Dorothy Eden (3 page)

‘Then you’ve recommended me to the new Lord Mallow?’ she asked.

‘Oh, no, I’ve not been as indiscreet as chat. You must appear to be a complete stranger. You know of the family only by reading this celebrated case. You have taken a great interest in its outcome and congratulate them on its success. Knowing their child is five years old you are sure they will be requiring a governess. The rest, my dear Sarah, is up to you. I’m sure you’re clever enough and charming enough to be successful.’

It was Aunt Adelaide who expressed shocked disapproval.

‘And what, Ambrose, may I ask, will you be doing while my niece belittles herself in this way?’

Ambrose smiled faintly.

‘I, dear Lady Adelaide, will be on my way to the Caribbean. I intend to arrange a passage at once.’

‘To the Caribbean!’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘You mean to find what evidence you can there? But a deputation has already been.’

‘I’m aware of that. And I’m not saying they didn’t discover evidence. Superficial evidence. That would have been there by plan. But this investigation requires something more. It requires a dedicated interest. Did it matter to the deputation who eventually owned Mallow Hall, whether it was this stranger or myself? Not in the slightest.’

‘None of the cross-examination could shake Thomas Whitehouse’s evidence,’ Sarah pointed out.

‘Exactly. Yet this same Thomas Whitehouse has been remarkably elusive. Each time I’ve discovered where he’s staying he has moved, and today, at last, when I thought I had run him to earth, I found he had just sailed for Trinidad.’

‘Already? With the jury not back!’

‘His part was done. It was advisable to get him out of the way quickly, no doubt with a fat fee in his pocket.’

‘Ambrose, you mean his evidence has been false? That he has not known Blane since he arrived as a boy in the West Indies twenty years ago? But I thought the deputation who went to Trinidad completely verified that.’

‘Then why is Mr Whitehouse so elusive? Why have I never been able to talk to him? Because he isn’t such a good liar after all? I promise you I’ll run him to earth in his own country. And not only that. I’ll discover other evidence. There are things I mean to search for. Blane Mallow’s tombstone, for instance.’

‘Heavens!’ gasped Aunt Adelaide. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’

‘He could be. I don’t know.’

‘Then if that’s so, this scoundrel and his wife must be denounced.’

‘The little boy’s name is Titus,’ Sarah said inconsequentially.

Ambrose’s eyes narrowed angrily.

‘It was my grandfather’s name. I wonder if he was called it at birth, or only recently.’

‘But there’s his extraordinary likeness to that portrait. Everyone agreed on that.’

For the first time Ambrose showed uncertainty.

‘I admit that. It’s the strongest piece of evidence they have. It’s difficult to explain. But there must be an explanation,’ he added decisively, ‘and I intend to find it. With your help, Sarah. You won’t refuse to help?’

‘Spying!’ muttered Aunt Adelaide, with the greatest distaste.

‘I have no references,’ Sarah said. ‘No one is employed by respectable families without reference.’

‘I won’t comment on that word respectable,’ Ambrose said in a scathing voice. ‘But I agree that these people will intend to behave in the most correct way. Therefore I’m sure your aunt will be happy to give you a reference, Sarah.’

‘A forgery!’ exclaimed Aunt Adelaide, scandalised.

‘Is it a forgery to say that Miss Mildmay has been with you for the last eighteen months and is of the most pleasant disposition? Of course it isn’t. Come, Sarah. Kiss me, and tell me that you’re with me. Are you going to be my wife or not?’

Sarah hesitated the merest second. Then she went happily to receive the brush of his lips on her cheeks. It was such a little kiss. And there would be months, and the seas of the Caribbean between them before she could be kissed properly, as a husband kisses his wife.

But she was immeasurably heartened by Ambrose’s definite action, and the future was full of excitement. As reckless now as Ambrose, she could pay no attention to Aunt Adelaide’s disapproval.

O
UTSIDE THE HOUSE IN
South Kensington, built in the new fashionable area, another carriage drew up. It was dark now, and Lady Malvina, peering through a parting in the heavy curtains, could not see who alighted. But it must be Blane. Blane? She nodded her head slowly, looking sly and satisfied. What a fine figure of a man he had grown. Tall, handsome, a little swashbuckling. Just the type of man she secretly admired. So different from his cousin, that narrow-minded disapproving dandy Ambrose.

