Free A Strange Likeness by Paula Marshall

mother.’
    â€˜Certainly, Sir Patrick. I believe that you left Sydney shortly after my birth,’ he said, adding slyly, ‘You do not object to eating with the felon’s son, I take it?’
    Sir Patrick dropped Alan’s arm and turned to face him. ‘I grew to admire your father before I left. Although I’m bound to say that he frightened me, too. In an odd way, that is.’
    Alan laughed. ‘He frightens us all. But the Patriarch is a great man.’
    Sir Patrick stopped short and began to laugh. ‘The Patriarch, is it?’ he choked. ‘Let me tell you later of one of my favourite memories of your father. He was pretending to be dead drunk when lying under the gaming table in Madame Phoebe’s brothel. The Patriarch! Well! Well! And do you play, Master Alan? Are you a fly-boy, too?’
    â€˜A little,’ replied Alan modestly. ‘Only a little.’
    So it came to pass that he dined with a laird of thirty thousand acres in Scotland, twenty thousand in England, who owned two castles, three country houses, four follies, who had a clever and beautiful wife, and whose happiest memories were of his days as a penniless officer in a frontier town in the Pacific when all the world seemed young and merry.
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    Alan liked visiting Stanton House. Its interior was beautiful after a fashion quite different from his home in Sydney, which was furnished in the Eastern style. Instead it contained all that was best in European taste, from the paintings on the walls to the objets d’art which stood everywhere, and the furniture on the elegantly carpetedparquet. Best of all he liked its owner, Almeria, and her charge, Eleanor Hatton.
    Shortly after Almeria had launched him on London society she invited him to dinner to introduce him not only to Sir Richard Johnstone, but also to his Loring cousins.
    â€˜It will be a splendid opportunity for you to make your peace with them,’ she had said.
    He arrived promptly, wearing his new evening clothes. Eleanor, greeting him, thought that, while in one sense it was necessary for him to conform to the society in which he was now mixing, they diminished him in another. He looked more like the smooth young men she knew, and less like the strange, exciting man she had first met.
    â€˜Ah, Mr Dilhorne, you are as prompt as I expected you to be,’ Almeria told him. Privately she contrasted him with careless Ned and other members of the Hatton family, who had been asked to be sure to arrive in the drawing room in time to meet Alan and her other visitors but who had not yet come down.
    Alan, indeed, soon became aware that beneath her usual calm manner she was vexed about something. Finally, in a lull in the conversation, she rang the bell for Staines and asked him to enquire of Mrs Henrietta Hatton whether she had forgotten that she had promised to come down early for dinner in order to meet Mr Dilhorne before Sir Richard and the Lorings arrived.
    He bowed deferentially. ‘I believe, m’lady, that they are on their way downstairs. I gather that there was a slight misunderstanding involving Master Beverley when they first set out, but that has now been overcome.’
    Young Charles Stanton, who was being allowed down to dinner that evening, gave a slight guffaw. His grandmother said, ‘Thank you, Staines,’ before looking over athim and remarking glacially, ‘You wished to say something, Master Stanton?’
    â€˜N…n…not at all, grandmother,’ he stuttered. He was so unlike his usual well-behaved and quiet self that Alan wondered what was wrong with him. Eleanor, as well as Charles and Almeria, was also on edge. Her welcome to him had seemed somewhat distracted—which was most unlike her. He was soon to find out why the atmosphere in the pretty room was so tense.
    Mrs Henrietta Hatton burst into the room all aflutter, immediately behind her unruly son whom she was unsuccessfully pursuing. She was,