The Other Cathy (26 page)

‘If you’ve called to see Aunt Chloe, I’m afraid she’s having her afternoon nap,’ Emma said coolly.

‘I anticipated that. It’s you I want to see.’

Without waiting for an invitation Blanche marched straight past Emma and into the drawing room. At that moment Nelly
appeared through the baize door behind the stairs, adjusting
her white cap in a fluster.

Emma said, ‘It’s all right, Nelly, I’ve let my aunt in, but I suppose you’d better bring some tea.’ It
sounded most ungracious, but she didn’t care about that.

With the door closed, Blanche turned to face her.

‘I thought it was my duty to come and warn you, Emma.’

‘Warn me, Aunt Blanche? About what?’

‘I think you know perfectly well. It is quite scandalous the
way you’re setting your cap at Matthew Sutcliffe. It has not gone unremarked that you have been seeing a good deal of him.’

‘That hardly surprises me. Bythorpe folk love something to
gossip about,’

‘Do not think that you can lightly dismiss the opinion of
others. This person with whom you’ve become so friendly
is the selfsame man who killed your father. You won’t be
allowed to forget the fact if you continue to associate with him.’

‘But you do not mind being seen to associate with him,’
Emma pointed out.

‘That is an entirely different matter. I am a mature woman,
not an inexperienced girl like you, and I can look after myself.
Besides, if you were not so infatuated, Emma, you would realise
that he is merely playing with you. What a triumph it would be for him to captivate Hugh Hardaker’s daughter.’

Blanche’s shaft went home and for a moment Emma felt
shaken. Then she rallied her confidence in Matthew. She
trusted his sincerity, believed in his love for her.

‘I have told him to his face that I can see through his tricks,’ Blanche went on. ‘Matthew and I understand one another
very well, Emma, and so we should! Only last night I warned
him that I would not stand by and allow him to break your
heart, just for his own gratification.’

‘You saw him last night?’ Emma whispered, catching her
breath. ‘Do you mean that he visited you?’

‘As a matter of fact, no,’ Blanche conceded. ‘But I happened to be going in that direction, so I called in at Oakroyd House.’

Emma breathed again. It was apparent what had happened.
Matthew had been keeping well clear of Blanche, so finally she
had decided to visit him.

Nelly entered with the tea tray, placing it on the sofa table.
The interruption gave Emma time to consider how best to deal
with Blanche.

‘And what was Matthew’s reply when you accused him of
trifling with my affections?’ she asked.

‘He tried to deny it, of course. What else would you ex
pect?’ Blanche moved gracefully to a sofa and seated herself,
arranging the folds of her pale green foulard. She extended
her gloved hand to Emma in earnest appeal. ‘You must listen to me, my dearest child. You may feel keenly attracted to Matthew Sutcliffe – and who am I to blame you for that? But he cannot be yours, not ever. You see, Matthew and I – well,
there could never be any other woman for him.’ She inclined
her head, looking up at Emma with candid eyes. ‘The two of us are bound together by links that can never be broken – though I cannot expect you to fully understand me.’

‘On the contrary, I understand you very well! You believe
that if I were not standing in your way you’d be able to be
witch Matthew as you did once before, all those years ago. You
see, Aunt Blanche, I know everything. I know that you and
Matthew were lovers in those days.’

‘He told you?’ Taken aback, Blanche rose to her feet, but Emma still had the advantage of height. They stared at each other in undisguised hostility until Blanche, rallying a little,
went on scornfully, ‘You say it so glibly, child, but you have
no real conception of what the word means.’

‘I know what it meant to you –
exactly
what it meant to
you! Matthew explained how you were in a position to prove
his innocence, but kept silent. He told me you and he were -were together, at the very time my father was killed. You could have saved him from being transported, but you preferred to protect your reputation. It is the most shameful,
despicable thing I have ever heard. Yet you can still delude
yourself that Matthew will turn to you again.’

Blanche’s fine golden eyes blazed with anger.

‘Will
turn! You little fool, he has done so already. I knew
the instant I met him at dinner here that first evening. I saw it in his whole demeanour towards me. Matthew could no
more spurn me now than he could stop breathing.’

‘If you are so certain of him,’ Emma persisted, ‘then why are
you telling me all this?’

‘I am trying to save you the humiliation of discovering the
truth after you have committed your heart to him. The fact
that I love Matthew does not blind my eyes to what he truly is.
He can be a ruthless man, Emma. You must be made to
understand that.’

‘And if he is ruthless, as you claim, could it not be that all
those bitter years as a wrongly convicted felon have made him
so? Especially when he remembers the woman who could have
saved him, but remained silent. No, it is you, Aunt Blanche, whom Matthew has been manipulating. Quite deliberately, he has allowed you to believe that his former passion for you
miraculously survived his ordeal ... because he hoped to make
use of you to prove his innocence.’ Head up, Emma challenged her aunt with a penetrating look. ‘Isn’t this what you learned from Matthew himself last night?’

‘How absurd you are! Matthew adores me. He told me I
am the sun and the stars to him.’

‘Why then have you come hurrying to see me today?’
Emma demanded.
‘
I think you imagine that even now you
have a chance to win Matthew back, if only you could dispose of me as your rival. But I am not your rival, aunt, because
whether I existed or not, there would never be any hope for
you with Matthew Sutcliffe.’

Blanche’s breath came rapidly, her fine bosom rising and falling. The beauty of her face had fled, leaving only the ugliness of anger and hatred.

‘How smug you are! But just remember this! If Matthew was fool enough to ask you to become his wife, the stigma
attached to him would become your stigma too, but magni
fied one hundredfold. In the eyes of the whole world you
would be condoning his crime – the brutal killing of your father.’

