitors but who had not yet come down.
Alan, indeed, soon became aware that beneath her usual calm manner she was vexed about something. Finally, in a lull in the conversation, she rang the bell for Staines and asked him to enquire of Mrs Henrietta Hatton whether she had forgotten that she had promised to come down early for dinner in order to meet Mr Dilhorne before Sir Richard and the Lorings arrived.
He bowed deferentially. ‘I believe, m’lady, that they are on their way downstairs. I gather that there was a slight misunderstanding involving Master Beverley when they first set out, but that has now been overcome.’
Young Charles Stanton, who was being allowed down to dinner that evening, gave a slight guffaw. His grandmother said, ‘Thank you, Staines,’ before looking over at him and remarking glacially, ‘You wished to say something, Master Stanton?’
‘N…n…not at all, grandmother,’ he stuttered. He was so unlike his usual well-behaved and quiet self that Alan wondered what was wrong with him. Eleanor, as well as Charles and Almeria, was also on edge. Her welcome to him had seemed somewhat distracted—which was most unlike her. He was soon to find out why the atmosphere in the pretty room was so tense.
Mrs Henrietta Hatton burst into the room all aflutter, immediately behind her unruly son whom she was unsuccessfully pursuing. She was, Alan later learned, Eleanor’s aunt by marriage, having been the wife of her father’s younger brother John, who had died in a drunken prank involving a curricle, two ladies of easy virtue and half a dozen equally overset friends. As if this was not bad enough he had done so on the day his wife was giving birth to their only child, known to all and sundry as Beastly Beverley.
He had been taken up dead after trying to manoeuvre through the gateway of Hatton House, off Piccadilly, when he could barely stand, never mind drive.
Henrietta had mourned her faithless husband as though he had been the most sober and loving of men. She had transferred her unthinking love to their son, with the result that the child, naturally headstrong, was rapidly transformed into something of a monster.
Although only eleven years old, he was already obese through self-indulgence, and had been informed by Almeria Stanton that he would not be allowed to sit down to dinner as he could not be trusted to behave himself. She had given way, regretfully, to his fond mother’s insistence that he might be allowed in the drawing room before it was served, so that he could meet the guests.
Beastly Beverley, living up to his name, walked up to Alan and thrust his scarlet face at him. Before he could speak Alan forestalled him by putting out his hand, taking Beverley’s flaccid one, and saying gravely as he shook it, ‘Hello, old chap. I’m Alan Dilhorne. Pray who are you?’
Beverley wrenched his hand away. ‘So you’re Ned’s convict look-alike. Where are your funny clothes? Ned said that you had funny clothes.’
He began to laugh loudly, pointing at Ned and choking out, ‘Got it wrong again, Ned, didn’t you? No funny clothes.’
Charles, sitting quiet and obedient by Mr Dudley, plainly did not know whether to laugh or to cry at this exhibition. Almeria Stanton shuddered. His mother said weakly, ‘Oh, Beverley, do try to be more polite.’
Beverley, who made a point of never listening to a word his mother said, opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could do so Alan said gravely, ‘Ned kindly introduced me to his tailor. Sorry to disappoint you.’
For once his already famous charm did not work. Beverley gave a shriek of laughter in order to demonstrate that nothing would be allowed to put him down.
‘Oh, I’m not disappointed. I never expect anything from convicts.’
At this Almeria Stanton said in her most severe voice, ‘Behave yourself, Master Beverley Hatton.’
Beverley’s response was to put his tongue out at her and shout, ‘Shan’t,’ before retreating behind his mother.
She said nervously, ‘Beverley always behaves well—unless, of course, someone provokes him.’
Presumably I provoked him when I came in fashionable clothing, thought Alan wryly.
Rational conversation proved impossible in Beverley’s presence, until Almeria said to Mrs Hatton in her coolest voice, ‘I think that, after all, it would be best, Henrietta dear, if you took Beverley to his room before our other guests arrive.’
This was only accomplished after a great deal of screaming and crying, and some reproaches from Mrs Hatton to her aunt concerning her disregard for poor Beverley’s feelings.
The sense of relief at his departure was immense. The only sad thing was that in response to Hetta Hatton’s demands for fairness, Charles and his tutor were asked to leave also. This was particularly hard on poor Mr Dudley, who had been looking forward to a good dinner and would now be reduced to dining on schoolroom fare again.
Sanity ruled at last. The Loring party and Sir Richard and his wife arrived to find a composed family ready to introduce them to the young Australian who was the subject of society’s latest gossip.
‘Yes,’ Sir Richard said, shaking Alan’s hand, ‘you are like Ned—but there is an odd difference between you. I hear from my brother George that you have been enjoying yourself in the City.’
‘Work to be done there,’ agreed Alan. ‘I like a challenge.’
‘Apparently. I wish more of our young men did. We grow soft.’
‘An old head on young shoulders,’ Sir Richard told his wife later.
Introduced to his Loring relatives en masse, as it were, Alan told them collectively, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet my English cousins whom I did not know that I possessed.’
Victor frowned. Caroline, wearing a pink gauze frock which did her no favours, smiled admiringly at him.
Clara Loring said gently, ‘We never knew your mama. She left England with her father after Fred’s bankruptcy. I hardly knew him, either. I believe that he quarrelled with his family before he lost everything.’
Well, they certainly quarrelled with him after he was ruined, thought Alan, but being a polite young man he bowed and smiled at her. Both Loring women appeared to be faded and cowed, and the reason was obvious: the dominant and personable Victor, who stood over them full of himself. He was a bullying Beastly Beverley grown up.
‘Must say that your arrival, as well as the news of Cousin Hester’s family, was a great shock to us all,’ was his grudging contribution to the conversation.
Alan nodded. ‘Must have been,’ he agreed: a statement which was laconic and cryptic enough to have pleased his father. ‘My mother left England when she was so young that she scarcely knew what family she had. It was a great shock to her, too.’
This was something of a gloss on the truth, but it seemed the thing to say. Nothing ever shocked his strong-minded little mother—‘surprised’ would have been a better word.
Victor made a great effort to be civil to the sandy-haired barbarian who had diddled him out of a fortune. Yes, the wretch had Ned Hatton’s face, but there the resemblance ended. It was as plain to him as it was to everyone else that he shared no other attribute with Ned. Side by side they were of a height, and a similar shape, but examined closely Alan’s athleticism and his hard determination shone out of him.
A friend had told Victor earlier that day, ‘Shouldn’t be surprised if that new cousin of yours was having it off with Marguerite Bencolin. I should be wary of him if I were you, old boy. Anyone who can have La Bencolin under him not long after meeting her bears watching.’
‘Stuff,’ Victor had said rudely. ‘I can’t see his attraction myself. Fools say anything about a new face.’
‘He hasn’t got a new face,’ his friend had guffawed. ‘Only Ned Hatton’s old one.’
Now, meeting him at last, Victor thought glumly that it was bad enough to have an unknown cousin disinherit him, but even worse to discover him to be so formidable despite his lack of years. Victor, at over thirty, felt himself to be juvenile beside him. Were all Australians so indecently mature? On the other hand, perhaps Caroline could be persuaded to charm the swine and get the money back that way. Now, there was a thought worth having!
As the evening wore on, however, it became apparent to Victor that, La Bencolin or no La Bencolin, Alan’s attention was fixed on Eleanor, and that Eleanor sparkled when he spoke to her. This added to the dislike he already felt for his supplanter.
He also feared that Eleanor was not so attracted to himself as she had once been.
He was not wrong. Eleanor was beginning to feel an even stronger disgust for Victor’s unkind remarks. Alan was shrewd, but he tempered his knowledge of the world with a half self-deprecating, half-teasing humour.
Drinking their port after dinner, the gentlemen indulged in male gossip.
‘Hear you spar a little,’ said Victor, who was indulging himself with the Stantons’ good port.
‘A little,’ said Alan.
‘More than a little,’ drawled Ned, determined to keep up with Victor. ‘Shouldn’t fancy going a round with him myself.’
Victor refrained from making the cutting remark about Ned’s condition which trembled on his lips. Disappointment had made his speech reckless lately. If he wanted to retain some favour with Eleanor, however, then Ned had to be placated. He decided to turn on Alan.
‘Hear you are a little épris with La Bencolin.’
‘La Bencolin?’ said Alan blandly. ‘Now, which was she? The blonde at Lady Ailesbury’s, or the brunette at Lady Palmerston’s? I don’t remember a Miss Bencolin.’
Both Sir Richard and Ned gazed sharply at him, but his manner was as easy and cool as he could make it. Alan had no intention of allowing two strenuous afternoons with Lady Bencolin to queer his pitch with Eleanor, to whom he was becoming increasingly attracted.
La Bencolin was all very well, but her practised charms were boring, and Alan was beginning to recognise that he was one of those men who needed more than an easily available body to attract him—and then to rouse him. He also needed some genuine rapport. So far he had only come across it once, and, sadly, that had been with someone who was married and wished to remain chaste.
His imperturbability annoyed Victor. ‘You know perfectly well who I mean,’ he said savagely. ‘Marguerite, Lady Bencolin, or are you so involved with the ladies that you can’t tell one from another?’
‘Steady on, Victor,’ said Ned indignantly. ‘Alan here’s such a busy man, what with sparring with Gurney, ruining his eyesight in the City and dancing about with your lawyers, that he’s hardly had time to get into bed with anyone, let alone such an exhausting piece as La Bencolin is said to be. He don’t look dead wore out, do he?’
Both Sir Richard and Victor, despite themselves, gave Alan a good hard look. No, he didn’t took ‘dead wore out’. But that proves nothing, thought Sir Richard cynically. He wouldn’t, not he. It was quite plain that Victor was making such a dead set at young Dilhorne because it was beginning to look as though the Hatton girl was slipping out of his hand.
He promptly turned the conversation to other matters, and fortunately a sudden access of good manners prevented Victor from turning it back. In revenge he took Ned off to Rosie’s as soon as he could decently prise him away from the aftermath of the dinner party. Once there he cheated Ned, now more than half-drunk, out of more money, playing piquet, than Ned could ever repay.
If playing clean wasn’t going to win him Eleanor, playing dirty might!
Chapter Four
‘N ed, a word with you,’ said Almeria Stanton when he crawled downstairs well into the next afternoon after his misspent night.
‘Yes, Great-Aunt,’ croaked Ned, ‘but make it short, please. I’ve a monstrous bad head on me.’
‘So you should have,’ she told him severely. ‘Arriving home at five in the morning and disturbing the sleep of the whole house with your drunken nonsense. If you can’t behave any better than that, I shall have to ask you to find rooms elsewhere. Apart from anything else, it’s a bad example for poor Charles.’
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Paula Marshall
FAMILY SECRETSSomething had gone wrong with the London end of the Dilhorne business empire, and Alan had been sent to England to make things right. But almost immediately after his arrival Alan met Ned Hatton, and to his total astonishment found that they were almost identical. It wasn't until he met Ned's sister, Eleanor, and learned more of their family background that he realized the likeness was more than a coincidence. The trouble was, as he grew to love Eleanor, the family secret could sweep away any hope he had of a lifetime with his true love.
His features were a little obscured.
“Wearing a fancy dress so as not to upset your new friend, are you, Ned? Why didn’t you put chains on, too? Then he would have felt really at home.”
Ned looked at her. His eyes seemed bluer than ever, Eleanor thought. They roved over her in a manner which, had he not been Ned, would have made her blush.
Alan found her enchanting. It was very plain to him that Ned had not seen fit to mention to his sister the likeness he shared with Alan. Before Eleanor could commit herself further and add to her embarrassment, Alan spoke at once.
“Your mistake, Miss Hatton,” he told her. “I am not Ned.” And he deepened the accent he had not known he possessed until he reached England.
A Strange Likeness
Paula Marshall
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
PAULA MARSHALL,
married with three children, has had a varied life. She began her career in a large library and ended it as a senior academic in charge of history in a polytechnic. She has traveled widely, been a swimming coach and appeared on University Challenge and Mastermind. She has always wanted to write, and likes her novels to be full of adventure and humor. She derives great pleasure from writing historical romances, where she can use her wide historical knowledge.
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
Prologue
Temple Hatton, near Brinkley, Yorkshire, 1839
‘O ne of these days Eleanor Hatton, you will go too far,’ sighed Mrs Laura Hatton to her daughter. She was trying to comb Eleanor’s glossy black hair into some sort of order.
‘Really, Mama, if you say that once again I shall have the vapours,’ retorted Eleanor angrily, twisting in her chair.
‘Do sit still, child. You look like an unbrushed pony. No one would think that you were nearly eighteen.’
‘Well, I hate the idea of being eighteen. I’m sure that when I get there Grandfather will start making plans for my marriage to Stacy. He knows perfectly well that I don’t want to marry him. I don’t wish to marry anyone, ever.’
‘I thought that you liked Stacy Trent,’ sighed her vague, gentle mother, who found it difficult to understand her strong-minded daughter. However had she come to give birth to such a hoyden?
‘Oh, I do, I do, as a friend—or as a brother—but not as a husband. Besides, I don’t want a husband chosen for me by someone else. You chose to marry Father, I know.’
Her mother sighed again, and did not need to tell Eleanor that it was the worst mistake she had ever made, Eleanor’s father having been an unfaithful, spendthrift rake of the first water.
‘Really, Eleanor, I think that your grandfather did you no favour when he arranged that you should be educated with Stacy and Ned until they went to Oxford.’
