A Strange Likeness

by Paula Marshall

  ‘What you do, Brough. The Queen’s cousin used your exact words.’

  ‘Knaresborough, eh? You could have stayed and peached on us to the Peelers. You could still do so.’

  ‘What—and spoil the fun?’

  His laugh was painful, and the shivering grew worse. The day had been long and hard before the fight, and he could not remember when he had last eaten. The drink suddenly hit him, and, since pride did not matter any more, he laid his head on the table and fell asleep, exhausted.

  Jem looked at him. ‘Ralf could never have beaten him were he ready and fit,’ he proclaimed drunkenly.

  The rest of them stared at him in silence. Brough said, ‘Do any know where he lodges?’

  ‘Aye, at The Nag’s Head,’ said one.

  ‘Then we’ll get him there,’ Brough said. ‘You’d best help us, Jem.’

  They hauled him to his feet and walked him down the ill-paved road, past the place where they had kidnapped him and upstairs to his room, where Gurney undressed him before he lay upon his bed, lost to everything, dreaming that he was back home in his room, a boy again and his mother calling.

  Alan was waiting for Brough and his friends at noon the next day. He was carefully dressed. His body was still one vast ache. He had been unable to eat properly, and had drunk spirits to ease the pain. He had a dreadful desire to vomit and only pride kept him on his feet.

  Gurney had shouted at him, been insubordinate, and had told him that he ought to rest.

  ‘I won’t answer for the consequences if you don’t,’ he had roared.

  In short he had gone on, as Alan had finally complained, holding his head, ‘as though you were my dam’d nanny’.

  ‘God, are we?’ Gurney had howled rudely, forgetting all differences between master and man while he eased Alan into his clothes. ‘Life’s your bloody chessboard, is it, sir?’ And the ‘sir’ had come out as an insult. ‘First you let Ralf knock you about instead of doing for him, and now this!’

  He had refused to be silent and insisted on accompanying Alan into Wilkinson’s office—‘Because, sir, damn your eyes, sir, you need someone there to look after you, if you won’t do it for yourself. Left to myself I’d see those bastards who kidnapped you last night hanged, and their heads where they belong—on Tower Hill.’

  ‘Just get my clothes on, and spare me the sermon,’ Alan had said wearily. ‘My head hurts me enough as it is without you making it worse.’

  Swearing and muttering, Gurney had pushed his way into the office, and now sat there glowering at Brough and his men when they arrived.

  If they were surprised to see Alan at work, spruce and beautifully turned out, and apart from his bruised hands and face apparently normal, they were not to know that only his resolute will kept him upright at all. They, too, were respectable again. Brough particularly so. He was dressed like the superior clerk he was.

  Alan began without preamble. ‘I want this strike no more than you do, and we all know it. I see no point in pretence. Mind me. If you push me too far I shall close the works and sell up. By now you should know that I always keep my word. I spent yesterday going over the books and I saw the shop at work. If you change your practices a little on the floor, and work with Wilkinson—instead of against him—with what we save on that the books show that I can offer you something midway between what I wanted to give and you wanted to take. That is my last word. Wilkinson will keep me informed of your progress when I return to London.’

  Brough stared at him and knew that he meant what he said. ‘So, that is why you were late leaving last night. Well, something is better than nothing.’

  He knew that if he refused the offer Alan would carry out his threat and close down. After last night Brough knew that this man was no puling gentleman.

  ‘I think that the men will agree,’ he replied cautiously.

  Alan laughed, a dreadful mistake. The room half-disappeared before him. ‘Don’t cozen me, Brough. The men will agree to whatever you tell them. But have it your way. Count heads, if you must. I want an answer by six o’clock tonight, and all the men back at work first thing tomorrow. Pay starts from then.’

  He rose. He knew that if he stayed any longer his tight control would fail. ‘Wilkinson here will show you the terms; I assure you that they are fair.’

  Somehow he reached the door and, straight-backed, walked out. Gurney, following, took him by the arm and steered him down the stairs to the courtyard at the back.

