CHAPTER IV
STREETS away, still ensconced in Berkeley Square, Arthur’s spirits were far from cheerful.
He had lain awake for much of the night.
Accustomed to sleeping in a camp-bed, surrounded by the snores of a hundred sleeping soldiers, one might easily assume that the softness of a four-poster bed and the quietude of a secluded London townhouse guaranteed a restful sleep.
On the contrary, Arthur had found these novel comforts more oppressive than peaceful, and with his mind still reeling from the revelations of the prior day, he had not fallen asleep until the early hours of the morning.
It was thus with some fatigue that he made his way to the breakfast table, where he found his brother and sister – but no Hetty.
‘Gone to an appointment with the modiste,’ Timothy explained, when he inquired after her absence. ‘Has it in her head to update her wardrobe.’
‘Oh.’ Arthur was rather irked, however unfair he knew this to be. It was not as if he had told Hetty that he wished to ride out with her that morning – only that, since it had been their regular habit when he was last in London, he had quite assumed she would have waited for him.
‘Fancies herself in love with a Belgian fellow, and wants to impress him,’ Timothy expounded.
Arthur’s attention was instantly diverted. ‘Hetty? A Belgian?’
‘Could be a Dutchman,’ Timothy added fairly. ‘Or a German. Not sure yet, but certainly European.’
‘Timothy!’ Trixie admonished him. ‘It’s a secret.’
‘Sorry – forgot!’
‘Who?’ Arthur demanded. This was the first he was hearing of it. Hetty had certainly never mentioned an attachment in her letters, he would have remembered that – but why should she choose to confide in Timothy, rather than him?
Timothy shrugged. ‘Someone from her youth.’
‘Timothy!’
‘Blast – forgot again.’
Trixie fixed her brother with a withering glare that subsided, after a moment, into a more contemplative expression – something which, to those who knew her, ought inspire far more wariness. ‘We must help Hetty catch this fellow,’ she decided.
Arthur reached for a bread roll. ‘What makes you feel she needs your aid?’
Trixie hesitated before she answered. As sharp as she might be with her brothers, she was far more conscious of hurting Hetty’s feelings.
‘You will understand, once you have seen her … out and about,’ she said at last. Then, after considering the matter for a moment, she added: ‘Perhaps if he thought she was ill, or dead, he might come flying to her side in a panic, realising he has loved her all along.’
‘Literature suggests that to be a plan fraught with difficulty,’ Arthur noted with a smile.
‘Literature has no place at breakfast,’ Timothy pronounced darkly.
‘We won’t get anywhere by doing nothing,’ Trixie castigated them both. ‘You must bestir yourselves!’
Timothy was rather offended. ‘I have bestirred myself! Helped her with her dresses, didn’t I?
’ He subsided rather grumpily into his coffee – truly, was a gentleman not permitted to breakfast in peace any more?
– but, after a moment spent considering his elder brother, emerged once more: ‘I do not mind telling you, Arthur, that perhaps you ought to follow Hetty’s suit.
I do not at all like the cut of that coat. ’
Arthur thanked him for his kind attention.
‘Not kindness,’ Timothy assured him. ‘Does me no credit if my brother’s looking a ragamuffin.’
‘Could you not be a little more understanding?’ Trixie sprang to Arthur’s defence. ‘He has just returned from war, recollect.’
‘Well, if all our fellows were dressed so poorly, it’s no wonder the Frenchies fled,’ Timothy said indignantly. ‘Dashed frightening!’
Arthur struggled between a desire to box Timothy’s ears and to laugh.
In the end, Trixie’s own peal of mirth was too infectious to resist, and so it was to this picture of idyllic familial bliss that Lady Allerton swept into the room, arrayed magnificently in a clinging gown of Pomona-green silk.
She beamed at the sight, but her arrival – serving to remind Arthur of their less than blissful conversation the day before – had his amusement slipping away, though he maintained a cheery demeanour until the rest of the family departed for their day of excursions.
He spent the rest of the morning reacquainting himself with the household, a process that caused him to feel both calmer and more concerned than he had at the wake of the day.
Calmer, for no member of staff appeared to be aware of their financial straits – being paid on time and in full – but concerned by how often Hetty’s name had been quoted in reference to the running of the household.