Worse than that, not only did the three of them share a tutor, who had taught them Latin and Greek, but Sir Hartley, her grandfather, had insisted that they should be instructed in Natural Philosophy, or Science, as it was coming to be called, as well as in Mathematics.
Eleanor had been as quick and bright as Stacy, and far more so than her older brother, Ned who hated all forms of learning. She had a mind like a knife, said her grandfather proudly; he secretly wished that her brother, Ned, his heir, was more like her.
Her mother, though, deplored what education had done to Eleanor. It had made her, she frequently and despairingly said, a boy in girl’s clothing, everything which was unfeminine. Besides, her wickedness was all the cleverer for her having been educated. It really served to show that girls should never be taught very much more than how to play the piano a little, paint a little, read a little and the proper way to conduct themselves in public—something which seemed beyond Eleanor.
Her frequent complaints to her father-in-law simply resulted in him saying gently, ‘I have no wish for Stacy to marry a fool.’
Which was all very well, but neither should he wish Stacy to marry a freak. This thought was so painful that Mrs Hatton gave a little moan and dragged the comb through her daughter’s hair more forcefully than she had intended. Eleanor twisted away from her again.
‘Do sit still, child. You will never look like an illustration from The Book of Beauty at this rate.
Eleanor pulled a face. ‘I shall never look like those simpering creatures if I live to be a hundred.’
‘Well, you certainly won’t look like a beauty if you do live to be a hundred! Concentrate on looking like a beauty at seventeen. There, that will have to do. And remember, you must be ready for tea. The Lorimers and some of their friends are coming.’
Eleanor ignored this, racing out of the room and up the stairs, two at a time, shouting as she went, ‘I’ll be back in an instant. Don’t worry so, Mama.’
On reaching her bedroom, she hung out of the window, calling down to one of the stable boys working in the yard below: he was her frequent companion in naughtiness. ‘Nat! Nat! Did you get it?’
‘Yes, Miss Eleanor, you can see it later…’
‘No, I want to see it now. Wait there. I’ll be down presently.’
She shot down the stairs even faster than she had mounted them and ran through a side door into the yard, where she found Nat cuddling an animal which was squirming beneath his jacket.
Nat Swain was a stocky youth from a family which had worked for the Hattons for generations. Although he was three years older than Eleanor he was not much taller than she was, but he was broad and strong, the perfect shape for a stable lad. He, Ned, Stacy and Eleanor had birds-nested and played together as children, and until recently the four of them had been companions and apparent equals.
But then Ned and Stacy had left for Oxford and the wider world outside to which Nat had no access. Ned, nearly four years older than Eleanor, was now a young man about town, and Stacy, almost the same age, was growing up fast, too.
Eleanor, once the two boys had gone, had been forbidden the stables and Nat’s companionship by both her grandfather, who was also her guardian, and her good-natured but ineffectual mother. She had responded by apparently agreeing with them—and then doing exactly as she pleased when no one was about. Sir Hart’s warning that her friendship with Nat must be a thing of the past went unheeded.
Nat showed her his prize: a ferret. Eleanor exclaimed delightedly over it and was impatient to see it running free.
‘No, Miss Eleanor, it’s not safe; it moves so quick we might lose it.’
‘Well, then, at least allow me to hold it.’
Nat looked doubtfully at her. He was well aware that Miss Eleanor was, as Ned, young for her age and that he was not. He had already pleasured one of the village girls out on the moors which surrounded the great house, and had pretended that it was Miss Eleanor in his arms, that grey eyes were really deep blue ones and russet hair was black.
He knew that to desire Miss Eleanor was crying for the moon, but there were times when his longing for her grew unbearable. He also knew that Sir Hart—as everyone called him—had forbidden them to associate with one another once Ned and Stacy had left, and that their recent return had not lifted his prohibition. If Miss Eleanor continued to ignore it, though, then so would he.
Unable to refuse her anything, he handed the wriggling creature over to her. Eleanor, ignoring her fine clothing and recent toilette, cuddled the feral thing, exclaiming over it until she almost drove Nat mad with desire for her, thus justifying all Sir Hart’s prohibitions.
She petted and stroked the little creature, holding it up so that it hung slack from her hands, but her raptures were cut short when the impudent beast bit her finger. With a sharp cry she relaxed her grip. It leapt out of her arms and, before she and Nat could recapture it, the little animal scuttled away in the direction of the house.
Nat’s desire for Eleanor was replaced by an even greater desire to catch the ferret before he could be in trouble for involving Eleanor in this escapade!
Alas, it was more nimble than they were. Scurrying and flowing along, it turned the corner of the house, found the tall glass doors opening on to the Elizabethan knot garden and ran through the drawing room, where Eleanor’s mama was entertaining the Lorimers, the Harshaws and other gentry of the district to tea.
Feminine screams bore witness that the arrival of the ferret had devastated the party.
In the middle of the noise Eleanor’s mama appeared at the doors to face her daughter and Nat, who were both transfixed by the enormity of a prank which had gone sadly wrong.
‘Run, Nat, run,’ Eleanor had said, once the outcry had begun. ‘It was my fault, not yours.’
Too late! Even as he turned her mama said, in a voice severe for her, ‘Miss Hatton, did you release that animal? Shame on you. Is that Nat Swain with you?’
‘Yes, but it was my fault, Mama, not his. It was an accident. I did not mean to upset the tea party. I am sorry.’
‘Sorry! Yes, you should be sorry, Miss Hatton. Swain, you had better come and rescue the tea party by taking the animal away. Sir Hartley must be informed of your misbehaviour once you have removed it. Having done so you will report immediately to him. And you, Miss Hatton, will go to your room at once. At once, I say.’
Her mother was rarely firm, but today she showed no signs of relenting.
Obedient for once, Eleanor, her head hanging, walked to the stairs, where she met Ned and Stacy attracted by the uproar.
‘Well, you’ve really done it this time, little sister,’ said Ned, grinning.
Stacy, just behind him, was more serious. ‘Oh, Eleanor, you’ve got poor Nat into trouble again! You know what Sir Hart said last time.’
‘Oh, Stacy, don’t preach,’ exclaimed Eleanor sharply. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. It was an accident.’
‘Which will cost Nat a thrashing,’ returned Stacy bluntly. ‘It will cost you, as well. Sir Hart won’t be best pleased. You’re not fair to Nat, you know.’
He was not referring to the prank, but Eleanor was too immature to grasp his real meaning—that she was a temptation to him.
‘Oh, Nat’ll take it in his stride,’ said Ned carelessly, nearly as blind as Eleanor. ‘Best you go to your own room, Nell. Mama was really in a taking this time.’
It was nearly an hour before her mother’s maid came knocking on her bedroom door to tell her that her grandfather wished to see her in his study. By then Eleanor had begun to regret her recent rash behaviour and the tears were not far away.
She made her way slowly downstairs, through the long picture gallery and past the giant Gainsborough portrait of Sir Hart’s father, Sir Beauchamp. Sir Beauchamp always frightened Eleanor: he was so cold, so stern and so handsome. It was strange that Sir Hart resembled him so much in appearance but was so different in his kind goodness from his redoubtable and severe father.
Sir Hart’s goodness was legendary; Sir Beauchamp’s ruthless will was equally so. Even in the days when Sir Hart had been a member of Lord Liverpool’s government his virtue had been a byword. It made it difficult to oppose him.
What was remarkable was that Sir Hart had always stuck to his principles first in his difficult youth, under Sir Beauchamp, and then with his equally difficult problems with his two worthless sons, one of whom had been Eleanor’s father. Both of them had died young as a consequence of their dissolute lives.
It must be hard, thought Eleanor, to have had someone like Papa to contend with. And for the first time she felt guilt at her own thoughtless conduct. She wondered how Sir Beauchamp would have dealt with her.
Her great-aunt Almeria, Sir Beauchamp’s only daughter, had said once to Eleanor’s mama that he had never suffered nonsense from anyone. She had added that he’d had the coldest heart she had ever encountered. Eleanor thought that her great-aunt resembled Sir Beauchamp—but was a little kinder.
By the time she had reached Sir Hart’s study door Eleanor was in a mood which was new to her. Seeing Sir Beauchamp as though for the first time had set her thinking of how unsatisfactory Ned was. With his easy charm and his heedlessness of the consequences of his rash actions, he was behaving exactly like their dead father.
Worse than that, she was suddenly unhappily aware that she was following the same path as Ned—and that would never do. The deeper implications of her friendship with Nat and her own thoughtless conduct were presenting themselves to her for the first time. Later she was to think that her life changed fundamentally on that afternoon—and all because Nat Swain had brought her a ferret!
She found Sir Hartley Hatton standing by the window looking out over the moors: his favourite position. He was in his late seventies but was still a handsome man, nearly as straight and tall as he had been in his prime.
‘Pray sit down, Eleanor.’
She chose a high-backed chair opposite to his desk, clasped her hands loosely in her lap and hung her head. Sir Hart thought that she might be so subdued because for the first time she was questioning her own conduct, and was wondering, perhaps, why she had behaved so wildly. It was plain that she was feeling shame for more than the silly prank itself. It was a good sign.
He came straight to the point. ‘I don’t often give you an order, Eleanor, but I gave you one over young Swain. Why did you disobey me?’
His voice was so kind that the tears threatened to fall immediately.
‘Oh, I don’t know, Grandfather. I thought that it was unkind of you, when I was lonely once Ned and Stacy had gone, to deny me Nat as well.’
‘Why do you think I gave it?’
Sir Hart’s voice was still kind, but there was a hint of sternness in it.
Eleanor twisted her hands, and said painfully, ‘I suppose it was so that I shouldn’t play a silly prank, as I did with the ferret. It wasn’t intended, though, Grandfather, and it wasn’t Nat’s fault. Please don’t punish him for it.’
Her grandfather waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, the business with the animal was stupid, and caused distress, but that was not the fault, only the symptom. Pray answer my question.’
Her eyes full of tears, Eleanor murmured, ‘I suppose because I’m too old to play childish tricks and run wild…’ She faltered to a stop.
‘Indeed, but more than that you are being unfair to young Swain. He is not of your world, Eleanor. What was innocent and passed the time when you were children became less so as you grew older. It was positively wrong once Ned and Stacy had left and you were on your own.’
Sir Hart paused. It was plain to him that Eleanor did not know what a temptation she presented to the lad now that she was growing into a beautiful young woman. What she must also understand was that he could not agree to young Swain going unpunished.
‘You must be aware that you have left me with no alternative but to instruct Hargreaves to give him a thrashing. He was expressly ordered not to associate with you once Ned and Stacy had grown up. He disobeyed me, so he must be punished as well as you. How shall I punish you, Granddaughter?’
‘In my grandmother’s day they did not hesitate to thrash naughty young ladies,’ she said steadily, her face white.
‘That is true, but it is not the fashion now, and I do not think that it is required. I believe that you understand that you have done wrong, and worse, I suspect, than you intended. No, what I have in mind for you is both more and less severe. I propose to send you to your great-aunt Almeria Stanton in London—without your mother. She cannot control you, I know, and that is bad for you, for you can control her. Almeria will teach you to be a young lady and prepare you for life. She is strict, but kind. You shall have your come-out, and she will make you ready to marry young Stacy—which is, as you know, my dearest wish.
‘Stacy is both good and steady, which is what you need in a husband. You have a fine mind, Eleanor, but you have been misusing it. On the other hand, apart from this folly with young Swain, you do not lack application. I have no wish for you to go the way that Ned is going.’
Eleanor was now crying bitterly. ‘Oh, no, Grandfather, I don’t wish to live in London. I’ve always hated it there. Please let me stay here. I promise to be good in future.’
‘No, Eleanor. You would have had to leave soon in any case, with or without your mother. You are merely going earlier than I intended. Your mother has been told and she does not like this, either, but she lost control of both you and Ned long ago, and we must all, I fear, pay for our failings as well as our sins.’
That was the end. There was no use in pleading—and no dignity, either. Kind Sir Hart might be, but he was also firm, and what he decreed was law.
‘You may go, Granddaughter. Tomorrow you must prepare to leave.’
Eleanor rose and walked to the door, where she turned and looked at him. Her face was white but the tears had stopped falling.
‘I will be good, I promise. I don’t want to be a fine lady, I despise them, but I will become one for your sake, Grandfather.’
‘And for yours, too, Eleanor. For yours, too.’
Chapter One
London, 1841: Monde and demi-monde
M r Alan Dilhorne, ‘the person from Australia’, as some butlers were later to call him, stood in the foyer of the Haymarket Theatre, London, on his second night in the capital.
Tired after the long journey from Sydney, he had gone straight to bed at Brown’s Hotel when he had arrived there, but a day’s sleep had restored him to full vigour and a desire to explore the land which had exiled his father. He looked eagerly about him at the fashionable crowd, many of whom stared at his clothing which, however suitable it had been in Sydney, branded him an outsider here.
Curious stares never troubled Alan. His confidence in himself, helped by his superb physique and his handsome face, was profound. It was backed by the advice offered him by his devious and exacting father.
‘Work hard and play hard’ was his maxim, which Alan had no difficulty in following. He had come to London to carry out a mission for his family which promised him a busy time in the old country. He was not going to allow that to prevent him from enjoying life to the full while he executed it.
He had walked through the demi-monde on his way to the theatre, and it was obviously much larger and livelier than its counterpart in Sydney.
