A Strange Likeness

by Paula Marshall

  ‘My father?’ asked Alan. ‘Why should you wish to know of him? You let him go lightly enough in the end.’

  ‘You have the right to say that, sir, and I deserve to hear it for the two great wrongs I did. One not to tell my father what I had done straight away, and the other that I took his word over your grandmother’s death and married again without looking for her until it was too late. Yet perhaps, before you go, you might tell me a little of him.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Alan, still cold, still Sir Beauchamp. ‘First I must think about what you have told me—for there are many lives whose future is at stake here.’

  Sir Hart bowed his head. ‘Indeed, and I must not seek to influence you.’

  ‘As you say. And the wrongs which you have done to me and mine cannot be righted. You could not know, nor guess that my father would become rich and powerful, and that he is happy with his life with my mother and his family. You say that there is no legal proof as to our rights. The Parish Registers have gone, and the marriage licence, too, I suppose. Whether my father, or my elder brother, Thomas, would wish to make a just claim to what is rightly theirs, I cannot say.

  ‘Only you can testify that the claim is just, and by saying so you would destroy many lives, including that of the woman I love—for, Hatton or not, she is supposed to be one. I had intended to leave for London soon, but I may not do that now. You must give me leave and time to think the matter over.’

  Sir Hart said painfully, ‘You behave as well as I might have expected—and not like he would have done, I am sure.’

  By ‘he’, he meant Sir Beauchamp. ‘Should you wish to claim what is your father’s, I could not lie again and deny you. When I contrast you with Ned and Beverley…my pain is worse…’

  Alan said only, ‘You will forgive me if I leave you, but I need to think of all this—coldly and carefully.’

  Sir Hartley Hatton lowered his head.

  The hard face before him neither judged him nor, indeed, showed any sign of what its owner thought. To be so young, and so formidable already! Alas, he knew that Alan would never be his willing grandson, whatever decision he came to. He and his father and his family were lost to him in affection. He had forfeited that right—and his pain was the greater.

  ‘I cannot ask you to stay or to speak further. You have my leave to go.’

  Alan left by the door to the Picture Gallery. He neither wished to see nor to speak to others, not even Eleanor. On the way through it he stopped to look at Sir Beauchamp. His great-grandfather, so hard, so severe, so clever, so cruel—and he so like him in looks and manner.

  He shivered. For the wrong was Sir Beauchamp’s in his treatment of his son. The thought of being like him was abhorrent—and all who had seen him, and had known Sir Beauchamp in life, had said he was. Knaresborough had immediately commented on it.

  Alan shivered again. Every tale he had heard of him testified to his cold severity. He knew that, in part, this was true of himself. Both his father and his mother had occasionally reproached him for being hard and inconsiderate—particularly when the rage took him. The rage he had inherited from Sir Beauchamp.

  He had learned to control it because the better part of him hated and feared it. Left to itself, the rage would have closed the mill at Bradford, but he had ignored it. On the other hand, he also knew that, properly controlled, it could make him transcend himself, as it had done on the moor outside Bradford, when it had enabled him to hold Jem off for so long, despite all.

  He must use it, not let it use him, lest, like Sir Beauchamp, he allowed it to destroy him, and those around him.

  The old man he had left behind him gazed unseeingly at the water-drenched landscape. He was on the moors again, in the brilliant sun of a long-gone summer’s day, with a pretty girl in his arms. She was saying, ‘It is right, now, Hart, for we are married, and God has said that we can love one another.’

  But both the boy and the girl had been lost in the mists of time, and although the past had returned it had brought him pain, not redemption.

  Alan met Stacy on the stairs, and in his concentration, which was almost distress, would have passed him blindly, except that Stacy put out his hand to touch him on the arm and ask anxiously, ‘Alan, is anything wrong?’

  Alan shook his head, as much to clear it as to answer Stacy’s question. ‘Forgive me, my mail today was troublesome: I was thinking of Bradford, and then of London.’

