CHAPTER II
THE new Lord Allerton, now a little pale under his tan, glanced from his mother to his man of business, aghast. ‘It cannot be as bad as that?’
‘No, of course not, darling,’ Lady Allerton hastened to reassure him.
‘It is not good,’ Mr Thimbleby hastened to clarify.
Arthur pressed a hand down on to the table beside him, hardly able to believe what he was hearing.
They were gathered, the three of them, in his father’s study.
It was a well-proportioned room situated on the western side of the house; the afternoon sun streaming in through the large sash windows was, at that moment, fading into the haze of a golden dusk.
The sunset cast a rather idyllic glow over the room’s inhabitants – one in stark contrast with the nightmarish news Arthur was struggling to digest.
‘But how can it be so? Belcourt – Grandpère’s fortune …?’
Had it existed, the biography of Lady Allerton’s father would chart quite a remarkable rise: born into a Parisian family of dyers, Christophe Barbet had amassed a fortune in textiles, his printed toiles eventually awarding him the title of Chevalier from King Louis XVI.
Leveraging this new-found nobility into an upper-class marriage for both himself – and, later, his daughters – he had eventually retired to Provence with an extremely large fortune.
‘Papa was always most generous,’ his mother agreed. ‘But with all this horridness in France …’
She gave an explanatory wave of her hand which, in one flippant motion, seemed to encompass the entirety of the French Revolution – in which the Chevalier de Barbet’s proximity to the King, once his proudest achievement, had endangered his life.
‘He was not able to extract much from the …’ Here Lady Allerton paused delicately to omit the word ‘factory’. ‘… before he fled to Vienna,’ she went smoothly on. ‘We had been living off the remains of my dowry, but now, Thimbleby seems to think it has run out.’
She pronounced this with no small amount of cynicism, as if she believed Thimbleby to have concocted this fiction to make himself seem more interesting.
Insistently cheerful herself, Lady Allerton put a great deal of effort into not thinking about unpleasant things, and was deeply suspicious of anybody who behaved to the contrary.
Arthur looked at Thimbleby. ‘We are not in debt, at least?’ he clarified. ‘Can I discount the prospect of bailiffs appearing at our door?’
‘It is difficult to say, exactly,’ Thimbleby hedged.
‘Lord Allerton – the late Lord Allerton, I should say – insisted on seeing to his own accounting, and …’ Thimbleby gestured rather helplessly towards the grand mahogany desk that sat in the centre of the room, piled high with an assortment of papers all covered with his father’s cramped scrawl.
‘We have been finding his bookkeeping rather puzzling.’
Arthur regarded him with no small amount of incredulity. ‘Do you mean to tell me you cannot read his handwriting?’
Thimbleby admitted this was, indeed, the case.
Arthur turned his gaze upon her ladyship, who shook her head.
‘I’ve never been able to,’ she admitted cheerfully.
‘When we were first courting, he used to write me pages and pages of letters, and I could not decipher a word – I had to ask your grandmère to help me read them, which led to some very awkward situations, I can assure you.’
Arthur chose to ignore this aside. ‘Matters are grave, then.’
‘Oh, they are not,’ Lady Allerton insisted. ‘Our affairs are merely a little … higgledy piggledy.’
At ‘higgledy piggledy’, Mr Thimbleby closed his eyes in abject pain.
Arthur strode across the room to stand before the window.
The study, at the front of the house, looked out at Berkeley Square.
It was the same view from the drawing room, and Arthur’s childhood bedroom, a view hardly less familiar than his own face – and one which he had been keenly anticipating for months now.
It was with no small degree of effort that he kept his voice even as he asked, still facing towards the window: ‘Why did you not tell me in what case we stood?’
Had Mr Thimbleby had less sense of the respect due to a lady, he might have pointed an accusing finger in her direction – but he did not, of course, merely swallowing, and praying to the heavens that her ladyship would not utilise him as a very convenient scapegoat.