A hand fell on his shoulder and spun him half around. A man of his own age, the late twenties, fashionably dressed, slightly drunk already, was laughing in his face.
‘Ned! What the devil are you doing here so early, and in those dam’d awful clothes, too?’
‘Yes,’ chimed his companion. ‘Not like you, Ned, not at all. Fancy dress, is it?’
‘Ned?’ said Alan slowly. ‘I’m not Ned.’
The small group of young gentlemen before him looked suitably taken aback.
‘Come on, Ned. Stop roasting us. What’s the game tonight, eh?’
‘Not roasting you,’ said Alan firmly. ‘I’m Alan Dilhorne, from Sydney, New South Wales. Don’t know any Neds, I’m afraid.’
He had deepened his slight Australian accent and saw eyes widen.
‘Good God, I do believe you’re not Ned,’ said his first accoster.
‘Bigger in the shoulders,’ offered one young fellow, who was already half supported by his friends. ‘Strip better than Ned, for sure. Bit soft, Ned.’ Other heads nodded at this, to Alan’s amusement.
The first speaker put out a hand. ‘Well, Not Ned, I’m Frank Gresham, and you’re like enough to Ned to deceive anyone. I’d have taken you for him on a fine day with the hounds running.’
Alan liked the look of the handsome young man before him, whom he took to be younger than he was—in contrast to himself; he looked more mature than his years.
‘I’d like to see Ned. Ned who?’
‘Ned Hatton. Not here yet, obviously. Always late, Ned. Look here, Dilhorne, is it? Meet us in the foyer in the first interval and you shall see him. And if this play is as dam’d boring as I expect it will be, we’ll make a night of it together.’
Most of them looked as though they had made more than a night of it already.
‘You got that shocking bad hat and coat in Australia, I suppose?’ said Gresham’s half-drunk companion, introduced as Bob Manners. ‘Better get Ned to introduce you to his tailor—won’t want his face walking around in that!’
‘Shame on you, Bob,’ said Gresham genially. ‘Fellow can’t help where he comes from.’
He put his arm through Alan’s—he had obviously been adopted as ‘one of theirs’ on the strength of his likeness to Ned—whoever he was. ‘Buy you a drink before the play, Dilhorne—girls’ll look better with a drop inside.’
Bells were already ringing to signal the start of the entertainment, but Gresham and his chums took no notice of them. The man at the bar knew him.
‘Yes, m’lord, what is it tonight?’
So Frank, who had walked him over, was a lord and Ned, who had still not arrived, was his friend. The foyer emptied a little, but Alan’s new friends continued to drink for some time before they decided that they were ready to see the play.
He made his way to his seat as quietly as he could, so as not to disturb the audience or the others in the box. Frank and his companions, who were a little way away from him, were not so considerate. They entered their box noisily and responded to the shushing of the audience by blowing kisses and, in Bob Manners’ case, by dripping the contents of a bottle of champagne on to the heads of the people below.
Alan, looking eagerly around the garish auditorium, expected them to be thrown out, but the other people in his box, half-amused, half-annoyed, knew the revellers.
‘It’s Gresham’s set again,’ said one stout burgher wisely to his equally plump wife.
‘Disgusting,’ she returned. ‘They should be thrown out, or not allowed in.’
‘Manager can’t throw Gresham out—too grand.’
The spectacle on the stage amused Alan, although it did not engage him. Half his mind was on his recent encounter, and when the curtain fell at the first interval he was down the stairs in a flash to see Ned, who wore his face.
Gresham’s friends, who had quietened a little after their entrance, had further annoyed the audience by leaving noisily before the first act ended, and were already busy drinking when Alan arrived in the bar. He was loudly greeted, and he guessed, correctly, that his new acquaintances were bored and needed the diversion which he was providing.
Well, that did not trouble him—who knew how this odd adventure might end?
‘It’s “Not Ned”, the Australian,’ proclaimed Gresham. ‘Here, Ned, here’s your look-alike.’ And he tapped on the shoulder the tall man standing beside him.
Ned Hatton turned to confront himself. And it was a dam’d disturbing experience, he reported afterwards. All he said at the time was, ‘Jupiter! You’ve stolen my face.’
Alan was amused as well as startled by seeing his own face without benefit of his shaving mirror.
‘As well say you’ve stolen mine.’
‘Not quite your voice, though,’ offered Manners. ‘Nor your clothes. But, dammit, you’re even the same height.’
‘I’m Alan Dilhorne, from Sydney, New South Wales,’ said Alan, putting out a large hand to Ned for it to be grasped by one very like his own. Yes, Manners had been right: Ned was softer.
Fascinated, Ned shook the offered hand. ‘Well, Alan Dilhorne, what you most need is a good tailor.’
‘And a good barber,’ commented Gresham critically. ‘Although nothing could improve the colour—as shocking as yours, Ned.’
General laughter followed this. Alan’s amusement at their obsession with his clothes and appearance grew.
The bells rang for the start of the next act. None of his new friends took the slightest notice of them. Alan debated with himself. Should he go back, alone, to his box? Or stay with this chance-met pack of gentlemen and aristocrats whom in normal circumstances he would never have met at all?
Fascination at meeting his exact double kept him with them. Almost exact was more accurate, for Manners was right: Ned was certainly not in good shape, would not strip well, and was, in all respects, a softer, smoother version of himself.
‘Well, my boys, let’s be off,’ said Gresham. ‘A dam’d dull play, and a dam’d unaccommodating audience. Give it a miss, Dilhorne, and come with us. Let’s find out if you can hold your drink better than Ned. Looking at you, I’d bet on it.’ He clapped the protesting Ned on the shoulder. ‘Come now, Ned, you know you’ve less head for it than Manners here, and that’s saying something!’
He removed the stovepipe hat which Ned had just put on and tossed it into the street. ‘Last one to leave pays for the rest. First one buys Dilhorne a drink.’ And the whole company streamed convivially out of the theatre, bound for another night on the town.
A couple of hours later Alan found that he could hold his liquor better than any of them, including Ned, which was not surprising, because although he appeared to keep up with them he took care, by a number of stratagems taught him by his father, not to drink very much.
They had been in and out of several dives, had argued whether to go on to the Coal Hole or not, and at the last moment had become engaged in a general brawl with some sturdy bruisers guarding a gaming hell just off the Haymarket. Ned expressed a wish to go to Rosie’s. Gresham argued that Rosie’s was dull these days. Alan intervened to prevent another brawl, this time between the two factions into which the group had divided.
His suggestion that they should split up and meet again another night met with drunken agreement. He announced his own intention to stay with Ned.
‘Mustn’t lose my face,’ he announced, and accordingly the larger group, under Gresham, reeled erratically down the road, to end up God knows where. Ned and another friend, whose name Alan never discovered because he never met him again, made for Rosie’s, which had the further attraction for Ned of being near to where they were, thus doing away with the need for a lengthy walk or a cab.
Rosie’s turned out to be a gaming hell-cum-brothel similar to many in Sydney, though larger and better appointed. Hells like Rosie’s were sometimes known as silver hells, to distinguish them from the top-notch places to one of which Gresham had led the other party. Ned, though, liked the easier atmosphere of these minor dives rather than the ones which the great names of the social world patronised. Besides, they were rarely raided by the authorities.
The gaming half of Rosie’s was a large room with card tables at one end and supper tables spread with food and drink at the other. The food was lavish, and included oysters, lobster patties and salmis of game and salmon. The drink was varied: port, sherries, light and heavy wines stood about in bottles and decanters.
Alan, who was hungry, sampled the food and found it good. The drink he avoided, except for one glass of light wine which he disposed of into a potted palm, remembering his father, the Patriarch’s, prudent advice.
Disliking bought sex—another consequence of his father’s advice—he smilingly refused Ned’s suggestion that he pick one of the girls and sample the goods upstairs.
‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Much too tired for exhausting games in bed. I think that I’d prefer a quiet hand of cards—or even to watch other people play.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Ned agreeably. He was always agreeable, Alan was to find, and this was a handicap as well as a virtue, since little moved him deeply.
‘Play cards by all means,’ Ned continued. ‘Girls are better, though. I always score with the girls, much more rarely at cards. Don’t wait for me, Dilhorne. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at Stanton House.’ He had earlier invited Alan to visit him at his great-aunt Almeria’s, his base when he was in London.
He went upstairs on the arm of the Madame, a pretty girl in tow, leaving Alan with the other highly foxed member of the party slumped on a bench near the gaming tables. Alan made himself comfortable in a large armchair which gave him a good view of the room. Sitting there, half-asleep, he watched two well-dressed members of the ton enter. One of them flapped an idle hand at him, and murmured, ‘Evening, Ned.’
Alan did not disabuse him. He could tell that they were both slightly tipsy, at the voluble stage, and when they seated themselves at a table near him the larger, noisier one began chaffing the other about a visitor he was expecting to arrive at his office on the following morning—‘Or rather, this morning, to have it proper.’ He had apparently reached the pedantic stage of drunkenness.
‘From New South Wales, I understand, Johnstone.’
The other laughed humourlessly. ‘Yes—if it isn’t bad enough that I have to earn a living at all, I’m expected to dance attendance on a pack of colonial savages who have set up in London and are sending one of their cubs to tell us our business. I understand that Father Bear went out there in chains. What a set!’
‘And when do you expect Baby Bear?’
‘Tomorrow, as I said. He sent me a note today, telling me that I am to have the honour of his presence at ten. The honour of his presence! And at ten! I don’t recognise the time. Well, Baby Bear will have to wait. He proposed the time, not me. The honour of his presence, indeed!’
He choked with laughter again, spluttering through his drink, ‘Young Master Alan Dilhorne must fancy himself.’
Alan had early begun to suspect exactly who Johnstone was speaking of, and this last sentence confirmed it. The true son of his devious father, he gave nothing away. Johnstone had risen, looked over at him and said, ‘A game of cards, Ned?’
Alan nodded. At some point he would have to speak. He, and not his older twin, Thomas, had inherited their father’s talent for mimicry. He tried out Ned’s voice in his head. It was light and careless, higher than his own, a very English upper-class drawl. He thought that he could pull it off. Impersonating Ned would be harder than some of the tricks he had played at home—but it would give him a different form of amusement.
Meantime, he warned himself, he must watch his vowels—it wouldn’t hurt to appear to be a little drunk. Johnstone and his pal called in another man so that they could sit down in pairs to play piquet. Johnstone against Alan, and his friend against the stranger. Alan prayed that Ned would not return; he had said that he would not, but one thing was very plain: he was not reliable and said whatever pleased him at the time.
It soon became equally plain that, for Johnstone, Ned was a pigeon to be plucked. He assumed that Ned was both drunk and careless and his manner was lightly contemptuous. Well, he might be in for a surprise. Alan began by knocking over his glass of light wine and dropping his cards. He fell on to his hands and knees in order to pick them up, exclaiming, ‘The devil’s in them tonight.’
He heard Johnstone and his friends, Lloyd and Fraser, laugh while he continued to offer them the picture of incompetence which they both expected from flighty Ned Hatton. All three, indeed, obviously regarded Ned as little better than a fool. Lloyd even winked at Johnstone when Alan dropped his cards again.
By the end of a couple of hours, though, they were all frowning. Stupid Ned Hatton was having the devil’s own luck, and was far in advance of the game, having consistently won despite muttering and moaning, losing his cards and once depositing all his gaming counters on the floor.
‘Hands and knees business, again,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Rising like Venus from the waves,’ he drunkenly told them all, before he began winning again. In his last hand, before he broke Johnstone completely, he even Rubiconed him—a feat rarely performed.
‘By God, Ned, you’ve got the cards tonight,’ exclaimed Johnstone, unable to credit that it was skill and not luck which was defeating him.
‘Fool’s luck,’ muttered Alan, picking up yet another of Johnstone’s IOUs with shaking hands. His father’s tuition and his own mathematical skills, honed by several years of running the money-lending side of his father’s business, gave him a good edge over most card players—even those as skilful as Johnstone, who was obviously unused to losing.
Towards the end Alan began to suspect that Johnstone’s friend was shrewd enough to guess that there was something odd about Ned Hatton that night, and when Lloyd’s game came to an end, with him as winner, Alan announced that he was too tired to continue. Since Johnstone had also had enough, they finished playing in the early hours of the morning.
Stone-cold sober, as he had been all along, Alan was careful to stagger out of Rosie’s some little distance behind Johnstone and his friends. The Haymarket was alive with light and noise—he was in the midst of the demi-monde about which his father had warned him. Chance and his strange resemblance to Ned Hatton had brought him here—and had also given him a strange opportunity.
He laughed to himself all the way to Brown’s. Not only would he be better prepared to meet Johnstone in the morning, but he was relishing the prospect of watching the other man’s reaction when someone with Ned Hatton’s face walked into Dilhorne and Sons’ London office.
And in the afternoon he was due to visit Stanton House off Piccadilly. It should be an interesting day.
Although perhaps not quite so surprising as the one just past!
‘You’re up early today,’ Eleanor Hatton commented to a yawning Ned, who had come down for breakfast in the middle of the morning and not at its end.
He took a long look at her and said inconsequentially, ‘I still can’t get used to how much you’ve changed.’
Eleanor smiled somewhat ruefully. She was remembering the first occasion on which Ned had visited Stanton House after her great-aunt Almeria had taken her over. She had only been away from Yorkshire for three months—the longest three months of her life, she had thought at the time.