The new cook, Dawson had told him, was excellent: Miss Clithero had recommended her employment; his lordship’s funeral was beautiful, Mrs Strout, the housekeeper, had assured him: Miss Hetty had done such a lovely job in organising it; Kitteridge, the head groomsman, was going to wash the carriage today, for Miss Clithero had suggested it was high time for a spring clean. Hetty had been kept busy, plainly.
He tried, however, to put this worry aside as he scaled the stairs to his father’s study: one problem at a time.
Yet he could not help but feel, as he regarded the sea of papers about him, that this was less of a problem and more of a hell.
The figures seemed to swim before his eyes, becoming more incomprehensible – not less – as he tried to decipher them.
He had never had much of a head for numbers, but still, even the greatest mathematician of the age would, he suspected, struggle to follow the workings of the late Lord Allerton, while Thimbleby’s correspondence provided no great elucidation, for he assumed a great deal of knowledge that Arthur currently lacked.
The most Arthur could do, after several hours of increasing frustration, was gather into one pile all the tradesmen’s bills he could identify from the chaos, a task which might have afforded him some satisfaction had the pile not been so intimidatingly enormous by the end.
With very little to show for his efforts that day, aside from a visit to the tailor that he could scarcely afford, it was an Arthur worn a little thinner who followed the signs of merriment towards the drawing room that evening.
He paused for a moment upon the threshold to admire the charming scene within: the fire crackling in the hearth – despite the advancing months, the evenings still held a chill in the air – and candles flickering in the sconces cast rather a golden light over the room.
The family were all arrayed in their finery, for they were bound for the theatre after dinner: Lady Allerton resplendent in a gown of fawn figured silk; Timothy in an exquisitely simple black coat and pantaloons that had nonetheless taken almost an hour to perfect; Trixie in fetching jonquil crape, her spangled scarf cast aside to concentrate wholly upon the game of lottery tickets laid out upon the table.
So absorbed were she and Timothy in this endeavour – which they would, outside the walls of Berkeley Square, publicly castigate as child’s play – that Arthur had no compunction in pulling his mother a little aside and telling her, in a low voice: ‘I intend to post down to Belcourt tomorrow. There is so much unclear, in Papa’s records …
I am hopeful Mr Holland might be able to shed some light over what has occurred. ’
Lady Allerton laid a hand upon his arm. ‘Oh darling, I hope you have not permitted Thimbleby to blue-devil you? Recollect how it is with financial fellows: I do believe they try to frighten us so that we continue to employ them – the fiends!’
His mother’s attitude might have been comical had it not been so very concerning. ‘Nonetheless, I must go.’
Lady Allerton bit her lip. ‘But your attendance is already expected at Almack’s, tomorrow – and I have promised your presence at Lady Davenport and Mrs Bagnall’s assemblies! It would be frightfully rude for you to cry off.’
Arthur frowned at her. ‘You should have asked me before doing so, Mama.’
‘Don’t be cross,’ she appealed. ‘Indeed, I think it will be good for you to enjoy some levity – you don’t wish to become the prim and prosy sort that is forever talking about finances, do you?’
Regarding his parent with a fascinated eye, Arthur asked: ‘Mama, you do understand why I wish to go to Belcourt, don’t you? Surely you comprehend the severity of our situation?’
‘Good gracious, Arthur, of course I do!’ Arthur sent a prayer of thanks for the heavens, for he had begun to think her denial a sort of madness.
‘I declare I can scarcely recall when I was last able to pay a bill – and the tiresome thing is that there are now so many of them in my desk that I can’t open it! ’
Arthur rescinded his prayer of thanks. ‘How have you contrived to continue living in this style?’
‘Oh, well, my love, upon credit! Everyone has been most obliging – and the ill-mannered ones that weren’t, well, Hetty and I sorted that out. So you see, I am not the villain that Thimbleby would paint me as!’
Arthur stilled. ‘You have confided in Hetty about our … difficulties?’
‘Oh, no,’ her ladyship assured him. ‘I should never be so indiscreet – only this fellow from Billingsgate was becoming so nasty that I could not wait any longer. I landed upon the notion of selling some of my jewels, you see – I have so many that half of them are collecting dust, which seems silly. Hetty, wonderful creature, sorted the whole thing in a trice – Thimbleby was no help at all, of course, for all his bleating – and my diamonds went for a very pretty penny.’
‘The family diamonds?’
Reading judgement in the question, Lady Allerton fired up at once.
