A Strange Likeness (11 page)

They had originally intended to change coats, but Alan's more massive shoulders had prevented that. Fortunately Ned's rings fitted Alan, just. Alan found that the seal ring with the Hatton eagle on it was the most difficult to force on to his finger, but he finally managed to make it fit.

Impatient Ned swore a little at the delay, but Alan was coolness itself. He hoisted Ned over the wall after he had promised to go home immediately by way of various back streets: it would not do for him to be seen.

Alan took a deep breath and made his faltering way back to the smoke-filled room.

‘Thought you'd got lost,' drawled Victor.

‘Dam'd buttons,' swore Alan, his mumble strangled. ‘Ready to play old man. Want my revenge.'

They sat at one of the small tables and the game began, after Alan had fetched himself a glass of brandy. He tossed it down in one gulp—and, being stone-cold sober, he filled another and took it to the table—his breath was now as rank as Ned's had been.

He had been correct to believe that contempt for Ned would make Victor careless, for he switched the pack of cards provided by the house quite clumsily, and substituted his own marked one. His subsequent cheating was more skilful, but not skilful enough to deceive a man taught by a master. He was also under the disadvantage of playing against someone whom he thought was drunk but was sober.

Alan began by allowing Victor to win—a ploy designed to convince him that he was again about to take Ned Hatton for all that the fool decided to wager. He knew that to a certain extent gambling was as much a test of stamina as anything else. He had instructed Ned to drink heavily for he needed an excuse not to drink himself.

‘Shan't last the night out if I take any more,' he claimed in a drunken mumble. ‘Don't want to be incapable.'

The luck suddenly, and surprisingly, turned. From winning easily Victor found himself losing, just as easily. Ned's luck, indeed, was amazing. This was not surprising, for Alan, a far better player than Victor, was using the marked pack to his own advantage, as well as employing a few tricks of his own. A small crowd gathered round at the sight of Victor being taken by poor Ned Hatton for once. The pile of Ned's IOUs passed back to Alan, for this had been agreed beforehand, and then, in a desperate
bid to carry on the game, Victor began signing his own, and these, too, swelled the pile in front of the supposed Ned.

Victor suddenly swore at the crowd pressing around them; their nearness was destroying his chance to cheat.

‘Damn you all. A fellow can't play with you breathing down his neck. Get back, can't you?'

One of the club's minders, there to keep order, immediately pushed the crowd away, greatly to Alan's relief, for he thought that the game was reaching a climax, and he did not want curious eyes to see and hear exactly what was going on.

After one heavy loss, while Victor was desperately signing yet another IOU, he looked up unexpectedly to see Alan's hard, cold stare, so unlike Ned's, on him. In his turn he stared at the man opposite to him.

Understanding flooded in. He might have started the evening with the true Ned Hatton, but he had not finished it with him. Fortunately for Alan rage filled Victor to the degree that he could barely speak.

He put out his hand and caught Alan, who was gathering up the cards, by the wrist. Alan had known the moment that he had seen Victor's face change that, tired by the long night, he had dropped his guard and given himself away.

‘You cheat,' whispered Victor, choked with a consuming anger. ‘It's Dilhorne I've been playing, not Ned Hatton, who agreed to play against me. You changed over. I swear that it was Ned who came here with me. How…? Oh, the privy, of course. Just wait until I tell the room of this! No decent house in London will ever receive you—or Ned—again.'

Alan was ready for him.

‘By all means tell them,' he whispered back. ‘If you
do I'll show them the marked cards, and the ones you're carrying in your sleeve. I'm a cheat, beating and cheating a cheat, I agree. Choose, Loring, choose! Expose us both, or leave us quits, neither of us to become outcasts—for who would receive you, either?'

Victor sat there in agony. Part of him wanted to jump up and expose the barbarian before him. The other part told him that he could not afford to do so.

‘Cut your losses,' said Alan, picking up Victor's IOUs. ‘End the game. Neither of us wishes to be socially ruined—I will survive it, but you can't.'

‘You leave me no choice,' muttered Victor, aware that curiosity at this abrupt end to the game was drawing the spectators near to them again, now that they had stopped.

‘Done,' said Alan. He picked up the cards and pitched them into the fire. Quite suddenly, and to Victor's astonishment, he turned into careless Ned Hatton again. He rose to his feet and shouted ‘
Io triomphe
—I win,' in exactly Ned's voice, and called for a taper and a bowl.

