A Strange Likeness (24 page)

Eleanor restrained herself from saying acidly that Polly Lorimer, her mother and brother Fred were all hearty boors, if not to say bores, whose brains were in their seats on their horses, and that she and they had little in common.

‘I like helping Charles,' she said, ‘he's lonely.'

‘He needn't be, said her aunt Hetta indignantly. ‘He has Beverley to play with.'

As well play with a scorpion, thought Eleanor, whose private thoughts grew nastier the longer Alan was away.
She had seen the satiric twist to his lips whenever Beverley rampaged through the House—Beverley was rapidly recovering from the effect of his enforced exile to the nursery by Sir Hart, and was now nearly as rudely headstrong as he had been when he had arrived.

Sir Hart was absent, too. He had rarely left his room while Alan was visiting Bradford and only came down for dinner, leaving as soon as it was over. Ned was often away as well. He had made a good friend of Robert Harshaw and they roistered around the Riding, drinking together.

Eleanor had been in the library one afternoon after Charles and Mr Dudley had gone fishing—a new amusement for Charles. She'd had no mind to go with them. She had pulled out one of the great folios of Sir Joseph Banks's original journey to the South Seas in order to look at the plants and animals he had seen in Alan's homeland.

Mr Rivers, the librarian was having a protracted tea in the housekeeper's room, when Sir Hart arrived, to find her studying the folio which was propped on huge oak lecterns.

‘I thought that I heard you, Granddaughter.' He came over to see what she was studying.

‘Oh, Grandfather,' she exclaimed. ‘It is very wrong of me to be so bored and so lonely when, as Alan says, I have everything. But there is nothing for me to do, nothing. I don't know how Mother and the others bear it. When I try to find occupation they look at me as though I have run mad. I cannot chatter, and embroider and unpick it and do it again, and listen to Aunt Hetta reading Mrs Gore's latest novel—or something even sillier—every day.

‘Mother can at least pretend to instruct the house
keeper—who doesn't really need instructing. I thought that I might like to go into the garden and help with the plants, but Mother wailed at me that I should ruin my hands. When I try to study with Charles she comes in and chatters at us in order to pry me away. Then she takes me out to visit Polly Lorimer, who only cares about dogs and horses, which I suppose is something—but it is not enough.'

Her voice rose at the end and she thought that she might cry or throw herself about if she were not careful.

‘You are missing him,' said Sir Hart gently. ‘But, Granddaughter, even so, were you never to have met him, you would still feel as you do.'

She began to cry at that. ‘Oh, you do understand me. What am I to do? Why could not Ned have been like me and I like Ned? Then I could have chattered away to Mother and the rest and you would not have been disappointed in him. I should not be saying this, it is so wicked and disloyal, but it is true, and I cannot help my thoughts. Sometimes I feel like a changeling.'

Sir Hart gazed helplessly at her. He could not tell her that, in effect, she
was
a changeling. A changeling to whom her father, Knaresborough, had bequeathed his rare and challenging intelligence which sat so ill with what society thought a young woman of gentle birth ought to be. He tried to comfort her, but he had long ago decided that she should never know the truth—it would simply be one more burden for her to carry.

‘It is painful for you, I know, and there is little I can do. If you marry, and your husband is kind, you may make your own life, and fix yourself on something which interests you.'

‘And that is all,' she said sadly. ‘To wait to be asked and then hope.'

If Alan asked her to marry him she knew that she would be able to share his life in a way that few women did. But suppose he were not to ask her. What then?

She did not speak to Sir Hart of that. Sir Hart must know how she felt about Alan, she had made no secret of it.

‘I will not marry an old man or a man for whom I do not care in order to gain a position and a title,' she said. ‘I had rather remain single—and be an aunt to Ned's children, if he has any.'

Sir Hart put an arm around her, he had never done so before. ‘It is the lot of women at which you rail, Eleanor. Yet men's lives are bound by duty, too.'

‘Oh, but they may choose their duty, and there is so much that men may do and so little for me. I am trained to nothing, yet my mind is as good as Charles's and a great deal better than Ned and Robert's. I would run Temple Hatton more carefully than either Ned or Beverley. It's such a waste. It's a pity that I am not more like Mother.'

