the great names of the social world patronised. Besides, they were rarely raided by the authorities.
The gaming half of Rosie’s was a large room with card tables at one end and supper tables spread with food and drink at the other. The food was lavish, and included oysters, lobster patties and salmis of game and salmon. The drink was varied: port, sherries, light and heavy wines stood about in bottles and decanters.
Alan, who was hungry, sampled the food and found it good. The drink he avoided, except for one glass of light wine which he disposed of into a potted palm, remembering his father, the Patriarch’s, prudent advice.
Disliking bought sex—another consequence of his father’s advice—he smilingly refused Ned’s suggestion that he pick one of the girls and sample the goods upstairs.
‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘Much too tired for exhausting games in bed. I think that I’d prefer a quiet hand of cards—or even to watch other people play.’
‘Suit yourself,’ said Ned agreeably. He was always agreeable, Alan was to find, and this was a handicap as well as a virtue, since little moved him deeply.
‘Play cards by all means,’ Ned continued. ‘Girls are better, though. I always score with the girls, much more rarely at cards. Don’t wait for me, Dilhorne. I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon at Stanton House.’ He had earlier invited Alan to visit him at his great-aunt Almeria’s, his base when he was in London.
He went upstairs on the arm of the Madame, a pretty girl in tow, leaving Alan with the other highly foxed member of the party slumped on a bench near the gaming tables. Alan made himself comfortable in a large armchair which gave him a good view of the room. Sitting there, half-asleep, he watched two well-dressed members of the ton enter. One of them flapped an idle hand at him, and murmured, ‘Evening, Ned.’
Alan did not disabuse him. He could tell that they were both slightly tipsy, at the voluble stage, and when they seated themselves at a table near him the larger, noisier one began chaffing the other about a visitor he was expecting to arrive at his office on the following morning—‘Or rather, this morning, to have it proper.’ He had apparently reached the pedantic stage of drunkenness.
‘From New South Wales, I understand, Johnstone.’
The other laughed humourlessly. ‘Yes—if it isn’t bad enough that I have to earn a living at all, I’m expected to dance attendance on a pack of colonial savages who have set up in London and are sending one of their cubs to tell us our business. I understand that Father Bear went out there in chains. What a set!’
‘And when do you expect Baby Bear?’
‘Tomorrow, as I said. He sent me a note today, telling me that I am to have the honour of his presence at ten. The honour of his presence! And at ten! I don’t recognise the time. Well, Baby Bear will have to wait. He proposed the time, not me. The honour of his presence, indeed!’
He choked with laughter again, spluttering through his drink, ‘Young Master Alan Dilhorne must fancy himself.’
Alan had early begun to suspect exactly who Johnstone was speaking of, and this last sentence confirmed it. The true son of his devious father, he gave nothing away. Johnstone had risen, looked over at him and said, ‘A game of cards, Ned?’
Alan nodded. At some point he would have to speak. He, and not his older twin, Thomas, had inherited their father’s talent for mimicry. He tried out Ned’s voice in his head. It was light and careless, higher than his own, a very English upper-class drawl. He thought that he could pull it off. Impersonating Ned would be harder than some of the tricks he had played at home—but it would give him a different form of amusement.
Meantime, he warned himself, he must watch his vowels—it wouldn’t hurt to appear to be a little drunk. Johnstone and his pal called in another man so that they could sit down in pairs to play piquet. Johnstone against Alan, and his friend against the stranger. Alan prayed that Ned would not return; he had said that he would not, but one thing was very plain: he was not reliable and said whatever pleased him at the time.
It soon became equally plain that, for Johnstone, Ned was a pigeon to be plucked. He assumed that Ned was both drunk and careless and his manner was lightly contemptuous. Well, he might be in for a surprise. Alan began by knocking over his glass of light wine and dropping his cards. He fell on to his hands and knees in order to pick them up, exclaiming, ‘The devil’s in them tonight.’
He heard Johnstone and his friends, Lloyd and Fraser, laugh while he continued to offer them the picture of incompetence which they both expected from flighty Ned Hatton. All three, indeed, obviously regarded Ned as little better than a fool. Lloyd even winked at Johnstone when Alan dropped his cards again.
By the end of a couple of hours, though, they were all frowning. Stupid Ned Hatton was having the devil’s own luck, and was far in advance of the game, having consistently won despite muttering and moaning, losing his cards and once depositing all his gaming counters on the floor.
‘Hands and knees business, again,’ he announced cheerfully. ‘Rising like Venus from the waves,’ he drunkenly told them all, before he began winning again. In his last hand, before he broke Johnstone completely, he even Rubiconed him—a feat rarely performed.
‘By God, Ned, you’ve got the cards tonight,’ exclaimed Johnstone, unable to credit that it was skill and not luck which was defeating him.
‘Fool’s luck,’ muttered Alan, picking up yet another of Johnstone’s IOUs with shaking hands. His father’s tuition and his own mathematical skills, honed by several years of running the money-lending side of his father’s business, gave him a good edge over most card players—even those as skilful as Johnstone, who was obviously unused to losing.
Towards the end Alan began to suspect that Johnstone’s friend was shrewd enough to guess that there was something odd about Ned Hatton that night, and when Lloyd’s game came to an end, with him as winner, Alan announced that he was too tired to continue. Since Johnstone had also had enough, they finished playing in the early hours of the morning.
Stone-cold sober, as he had been all along, Alan was careful to stagger out of Rosie’s some little distance behind Johnstone and his friends. The Haymarket was alive with light and noise—he was in the midst of the demi-monde about which his father had warned him. Chance and his strange resemblance to Ned Hatton had brought him here—and had also given him a strange opportunity.
He laughed to himself all the way to Brown’s. Not only would he be better prepared to meet Johnstone in the morning, but he was relishing the prospect of watching the other man’s reaction when someone with Ned Hatton’s face walked into Dilhorne and Sons’ London office.
And in the afternoon he was due to visit Stanton House off Piccadilly. It should be an interesting day.
Although perhaps not quite so surprising as the one just past!
‘You’re up early today,’ Eleanor Hatton commented to a yawning Ned, who had come down for breakfast in the middle of the morning and not at its end.
He took a long look at her and said inconsequentially, ‘I still can’t get used to how much you’ve changed.’
Eleanor smiled somewhat ruefully. She was remembering the first occasion on which Ned had visited Stanton House after her great-aunt Almeria had taken her over. She had only been away from Yorkshire for three months—the longest three months of her life, she had thought at the time.
