A Strange Likeness (16 page)

‘No need to temporise with you, Sir Hart. My father
was
a felon, long reformed. He saved my mother from destitution and worse after her parents died penniless. He has made a great fortune by his own honest efforts and I am here to run his business in England.'

Well, if Sir Hart didn't like that, then he could always turn him out.

Stacy Trent said, ‘Bravo,' softly. Robert Harshaw looked down his nose at the convict's son.

‘And your twin brother?' asked Sir Hart, not commenting on Alan's frank answer. ‘Does he resemble you?'

‘No,' said Alan. ‘Had he come to England Ned would never have met him. Tom is like my uncle Rowland, who died in the Peninsular War when my mother was a girl. He is tall and dark and handsome, not at all like me.'

After this, talk became general again. Sir Hart decided that questioning his guest further would go beyond the bounds of politeness. He had learned a little of what he wanted to know, and over the weeks of Alan's visit he hoped to learn more.

Perhaps ‘hoped' was the wrong word—‘feared' might be a better one for a man who was becoming increasingly aware that a past he had thought dead had returned to life and come back to haunt not only him but his innocent descendants.

‘Y
ou are enjoying yourself, are you not, Alan? Sir Hart likes you, I know.'

‘I like him, Eleanor—and the house. I had never thought to see anything quite so beautiful, lost among the moors.'

They had left the gardens which surrounded the house and were walking on a rough path which gave them a splendid view of the blue distance. They were rarely left alone together, but that afternoon they had tactfully slipped away in the middle of an argument between Sir Hart and Ned over his refusal to be instructed by Shotton.

‘Ned does not like either Sir Hart or the house,' she said mournfully.

Alan stopped and turned to face her. ‘But you do, Eleanor. You would make a better heir.'

She looked up at him sadly. ‘I know. I would guard the heritage as the Hattons before have guarded it, but it's useless thinking like that. He
is
the heir, and he's my brother, whom I love, despite all.'

He put an arm about her to hold him to her in such away that although her nearness might tempt him, the temptation would not be overwhelming.

‘I would guard you, Eleanor, you know that—if you gave me permission.'

It was not a declaration of marriage, but it was near enough. Eleanor was now grown up enough to understand that she must keep her distance from him a little in these early days, and that when he finally declared his love for her it would be after he had spoken to Sir Hart—and that would not be yet.

His next words confirmed her instinctive knowledge. ‘I cannot offer for you yet, Eleanor. Not until Sir Hart has come to know me better and to believe that he may entrust you to me. He is resigned to Stacy marrying elsewhere, but he is a cautious man—and you are his treasure; the more so because of Ned's weaknesses.'

It was a mark of their growing rapport that he could speak so frankly. He bent down from his great height and kissed her, chastely, on the cheek. ‘I dare not do more than that yet,' he said simply. ‘You understand me?'

Eleanor nodded mutely.

‘Time to go back,' he said.

They found a tea-party assembled on the lawn at the back of the house beneath a tree which Sir Hart had told them was centuries old. Sir Hart's armchair had been brought out. Alan reclined at Eleanor's feet and she fed him sandwiches, careless of what others thought. Her mother looked displeased, Sir Hart faintly amused.

At a lull in the conversation Alan sat up and spoke to the old man. ‘With your permission, sir, I should like to spend a day or two in Bradford to inspect the mills and the town. Perhaps Ned would care to go with me.'

Before Sir Hart could answer, Ned said frankly, ‘Not I, old fellow. Shouldn't care to peer into the innards of mills. Nasty places, mills.'

Eleanor winced at this confirmation of her earlier fears;
Sir Hart looked severely at him. ‘You are frivolous, Ned. Of course you may visit Bradford, Mr Dilhorne. You may take Abdul with you, if you wish to ride there.'

‘With due respect, I must refuse your kind offer, sir,' Alan replied. ‘I would prefer one of his more workaday fellows. It would not do to come on too strong, as one of the nobs. A less wealthy image would be better.'

Sir Hart said, ‘Since foolish Ned will not go with you, why not take Stacy?'

Alan looked at Stacy. ‘I can think of nothing better. If it would please him, that is.'

‘Of all things I should like to go,' said Stacy eagerly. He guessed, correctly, that the one person in the world whom Alan would have liked to take was Eleanor—but that was impossible.

‘Good,' said Alan. ‘The day after tomorrow, then. I must think on, as my father says.'

He fell back again and, smiling up at Eleanor, said, ‘Madam, is the cake-mine empty that I receive only sandwiches?'

