On an impulse, Emma decided to go down to Uncle Randolph’s study and have a look at this book. It might, just conceivably, contain some useful clue – a marked passage, perhaps. But she was frustrated in her aim. On her way downstairs she heard a carriage draw up outside, and the doorbell jangled. Going to answer it herself, Emma was surprised to find Blanche standing there.
‘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 expect?’ 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 bewitch 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 magnified 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 repeat 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 forgotten 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 dictated. 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 furniture 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 something 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 document. 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, spreading 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 registered 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 employer – 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 belonged 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.
There was no time to waste, she must pass on the good news to Matthew at once. With lightning speed she changed her dress and placed the vital papers in her pocket, then thrust the rest of the bundles under the bed to deal with later. Tying on her bonnet she ran downstairs to find Nelly.
‘I am going out,’ she told her firmly, ‘and I don’t know how long I shall be, so you must give Cathy her tea today. I looked in on her just now and she is still asleep.’
Joseph harnessed the trap for her without comment and Emma started off along the same road she had taken with Ursly two weeks ago, then branched off towards the head of the valley. Oakroyd House was perched high on the hillside sheltered by the wooded slopes rising behind, and was in Emma’s sight fully ten minutes before she reached the gates, a fine, solid residence left empty since Sir Richard Armstrong died eight years ago and his heir went to live in London. The carriage drive was flanked by lavender bushes which filled the air with their fragrance. Dashing up to the door, Emma descended from the trap and went up a flight of steps to the pillared porch. Her summons was answered by a young maid servant, bright-eyed with curiosity, and she was shown into a tastefully furnished ante-room. Too tense and excited to sit down, Emma paced the carpet until Matthew came to her.
‘Emma, dearest!’ he exclaimed eagerly, catching her hands and kissing them. ‘It’s wonderful to see you. But what has made you risk coming here?’
She held on to him excitedly. ‘Matthew, I have news! I have discovered the proof that your father invented the Condensing Engine! Look! See what I have here! Read it! No longer can anyone say you were not telling the truth.’
Enthusiastically she spilled out the whole story, and Matthew examined the papers she thrust at him, comparing the handwriting of the patent application with that of her father’s letter. He said nothing. When she searched his eyes for reciprocation of her own gladness she saw only dark uncertainty.
‘What is the matter?’ she cried in dismay. ‘Are you not pleased?’
‘Would to God I could be! This is proof that my father invented the condenser – that I was not lying in my claim. It proves nothing beyond that. We are no nearer being free to marry.’
‘But I don’t understand, Matthew. Surely this is a complete vindication of all you have ever said.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed sombrely. ‘And at the same time it will be held to reinforce my motive for the crime of which I was convicted. Can you not see, Emma? If I established the invention as my father’s it would bring to light the legitimacy of my grievance against Hugh Hardaker, instead of the imaginary one it was believed to be in court. That could only strengthen the case against me and my guilt would be considered all the more proven. To produce this document now would be of no help at all. On the contrary! Far better to conceal it for the time being until we can clear my name of manslaughter.’
Emma felt stricken. Unbelievably, Matthew was spurning this gift she had brought him. Could he really be saying that the evidence she offered him so generously, even though it tainted her own father, was worthless? Even dangerous?
‘I’m sorry, Emma, but what I say is true,’ he said gently. ‘We will keep this specification and produce it at the right time. When that will be, alas, I don’t know.’
Her eyes brimmed with tears and repentantly Matth
ew folded his arms about her, holding her close. But now his warmth and nearness brought her little joy.
Chapter Sixteen
That night Cathy suffered the first massive haemorrhage. Uncle Randolph was out and Chloe was spending the night at High Banks, so Emma had to face the frightening responsibility alone.
All the evening Cathy had been talkative, which was unusual for her. She was rational for the most part and prattled artlessly while Emma, lost in thought, made appropriate noises; but every now and then Cathy’s grasp on reality slipped away and her mind wandered. All of a sudden she was in the throes of a fit of violent coughing which brutally ravaged her thin frame. Emma shot from her chair to help her and when at last, gasping and exhausted, Cathy sank back upon her pillows the blood began to gush from her mouth. Mercifully, Bernard had warned Emma to expect such an emergency as this and she was prepared. She held Cathy in her arms to comfort her, while she ordered Nelly to wring out pads of cloth in cold water to lay upon Cathy’s chest, and hot stone jars to place at her feet.
‘And send Seth to fetch Dr Mottram,’ she whispered urgently, ‘Ask for him to come as quickly as possible – this is worse than anything before.’
The Other Cathy Page 18