False Colours Read online

  Eighteen

  There was no more to be got from Sir Bonamy, who went off to enjoy his usual afternoon sleep in the library, saying that he was glad not to have that fidgety fellow, Cliffe, sharing the room with him any longer. Kit made no attempt to detain him. Every feeling might revolt against allowing his mother to be so deeply indebted to a man upon whom she had no claim, and who stood outside the family, but he could perceive no way either of forcing Sir Bonamy to state the sum of her obligation to him, or of discharging the debt, if he surmounted that first obstacle.

  The Cliffes were gone within an hour of rising from the nuncheon table; and Kit waited only to see them off before going across the park to Nurse Pinner’s cottage. He found Fimber, whom he had sent there earlier with a couple of bottles of wine, engaged in rather more than usually acrimonious hostilities with Nurse, and for once at a disadvantage, since the noble object of their jealousy was once more, and for the first time since her retirement, restored to Nurse’s fond and despotic care. Fimber had scored a point in having his services in helping his lordship to dress preferred to Nurse’s; but he had been obliged to yield to her superior skill in bandaging; to endure, in tight-lipped silence, her sharply authoritative warnings and instructions when he eased my lord into his shirt and coat; and to suppress his wrath at my lord’s tacit refusal to send her out of his tiny bedroom while he was dressed. She bustled in and out, full of interference, and addressing her nursling with such endearments as she had used during his childhood, so that the only course open to his valet was to adopt an attitude of meticulous respect towards a young gentleman whom he was burning to scold and to cross-question.

  When Kit walked into the parlour, Fimber bowed, and immediately informed him that he would find his lordship in the garden. He added, dropping his voice in the manner of one imparting a confidence whose significance was known only to himself and Kit, that he would find his lordship a trifle on the fidgets.

  ‘Lord bless the man, what else was to be expected?’ Nurse exclaimed scornfully. ‘Do you go out to him, Master Kit! And if he is to go up to the house this evening, as her ladyship wishes, you may bring him back here, though there’s not a bit of need, for I can help him out of his coat better than you or Fimber. Nor I don’t want Fimber to come fussing round him at that hour of night, keeping him awake till all hours, with brushing his clothes, and I don’t know what besides, in the finicking way he has!’

  ‘Well, we can talk about that later, Pinny,’ Kit said pacifically. He added, with the flicker of an eyelid at the outraged valet: ‘Better get back to the house now, Fimber, or Norton will begin to wonder what’s become of you.’

  He then made good his escape into the small, enclosed garden at the back of the cottage, where he found Evelyn moodily winding his way along the narrow paths which separated various beds filled with vegetables and currant bushes. Nurse had carried a chair out, and placed it in the shade of an apple tree; an open book lay on the ground beside it, with a clutter of newspapers and magazines.

  Kit said cheerfully: ‘I wouldn’t be in your shoes for something, twin! There’s a pitched battle going on in the parlour!’

  Evelyn was looking moody, but he laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t mind that! They’ve been skirmishing over me ever since you sent Fimber here. The thing is that every time he starts to give me one of his thundering scolds Pinny comes back into the room, so he’s obliged to stop, because by the mercy of God neither combs my hair if the other is present. I can’t think why not, but I can tell you I’m thankful for it! Has Mama managed to send the Cliffes packing? She said she meant to, if she could only hit upon a means of doing it. Did she?’

  ‘Can you doubt it? I’ve just been waving farewell to them.’

  ‘Mama is wonderful! How did she contrive to make them shab off?’

  ‘By telling them that there was not an outbreak of scarlet fever in the village. I was afraid, when she began to talk of sickness, she was going to make it small-pox, which would have been doing it too brown. If you’re coming up to the house tonight, I’d best meet you in the nursery-wing, to make sure the coast is clear. Lady Stavely goes to bed at ten and the servants won’t come into the drawing-room once the tea-tray has been taken away.’

  Evelyn nodded. ‘Yes, very well. Kester, I think I’ll go to Tunbridge Wells tomorrow. That’s one piece of business I can settle – and if I stay cooped up here for much longer I shall go mad!’

  ‘I should think you might,’ agreed Kit. ‘But you can’t go to Tunbridge Wells, for all that.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Kester, don’t you start talking fustian about my broken shoulder!’ Evelyn exclaimed irritably.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about your shoulder. The fact is, Eve, you can’t go anywhere until I’ve disappeared. How are you to get there? Challow can’t drive you there in the curricle, because for one thing, someone would be bound to see you, and recognize you; and, for another, he can’t take the curricle out secretly, you know.’

  ‘But he can take it out at your orders, and bring you here in it,’ Evelyn pointed out, an impish gleam in his eyes. ‘Then, dear twin, you can take my place here, in hiding, and I can go to Tunbridge Wells!’

  ‘Leaving my guests to fend for themselves! I would, if the matter were of no particular urgency, but as it doesn’t seem to be – no!’

  Evelyn sighed. ‘I suppose not. But you’ll have to leave them, if you mean to go to Brighton in my stead.’

  ‘I don’t. I came to talk to you about that,’ Kit said. ‘Let’s sit down!’

  He dragged Evelyn’s chair up to a wooden bench, and himself sat on the bench. ‘You won’t like this,’ he warned Evelyn, ‘but you’ve got to know it.’ He drew from his pocket the roll of bills Evelyn had given him, and handed it to him. ‘Here are your flimsies: they won’t be needed. The brooch was not counterfeit. I doubt whether any of Mama’s jewelry is – not even the necklace she says she sold on your behalf.’

  Evelyn frowned at him, flushing slightly. ‘What the devil do you mean? She told me herself she had sold the brooch, and had had it copied!’

  ‘Yes, that’s what she told me. But she also told me that she had several times employed Ripple to sell trinkets for her, which I imagine you didn’t know.’

  ‘You may be very sure I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, the long and the short of it, Eve, is that Ripple never sold anything for her. He gave her the price of that brooch and what he told her was a copy of it.’

  Evelyn stiffened, his hand closing on the roll of bills so tightly that his knuckles whitened. His eyes blazed for an instant, then he lowered them to his clenched hand, and opened his fingers. ‘Why didn’t you give him this, then?’

  Kit shrugged, half-smiling. ‘You may be able to: I found I couldn’t.’

  ‘Kester, he had no right – !’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is intolerable!’ Evelyn said, in a suffocating voice. ‘How much does Mama owe him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘He will tell me!’

  ‘He won’t, Eve. Or anyone. I think you had better hear what passed between us.’

  Evelyn nodded, his lips compressed. But when Kit reached the end of his unquestioned recital, the white, angry look had left his face, and although he still frowned there was a softer light in his eyes. He did not speak immediately, but a rather bitter smile curled his lips, and presently he said: ‘My father left me one thing I forgot to mention last night – humiliation! I shan’t be rid of that until I’ve repaid Ripple.’

  ‘It isn’t in your power to repay him, twin.’

  ‘Not yet. But it will be – when I’m thirty, if not before. I must talk to him.’

  ‘Of course – but he bade me tell you it was none of your business, since it all happened during my father’s lifetime, when you couldn’t have rescued Mama. An