At first she had fought and argued in her determination not to be turned into a fine lady. She had hated London and longed for her carefree life in the country. Worst of all had been to be told to forget notions of educating herself beyond the mere demands of most fashionable women’s lives.
Finally she had confronted her great-aunt with an ultimatum. ‘If you will allow me to spend a few hours each week with Charles and his tutor, Mr Dudley, then I will agree to be groomed for the life of a fine young lady. Otherwise…’ And she had shrugged.
Almeria Stanton, faced with a will as strong as her own, had capitulated.
‘A bargain then,’ her aunt had agreed, amused by Eleanor’s strange mixture of learning, and athleticism, both qualities totally unsuitable for the lady of fashion which she was destined to be.
Charles was Lady Stanton’s grandson, a lively twelve-year-old who had been left behind in England when his soldier father had been ordered to India. His tutor, an earnest young man, had been pleased to teach her once Eleanor had proved that her interest in learning was genuine. He had also, much against his will, fallen in love with the lively young woman who was so far beyond his reach.
Eleanor kept her promise. Ned, meeting her again after nearly two years, had barely recognised her. She had entered the room where he’d been reading the Morning Post, stripped off her gloves, pulled off her poke-bonnet to reveal her fashionably dressed hair, and smiled at him in the cool, impersonal way she had learned from her great-aunt.
‘Oh, Ned, how nice to see you,’ she’d murmured, graciously offering him two fingers and her cheek.
Ned had been lost between admiration and horror. Where had tomboy Nell gone to?
‘Good God, sister, what have they done to you?’
‘I’m a lady now, Ned. I’ve had my come-out and two proposals of marriage. Both unsuitable, I hasten to add. I’ve also got a marquess dangling after me. Not that I care about him; he’s as old as the hills.’
Almeria had surveyed her transformed charge approvingly. ‘Well done, my dear—although we could have done without the bit about the Marquess.’
‘Well done?’ Ned had exclaimed scornfully. ‘What do you think that Stacy will have to say about this?’ He had flipped his hand derisively in his sister’s direction. ‘I thought that you, at least, were a girl of sense. Never thought that propriety would overtake you, Nell.’
‘Eleanor,’ she’d said automatically, colouring faintly and moving away from him. ‘Nell’s days are over. Sir Hart was right. My behaviour was not proper. In any case, I have to leave now. I need to change for Lady Lyttelton’s soirée.’
‘Oh, you’ll come about, I’m sure,’ Ned had said uneasily, but she hadn’t. Some of their old rapport had returned, but the Nell who had romped with Ned, Nat and Stacy had gone for ever.
Now, sitting opposite to her, months later, drinking coffee and nursing a thick head after the previous evening’s debauchery, he asked, somewhat blearily, ‘Going to be in this afternoon, Eleanor?’
She looked up from her plate. ‘I shall be with Charles and his tutor until four-thirty, and then I’m free. Why?’
‘I’ve invited an Australian friend I made last night to meet me here around half past four. I promised to take him to Cremorne Gardens this evening. Thought that you might like to meet him before we go.’
He did not say so, but Ned was hoping to play a jolly jape—his words—on his sister when Alan arrived. It was all that she deserved for turning herself into such a fashionable prig.
‘An Australian?’ said Almeria Stanton doubtfully. ‘Is he a gentleman, Ned?’
‘As much as I am,’ returned Ned ambiguously. ‘Which isn’t saying much, I know. But I think that you’ll like the look of him.’
He laughed to himself when he said this, and watched Nell rise gracefully from the table. She and Great-Aunt Almeria were about to spend the morning shopping in Bond Street, an occupation which the Nell who had once been Ned’s boon companion would have rejected completely.
Never mind that, though. Ned nearly choked over his coffee when he thought of the shock she would get when she met Alan Dilhorne. He wondered idly what his new friend might be doing on this bright and shining early summer morning.
Alan was enjoying himself by combining business with pleasure. He rose early, ate a large breakfast and arrived at Dilhorne and Sons’ London office promptly at ten. They were situated in one of the rabbit warren of streets in the City, at the far end of a filthy alley. This appeared to signify nothing, since several of the dingy offices sported brass plates bearing the names of businesses equally if not more famous than Dilhorne’s.
He still wore his disgraceful clothes, and the clerk in the outer office gave him a look which could only be called insolent.
‘Yes?’ he drawled, not even putting down his quill pen. His contemptuous look dismissed this poorly dressed anonymous young man.
‘I have an appointment with Mr George Johnstone at ten of the clock,’ Alan announced without preamble.
‘Doubt it.’ The clerk’s drawl was more insolent than ever. ‘He never gets in before ten thirty, mostly not until eleven.’
‘Indeed.’
Alan looked around the untidy, disordered room, and listened to the staff chattering together instead of working. He noted the clerk’s languid manner and the idle way in which he entered figures into a dog-eared ledger. He reminded himself that his father, always known to his family as the Patriarch, had sent him to England with instructions to find out what was going wrong with the London end of the business.
He wondered grimly what the Patriarch would do in this situation. Something devious, probably, like not announcing who he was in order to discover exactly how inefficient the business had become. Yes, that was it. They could hang themselves, so to speak, in front of him. Yes, deviousness was the order of the day.
‘I’ll wait,’ he offered, a trifle timidly.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said the clerk, grinning at Alan’s deplorable trousers. ‘He won’t see you without an appointment—and I’ve no note of one here.’
Alan forbore to say that, judging by the mismanagement he could see in the office and its slovenly appearance, the clerk’s list might be neither accurate nor reliable.
Time crawled by. When the clock struck eleven the clerk looked at Alan and said, ‘Still with us, then?’
‘Nothing better to do.’ Alan was all shy, juvenile charm, which the clerk treated as shy, juvenile charm should be treated by a man of the world: with contempt.
‘Pity.’ The clerk’s sympathy was non-existent.
Everyone stopped work at eleven-thirty. One of the junior clerks was sent out for porter. Alan looked around, identified where the privy might be, used it, and came back again to take up his post before the clerk’s desk.
‘Thought you’d gone,’ tittered one of the younger men, currying favour with the older ones, waving his pot of porter at him.
No one offered Alan porter. He resisted the urge to give the jeering young man a good kick and sat back in his uncomfortable chair.
It was twelve-fifteen by the clock when George Johnstone entered, blear-eyed and yawning. The clerk waved a careless hand at Alan. ‘Young gentleman to see you, Mr Johnstone.’
Johnstone looked at Alan in some surprise.
‘Good God, Ned, what are you doing here? Still wearing those dreadful clothes, I see. Lost all the Hatton money?’
‘I came to see how hard you businessmen work.’
Alan’s imitation of Ned’s speech was perfect enough to deceive Johnstone.
‘Come into my office, then. Thought that I’d have a visitor waiting to see me. Some colonial savage—but he’s obviously given me a miss. Or he’s late. You can entertain me until he arrives.’
Alan followed him into his office. It was little cleaner or tidier than the one which the clerks occupied.
‘Have a drink,’ offered Johnstone, going immediately to a tantalus on a battered sideboard. ‘Must get ready for Baby Bear.’
‘Not in the morning,’ said Alan, still using Ned’s voice.
‘T’isn’t morning,’ said Johnstone, sitting down and swallowing his brandy in one gulp. ‘By God, that’s better. Hair of the dog. But have it your way, Ned.’
‘I fully intend to,’ returned Alan, in his own voice this time. He rose abruptly: now to do the Patriarch on him. He leaned forward, seized Johnstone by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet with a jerk. He let go of the astonished man and stood back.
‘Stand up when you speak to me, you idle devil!’
His cold ferocity, so unlike Ned Hatton’s easy charm, was frightening in itself. Coming from someone with Ned’s face it was also overpoweringly disconcerting.
‘You aren’t Ned!’ squeaked Johnstone, beginning to sit down again.
‘How perceptive of you. No, I’m not. And stand up when Baby Bear speaks to you.’
‘Oh, by God, you weren’t Ned Hatton last night, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t Ned Hatton last night, either. I am your employer, Tom Dilhorne’s son Alan, come over without his chains to find out what has gone wrong with the London end of the business. I only needed to look at you to find out. Would you care to explain how a worthless fine gentleman like yourself came to be in charge here?’
‘But why do you look exactly like Ned Hatton? Are you his cousin?’
Alan surveyed Johnstone wearily. ‘No, I’m not his cousin. It’s just a strange likeness, that’s all. Pure chance. And I’m not a pigeon for the plucking like poor Ned, either—which you found out last night.’
‘Doosed bad form that, pretending to be Ned Hatton.’
‘You called me Ned first. You were so dam’d eager to fleece him that you couldn’t look at him properly. You haven’t answered my question.’
‘What question?’
Alan sighed. ‘How you came to be in charge here? Good God man, where’s your memory?’
‘I was Jack Montagu’s friend. He knew I needed to find work so he made me the manager here when he married his heiress.’
‘I suppose you think that you’ve been working. Good God, man, you don’t know the meaning of the word, but you will by the time that I’ve finished with you.
‘I want to inspect all your books and papers. I want to interview every clerk in your employment, see all contracts, bills of sale, be given a full account of all transactions, wages, rents, and what you’re paying for this hole—it had better be cheap. In short, I want a full account of the whole business, and I want everything ready for inspection by ten of the clock tomorrow. Not ten-thirty, mind, but ten. You take me, I’m sure.’
This last sentence was delivered in a savage imitation of Johnstone’s own gentlemanly drawl.
Johnstone blenched. ‘I can’t, Dilhorne, you’re mad.’
‘Sir, to you,’ said Alan, in the Patriarch’s hardest voice. ‘You can and you will, or it will be the worse for you.’
‘Good God, sir, it will take all night.’
‘Then take all night. You and the rest of the idlers in the other room have wasted enough of the firm’s time and money. Now you can make some of it up.’
Johnstone sank back into his chair, his face grey.
‘I didn’t give you leave to sit, you idle devil. You’ll remain standing until I leave.’
Mutinously Johnstone rose, silently consigning all sandy-haired young Australians to the deepest pit of Hell.
‘Now mind me,’ said Alan pleasantly. ‘You’ll jump when I say jump, and you’ll say please nicely when I ask you to if you don’t want instant dismissal. And if you think that Baby Bear plays a rough hand I can’t recommend you to meet Father Bear. He’d not only eat your porridge, he’d eat you, too.’
He strolled into the outer office, leaving behind him a stunned and shaken man. The clerk, quite unaware of what had taken place in Johnstone’s room, gave him yet another insolent grin, and said, ‘Got your interview, did you? Not long, was it?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan sweetly. He looked judiciously at the clerk, registered his leer, leaned forward, picked up his inkwell and slowly poured its contents over the page of ill-written figures which the clerk had been carelessly copying from various invoices, receipts and notes of hand.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ yelped the clerk. ‘That’s my morning’s work ruined.’
‘Well, you ruined my morning’s work,’ said Alan reasonably, head on one side, surveying the havoc he had wrought. ‘You can do it again, legibly this time.’
He turned and shouted at the door behind him, ‘Johnstone! Come here at once!’
To the clerk’s astonishment the door opened and a respectful Johnstone appeared.
‘Sir?’ he said to Alan, and the office fell silent at the sound.
‘What is this man’s name?’ asked Alan.
He still had the inkwell in his hand and he leisurely began to pour the remains of the ink on to the clerk’s head. The clerk let out another strangled yelp and looked reproachfully through the black rain, first at Alan and then at the subservient Johnstone.
‘Phipps,’ Johnstone said. ‘Nathaniel Phipps.’
‘Phipps,’ said Alan thoughtfully. ‘Dirty, isn’t he?’ He critically surveyed the ruined ledger and the ink dripping down Phipps’s face.
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Johnstone nervously.
‘You did it,’ squealed Phipps at Alan. ‘He did it, Mr Johnstone. Not I.’
“‘You did it, sir,” is the correct usage,’ said Alan, putting down the empty inkwell. ‘Say it after me, please.’
‘Mr Johnstone, sir,’ roared Phipps desperately. ‘Please stop this madman.’
‘Madman? Tut-tut,’ said Alan. ‘And if I am mad you’ve driven me into that condition, what with making me wait over two hours in a dam’d uncomfortable chair and enduring your insolence while I did so. I’ve a short fuse, which anyone who works for me soon finds out.’
This was a lie, but Phipps was too agitated to care.
‘Works for you! I don’t work for you! I work for Mr Johnstone.’
‘And he works for me,’ said Alan gently. He picked up the clerk’s quill pen, and with the whole office and Johnstone watching him silently, breath drawn in, he rolled it in the ink and negligently wrote his initials on Phipps’s forehead.
‘Yes, he works for me, and so do you now. You’re mine, Phipps. Alan Dilhorne’s property so long as you’re in this room. Unless, of course, you care to resign.’
The silence in the room grew more deathly, broken only by the clerk’s whimpering while he scrubbed at his face with his handkerchief. ‘This can’t be true, Mr Johnstone.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ said Alan. ‘Now clean up your disgusting person and your disgraceful work and do it again: properly this time.’
‘It’s not fair,’ said Phipps tearfully. ‘You should have told me who you were.’
Alan’s face was suddenly like stone. ‘Ah, but you see, I needed to know how you would treat someone whom you didn’t know was your employer’s son, and I found out, didn’t I. Didn’t I, Phipps? And if you can’t see what was wrong with what you’ve just said, then we shall never get Dilhorne and Sons’ London branch straight again, shall we?’