Lady Allerton had more sport than that, however. ‘I ordered him not to tell you,’ she explained candidly. ‘You were wounded, dearest! I would not for the world have distressed you at such a time.’
‘It has been months since then,’ Arthur noted, still facing away. ‘Had I the least notion of the truth – I should have returned to England immediately.’
So much time had been lost, so many months when he might have been here, trying to repair their shockingly wasted fortunes.
‘As I said!’ Lady Allerton rounded on Thimbleby, demanding corroboration. ‘Did I not say so?’
Mr Thimbleby had to admit that she had, indeed, said this. Lady Allerton nodded her satisfaction. ‘I knew how mortified you would have been to sell out before the war was over – so you see, I could not have told you.’
Arthur locked eyes with his reflection in the window pane, and saw the naked frustration upon his own face.
He had imagined, entering the doors of Berkeley Square, that he would place all the strife and hardship of the past few years safely into the past. He would slot back into his old life, and his old self, as easily as shrugging on an old coat, only this time with the fullest appreciation of how wonderful it all was. He had not prepared for this.
‘Don’t be cross, dearest,’ her ladyship implored, regarding his straight back in some dismay.
Arthur took in a deep breath. At least, he thought pragmatically, nobody was shooting at him. Turning back to the room, he looked first at Thimbleby.
‘I shall turn my attention to this without delay,’ he promised. Then, looking towards his mother: ‘We shall solve this, Mama. There is no need for you to worry.’
Lady Allerton gave a contented sigh, as if she believed the matter could now rest. ‘I am so glad you have come home.’ She beamed at him. ‘With all the foreign notables upon us, I have decided to hold a ball to celebrate – do you not think it a famous idea?’
On reflection, perhaps it would be good for Lady Allerton to worry a little. ‘At such a time as this? No, I do not.’
He might not know how much, exactly, such an event would cost – Arthur had been raised never to consider the price of anything – but even he, accustomed to such blissful ignorance, knew that throwing a tonnish ball at such an hour was foolhardy in the grandest of senses.
When he conveyed this, however, Lady Allerton did not appear in the least concerned. ‘Oh, Thimbleby will sort it all. He has it entirely under control.’
Thimbleby made a strange sort of groaning noise, very much in the tone of one who did not, in fact, have ‘it’ entirely under control.
‘We have to think of Trixie in all this! This will be her first family occasion, too.’ Lady Allerton defended herself.
‘Of course, last year ought to have been her first Season – we could not bring her out of course, not in mourning – and it did not feel right to have a proper coming-out ball with all this Napoleon business.’ Now that peace had been secured, Lady Allerton had resumed using Napoleon’s name, though she could not help but add, in a dark aside: ‘Horrid little man.’
‘Had I been made aware of our difficulties, I should have recommended you delay Trixie’s coming out, until such a time as we had solved—’ Arthur broke off. It was too late, after all: voicing such protestations now was a waste of breath.
‘There is no need to fret,’ Lady Allerton reassured him. ‘We shall come about! For there is one crucial circumstance you are forgetting: Hetty!’
Arthur stared at her with knitted brows. ‘In what way does this concern Hetty?’ A dreadful thought flashed into his mind. ‘Her fortune has surely not been used to—’
He broke off, wiser thoughts prevailing. Hetty’s father might have made the Allertons her guardians, but that did not give them unfettered access to her funds.
‘Arthur!’ Her ladyship was indignant. ‘I wonder at your supposing that I would even entertain such a notion!’
‘Do explain it to me, then: in what way is Hetty implicated in this affair?’
‘Well …’ Lady Allerton paused delicately. ‘Of course, a mother must allow one’s children to find their own way in this world, their own loves.’
Arthur waited. He had a horrible feeling he knew what Lady Allerton was hinting at.
‘But I suppose, since you yourself professed your intention to marry,’ she said airily – quite forgetting, it seemed, that it had been she who had professed this, not Arthur – ‘I might as well confess I had always harboured a quiet dream that you and Hetty might make a famous match.’
