A Strange Likeness (9 page)

Ned caught at her hand when she rose to leave.

‘Don't go, Nell. I need to speak to you. It's urgent.'

‘Very well, but don't be too long. I am due to go out with Great-Aunt shortly.'

She sat down. Ned caught at her hand again, saying breathlessly, ‘Good God, not here, where we may be interrupted.' He looked around with a haunted expression. ‘In the study, perhaps.'

‘Very well, if you must.'

When they reached the study, however, Ned hardly knew how to begin. He looked everywhere but at her.
Finally, and unexpectedly, he came out with, ‘You like Victor, don't you, Nell?'

Her answer dismayed him. ‘A little, but not nearly as much as I did.'

‘Oh, come on, Nell,' he ground out. ‘You know you do.'

Eleanor's expression was a pained one. ‘Do come to the point, Ned.' She was worried that she might be late, and she knew that her great-aunt deplored unpunctuality: ‘the beginning of sin', she had once called it.

‘Well, I'm horribly in debt to all sorts of tradesmen, and on top of that I've lost an awful lot of tin to Victor. There's no way I can repay any of it. Victor says he'll cancel all my debts to him if…if I…'

He stopped, his head hanging.

‘Oh, Ned, if what?' she asked him, exasperated. ‘If you can't come to the point I shall have to leave you.'

‘If I persuade you… If you'll marry him. Oh, Nell, do say that you will—you know you like him. All my troubles will be over.'

Shocked, Eleanor sank into the nearest chair.

‘No, Ned, no. You don't know what you're asking of me.'

He fell on his knees before her, clutching at her hands.

‘Oh, Nell, do but consider. I shall be ruined if you won't accept him. I beg you, do but consider…'

She wrenched her hands from his and shook her head, unable to speak.

He was desperate.

‘Say you'll consider, please, Nell, please… Sir Hart… I shall be ruined. It's little enough to ask of you…'

Somehow she managed to answer him. ‘No, Ned, no. It's vile of him to suggest such a thing! How can I want to marry a man who would buy me after this fashion?'

His answer was to burst into tears, wailing at her through them. ‘Please, Nell, please, for my sake, for Ned's sake, for all we mean to one another.'

‘I will consider, but I can hold out no hope that I shall change my mind. I will give you my answer in two days' time, and you must accept it, whatever it is. Now I must leave you.'

Ned had to be content with that. Glum and ashamed, trapped in his own self-indulgence, he watched her leave the study. As for Eleanor, she was in a frenzy of anger and revulsion.

So the old alliance between Ned and Nell had come to this sorry end. Ned was prepared to sell her to Victor, for whom he knew that she did not care, to pay his gaming debts. Worse than that, she was sure that once they were written off Ned would start gambling again, by virtue of having once—no, twice—being saved from his folly.

Everything that Sir Hart had said to her nearly two years ago, before he had sent her to London, came back to her in a new light. How would
she
have ended up if she had given way to every desire, every light and foolish impulse, as Ned was doing, which she
had
begun to do before Almeria had taken her in hand?

To what would she finally have stooped when matters turned sour—as they surely would have done? Would she have turned into her aunt Emily, always known as The Bolter, who had abandoned not one husband, but two, and who now lived in permanent exile and semi-poverty in a tiny German duchy?

She sent word to her great-aunt that she was taken ill and begged to be let off the morning's excursion. She was shivering so violently that the maid put a warming pan into her bed before she crept into it. All that she had recently learned about herself and Ned—knowledge re
cently gained—told her why Nat had been forbidden to her, and what Sir Hart had really been speaking of when he had reproached her.

Her answer to Ned must be no, whatever the cost to him. She could neither give way to him nor be his keeper, as Alan had said, but surely there must be some way out. She wrote a short note to the Lorings, regretting that she could not visit them that afternoon as she had promised, but she did not suggest an alternative date. After this morning's work she felt that she never wanted to see any of them again.

Briefly, she wondered what Alan's advice to her would be if he knew of this latest development.