  This was not a lie, but it was not the truth either. He thought again of how often he did that, and wondered whether it came from Sir Beauchamp. It certainly came from his father, and Thomas possessed the same habit.

  Stacy shrugged his shoulders and walked on: that something was wrong was plain, but it was not his business, and in his way Alan had told him so.

  Eleanor was alone in the drawing room when Alan walked in. Her face lit up at the sight of him, but, sensitive to him now, she saw that he was troubled. She was still in the dark dress that she wore to work with Mr Rivers, and its severity enhanced rather than diminished her beauty, which lay in force of character, not only in pretty colouring and youthful vivacity. Almeria had made her laugh once by telling her that one day she would be a beautiful old woman because of this.

  Alan, admiring her beauty while she talked of the book she had been examining—Captain Cook’s Voyages—unknowingly made the same judgement. The promise under her youthful high spirits, which Sir Hart had always seen, was coming to maturity. Alan suddenly wanted her most desperately for his wife and companion, his better half, who would help him to tame the rage and keep down Sir Beauchamp. To know that he also loved her equally desperately for herself and nothing else, simply because she was Eleanor, was a bonus.

  While no one was looking, she patted him on the hand. The look of gratitude which he gave her was more exciting than a kiss would have been. What troubled him troubled her, and if she could not by convention tell him so, then she could give him silent support.

  Ned was there, too, dressed for riding. He was due to meet Robert for a final fling with him before going off to the wedding in York with Eleanor.

  After he had left, Eleanor turned to Alan and said, ‘I have been indoors all day, and I would love to have a last ride with you before I go to York. The weather has cleared and the sun is shining. Besides—’ and she gave him a comic conspiratorial look ‘—we shall be on our own. Stacy, Jane and Mrs Chalmers are returning to Culverwell Manor in the morning, and are preparing to leave. Aunt Hetta, Beverley and my mother are visiting the Lorimers, so we shall have the moors to ourselves.’

  ‘Minx!’ said Alan, smiling fondly at her and thinking, not for the first time, that to be with her renewed him. Like her unacknowledged father, she was both straightforward and frank. ‘Of course I will come with you—particularly if we are to be alone.’

  ‘We can go to the Cradle Rocks,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘They’re called that because of their shape. We have never been so far before.’

  They dismounted at them after a hard ride, and Alan wondered briefly if the long-gone lovers had been here, too. It made him gentle—and careful—with Eleanor. Eleanor had thought, nay hoped, that he might offer for her here, surrounded by the wild beauty of the savage landscape, but she saw that his morning visit to Sir Hart had left him distrait.

  They kissed and embraced, but the controlled passion he had sometimes shown was missing. He was loving, indeed he could not have been more so, but there was something bittersweet in his manner quite unlike his usual forthright habit, so that Eleanor could not help wondering what was troubling him.

  Alan was recalling, a little sadly, what careless love had done to Sir Hart and his grandmother. The memory of what he had learned that morning was strong in him, and made him particularly considerate of his dear girl, for he had no wish to say or do anything which might end in sorrow for them both.

  ‘Ned and I used to ride out here when we were children,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes we would bring a picnic with us, but Sir Hart nev
er liked to visit Cradle Rocks, which I found strange, for it has by far the best views.’

  If his guess was correct, that Sir Hart and his grandmother had met here as young lovers, his reluctance was understandable, Alan thought.

  ‘I love it here in Yorkshire,’ she told him, ‘but I would like to see the rest of the world, too.’ This was as near encouragement as she dared offer him. ‘I know that comparisons are odious, but how does this scenery strike you after that of New South Wales?’

  ‘It is so different that comparisons are difficult. Each has its own beauty, and people are different here as well. Our society is very limited, compared with yours, both in London and in Yorkshire. But there is a vigour with us which is lacking here.’

  Looking at him, Eleanor thought that vigour was what marked him off from other men. For all his deviousness, which she had long since recognised by picking up the half-truths and indirections which he employed—unlike Ned—there was still a directness about him missing from the men she knew. If Alan did not offer for her everyone else who might seemed second-best. But something was troubling him, and had obviously been troubling him all day.