‘No,' he said sharply. ‘Do not say that. Should you wish it I will ask Rivers to allow you to help him. He is cataloguing the books here and in London and needs an assistant. You could help him in the mornings. I will silence the complaints which your mother is sure to make. You must understand that once you have begun this work you will need to do it properly and continue it—even if you find it hard. I will not have Rivers played with.'

‘Oh, yes, I understand that,' she cried passionately. ‘But Mother will be sure to complain.'

‘For once, your mother will do as I say.'

Eleanor had thought that there was a touch of Sir Beauchamp in his manner then, and, like Sir Beauchamp, he kept his word. He had been right to warn her that it might
be difficult, for Mr Rivers was a hard, if just, taskmaster. She soon began to understand why Alan was so secretly contemptuous of them all, however much he tried to disguise it. For actually working and doing things correctly, as Sir Hart had warned, was quite different from playing.

Her mother was particularly annoyed by the brown Holland overall she wore when at her work, but that counted for nothing against the approval of both Mr Rivers and Sir Hart.

‘She learns quickly, and retains what she learns,' Mr Rivers told Sir Hart. ‘She is better than anyone we could hire, for she is learning to love the books and her interest is true and genuine.

‘Excellent,' said Sir Hart, delighted to learn that he had made his granddaughter a gift which would last her all her life. She knocked at his door to tell him so that evening.

Her equals, though, apart from Jane and Stacy, who occasionally joined her, were not impressed at all, and her mother made her promise that she would not tell their friends.

‘Such a strange thing for a young lady to wish to do with her time. I am surprised at Sir Hart for encouraging you.'

Secretly she thought that Eleanor was more like her true father than was comfortable. It would not do if her resemblance to him, already strong, were detected through this latest freak of conduct. Knaresborough was the subject of gossip for being a bibliophile as well as a sportsman, and spent a great deal of time in his library at Castle Ashcourt.

Eleanor longed to tell Alan of her new life, for he was one of the few in the House, beside Jane and Stacy, who
enjoyed the library. She wondered what was happening in Bradford which was keeping him so long.

 

Alan was staying away longer than he intended in order to allow his face to heal before he returned to Temple Hatton. He saw the deal through with Brough and his men, and spent part of his time mixing with the other mill-owners. They invited him to dine in their brash new houses, full of shining new furniture and dark brown paintings which looked as though the gravy which they served in such quantities had seeped on to the canvases.

The story of the fight on the moor had spread round the district, but no one spoke of it to him, although the knowledge was canny in their hard faces. Some reproached him for raising his hands' wages. He met that with, ‘It's so ordered that it doesn't touch our profits. Outhwaite's was badly run, as you all know. I would have closed the mill rather than give way to their original demand—I could not carry a strike. A little rearrangement served to save all.'

They grunted dissent at him. Surrounded by new-won wealth, they were aping the manners of the gentry in more ways than one. For their sons—like Ned—were soft, and were forgetting the hard work and industry which had created their fathers' fortunes. Life's patterns and cycles recreated themselves, just as the old Greeks had said.

 

Eleanor was on her way to the library to do a voluntary afternoon stint when she heard the noise of Alan's return. She ran down the great staircase, wearing her Holland apron, in order to be the first to greet him.

‘Oh, I am so glad that you are back, Alan. Did all go well with you?'

She saw the fading bruises on his face, and later she would see the remnants of the fight written on his knuckles, but, smiling joyfully, she said nothing to him, other than ‘Oh, I have such things to tell you—later, that is. Doubtless you have things to tell me. We can talk at tea.'

Her welcome of him was so frank and free that Alan was lifted by it, even when her mother said crossly, ‘Miss Hatton, you forget yourself. And I wish that you would stay downstairs with us. Rivers must learn to do without you this afternoon.'

‘Oh,' said Eleanor gaily, much to Alan's amusement, although he did not quite understand what they were talking about, ‘it is not Mr Rivers who forces me to labour in the library, it is I who go there willingly, as I shall explain to you later, Alan.'