He swung round and addressed his staring staff. ‘The rest of you can get down to it immediately, and do an honest day’s work for once. You’re none of you fit to work in my Sydney office. Mr Johnstone will tell you what I expect of you by tomorrow, and God help you all if it’s not ready by ten.’
He walked to the door before turning and delivering his parting shot.
‘Oh, and by the by, mid-morning porter is out, from today!’
Chapter Two
T hat afternoon Eleanor left the schoolroom, where she had been working with Charles and young Mr Dudley, and decided that, four-thirty being almost upon her, she would not trouble to change her clothes in order to meet Ned’s Australian friend. She was still wearing her deep blue walking dress and that would have to do.
She had reached the last step of the graceful staircase which spiralled to the top of the house when she met Staines, the butler. He bowed and said ‘Mr Ned is in the drawing room, Miss Eleanor, awaiting his friend, and asks you to join him there.’
Somehow Eleanor gained the impression that he was enjoying a small private joke. She immediately dismissed this notion as fanciful and walked across the stone-flagged hall to the drawing room door.
She should have trusted to her instincts. Ned had spent the afternoon avoiding her. He had also given orders to Staines for Mr Alan Dilhorne to be taken straight to the small drawing room with the message that Mr Ned Hatton would shortly join him there.
He had taken care to tell Staines of the likeness and to warn him not to inform anyone else of it before Alan arrived.
‘For,’ he had said ingenuously, ‘I wish to tease the family a little and you must not spoil the fun.’
Staines had agreed to be discreet. All the servants liked Ned: he was so easy, jolly and kind, although some worried what would happen to the Hatton fortune when Sir Hart had gone to his last rest.
Eleanor said over her shoulder to Staines, in a sudden access of her old impetuous spirit, ‘Australian, is he? D’you think he’ll be wearing his chains?’
Staines, bowing his head again, opened the double doors for her, and she entered the drawing room to find not the Australian guest but Ned, standing in front of the fireplace studying Lawrence’s portrait of Great-Aunt Almeria in her youth, which hung above it.
Eleanor resembled her father’s aunt a little, but Almeria Stanton was sterner-looking, and even her airy draperies and the posy of flowers which she was holding did not soften her austere expression. Ned had his sandy head tipped back, the better to inspect it, which struck Eleanor as amusing—as did the outlandish clothes he was wearing.
She gaily continued teasing him when he turned towards her, his back to the light so that his features were a little obscured. ‘Wearing fancy dress so as not to discommode your new friend, are you, Ned? Why didn’t you put chains on, too? Then he would have felt really at home.’
Ned looked at her. His eyes seemed bluer than ever, and they roved over her in a manner which, had he not been Ned, would have made her blush.
Alan found her enchanting. She did not resemble Ned in the least, either in manner or appearance. She was a tall girl, beautifully proportioned, elegantly dressed, from the crown of her glossy head to the toes of her well-shod feet. Ned had spoken of a sister and this must be her. Her colouring was deeper and richer than Ned’s and her hair was a raven-black in colour.
It was very plain that naughty Ned had told her of a visitor from Australia but had not seen fit to mention the likeness. His mouth twitched in involuntary amusement, but before he could identify himself Eleanor spoke again.
‘I understand that you’re taking him to Cremorne Gardens. Tell me, don’t you think that your colonial friend will be overset by such worldly sophistication?’
Before she could commit herself further, and add to her ultimate embarrassment, Alan spoke at once, privately deciding to reproach Ned for putting his pretty sister in such a false position. He had already learned enough about him to know that what had been done was deliberate.
‘You mistake, Miss Hatton,’ he told her, ‘I am not Ned.’ And he deepened the accent which he had not known he possessed until he reached England.
Eleanor’s hand flew to her mouth in an embarrassed reversion to childhood.
‘Not Ned? Then you must be the Australian visitor of whom he spoke. Oh, dear, I have been so mannerless, so gauche. How can I apologise? On the other hand you are so like Ned I can be forgiven for being tactless. Only your voice is different, and, yes, I do believe that you are even bigger than he is.’
Alan decided not to favour her with his wickedly accurate imitation of Ned’s light drawl.
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s too deep. The voice, I mean. It’s the chains. They weigh it down, you know. They took them off…’
He paused tantalisingly, still smiling. He had two sisters whom he liked to tease gently, and he wanted to see how this poised and pretty girl would react to similar treatment.
Eleanor took the bait.
‘The chains? Took them off?’
‘Yes, when we boarded the ship for England. They said that if we wore them during the journey they’d slow us down too much. The weight again.’
‘They did?’ said Eleanor, fascinated by this young man who looked so like Ned but who was yet utterly unlike him when he teased her. On closer inspection he looked very much more severe than Ned, but there was a gentleness in his manner to her which her wild brother had never possessed.
‘Yes. Sorry to disappoint you by not having ’em on.’
‘I’m not disappointed,’ said Eleanor truthfully.
‘I can see that. The Patriarch says—’
‘The Patriarch?’ Eleanor was fascinated all over again.
‘M’father. We call him the Patriarch occasionally—he does come on rather patriarchal at times. He also says that they slow you down when you’re working. So they took them off him soon after he arrived in New South Wales. More trouble than they were worth, he said.’
‘Do stop,’ said Eleanor faintly, trying not to laugh. Great-Aunt Almeria insisted that young ladies never laughed. Lord Chesterfield wouldn’t have liked it, she said. ‘You’re not a bit like Ned now that I’ve got to know you.’
‘No, I’m not,’ agreed Alan cheerfully.
‘But you do look very like him.’
‘Yes—but it was a naughty trick to play on you—and so I shall tell Ned.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t have said all that to you about chains if I hadn’t thought you were Ned.’
He agreed with her, head on one side judiciously, adding, ‘Not to my face, perhaps, but afterwards.’
‘Yes, no. Oh, dear.’ She laughed out loud this time, but was saved further embarrassment by the arrival of a grinning Ned.
‘I see you’ve found one another,’ he offered carelessly.
‘Too bad of you, Ned,’ Eleanor began.
‘Miss Hatton found me,’ said Alan. ‘I didn’t do any finding. Our resemblance confused her somewhat.’
Ned’s grin was wider than ever. ‘Thought it might. Bit of a shock was it, Nell?’
‘My name is Eleanor,’ she said repressively. ‘You are quite disgraceful, Ned. I behaved very badly as a consequence of your silly trick and Mr—?’ She looked at Alan.
‘Dilhorne, Alan Dilhorne,’ he told her. ‘But then I behaved badly, too. I was a dreadful tease, I fear.’
‘Indeed you were,’ she agreed, captivated by his charm. No, he was not really very like Ned, despite the resemblance.
‘So, we are quits,’ he said to Eleanor, ignoring the grinning Ned, who was beginning to annoy him.
‘Quits,’ she agreed, and put out her hand to take his and shake it, which pleased Alan mightily.
There was no false affectation about her, despite her overwhelming air of fashion and consequence. He looked at Ned and said, only half-jokingly, ‘Beg both our pardons, Ned, and introduce me properly to your sister, there’s a good fellow.’
The note of command in his voice was such that Ned had begun to obey him when the doors opened again, and Almeria Stanton entered. Her eyebrows rose alarmingly when she saw Ned and Alan standing side by side, their two faces and figures so alike. Yet she thought that there was no doubt which was Ned. The face on the right possessed a power and a strength missing in her great-nephew’s.
Almeria sighed. Inconvenient likeness were the bane of the aristocracy’s life, but if this were the Australian visitor of whom Ned had spoken then the likeness had to be put down to chance.
But she would still like to know more of the origins of Ned’s new friend…
‘I understand that you are taking Mr Dilhorne to Cremorne Gardens tonight, Ned. I must remind you that you were out late this morning. I’m not sure that your grandfather would approve of your way of life.’
‘I’m well of age,’ said Ned sulkily.
Watching him, Alan thought that Ned Hatton was strangely juvenile, for all that he had reached his mid-twenties.
So, apparently, did his formidable great-aunt.
‘You must remember, Ned, that you are dependent upon Sir Hartley for your income—and that you do little in return for it. You make no attempt to begin to learn the management of the estate which you will one day inherit. Besides, if you are living in my home you must respect my wishes. No, I propose that you ask Mr Dilhorne to dine with us instead. Should you like that, Mr Dilhorne?’
Alan looked from Ned’s scarlet and embarrassed face to Almeria Stanton, so serene and sure of herself.
‘If Ned does not mind forgoing our entertainment this evening—and I’m sure that Cremorne Gardens will be there for another time—I should be honoured to dine with you. Although, as you see, I am not properly dressed for it.’
‘No matter. I will ring for Staines and tell him to see that another place is laid at table.’
Having done so, she sat down and began to draw out this young man who so improbably possessed her nephew’s face.
‘Since Ned has been as mannerless as usual and has failed to introduce us, I must introduce myself. I am Almeria, Lady Stanton, Ned and Eleanor’s great-aunt, and you, I believe, are Mr Alan Dilhorne. I seem to remember, from my childhood in Yorkshire, that it is a surname commonly found there, but I have not come across it in the south.’
‘It is not common where I come from, either,’ Alan told her. ‘I have no knowledge of any relatives of that name in England.’
‘I presume that you are in England on pleasure, then?’
‘Not at all,’ said Alan. He was beginning to admire this forthright old lady. He thought that Eleanor Hatton might grow to be like her in time. ‘I am here on two pieces of business. My first relates to the London branch of the family firm.’
Ned was struck by this. ‘Of course, Dilhorne and Sons! What a forgetful ass I am. My friend, George Johnstone, is manager there.’
‘Yes,’ said Alan with a small smile. ‘I know.’ He thought that the friendship revealed a great deal about Johnstone.
Almeria Stanton knew that one should not ask someone from New South Wales about his family’s origins, but she cared little for society’s rules and regulations. Besides, the resemblance was beginning to make her feel uncomfortable, and the more she could discover about this self-controlled young man—so unlike Ned in that—the better.
‘You must be a member of the Dilhorne family which, I understand from my brother-in-law, who is at the Board of Trade, runs something of an empire in Sydney and district. Pray where did your father originate from, Mr Dilhorne?’
Alan was amused, although he could see that Miss Eleanor was shocked by her great-aunt’s bluntness. The people whom he had met so far had danced around the tricky subject of his origins. He decided to give the straightforward old woman a straightforward answer, however much it might shock her or his hearers.
After all, the Patriarch had never repudiated his origins, nor sought to hide the fact that he had arrived in chains. He was always frank about his past, being neither proud nor ashamed of it.
‘I believe my father lived in London before he was transported to New South Wales.’
It was as much of the truth as he was prepared to give. Later, he was to be grateful for this early reticence.
Eleanor’s face was shocked when her unfortunate gaffe about chains came back to haunt her. Ned would have guffawed had Alan made his answer in male company, but being in his great-aunt’s presence always made his behaviour a trifle more reticent than was habitual with him.
For her part, Almeria Stanton was cool. ‘I collect that he was the architect of your family’s fortunes, Mr Dilhorne. I find that most praiseworthy, given his unfortunate start in life. But you spoke of two reasons for your visit?’
Alan was pleased to hear her ask this question. Now for the second and somewhat different bombshell.
‘My second reason is perhaps why I am here at all. I have come to clear up the business of my mother’s inheritance.’
He paused, watching for—and finding—the twitch of surprise on their faces.
Eleanor, throwing on one side all good manners which prescribed that you did not bombard new acquaintances with personal questions, but fascinated by Ned’s new friend who looked so like him but was really not like him at all, took up the inquisition.
‘Your mother’s inheritance? May we know of it, Mr Dilhorne? It must be substantial to bring you all the way from the Southern hemisphere.’
‘Indeed. My mother happens to be one of the Warings of Essendene Place in Surrey. By chance she has fallen heiress to the entire estate since Sir John Waring, who never married, left it to her. She is the daughter of Sir John’s younger brother, my grandfather, Frederick Waring, who died in Sydney before I was born. I understand that there are some distant cousins of mine in the female line who were unaware of my mother’s existence until her name appeared in Sir John’s will and who had consequently hoped to inherit Essendene. They are rightly demanding proof of her existence and I have come to furnish it.
‘I also understand that Sir John had only lately decided to leave everything to my mother, and that this, too, is causing friction. My mother hopes that if her claim is substantiated I can bring about a reconciliation of sorts, once I have settled the legal situation to the satisfaction of us all.’
Ned was looking fuddled at the end of this precise and exact recital. The two women thought all over again how little the two men really resembled one another.
Almeria’s expression was one of astonishment for another reason. ‘You are saying that your mother is one of the Warings of Essendene? I had understood that it was the Lorings who stood to inherit—through their grandmother.’
‘You mean my friend, Victor Loring?’ Ned offered. ‘I had heard that he’d had a great disappointment recently over a will. They’re as poor as church mice.’
He looked respectfully at Alan, who, despite his apparently dubious origins, had turned out to be related to one of the oldest families in England.
Alan was amused to notice by their changed expressions that his worthless grandfather, Fred, a remittance man who had died of drink, having gambled away what little he had left, leaving Alan’s mother penniless, had given him an introduction into high society which his own father’s sterling qualities could not have achieved for him.
‘Fancy that. Related to Caroline and Victor Loring,’ laughed Ned. ‘You have a whole pack of relatives over here whom you do not know. And plenty more cousins to discover, I’ll be bound. The Warings married into all the best families.’