  Speculation in his eyes, Brough watched him go. He turned to his second-in-command and whispered to him to take over. He ran lightly down the stairs and into the courtyard where Alan lay prone—Gurney holding his head—vomiting into a drain in the corner. Gurney glared malignantly at Brough.

  Alan croaked between spasms, ‘Come to gloat?’

  ‘If he has, I’ll kill him for you,’ Gurney snarled.

  ‘No,’ said Brough slowly. ‘No, I saw that you were out on your feet in the office.’

  ‘And no wonder,’ snorted Gurney. ‘It’s more’n twenty-four hours since he’s eaten. He came straight over t’other morning to save your dam’d mill for you, and then, after you’d made sure that he was knocked nearly senseless last night, he got up early to finish his sums so that you bastards needn’t starve.’

  ‘Give over, Gurney, do,’ said Alan, who was feeling a little better after heaving up his heart. ‘I’ve told you once already today, you’re not my nanny.’

  Brough walked over and looked down at him where he lay against the wall, ‘Is that true?’

  ‘What? Be plain. I’m in no condition to solve riddles.’

  ‘That you came to save the mill?’

  ‘I’m no dam’d philanthropist, Brough. Save it or sell it, whichever was best for business.’

  Brough knew that he’d get nothing from him. He hesitated. Gurney suddenly roared at him, ‘Help me to get him to his feet, man. He’s too big for me to do it on my own.’

  ‘Two dam’d nannies, then,’ said Alan pleasantly when he hung between them. ‘Get me to the inn, Gurney, and you can satisfy your passion to be my nursemaid. I don’t think that my legs will carry me any further.’

  Without warning he gave way at last, and fell against them, unconscious, Gurney cursing until they got him to the inn and finally to bed.

  Eleanor was lonely and bored when Alan had gone. Stacy and Jane had each other—she was an extra wheel on their coach. The chatter of her mother, her aunt Hetta and Mrs Chalmers was scarcely bearable. The only amusing episode had been the quarrel between her mother and Mrs Chalmers. Her mother had expressed her disapproval of Alan, and Mrs Chalmers had immediately gushed back at her, ‘But he’s so handsome, and possesses such charm—one wonders if all young men from New South Wales are the same!’

  Beastly Beverley had to be evaded, too, although Charles’s tutor helped his charge to escape the worst of him by increasing his hours of tuition. This was no hardship for Charles, who was eager to learn and, insofar as such a good-natured child was capable of it, hated Beverley. His grandmother had left for a visit to friends in Northumbria.

  Eleanor joined Charles when she could, although the Triumvirate, as she nicknamed them to herself, disapproved acutely.

  ‘How can you wish to be shut away there?’ wailed her mother sorrowfully. ‘What use is it? We could be visiting the Lorimers. Polly Lorimer was saying only last week that she has not seen you since the Flood.’

  Eleanor restrained herself from saying acidly that Polly Lorimer, her mother and brother Fred were all hearty boors, if not to say bores, whose brains were in their seats on their horses, and that she and they had little in common.

  ‘I like helping Charles,’ she said, ‘he’s lonely.’

  ‘He needn’t be, said her aunt Hetta indignantly. ‘He has Beverley to play with.’

  As well play with a scorpion, thought Eleanor, whose private thoughts grew nastier the longer Alan was away. She had seen the satiric twist to his lips whenever Beverley rampaged through t
he House—Beverley was rapidly recovering from the effect of his enforced exile to the nursery by Sir Hart, and was now nearly as rudely headstrong as he had been when he had arrived.

  Sir Hart was absent, too. He had rarely left his room while Alan was visiting Bradford and only came down for dinner, leaving as soon as it was over. Ned was often away as well. He had made a good friend of Robert Harshaw and they roistered around the Riding, drinking together.

  Eleanor had been in the library one afternoon after Charles and Mr Dudley had gone fishing—a new amusement for Charles. She’d had no mind to go with them. She had pulled out one of the great folios of Sir Joseph Banks’s original journey to the South Seas in order to look at the plants and animals he had seen in Alan’s homeland.

  Mr Rivers, the librarian was having a protracted tea in the housekeeper’s room, when Sir Hart arrived, to find her studying the folio which was propped on huge oak lecterns.