Emma felt a surge of triumph over this vicious, malignant woman who faced her.

‘You are forgetting that Matthew can prove his innocence now. You have confessed to me that he was with you on the
night of my father’s death.’

‘Do not be so confident! Who would believe such an unlikely story? Ask yourself that!’

‘But you have just admitted it,’ Emma faltered.

‘Only within these four walls! Should you attempt to re
peat this conversation, I shall deny it emphatically. Be in no
doubt of that, Emma.’

Some of Blanche’s poise and self-assurance had returned.
Sweeping across the room, she paused with one hand on the door knob and looked back at her niece.

‘Take my advice and forget Matthew Sutcliffe. Even without these insurmountable obstacles, he is still not the man for you.
Matthew is full of fire, full of male arrogance. A woman like
me can handle that. I can control and tame him as a young
girl never could. Your choice should be someone of your own
measure, my dear – and there is such a man who is only too eager and willing. Bernard Mottram is taking over Paget’s
practice and will be in a position to marry you – and if you don’t decide to accept him soon, you’ll find that he’s been
snapped up from under your very nose.’

With a quick rustle of silken skirts she was gone from the
room. Emma heard the light tapping of heels across the hall;
the front door was opened, and closed with a slam. Outside,
the wheels of the carriage grated on the gravel drive as Blanche
drove off, the sound fading quickly until there was silence.

Emma sank on to the sofa and gazed unseeingly at the for
gotten tea things. A full ten minutes went by before she
found the strength to leave the drawing room. How ridiculous to allow herself to be crushed by Blanche; that had been her
aunt’s whole purpose in coming here this afternoon. Nothing
had changed, however hard this was to believe after the dreadful things that had just been said between them. Her task – hers and Matthew’s – was still the same, to establish his innocence and clear his name; and she must proceed with
that purpose undeterred.

Composed again, Emma recollected what she was going to
do when Blanche’s arrival had interrupted her. Of course -
her father’s books! She must have a look at the one dealing
with patents. She slipped stealthily into the empty study and
closed the door behind her with elaborate care. It felt
strange being there without Uncle Randolph’s invitation; for a second she recaptured the special sense of dignity associated
with his sanctum, visualising her uncle waiting before the
hearth to greet her, sternly or jovially, as circumstance dic
tated. The afternoon sun sent a golden shaft across the room, highlighting the portrait of Grandfather Hardaker above the
mantel, gleaming mellowly on the polished mahogany furni
ture and glancing off the pair of polished brass oil lamps upon
the desk. Emma crossed to the secretaire in the alcove and
almost immediately spotted the book she sought. She stood on a chair to open the glass-panelled doors and drew out the volume bound in black morocco. As she lifted it down some
thing slipped from between the leaves and fell to the floor.
Emma got down and picked up a large sheet of white parchment, folded several times in the manner of a legal document.
She read the inscription neatly written on the outside.

An Improved Method of Producing Continuous Wool Sliver
from a Carding Engine by means of Traversing Ring Doffers.
Underneath this heading ran a declaration, the sense of which rook her breath away.

I
,
Arnold Ramshaw Sutcliffe, a British subject, of Bythorpe in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, do hereby declare this invention to be described in the following statement.

Arnold Sutcliffe! Not Hugh Hardaker! With a thudding
heart Emma unfolded the large sheet and perused the docu
ment. The legal-sounding phrases and accompanying technical
diagrams meant precious little to her, but the calligraphy
claimed her attention; it was a hand she recognised, or thought
she did. Hurriedly replacing the book on its shelf and closing
the doors, Emma left the room as quietly as she had entered
and fled upstairs clutching the parchment. She seized the
packet of love letters from the bed and took one out, spread
ing it with trembling fingers alongside the patent application. Yes, there could be no doubt, the handwriting was identical -the individual shape of each letter, the bold horizontal scoring
of the t, the long graceful loops. This specification had been
drafted by her father – in Matthew’s father’s name. Why?

The idea began to form in her mind, rapidly taking shape.
Arnold Sutcliffe had been skillful in handling machinery -he’d had to be, as overlooker at the mill. But doubtless he
had had little in the way of formal teaching, and the task of
preparing a statement in the correct legal form would have daunted him. What more natural than for him to seek advice from a man with the necessary education. Her father, having
agreed to help, had himself prepared this specification in
Arnold Sutcliffe’s name. But the invention was officially regis
tered at the Patent Office in London in the name of Hugh
Hardaker. So what had occurred in the interval to cause this
change? The answer came quickly, Arnold Sutcliffe’s death!

Arnold Sutcliffe would have been cautious about telling
anyone of his invention – wasn’t secrecy the first essential
with any new development until it was safely registered? So
probably he had spoken of it to no one but his son and the
one other person in whom he placed implicit trust, his em
ployer – her father. Then, unhappily before he could reap
benefit from his invention, before even the patent was applied
for, the poor man had died. And Hugh Hardaker had seized
his chance of taking the credit for it himself.

In her heart, Emma realised, she had already accepted this, convinced by Matthew’s burning sincerity. Yet, even so, such positive proof that her father had lied and cheated brought
its own anguish. She forced herself to set aside her filial feelings and think only of Matthew. Her father was dead, he be
longed to the past, while Matthew was a living, breathing man who had suffered grievously from a sequence of events which
sprang from her father’s wrongdoing. If this document she
had discovered were proof that her father was a cheat, then at
the same time it vindicated Matthew. It could be used to
establish that he was an innocent man.