‘Oh, you're insatiable,' she teased him, ‘which is a polite word for greedy. All the same, you may have some good Yorkshire parkin with plenty of treacle in it to set you up for your journey.'

‘I shan't be long,' he told her softly, ‘seeing that it is you to whom I return.'

 

Two days later they rode to Bradford. Stacy, at Alan's request, also dressed down, so that he looked like a junior clerk. Before they left Alan took him into his room, wetted his hair, parted it down the middle and combed the sides flat again.

‘Now for some fun,' said Alan cheerfully, ‘and I want you to help me have it. I know you well enough to be
sure that you won't refuse to do whatever I ask, however odd it might seem. I'll tell you the rest of it when we reach Bradford.'

They came back in three days, not the two Alan had told Sir Hart. They were red-eyed and kept bursting into wild laughter. Stacy said that he'd never had such a jolly time, despite his thick head from the previous night's drinking.

Sir Hart and Eleanor were both a little disappointed. Neither of them had thought that it was mere debauchery which had taken Alan to Bradford. Sir Hart sent for Stacy when his head was better and questioned him. What he learned, for Alan had told Stacy to tell him the truth, made him more thoughtful than ever. He looked at his guest with even greater respect.

Eleanor simply said to Alan in mock severity, ‘I hope that you didn't lead Stacy into bad ways.'

‘Indeed not,' he told her, grinning. ‘But since what we did do is not quite finished we had better keep quiet. After that, Stacy may tell you as much of the truth as he thinks fit.'

The next day they all went over to Byethorpe, Robert Harshaw's place, for dinner. The manor house was nearly as old as Temple Hatton, but was dour and harsh, like Robert himself. The dinner was good, though.

Halfway through it Robert said to Alan, ‘Ned tells me that you took young Stacy to Bradford with you. What were you doing there? Thinking of buying a woollen mill?'

He said this last in a jeering tone.

‘No,' said Alan mildly. ‘I'm not thinking of buying one.'

Stacy, despite himself, began to laugh. Robert looked
suspiciously at him. ‘I was not aware that I had made a joke, Stacy.'

‘No, not you,' said Stacy, still laughing. ‘Alan, it's Alan who makes the jokes.'

‘Where is the joke in what you said, Dilhorne?' queried Robert, brows lowered.

‘Why, as to that,' said Alan, ‘I am not thinking of buying a woollen mill, for I have bought one.'

‘You have bought one? Here? Now? What with?'

Robert was not the only one who was surprised, for the whole table was listening.

‘With an advance in the form of a banker's draft,' said Alan, still cheerful. ‘I lodged it with a house in Bradford as surety to be held in neutral hands until I am satisfied as to what I am buying. I have looked only cursorily at the books, but my man from London will be coming to examine them further. The lawyers must also have their say, and when all is done to my satisfaction, Outhwaite's shall be mine.'

‘Outhwaite's! You have bought Outhwaite's,' exclaimed Robert. He jeered again. ‘I suppose that your draft was drawn on Rothschild's!'

‘Now how did you guess that,' said Alan innocently, looking Robert straight in the eye. ‘But, yes. I dined with Mr Lionel before I left for Yorkshire. The talk was of this and that. That was mostly Yorkshire woollen mills.'

He ate his food with his usual appetite.

Sir Hart said, ‘I see that you mix business with pleasure. I wish Ned had gone with you. It would have done him good.'

‘I fear, sir, that he would not have enjoyed it. Stacy, I know, had a dam'd dull time. He made an excellent clerk.'

‘Not I,' said Stacy, ‘never had such fun in my life.'
But neither Alan nor he would be drawn further to amplify on that.

‘One does not enlarge on one's business deals, sir. That is one of my father's maxims,' Alan said to his companion at dinner, who also owned a mill or two, and tried to question him on how Outhwaite's had come to sell—and for what return.

Ned, listening to all this, put down his knife and fork and began to laugh.

‘So, you have been at it again, Alan.' He looked around the table. ‘I could tell you such tales of what he got up to in London. How—'

‘But you will not,' said Alan, cutting across him. ‘For that would be a breach of confidence, freely given.'

His voice was so cold and hard that Ned, for once, was overborne. He flushed, and picked up his knife and fork again.

‘Yes,' he said, in a low voice. ‘You are right.'

Sir Hart looked from one to the other: so alike and yet so different. Eleanor also, looking at them, thought that she loved Alan in spite of his having Ned's face and not because of it. It was his strength and his zest for life which drew her to him more than anything else about him.