  Almost as if he had read her thoughts, he turned and took her small hand in his large one. He gave her a smile and said, ‘Remember, Eleanor, whatever happens in the future, I love you, and all this, too.’

  He swept his hand around the horizon. ‘It is almost like coming home. I thought so the first time that I saw it, and think so still. London is quite another thing. If I settle in England I shall be compelled to work in the City, but I should want a refuge outside of it. Essendene, for all its beauty, is too mild for my taste.’

  It was almost the long-awaited declaration, but not quite. She must be patient.

  After dinner they sat and talked together of her work with Mr Rivers, of his need to return to London soon, of her visit to York and of their mutual regret that they must part for a few days.

  ‘I shall certainly not leave before you return,’ he told her—and Eleanor’s hopes rose again.

  Alan was restless, and after he had seen Ned and Eleanor off the next morning he knocked on Sir Hart’s study door. When the old man asked him what he wanted of him, he said simply, ‘The loan of a horse and a pack. I’ve a mind to visit the Dales on my own. Without Gurney.’

  The old man immediately understood him. In some ways it was like talking to his father.

  ‘Is it wise? And how will you know where to go?’

  Alan gave him what his sister Mary called his knowing grin. ‘You will tell me where I may find the Dilhorne farmhouse, to the second question, and to the first, I don’t know. I don’t even know what I shall do when I get there. I take it that there are inns?’

  ‘It will be a pleasant ride in this weather. Yes, there are inns, rough ones. I cannot see any harm coming of it. You have a cool head.’

  So Alan rode into the Dales in the halcyon weather of early September and found the village near to the farmhouse with the aid of the rough map which Sir Hart had given him before he left. He never looked back when he left the House, so he did not see that the old man watched him until he was lost to sight.

  The inn in the village was small, pleasant and simple. The landlord was friendly when he questioned him. ‘I understand that a family called Dilhorne farms in these parts.’

  ‘Right enough, Maister, over to Leethwaite. There’s a track leaves the byway nigh two miles on from here.’

  He bespoke a room and food. Like the accommodation and the ale, the food was simple, but good.

  The landlord and his wife were curious as to what such a fine young gentleman should be doing in these parts, looking for Dilhornes’ farm. They asked him his name, and where he came from.

  ‘London,’ he answered them, with the smile which always won people over. ‘And my name is Smith, Alan Smith.’

  He had no wish to start hares. The resemblance to Ned which had occasioned such excitement in London society and around Temple Hatton and Brinkley fortunately meant nothing here. His clothes and his horse excited more comment than his face.

  He spent the morning after his arrival walking around, admiring the scenery and drinking in the flavour of the village, so far from civilisation. There was a great grey church, and he wondered if it were like the one the boy Hart had taken his grandmother to, sixty years and more ago.

  It was pleasant without Gurney nursemaiding him. Lunch was bread, cheese and ale. He ate it outdoors in his shirtsleeves, surrounded by geese, an old goat, and a number of village children to whom any stranger was a curiosity. After that he resumed his fine London coat and boots and mounted his horse, and under the curious stares of the villagers he rode off towards Leethwaite, up the rough road, and then along the even rougher track, towards the farmhouse. It was a low grey building, set on a slight rise, with a cottage garden at the front and the back.

  More curious stares from a burly man with dark hair and a brown face greeted him. The farmer—for his clothes were superior to those of the labourers he had seen—was tending to a shaggy pony. There were stables at some distance from the house. An idle boy was filling a bucket from a well. A woman in a sunbonnet and a print dress was carrying dried washing in a wicker basket.

  Alan tied his horse to a stump which had obviously done similar duty before and walked towards the farmer and the woman, who, despite their curiosity, greeted him with a gaze so blank that it was almost hostile.

  He pulled off his tall hat, another fashionable result of his friendship with Ned, and said as pleasantly as he could, ‘Am I correct in supposing this to be the farm where the Dilhorne family live?’

