A Strange Likeness (21 page)

He'd seen Jane and Stacy, whom they had outpaced, coming towards them, and rebuttoned Eleanor's habit rapidly. They had been decorously admiring the view by the time the other pair of lovers arrived.

Stacy, taking in Eleanor's brilliantly roused eyes and her flushed face, had said nothing, but thought a lot. He was taking great care not to frighten Jane and thought how strange it was that everything was allowed to young men and nothing to women, who consequently came ignorant to the marriage bed.

Now he was watching Alan and Knaresborough; their voices were low so that none could overhear them.

‘You play well, young sir.'

Alan laughed at him. ‘Oh, there is nothing to that. If one man marks the cards, the other may use them—if he knows how.'

‘Yes, you are a fox among the chickens. I must not forget that.'

They played on a little in silence before Knaresborough said idly, ‘You speak proudly of your father—but give little of him away.'

‘Nothing to give away, m'lord.'

‘Knaresborough. I am Knaresborough to you. I suppose that he was sent as a felon to New South Wales instead of being hanged in England?'

‘You suppose correctly…Knaresborough.'

Knaresborough laughed. ‘You did not mind me saying that?'

‘He would not mind if he heard you, so why should I?'

‘Why indeed? And from London, I hear. Pass the bottle, boy, you have nursed it long enough. Mark you, though, I note how little you actually drink. No Yorkshire connections at all?'

His voice was idle when he came out with this last.

Alan suddenly tired of both the games they were playing; tired of the half-truths and the evasions. He remembered Sir Hart's anxious face, Ned's angry one on the night of the fight, his father's likeness to Sir Hart—and, above all, his own to Sir Beauchamp. It was time to end it.

‘Oh, yes, Knaresborough, there was a Yorkshire connection. However did you guess?' His voice was mocking.

‘I am sure that Sir Beauchamp did not live for nothing.'

‘Well, as to that, I don't know. They are your points this time, Knaresborough, but you have not won enough to help you.'

‘I distracted you,' said Knaresborough mildly. ‘Have you told Sir Hart of the connection?'

‘No, nor has he asked me if there were one—but I am tired of being devious. Nothing but the truth will satisfy me now—for there is Eleanor to think of.'

Knaresborough made no immediate answer. At last he said, ‘I think that I may have won my first hand.'

Alan's answering laugh had no mirth in it. ‘I think not. You are rubiconed as the game has it, I fear, and have lost it.' He watched Knaresborough stare in disbelief at the cards before saying, ‘My father, as you have doubtless guessed, had no acknowledged father, but you could not disturb him by calling him bastard.'

‘Oh, I could believe anything of a father of such as you. But your father had a mother, I suppose?'

‘Oh, yes, and I know that she was from Yorkshire. It is your turn to play.'

‘Indeed, and you have beaten me again. Are there cards up
your
sleeve, too?'

‘You must ponder that, Knaresborough, for I shall not tell you. What I
can
say is that she worked in a big house on the edge of the moors.'

More counters on Knaresborough's side passed to Alan. They played on.

‘It was the old story, I suppose. The son of the house and the pretty servant, no doubt.'

‘No doubt.'

Alan was short, for the game was nearly over.

‘I can tell you that my father was born at a farm on
the moors, but the moors are wide and there are many farms and many big houses on them.'

‘Indeed, young man. But not many by-blow's sons have Sir Beauchamp's brass face, I assure you. You are too good for me again.'

Alan made him no direct answer, said instead, ‘You would have done better to have played without marked cards and sleight of hand. My father taught me how to use them against the cheat, long ago.'

‘So, you have beaten me; I give you best. You know that I shall tell Sir Hart all this?'

‘Of course—else I should not have told
you
.'

Ned, seeing that the game had ended, walked over to them. ‘So you have won, Alan, and against Knaresborough of all people. He always wins, for he plays dirty, you know, when he does not play for money.'

‘Yes, I guessed that, Ned.'

Ned said sorrowfully, ‘But you play dirty, too, Alan.'