  ‘I thought that I heard you, Granddaughter.’ He came over to see what she was studying.

  ‘Oh, Grandfather,’ she exclaimed. ‘It is very wrong of me to be so bored and so lonely when, as Alan says, I have everything. But there is nothing for me to do, nothing. I don’t know how Mother and the others bear it. When I try to find occupation they look at me as though I have run mad. I cannot chatter, and embroider and unpick it and do it again, and listen to Aunt Hetta reading Mrs Gore’s latest novel—or something even sillier—every day.

  ‘Mother can at least pretend to instruct the housekeeper—who doesn’t really need instructing. I thought that I might like to go into the garden and help with the plants, but Mother wailed at me that I should ruin my hands. When I try to study with Charles she comes in and chatters at us in order to pry me away. Then she takes me out to visit Polly Lorimer, who only cares about dogs and horses, which I suppose is something—but it is not enough.’

  Her voice rose at the end and she thought that she might cry or throw herself about if she were not careful.

  ‘You are missing him,’ said Sir Hart gently. ‘But, Granddaughter, even so, were you never to have met him, you would still feel as you do.’

  She began to cry at that. ‘Oh, you do understand me. What am I to do? Why could not Ned have been like me and I like Ned? Then I could have chattered away to Mother and the rest and you would not have been disappointed in him. I should not be saying this, it is so wicked and disloyal, but it is true, and I cannot help my thoughts. Sometimes I feel like a changeling.’

  Sir Hart gazed helplessly at her. He could not tell her that, in effect, she was a changeling. A changeling to whom her father, Knaresborough, had bequeathed his rare and challenging intelligence which sat so ill with what society thought a young woman of gentle birth ought to be. He tried to comfort her, but he had long ago decided that she should never know the truth—it would simply be one more burden for her to carry.

  ‘It is painful for you, I know, and there is little I can do. If you marry, and your husband is kind, you may make your own life, and fix yourself on something which interests you.’

  ‘And that is all,’ she said sadly. ‘To wait to be asked and then hope.’

  If Alan asked her to marry him she knew that she would be able to share his life in a way that few women did. But suppose he were not to ask her. What then?

  She did not speak to Sir Hart of that. Sir Hart must know how she felt about Alan, she had made no secret of it.

  ‘I will not marry an old man or a man for whom I do not care in order to gain a position and a title,’ she said. ‘I had rather remain single—and be an aunt to Ned’s children, if he has any.’

  Sir Hart put an arm around her, he had never done so before. ‘It is the lot of women at which you rail, Eleanor. Yet men’s lives are bound by duty, too.’

  ‘Oh, but they may choose their duty, and there is so much that men may do and so little for me. I am trained to nothing, yet my mind is as good as Charles’s and a great deal better than Ned and Robert’s. I would run Temple Hatton more carefully than either Ned or Beverley. It’s such a waste. It’s a pity that I am not more like Mother.’

  ‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Do not say that. Should you wish it I will ask Rivers to allow you to help him. He is cataloguing the books here and in London and needs an assistant. You could help him in the mornings. I will silence the complaints which your mother is sure to make. You must understand that once you have begun this work you will need to do it properly and continue it—even if you find it hard. I will not have Rivers played with.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I understand that,’ she cried passionately. ‘But Mother will be sure to complain.’

  ‘For once, your mother will do as I say.’

  Eleanor had thought that there was a touch of Sir Beauchamp in his manner then, and, like Sir Beauchamp, he kept his word. He had been right to warn her that it might be difficult, for Mr Rivers was a hard, if just, taskmaster. She soon began to understand why Alan was so secretly contemptuous of them all, however much he tried to disguise it. For actually working and doing things correctly, as Sir Hart had warned, was quite different from playing.

  Her mother was particularly annoyed by the brown Holland overall she wore when at her work, but that counted for nothing against the approval of both Mr Rivers and Sir Hart.

  ‘She learns quickly, and retains what she learns,’ Mr Rivers told Sir Hart. ‘She is better than anyone we could hire, for she is learning to love the books and her interest is true and genuine.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Sir Hart, delighted to learn that he had made his granddaughter a gift which would last her all her life. She knocked at his door to tell him so that evening.

