скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Oh, Ned, how nice to see you,’ she’d murmured, graciously offering him two fingers and her cheek.
Ned had been lost between admiration and horror. Where had tomboy Nell gone to?
‘Good God, sister, what have they done to you?’
‘I’m a lady now, Ned. I’ve had my come-out and two proposals of marriage. Both unsuitable, I hasten to add. I’ve also got a marquess dangling after me. Not that I care about him; he’s as old as the hills.’
Almeria had surveyed her transformed charge approvingly. ‘Well done, my dear—although we could have done without the bit about the Marquess.’
‘Well done?’ Ned had exclaimed scornfully. ‘What do you think that Stacy will have to say about this?’ He had flipped his hand derisively in his sister’s direction. ‘I thought that you, at least, were a girl of sense. Never thought that propriety would overtake you, Nell.’
‘Eleanor,’ she’d said automatically, colouring faintly and moving away from him. ‘Nell’s days are over. Sir Hart was right. My behaviour was not proper. In any case, I have to leave now. I need to change for Lady Lyttelton’s soirée.’
‘Oh, you’ll come about, I’m sure,’ Ned had said uneasily, but she hadn’t. Some of their old rapport had returned, but the Nell who had romped with Ned, Nat and Stacy had gone for ever.
Now, sitting opposite to her, months later, drinking coffee and nursing a thick head after the previous evening’s debauchery, he asked, somewhat blearily, ‘Going to be in this afternoon, Eleanor?’
She looked up from her plate. ‘I shall be with Charles and his tutor until four-thirty, and then I’m free. Why?’
‘I’ve invited an Australian friend I made last night to meet me here around half past four. I promised to take him to Cremorne Gardens this evening. Thought that you might like to meet him before we go.’
He did not say so, but Ned was hoping to play a jolly jape—his words—on his sister when Alan arrived. It was all that she deserved for turning herself into such a fashionable prig.
‘An Australian?’ said Almeria Stanton doubtfully. ‘Is he a gentleman, Ned?’
‘As much as I am,’ returned Ned ambiguously. ‘Which isn’t saying much, I know. But I think that you’ll like the look of him.’
He laughed to himself when he said this, and watched Nell rise gracefully from the table. She and Great-Aunt Almeria were about to spend the morning shopping in Bond Street, an occupation which the Nell who had once been Ned’s boon companion would have rejected completely.
Never mind that, though. Ned nearly choked over his coffee when he thought of the shock she would get when she met Alan Dilhorne. He wondered idly what his new friend might be doing on this bright and shining early summer morning.
Alan was enjoying himself by combining business with pleasure. He rose early, ate a large breakfast and arrived at Dilhorne and Sons’ London office promptly at ten. They were situated in one of the rabbit warren of streets in the City, at the far end of a filthy alley. This appeared to signify nothing, since several of the dingy offices sported brass plates bearing the names of businesses equally if not more famous than Dilhorne’s.
He still wore his disgraceful clothes, and the clerk in the outer office gave him a look which could only be called insolent.
‘Yes?’ he drawled, not even putting down his quill pen. His contemptuous look dismissed this poorly dressed anonymous young man.
‘I have an appointment with Mr George Johnstone at ten of the clock,’ Alan announced without preamble.
‘Doubt it.’ The clerk’s drawl was more insolent than ever. ‘He never gets in before ten thirty, mostly not until eleven.’
‘Indeed.’
Alan looked around the untidy, disordered room, and listened to the staff chattering together instead of working. He noted the clerk’s languid manner and the idle way in which he entered figures into a dog-eared ledger. He reminded himself that his father, always known to his family as the Patriarch, had sent him to England with instructions to find out what was going wrong with the London end of the business.
He wondered grimly what the Patriarch would do in this situation. Something devious, probably, like not announcing who he was in order to discover exactly how inefficient the business had become. Yes, that was it. They could hang themselves, so to speak, in front of him. Yes, deviousness was the order of the day.
‘I’ll wait,’ he offered, a trifle timidly.
‘I shouldn’t,’ said the clerk, grinning at Alan’s deplorable trousers. ‘He won’t see you without an appointment—and I’ve no note of one here.’
Alan forbore to say that, judging by the mismanagement he could see in the office and its slovenly appearance, the clerk’s list might be neither accurate nor reliable.
Time crawled by. When the clock struck eleven the clerk looked at Alan and said, ‘Still with us, then?’
‘Nothing better to do.’ Alan was all shy, juvenile charm, which the clerk treated as shy, juvenile charm should be treated by a man of the world: with contempt.
‘Pity.’ The clerk’s sympathy was non-existent.
