Belinda felt that to eat anything at all would choke her.
She was wondering all the time if she could find something anywhere in the house that her stepfather could pawn.
She knew that Bates was hoping for an opportunity to ask him for the wages he was owed.
She was aware that her stepfather was thinking, as she was, if there was anything valuable that would not be claimed by the bank.
When they left the dining room, they walked into the drawing room before D’Arcy Rowland said sharply,
“We might as well make a tour of the house. I have had a copy made of the inventory that I gave to the bank. Anything that is not on it is, of course, ours.”
Belinda knew that when her father had had the inventory made it had been a very comprehensive one.
She could not remember anything of value that she or her mother had bought since his death. What was more, as her mother had been away so much after her marriage to D’Arcy Rowland, it had never entered her mind to buy anything new.
In any case she had always thought her home was perfect and complete.
Now, helplessly, she looked at her stepfather and asked,
“Where shall we start?”
He had taken the inventory from the table where he had left it when they went into luncheon. He was turning its pages with a grim expression on his face.
It was then that Belinda asked with some trepidation,
“What did you – buy with the – money you obtained from Mama’s jewellery?”
She thought that perhaps her stepfather would be angry at the question.
Yet somehow she felt she had to know.
She could not bear to think that the jewels her mother had worn and had been so fond of had been spent on one of her stepfather’s fast friends.
“I will tell you exactly what I did with it,” her stepfather replied in a hard voice. “A man who, I know, has made a great fortune for himself, told me that he had heard of a gold mine in Arizona. It was scheduled to produce enormous quantities of gold. He told me its prospects were fantastic and, because he has been so successful in the past, I believed him.”
Belinda, listening, knew without his telling her what the outcome of this venture had been.
“I put all the money from your mother’s jewels into this gold mine,” D’Arcy Rowland said angrily. “Then three weeks ago, I was told that the mine was not producing what they expected and they intended to abandon the whole project.”
Belinda gave a little cry.
“How could – you have been so mistaken in the – first place?”
“That is exactly what I asked myself,” he replied. “I have lost every penny and there is nothing I can do about it.”
For a moment Belinda felt sorry for him.
Then she told herself it was very wrong of him to gamble everything in such a reckless manner.
D’Arcy Rowland turned over some more pages of the inventory.
Then he said,
“There is nothing left in the safe worth tuppence. I have already pawned everything that was valuable.”
Belinda did not reply.
She only felt helplessly that things were even worse than she had anticipated.
Suddenly her stepfather gave an exclamation,
“I have just remembered,” he said, “that when I took your mother’s jewellery from the safe I found nothing there belonging to your father!”
Belinda looked at him in surprise as he went on,
“He must have had a gold watch and of course some cufflinks! Where are they?”
“I-I suppose,” Belinda said slowly, “they will be upstairs in the room to which they were moved when you – married Mama.”
D’Arcy Rowland shut the inventory.
“Then we will go and have a look at them.”
Belinda wanted to protest.
She felt it was wrong to allow her stepfather to search through her father’s personal possessions for what he could sell off.
Then she told herself sensibly that nothing could be worse than what had happened already.
“I will get the key,” she volunteered.
She knew her mother had put it in a drawer of her desk that stood in the morning room.
She went there and, as she touched the desk, she thought of her mother and wondered if she was aware of the terrible predicament he was now in.
“Help us, Mama!” she prayed. “You will understand better than anyone how ghastly– everything is.”
She opened the drawer and found the key to the room to which her father’s clothes and personal possessions had been moved.
She walked back into the hall.
She found her stepfather was waiting expectantly and he started up the stairs without saying anything.
The room in question was at the end of the corridor past the main bedrooms.
It was a small single room that in the past had been slept in only when they were very overcrowded at Christmastime.
Belinda unlocked the door and went in.
She crossed to the windows, pulled back the curtains and raised the blinds.
It was a pleasant room, if small and she saw that her father’s hats were all laid out on the bed.
She knew his suits would be hanging in the wardrobe, his shirts and other garments placed in the chest of drawers.
D’Arcy Rowland walked to the dressing table. He pulled open one of the small drawers and gave an exclamation.
“Just as I thought! Your father’s gold watch! This should be worth a fair amount!”
As he spoke, he drew from the drawer the gold watch and chain that Sir Richard had always worn.
It gave Belinda a sharp pain to see it grasped in her stepfather’s hands.
But she knew there was no use in protesting and saying it was something she would like to keep.
D’Arcy Rowland put the watch down on the dressing table.
He started to open the other boxes the drawer contained.
There were several pairs of gold cufflinks and a set of elaborate and obviously expensive waistcoat buttons.
He regarded the two pearl studs with satisfaction.
