Page 7 of Henrietta

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?’