Everyone stopped work at eleven-thirty. One of the junior clerks was sent out for porter. Alan looked around, identified where the privy might be, used it, and came back again to take up his post before the clerk’s desk.
‘Thought you’d gone,’ tittered one of the younger men, currying favour with the older ones, waving his pot of porter at him.
No one offered Alan porter. He resisted the urge to give the jeering young man a good kick and sat back in his uncomfortable chair.
It was twelve-fifteen by the clock when George Johnstone entered, blear-eyed and yawning. The clerk waved a careless hand at Alan. ‘Young gentleman to see you, Mr Johnstone.’
Johnstone looked at Alan in some surprise.
‘Good God, Ned, what are you doing here? Still wearing those dreadful clothes, I see. Lost all the Hatton money?’
‘I came to see how hard you businessmen work.’
Alan’s imitation of Ned’s speech was perfect enough to deceive Johnstone.
‘Come into my office, then. Thought that I’d have a visitor waiting to see me. Some colonial savage—but he’s obviously given me a miss. Or he’s late. You can entertain me until he arrives.’
Alan followed him into his office. It was little cleaner or tidier than the one which the clerks occupied.
‘Have a drink,’ offered Johnstone, going immediately to a tantalus on a battered sideboard. ‘Must get ready for Baby Bear.’
‘Not in the morning,’ said Alan, still using Ned’s voice.
‘T’isn’t morning,’ said Johnstone, sitting down and swallowing his brandy in one gulp. ‘By God, that’s better. Hair of the dog. But have it your way, Ned.’
‘I fully intend to,’ returned Alan, in his own voice this time. He rose abruptly: now to do the Patriarch on him. He leaned forward, seized Johnstone by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet with a jerk. He let go of the astonished man and stood back.
‘Stand up when you speak to me, you idle devil!’
His cold ferocity, so unlike Ned Hatton’s easy charm, was frightening in itself. Coming from someone with Ned’s face it was also overpoweringly disconcerting.
‘You aren’t Ned!’ squeaked Johnstone, beginning to sit down again.
‘How perceptive of you. No, I’m not. And stand up when Baby Bear speaks to you.’
‘Oh, by God, you weren’t Ned Hatton last night, were you?’
‘No, I wasn’t Ned Hatton last night, either. I am your employer, Tom Dilhorne’s son Alan, come over without his chains to find out what has gone wrong with the London end of the business. I only needed to look at you to find out. Would you care to explain how a worthless fine gentleman like yourself came to be in charge here?’
‘But why do you look exactly like Ned Hatton? Are you his cousin?’
Alan surveyed Johnstone wearily. ‘No, I’m not his cousin. It’s just a strange likeness, that’s all. Pure chance. And I’m not a pigeon for the plucking like poor Ned, either—which you found out last night.’
‘Doosed bad form that, pretending to be Ned Hatton.’
‘You called me Ned first. You were so dam’d eager to fleece him that you couldn’t look at him properly. You haven’t answered my question.’
‘What question?’
Alan sighed. ‘How you came to be in charge here? Good God man, where’s your memory?’
‘I was Jack Montagu’s friend. He knew I needed to find work so he made me the manager here when he married his heiress.’
‘I suppose you think that you’ve been working. Good God, man, you don’t know the meaning of the word, but you will by the time that I’ve finished with you.
‘I want to inspect all your books and papers. I want to interview every clerk in your employment, see all contracts, bills of sale, be given a full account of all transactions, wages, rents, and what you’re paying for this hole—it had better be cheap. In short, I want a full account of the whole business, and I want everything ready for inspection by ten of the clock tomorrow. Not ten-thirty, mind, but ten. You take me, I’m sure.’
This last sentence was delivered in a savage imitation of Johnstone’s own gentlemanly drawl.
Johnstone blenched. ‘I can’t, Dilhorne, you’re mad.’
‘Sir, to you,’ said Alan, in the Patriarch’s hardest voice. ‘You can and you will, or it will be the worse for you.’
‘Good God, sir, it will take all night.’
‘Then take all night. You and the rest of the idlers in the other room have wasted enough of the firm’s time and money. Now you can make some of it up.’
Johnstone sank back into his chair, his face grey.
‘I didn’t give you leave to sit, you idle devil. You’ll remain standing until I leave.’
Mutinously Johnstone rose, silently consigning all sandy-haired young Australians to the deepest pit of Hell.
‘Now mind me,’ said Alan pleasantly. ‘You’ll jump when I say jump, and you’ll say please nicely when I ask you to if you don’t want instant dismissal. And if you think that Baby Bear plays a rough hand I can’t recommend you to meet Father Bear. He’d not only eat your porridge, he’d eat you, too.’