“Well, it is better than nothing!” he remarked.
“At least it will give us the money to pay the servants,” Belinda said quickly.
Her stepfather hesitated.
She knew that he was thinking that his need was greater than theirs.
Then, almost as if her father told her what to do, she opened another small drawer on the other side of the dressing table.
In it was her father’s notecase. He had always carried it in the inside pocket of his coat.
She opened it and gave an exclamation.
There were three notes in it, two of ten pounds and one of five.
Without speaking she showed her stepfather what she had found.
“Twenty-five quid!” he exclaimed. “Well, thank God, at least we will not starve!”
Belinda put the notes down on the table and looked further into the drawer.
She remembered that her father before he undressed always took the loose change out of his pockets and put it into one of the drawers.
She looked and, as she expected, there were three sovereigns and several florins behind the notecase.
These too she placed on the dressing table, saying,
“I insist, before we do anything else, that we pay the shopkeepers in the village what we owe, and give Bates and Mrs. Bates their wages.”
She thought her stepfather was going to refuse and continued,
“I know that is what Mama would want us to do. What happens in London is your business, but the local shopkeepers cannot afford to give credit and we cannot deprive the Bateses when they have been with us for so many years.”
Expecting an argument, she was surprised when her stepfather replied,
“You are quite right, Belinda. After all, it is your father’s money and you must do with it as you think best. But if I could have the watch
and the cufflinks, I can ‘keep the wolves at bay’ until you find out what I want to know about Logan.”
Belinda could not help thinking that it was a rather forlorn hope.
However, she was relieved that she had not to fight him over the money for the village shops and the servants.
She picked up the notecase and the loose change from in the drawer.
He was looking avidly round the room.
It was then he noticed that in one corner was a stand with a collection of walking canes in it. Belinda’s father had bought them in various parts of the world when he had travelled before he had married.
There was only one amongst them that he used ordinarily.
D’Arcy Rowland walked across the room to examine them.
“These are interesting,” he remarked, “and should certainly fetch a tidy sum from a collector.”
“Then take them with you to London,” Belinda suggested.
Even as she spoke, she knew that she could not bear to discuss her father’s belongings with him any further.
Carrying the money in her hand, she went from the room, down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Mrs. Bates was washing up and Bates, in his shirtsleeves, was drying the dishes as she handed them to him.
They looked up in surprise as Belinda entered.
“I have brought you your wages,” she said, “and my stepfather apologises for having kept you waiting for so long and I think there is enough here to pay what we owe Mr. Knight and Mr. Geary.”
As she spoke, she put the money she was carrying down on the kitchen table.
She was aware as she did so that the Bateses were looking at it with delight.
“I’m sure that’ll be enough, Miss Belinda,” Bates said. “The shops in the village’ll be pleased to have their bills paid.”
“Perhaps you would be kind enough,” Belinda said, “when you have finished helping Mrs. Bates, to pop down to the village and settle our accounts right away.”
Belinda was thinking that the sooner the money was out of the house the better.
“And glad they’ll be to have it, Miss Belinda,” Mrs. Bates said. “Things be bad enough these days without having bad debts!”
Belinda did not answer.
She merely returned to the hall to find her stepfather was coming down the stairs, carrying her father’s canes.
He put them down on a chair so that it would be easy to transfer them to the chaise in which he had arrived.
Belinda wondered if he had any money to pay the groom who had accompanied him. He was a lad from the village and had gone home after he had stabled the horses.
She hoped the boy did not know anything about her stepfather’s financial troubles and it would be a mistake, she knew, for their situation to be gossiped about in the village.
Her stepfather walked into the drawing room and Belinda followed him.
“What we must do,” he said, “is to leave early tomorrow morning so that you can call on Lady Logan either just before luncheon or immediately afterwards.”
He gave a somewhat twisted smile before he added,
“Perhaps before would be better. She might invite you to a meal which at least would not cost you anything!”
“Do you – think,” Belinda asked in a small voice, “that if she accepts me as her reader I will be able to start with her – straight away? Or will I be coming back – here?”
“I said in my letter that you were available immediately,” D’Arcy Rowland replied. “Therefore it is up to you to make it clear that when you came to London you brought all your luggage with you and left it with a friend.”
“At what time are we leaving?” Belinda asked.
Her stepfather calculated for a moment.
Then he said,
“If we start off soon after eight o’clock, I can get you to Regent’s Park at noon.”
“Regent’s Park?” Belinda repeated. “Is that where Lady Logan lives?”
“Her son has bought her one of the most attractive houses in London,” her stepfather replied. “There are only six houses built in the centre of the Park and Lady Logan lives in one of them.”
Belinda was not particularly interested.