Winking at the shaken Victor, he picked up the two piles of IOUs, the one of Ned's, which he had won back, and the other of Victor's, recklessly given, and placed them in the copper bowl provided. Then, with a characteristic flourish, so that the whole room cheered, and agreed that mad Ned Hatton had never been madder, he picked up the taper, put it into one of the candles which lit the room—and set fire to both piles before handing the bowl and the ashes to the astonished Victor.

‘Quits,' he proclaimed—and his imitation of Ned was perfect. ‘I'll not play against you, Victor, ever again. The slate is clean between us, and will remain so. Now, who's for a drink on the winner?'

Delirious with laughter, he staggered across to the table laden with food and drink, the sound of the company's cheers following him.

T
he gossip ran round London. The tale of how Ned Hatton had turned the tables on Victor Loring was too good not to pass on. If there were some, like Frank Gresham, who wondered which Ned Hatton had played Victor, the knowledge that he had seen Alan Dilhorne several times that night at the Palmerstons' reception—for Alan had returned to it shortly after midnight—made a switch seem unlikely.

Victor, of course, kept mum. Alan had not only saved his reputation, but had burned the IOUs which he might have retained—and then ruined him by demanding that they be repaid.

The big problem, as both Alan and Eleanor agreed, was trying to keep Ned mum! He was quite capable of blurting out the whole story after he had been drinking, however many times he assured Alan that he never would.

‘Ned says that you burned Victor's debts,' Eleanor said to Alan when she met him again, several days later, ‘but I'm worried about the Lorings. None of them have been seen in the Park since Victor lost to you. Do you think that he was going to pay his creditors with Ned's IOUs if I refused to marry him?'

‘You mustn't feel guilty about that,' Alan told her earnestly. ‘Ned was asking an impossible sacrifice of you.'

‘Still…' said Eleanor sadly. ‘It's Mrs Loring and Caroline who worry me. They are his victims, are they not?'

And Victor is mine, thought Alan, a trifle sadly. Aloud, he said, ‘All things considered, it is kind of you to worry about them. I would like to help them but I fear that after that night they may not want to know me.'

‘Life is hard, isn't it?' she said earnestly. ‘And I used to think that it was simple and easy. You are teaching me otherwise. Not deliberately, of course. You see, when we spoke of saving Ned I didn't foresee that doing so would hurt Victor's mother and Caroline as well.'

After that they spoke of other, lighter things, but Alan remembered this conversation the next morning in his office at Dilhorne's when Phipps informed him that there was a young lady asking to see him.

What young lady could that possibly be? ‘Did she give her name?' he asked.

‘She wouldn't, Mr Alan. Just said that it was urgent, that she needed help.'

‘Show her in, anyway.'

It was Caroline Loring, her face pale and her eyes red with weeping. Alan rose and showed her to the only comfortable chair in the room.

‘How may I help you, cousin Caroline?'

‘I have not come for myself but for Victor. The only person I could think of who might help us is you.'

Alan grimaced, remembering that in effect he had ruined Victor not once, but twice.

‘I would scarcely imagine that Victor would accept help from me.'

‘He would not welcome it from anyone—but we, the
three of us, desperately need it. And you are our cousin, Alan, even if we did not really befriend you.'

‘Tell me what is wrong, Caroline, and I will see whether I may be able to assist you. I suppose that Victor is in Queer Street financially?'

‘Oh, Alan,' half-sobbed Caroline, ‘it is much worse than you think. Victor is not only broken, he is ruined. We are all ruined. You see, he'd always expected to inherit Essendene. Sir John told him that he would. So he lived high and played deep—and lost. When he asked Sir John to bail him out, Sir John refused. He then went to the money-lenders and borrowed on his expectations—and when he couldn't pay the interest on his debts they wrote to Sir John.

‘Sir John was furious. So furious he cut Victor and all of us out of his will. He had told him he would, but Victor hadn't believed him.'

She began to sob in earnest.

‘And then Sir John left everything to your mama. Victor owes so much, and so do Mama and I. We have no resources at all other than a small annuity left to us after our father died. He was a younger son, too. We thought that the Essendene estates would save us.