Unspoken was the question, How did your mama come to marry an ex-felon? Politeness rendered them all silent, but left them bursting with curiosity.
Alan decided to be downright. ‘They can scarcely be expected to wish to know an Australian cousin who has come to dispossess them—for that is how they will see it.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Almeria sharply. ‘If your mother’s claim is a true one, then the laws of succession must hold.’
‘With respect, Lady Stanton, my father would not agree with you. The women in our family have been given the same rights as men. They, and my elder twin brother, Thomas and myself, all have the same legal standing. He does not hold with primogeniture or the subjection of women.’
‘Your twin,’ said Eleanor, sparkling at him. ‘Is he Ned’s double, too?’
‘Fortunately not. Begging your pardon, Ned. He is very much like my mother—and her long dead brother Rowland, she says. Except that Thomas is tall and dark while she is little and dark. Had he gone to the theatre no one would have taken him for Ned.’
Eleanor pursued a point. ‘You said that your sisters were equal in law with you and your brothers. Can that really be true? We women have so many constraints and Mr Dudley, Charles’s tutor, tells me that we have no legal existence at all.’
‘My father had contracts and settlements drawn up for them. One of his sayings is, “In matters of judgement sooner a clever woman than a dull man.”’
‘Is this commonplace in the colony, Mr Dilhorne?’
‘By no means, Lady Stanton. I fear that our women are under even more constraints than they are in England, and are even less regarded. The Patriarch—I mean my father—is, however, very much his own man.’
‘Well, he would be my man,’ said Eleanor decidedly, ‘if he treats women so well.’
‘Eleanor, you forget yourself,’ said Almeria, ever ready to rebuke her great-niece when she showed her old outlaw spirit.
Alan regarded Ned’s radiant sister with approval. There was obviously much more to her than there was to her charmingly lightweight brother.
‘With respect, Lady Stanton, I think that the Patriarch would admire Miss Hatton greatly.’
The look Eleanor gave him was glowing. His smile made her tingle all over in the oddest manner. No man had ever affected her in such a strange way before.
Throughout the dinner which followed, where Alan knew how to use all the right knives and forks—doubtless his mother’s influence being Almeria’s inward comment—the good impression which he had made on the two women grew with each passing moment.
By unspoken agreement Alan was quizzed no further until, sitting over their port, the women having retired into the little drawing room, Ned remarked, a trifle roughly for him, ‘Do you always make such a good impression on the ladies, Dilhorne?’
Alan’s answer was an oblique question. ‘Lady Stanton and Miss Hatton approved of me, then?’
‘You know dam’d well they did.’
‘Excellent. It’s nice to know.’
The contrast between the two men could not have been more marked. Ned drank heavily of the port, Alan drank little, and by the time they rejoined Almeria and Eleanor in the drawing room Ned’s drawl was already blurred. He was not entirely sure that he liked his women approving so much of his new friend—it took a little of his pleasure in him away.
Alan, meantime, contented himself with admiring both Miss Hatton and her great-aunt, for entirely different reasons!
Eleanor Hatton had to admit that she was fascinated by Ned’s new friend. It was not the likeness which intrigued her, but the differences between them. Not only was Alan so much cleverer than Ned, but she also liked Alan’s easy athletic carriage, which was such a strong contrast to Ned’s slouch.
For the first time in her short life she found sleep slow in coming. She relived her first meeting with Alan: something which she had never done before. Her great-aunt had said to her after he had left, ‘Mr Dilhorne seems to be a worthy young man, my dear, despite his doubtful origins. We must not condemn a man because of his father’s mistakes.’
‘The Essendene connection must count for something, too,’ Eleanor had said, trying not to sound too eager.
‘If it’s proved,’ Almeria had replied dryly—although she had no real doubts. ‘It’s hard on the Lorings, though.’
Eleanor agreed. Caroline Loring, a shy, pretty girl, was one of her London friends—although she had told Eleanor nothing about the problem of the Essendene inheritance. Consequently, the next afternoon Eleanor took the Stantons’ carriage and was driven to Russell Square, where the Lorings, Alan’s cousins, lived.
They were all at home: tea was just being served. Victor, who had been about to go out, put down his gloves, hat and cane when she was announced, and returned to the drawing room.
‘I’ve decided to stay for tea after all,’ he said.
He was already half in love with Eleanor, and the fact that she was Sir Hartley Hatton’s granddaughter, and would have a good dowry when she married and stood to inherit even more when the old man died, was an attraction to a man whose family was perennially short of money.
Eleanor was not sure how much she liked Victor. At first she had been drawn to him, because he was not only tall and dark, but handsome as well. Unfortunately he did not improve on further acquaintance, and if she was not sure whether or not she wished to marry Stacy she had no doubt that Victor would not do as a husband. His manner to his mother and his sister was frequently unpleasant and dismissive.
That his manner to Eleanor was always charming and courteous somehow made matters worse, not better. Only pity for Caroline kept her friendly with the Lorings at all. Victor, armoured in conceit, was quite unaware of her aversion to him.
Today the conversation turned immediately to the question of Hester Dilhorne’s claim to the Waring fortune and estates. It was like a sore tooth to Victor, and to a lesser extent to his mother and sister. Their father had already succumbed—at a relatively early age—to his dissolute life. He had been a boon companion of Ned Hatton’s father and uncle.
Before Eleanor had time to tell them that she had met Hester Dilhorne’s son, Victor exclaimed viciously, in the middle of a long tirade, ‘How do we know that the dam’d woman, her felon husband, and the whole Dilhorne family aren’t gross impostors anyway?’
‘Oh, Victor, we’ve been over all this before,’ said his mother wearily. ‘You know that the lawyers have affidavits from Sir Patrick Ramsay and Colonel Frank Wright testifying that they knew your great-uncle Fred, and Hester. Colonel Wright was even a guest at her wedding to Tom Dilhorne. There’s no real cause for doubt, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Then why did your cousin Hester forget herself and marry a dam’d ex-felon is what I want to know?’ said Victor ferociously, forgetting his manners and his speech before ladies. ‘And why did Sir John lose his mind and settle everything on her?’
‘I expect that there were few others she could marry,’ said Caroline quietly.
‘Well, she should have had nothing to do with the brute, remained a spinster and not done us out of what we had come to expect.’
Eleanor decided that this was one of the days when she disliked Victor. She was remembering the pride and affection with which Alan Dilhorne had spoken of his father, the man Victor was calling a brute.
‘I met Hester Dilhorne’s son last night,’ she said at last, when Victor had run down.
Victor was incredulous. ‘Met him? Here? In London?’
‘Well, I could hardly have met him in Sydney, Australia, could I?’ asked Eleanor reasonably, unable to resist teasing Victor a little, even at this serious juncture. ‘Ned met him by accident at the theatre the other evening and brought him home to dinner last night. Only fancy. He is Ned’s double, but bigger, I think. His name is Alan Dilhorne.’
‘Looks like Ned, only bigger, named Dilhorne, and here in England. The whole thing grows more unlikely every minute—which I have already told you, Mama.’
Really, thought Eleanor, Victor can be very wearisome at times.
‘He can scarcely be a gentleman if he comes from Botany Bay and is an ex-felon’s son,’ ranted Victor. ‘How in the world did Lady Stanton allow such a creature to sit down to dinner with her at all?’
‘His manners are perfectly good, although I admit that his clothes are odd,’ said Eleanor, suddenly indignant on Alan’s behalf. ‘He struck me as remarkably clever, although Ned laughed when I said so. “No one with his face could be clever,” he said. Great-Aunt agreed with me, not him.’
She did not add that her great-aunt had said that the young man was inconveniently clever, and was apparently not aware of it. Almeria had noticed, even on this short acquaintance, that young Dilhorne appeared to be able to control Ned, a feat which no one else had ever performed.
He had reconciled Ned to his loss of the Cremorne expedition, and had quietly checked him at dinner when Ned had begun to speak of unsuitable topics before Eleanor. Later, when Charles had come down into the drawing room after dinner, he had entranced him by telling him of his intention to inspect railway lines and engines while he was in England, Charles being of a mechanical bent.
His charm was enormous, and it had certainly impressed Eleanor and Almeria, as well as Ned and Charles. Eleanor found herself spiritedly defending him.
After Victor had indulged in some further rant, for his anger at being dispossessed had been fuelled by the arrival in England of one of his dispossessors, Eleanor said quietly, ‘You know, Cousin Clara—’ she was distantly related to Victor’s mother ‘—I think that Victor wrongs him. Mr Dilhorne said that his mother was all for a reconciliation with you, and with his other relatives in England whom she does not know, and that he hopes to achieve one before he leaves.’
‘A likely tale,’ sneered Victor, ‘and easy for him to say when he has taken all.’
Eleanor decided all over again that this was one of the days when she definitely disliked Victor. ‘Seeing that he is the younger twin, and that his father apparently does not believe in primogeniture, he will only take his share. Furthermore, since the lawyers took some time to trace his mama, she could scarcely have connived at influencing Sir John.’
Clara Loring took a hand when Victor, red in the face, began to answer Eleanor.
‘You have to admit that it is quite beyond us to affect matters now, Victor,’ she said wearily. ‘The young man must have brought proof of Cousin Hester’s existence and her marriage, so we must reconcile ourselves to accepting that Sir John’s will must stand. It is both unmannerly and fruitless to continue to rail at fate. It is certainly not poor Eleanor’s fault that Ned has become acquainted with him. If it proves that the lawyers are satisfied by the young man’s evidence, it will be our duty to receive him, once at least, for my cousin Hester’s sake. Let that be all for now.’
‘But, Mama,’ began Victor.
‘No, that is quite enough. There are other topics to occupy us. Eleanor will think us all savages to go on so. Tell me, my dear, when do you hope to return to Yorkshire? I know how much you miss the country.’
‘I don’t know exactly when I shall go home,’ murmured Eleanor, relieved that the question of the Waring inheritance had been dropped. ‘I suppose when Great-Aunt thinks that I am sufficiently polished.’
‘You look remarkably well polished to me,’ said Victor, who was suddenly worried that his recent churlishness might have put Eleanor off him. He was not wrong. Eleanor did not like this new face which Victor had shown her, so different from that of his usually easy self. His anger over the whole business seemed excessive.
Victor could have told her that it was not. The Lorings had been financially desperate even before his own folly had made matters worse. The prospect of inheriting Essendene, and his possible marriage to Eleanor, were the only things which had kept them going.
They had borrowed heavily on their expectations.
Their creditors would allow them no more rope once Hester Dilhorne’s claim had been proved. What would happen to them after that Victor dared not imagine. Only a rich marriage could save them, otherwise they were ruined.
He devoted his efforts to trying to charm Eleanor again, but she left earlier than she had intended. Her manner to him was as pleasant as usual, but he was unhappily aware that that meant nothing: Almeria Stanton had turned her into the very model of a complete young lady of fashion, who never gave any of her true feelings away.
By the way that Eleanor had carried on about that colonial swine, Dilhorne, he had obviously made it his business to win her over—which was another nail in the coffin of Victor’s hopes.
Chapter Three
E leanor was delighted to discover that her great-aunt was also impressed by Alan Dilhorne.
‘If Ned is determined to be his friend, then I must launch him into good society,’ Almeria said decidedly to her niece. ‘He cannot be left to wander about the demi-monde, which is all that Ned can introduce him to. He deserves better than that. Ned must also introduce him to a decent tailor, since he plainly does not lack money. I shall speak to Lady Liston about him. She is the hostess of the biggest reception of the season next week, and for him to be received at Liston House will give him all the social cachet he needs.’
The shrewd old woman was not thinking solely of assisting Alan. It was plain to her that he was a steadying influence on Ned, and for that reason alone the friendship ought to be encouraged.
Ned did more than introduce Alan to his tailor. A fortnight after meeting Alan he asked him to Stanton House, took him to his rooms, called for his valet, Forshaw, and said in a manner which brooked no opposition, ‘Come on, Dilhorne, if you’re going to visit the best houses, and given that it will be some days before the tailors have your new clothes ready, you might as well be outfitted in my spares. I’ve enough to fit you up twice over, haven’t I, Forshaw?’
‘Certainly, Mr Ned, and no problem about the size, either.’
Alan began to demur, but the prospect of wearing clothes which would not raise eyebrows was too much for him. Ned and Forshaw danced around, sorting out shirts, jackets, trousers, socks, shoes and assorted underwear as assiduously as a pair of drapers in one of the new shops which were beginning to arrive in Oxford and Bond Street.
Forshaw also trimmed what he privately called young Dilhorne’s ‘errant hair’, and when he was togged out to their mutual satisfaction a trunk was filled with more of Ned’s ‘spares’ and the two of them set off to see the town.
They met Almeria and Eleanor in the hall. They had just come back from a similar expedition—ordering two more evening dresses for Eleanor to dazzle the ton in.
They both stared at the handsome pair. Almeria said faintly, ‘Properly dressed, Mr Dilhorne, it is quite impossible to tell which of you is which.’
Eleanor, on the other hand, had no such difficulty. She exclaimed, ‘Oh, no, Mr Dilhorne is the one on the left. I can’t understand, begging your pardon, Great-Aunt, how anyone could mix them up!’
‘Alan, please, Miss Hatton. We have gone beyond Mr Dilhorne, I think,’ Alan said quickly, before naughty Ned could begin to tease his sister by falsely claiming that, not at all, he was the man on the left. He was delighted, and a little surprised that Eleanor could immediately, and correctly, identify him. A girl of common sense as well as spirit, he decided.