She would never forget the moment when the news had been brought up to her that her long-lost son Blane was downstairs waiting to see her. She had gone down in the greatest trepidation. She could not admit to anyone, not even pompous old George Trethewey, her late husband’s solicitor, that she was an old woman now, and had almost completely forgotten what her wild young son had looked like twenty years ago, or indeed how he could be expected to look now.

She was in such a state about the unexpected arrival that she would scarcely have had the wit to reject him even had his skin been black! But the moment she set eyes on the little group waiting in the hall, she knew.

For there was the little boy.

The breathless maid, stupid Bessie with never a brain in her head, had omitted to tell her that not only the man claiming to be her son but his wife and child were downstairs.

Lady Malvina had taken a perfunctory look at the dark thin young woman in the unsuitable too-thin travelling cloak and rather shabby bonnet. She had not, at the moment, spared much more than a glance for the tall man at her side. Because the little boy, dark-haired, pale and quiet in his travelling clothes, clutching his mother’s hand and looking at her with the blankness of exhaustion, was her baby over again. That much was perfectly clear to her. It was as if, miraculously, the years had rolled back and she was young and gay, as she had loved to be, and the mother of a perverse, high-spirited, difficult but enchanting little boy.

‘Oh, my little darling! Come to me!’ she exclaimed, reaching out her arms.

The child shrank back. Lady Malvina did not realise what an alarming figure she must have made, swooping down like this in her voluminous dark-purple gown, with her lace cap nodding on an elaborate erection of stiff grey curls. Protuberant pale-blue eyes, a large haughty nose, and a mouth that seemed, when she smiled so welcomingly, overfull of yellowed teeth, were not reassuring to a nervous child.’

‘His name’s Titus,’ said the tall man. ‘Have you nothing to say to me, Mamma?’

‘Titus!’ said Lady Malvina happily. ‘You named him for his grandfather.’

The little boy cast a swift unhappy glance at his mother. He seemed about to speak, but the young woman quickly drew him to her, partially concealing his face in her skirts.

‘My husband decided on his name, ma’am,’ she said primly. ‘I confess I thought it an odd name for a little boy. But then my husband has talked incessantly about everything English for so long.’

‘Mamma,’ said the tall dark man, ‘this is my wife Amalie. Or should I say’—he hesitated a moment, as if testing the atmosphere—‘the new Lady Mallow.’

An expression of triumph passed fleetingly over the young woman’s face. Then her eyelids dropped, and she curtseyed demurely.

Lady Malvina decided at once that she did not like her. A sly ambitious miss. What was her background? Where had Blane picked her up?

Blane?

At last, in her state of bemused excitement, she looked fully into the features of the tall man beside her.

Brilliant dark eyes, magnificent black brows, a nose as arrogant as her own, an expression of inscrutability and—could it be amusement? Skin burned dark with seawinds or tropical suns, a spare strong body with, at this moment, a kind of lazy lounging grace.

Was this the hot-tempered boy who had quarrelled so violently with his father and run off to sea, never to be heard of again?

She was too confused to decide, or to care about making a correct decision. She only knew she most urgently wanted her son home. It was a matter of vital importance.

Everyone had said for years that Blane must certainly be dead. His father had reiterated it with gloomy anger until the day of his own death. Admitted, Blane had a violent temper, and as a boy was impulsive and thoughtless. But no grown man would turn away from an inheritance such as his. Had he been alive he would have returned home ten, fifteen years ago, and made his peace.

Now his father had been dead a year, and the legal machinery had been set in motion to have Blane also assumed dead. So that the correct cold ambitious young man, Ambrose Mallow, who would bring neither shame nor glory to the name, should inherit.

Lady Malvina, for various reasons, had stubbornly refused to admit that this must happen.

And now, like an answer from heaven, this handsome black-browed stranger stood in front of her.

Why should she hesitate to acknowledge him?

‘Blane I My dearest son! Welcome home!’ she cried.