He strolled into the outer office, leaving behind him a stunned and shaken man. The clerk, quite unaware of what had taken place in Johnstone’s room, gave him yet another insolent grin, and said, ‘Got your interview, did you? Not long, was it?’
‘Yes,’ said Alan sweetly. He looked judiciously at the clerk, registered his leer, leaned forward, picked up his inkwell and slowly poured its contents over the page of ill-written figures which the clerk had been carelessly copying from various invoices, receipts and notes of hand.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ yelped the clerk. ‘That’s my morning’s work ruined.’
‘Well, you ruined my morning’s work,’ said Alan reasonably, head on one side, surveying the havoc he had wrought. ‘You can do it again, legibly this time.’
He turned and shouted at the door behind him, ‘Johnstone! Come here at once!’
To the clerk’s astonishment the door opened and a respectful Johnstone appeared.
‘Sir?’ he said to Alan, and the office fell silent at the sound.
‘What is this man’s name?’ asked Alan.
He still had the inkwell in his hand and he leisurely began to pour the remains of the ink on to the clerk’s head. The clerk let out another strangled yelp and looked reproachfully through the black rain, first at Alan and then at the subservient Johnstone.
‘Phipps,’ Johnstone said. ‘Nathaniel Phipps.’
‘Phipps,’ said Alan thoughtfully. ‘Dirty, isn’t he?’ He critically surveyed the ruined ledger and the ink dripping down Phipps’s face.
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed Johnstone nervously.
‘You did it,’ squealed Phipps at Alan. ‘He did it, Mr Johnstone. Not I.’
“‘You did it, sir,” is the correct usage,’ said Alan, putting down the empty inkwell. ‘Say it after me, please.’
‘Mr Johnstone, sir,’ roared Phipps desperately. ‘Please stop this madman.’
‘Madman? Tut-tut,’ said Alan. ‘And if I am mad you’ve driven me into that condition, what with making me wait over two hours in a dam’d uncomfortable chair and enduring your insolence while I did so. I’ve a short fuse, which anyone who works for me soon finds out.’
This was a lie, but Phipps was too agitated to care.
‘Works for you! I don’t work for you! I work for Mr Johnstone.’
‘And he works for me,’ said Alan gently. He picked up the clerk’s quill pen, and with the whole office and Johnstone watching him silently, breath drawn in, he rolled it in the ink and negligently wrote his initials on Phipps’s forehead.
‘Yes, he works for me, and so do you now. You’re mine, Phipps. Alan Dilhorne’s property so long as you’re in this room. Unless, of course, you care to resign.’
The silence in the room grew more deathly, broken only by the clerk’s whimpering while he scrubbed at his face with his handkerchief. ‘This can’t be true, Mr Johnstone.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ said Alan. ‘Now clean up your disgusting person and your disgraceful work and do it again: properly this time.’
‘It’s not fair,’ said Phipps tearfully. ‘You should have told me who you were.’
Alan’s face was suddenly like stone. ‘Ah, but you see, I needed to know how you would treat someone whom you didn’t know was your employer’s son, and I found out, didn’t I. Didn’t I, Phipps? And if you can’t see what was wrong with what you’ve just said, then we shall never get Dilhorne and Sons’ London branch straight again, shall we?’
He swung round and addressed his staring staff. ‘The rest of you can get down to it immediately, and do an honest day’s work for once. You’re none of you fit to work in my Sydney office. Mr Johnstone will tell you what I expect of you by tomorrow, and God help you all if it’s not ready by ten.’
He walked to the door before turning and delivering his parting shot.
‘Oh, and by the by, mid-morning porter is out, from today!’
Chapter Two
T hat afternoon Eleanor left the schoolroom, where she had been working with Charles and young Mr Dudley, and decided that, four-thirty being almost upon her, she would not trouble to change her clothes in order to meet Ned’s Australian friend. She was still wearing her deep blue walking dress and that would have to do.
She had reached the last step of the graceful staircase which spiralled to the top of the house when she met Staines, the butler. He bowed and said ‘Mr Ned is in the drawing room, Miss Eleanor, awaiting his friend, and asks you to join him there.’
Somehow Eleanor gained the impression that he was enjoying a small private joke. She immediately dismissed this notion as fanciful and walked across the stone-flagged hall to the drawing room door.
She should have trusted to her instincts. Ned had spent the afternoon avoiding her. He had also given orders to Staines for Mr Alan Dilhorne to be taken straight to the small drawing room with the message that Mr Ned Hatton would shortly join him there.