Eleanor blushed charmingly, ‘Then if you are to be Alan, I must be Eleanor.’
‘And all the more so,’ he returned gallantly, ‘as a reward for your good sense in distinguishing me from Ned.’
‘Dam’d odd that,’ Ned told Alan, when they had made their adieux to the two women and set off together for an evening on the town. Later they were going on to a reception at the Ailesburys’, to which they had both been invited and where they would later rejoin Lady Stanton and Eleanor. ‘No one else can tell us apart, even when we’re wearing quite different clothes. Wonder how she does it?’
Alan could offer no convincing explanation, and nor could Eleanor, when Almeria Stanton quizzed her later.
‘Oh, it’s simply a feeling I have when I look at them,’ she offered hesitantly. ‘I can’t explain it. It’s something which goes beyond reason, I think.’
Her tough old great-aunt thought that there might be a very down-to-earth explanation which the innocent Eleanor was not yet mature enough to understand. She had already noticed that her charge sparkled whenever Mr Alan Dilhorne walked over the horizon, and that her eyes followed him around the room.
Whether his apparent attraction for her niece was a good thing or a bad thing she was not yet in a position to say. Though his influence on Ned was so beneficial that she decided to give him carte blanche to visit Stanton House whenever he pleased.
Others at the function were obviously ready to accept him in society: he was rapidly surrounded by a group of fascinated members of the ton, most of them women.
‘He’s already got La Bencolin after him,’ grumbled Ned to Frank Gresham, having met with a polite refusal himself from the lady who was the merry widow of Lord Bencolin, who had left her his not inconsiderable fortune.
‘Oh, Marguerite’s always after the latest sensation,’ drawled Frank, who had once scored with the lady himself, ‘and Dilhorne’s certainly that.’ He admired Ned’s look-alike: talking to him was always refreshing. One never knew what he was going to say next.
Frank had found Alan a body-servant, Gurney, who had been a professional boxer, with whom he sparred in a gymnasium off the Strand—much to Frank’s amused admiration.
‘How the devil did a great bruiser like you, Dilhorne, acquire such a head for figures? You certainly don’t resemble Ned: he possesses neither talent,’ Frank had said after watching Alan work out one afternoon. ‘Ned tells me you spend the morning grinding away in the City. He says that the rumour is that your father’s rich enough for you never to work again.’
Alan, towelling himself off, had stared at young Gresham, armoured in idleness like all the young men whom he had met through Ned.
‘Now where would be the fun in that? Look at the trouble that fellows like you and Ned have in filling your days. Some useful occupation would certainly do him a world of good.’
‘Ned? Useful occupation!’ Frank had snorted. ‘You’re light in the attic. He hasn’t the brains of a flea, poor fellow.’
‘Now, how do you know that?’ Alan had queried. ‘I doubt whether anyone ever troubled to find out.’
‘Well, he made a dam’d poor fist of it at Oxford, I can tell you, and I was there with him.’
Alan raised his eyebrows. ‘Now, what do you think that proves? That he can’t construe, or write Latin verses. What in God’s name has that got to do with anything?’
‘Better than nothing,’ Frank drawled. ‘Though I confess that my ability to recite pages of Livy isn’t exactly helpful—though it’ll be pretty impressive when I do choose to sit in the Lords, even though half my audience won’t know what on earth I’m spouting about. Be off with you, then. If you aren’t going to be a bruiser you can concentrate on making yourself even richer than you are. Better than being like Victor Loring, perpetually strapped.’
Alan asked, apparently idly, ‘The Lorings? Poor, are they?’
‘Church mice,’ agreed Frank cheerfully. ‘And there’s you, you devious devil, filthy with it, doing them out of that, too. Life isn’t fair, else I shouldn’t be ready to take my seat in the Lords and live on milk and honey.’
Alan thought that Frank was a little devious himself. He might be living a rackety life around town, but he possessed a good brain beneath his idly cheerful façade. He suspected that it would not be long before his wild life palled, and Frank, Lord Gresham, would place his obligations and duties first, and not second.
Meantime he was a jolly companion, and it was he who had introduced Alan to La Bencolin at the Ailesburys’: a kindness which Alan had already begun to appreciate before Eleanor and her great-aunt arrived.
‘So that’s Ned’s discovery and his improbable look-alike,’ said George Johnstone’s older brother, Sir Richard, who was a great friend of Lady Stanton’s. He was amusedly watching Alan charm the ladies before taking La Bencolin off to supper. She was hanging on to his arm as though she never meant to let go of it.
‘You know that my brother George is working in the City, Father having left him nothing. He’s been entertaining us all with the goings-on at Dilhorne’s ever since young Master Alan arrived there one fine morning.
‘He entered the office like a whirlwind and frightened everyone to death. Told ’em they were all slackers,’ Sir Richard continued cheerfully, ‘which wasn’t surprising considering George’s attitude to life. He got the job by accident, and being George, didn’t even try to do it properly. Young Dilhorne made ’em work all night, not once, but twice—took off his coat and worked with ’em in his shirtsleeves. He made George do the same—now, that I would like to have seen. Then he sent them all home, and worked most of the next day himself—God knows when he slept, because he was on the town with Ned Hatton the same night!
‘When he’d got everything straight again, after making them work like coolies for the rest of the week, they arrived one day to find that at lunchtime he’d arranged a dam’d fine meal for them all, with enough drink to stun several horses, never mind some half-starved City clerks.
‘He told them afterwards he’d put their pay up if they carried on as devotedly as they had been doing. George thinks he’s God, and has begun to work for his money. What’s more, some whippersnapper of a clerk he’d assaulted on the first day got up and made a drunken speech on Mr Alan, thanking heaven for the day he’d arrived—seems he’d grasped that young Master D had saved the London branch from bankruptcy, and all their jobs into the bargain.
‘I want to meet this paragon, Almeria, and soon. Anyone who is the spit image of Ned Hatton and can make George work must be worth seeing. Tonight he’s walked off with La Bencolin after five minutes’ conversation with her! What will he get up to next?’
‘He can tame Ned, too,’ Almeria said quietly. ‘The only question is, how soon will it be before he leaves Ned behind, or Ned begins to resent him?’
She said nothing of her suspicions that Eleanor had fallen in love—and at first sight, too—with Sir Richard’s paragon. It was perhaps fortunate that Eleanor had missed his encounter with La Bencolin, nor did she see him leave with her later, having been cornered by Victor and Caroline Loring.
Sooner or later the gossip would reach her. Later would be better, when the first gloss of Mr Alan Dilhorne’s arrival had worn off—or so Almeria hoped.
The gloss was not wearing off for Alan. His days were full and he had begun to discover that there were opportunities in London which did not exist in Sydney. And they were not all to do with getting into bed with one of society’s most famous beauties.
His brother, Thomas, had commented shortly before he had left home that a buccaneer like Alan would be able to pillage the pillagers, and he was rapidly beginning to see ways of accomplishing this!
One duty, rather than pleasure, saw him making his way to the Waring family lawyers, who had their offices in Lincoln’s Inns Fields. He dressed with some care, not in Ned’s presents, but in the new suit which his tailor had made for him. Gurney had even tamed his unruly sandy hair, so like his father’s. Thus respectable, he was ushered into the rooms of Hallowes, Bunthorne and Thring.
There were three people waiting for him, and two of them were obviously lawyers. One was sitting at a large desk, the other, holding a pile of papers, was perched on a high stool next to an over-full bookcase, and was obviously the junior of the pair.
The third man was tall and silver-haired. He was in his late fifties or early sixties and the expression on his handsome face could best be described as sardonic when he saw Alan come through the door.
All present rose to their feet.
‘Mr Alan Dilhorne, I believe?’ the senior lawyer said. Alan nodded agreement. He continued, ‘May I present myself? I am Mr John Bunthorne, at your service, and this is Lewis Thring, my junior partner.’
Alan bowed and acknowledged them both.
Bunthorne turned and identified the third man in the room. ‘May I have the honour of presenting you to Sir Patrick Ramsey, KB, once of the 73rd Foot, the Royal Highlanders, stationed in Sydney when Lachlan Macquarie was Governor there. He has come to help us in our duties.’
Sir Patrick bowed gracefully to Alan. Alan responded; the lawyer waved him to a chair before his desk.
‘Being a businessman yourself, Mr Dilhorne, you will, of course, understand that we have a duty to protect the Waring estate from possible impostors.’
He paused, and Alan said, ‘Of course,’ and tried not to look at Sir Patrick who appeared vaguely amused by the whole business.
‘Since we discovered your mother’s existence—Sir John having left her everything without ascertaining whether she was alive or dead—we have taken a number of affidavits from persons resident in Sydney at the time of her marriage but who have now returned to England. These appear to be satisfactory on the face of it.
‘I am sure, though, that you will understand that it seemed wise to ask Sir Patrick Ramsey to meet you as further confirmation, since Colonel Wright left for service in India some six months ago. That is correct, is it not, Sir Patrick?’
Sir Patrick flapped a hand in agreement.
‘Now, as I understand it, Mr Dilhorne, you are here on behalf of your father, Thomas Dilhorne Esquire.’
‘No,’ said Alan, throwing both lawyers into a temporary fluster. ‘My father is Tom, not Thomas, and I am not here on his behalf. It is my mother who inherits the estate, and I represent her.’
Sir Patrick gave a short laugh on hearing this.
Bunthorne favoured Alan with a patronising smile.
‘Not so, Mr Dilhorne. But your mistake is quite understandable, since you may be unaware that under English law your mother’s rights are subsumed under your father’s.’
‘It is you who mistake,’ said Alan gently. ‘At home my mother’s possessions have been contractually reverted back to her. She is a free agent, and, as such, is as full a partner in my father’s firm as myself or my brother Tom.’
Sir Patrick’s laugh was not stifled this time. Memory moved in him when he surveyed Tom Dilhorne’s son.
The lawyer was only temporarily embarrassed. He began again.
‘Your mother’s inheritance. So be it. And you are her representative. Very good.’
He gave a half-bow in Sir Patrick’s direction. ‘Now, Sir Patrick, you see Mr Alan Dilhorne before you. Have you any comments to make or questions to ask?’
Sir Patrick rose negligently. Alan saw that he had been an athlete in his youth and was still supple for his age. He walked to Alan and put out his hand. Alan took it. They shook hands gravely.
‘Only,’ said Sir Patrick, ‘that Mr Alan Dilhorne is the image of the Tom Dilhorne I once knew—only larger. I suppose that, like me, he is feeling his years.’
The lawyer smiled. ‘That merely proves Mr Alan here to be his father’s son, and not necessarily Miss Hester Waring’s.’
Alan looked at Sir Patrick, who said, ‘I remember Miss Waring’s wedding, and also the birth of twins to her. This is the younger twin, I am sure.’
Alan thrust his hand into the pocket of his beautiful coat and took out a locket, which he handed to Sir Patrick. Sir Patrick opened it to find there Tom and Hester, painted as they had been nearly thirty years ago when he had known them.
‘Sarah Kerr’s work, I take it,’ he said examining the portraits carefully. ‘A beautiful woman, your mother,’ he added, handing the locket to the lawyers for them to inspect it. ‘I was right about your resemblance to your father. Is your older brother like him, too?’
‘No. He is like my mother’s brother, who was killed in the Peninsular War before I was born. He is very like my father in character, though.’
‘Both are truly your father’s sons, then,’ said Sir Patrick. ‘When I heard George Johnstone speaking of you in admiration, although God knows why after the way in which you treated him, I was back in Sydney nearly thirty years ago. Tell me, are you as dangerous as he was?’
‘No,’ said Alan. ‘I haven’t had his provocations. My life has been easier.’
The three men were struck by him: by his maturity compared with that of most of the young men in their twenties whom they knew.
The lawyer handed the locket back. Alan passed to him the notarised copies of the documents relating to his parents’ marriage, his mother’s birth certificate, and the records of his own and his siblings’ births. He also passed to the lawyer the power of attorney signed by his mother, setting him out as her agent to act for her in any problems concerning the Waring estate, and a similar document from his father relating to his power over the Dilhorne branch in London.
All the time he felt Sir Patrick’s humorous eye on him.
‘Done, then?’ said Sir Patrick at the end, pulling out his watch. ‘Luncheon calls.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Bunthorne. ‘A piece of advice for Mr Alan here, which it would not go amiss for you to hear, Sir Patrick. The Loring connection are resentful that the estate on which they counted passes to your mother. It would be wise to be wary, Mr Alan.’
‘So noted,’ returned Alan coolly. ‘Do I take it that you are satisfied with my credentials?’
‘After meeting your good self and hearing what Sir Patrick has had to say, and having seen these documents, there can be no doubts in the matter. There remain only the final legal moves—including the granting of probate—which will place the estate in your mother’s hands. The title, of course, died with Sir John.’
‘Of course,’ said Alan gravely, and Sir Patrick cocked a sardonic eye at him.
‘You will be staying some little time in England, Mr Dilhorne?’ pursued the lawyer.
‘Until this and other matters are settled,’ said Alan cheerfully.
‘We shall, then, remain in touch. I gather that your firm employs its own solicitors in London? Pray keep our office informed of your own address, and your movements, if you would be so good.’
Alan assented to this, and they all bowed at one another.