Stacy whispered in Eleanor's ear, ‘I think that I shall feed Jane's mama to
him
, after Bradford.'

Not even to Eleanor would he reveal all that they had done. He had told Sir Hart only the bare bones of their adventure, with few details.

On their first day in Bradford Alan had dressed Stacy's hair again, had made him wear a dirty neck-cloth and an ink-stained shirt with grimy cuffs. He had given him a notebook and a pencil and precise instructions.

‘While they are talking look wise, and write any gibberish down in it. Walk behind me, be outwardly deferential, but make it plain that you are the clever young clerk and I am the rich young fool. That I am your charge.'

When they reached the mill Alan had turned into a dreadful parody of Ned, laughing, inconsequential and stupid, apparently taking heed of nothing. He'd clambered around, joking and asking people's pardon, had disappeared around corners, poked and prodded daftly at things.

The machines took his fancy. He asked questions of such profound silliness that the contempt for him of the owners, their bookkeeper and their lawyers was undisguised.

‘The stupid son of a rich, hard-working pa,' was their conclusion after he had left.

All the time he was there, though, his cold, scheming brain had been at work, while they gave themselves away. So it went on. Stacy obediently walked behind him, occasionally placed a hand on his apparently heedless arm, whispering at him when he was being particularly stupid.

Stacy wrote and wrote in his notebook. He filled it with The Lord's Prayer, The Twenty-third Psalm, great chunks of Caesar, Livy and Ovid's
Ars Amoris—The Art of Love
—particularly the more erotic bits—and all in Latin. After that he wrote down pages of Greek.

When they were left alone with Stacy, Alan having been taken away on his own, the owners were wariness itself, but before Alan no such thing.

Then, on the last afternoon, when he had found out what he wanted—that contrary to general belief Outhwaite's plant was out of date and they were nearly bank
rupt—he changed before Stacy's eyes into someone so cold and hard that he was barely recognisable. After that they went back to Outhwaite's—that whited sepulchre—and the real business of the deal was done.

He changed from a clambering, eager, silly boy into a mocking man. He took the notebook from Stacy more than once, opened it and put his forefinger on a meaningless page, saying, ‘But my man here noted at this point that you said quite otherwise yesterday. Is not that so?'

To which Stacy nodded, looked wise, replying helpfully, ‘Indeed, Mr Alan, sir. I quite recollect, and so noted at the time.'

On the last night, with the deal well done, Alan took Stacy off to celebrate. The usual uproar was going on at Outhwaite's after he had left, with the usual recriminations about a bastard boy who had got the business for far less than he could have paid or they had hoped to get. Who in the world would have guessed that he knew so much—and so quickly—and had picked up so much more while he was behaving like a tumbler at a fair?

It was while they were drinking themselves stupid back at the inn where they had been staying that Alan picked up Stacy's notebook and solemnly began to read from it.

‘“The Lord is my shepherd, Mr Outhwaite, sir”,' he intoned, ‘“as Stacy Trent has so noted, and my love has breasts of such magnitude, Ovid says, that even you, Mr Outhwaite, sir, might be astonished at them”.'

He threw the notebook into the fire, to Stacy's disappointment, because he'd wanted to keep it in memory of having had fun with Alan. Alan, only half-drunk at this point, looked him in the eye and said, ‘The best evidence in such cases is no evidence—another of the Patriarch's maxims. Carry away with you the memory that they were
so busy watching you that they quite forgot to check what I was doing.

‘Now, drink up, Stacy, I want you unconscious before morning.'

 

Although Alan was generally popular with those who frequented Temple Hatton House, Robert Harshaw hated him, and Nat, the stable hand, glared at him whenever he visited the stables to watch and to help with the schooling and management of the horses.

One of the estate workers had been a pugilist, and early in the morning Alan, stripped to the waist, made a habit of sparring with him as a change from Gurney. Nat, unlike the other staff, hated him for this, too. Such a brute, he was, to care for Miss Eleanor and have his care returned.

The day after Alan had come back from Bradford Eleanor went to the stables before breakfast. Snowflake, the old pony whom she had ridden when she was younger and smaller, was ill, and she had come to see how he was.

She met Nat on entering the yard. He was carrying a bucket of water which he put down when he saw her. Eleanor gave him a brief, almost unseeing, nod, her attention fixed on the animal she had come to see. It stung him by its difference from their old camaraderie. Nat thought that he knew the cause.

‘A word with you, Miss Eleanor, if you please.'

At last he had her full attention. ‘Yes, Nat.' She smiled at him. He had been her old friend, after all. ‘What is it?'