All she was thinking of was that if she had to leave for London so early, she must go upstairs now and pack, besides which, she also wanted to be alone.
There was not only the shock of learning about her stepfather’s terrible predicament, but also the distress it had caused her to see her father’s personal items interfered with.
Just as she had never gone back into her mother’s room because she knew it would upset her, so she had avoided the place where her father’s belongings had been kept.
She knew if she saw them she would only cry and her father would tell her she was making herself unnecessarily miserable.
Now the whole horror of all that her stepfather had done swept over her.
She felt she could no longer go on talking to him.
“I-I must go and – p-pack,” she said in a strangled voice and ran from the room.
Upstairs in her bedroom she locked the door, threw herself down on her bed and wept bitterly.
She had not cried since her mother’s death. Instead, she had summoned up a self-control of which she was sure her father would have been proud.
She had tried to believe that her mother was not dead, but near her.
Now she felt as if she had been abandoned by both her mother and her father.
However hard she tried, she would lose her home and her stepfather would go to prison.
‘How can – this have – happened? How – can it?’ she asked herself despairingly.
It was then her whole body shook with a terror that made it impossible to think and she could only feel as if she had reached the end of the world.
Finally, when she could cry no more, her brain began to think more clearly.
She thought that her stepfather’s plan was such a wild one that it was unlikely to come off and she told herself that she would have to find some other way of saving both her home and herself.
What it would be she had no idea.
Yet she knew her father would expect her to explore all likely possibilities before giving up and accepting the inevitable.
She remembered how he had told her once that he had lost his way.
It was in a remote part of a country where the natives were hostile. He had three bearers with him, carrying his luggage, who were so terrified that they wanted to run away.
“It must have been very frightening, Papa,” Belinda had said.
“I admit it was a very uncomfortable situation to be in,” her father had replied, “but I knew I had to keep my head and not let the men with me be aware that I was worried. It was, I am sure, the prayers I sent up to the Power that is always there, if we seek it, that saved me.”
“Do you mean, Papa,” Belinda asked, who was quite young at the time, “that you think God, when you prayed to Him, told you what to do?”
“I am sure of it!” her father answered. “It was a question of which way to go, right or left. I learnt later that had I taken the wrong path, we would not only have lost our lives, but also our heads, for the natives there were head-hunters!”
“Oh, Papa – how frightening!” Belinda had exclaimed.
“I lived to tell the tale,” her father said, “and I am telling you the story, my dearest, so that you will remember that however difficult things may seem, you must never give up.”
Belinda remembered his words so clearly.
She felt now as if he was telling her again so that she would know she was not alone and the Power above that he believed in was there to help her.
She lay back against the pillows.
She felt as if her tears and what her father had said had swept away her terror of the future.
‘Perhaps something will turn up,’ she told herself, ‘and if ‘Lucky Logan’ can use his intuition, so can I!’
&n
bsp; She climbed out of bed, washed her face and started to pack.
Because she was afraid she might never be able to come back to the house, she packed nearly everything she possessed.
Then she looked at her books. They were on shelves which had all been specially made for them in a corner of the room.
They were mostly books and manuscripts her father had written himself. Some had been published, some he had intended to polish up for publication, but had never got round to it.
It was impossible for Belinda to take them all with her.
‘I am sure I can claim them as personal presents,’ she thought.
But she was not certain if that would be legal. Finally she packed three of the ones she loved best.
Then, for the first time since her mother had died, she went to her bedroom.
Lady Wyncombe’s gowns were still hanging up in the wardrobe room that opened out of the bedroom.
They were as she had left them.
Just as Belinda would not go back into her mother’s room after her death, so she knew that her stepfather had never opened the door.
He slept in what had been the best spare room and it was at the opposite end of the corridor from the room he had shared with his wife.
Without waiting for orders, Bates had moved his clothes into the dressing room attached to that bedroom.
Now Belinda could smell the fragrance of her mother’s favourite perfume, which was lilies of the valley.
It brought her back so vividly that Belinda wanted to cry again.
She could not bear to think of her mother’s gowns being handled by strangers or perhaps sold by the bank to the villagers or whoever cared to bid for them.
There were the trunks in the wardrobe room that her mother had brought back from Paris after her honeymoon.
Belinda packed everything into them and there were not only her mother’s clothes.
There were her brushes, combs, bottles half-filled with perfume and a great number of trinkets. There were small presents that Belinda and her father had given to her at Christmas and on her birthdays.
She had treasured everything she had received from them ever since her marriage.
There was so much to pack that, when Belinda had finished, she felt exhausted.
She told herself that they at any rate had not been in the inventory.
Lucky Logan Finds Love Page 4