‘Yes, and did so for you, Ned.' Alan had not meant to remind Ned of the debt he owed him, but Ned's tone had stung.

‘You shall both drink with me,' Knaresborough told them, ‘to celebrate my defeat, for I rarely lose.'

Ned drank down one bumper and then left them. Knaresborough said dryly to Alan, ‘You are sorry for Ned, I see. Why? He is most fortunate, being the Hatton heir.'

‘He would have been happier in a cottage.'

‘There is nothing to that. He is heir here, and that's an end to it. When you visit me at Castle Ashcourt leave him behind. He bores me.'

‘You are frank, Knaresborough, but unkind.'

Knaresborough's laugh was humourless. ‘There is no point in being able to call the Queen cousin if I may not
say and do as I please. And it will not be long before me and mine will not be able to please themselves. For as my friend Alexander Baring says, “The field of coal will outstrip the field of barley”, and you and yours will sit where I am sitting now—but until then I will do as I please. What was your grandmother's name?'

‘The same as mine, only Mary. I know little of her beyond that. My father has never spoken to me of her, or of his English past.'

‘As is natural. Well, I like you, and not only because you remind me of a man whom I feared and respected. I hope that you may be successful with Miss Eleanor. She deserves better than she may find here.'

Alan looked Knaresborough square in the face.

‘I understand your concern for her, Knaresborough. It is most natural, given everything, and if we marry I shall try to make her as happy as her father might wish.'

Knaresborough whistled. ‘You know, boy. How do you know? That was, and is, a well-kept secret.'

‘Now, that I shall not tell you, nor will the secret ever be revealed by me. You may be sure of that.'

‘The only thing that I am sure of is that Temple Hatton deserves one like you, and not like Ned.'

‘That is as may be, Knaresborough.'

Alan bowed—and left him. For once the Belted Earl had been given his congé by an inferior, and had accepted it.

Eleanor motioned for Alan to sit beside her. She had been reading—or pretending to. ‘He's splendid, isn't he?' she said. ‘I ought to tell you that Ned hates him.'

‘I'm not surprised. If he does not like you, or consider you worthy of his interest, he could be cruel.'

‘Sir Hart says that he is a splendid relic. They were all like that when he was a boy.'

They thought together of that distant, different, world, so far removed from the one which they inhabited. Eleanor was restless: she was becoming aware of the body's demands.

‘Ned says that you could have beaten Ralf. Is that true?'

‘Half true,' he said, not wishing to hurt Ralf, but not wishing to lie, either.

‘Ned is sometimes right,' she offered.

‘We are all of us sometimes right, Ned included, only the sometimes is greater for one than for another.'

Eleanor said doubtfully, ‘That does not seem fair.'

‘Life is not fair, Eleanor, or we should not be sitting here in comfort while they half starve in Brinkley.'

She shivered. ‘You live in the real world, Alan.'

‘A little—but all worlds are real to those who live in them.'

He laughed, and added wryly, ‘We are sober tonight.'

‘Yes. Stacy is sober, too. He is playing chess with Jane in the library to get her away from her mama. My mama is teasing me about making a great marriage now that Stacy and I are no longer a pair.'

‘Is that what
you
want, Eleanor?'

‘You know it is not, Alan.'

She did not add, It is you I want—for that would not be the act of a properly brought up young lady—but her face told him what she thought.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I know.'

He also knew that he could not offer yet. Knaresborough must tell Sir Hart what he had learned, and then Sir Hart would speak to him of it. He knew that as surely as he knew each new day would bring the dawn.

‘I'm afraid that we must prepare ourselves for tomor
row,' Eleanor said, trying to lighten the conversation, ‘for Sir Hart has decreed that Beverley may join us again.'

‘Poor Charles,' said Alan, and he was not speaking lightly.

‘Poor all of us,' riposted Eleanor. ‘But I think that if he misbehaves again Sir Hart will have him beaten, or sent away.'

She shivered, although the evening was warm. ‘I often wonder why Sir Hart, who is goodness itself, should be plagued by such unworthy children and grandchildren as we are. You must know that my father and uncle were such disappointments as a man could scarcely bear to have for sons.