  Her equals, though, apart from Jane and Stacy, who occasionally joined her, were not impressed at all, and her mother made her promise that she would not tell their friends.

  ‘Such a strange thing for a young lady to wish to do with her time. I am surprised at Sir Hart for encouraging you.’

  Secretly she thought that Eleanor was more like her true father than was comfortable. It would not do if her resemblance to him, already strong, were detected through this latest freak of conduct. Knaresborough was the subject of gossip for being a bibliophile as well as a sportsman, and spent a great deal of time in his library at Castle Ashcourt.

  Eleanor longed to tell Alan of her new life, for he was one of the few in the House, beside Jane and Stacy, who enjoyed the library. She wondered what was happening in Bradford which was keeping him so long.

  Alan was staying away longer than he intended in order to allow his face to heal before he returned to Temple Hatton. He saw the deal through with Brough and his men, and spent part of his time mixing with the other mill-owners. They invited him to dine in their brash new houses, full of shining new furniture and dark brown paintings which looked as though the gravy which they served in such quantities had seeped on to the canvases.

  The story of the fight on the moor had spread round the district, but no one spoke of it to him, although the knowledge was canny in their hard faces. Some reproached him for raising his hands’ wages. He met that with, ‘It’s so ordered that it doesn’t touch our profits. Outhwaite’s was badly run, as you all know. I would have closed the mill rather than give way to their original demand—I could not carry a strike. A little rearrangement served to save all.’

  They grunted dissent at him. Surrounded by new-won wealth, they were aping the manners of the gentry in more ways than one. For their sons—like Ned—were soft, and were forgetting the hard work and industry which had created their fathers’ fortunes. Life’s patterns and cycles recreated themselves, just as the old Greeks had said.

  Eleanor was on her way to the library to do a voluntary afternoon stint when she heard the noise of Alan’s return. She ran down the great staircase, wearing her Holland apron, in order to be the first to greet him.

  ‘Oh, I am so glad that you are back, Alan. Did all go well with you?’

  She saw the fading bruises on his face, and later she
would see the remnants of the fight written on his knuckles, but, smiling joyfully, she said nothing to him, other than ‘Oh, I have such things to tell you—later, that is. Doubtless you have things to tell me. We can talk at tea.’

  Her welcome of him was so frank and free that Alan was lifted by it, even when her mother said crossly, ‘Miss Hatton, you forget yourself. And I wish that you would stay downstairs with us. Rivers must learn to do without you this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eleanor gaily, much to Alan’s amusement, although he did not quite understand what they were talking about, ‘it is not Mr Rivers who forces me to labour in the library, it is I who go there willingly, as I shall explain to you later, Alan.’

  She ran lightly up the stairs, leaving him wondering at the apron, the reference to forced labour, and the Triumvirate’s openly expressed annoyance at her behaviour when she had gone.

  All three women felt that Eleanor’s occupation and her interest in it was a vague threat to their pleasant, easy lives. ‘For if,’ as Aunt Hetta said, ‘Sir Hart can compel Eleanor to do such strange things, what might he not ask of us?’

  Alan gathered that Eleanor had found something to fill her idle days, and with Sir Hart’s help, no doubt. He looked forward to seeing him again, although he half feared the revelations which might flow from him when he did.

  Sir Hart did not come down to dinner that night, but sent word to Mr Dilhorne to be so good as to visit him in his study at ten-thirty the next morning.

  ‘And that’s a relief,’ said Ned frankly to Alan. ‘That he’s not coming down. For much though I like the old man he’s a bit of a death’s head at the feast, you know. You see, I did learn something from those intolerably boring old men at Oxford, even if I’ve forgotten most of it. Now you may tell me of your adventures in Bradford, for I see by your face and hands that you have been fighting again.’

  Eleanor raised internal eyebrows while Ned was speaking, and silently enjoyed watching Alan dodge Ned’s questions. He was helped in this by the presence of Knaresborough, who was an unexpected visitor that night. He was on his way to London.