Sir Patrick took Alan’s arm. ‘I insist that we dine at my club, Master Alan. You can tell me the latest news from Sydney. Particularly anything about your redoubtable father and your beautiful mother.’
‘Certainly, Sir Patrick. I believe that you left Sydney shortly after my birth,’ he said, adding slyly, ‘You do not object to eating with the felon’s son, I take it?’
Sir Patrick dropped Alan’s arm and turned to face him. ‘I grew to admire your father before I left. Although I’m bound to say that he frightened me, too. In an odd way, that is.’
Alan laughed. ‘He frightens us all. But the Patriarch is a great man.’
Sir Patrick stopped short and began to laugh. ‘The Patriarch, is it?’ he choked. ‘Let me tell you later of one of my favourite memories of your father. He was pretending to be dead drunk when lying under the gaming table in Madame Phoebe’s brothel. The Patriarch! Well! Well! And do you play, Master Alan? Are you a fly-boy, too?’
‘A little,’ replied Alan modestly. ‘Only a little.’
So it came to pass that he dined with a laird of thirty thousand acres in Scotland, twenty thousand in England, who owned two castles, three country houses, four follies, who had a clever and beautiful wife, and whose happiest memories were of his days as a penniless officer in a frontier town in the Pacific when all the world seemed young and merry.
Alan liked visiting Stanton House. Its interior was beautiful after a fashion quite different from his home in Sydney, which was furnished in the Eastern style. Instead it contained all that was best in European taste, from the paintings on the walls to the objets d’art which stood everywhere, and the furniture on the elegantly carpeted parquet. Best of all he liked its owner, Almeria, and her charge, Eleanor Hatton.
Shortly after Almeria had launched him on London society she invited him to dinner to introduce him not only to Sir Richard Johnstone, but also to his Loring cousins.
‘It will be a splendid opportunity for you to make your peace with them,’ she had said.
He arrived promptly, wearing his new evening clothes. Eleanor, greeting him, thought that, while in one sense it was necessary for him to conform to the society in which he was now mixing, they diminished him in another. He looked more like the smooth young men she knew, and less like the strange, exciting man she had first met.
‘Ah, Mr Dilhorne, you are as prompt as I expected you to be,’ Almeria told him. Privately she contrasted him with careless Ned and other members of the Hatton family, who had been asked to be sure to arrive in the drawing room in time to meet Alan and her other visitors but who had not yet come down.
Alan, indeed, soon became aware that beneath her usual calm manner she was vexed about something. Finally, in a lull in the conversation, she rang the bell for Staines and asked him to enquire of Mrs Henrietta Hatton whether she had forgotten that she had promised to come down early for dinner in order to meet Mr Dilhorne before Sir Richard and the Lorings arrived.
He bowed deferentially. ‘I believe, m’lady, that they are on their way downstairs. I gather that there was a slight misunderstanding involving Master Beverley when they first set out, but that has now been overcome.’
Young Charles Stanton, who was being allowed down to dinner that evening, gave a slight guffaw. His grandmother said, ‘Thank you, Staines,’ before looking over at him and remarking glacially, ‘You wished to say something, Master Stanton?’
‘N…n…not at all, grandmother,’ he stuttered. He was so unlike his usual well-behaved and quiet self that Alan wondered what was wrong with him. Eleanor, as well as Charles and Almeria, was also on edge. Her welcome to him had seemed somewhat distracted—which was most unlike her. He was soon to find out why the atmosphere in the pretty room was so tense.
Mrs Henrietta Hatton burst into the room all aflutter, immediately behind her unruly son whom she was unsuccessfully pursuing. She was, Alan later learned, Eleanor’s aunt by marriage, having been the wife of her father’s younger brother John, who had died in a drunken prank involving a curricle, two ladies of easy virtue and half a dozen equally overset friends. As if this was not bad enough he had done so on the day his wife was giving birth to their only child, known to all and sundry as Beastly Beverley.
He had been taken up dead after trying to manoeuvre through the gateway of Hatton House, off Piccadilly, when he could barely stand, never mind drive.
Henrietta had mourned her faithless husband as though he had been the most sober and loving of men. She had transferred her unthinking love to their son, with the result that the child, naturally headstrong, was rapidly transformed into something of a monster.
Although only eleven years old, he was already obese through self-indulgence, and had been informed by Almeria Stanton that he would not be allowed to sit down to dinner as he could not be trusted to behave himself. She had given way, regretfully, to his fond mother’s insistence that he might be allowed in the drawing room before it was served, so that he could meet the guests.
Beastly Beverley, living up to his name, walked up to Alan and thrust his scarlet face at him. Before he could speak Alan forestalled him by putting out his hand, taking Beverley’s flaccid one, and saying gravely as he shook it, ‘Hello, old chap. I’m Alan Dilhorne. Pray who are you?’
Beverley wrenched his hand away. ‘So you’re Ned’s convict look-alike. Where are your funny clothes? Ned said that you had funny clothes.’
He began to laugh loudly, pointing at Ned and choking out, ‘Got it wrong again, Ned, didn’t you? No funny clothes.’
Charles, sitting quiet and obedient by Mr Dudley, plainly did not know whether to laugh or to cry at this exhibition. Almeria Stanton shuddered. His mother said weakly, ‘Oh, Beverley, do try to be more polite.’
Beverley, who made a point of never listening to a word his mother said, opened his mouth to speak again, but before he could do so Alan said gravely, ‘Ned kindly introduced me to his tailor. Sorry to disappoint you.’
For once his already famous charm did not work. Beverley gave a shriek of laughter in order to demonstrate that nothing would be allowed to put him down.
‘Oh, I’m not disappointed. I never expect anything from convicts.’
At this Almeria Stanton said in her most severe voice, ‘Behave yourself, Master Beverley Hatton.’
Beverley’s response was to put his tongue out at her and shout, ‘Shan’t,’ before retreating behind his mother.
She said nervously, ‘Beverley always behaves well—unless, of course, someone provokes him.’
Presumably I provoked him when I came in fashionable clothing, thought Alan wryly.
Rational conversation proved impossible in Beverley’s presence, until Almeria said to Mrs Hatton in her coolest voice, ‘I think that, after all, it would be best, Henrietta dear, if you took Beverley to his room before our other guests arrive.’
This was only accomplished after a great deal of screaming and crying, and some reproaches from Mrs Hatton to her aunt concerning her disregard for poor Beverley’s feelings.
The sense of relief at his departure was immense. The only sad thing was that in response to Hetta Hatton’s demands for fairness, Charles and his tutor were asked to leave also. This was particularly hard on poor Mr Dudley, who had been looking forward to a good dinner and would now be reduced to dining on schoolroom fare again.
Sanity ruled at last. The Loring party and Sir Richard and his wife arrived to find a composed family ready to introduce them to the young Australian who was the subject of society’s latest gossip.
‘Yes,’ Sir Richard said, shaking Alan’s hand, ‘you are like Ned—but there is an odd difference between you. I hear from my brother George that you have been enjoying yourself in the City.’
‘Work to be done there,’ agreed Alan. ‘I like a challenge.’
‘Apparently. I wish more of our young men did. We grow soft.’
‘An old head on young shoulders,’ Sir Richard told his wife later.
Introduced to his Loring relatives en masse, as it were, Alan told them collectively, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet my English cousins whom I did not know that I possessed.’
Victor frowned. Caroline, wearing a pink gauze frock which did her no favours, smiled admiringly at him.
Clara Loring said gently, ‘We never knew your mama. She left England with her father after Fred’s bankruptcy. I hardly knew him, either. I believe that he quarrelled with his family before he lost everything.’
Well, they certainly quarrelled with him after he was ruined, thought Alan, but being a polite young man he bowed and smiled at her. Both Loring women appeared to be faded and cowed, and the reason was obvious: the dominant and personable Victor, who stood over them full of himself. He was a bullying Beastly Beverley grown up.
‘Must say that your arrival, as well as the news of Cousin Hester’s family, was a great shock to us all,’ was his grudging contribution to the conversation.
Alan nodded. ‘Must have been,’ he agreed: a statement which was laconic and cryptic enough to have pleased his father. ‘My mother left England when she was so young that she scarcely knew what family she had. It was a great shock to her, too.’
This was something of a gloss on the truth, but it seemed the thing to say. Nothing ever shocked his strong-minded little mother—‘surprised’ would have been a better word.
Victor made a great effort to be civil to the sandy-haired barbarian who had diddled him out of a fortune. Yes, the wretch had Ned Hatton’s face, but there the resemblance ended. It was as plain to him as it was to everyone else that he shared no other attribute with Ned. Side by side they were of a height, and a similar shape, but examined closely Alan’s athleticism and his hard determination shone out of him.
A friend had told Victor earlier that day, ‘Shouldn’t be surprised if that new cousin of yours was having it off with Marguerite Bencolin. I should be wary of him if I were you, old boy. Anyone who can have La Bencolin under him not long after meeting her bears watching.’
‘Stuff,’ Victor had said rudely. ‘I can’t see his attraction myself. Fools say anything about a new face.’
‘He hasn’t got a new face,’ his friend had guffawed. ‘Only Ned Hatton’s old one.’
Now, meeting him at last, Victor thought glumly that it was bad enough to have an unknown cousin disinherit him, but even worse to discover him to be so formidable despite his lack of years. Victor, at over thirty, felt himself to be juvenile beside him. Were all Australians so indecently mature? On the other hand, perhaps Caroline could be persuaded to charm the swine and get the money back that way. Now, there was a thought worth having!
As the evening wore on, however, it became apparent to Victor that, La Bencolin or no La Bencolin, Alan’s attention was fixed on Eleanor, and that Eleanor sparkled when he spoke to her. This added to the dislike he already felt for his supplanter.
He also feared that Eleanor was not so attracted to himself as she had once been.
He was not wrong. Eleanor was beginning to feel an even stronger disgust for Victor’s unkind remarks. Alan was shrewd, but he tempered his knowledge of the world with a half self-deprecating, half-teasing humour.
Drinking their port after dinner, the gentlemen indulged in male gossip.
‘Hear you spar a little,’ said Victor, who was indulging himself with the Stantons’ good port.
‘A little,’ said Alan.
‘More than a little,’ drawled Ned, determined to keep up with Victor. ‘Shouldn’t fancy going a round with him myself.’
Victor refrained from making the cutting remark about Ned’s condition which trembled on his lips. Disappointment had made his speech reckless lately. If he wanted to retain some favour with Eleanor, however, then Ned had to be placated. He decided to turn on Alan.
‘Hear you are a little épris with La Bencolin.’
‘La Bencolin?’ said Alan blandly. ‘Now, which was she? The blonde at Lady Ailesbury’s, or the brunette at Lady Palmerston’s? I don’t remember a Miss Bencolin.’
Both Sir Richard and Ned gazed sharply at him, but his manner was as easy and cool as he could make it. Alan had no intention of allowing two strenuous afternoons with Lady Bencolin to queer his pitch with Eleanor, to whom he was becoming increasingly attracted.
La Bencolin was all very well, but her practised charms were boring, and Alan was beginning to recognise that he was one of those men who needed more than an easily available body to attract him—and then to rouse him. He also needed some genuine rapport. So far he had only come across it once, and, sadly, that had been with someone who was married and wished to remain chaste.
His imperturbability annoyed Victor. ‘You know perfectly well who I mean,’ he said savagely. ‘Marguerite, Lady Bencolin, or are you so involved with the ladies that you can’t tell one from another?’
‘Steady on, Victor,’ said Ned indignantly. ‘Alan here’s such a busy man, what with sparring with Gurney, ruining his eyesight in the City and dancing about with your lawyers, that he’s hardly had time to get into bed with anyone, let alone such an exhausting piece as La Bencolin is said to be. He don’t look dead wore out, do he?’
Both Sir Richard and Victor, despite themselves, gave Alan a good hard look. No, he didn’t took ‘dead wore out’. But that proves nothing, thought Sir Richard cynically. He wouldn’t, not he. It was quite plain that Victor was making such a dead set at young Dilhorne because it was beginning to look as though the Hatton girl was slipping out of his hand.
He promptly turned the conversation to other matters, and fortunately a sudden access of good manners prevented Victor from turning it back. In revenge he took Ned off to Rosie’s as soon as he could decently prise him away from the aftermath of the dinner party. Once there he cheated Ned, now more than half-drunk, out of more money, playing piquet, than Ned could ever repay.
If playing clean wasn’t going to win him Eleanor, playing dirty might!
Chapter Four
‘N ed, a word with you,’ said Almeria Stanton when he crawled downstairs well into the next afternoon after his misspent night.
‘Yes, Great-Aunt,’ croaked Ned, ‘but make it short, please. I’ve a monstrous bad head on me.’
‘So you should have,’ she told him severely. ‘Arriving home at five in the morning and disturbing the sleep of the whole house with your drunken nonsense. If you can’t behave any better than that, I shall have to ask you to find rooms elsewhere. Apart from anything else, it’s a bad example for poor Charles.’
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Paula Marshall
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: FAMILY SECRETSSomething had gone wrong with the London end of the Dilhorne business empire, and Alan had been sent to England to make things right. But almost immediately after his arrival Alan met Ned Hatton, and to his total astonishment found that they were almost identical. It wasn′t until he met Ned′s sister, Eleanor, and learned more of their family background that he realized the likeness was more than a coincidence. The trouble was, as he grew to love Eleanor, the family secret could sweep away any hope he had of a lifetime with his true love.