‘If you mean to say that they belong to you, I know it! But, pray, what use would you have for them? You can hardly wear them – and even if you could,’ she went on reflectively, ‘you truly would be better off wearing sapphires, Arthur, for blue has always suited you best!’
Ignoring this recommendation, Arthur continued doggedly on: ‘Are you not wearing the family diamonds now?’
‘Oh!’ A mischievous twinkle sprang to Lady Allerton’s eye. ‘That was Hetty’s initiative. Would you believe these are a copy?’
Arthur, taking in the clasp of glittering jewels about his mother’s neck, would not, indeed, believe it.
Connoisseurship of precious stones was not one of his competencies, but he knew Hetty.
Trixie might have the reputation as the hoodwinker in the family, and rightly so, but Hetty’s machinations had always been of the neater variety.
As he gazed at the glittering, authentic ‘copy’ around Lady Allerton’s neck, Arthur felt that he had a pretty accurate idea of what trick she had managed to achieve here – and it would have been admirable if it were not so damnably mortifying.
Lady Allerton gave him another pat upon the arm, as if she had just given him some reassurance rather than further cause for worry, before wondering aloud: ‘But where is Hetty? It is nearing eight o’clock.’
It had not been Hetty’s intent to make a grand entrance.
The first of her new gowns had arrived at Berkeley Square that very afternoon – a piece of efficiency that pleased and dismayed Hetty in equal measure, for now she had to muster the courage to actually wear the thing, which was far harder here than it had seemed in the cosy safety of the modiste’s, and she spent an age prevaricating in front of the looking glass.
Finally, in concession to the demands of the clock – and her increasingly impatient dresser – Hetty left her chambers, fervently hoping that the Allertons would be too wrapped up in Arthur’s arrival to make a comment upon it.
‘Hetty!’ Lady Allerton exclamation was almost a shriek as Hetty slipped into the drawing room. ‘What an exquisite new gown.’
‘You did not get that from Mrs Butterworth,’ Trixie said enviously.
Timothy, meanwhile, raised a quizzing glass. ‘Yes, very good,’ he murmured.
Hetty, arrayed in the new gown of sea green, with her curls brushed until they shone rich chestnut, felt herself blush furiously. ‘Thank you,’ she muttered, fighting an urge to fidget at her hems, feeling horribly exposed. Why on earth had she thought it acceptable to agree to such a low bodice?
‘You look marvellous,’ Lady Allerton enthused, ‘Does she not, Arthur?’
Arthur still reeling from Lady Allerton’s confidences, discovered that he could not yet look at Hetty. Affecting deafness, he turned his attention, instead, to Timothy, and the quizzing glass that was evaluating the trimming of Hetty’s gown.
‘When did you begin carrying such a thing?’
‘Would you like one?’ Timothy turned one grotesquely magnified eye in Arthur’s direction.
‘Certainly not. One might as well lug around a telescope.’
Timothy shook his head firmly. ‘Oughtn’t do that, Arthur, dashed eccentric! Get a quizzing glass, much more the thing.’
Hetty could not help but let out a soft laugh, and Arthur turned instinctively towards her, the impulse to share her amusement so deep within him, that he did so without conscious thought – only, as soon as he caught her eye, the smile fell from his face.
‘Arthur,’ Lady Allerton cut in insistently, ‘don’t you think Hetty looks marvellous?’
Hetty – who had previously only held the warmest of feelings for Lady Allerton – could quite happily have throttled her.
‘Yes, certainly.’ Arthur forced a smile. ‘Let us go down to dinner, shall we?’
Hetty felt herself deflate. It was not quite the second glance that she had desired, for there was none of the same surprised appreciation of the day prior, only a frowning stare she did not understand.
It had lasted a moment only, but as they walked together down to dinner – though Arthur was speaking as he normally did, and in a passable enough imitation of his usual cheer – she could not help but feel he was hiding some inner disquiet.
Had Arthur known the direction of Hetty’s thoughts, he might have advised her that disquiet was too soft a word.
As they walked down to dinner, Arthur was conscious of feeling more vexed with his mother than he had all day.
It was plain that she had not been exaggerating when she had spoken, the day before, of Hetty’s helpfulness, but Arthur was not inclined to think this heartwarming.
Hetty speaking to the cook; Hetty directing the staff; Hetty pretending to sell the family diamonds …
She had been most shamefully used.