 

Alan had an ability which had served him well in the past and would do so in the future. Worried though he might be about Ned and Eleanor, once away from them he filed them away in the back of his mind and concentrated on trying to put Dilhorne's on an even keel again: helping the Hattons was something he would think about later.

Dilhorne's London branch had been on the verge of bankruptcy when he had arrived in England, and although he had staved off immediate ruin he needed to exercise all his powers to restore them to a satisfactory state. Their rivals had found them an easy mark to exploit, and it would take time and trouble to teach them that those happy days had gone.

The day on which Eleanor was due to tell Ned of her decision over Victor saw him dealing with a firm of shippers who had come to regard Dilhorne's with contempt since George Johnstone had become its manager.

They allowed this contempt to show when Alan, a very young man in their eyes, arrived with George to negotiate
a new contract with them. He allowed George to do the talking while he sprawled at ease, his eyes half closed, looking bored, and occasionally yawning openly.

Well, it was obvious to him that they thought that they had George sewn up—as they had in the past. They looked pious when they told him regretfully that their rates for carriage in the Far Eastern trade must rise yet again.

In the middle of their self-serving explanation he interrupted them—they knew who he was for George had introduced him to them when they had arrived—and remarked in a passable imitation of Ned Hatton at his silliest, ‘Pray, Mr. Simpson, would you say all that again? Didn't quite get it.'

Simpson stared at him offensively, and repeated his outrageous offer.

Alan yawned. ‘You've lost me, old man. Could you take me through it again—more slowly this time.'

George would have laughed at Simpson's expression if Alan had not warned him beforehand of what he proposed to do. Simpson repeated what he had said as though Alan were ten years old, and backward at that.

Alan picked up a piece of paper and began to write on it, slowly, his tongue protruding between his lips as though he were having acute difficulty in forming the words and figures on paper. Simpson and his aides watched him, fascinated. They had heard that he was shrewd: they saw nothing shrewd here. Alan continued to struggle with the figures before him, breathing heavily. He then gazed earnestly at them, his face contorted.

‘Profitable contract for you, would you say?' he managed at last.

Simpson was careless. ‘Profitable for both of us, Mr Dilhorne.'

Alan addressed his paper once again.

The mute hostility and impatience radiating from Simpson and his cohorts could almost be felt. Nothing daunted, he struggled on, swore gently when his pencil point broke, looked up and managed to avoid George's eye. George, indeed, was purple in the face from suppressed laughter.

‘I am a busy man,' announced Simpson repressively, when Alan began working on his figures again from the beginning, his face screwed up in almost palpable concentration on the task before him.

‘I have already spent the best part of the morning on this. I believe that Mr Johnstone understands the terms I am offering, and why I have offered them. He knows the market and the current rates. Pray save us all our time by consulting with him and closing with us.'

Alan ignored him. Suddenly shouting a triumphant ‘Yes' he finished adding up a line of figures. He walked to the window, holding the paper up to the light the better to examine it.

‘You are sure your figures are correct, Mr Simpson?' he asked dubiously. ‘I would not like to get my sums wrong. Bad example for George here to discover that a member of the firm is not up to it and all that. Pray repeat them for me.'

He sounded more like fatuous Ned Hatton than ever.

George gave a curious muffled groan when Simpson, plainly nearing breaking point, repeated his figures for the fourth time.

‘We have dealt with Dilhorne's for some years now, young sir. No one has ever expressed any reservations about our prices before.'

‘I know,' said Alan, waving his paper about in a vague, happy manner. ‘Begging George's pardon, and yours, too,
I am sure, what puzzles me is not you, sir—I quite see your corner in this—but why Dilhorne's should ever have agreed to such prices in the first place.

‘Now, this piece of paper would seem to show me that you have made something like five hundred per cent profit out of us in the last three years. A pretty little swindle, wouldn't you say? Taking advantage of poor George, here. Not really trained in all this, was he? He don't mind me saying that, I'm sure, he's learning fast is George.

‘Why, just yesterday George helped me to negotiate a possible deal with your rival Jenkinson down the road, at half your price. You see, in the past George took your word of honour—a big mistake that—he knows better now, don't you, George?'