Later, of course, there had to be the endless questions, for the trustees of the estate, pompous intolerably stupid George Trethewey, and Martin Lang, demanded certain proof that this man, arrived as if he had dropped from the sky, was indeed Blane Mallow. The triumphant evidence of the small scar beneath his left ear, acquired after a fall from his horse, was not sufficient. Anyone, they said dourly, could have a scar. And against this were the man’s strange lapses of memory. Vital things seemed to be forgotten where quite irrelevant ones were remembered.

When acquiring the scar he had also suffered a fairly severe case of concussion which, several doctors in consultation agreed, could produce amnesia. But it was a curious amnesia, lightened by flashes of complete memory. As an impostor, he could never have seen Mallow Hall. Shown a plan of it, he could identify each room, even to the attic rooms. Yet later in court he had no recollection of being locked in the supposedly haunted room, a terrifying experience for any child. He could name his schoolmasters and several of his school fellows, and described journeys taken to the seaside and with whom. He unhesitatingly identified his old nurse, but this lady was now so old that she herself suffered from an amnesia too great for her evidence to be of any worth.

The trustees considered the estate too valuable for a decision to be lightly given. A claim must be made and heard in a court of law. A deputation must be sent to the West Indies, from which the man claimed to have come, and evidence sought there. For the purposes of the child Titus’s succession, proof of the marriage to Amalie must be produced.

It all took an endless time, and Lady Malvina was beside herself with impatience. Why couldn’t they all go down to Mallow and live normally? This was her son and her grandson. Surely that she should say so was sufficient. Surely the final unanswerable proof was sufficient—the astonishing likeness the little boy bore to the portrait of Blane at the same age.

No, there didn’t seem to be much doubt about the outcome, especially since the claimant had conducted himself with such superb almost impertinent confidence.

The marriage to Amalie had taken place in a small church, started by a quite respectable Anglican missionary, in Trinidad, and this was duly proved. Amalie was the daughter of a sea captain and a young Spanish woman from Teneriffe. Unfortunately she was not all one would have desired, but she had a certain vivid handsomeness, and a wish, so far at least, to be the kind of English wife of whom Lady Malvina would approve. And her crowning achievement, of course, was producing the next heir to Mallow Hall, the little boy who was the image of his father, and bore his grandfather’s name. This surely made his father’s claim incontestable. Now, peering out into the foggy gloom, Lady Malvina saw the tall figure of the man she had, for the past few months, been calling her son. Wheezing a little as her heart palpitated with excitement, she hurried to ring the bell. When Bessie appeared she said eagerly, ‘Tell Lord Mallow I would like to see him at once.’

Then she plumped up the cushions in her overheated sitting-room and sat down to wait.

This she had not long to do. Presently the door swung open and the young man strode in.

‘Well, Mamma, thanks to you, we won.’

He stood in front of her fireplace, very tall, very confident, full of triumph. If he were not her son, she thought confusedly, she would dearly like to have such a son. He made all his contemporaries look languid and anaemic.

She was equal to the moment. For she, too, had her triumph. Now she could return to Mallow Hall. How soon, she wondered, could she tactfully request her son to pay her debts?

‘Blane, my dear, I’m so happy! Not that I doubted for a moment. Truth must be acknowledged.’

‘It can also be twisted. My cousin Ambrose would have liked to do that.’

‘With his crafty legal mind! And you realise I might have lost my home to him?’

‘Yes, we all realise what you haven’t lost, Mamma.’

The deep voice, full of amusement and significance, made Lady Malvina lift her head haughtily.

‘And you, too, my son.’

Blane began to laugh, his head thrown back, his laughter hearty and uninhibited. Reluctantly, because she was still so unsure of him, she joined in. Then the humour of the situation struck her, and her raucous voice sounded above him.

‘What are we laughing at?’ she demanded at last.

‘The fact that all our differences are over. You’ve forgotten what an unpleasant child I was, and you’re truly happy to have me home.’

Lady Malvina nodded, quiet for a moment.

Then she asked, ‘Have you told your wife?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But you must. She must be even more anxious than I. Bring her up here. We must have a celebration. Ask Tomkins to put some champagne on ice. We might give Titus a glass. It wouldn’t hurt the child.’

‘Lord, no. It wouldn’t hurt him. And he shares the celebration. After all, he’s the heir.’

‘Yes,’ said Lady Malvina with intense satisfaction. ‘The heir.’