‘After you and he played at…at…Rosie's—' when Alan gave a start of surprise she said sorrowfully, ‘Oh, yes, everyone knows; it's a great joke. Ned talked—did you think that he wouldn't? Victor came home and said that he would break the will. It wasn't right. Sir John was out of his head when he made it. He sent for the lawyers. He wouldn't go to their offices, he made Mr Bunthorne come to us.

‘Mr Bunthorne told us that Sir John had written two letters as well as the will. One for him and one for Victor, if he tried to challenge it. He gave Victor his letter. It
said that Victor wasn't fit to inherit, that the Warings had done Sir John's brother, Fred, a great wrong, and that as he had grown older he had remembered Fred. He remembered carrying him about as a little one at Essendene. He had learned that Fred died miserably, in great poverty, in Sydney, and had left cousin Hester destitute. It was restitution, he wrote. If cousin Hester was alive she was to have everything, and if not it should all go to charity.

‘After the lawyers had left Victor was beside himself. Mama and I could not quieten him. He threatened to commit suicide. He said that the money-lenders had him by the throat and if he could not pay by next quarter-day they would send him to the Marshalsea Prison for debt. If they did we were all ruined, for he would never get out of the Marshalsea once he was in it.

‘He has locked himself into his room and he has been drinking heavily. He will not answer and Mama is half-mad. I am afraid for her, too.'

She stopped. Alan looked at her, at her gentle, pretty face, now ruined by grief. When he had destroyed Victor in Rosie's, half in fun, he had not realised that it might come to this. Caroline was right. He was their cousin, and that must mean something.

‘Don't cry,' he said gently. ‘I will try to do what I can for you. After all, I pushed him to his final ruin. I will call on you tonight, but don't tell him so.'

‘I couldn't, if I wanted to. He will no longer speak to us.'

‘Don't cry, I beg of you. Phipps shall call you a cab, if you have not one waiting. You must go home and tell my cousin Clara that I shall do what I can.'

 

Alan was not hopeful, despite what he had said to Caroline, that he could do much to rescue Victor, but he left
work early in order to reach Russell Square as soon as possible. His cousin Clara flew at him when he entered her drawing room.

‘Oh, cousin Alan, Caroline should not have come to see you, but I am so glad that she did. He is still refusing to answer us. I am afraid for him.'

Alan was not. In his experience, men like Victor threatened much, but did little. He was still bullying his mother and his sister and trying to avoid the unpleasant facts of his idle and useless life.

‘Where is he?'

‘Upstairs. I will take you there, but I am sure that he will not speak to you.'

‘Leave that to me, cousin. Please lead me to him.'

Victor's room was off the main first floor landing. Both women, faces pale, eyes red, at the end of their endurance, would have stayed with Alan, but he did not want their loving, fearful presence to inhibit him in what he might say or do.

‘Best you both retire, and wait for me in the drawing room.'

After they had gone he knocked on the door. He heard movement, but no answer. He knocked again, saying, ‘Cousin Victor, it is I, Alan Dilhorne. I wish to speak to you.'

There was silence, and then a choked voice replied, ‘Damn you, Alan Dilhorne, go away. I have no wish to see you again.'

Alan beat a tattoo on the door. ‘And damn you, too, cousin Victor, but I intend to see you, and if you do not open this door at once I shall have it broken down. You know me well enough by now to know that any threat which I make I will execute. Do you want another scandal?'

There was a short silence and then the door opened. A haggard-looking Victor beckoned him into a disordered room, stinking of tobacco, alcohol and unwashed man. A pistol lay on a side table.

‘What do you want of me now, Dilhorne? You've ruined me, isn't that enough?'

‘You ruined yourself,' retorted Alan. ‘I've come to stop you from ruining your mother and your sister, too. You've bullied them into a stupor, but, God forgive them, they love you and want you saved.'

‘Saved!' The word was almost an obscenity. ‘By you? I'd rather be ruined.'

Alan strode over and seized Victor by the collar. It appeared, he thought, to be his favourite occupation when dealing with gentlemanly fools in England.

‘You're half-drunk, Victor, or I'd teach you manners. It's your mother and your sister I'm thinking of, not you. Tell me, is it true that you are being threatened with the Marshalsea?'

Victor nodded.

‘And your bills and debts. Where are they? Who owns them now?'

‘They're over there, on my desk. Waldheim's have bought the lot, damn them. It's they who are threatening me with the Marshalsea if I can't pay.'

Alan let go of him. ‘Waldheim's, you say? There might be hope there.'