  ‘Aye,’ said the farmer, in true Yorkshire style determined to give nothing away. In any case gentry—and this young sprig was such obvious gentry—were always folk to be wary of.

  Since nothing further was offered, Alan spoke again. ‘I wonder if you would be good enough to answer a few questions for me.’

  ‘Happen. Depends what they are.’

  ‘I understand that a Mary Dilhorne lived here nearly sixty years ago. I know that the chances are small, but is there anyone alive who might remember her?’

  ‘Mary Dilhorne? Can’t say that I remember a Mary,’ said the farmer.

  He looked at his wife, who said hesitantly, ‘Ezra might know. He’d be the right age.’

  ‘Aye, Ezra’s my great-uncle,’ he explained. ‘Take the young gentleman round the back, Lottie.’

  He turned to Alan. ‘The old man likes to lie outside in fine weather.’

  Lottie Dilhorne beckoned to Alan, and he followed her round the house to a small flower garden with a wild lawn, next to beds of vegetables and some small fruit bushes. A wooden settle was drawn up beneath an apple tree, and an old, white-haired man lay on it, covered with a knitted blanket.

  He looked up at Lottie, who screamed at him, ‘Great-Uncle, here’s a young gentleman enquiring after a Mary Dilhorne. Would be about your age. Do you remember a Mary?’

  ‘No need to shout,’ said the old man petulantly. ‘Of course I remember a Mary. She were my older sister. Long gone, is Mary.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything of her?’ asked Alan, raising his voice a little.

  ‘Aye, she were a bad girl, were Mary. Went to the Big House, Temple Hatton, over the moors, she did, and got herself a bastard. I mind my feyther’s anger. He wouldn’t have her back. Disgraced us all, she had. But when my mother were took ill a few years later, she swore she’d never rest easy until she knew what had happened to Mary and the child.’

  He stopped and appeared to fall asleep. ‘Where were I, young sir? Aye, Mary. Feyther went to the place where she’d been sent. He missed her by a few weeks. She’d been a bad girl again, so they’d turned her out, and the little lad, too. Never did know where she’d gone. Handsome little lad, they said. I mind a gentleman came round some time later, after Mother died, asking for Mary, and that were all we could tell him.’

  He was silent again: lost in a world where Alan’s f
ather had been a handsome little lad, turned out with his mother into an uncaring world.

  The old man looked at Alan, standing there in the pride of his youth: at his confident bearing, big and strong, his handsome face, his beautiful clothes especially made for him by Ned’s tailor and his polished boots. He stared at Sir Hart’s splendid horse, tethered where he could see it.

  ‘And you, my fine young gentleman? What can the likes of you want to know about Mary Dilhorne?’

  Alan debated—and then made up his mind. He was aware of the farmer’s sudden interest, but he also knew that he would never come here again. The truth could not hurt.

  ‘She was my grandmother. My father is—was—her little lad.’

  ‘Aye, and is she still alive, then?’ asked Ezra, staring at him in wonder.

  ‘No, she died not long after your father tried to find her,’ said Alan, recalling how little he knew of his grandmother, beyond her name.

  ‘How come you’re gentry?’ said the farmer. ‘Seeing that your father was…’ He stopped, embarrassed.

  ‘A bastard,’ said Alan gently. ‘My father is a clever man who made a great fortune. I’m not really a gentleman. I only look like one.’ His tone was quite unoffended.

  His last remark was greeted with complete disbelief, except that Lottie said, ‘Ezra is your great-uncle, too, so we must be cousins.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alan.

  ‘A cup of tea, then,’ said Lottie. ‘Come into the house.’

  The house had been improved recently. There was new furniture and a small piano. He was persuaded to sit down, and Lottie brought him tea in a bright china cup and saucer. They had no idea what to make of him. He was so alien to everything they knew.

  It seemed preposterous that he was Mary’s grandson, and the unlikelihood grew when Alan confessed that he was from New South Wales, on the other side of the world. They were almost afraid of him. Such a great gentleman to be sitting with them and claiming to be thier cousin.