A Strange Likeness. Paula MarshallЧитать онлайн книгу.
carefully. ‘A beautiful woman, your mother,’ he added, handing the locket to the lawyers for them to inspect it. ‘I was right about your resemblance to your father. Is your older brother like him, too?’
‘No. He is like my mother’s brother, who was killed in the Peninsular War before I was born. He is very like my father in character, though.’
‘Both are truly your father’s sons, then,’ said Sir Patrick. ‘When I heard George Johnstone speaking of you in admiration, although God knows why after the way in which you treated him, I was back in Sydney nearly thirty years ago. Tell me, are you as dangerous as he was?’
‘No,’ said Alan. ‘I haven’t had his provocations. My life has been easier.’
The three men were struck by him: by his maturity compared with that of most of the young men in their twenties whom they knew.
The lawyer handed the locket back. Alan passed to him the notarised copies of the documents relating to his parents’ marriage, his mother’s birth certificate, and the records of his own and his siblings’ births. He also passed to the lawyer the power of attorney signed by his mother, setting him out as her agent to act for her in any problems concerning the Waring estate, and a similar document from his father relating to his power over the Dilhorne branch in London.
All the time he felt Sir Patrick’s humorous eye on him.
‘Done, then?’ said Sir Patrick at the end, pulling out his watch. ‘Luncheon calls.’
‘Indeed,’ agreed Bunthorne. ‘A piece of advice for Mr Alan here, which it would not go amiss for you to hear, Sir Patrick. The Loring connection are resentful that the estate on which they counted passes to your mother. It would be wise to be wary, Mr Alan.’
‘So noted,’ returned Alan coolly. ‘Do I take it that you are satisfied with my credentials?’
‘After meeting your good self and hearing what Sir Patrick has had to say, and having seen these documents, there can be no doubts in the matter. There remain only the final legal moves—including the granting of probate—which will place the estate in your mother’s hands. The title, of course, died with Sir John.’
‘Of course,’ said Alan gravely, and Sir Patrick cocked a sardonic eye at him.
‘You will be staying some little time in England, Mr Dilhorne?’ pursued the lawyer.
‘Until this and other matters are settled,’ said Alan cheerfully.
‘We shall, then, remain in touch. I gather that your firm employs its own solicitors in London? Pray keep our office informed of your own address, and your movements, if you would be so good.’
Alan assented to this, and they all bowed at one another.
Sir Patrick took Alan’s arm. ‘I insist that we dine at my club, Master Alan. You can tell me the latest news from Sydney. Particularly anything about your redoubtable father and your beautiful mother.’
‘Certainly, Sir Patrick. I believe that you left Sydney shortly after my birth,’ he said, adding slyly, ‘You do not object to eating with the felon’s son, I take it?’
Sir Patrick dropped Alan’s arm and turned to face him. ‘I grew to admire your father before I left. Although I’m bound to say that he frightened me, too. In an odd way, that is.’
Alan laughed. ‘He frightens us all. But the Patriarch is a great man.’
Sir Patrick stopped short and began to laugh. ‘The Patriarch, is it?’ he choked. ‘Let me tell you later of one of my favourite memories of your father. He was pretending to be dead drunk when lying under the gaming table in Madame Phoebe’s brothel. The Patriarch! Well! Well! And do you play, Master Alan? Are you a fly-boy, too?’
‘A little,’ replied Alan modestly. ‘Only a little.’
So it came to pass that he dined with a laird of thirty thousand acres in Scotland, twenty thousand in England, who owned two castles, three country houses, four follies, who had a clever and beautiful wife, and whose happiest memories were of his days as a penniless officer in a frontier town in the Pacific when all the world seemed young and merry.
Alan liked visiting Stanton House. Its interior was beautiful after a fashion quite different from his home in Sydney, which was furnished in the Eastern style. Instead it contained all that was best in European taste, from the paintings on the walls to the objets d’art which stood everywhere, and the furniture on the elegantly carpeted parquet. Best of all he liked its owner, Almeria, and her charge, Eleanor Hatton.
Shortly after Almeria had launched him on London society she invited him to dinner to introduce him not only to Sir Richard Johnstone, but also to his Loring cousins.
‘It will be a splendid opportunity for you to make your peace with them,’ she had said.
He arrived promptly, wearing his new evening clothes. Eleanor, greeting him, thought that, while in one sense it was necessary for him to conform to the society in which he was now mixing, they diminished him in another. He looked more like the smooth young men she knew, and less like the strange, exciting man she had first met.
‘Ah, Mr Dilhorne, you are as prompt as I expected you to be,’ Almeria told him. Privately she contrasted him with careless Ned and other members of the Hatton family, who had been asked to be sure to arrive in the drawing room in time to meet Alan and her other visitors but who had not yet come down.
Alan, indeed, soon became aware that beneath her usual calm manner she was vexed about something. Finally, in a lull in the conversation, she rang the bell for Staines and asked him to enquire of Mrs Henrietta Hatton whether she had forgotten that she had promised to come down early for dinner in order to meet Mr Dilhorne before Sir Richard and the Lorings arrived.
He bowed deferentially. ‘I believe, m’lady, that they are on their way downstairs. I gather that there was a slight misunderstanding involving Master Beverley when they first set out, but that has now been overcome.’
Young Charles Stanton, who was being allowed down to dinner that evening, gave a slight guffaw. His grandmother said, ‘Thank you, Staines,’ before looking over at him and remarking glacially, ‘You wished to say something, Master Stanton?’
‘N…n…not at all, grandmother,’ he stuttered. He was so unlike his usual well-behaved and quiet self that Alan wondered what was wrong with him. Eleanor, as well as Charles and Almeria, was also on edge. Her welcome to him had seemed somewhat distracted—which was most unlike her. He was soon to find out why the atmosphere in the pretty room was so tense.
Mrs Henrietta Hatton burst into the room all aflutter, immediately behind her unruly son whom she was unsuccessfully pursuing. She was, Alan later learned, Eleanor’s aunt by marriage, having been the wife of her father’s younger brother John, who had died in a drunken prank involving a curricle, two ladies of easy virtue and half a dozen equally overset friends. As if this was not bad enough he had done so on the day his wife was giving birth to their only child, known to all and sundry as Beastly Beverley.
He had been taken up dead after trying to manoeuvre through the gateway of Hatton House, off Piccadilly, when he could barely stand, never mind drive.
Henrietta had mourned her faithless husband as though he had been the most sober and loving of men. She had transferred her unthinking love to their son, with the result that the child, naturally headstrong, was rapidly transformed into something of a monster.
Although only eleven years old, he was already obese through self-indulgence, and had been informed by Almeria Stanton that he would not be allowed to sit down to dinner as he could not be trusted to behave himself. She had given way, regretfully, to his fond mother’s insistence that he might be allowed in the drawing room before it was served, so that he could meet the guests.
Beastly Beverley, living up to his name, walked up to Alan and thrust his scarlet face at him. Before he could speak Alan forestalled him by putting out his hand, taking Beverley’s flaccid one, and saying