Arthur could no longer contain himself. ‘Good God.’
Mr Thimbleby gave a little cough. ‘By your leave, my lord …’
‘Yes, thank you, Thimbleby. If you could call again … at the end of the week, perhaps? And I will …’ Arthur trailed off, unsure of how to conclude the sentence. For what was he going to do at the end of the week?
‘Advise me on your course of action?’ Thimbleby suggested hopefully.
The idea of Arthur being able to achieve such a thing seemed, in that moment, beyond the realms of possibility – but he gave a crisp nod nonetheless. ‘Exactly so!’
Thimbleby did not run for the door, but it was a near thing, fervently hoping that the new Lord Allerton might be able to succeed where he had failed.
‘Mama, you cannot, I hope, have been counting on my marriage to Hetty to save us from this mess.’
‘You have always been such friends!’
‘She is very dear to me, of course—’
‘I suspect that is indeed why her father began sending her to us …’
‘So that she might one day marry an impoverished viscount?’ Arthur was incredulous. ‘Mama, Hetty arrived here as our ward and with eighty thousand pounds to her name – how do you suppose that would look?’
The thought of what people would say, even to know such a match was being considered – that the Allertons had welcomed the heiress into their home, as a girl, just to hold her in waiting for their son? It made him feel rather ill.
‘You object to the match because she is wealthy?’ Lady Allerton said reproachfully. ‘I must say, I think it dreadfully prejudiced of you, Arthur. One ought not hold the circumstances of a person’s birth against them.’
Arthur had forgotten how it was, speaking to his mother.
One might find conversing with an eel less absurd.
Perceiving her advantage, Lady Allerton pressed on: ‘I know she was very young when you went away, but truly, she is much changed now. She has been such a help to me, since your father – Well, I do not think we would have managed without her. You do not find her displeasing?’
‘No, I—’ Arthur broke off before he conceded his mother this ground. For he did not find Hetty displeasing. Indeed, there had been a moment in the entrance hall where Arthur had found himself surprised by quite how much Hetty had altered since he had been away.
Lady Allerton drew herself up indignantly. ‘Is it her freckles? For while I know they are not in the latest mode, I for one believe they suit her very well!’
‘Mama, it has nothing to do with –’ Arthur stopped, and began again: ‘Hetty is very dear to me.’
In some senses Hetty was his closest confidante, however unconventional that might be.
Certainly, there was much about a gentleman’s life one did not share with young ladies (though Arthur was all too frequently guilty of forgetting his rule in Hetty’s company) but that did not render their friendship any less treasured.
Hetty was always ready with a listening ear if he wished to unburden himself, or a teasing comment if he needed to be jostled out of the doldrums; and whenever a member of his family did or said something particularly ridiculous (as was so often the case) it was her eyes he wished to meet to share the joke.
Still, to contemplate being married to Hetty – the mere idea of it was downright peculiar.
‘I do not regard her in such a way.’
‘She would make the most excellent wife!’
‘I do not dispute it.’ Then, brows abruptly furrowing, Arthur asked: ‘Why hasn’t she married? She has been out three years now, has she not?’
‘This is only her second, true, Season,’ his mother corrected. ‘Last year, we were all in mourning.’
Still.
‘You have not communicated this proposition to her?’ Arthur checked. ‘She does not, in any way, believe herself promised to me?’
‘I would certainly not raise the subject before speaking with you first,’ Lady Allerton said hotly. ‘But I think you will find her perfectly amenable and—’
‘Mama, let me be very clear,’ Arthur said, as calmly as he was able. ‘I do not yet know how we are to extricate ourselves from this mess, but I will never countenance using Hetty in such a way.’
Lady Allerton opened her mouth to argue further, but Arthur – suddenly sure he could not withstand a moment more of this – raised his hand to forestall her.
‘I will not marry Hetty,’ he repeated, very firmly, very clearly, ‘and that is my final word.’