She ran lightly up the stairs, leaving him wondering at the apron, the reference to forced labour, and the Triumvirate's openly expressed annoyance at her behaviour when she had gone.

All three women felt that Eleanor's occupation and her interest in it was a vague threat to their pleasant, easy lives. ‘For if,' as Aunt Hetta said, ‘Sir Hart can compel Eleanor to do such strange things, what might he not ask of us?'

Alan gathered that Eleanor had found something to fill her idle days, and with Sir Hart's help, no doubt. He looked forward to seeing him again, although he half feared the revelations which might flow from him when he did.

Sir Hart did not come down to dinner that night, but sent word to Mr Dilhorne to be so good as to visit him in his study at ten-thirty the next morning.

‘And that's a relief,' said Ned frankly to Alan. ‘That he's not coming down. For much though I like the old
man he's a bit of a death's head at the feast, you know. You see, I did learn something from those intolerably boring old men at Oxford, even if I've forgotten most of it. Now you may tell me of your adventures in Bradford, for I see by your face and hands that you have been fighting again.'

Eleanor raised internal eyebrows while Ned was speaking, and silently enjoyed watching Alan dodge Ned's questions. He was helped in this by the presence of Knaresborough, who was an unexpected visitor that night. He was on his way to London.

‘Out of season,' Ned said. ‘Wouldn't you know? Just like him to be different from everyone else.'

His splendid train of coaches, servants and wagons were being put up at Temple Hatton overnight—and all of it was going to be loaded on to a special train at Leeds. He was debating whether to stay in his coach on the train journey, or use an ordinary railway carriage, and gravely asked Alan's advice.

‘I'm afraid that I may not entertain you at Castle Ashcourt after all, Master Alan, but you shall come to Knaresborough House in Piccadilly when you return to London. I'll brook no refusal from you, for if you do I shall get little Vic to put you into the Tower for contempt!'

Seated at dinner, and before Ned could quiz Alan again, Knaresborough said, ‘So, you set Bradford by the ears, young man. It is all over the Riding that you fought with Jem Briggs on the moor above Bradford, until the Peelers broke it up. Now, how came that about?'

Eleanor turned white while Ned, Stacy and Charles said together, ‘Oh, famous, Alan. How did you fare with him?'

‘I narrowly missed a real beating,' Alan told them
cheerfully, and gave them a highly edited version of his trip to Bradford. He did not tell them that Brough had visited him before he left to offer him his hand in friendship, and had told him that he was a true Yorkshireman for all that he came from the Antipodes.

‘Your name's a give-away, young fellow,' he had told Alan. ‘And you're as like the old man at the House as he must have been in youth to make more than one man think.'

‘Don't think about it too hard,' Alan had replied. ‘It wouldn't do to strain yourself overmuch. Your men need you.'

He avoided Knaresborough's satiric eye now, while he placated Ned, but he could not avoid Eleanor's tongue when they joined the ladies after the dinner.

‘I thought that you had promised me not to run any unnecessary risks,' she said reproachfully, ‘and there you were fighting the man Ned and Robert have been ranting about.'

Alan looked soulfully at her. ‘I didn't intend to,' he said, ‘but needs must when the devil drives.'

‘I suppose that he was driving pretty hard around Bradford, judging by the state that you're in.'

‘True—but you'll be happy to learn that we all became friends in the end, and drank together afterwards.'

Knaresborough, who had strolled up and was listening to them, drawled, ‘Brough? Was it Brough you were dickering with? At least he's an honest rogue, unlike some.'

Both Eleanor and Alan stifled laughter at this typical pronouncement, and Alan wondered where and when Brough and Knaresborough had crossed swords and what they had made of one another. Fortunately the Belted Earl abandoned the topic of Alan's exploits and engaged the
three of them in a discussion of Eleanor's new duties in the library, of which he heartily approved.

Ned and Robert remained in the dining room drinking, and did not emerge until after Alan had retired to bed. Once there he could not sleep for thinking about what Sir Hart might have to tell him on the morrow.