‘You make me laugh, Dilhorne. You're green. Hope with Waldheim's? Not a hope! They're the hardest of the lot.'

‘Shut up, and let me look at them.'

Victor grinned madly. ‘Look away. They'll tell you nothing.'

‘For God's sake, Victor, I'm a businessman.'

‘Yes, but you're not a money-lender.'

Alan ignored him for a moment and began to examine the pile of bills.

‘You mistake, Victor. Your cousin Hester married a man who, among other things, is the biggest money-lender in Sydney. I ran that side of the business for him for two years.'

Victor sneered. ‘I always knew that you weren't a gentleman.'

‘I never claimed to be one,' returned Alan equably.

He sat down, found an unused sheet of soiled paper and began listing the dog-eared bills before him. Occasionally he asked Victor about rates of interest—to receive grudging replies. Victor watched him, fascinated against his will, until presently Alan looked up.

‘Is this all?'

‘Yes,' replied Victor, dropping his eyes.

‘You're lying. Where are the rest? Damn you, Loring, I won't help you if you don't come clean.'

Loring, is it now? thought Victor resentfully, but said, ‘The rest are in the right-hand drawer, and that's the lot, as God is my witness.'

‘Well, he isn't. And God can't give evidence, particularly not in a mess like this. Shut up, man, I want to finish this, and I'm tired. I've done a day's work already.'

He wrote in silence for several more minutes before he said, ‘What with the interest and all, there's a small fortune owing here. You do know that if they send you to the Marshalsea there's not the faintest hope that you'll ever get out again? I suppose that's why you're in here with a pistol. Only you're too weak to pull the trigger.'

Victor's answer was an anguished nod.

‘I'll do what I can to clear matters up, but I can't promise that I shall be able to—only try.'

‘Oh, God,' wailed Victor. ‘I want to be saved, but to be saved by you is the worst thing of all.'

‘Don't you ever listen to me? I keep telling you that I'm trying to save Clara and Caroline. If it weren't for them you could rot in the Marshalsea for ever for all I care.'

‘Noble swine, aren't you?' sneered Victor.

‘You're all the family I've got,' said Alan simply. ‘My father has none, so you are, in some strange way, my responsibility, particularly since mine was the final blow which drove you to this. That's all.'

He picked up the pile of papers.

‘You'll do two things for me in return. You'll not leave this house until I order you to, and you'll not bully poor Caroline for coming to tell me of your predicament. Now give me the pistol. You never intended to use it—other than to bully your wretched women. Try to comfort them a little, instead.'

 

Eleanor found Alan a trifle
distrait
that evening. They were at Lady Templestowe's ball, and during a brief interval while they queued for supper Eleanor said, ‘You're not with us tonight, Alan.'

‘No, I'm sorry. I've been thinking.'

She laughed up at him. ‘It's not usual at a ball.'

‘I know, but I've work to do tomorrow.'

‘And that's not usual, either.'

They walked on for a little in silence. Then Alan said, ‘Eleanor, I have a favour to ask of you.'

‘And it is?' she replied swiftly.

‘That's nice,' said Alan, laughing. ‘No querying, no coyness. I like that.' His eyes stroked her which made her shiver. ‘It's this. Be kind to my cousin Caroline and
her mother. Life is very hard for them just now. I know it will be difficult for you, considering everything.'

‘Yes,' agreed Eleanor, ‘but that's not Caro's fault, is it?'

‘Victor is in a bad way, too. Note that I do not ask you to be kind to
him
.'

‘I should think not! But, yes, I'm sorry for Caro and I have been avoiding her. I thought that she would be here tonight. I know that she arranged to meet Anthony Beauchamp, but he told me just now that she must have cried off. Poor Caro, I know that she likes him, but she stands to lose him to other girls who are more determined.'

Alan took her small hand and pressed it gently. He looked at her as affectionately as he dared before the eyes of several hundred people and her great-aunt Almeria.

‘Are you a determined girl, Eleanor?'

Her smile was wry. ‘Mother thinks that I'm too determined, and so does Sir Hart.' Greatly daring, she added, ‘What do you think, Alan?'

‘That I like a girl who knows her own mind. I've never admired doormats.'

This set her laughing. ‘And I like a man who says clever things. I shall miss you when you go home again.'

His eyes caressed her again. ‘I've not yet made up my mind where home is, Eleanor. Perhaps you can help me.'