George, his face red with the effort of trying not to laugh at the expression on Simpson's face, nodded, and muttered, ‘Yes, Mr Dilhorne, sir, I've learned a lot since you arrived in London.'

‘Thank you, George.' Alan smiled. ‘Now, let me explain to Mr Simpson that if he wants our business he'd better dip under what Jenkinson has to offer, and after that we'll see what Jenkinson has to say in the way of fresh terms. I'm sure, Mr Simpson, sir, that you will understand why I needed to know
your
exact terms. I thought at first that they were a hum, you see.'

His smile when he said this was so engaging that it nearly undid George.

It was Simpson who was purple now. ‘No one from Dilhorne's has ever complained before. Not Mr Johnstone, here, nor his predecessor, Mr Montagu.'

‘Well, Montagu wouldn't, would he?' said Alan agreeably. ‘Seeing that you were giving him a cut of your profits to get him to sign preposterous agreements like the one you just offered me. Not preposterous for you, I
do acknowledge. But you soon saw that George here was green—begging your pardon, George—and you offered
him
nothing. Another big mistake. Greedy, weren't you? Think how poor George felt when he learned what you'd been giving Montagu. I had to up his stipend to console him.'

He got up, tossing the paper on to the table before them and saying negligently, ‘Think it over. You'll find my offer is at the bottom. I expect to hear from you, one way or the other, tomorrow.'

George bursting behind him, he swept out. It was not the first time, nor the last, that he was to leave a room in an uproar. The recriminations at Simpson were severe.

‘Now how the devil did he find out that Montagu was on the take?' moaned one.

‘Went through all the books like a hawk when he first got here,' said another. ‘I always thought that we should have listened to the talk about him—and his father.'

‘But who would have thought it?' wailed Simpson miserably. ‘Perfect picture of a ninny when he came in, and then there was all that wretched business with the paper. He looked like Johnstone's worst.'

‘Not giving Johnstone a cut was a big mistake,' said the first speaker, wise after the event. ‘Bound to help that bastard of a boy crucify us when he found out.'

‘Laughing their heads off at us this minute, no doubt,' said Simpson miserably. It was the truest statement he had made all morning.

‘Never had such fun in all my life,' gasped George when Alan treated him to a drink in the City Road. ‘You should have seen his face when you started writing on that piece of paper as though you didn't know what writing was, after you'd made him repeat his awful terms three times running. Once to me, and twice to you. You
even got him choking out a fourth. You should be on the stage, Dilhorne. You looked like the village idiot at play. Where did you learn such tricks? God, you're a fly-boy. No one's safe around you.'

This was a sentiment echoed by an embittered Simpson at the end of the uproar.

Alan looked modest. ‘I may be fly, but I never cheat—until I'm cheated, that is. Anything goes then—no ceiling to it. Mind that, George. Honesty first, last and always, if you can. It pays better in the long run—but take the dishonest for every penny. I'm sorry I had to cut you up a bit, but it was all in a good cause. Not your fault that you were brought up to live a soft life, not a hard one. At least you're learning fast.'

Unlike Ned Hatton, was Alan's private judgement.

George nodded, then exploded over his claret. ‘Worried about getting your sums right, were you? That was the richest bit of all! I've never met anyone faster with figures than you.'

Alan nodded, amused by the pleasure of his recent recruit to hard work and common sense. When George asked him if he thought that Simpson would agree to the terms he had offered, he answered him plainly.

‘Bound to, aren't they? They need our business. They won't want to lose it—particularly since somehow the truth about today will get out. Biter bit, and all that.

‘Close with us and they get something. Lose us to Jenkinson and Queer Street might beckon. Question really is, do we want them? Think it over, George, and let me know in the morning. Home now. Dilhorne's is on the up and up at last and we've earned the right to play a little.'

 

Eleanor had spent two sleepless nights worrying about Ned and his monstrous offer. She acknowledged that
when she had first met Victor she might have agreed to marry him, but the more she knew of him, the less she liked him. He was rude and unkind to everyone, family, servants and even his horses. How, then, once he was married, would he treat his wife?