‘I sometimes think that Mama and Ned are so flighty because that was the only way in which they could manage to live with Papa. Ned, though, is more good-hearted than Papa ever was. They say that Beverley is exactly like my father was when he was that age. I only know that I was glad when he was absent when I was a child. Such scenes there were. Such hate. Me, he particularly disliked, but then, he liked nobody but himself.'

She thought that Alan ought to know all this before he offered for her: it was only right.

‘When he died I felt unworthy because I was not sorry. He would never beat Mama nor Ned again. It was strange—he never touched me. I sometimes think that Ned is as he is because of our father's treatment of him as a boy. Sir Hart would not tell us how he died, but I fear that it was disgraceful, like Uncle John's death on the day that Beverley was born. Only Uncle John was kind, but silly, and Father was neither.'

Alan could see that telling him this pained her, but he could only admire her honesty. What was he to say to her? That we cannot choose our parents, or our children,
only accept them as they are? The father of whom she had spoken so sadly must have been well aware that Eleanor was not his child—and fearful of what Knaresborough might do to him if he mistreated her.

Thinking of Eleanor's timid and frightened mother made him wonder how exactly she had come to have an affair with Knaresborough, of all people. But that was no business of his. Only that she had, and the result was Eleanor, who had inherited the bottom of sound common sense which lay beneath Knaresborough's theatrics.

After that they spoke of lighter things. She was to attend a friend's wedding in York soon, with Ned, and they would be away for a few days. ‘I know that you must be fretting for London and occupation,' she said, ‘but I hope that you will not leave until after we have returned. Sir Hart likes you, I know, and he has little enough to comfort him.'

Alan did not think that he comforted Sir Hart, but he did not tell Eleanor so.

 

Alan sparred with Ralf again in the early morning, but it was not the same. Knaresborough, in his careless arrogance, had spoiled it for them. He would have given up this much-needed exercise, but he needed it, not only to keep himself in trim, but to provide him with something to look forward to and to do.

Eleanor was right: he was missing occupation. That is why they are so unsatisfactory, if beautiful, these great ones, he had decided, for everything is done for them and they live only to please themselves, which they cannot do, for they have no lives to live; their servants do it for them.

Well, if Eleanor married him she would find that she would have occupation, for he did not intend his wife to
be a mere decoration, a toy, but that she would take her part in his life, as his mother had done in his father's.

Sir Hart did not come down to breakfast on the morning after Alan had told Knaresborough of his grandmother's past, but Knaresborough did. A messenger from Castle Ashcourt brought him letters, and he sprawled in his chair, eating and drinking and exclaiming as he read them.

‘I have to leave sooner than I intended,' he told them. ‘Matters call me home—but my business here is ended—for the time being, at least.'

He took Alan on one side before he left that afternoon.

‘I told the old man last night of your father's mother, and he took it hard, I know. Very hard, although he said nothing. I hope that you fix yourself with Eleanor. You have my blessing, and if you marry her in London she shall be sent off from my palace there. I ought to marry myself; my life is lonely since my poor Jenny died. Why should all I own go to the little Queen when
I
die? She has enough already. Mind you visit me before you return to London, else I shall follow you there and persecute you.'

 

The House seemed empty when he had gone. I do not like him, Alan thought, but he does not want to be liked, and I shall visit him because I admire such splendid arrogance.

He had thought that Sir Hart might have sent for him straight away, but he stayed in his room that day, sending word that he had a megrim and was unfit for company.

‘Which is very unlike Sir Hart,' Eleanor told Alan.

Stacy agreed. ‘He is seldom ill.'

Stacy consequently proposed that it was such a fine day they should all ride over to his home, Culverwell
Manor, which was not far distant. They could take food with them for a picnic there, leaving the House quiet for its owner.

‘We will all win that way,' said Stacy cheerfully to Alan. ‘In the afternoon the mamas will want to sit on the lawn in the sun and we can take the girls for a walk, unchaperoned, if we promise not to roam too far away.'